Matija Strlic and colleagues note in the new study that the familiar musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. Those substances hold clues to the paper's condition, they say. Conventional methods for analyzing library and archival materials involve removing samples of the document and then testing them with traditional laboratory equipment. But this approach destroys part of the document.

The new technique, called "material degradomics," analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves.

(Image: Books of the Past, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lin Pernille ♥ Photography's photostream)

In other words, it's not merely clicking the "I Agree" button that creates the legal contract. The issue turns on reasonable notice and opportunity to review--whether the placement of the terms and click-button afforded the user a reasonable opportunity to find and read the terms without much effort. In practice, the enforceability of each TOS implementation often falls on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of notice it provides the user. At one end, presentations that require the user, before clicking, to scroll to the bottom of a set of terms, or through an adjacent scroll box, guarantees the entirety of the TOS appears at least once, even if the user chooses to ignore it, and has been held to be enforceable. At the other end, by contrast, if a user must click on a hyperlink, or series of hyperlinks, to view the terms, the significance of clicking "I Agree" as showing assent diminishes, depending on the difficulty in actually finding the terms and whether a reasonable Internet User would have done so. Finally, in addition to the placement of terms, courts also consider the inclusion of conspicuous statements on websites that instruct users to read the TOS and inform them of the consequence of clicking "I Agree."...

Whereas courts have been willing to give clickwraps their blessing, attempts to legally bind users with browsewrap agreements have been more controversial. Unlike clickwrap agreements, browsewraps do not require a user to engage in any affirmative conduct, like clicking on a box, in order to show that they agree to a set of terms. Instead, websites with browsewrap agreements often purport to bind their users by passive conduct, unrelated to the TOS itself, like continuing to use the website or proceeding past its homepage.

Penalties for camcordering have been ratcheting higher and higher (and have been introduced in international treaty negotiations, as well as in bilateral trade agreements with the US, which demands that its trading partners imprison people operating video recorders in cinemas). But the actual incidence of camcordered pirate DVDs is declining relative to "screeners" and other leaks from the industry itself.

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures -- blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing "Happy Birthday" at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry's pitch to us remains, "Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don't stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence."

Charged With Felony After Taping 4 Minutes Of "New Moon" (Thanks, Blaire!)

(Image: Camcordering, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from kowitz's photostream )

Femtrooper Friday 8/28/09 (via JWZ)

Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content

Good thing Oprah quit that show, because 4Chan pwned it. I think this happened a couple years ago, but I'm just now seeing the video. Sorry, I'm lame and slow. "His group has over nine thousand penises, and they're all raping children." (thanks, Sean Bonner!)

Update: Among the many remixes this spawned, Pedobear techno.

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, and is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He is the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, and was an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco.

I love Tom Geisler's art illustrations, which combine the life-improving spirit of chindogu with the obsessive precision of antique technical drawings (he's also a technical illustrator). Tom is working on a book, "Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent: Free Patents That Will Save Our Galaxy," and here's some material from it, including an hilarious series of pages that illustrate the inventor's personal history.

Despite its wealth and nominal status, Italy's counterparts in Europe look at it with derision and dismay for the circuses of which the Knox case is but one more. Public life in Italy often evinces these pious but oddly inscrutable outcomes, produced with alarming regularity by legal and political institutions that are like cargo-cult copies of those possessed by other nations.

This example, however, may be easier to understand than most. The jurors wore Italian flags while the judge read their verdict.

The Food and Drug Administration is holding up the delivery of MG Siegler's iMac because they apparently think it is an apple, not an Apple.

I don’t want to believe that either UPS or the U.S. Government are so stupid as to think that my Apple computer is actually an apple, but I can’t come up with any other explanation (and neither can people on Twitter). On my UPS tracking shipment screen right now all I see is “Exception” followed by a note that my iMac was held up in in Louisville, Kentucky because, “UPS HAS OBTAINED DOCUMENTATION AND SUBMITTED TO FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION AND/OR DEPARTMENT OF AG/PPQ;AWAITING RESPONSE”

An after dark exploration of the sidewalk cracks around Machine Project for local medicinal plants, led by Nance Klehm. Get ready for the long winter dry, cold haul with simple knowledge on how to identify common wild plants that can be used in herbal remedies.

Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. More information on Nance can be found at her website.

Echo Park Medicinal Forage with Nance Klehm

From a Detroit News article:

The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.

It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.

Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.

Banana Bunker (Thanks, Jeff!)

These television spots for LG Mobile featuring "Actors Studio" host James Lipton really get the Funny job done. Post with background over at Laughing Squid. The campaign site is here (warning: Flash, auto-load sound). There's an article about the purpose of the campaign here. I'm guessing they were created by the same agency that did "Subservient Chicken" for Burger King? I'm told the agency was Young and Rubicam.

Above, my favorite spot in the "Ponder" campaign, which includes a unicorn reference.