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Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Rheingold and Powazek: Two great tastes that taste great together

Derek "Heather's Spouse" Powazek interviews Howard "Online Community" Rheingold on the past and future of online community.

I think there has been a partial breakdown of the cooperative ethic that an essential element to the success and growth of the early internet. Back then there was a certain amount of understanding of basic netiquette and an expectation of a cooperative behavior. That was the norm from the very beginning and that has made the internet valuable. Those norms are not located in any handbook, although you can find some basic documents on netiquette. They've mostly been taught to newcomers by the people who were already there.

What used to happen was that every September, a bunch of new freshmen would join universities and get their first internet accounts and would start flooding Usenet, asking questions that were already answered in the FAQ and doing other things that were breaches of basic netiquette. They would then be educated by the old-timers, sometimes rather rudely, sometimes more patiently. But the old-timers took the time, even if they were flaming, to pass on the norms.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hollywood fatcat calls TiVo use "theft"

The CEO of Turner Broadcasting thinks that TiVo owners are thieves:

I'm a big believer we have to make television more convenient or we will drive the penetration of PVRs and things like that, which I'm not sure is good for the cable industry or the broadcast industry or the networks...

Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.

The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is full of guys like this from the studios and the TV world. They think that viewers are thieves. They tried to shut down piano rolls and radio. They conspired to keep movies off of TV. They fought the VCR and crippled the DAT.

The role of the technology industry is to blaze new trails that create new opportunities for Hollywood. The role of Hollywood is to seek injunctive relief from those opportunities. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If Quentin Tarantino was an accountant...

Joey's latest blog-gem is a laugh-out-loud account of his tough-talkin', medallion-swingin' family account. First prize for humorous use of the eff-word by a bean-counter. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:17:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Figment come back to Epcot

Journey into Imagination at Epcot Center is re-opening, and Figment (the purple dragon sidekick of Dreamfinder from the original Journey) has been sprinkled throughout. A confession: I loathe Figment. However, my pal Grad can't live without him. Hence this post:

"The return of Figment adds another level of excitement to this re-energized attraction," said David Mumford, show designer for Walt Disney Imagineering. "Journey Into Imagination with Figment is bright and fun and should appeal to guests of all ages."

The revamped attraction also heralds the return of "One Little Spark," an uplifting song written by legendary Disney composers Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman for the attraction's original opening in March 1983. Comic actor Eric Idle also returns as Dr. Nigel Channing, a role he originated in the adjacent "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience" 3-D attraction at Epcot.

Awright, putting a Sherman Brothers original song back into the park is all to the good, but Figment -- shudder. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My words, with pictures

My story, "Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)" is coming in the next ish of The Black Gate magazine. One of the coolest things about writing for publication is getting your work illustrated by talented artists like Chuck Lukacs. Chuck send me the URL of this page with his illos for "Beat Me Daddy," and I couldn't be happier with 'em.

If you're an art-director looking to source an illustrator, check out Chuck's portfolio. He's fantastic. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plague of Locust snowdome

Apocalyptic tchotchke, the perfect Passover centerpiece.

Can you imagine what a swarm of hungry grasshoppers sounds like? With this Plaguedome, you won't ever have to! With a quick swish of your wrist you can cause millions of ravenous locusts to descend upon the world's food supply! This 40mm diameter, glass dome was the first in the Plaguedomes line here at Products of the Apocalypse, Inc. Don't let this one pass you over!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phone psychics gone wild

Rules for telephone psychics:

* Do not try to extort any money from a caller.

* Never put callers on hold for any reason.

* We do not talk to the dead, we let them rest in peace.

* No discussion of death, doom or disaster. Never upset a caller.

* Do not pretend to know the future.

* You cannot give any counseling about abortion.

* There shall be no casting of spells on this line or any magic potions.

* This line is NOT to be used for promoting evil.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 29, 2002

Dagnabbit! I want me an eMac

About six weeks ago, I bought a 700MHz G3 iMac (not the flat panel one) for $1100 or so. Now Apple has just announced a 700 Mhz G4 Mac with a 17-inch screen for about the same price. The design is great too, like a big brother or sister to the iPod. I think you have to be a school to get one, though. Damn, I like these. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:03:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crossed Words

My new friend Peter Valentine creates amazing cut-up poetry from crossword puzzles. In fact, his whole site is a surreal masterpiece. Don't miss the Flash opening--it's as darkly sweet as it gets. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:48:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jerk complaining about the Discuss links

I just got this little gem in my mailbox:

To: doctorow@craphound.com
X-Personal_Name: : Annoyed
From: moo@cow.gov
Subject: why do we have to sign in for discuss? Fuck this, i'm sick of signing

to every little anal cranny.

take it off.

This anonymous coward (get it? Anonymous? Cow? Heh.) wants to know why the discuss areas require sign-in now. Regulars here will know that a couple weeks back, someone started posting abusive messages to the discussion areas, using my name. The only fix for this available to us is to switch off anonymous posting and require sign-in. Other fixes may be available with other message-board systems, but this is what we can do with QuickTopic. If Blogger ever starts supporting message board with clearly differentiated anonymous messages (and forbids anonymous posters from hijacking identities), then you can be sure we'll implement it. Our sysadmin, who donates the bandwidth and hosting for this blog, doesn't want us running executables on his server (fair enough -- he's too busy to audit every perl script we might install, and he's already doing us a huge favor), so Movable Type and other local discussion systems are out for now.

But man, I gotta tell ya: When people send me abusive, imperious messages like this, demanding that I change the way I do Boing Boing, it makes me just want to give up. It's our goddamned blog, and if we don't want anonymous posting, there's no anonymous posting. If moo@cow.gov wants to start his/her own blog and permit it, g'head and do it. Jesus, moo@cow.gov, were you born in a goddamned barn? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:08:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Choose Your Own Existentialism

Waiting for Godot, rendered as a choose-your-own-adventure story. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The long-lost classic Holiday Inn sign

A lyrical appreciation of the original Holiday Inn sign and the golden age of family motels it heralded; just as Disneyland rehabilitated roadside amusements from dangerous and dirty sleaze-towns, Holiday inn transformed motels from dens of sin into family meccas.

"Holiday Inn's sign was a prop in a play," says Andrew Moore, professor of communication studies at San Jose State University and an authority on motel history. "It communicated the playfulness, fantasy and optimism of the American roadside. And it meant safety for the [traveling] middle class."

The Great Sign was brash, bold and a masterpiece. It is also, alas, extinct. The company ripped them down in a bid to be a little more upscale.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:50:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Piss-elegant idea

The Johnny Glow: Never have to choose between blinding yourself with the bog-lights and missing the bowl again. As seen on TV! Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 28, 2002

Welcome, Heather!

We've got a new Guestblogger -- Heather Champ, of jezebel.com, harrumph.com, and mirrorproject.com. She's a fellow Canadian and an old-skool blogger-type.Thanks, Bonnie, for doing such an excellent job on the blog! Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:46:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, George Alec Effinger

George Alec Effinger, one of the first science fiction writers I ever met, has died. I was 15 or 16, and he was very friendly and encouraging. He'd been chronically ill for decades, and had at one point been in danger of losing the rights to his characters to the hospital that was his largest creditor in a bankruptcy court. His Marid Aubran novels are cyberpunk classics. Poor piglet. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kelly Link wins a Neb!

Hey! Kelly Link won the Nebula yesterday for her fantastic story, "Louise's Ghost," from her even-more-fantastic collection, "Stranger Things Happen" (run, don't walk!) Link   Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report from the futur[e|ists]

All the big thinkers are hanging out at the Foresight Institute's retreat this weekend, and Dan Gillmor's taking notes:

Ray Kurzweil is doing his usual amazing job of explaining the mind-boggling nature of exponential change -- the acceleration of progress. He's the ultimate optimist.

His future is one where biology and machines become seamless, where machines and intelligence help humanity become (in my mind) somewhat disturbingly "God-like," for lack of a better expression. I also crave that future, because it is where we need to go.

You have to take a lot of this on faith. Kurzweil says these changes, which will lead to advances that we truly cannot grasp at this stage, are inexorable and vastly more powerful than human civilization's greatest dreams today.

"We will become these machines and merge with them," he says.

Another line: "The universe will ultimately wake up and command its own destiny." Hmmm.

Dan's been really good about going to all these hyper-leet events and taking realtime notes as they unfold. It's journalism 3.0! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 27, 2002

My brother's getting married!

My kid brother, Neil, got down on one knee today and proposed to his girlfriend, Tera. They were on the rugby pitch, with both families in attendance. She said yes. I'm gonna have a sister-in-law! Mazeltov, kids. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:47:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Golden age Apple ad

Charles sez: "Vintage 1985 video from Apple. See a nostalgic demonstration of Pagemaker 1.0 with a Mac 128 and a Laserwriter. See Apple blow it with their infamous 1988 "HeloCar" advertising campaign." Link Discuss (Thanks, Charles!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Corpse discovered in WDW's Seven Seas Lagoon

The body of a tourist was discovered in Walt Disney World's Seven Seas Lagoon. The man had been staying at the Grand Floridian Hotel, and had been seen earlier arguing with his wife. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:20:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Send Blagg feeds by email

Rael's created a new plugin for Blagg, his RSS aggregator, that emails the contents of you aggregated feed to the address of your choice. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:07:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What would Jesus rent?

The Distributed Republic of Biblestan, all those fundie communities scattered around the US, have their own video-stores. The Cleanflicks Co-Op is a by-fundies/for-fundies video-rental chain that rents sanitized versions of Hollywood blockbusters -- think Beverley Hills Cop without any swearing.

The store defines itself as a co-op so that when customers sign up for memberships, they can be said to technically "own" the videos they rent from the store. The chain, which has yet to be challenged by Hollywood, now has stores in Colorado, Arizona, and Idaho, and aims to have a shop in every state by the end of 2002.

Call it the dark side of the Doctrine of First Sale. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Hollings Bill isn't dead

More evidence that the Hollings Bill (CBDTPA: Consume, But Don't Try Programming Anything) isn't going to pass this year, if at all. As I suspected, this bill is a smokescreen for the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group in Hollywood. Check this out:

In a speech last week, [Commerce Department undersecretary for intellectual property] Rogan said that "negotiations are presently underway among hardware manufacturers and content owners to develop improved means for protecting online content," and legislators should wait for results before voting on a proposal such as the Hollings bill.

"Before Congress rushes into the imposition of a legislative solution," Rogan said, "I hope its members will grant more time for the free market to find its own middle ground."

Those negotiations are the BPDG, a consipiracy of 15-some tech and entertainment companies. They're writing a "standard" that they've asked Hollings to give the FCC the power to give the force of law to. It will be illegal to manufacture or distribute any device or software that can access digital broadcast TV if it doesn't meet the "standard."

And what will the "standard" require? Well, for starters, all tech will have to be "tamper-resistant," which means that you won't be able to tinker with the hardware and software you own. Open source will be illegal.

Those devices that are allowed will only be permitted to incorporate cables and media that limit copying. And new technologies will only be added to the list of permitted tech if Hollywood says so (the standard that the studios have proposed for evaluating new tech is "We'll know it when we see it").

Imagine it: HDTV devices and computers that interface with them will only be allowed to incorporate broken technologies that Hollywood permits. If your computer monitor doesn't include the "approved" inputs, it will be against the law for your computer to output a digital video stream to it. The manufacturer will have two choices:

1. Add a second input that uses a "protected" method (you'll need two wires to connect your computer to your monitor)
2. Take away the "unprotected" input and just use one, "protected" wire, which means that you won't be able to buy a computer that allows you to do anything you want with the video that you make on your own

We all got upset about the Hollings Bill because it would use the force of law to control how a computer could be made. The BPDG will do exactly that -- it's not a "free market middle-ground," it's Hollywood's absolute dominion over your machine.

Don't let 'em fool you -- CBDTPA is just another way of spelling BPDG, and it's a-comin' soon. The BPDG says it'll have its standard finalized by May 17, and no one's even noticing. The BPDG meetings are public (though they cost $100 to attend). There's one coming up in LA on Monday, and wouldn't it be sweet if a couple hundred of us showed up to tell 'em what we think? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:42:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The market punishes Verisign

Verisign's stock fell 46% yesterday. Only 54% to go before it is planted in its grave, and we can buy its managers' laptops at bankruptcy auctions and blog their private email. Soon, soon... Let's put Verisign to death! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 26, 2002

Sorry, leg amputees are not considered vertically challenged

Craig's List rocks:

Distinguished adult film company in search of midgets, dwarfs, and other vertically challenged men and women for an ultra sexy oompa loompa gang bang. The lucky few who will be selected must fit into our stylish crotch less oompa loompa costumes. If you are allergic to latex based makeup, body paint, do not wish to become a rich/famous adult film star, and or do not like rough wild oompa sex please do not apply. Sorry, leg amputees are not considered vertically challenged and will not be considered for this film.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dog-juice at the World Cup

The World Cup games in Seoul will feature dog-meat-juice as a means of showing foreigners the innocence of canine comestibles. This reads like an Onion article, but the Hindustan Times seems a little sober-sided for hoaxing.

"We plan to develop canned dog meat tonic juice, which football fans can enjoy in their stadium seats while watching games," said Choi Han-Gwon, a leader of a national association of dog meat restaurants.

"They will enjoy it instead of Coke," he said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ICANN reform, an alternative view

Elliot "Tucows" Noss and some pals have penned an alternate ICANN reform proposal: The Heathrow Declaration.

1.      The governance of the DNS should be appropriate and proportionate to the nature and needs of the DNS. Accordingly, the governance of the DNS should not outlast the useful life of the DNS. This result is more likely to be achieved if governance of the DNS is more responsive to popular demand for domain names and a coherent working DNS than to formal arrangements among states.

  2.      Owing to the role of states in the management of country codes, the role of a central manager of the DNS, such as ICANN, is naturally larger in relation to generic TLDs than it is in relation to country codes.

3.      Those who wish to participate in the management of the DNS should contribute to the funding of it, possibly with some exception for non-profit entities.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Elliot!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:50:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Skippy's been a bad GI

213 Things Skippy Schwarz is No Longer Allowed to Do in the US Army:

16. Must get a haircut even if it tampers with my 'Sampson like powers'.

17. God may not contradict any of my orders.

18. May no longer perform my now (in)famous 'Barbie Girl Dance' while on duty.

19. May not call any officers immoral, untrustworthy, lying, slime, even if I'm right.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jet!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nuclear license plates

Nevada is shipping mushroom-cloud license plates. I'm on a dirt-slow, massivley unreliable network connection; maximum gratitude to anyone who posts the URL for a < 300 pixel wide jpeg in the discussion area. (Thanks, Casey!)

"Nevada being Nevada, this is a unique subject," said Rick Bibbero, 55, a real estate agent in Minden who won $500 with his design for the license tag. "You wouldn't find California trying to memorialize something like this, but this is our past," said Bibbero, who said he's neither for nor against the federal government's plan to entomb 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste beneath a volcanic ridge 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:49:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Send this art-car to Burning Man

My pal Jet's selling funny stickers and t-shirt to underwrite the expense of building a killer art-car to take to Burning Man. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Telecoms policymakers blown away by WiFi sales figures

Kevin Werbach describes the astonishment of policy-makers when he drops the WiFi bomb on them: 1.5 million 802.11b cards sold every month. Meanwhile, in DC, they're pushing ahead with a plan to provide municipal lighting by filling standards with gas that glows when you hit it with 2.4GHz radio -- a plan that will saturate the city with radio waves that drown out 802.11b.

For the past day, I've been at a small workshop on spectrum policy hosted by the Aspen Institute.  Aspen regularly assembles key figures from the government, private sector and academia to frame emerging communications and Internet policy issues.  This one was interesting.  I was there to advocate open spectrum and unlicensed wireless technologies, like 802.11/WiFi.  It was heartening to see the level of awareness about WiFi among the lawyers, economists, lobbyists and policy-makers.  They realize something important is going on here.  Still, most of them were shocked when I mentioned there are now 1.5 million WiFi cards being sold every month.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fray Day 6

Derek sez:

Save the date: Fray Day 6 has been set for September 14, 2002. Last year we came to ten cities worldwide. This year could be even more. Ever wanted to organize a Fray event in your town? Now's the time to speak up!

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll-yer-own municipal wireless

Andy sez: "Tired of waiting for Verizon to provide high-speed internet access, The town of Cumberland in Maryland is extending its pre-existing wireless network to bring broadband access to its residents." Link Discuss (Thanks, Andy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 25, 2002

If ICANN can't, who can?

After my last anti-Verisign rant, Paul Hoffman sent me some email and set me straight on a lot of things. One thing he asked me, which I didn't have an answer to, is "Who should run the DNS Root instead?" Paul has a pretty credible answer, in his sweeping ICANN-reform proposal.

The TLD Secretariat could easily be a single person. Her or his allegiance would be first to the root server operators, then to the ccTLDs, and lastly to the gTLDs. A stable, well-respected, international Internet organization would appoint the TLD Secretariat. While there are benefits to having the ITU organize the ccTLD administrators, it would be completely unsuited selecting the TLD Secretariat because it isn't well regarded in the Internet community or by the root server operators. The Internet Society (ISOC) would be a much better choice.

Given ICANN's current penchant for secrecy and closed meetings, the new TLD Secretariat will have a harder time gaining the world's trust. Fortunately, it wouldn't be difficult to make all correspondence to and from the TLD Secretariat a matter of public record. Although this might initially cause some consternation for the commercial registries that have benefited from ICANN's methods, it will build trust in the system.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:05:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rosetta Stones: $25,000

The Long Now Foundation has a store! And unline the crappy affinity items that most charities give you if you slip 'em a couple bucks (how many tote-bags can one PBS watcher usefully own?), these are really cool:

First Edition Rosetta Disk: (25 will be made, 23 remaining)
We are creating a limited edition run of 25 Version 1.0 Rosetta Disks and Containers, which we are offering in exchange for donations of $25,000 and above. Proceeds will support our global collection efforts to build the 1,000 language archive and complete the disk. The delivery date is the summer of 2003. You can see the design for the disk and container in the "about this project" part of our site under "concept" and "design". $25,000

Link Discuss (Thanks, jpancake!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Internet is for Everyone

The Internet Society's latest RFC, entitled "The Internet is for Everybody," is an inspirational call to arms: Free the Subnet 255!

Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if it cannot keep up with the explosive demand for its services, so we must dedicate ourselves to continuing its technological evolution and development of the technical standards the lie at the heart of the Internet revolution. Let us dedicate ourselves to the support of the Internet Architecture Board, the Internet Engineering Steering Group, the Internet Research Task Force, the Internet Engineering Task Force and other organizations dedicated to developing Internet technology as they drive us forward into an unbounded future. Let us also commit ourselves to support the work of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - a key function for the Internet's operation.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Katie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Finally, a downloadable "King of Kensington" theme!

MP3s of great Canadian TV themes:

Edison Twins theme Polka Dot Door theme Take Off, Eh! Degrassi High Theme Degrassi Jr. High Theme Beachcombers Theme King of Kensington Theme Definition Theme Hockey Night in Canada (Original) Theme From Degrassi -- Zit Remedy The Littlest Hobo Theme Mr. Dressup Theme Kids In the Hall Theme

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOL lost $50B+ this quarter

Holy crap. AOL/TW/NS/whatcher just wrote down a $54.2+ Billion loss, the largest in corporate history. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comrade Smurf

The Smurfs as Marxist parable. The parallels are quite amazing; I'm still reeling from the similarity of "Comrade _________" and "_________ Smurf."

Papa Smurf represents Karl Marx. He is not so much the leader of the Smurfs as an equal revered by the others for his age and wisdom. He has a beard, as did Marx, and thus could conceivably be a caricature as well. And lastly, he wears red, which is the traditional colour of socialism. Brainy Smurf could represent Trotsky. He is the only one in the village who comes close to matching Papa's intellect - he is a thinker. With his round spectacles, he could also be a caricature of Trotsky. He is often isolated, ridiculed or even ejected from the commune of the village for his ideas. And of course, Trotsky was banished from the USSR.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blagg: Blaggpluggs: Bling Bling

Rael's still hacking his RSS aggregator, Blagg, the <50-line perl marvel. He and Ben "Movable Type" Trott have jemmied up Blaggplugs (I think they should spell it Blaggpluggs, but what do I know), a Blagg implementation that spits out aggregated RSS in formats that can be easily slurped into various blogging engines (including Movable Type, natch!). Another testimony to tackling large, ambitious technical problems with small, lightweight tools that are easy to hack and chain. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 24, 2002

Cattle-class is a crime

A British court has ruled that airlines bear liability for deep-vein thrombosis resulting from cramped conditions in Coach on long flights. No more veal pens for travellers! Link Discuss (Thanks, Ronks!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:27:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blue Demon Iron On Auction

Here's my new iron on. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:43:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nested emulators for posterity's sake

An oldie but a goodie: The Library of Congress has a monkey on its back. Every couple years, it has to open and re-save every doc in its 35TB collection so that the docs can be read by modern computing and modern machinery.

This is problematic and not just because it's expensive. When you convert a document, it's hard to know whether you've preserved all the parts of that doc that will be of interest to posterity -- it's impossible. For example, someone may want to dig through billions of Word docs to look at the embedded spyware GUIDs to see which modern writers were reviewing each others' works. Opening a Word 5 doc and saving it in WordXP may well eliminate that information.

The solution is emulation. Write, say, a 486 simulator that will run under a Pentium III running XP. Run Win 3.1 on the virtual machine and run Word 3 under the virtual Win 3.1. When PIIIs are in danger of obsolescence, write a PIII emulator to run on a G5 processor under OS X. Run XP on the virtual PIII, run the 486 emulator on the virtual XP, run Win 3.1 on the virtual 486 and so on -- nested Turing machines, one inside the other.

Theoretically, this eliminates the explosion of complexity; at any time, you need only know how to emulate the last generation of technology on the current gen. While there is a possiblity that the nested emulators will introduce difficult debugging problems, an emulator that runs on a gate-for-gate simulated processor should, in theory, run perfectly (what do you do about I/O? I dunno).

It's a powerful idea. Human posterity is terribly endangered by proprietary data-formats (and doubly so by DRM technology), but by funding emulator research, the LoC can preserve posterity -- just so long as Moore's Law keeps on generating CPUs that are sufficiently advanced over their predecessors that they can handily simulate them.

Of course, it's at direct odds with DRM. If I simulate your "trusted computer" in a virtual machine, I can bend the laws of time and space as far as the simulated computer goes -- like a brain in a jar with a wire running off its stem, it doesn't have any way of distinguishing those responses that are explicitly generated from those that are "real."

The MPAA's Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is establishing the principal that digital media technologies should be made tamper-resistant (read: no emulators, no open source) so that you can't intepret the "protection" as damage and route around it.

I predict a major collision between the Copyright Office and the copyright industry in the coming months -- let's hope posterity wins. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:21:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Email without the switching costs

I recently wrote an extended rant about my problems with Entourage and my yearning to switch to a mailer that stores its material in flat text files. Tim McLaughlin wrote in to describe his solution to the problem which involves <geek>running fetchmail on your OS X machine, storing the mail in a store that a local IMAP server can access. That way, you can use any email client, point it at your IMAP server on localhost, and away you go. In other words, there are no migration issues (modulo address-books) if you want to switch mailers. Lock in? What lock in?</geek> Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Damon Knight remembered

Damon Knight's daughter-in-law is compiling a master sheet of euologies and memorials for Damon, which is shaping up to be an astonishing document. Damon was a fantastic and odd person, and reading others' remembrances of him reminds me of how lucky I was to know him. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ted!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:06:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scriban v. Valenti

George Scriban is one of my heroes. After reading Jack Valenti's latest filetraders-are-commies-chewing-through-the-body-politic rant, George has decided to turn his keep analytic corpus to letting the air out of Valenti's rhetorical tires (George is the freelance troublemaker who demonstrated that the RIAA's sales-figures-in-decline-because-of-file-sharing hysteria was as unfounded as we suspected, and yes, folks, he still needs a gig!).

So check this out, as George begins his one-man crusade to tear apart Black Jack Valenti's prevarication:

according to the report, the "350,000 downloads" number was ginned out of a weeklong sample of IRC file-trading activity. the IRC profile was subsequently applied against "self-reporting" P2P networks (like Napster or Gnutella) activity (ie, given x nodes and y files, z files can be assumed to have been traded). the resulting numbers were smoothed out with media reports for the less transparent networks (like Aimster). I admit that this is about as thorough as you can get. it's also probably wildly inaccurate.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Outer Limits kick azz

Hallucinogenic rave for The Outer Limits:

With a free-flowing id and the assistance of old-school, no-nonsense directors like Gerd Oswald and Byron Haskin, Stefano established "The Outer Limits'" uneasy tone and celebratedly gothic atmosphere in the stellar episodes he wrote. Among these were "Don't Open Till Doomsday," a deliciously unctuous take on frustrated desire featuring a belligerent phallo-vaginal blob, coitus interruptus on a cosmic scale and several Stefano-penned songs; "The Bellero Shield," a spin on "Macbeth" with a shimmering space creature as inadvertent Player King; "The Invisibles," in which crablike aliens botch a takeover of the human race by commandeering its most marginalized members; and "Nightmare," a prescient look at the internal and external bonds that disintegrate during wartime. Some of his other efforts, such as "A Feasibility Study," "The Mice" and "The Zanti Misfits" (which features the series' best-remembered monsters, a race of fist-sized ants with leering human faces), were less cohesive but no less distinctive

Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:33:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boy adopted by chimps

Nigerian parents leave their disabled infant son in jungle to die, but he is adopted by chimpanzees. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:04:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RSS aggregation in 46 lines of perl

Rael's written an RSS-aggregator for Blosxom (though you can use it for lots of things), in 46 lines of perl. Tie it together with Blosxome and you've got an entire blogging engine, complet avec RSS aggregation, in fewer than 100 lines of perl!

* Aggregate (i.e. read and blog) RSS syndicated feeds of about any flavour via a simple command-line interface

* Simpler than pie drag-n-drop installation

* Small (<= 46 lines of actual code ;-) and lightweight

* Makes use of all the operating system and Web server beneath its feet have to offer

* Doesn't even require an XML parser (whatever that is ;-)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bluetooth harddrives -- living-room-area storage

Toshiba's shipped a 5GB Bluetooth hard-drive. I like the idea of being able to access, say, a living-room storage device over a wireless link, but I have to wonder about the speed of Bluetooth. At 0.72 Mb/s, it seems that 802.11b or 802.11a would have been a better choice -- who wants to wait an hour to transfer a CD's worth of MP3s to your laptop? Link Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:42:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freedom through graffiti

A woman who was kidnapped by a trucker who drove her across the country, beating her and keeping her locked up for over a year is free. She used a marker that she hid in her sock to scrawl pleas for help on over 100 toilet walls at gas-stations -- her kidnapper stood guard over the door -- and finally, someone called 911. Cops used GPS to track down the truck and arrested the driver. The driver's employer characterizes the crime as a lovers' spat. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Epic Tums jingle

A gem in today's Onion:

Opium-Inspired Ad Executive Composes Epic Tums Jingle

CHICAGO— An eight-hour opium binge resulted in a towering work of advertising Sunday, when DDB Needham copywriter Brian Lisi gave birth to an epic 400-line radio jingle for Tums. "When Vulcan's fires spout and rage / within a roiling acid sea / let work the soothing tablet Tums / The Hell-sear'd forge within becomes / sweet alkaloid esprit," the jingle begins before detouring into iceberg imagery believed to represent Tums' new "Cool Relief" flavor. The ad, which begins production in June, is expected to run nearly 90 minutes.

Link Discuss (This one's for you, Grad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The happiest geek on earth

Joey is the happiest geek on earth. He feeds the beast by taking contract programming gigs, and spends the rest of the time working on hacktivist projects and playing alterna-tunes on his accordion, surrounded by beautiful women who are drawn, irresistably, to his exhibitionist performances and are compelled to purchase drinks for him while he gets random passers-by to snap photos with his digital camera. His latest adventure, "The accidental go-go dancer," is a classic. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

What's that word again? Monorail!

Vegas is building the largest monorail transit system in the country:

Plans call for the line to stretch up to seven miles by the time construction ends later this decade, with stops at most casinos, downtown and the local convention center. Sleek bullet-shaped trains will be run by computers, not drivers, and travel up to 50 miles per hour on a winding route above roadways.

There will also be unusual safeguards. Since more than a few riders here are bound to be sloshed by more than a few drinks, every stop will be walled and sealed in glass, with doors timed to open only at the moment trains arrive -- so no one in a stupor falls from a platform.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

It's all [Greek|Chinese|Hebrew|Turkish|Heavenly Script] to me

Fascinating whitepaper surveys the world's languages to determine what other languages native speakers consider to be most difficult to understand. Link Discuss (Thanks, Raffi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are publishing contracts anti-trust?

The Authors' Guild is doing something more like its job these days -- instead of trying to tell Amazon how to run its business, it is publicizing the dreadful state of the modern publishing contract. The clauses they describe are indeed quite dreadful -- like the option to opt not to publish a novel without surrendering the rights to it.

The essayist's point is that publishers -- either by deliberate collusion or economic forces -- have harmonized their standard, non-negotiable boilerplate contracts, and that this leaves authors with no choice: Sign the contract or publish it yourself. He goes so far as to call it anti-trust.

For the record, the book contracts I've signed have been, on the whole, fair. The only parts I've ever taken serious issue with that I haven't been able to negotiate are the occassional nondisclosure clauses. When you're writing a book where you're a domain expert, it's hard to determine what information you learned in confidence versus information you came by over your transom. The other thing I've objected to is the "reasonable" withholding against returns, which is a pretty ugly practice, since it never specifies the definition of "reasonable."

OTOH, I did turn down a nonfic contract recently, after my agent looked it over and pronounced it completely unworkable. He sent the publisher a letter asking for a real contract and the publisher never wrote back. Que sera, sera. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Write in Kerouac's house -- in Orlando!

OK, this is the ultimate writing gig: Live in Jack Kerouac's house in Orlando rent free. Got writers' block? Visit Walt Disney World! Orlando is the land of cheap buffets and discount pharmacies/groceries, close enough to the Keys for a diving weekend, and damn, I'm drooling. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:46:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY coaster

Amazing DIY back-yard rollercoaster built out of scrap metal, the seat from a junker-car and the lap-belt from a wrecked airplane. Check out the 360 degree corkscrew!

John Ivers wanted to see a roller coaster.

So he built one -- a real, working roller coaster 180 feet long, 20 feet high, and complete with a 360-degree corkscrew. It goes over his steeply angled barn roof, wraps around a nearby Chinese elm and comes to a roaring stop in about 11 seconds

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tom Swift Jr glory!

Justin sez: "The Tom Swift, Jr series was my favourite pulp sci-fi when I was growing up - the undersea space coptor and the captive planetoid ruled my technic fantasies. This lucky boy had a great brain, unlimited funds and tolerant parents! And of course wild adventures. The writer of this site respects Tom Swift Jr's contributions to science and literature such that he has posted a book-by-book technology review to see whether these machines would be plausible. Nice to revisit the series if you've been a fan, and fun reading for technology speculation nuts. Before we go any further, please let me alert you to this finest web shrine to Tom Swift, Jr." Link Discuss (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:37:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tax sf for space program

A Republican congressional candidate is proposing to fund the space program by imposing a 1% tax on science fiction paraphenalia. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dating tips for autistics

Step-by-step dating instructions for autistics on autistics.org's skills directory. This is a tour through the invisible world of social cues, mindbend-ing.

Things needed:

pen
paper
movie schedule

Step by step directions:

1.) Sit down and write down the sentence. Would you like to go with me to see _______ on Friday night at ___(whatever time movie starts? By asking the girl to see a specific movie on a specific night, you give her the chance to say "no" to the movie or the night. That way, if she says 'no', she can do so to the movie or the night.

2.) Find a girl who you would like to go see a movie with.

3.) Introduce yourself (if she doesn't already know you) and say your line, including the name of the movie and the time.

Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:17:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Brief History of Spirit Photography

"How wonderful is the recent progress of our art! We now in the usual way go through the process of having our picture taken, but when the finished photograph is presented, lo! Beside our lovely image is the attendant spirit, a babe, or a grandfather, or an unknown!" If you have a line on any original spirit photographs, my wunderkammer is waiting! Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:05:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 22, 2002

A remembrance of and primer for color

Colors explained by a blind man who lost his sight when he was 11.

Amber. Brownish yellow.
Apple Yellow. Normally a light to dark yellow or yellowish green.
Banana Yellow. Moderate to light yellow.
Bisque. Pale orange yellow to yellowish gray. Also, moderate yellowish pink.
Blond. Light yellow or light golden.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woodring's amazing plastic pals

Stefan sez: "Sony commissioned "Frank" creator Jim Woodring to come up with a set of plastic figures . . . part of a line by various artists. They wanted weird, and he delivered. The other artists' work is worth a look, too." Discuss Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lawyering up and down

Overlawyered is a blog devoted to documenting the excesses of the legal profession and the subsequent deterioration of society. I

April 22 -- Lawyers puree Big Apple.  Figures from the City of New York's fiscal year 2000 show that the city paid a record $459 million in judgments and settlements, a 10.5 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.  $406 million of that figure was laid out on personal injury claims, up 11.5 percent from fiscal 1999.  (Elaine Song, "Costs Climb for the City", New York Law Journal, Mar. 21; "New York Sees Higher Verdicts in 2001", New York Law Journal, Mar. 21; "Tort City, U.S.A." (editorial), Wall Street Journal, Apr. 17 (online subscribers only). (DURABLE LINK)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Capture MP3 streams in OS X

StreamCatcher is a MacOS X utility for storing MP3 streams to disk as MP3 files -- a nice testimonial to the strength of Apple's new Unix underpinnings, as the app consists of nothing more than a GUI built on top of the GNU/Linux utility Streamripper. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadians don't trust politicians

69% of Canadians believe that Federal and Provincial politicos are lying, corrupt scumbags. (Remaining 31% believe in the tooth fairy?) Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:03:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hacktivism demystified

Great rant from the Cult of the Dead Cow's Oxblood Ruffin explaining the whys and wherefores of Hacktivism.

Witnessing hi-tech firms dive into China is like watching the Gadarene swine. Already fat and greedy beyond belief, the Western technology titans are being herded towards the trough. And with their snouts deep in the feedbag, they haven't quite noticed the bacon being trimmed off their ass. It isn't so much a case of technology transfer as digital strip-mining. Advanced research and technical notes are being handed over to the Chinese without question. It couldn't be going better for the Communists. While bootstrapping their economy with the fruits of Western labor and ingenuity, they gain the tools to prune democracy on the vine.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Laird!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Porn: Where old domains go to die

This is an amazing case-study documenting a porn-site that has registered over 4,000 expired domains and pointed them at itself (presumably on the grounds that people following old bookmarks and links to the original site will see the porn and possibly register for the site). The documentation is really amazing: The author's gone back to archive.org snapshots of the old domains to see what they looked like and what their meta-tags said they were about.

PACE-TECHNOLOGIES.COM
Current title: Tina's Free Live Webcam
Old title: Pace Technologies
Google: Pages containing pace-technologies.com (50), linking to pace-technologies.com Old description: providing web design and hosting, e-commerce solution, email accounts, web application development, domain name registration... one of the chinese leading agencies.
Old keywords: website hosting, web advertising, web publishing, complete web design packages, web designing, web design, email To fax, e-commerce, electronic stores, virtual mall, payment, order form, shopping cart, virtual hosting, virtual server, customized programmi ...
Archive: index, as of ~1/1/2000 (871 distinct snapshots among 999 archives since Nov 5, 1996)

PACKATTACKONLINE.COM
Current title: Tina's Free Live Cam
Old title: Pack Attack Online- "Your source for the Green Bay Packers"
Google: Pages containing packattackonline.com, linking to packattackonline.com
Old description: Green Bay Packers Pictures, Live news, stats, and more!
Archive: index, as of ~1/1/2000 (7 distinct snapshots among 9 archives since Mar 4, 2000)

Link Discuss (Thanks, George!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hypnotically encased iMacs trick unsuspecting computer users into accepting Darwinism

"Creation Science" loonies have found a new source of evil: The Open Source core of OS X, which is called "Darwin."

However, these propagandists aren't just targeting the young. Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling's CFP speech

Bruce Sterling gave a remarkable, inflammatory, hilarious, confusing, terrific speech at Computers, Freedom and Privacy in San Francisco. It's a Sterling classic:

So, I went to my hotel room here. Very nice, perfectly acceptable. It has a bedside digital clock that was never reset for daylight savings time. There's even digital media on the hotel TV. Did anyone else notice Channel 19? It's supposed to be showing a promotional DVD for San Francisco tourist sites. But it's a scratched DVD. So there has been a scratched record, repeating the same 5 to 7 seconds of video, around the clock, in this hotel, all week. DVDs really suck. When they malfunction, the visual damage on the screen is just awe- inspiring. Why several hundred computer experts at CFP never complained to hotel management about this stuck DVD, that is beyond me. I mean, it is a commercial DVD, so maybe they were afraid of being prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But come on! How long has this thing been malfing? Maybe it's been screwed-up ALL YEAR!

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tesselation gallery

Amazing Japanese gallery of animated tesselations -- math curriculum waiting to happen! Link Discuss (Thanks, Dad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:36:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NSI horror stories

Well, I took a three-day weekend off and had a fine old time. Of course, now it's time to pay the piper and deal with the hundreds of messages in my in-box.

First up, here's a blog documenting NetSol horror stories. NetSol is our least favorite registrar, a division of the "trust" company Verisign, and this singular site documents abuse after abuse, demonstrating the depth of NetSol's incompetence, villainy and dishonesty.

On domain ________.com no notification of renewal was received until June 2001, however expiration was 5/12/01. When transfer to Tucows was attempted, Network Solutions refused to allow transfer. Informed by [winning registrar customer service] that there was nothing they could do to assist. Forced to pay NetworkSolutions their bloated fee for another year so as not to lose the domain, since they had ALSO hoarded the domain past its expiration.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lifestyles of Slovenly Japanese Housewives

Excellent (but really low-rez) segment from a Japanese TV show about "katazukerarenai onnatachi" (women who can't clean up.) Link Discuss (Thanks, Charles Eicher!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:51:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steve Ballmer's new dance tune

Here's Ballmer's followup to his hit Monkeyboy video of last year. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:26:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Random NYTimes.com Registration Generator

I don't mind regsitering for the NYT, but this is a clever trick. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris Barrus)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:20:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unintentional phallic symbol in golfer photo?

Boing Boing reader Chris comments, "Ah, yes. The power of media imagery. Does anyone believe the photographer DIDN'T see this image the way we are seeing it?" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:04:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 19, 2002

Yahoo Yanked Yodeler

The guy who provided the "Yahoo!" yodel played at the end of company's TV commercials wants Yahoo to fork over $5,000,000. He was originally paid $590, but he says it was his understanding that his yodel would be used on just one commercial, not all of them. Yodelers are just about the only group of people ukulele players can make fun of. (Incidentally, John Kricfalusi of Spumco belongs to a yodeling club.) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:28:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Torturer worked at Disney World

A torturing, murdering human rights criminal from Haiti worked at Walt Disney World for two years.

Maj. Gen. Jean-Claude Duperval is accused of having participated in the Raboteau massacre, in Gonaives, 150 kilometers (93 miles) north of Port-au-Prince, on April 22, 1994, under the military regime of coup-leader Raoul Cedras.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Illustrated Gravity's Rainbow

Eli sez: "A graphic and text summary of Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_. The interface is bit odd, but play with it." Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:19:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to Make an Aqua Button

Step-by-step Photoshop instructions for making buttons and other UI elements that look like OS X's Aqua. Link Discuss (Thanks, Arnab!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:15:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine

Extreme gardening. I want meals-in-a-pill generated by my nanofab, but until then...

It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet," he says. "I've figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Allan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patrick's up for a Hugo!

Patrick Nielsen Hayden just landed his eighth Best Editor (thanks, Patrick) Hugo nomination! How long, I wonder, until there are enough bloggers on the ballot for a Nominees' Blog? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charlie's up for a Hugo!

Charlie Stross got a Hugo Nomination for his brilliant story, "Lobsters." All hail Charlie! You gonna post the story, Stross? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 18, 2002

Japanese phones go IP

The Japanese telco monopoly is ditching circuit-switching for Internet Protocol. Paging Bob Frankston, your meme is ready. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:29:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My Google Answers question

Here's my Google Answers question: five bucks is on the table!

How much space would one hour of ATSC-encoded, cleartext video occupy on a harddrive (without any compression beyond that which is part of ATSC)?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:25:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An eBay for cluefullness

Google has relaunched its Google Answers service. Originally, Answers used a staff of paid researchers to answer questions posed by visitors who ponied up a buck for the privelege. This model is pretty obviously non-scalable.

The new Answers is much, much neater. Google is hosting a marketplace for answers. Visitors post questions and offer up a sum between $4 and $50. Any registered user can proffer their opinions on the question (which the poser gets to look at for free), and the researcher distills the wisdom and provides a definitive answer.

The next step, I hope, is cutting in kibbitzers for a share of the bounty if their input is used in the answer. It's amazing how systems that rely on blessed "experts" are hard to scale, while systems that just provide a place for people to do their thing and figure out a way to extract some cash (i.e., eBay) scale fantastically well and make giant oodles of money.

Can't wait to see where this is going. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:20:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Internet was made for cussin'

Glorious Usenet profanity:

So, I have the fucking bitch job of fuck. I forgot to tell that. And I can't get any other job, because I am on the Enemies List. And also, that job makes my head bees get angry almost every day. And. BORING. All the time. As boring as a stupid guy who is a different kind of stupid from what you are.

And today, I am wearing these different shoes that I don't wear very much, but they cost me $5, so I figured I'd better wear them sometimes, but then they are not my regular shoes, so I am all feeling like a movie star wearing them, like Ernest Borgnine or something in my dumb fucking shoes, and then I have to wear the dumbass holder thing with my dumbass picture on it, in case I ever forget for a minute that I am just a big dumb bag of meat, I can look and find out all about it all over again.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google-by-mail

Send an email to google@capeclear.com with some searchterms in the subject line -- it will mail back your search results. Viva Google API! Link Discuss (via Werblog) (Which is Kevin Werbach's blog, which I discovered through Doc)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:51:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microsoft tells schools: refuse computers without their orginal paperwork

Microsoft's guidelines for schools that are accepting donated PCs is a hoot, primarily for gems such as this:

It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC.

This is, of course, so much bullshit. Ridiculous statements like this reflect the dilution of First Sale in the modern world. I bought that PC. It's up to me what I do with it. I can erase the hard-drive, I can use the CDs that the OS shipped on for skeet-shooting, you name it. When you abridge first-sale, you get howlers like this:

Microsoft recommends that educational institutions only accept computer donations that are accompanied by proper operating system documentation. If the donor cannot provide this documentation, it is recommended that you decline the donated PC(s).

"I'm sorry, sir, we can't accept that computer for your daughter's kindergarten class; you lost the warranty card." Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:38:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Therapeutic versus reproductive cloning

Meryl sez:

Oh my God! I just got back from DC where I learned about this cloning and now I've been writing to my senators and friends urging them to ask their senators not to support the Brownback Bill.

Anyway, here is a great link for more explanations on therapeutic cloning and how it differs from reproductive cloning. There is confusion between the two.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Meryl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:21:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Passport for National ID service, just shoot me

The sixth seal is open, the antichrist rides o'er the land, and the Feds are talking about using Microsoft Passport as a National ID system. Allow me to say: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rebecca!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:18:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Europe sez no to blocking

This makes me happy:

The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to oppose the use of "blocking" as a way of regulating content on the Internet.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:14:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massively parallel C64

Wiley sez: ""The Vintage Technology Cooperative has plans to build a massively parallel Commodore 64 supercomputer.  A system design has been developed but volunteers are needed to code the operating software for the system." Link Discuss (Thanks, Wiley!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:11:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grim furniture

Super-pricey coffin-shaped furniture for the wealthy goth in your life. Link Discuss (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suggest form now works!

Boing Boing pal and ex-Open Colan Chris Smith has given us a brand new, better-than-ever form-processor for suggested links. All hail Chris! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:31:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automatic Amazon: Amazox

Rael's started playing with Amazon's API, and has written a little thinggum called Amazox that is awfully swell:

A praiseworthy initial foray for Amazon into the world of publicly available Web Services, what I'm most looking for from the Amazon Associates XML interface is access to wishlists (both my own and those of thers), listmania, and advanced searches beyond simple keywords (e.g. by author).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

VW's no-guzzle Batmobile

VW's hyperfuturistic concept car gets 100km/l.

The automated gearbox is coupled to a start-stop system, which includes a freewheel function. In overrun mode, the vehicle switches the engine off. The vehicle then rolls without the engine running. Development engineers call this gliding — alluding to the silent flight of a glider. The engine starts up again immediately when the magnesium accelerator pedal is depressed. A specially developed starter-alternator makes sure the engine is immediately restarted. Positioned between the engine and gearbox and using a dual clutch system, this works as both current generator and flywheel. In gliding mode, both clutches are open. When the driver presses the accelerator pedal again, the clutch between the engine and the starter-alternator is closed, causing the still turning flywheel to restart the engine without consuming any electrical current. Apart from this, the crankshaft starter-alternator, which eliminates the need for a conventional alternator and starter motor, has a so-called boost function which is able to supply additional power to supplement the power of the engine. But that is not all the starter-alternator does. While braking, the negative acceleration energy is fed into the alternator and recovered (recuperation).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney World: love of broad sentiment and bright colors and violent movement

This Atlantic article on Walt Disney World is wonderful for its critical and joyful look at the park that I love.

Now, as we strolled next to the lagoon in the warm, midwinter Florida sun, a feeling of some pleasure arose. I have felt this way in many parts of the world—at the Great Pyramids, for instance, despite the presence of beggars, touts, and larcenous camel drivers (none of which were a problem at Disney World, of course). Everyone has experienced it: a pleasure that has little to do with fun. It's a tourist's sense of accomplishment: By God, this really must be seen, and I am seeing it...

As you travel across the big interior of Disney World by bus, on Disney's own system of divided highways that evoke the barren stretches of interstate America, you are apt to think of the ways in which this place resembles the country that spawned it. It is like us in its love of broad sentiment and bright colors and violent movement—it has helped to teach us those things, hasn't it? It is like America in its celebration of democracy, or at least an aspect of it—democracy as leveler, enemy of pretension. And it is like America in that when, as is so often the case, any one place proves disappointing, you think the best must lie ahead, and so you move on.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:36:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Writers, publishers and board members of Authors Guide speak out for Amazon's used books

Sylvia Nassar (who sits on the board of the Authors Guild and wrote the bestselling "A Beautiful Mind") has written a stirring defence of Amazon's practice of interlisting used and new books.

Well-organized resale markets have often helped, not hurt, producers of other durable goods. An efficient market for used books may allow publishers ultimately to charge more for new ones — and authors thereby to collect higher royalties — without necessarily sacrificing sales. Amazon's resale service has effectively split the market for new books in two: readers who buy and keep versus readers who buy and resell. They wind up paying different amounts for the same book, just as airline passengers pay different amounts for a seat on the same flight. Take, for example, Michael J. Fox's new memoir, "Lucky Man." The cost to the "business-class" customer who buys and keeps the book is $16. The cost to the "economy-class" customer is roughly $7, assuming the customer resells it for $12 and then pays Amazon's fee and commission. Splitting the market lowers the average cost of owning a book, creating more buyers.

Link

Also, Tim O'Reilly has written a great note from a publisher's PoV:

Anyone who cares about books and authors should be applauding Amazon's expansion into the used book market, which is a real boon for consumers, and frankly, even for authors. As a publisher, I'm willing to take the chance that I'll lose a sale to a used book if that means that books that are otherwise unvailable can be easily found by someone who wants them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:27:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on the war on goths

A followup on Blue Springs, MO's $273,000 federally funded campaign to eliminate goth culture.

If there is such a thing as a hangout for Goths in Blue Springs, it's the parking lot outside the Barnes & Noble Booksellers in neighboring Independence. Each Friday night, dozens of black-clad youths mill around for hours, though a regional manager for the bookstore described the activity as harmless loitering.

Across the street in the Independence Center mall, the store Hot Topic is perhaps the only one in the area that carries Goth merchandise. The back wall displays several black velvet and lace medieval-era gowns and dresses.

An employee of the store, who said he was not allowed to give his name, said many teens in the area feel stifled by the suburban blandness of Blue Springs and are seeking forms of self-expression.

He said he is angry that police are singling out a group whose members are no more likely to get involved in criminal activity than the cleanest-cut teens.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:20:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PNH on NPR on Damon Knight

Here's Patrick Nielsen Hayden on NPR's "All Things Considered," discussing Damon Knight's life. It's a Real file, so I can't play it under OSX, but I'm sure it's fab. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:06:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Living in the knee of the curve

Matt pointed out this fantastic Douglas Adams quote from his blog. It's serindipitous, tying back to a conversation I was having with my co-worker Seth last night as we flew back from LA. We were talking about Kurzweil's idea of life in the "knee of the curve" -- the doubling-curve of technological change.

Doubling curves are nearly flat for a long time, then voom, they take off skywards in a hot second. Seth made the (no doubt mathematically correct) point that there is no point in a doubling curve that we can call the knee, but socially, I believe that the knee of the curve comes when we reach a point where generation gaps start to manifest.

There were multi-hundred-year spans of human history when people knew everything they needed to know to conduct themselves in the world by the time they reached adulthood, and passed that knowledge onto their children.

These days, it seems that there are no multi-hundred day spans of life in industrial society during which the body of knowledge necessary to conduct your daily round remains static.

"We're moving towards a 'Creole' of technological concepts. The idea comes from language theory, specifically Steven Pinker's work where adults come together in an area with lots of different languages and end up coming up with a broken, lumpy language that is put together as a pidgin language. When the next generation comes along, however, it becomes more sophisticated and develops into a real language, then called a Creole. You only have to watch kids today using technology to realise the similarities, and that we adults are very much the pidgins."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Like Kazaa, but without the invasions of privacy

Good Wired News story about Kazaa Lite, an unauthorized Kazaa network client that runs without any of the spyware surprises and other hidden code. The Kazaa people are hardly approaching this project with good humor and a strong commitment to the value of interoperability in an innovation marketplace -- rather, they're chasing down sites that make Kazaalite available for download and sending them cease and desist letters.

See In a statement forwarded to Kazaalite.com, a website dedicated to the software program, a Russian programmer known only as "Yuri" outlined his motives for creating Kazaa Lite: "It is not my intention at all to stop Kazaa from earning advertising revenue. In fact, I am thankful to Kazaa for creating their great software and the FastTrack network. I only want to make it clear that Kazaa has to stop misleading the people who use their software."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Peter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Damon remembered in NYT

The NYT ran a very nice obit for Damon Knight yesterday, and countless Boing Boing readers wrote in to tell me about it.

Mr. Knight was part of the first wave of literary-minded science fiction writers. Born in Baker, Ore., he moved to New York in the early 1940's and joined a group of budding writers called the Futurians. Their ranks included Isaac Asimov, Donald A. Wollheim and Frederick Pohl, who went on to be some of the most influential writers and editors in the field. Mr. Knight's memoir of the group, "The Futurians," was published in 1977.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Argentine hackers are lawful

Judges in Argentina rule that hacking is legal!

Arguing that the law only covered crimes on "people, things and animals" and not digital attacks, a federal court declared several Argentines known as "X-Team" innocent of charges they broke into the high court's Web page to accuse judges of covering up a human rights case.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tantek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Theme-weddings gone loco!

Gettin' theme-hitched, Vegas style!

Choose the Gothic Wedding and you'll be married by Dracula, who's rolled into the chapel in a coffin, amid the tombstoned setting of a foggy cemetery. Then there's the Egyptian wedding, where the bride, dressed as Cleopatra, is carried in by two male slaves as two goddesses fan the groom and King Tut officiates. And don't forget the Godfather-esque Gangster Wedding, which is set in an Italian restaurant and overseen by a minister accompanied by his two bodyguards.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Evan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Breast-cancer blog

NoBraRequited is the journal of Dori Johnson, a breast-cancer patient with a young son. Dori, a schoolteacher, is taking weekly chemo sessions. The blog is an unflinching and brave look at breast-cancer and anti-cancer therapy.

This may be too much information for some of you but i finally lost a toenail. It feels much better but not too attractive in sandals! It is almost a relief so i can start growing a new one. Wonder if it will come back another color or texture as my hair did after the first time i lost it?!?! It really freaked my four year old out (the nail loss) but we had a great lesson about regrowth. Just like a teacher to make it a learning experinece.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dori!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Firecracker packaging artwork

Utterly scrumptious gallery of firecracker packaging artwork. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copy-prevention hurts ebook sales, ebooks don't hurt real-book sales

Eric Flint, a Baen Books author, has written an essay on his experiences with Baen's free etext program, where readers are given free cleartext copies of current titles to download.

Flint shows good stats that suggest that giving away ebooks increases his sales, provided that there's no copy protection mechanism embedded in the text. Stirring stuff!

Let me begin by posing a simple question. Does anyone have any real evidence that having material available for free online-whether legitimately or through piracy-has actually caused any financial harm to any author?

The entire argument for encryption rests precisely upon this PRESUMPTION. A presumption which has never once been documented or demonstrated-and which, to the contrary, has been cast into question any number of times.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 17, 2002

The Street Finds its Own Uses for the Law of Unintended Consequences

My latest article for the O'Reilly Network is up, all about the magnificent power of innovation.

Constraint is the enemy of innovation. Blocks (and high-tech blocks, like Legos) are the darlings of educators and child-development specialists because they encourage open-ended play (likewise, the profitable trend to license Lego kits is bemoaned by the same educators because it constrains children's imaginations). Tamper-resistant seals and proprietary connectors discourage innovation through constraint.

The technological equivalent of the humble block is the Universal Turing Machine. Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, revolutionized computers with his realization that it was possible to replace all the special-purpose electronic computers of his day -- one device for calculating one function, another to calculate another -- with a single, meta-machine.

This Universal Machine -- the foundation of the microprocessor in your watch, alarm clock, VCR, laptop and singing greeting card -- is capable of performing any task that can be expressed mathematically. The Universal Machine ushered in an era of unprecedented innovation. It was the protean, primordial goo that was stretched and deformed and smooshed into every corner of human existence.

Turing's Machine gave us an aesthetic of mutability. Our world is increasingly full of configurable artifacts. The Transmeta chip changes its computing characteristics in response to software instructions, software-defined radio opens the possibility of a single card that can emulate a cell phone, an 802.11b card, or a digital TV receiver. Nanotechnology promises a world of Utility Fogs and smart matter that dynamically reconfigures meatspace as we move through it, optimizing reality to suit our needs.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:11:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"The Good Germ" Iron-On

Here's my latest iron-on image. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:29:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Order of the Phoenix on hold indefinitely

JK Rowling's behind schedule on Harry Potter #5, and she isn't making any promises. Prepare to wait. Also, where the hell is the ninth Lemony Snicket novel, dammit? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOL/Time-Warner versus interracial dating

The juror at a wrongful dismissal suit has written an amazing account of the disgusting treatment AOL/Time Warner afforded an employee to discourage his interracial dating. The harrassment was quite astounding, and what's more, the judge's instructions to the jury made it impossible for them to side with the employee, which meant that AOL/TW got off scott-free.

The story itself is almost too perfectly revolting, to archetypal. That, combined with the plea for funds, suggests that this may be a hoax. Anyone wanna do some research (i.e., get a docket number and a phone number for the Florida court)?

* He was shown porn of black cheerleaders by his manager and asked if his fiancée looked like that. This manager (Chris Nightingale), while swearing under oath that he displayed pornography at work (multiple times) in a deposition six months ago, has not to this day been reprimanded even verbally.

* He was told by the H.R. representative that mixed marriages don't work, and if he marries a black woman he will lose his job at Time Warner.

* His own (personal) laptop was taken from his car without his consent and the hard drive stripped and deleted because "it may have had company records on it".

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:46:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Support cloning!

If you're a US Citizen and believe in the value of human cloning research, this petition is something you should sign on to:

Congress should not outlaw this research despite recent pressure from various political factions. Nor should Congress impose a moratorium on this research, which would have the effect of halting the advances that are currently being made.

We the undersigned--many of us conservatives, some of us scientists, all of us concerned for the future--want it known that therapeutic cloning has supporters from across the political spectrum. To halt this research would be a terrible blow to science and public health.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automated blogroll management and syndication

Blogrolling is a web-based interface for creating and managing lists of links (including blogrolls and lists of bookmarks) that can then be syndicated by pasting in Javascript. I hope they do an RSS feed, too! Neat idea. Link Discuss (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:11:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another reason not to go to California Adventure

There are perhaps three noteworthy unique attractions at the sucktastic Disney's California Adventure park in Disneyland. I believe that the Superstar Limo is one of them -- primarily on the strength of a very witty tribute to the Haunted Mansion's Madame Leota near the ride's end. Unfortunately, Superstar Limo is closed, and will remain so through the summer. Another reason *not* to go to California Adventure. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CFP2002 on the WELL

Live coverage from this year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco, from the WELL's public conference: Link Discuss (Thanks, Jonl!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:13:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sublime Stitching Iron-On Patterns

Jenny has started selling Embroidery pattern iron-ons, and they look amazing. I ordered all four for the low price of $10. The sets come with instructions so hopefully I won't poke too many holes through my thumb.Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google finds "the" now

Google's changed its stopwords (words that are ignored as part of a search due to their ubiquity in language):

Well, Google's pulled a fast one on us. The no longer counts, strictly speaking, as a stopword. Run a Google search on the. You'll get about 2,550,000,000 results. In fact, you can search for stopword standbys like a and www and also get results, though none as dramatic as a search for the. 

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dracula seeks heir

The last Count Dracula is decrepit and childless, and is seeking an apdotive heir to carry the name.

Now Ottomar Rudolphe Vlad Dracula Prinz Kretzulesco has decided to continue the tradition of European nobility of adopting when there is no suitable blood relation to carry on the family name.

He has called on any European nobility to contact him by letter enclosing a photograph.

He said: "I would be pleased to hear from practically any prince or princess.

"We would like to adopt, but a real prince or princess. I cannot just take anyone from the street."

Link Discuss (via Fortean Times)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanoglue

Nanotech yeilds a kick-ass consumer-product: conductive super-epoxy.

Now this longstanding promise of superfortified heat-conducting materials has become a reality. University of Pennsylvania scientists have determined that adding a relatively small number of carbon nanotubes to epoxy yields a compound three-and-a-half times as hard and far better at heat conductance than the product found in hardware stores.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tweaking gas-guzzlers in LA

A New Times of LA reporter decided to make some news by stalking SUV drivers and slipping haranguing cards under their windsheilds:

"Road-Hogging, Gas-Guzzling, Air-Fouling Vulgarian! Clearly you have an extremely small penis, or you wouldn't drive such a monstrosity. For the adequately endowed, there are hybrids or electrics. 310-798-1817."

The number yeilds further SUV abuse and the opportunity to respond. The responses weren't nearly as funny as the card, though:

I just want you to know that my penis is huge. It is really, really, really big. And I bitterly resent that insult to my precious manhood.

Hello, psycho! We should all be driving hybrids or electrics or little Honda Civics with hatchbacks, but you don't know how half of us came about having our cars. I can't just get rid of this car I have. And it's not a new SUV, OK, so screw off. And worry about yourself.

Hey, I received one of your cards saying that I'm a really creepy person for driving a big V8 engine and let me tell you, it's people like you that really make me want to pollute even more. Actually, I can't wait to go home and just get all the batteries I've saved for the last several years -- just dump them into the ocean -- and just drop cans at random in nature. And when I go hiking just drop all my plastic and nonbiodegradables and Saran Wrap. I mean, I just want to pollute as much as possible because of idiots like you.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Vanessa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 15, 2002

Earth's Magnetic Poles About to Flip?

The Earth's magnetic poles switched 780,000 years ago. This New Scientist article reports that it could happen again very soon. Besides screwing up compasses and the navigation systems of migratory animals, what other bad things could happen? Link Discuss (Thanks, Kenny!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:37:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How the RIAA cooked the books, Part II

More ways to cook the music-industry books: The industry has been reporting total sales in steady decline, but as George Scriban, boy researcher (employers: he's at large!) discovered, there's every indication that the industry is folding in sales figures from singles (which they've discontinued, by and large).

Did you follow that?

It used to be that the labels sold CDs (which were expensive, and got very expensive after they started price-fixing) and singles (which were cheap).

Then, they stopped selling singles.

Then, total sales -- of singles (which they no longer sold!) and CDs -- declined.

But really, Napster caused the drop in music sales.

the RIAA's numbers support Ms Horovitz' argument: since 1997, shipments of CD singles have free-fallen from over 66 million units to 17 million -- they now represent less than one percent of the total dollar value of all CDs sold. had CD singles represented as much of the overall market as they did in 1997 (the peak of the format, with 66.7 million units shipped), the major labels might well have seen a modest increase in music sales compared to 2000, rather than a drop.

with the increasing evidence the evidence that a botched major-label money-grab of bad pricing and foolish product mixes was responsible for recorded music's woes, it becomes harder and harder to accept Big Content's party line that "the internet dunnit".

Would it surprise anyone if CD sales were actually up, post-Napster?

This is a meme worth spreading -- tell your journo friends. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tinkertoys for grownups

XBeams are a stick-and-connector system for building furniture -- toolracks, benches, sawhorses, clothesracks. Tinkertoys for grownups. These look like they'd be awesome for building little table-y and shelf-y things to fit into tight corners in miniscule San Francisco apartments. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jet!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:39:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thousand of miles of ants

A supercolony of ants, thousands of miles long, has been discovered, stretching from the Italian Riviera to Spain.

Normally, ants from different nests fight. But the researchers concluded that ants in the supercolony were all close enough genetically to recognize one another, despite being from different nests with different queens.

Cooperating allows the colonies to develop at much higher densities than normally would occur, eliminating some 90 percent of other types of ants that live near them, said Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

The Argentine ants were accidentally introduced to Europe around 1920, probably in ships carrying plants, Keller said in an interview via electronic mail.

I want satellite pix, dammit! Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:09:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Emporer's New Mind author bummed out by TP

Roger "king-hell math-guy" Penrose is suing over the presence of Penrose tiles on bumwad.

In a unique accusation of copyright infringement, distinguished mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose has filed a lawsuit over the decorative design on a brand of toilet paper. He charges that the Kimberly-Clark Corporation unlawfully appropriated an important geometric pattern of his creation and imprinted it on rolls of Kleenex Quilted bathroom tissue. He is demanding that all existing stock of the offensively designed T.P. be confiscated and destroyed, and wants an inquiry into Kimberly-Clark's profits so that suitable damages may be assessed....

Speaking of doing things by hand, let's get back to the toilet paper. When Penrose noticed a pack of Kleenex Quilted his wife had purchased, he immediately recognized the design embossed on its ill-fated 2-ply sheets. It was a very near facsimile of an aperiodic pattern he had created twenty years ago. Widely known in the geometry field as "Penrose tilings," this particular pattern is notable for using only two polygons to cover a surface. A thin diamond and a thick one form an endlessly interlocking field of five-pointed stars and decagons, sort of like a mildly psychedelic bathroom tile.

Link Discuss (via FOJO)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:52:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tell the Authors Guild what you think of used books

Amazon is calling on used-book sellers and writers to send letters to the President of the Authors Guild, giving him what-for in return for his campaign to get writers to sever ties with Amazon to protest Amazon's practice of selling used and new books together. This is a stupid, reactionary response to an innovative idea that will drive more sales, especially for new writers (ahem), and the Authors Guild is way out of line here.

Here's some of my letter:

I'm quite distressed at the Authors Guild's reactionary position on Amazon's used-book service. As a new author whose books will be published as $25+ hardcovers, my principal challenge will be to find a way to introduce my work to new readers. The intershelving of used and new books has been shown to be an effective means of driving sales of new authors -- I discovered this myself when I was a bookseller, and it's an experience that has been replicated in many bookstores, from corner operations like my local genre bookstore, Borderlands Books, all the way up to Powell's Books, the largest bookstore in the world.

What's more, the Amazon used-books service does not push the bounds of established copyright law or practice *at all*. The right of a consumer to resell the property s/he's lawfully acquired (called the Doctrine of First Sale) is the reason that we are able to have used bookstores at all. Also, yard-sales, charitable donations, library discard sales, collectibles sales, etc and so forth.

Indeed, one of the most revolting characteristics of many e-book technologies is that they abridge this right -- think of all the tens of millions of books donated to schools and libraries, sent to prisons and literacy programs, passed from friend to friend or within a family. The Doctrine of First Sale makes all of this possible. READ THE WHOLE LETTER...

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Atlantic: The Apocalypse of Adolescence

An article from The Atlantic called "The Apocalypse of Adolescence" blames pop culture products such American Beauty for turning normally non-rebellious teens into cold-blooded killers.

This spring one of two Vermont teenagers charged with the knifing murder of two Dartmouth College professors will go on trial. The case offers entry to a disturbing subject -- acts of lethal violence committed by "ordinary" teenagers from "ordinary" communities, teenagers who have become detached from civic life, saturated by the mythic violent imagery of popular culture, and consumed by the dictates of some private murderous fantasy.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:57:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Great Movie Ride Script

Check out this awesome, link-annotated script for the Walt Disney World Disney/MGM Studios' "Great Movie Ride."

Tour Guide: This is the underworld, scene of such classic gangster films as "The Public Enemy", starring the great James Cagney.

James Cagney: Aw, you dirty, double-crossing - open up in there, you hear me?

Thug #1: There's somebody coming! There's somebody coming! Get down!

Thug #2: Ah, just a bunch o' rubberneckin' tourists.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Instant Bullying

Short Yahoo piece that reports that kids are getting picked on around the clock via instant messages. I'm glad I went to junior high school in the '70s. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:12:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paying to list poems with Google's AdWords

This site details an interesting art project: The author wrote three-line poems and then paid to have them associated with Google's AdWords program, so that searchers for, say, "Money" would see the low-ku on the left. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PNH remembers Damon Knight

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has written an excellent remembrance of Damon Knight on his blog, Electrolite. I'm still in shock. I keep remembering little snippets about Damon, like:

• He was a total net.fanatic. When I first encountered Damon, it was online, on GEnie, and he was in his late sixties. He was all over GEnie's science-fiction roundtable, picking fights, starting word-games, educating. I assumed at first that it must have been someone impersonating Damon, since I could not imagine that this grand master of the genre could be hanging around, being so, you know, human, let alone negotiating the intricacies of getting a creaking PC to successfully connect to GEnie's modem-pool.
• We'd all heard legends about the water-gun fights at Clarion, but they largely failed to materialize -- until Damon arrived. He'd sit in his ground-floor dorm-room, sheilded by the window-screen, and squirt passers-by, then duck and cover. At the Clarion 25 Anniversary reunion party at the end of my year, Damon nailed Harlan Ellison but good, and was later captured by a gang of students and former students and given a thorough drenching.
• He'd lost his ability to hear the higher registers. For days, we stared at each other in nervous confusion when Damon's digital watch would emit a blast of ear-splitting, high-pitched beeps during the workshop sessions while Damon studiously (seemingly) ignored it -- until he remarked casually that he'd bought a watch with an alarm built in to help him remember to take his pills, and the damned alarm didn't work.
• Further to that, Damon couldn't hear young Felicity Rose Savage, the 17-year-old prodigy of our group, whose high voice was outside of his register for hearing. When Rosie spoke, then, Damon would cross the floor and crouch before her, hands cupped to his ears.

Here's Patrick:

He was an absolutely central figure of the science fiction world. As a teenager in 1939, he hitchhiked from his home in Oregon to New York City, where he became part of the Futurians, the group of fans and writers that also included the young Frederik Pohl, Donald Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, C. M. Kornbluth, and many others; his book-length memoir of this period, The Futurians, remains one of the most entertaining works of SF history ever published. He was the first reviewer to subject science fiction to the standards of ambitious mainstream fiction; his collection of essays and reviews, In Search of Wonder, is the founding document of modern SF criticism. With Judith Merrill and James Blish, he founded the Milford series of writing workshops, which led to the creation of the Clarion SF and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, at which he and his wife Kate Wilhelm taught for decades--helping to raise generation after generation of some of the field's best writers. His book Creating Short Fiction remains one of the best how-to texts for the any aspiring fiction writer. He founded the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and served as its first president; he was a tireless defender of authors' rights and critic of bad publishing practices. He edited dozens of important anthologies, most notably the "Orbit" series; in that capacity, he discovered many writers who later rose to prominence, including R. A. Lafferty, Gardner Dozois, and Gene Wolfe. (Wolfe's classic The Fifth Head of Cerberus is dedicated "To Damon Knight, who one well-remembered June evening in 1966 grew me from a bean.")

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Goodbye, Damon

Damon Knight was my teacher at the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 1992. One of the fathers of science fiction, Damon founded the Science Fiction Writers of America, helped invent the writers' workshop, wrote much of the classic Twilight Zone canon. He edited the Orbit series of short story anthologies. He wrote brilliant stuff in his youth and his work got even better as he grew older, more controlled. His last two novels, "Why Do Birds?" and "Humpty Dumpty, An Oval," are two of the finest science fiction novels ever written. I have never had a teacher quite like Damon. His notes on the creative process are among the most lucid instruction on tickling your brain that I've ever received.

Damon died last night, at the age of 80, after an illness. I feel privileged to have known him. I'll miss him, as will the thousands of writers and millions of readers that he touched. Goodbye, Damon.

A plotted story has a skeletal structure that can be extracted and examined; the story makes sense if you just tell what happens in it. This is not true of unplotted stories. Consider, for example, Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." It is easy to say what happens in this story. The narrator gets off a train in a deserted countryside and walks deep into the forest, where he makes camp and goes to sleep. In the morning he catches grasshoppers for bait, has breakfast, and fishes the river. He catches trout and cleans them. This account could be expanded by adding detail, but even if it included every least thing that happens, it would not tell you what the story means.

The strength of "Big Two-Hearted River" lies partly in its symbolism (the river is the narrator's life, and he is fishing the upper part of it, which represents the lost paradise of his boyhood), but there are powerful unplotted stories in which symbolism plays no part. Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is simply the chronicle of a man's life; the same can be said of Willa Cather's "Good Neighbor Rosicky." In these stories we are profoundly moved, not by drama, but by the inner meaning of a human being's existence. These are stories of illumination rather than of revelation; they take the form, "This is what life is."

The story forms we have been discussing are not rigid little boxes, into which every work of fiction must be crammed; they are ideal categories. In practice, elements of these forms are mixed in all kinds of ways. The same story may be partly one of resolution, partly of solution, partly of illumination (see, for example, The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett). When you understand the simple forms, you can mix and combine them to make more sophisticated ones. There is no end to the stories that can be written, because the possible combinations of old forms will never be exhausted, and because good writers keep on inventing new forms. 

Damon on plot: Link

Damon's Hotwired chat: Link

Damon's bibliography: Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 14, 2002

Cover-version obsession heaven

Chris sez:

It's like Six Degrees of Bacon, but it finds the longest links. Also, it's not about Kevin Bacon, it's about cover songs instead. Did I mention there's an XML-RPC interface to it? The longest chain of cover songs (where each song is a cover of a song by the previous artist) is up to 16 songs.

Unfortunately, it's also incredibly addictive, so you may want to stay away from it unless you want your brain to be tortured for hours on end.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nesting doll heaven

Russky kitsch doesn't come any finer than this 50" tall, 50 piece, $2,000 Russian Nesting Doll from BornInThe USSR.com. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:47:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Some lessons for CompUSA

This in an amazing account of one customer's attempt to purchase a ~$3,000 oversized Apple flatpanel display from CompUSA, using a CompUSA credit-card. CompUSA wouldn't let him ship the display to his office unless he had his credit-card company (which was CompUSA!) add his office as a "shipping address" on his billing record, but his credit-card company (CompUSA, remember?) doesn't have any facility for adding shipping-addresses to their credit-cards.

The best part of this article is the way it's structured, as a series of lessons for corporations that would sell us their goods.

Break your promises. Promise to do something, and then don't follow up. When a customer complains, you need to be on the ball and get things done for them. The worst thing you can do is drop the ball. Well... actually, that's not quite true...

Use revisionist history. It's worse yet to drop the ball and then claim "I never said that" when the customer knows damn well that you did. It's better to admit you screwed up. Most people can allow for a little human error, as long as it isn't constant.

Link Discuss (via Dave's Picks)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The cable-puller's rap

Netmaster 10BaseT is a nerd-rapper who's kickin' it old-school wired-network style. (Yes, Henson, this one is for you.)

Some cracker cuts yo fiber with a hatchet?

I'll rap his fuckin' head in with a ratchet,

cuz I'm the Netmaster. 10baseT is in the house;

I'm clackin' on yo keyboard, I'm clickin on yo mouse.

And you better watch out , cuz I'm sniffin yo packets

Got a mile o' CAT-5 with the insulator jacket.

[chicka wap chicka widget chicka boom boom pppfffffttt]

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rushkoff's blog

Boing Boing pal Doug Rushkoff has a blog! Link Discuss (via Salad With Steve)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massive Passover infographic

This application of information design to the Passover Seder is obsessive, wonderful, and massively cognitively dissonant. I like it. This year on Passover, I went out for Mexican food, but I did hide a corn-chip and I sang "Mah-nish-ta-na" to the mariachis' rendition of "Ay, yi, yi, yi/Canta y no llores" (it fits!). Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sniffing X10 cams

Another FUDdy article on the rise of a new species of war-driving: sniffing for X10 spycams and watching over their owners' shoulders. Any unencrypted wireless connection is subject to sniffing -- it should not come as a revelation to anyone in this day and age that cleartext wireless comms are being listened in on. Software-defined radio will let oatmeal COTS PCs listen in on the entire spectrum simultaneously. If you're talking without wires and without ciphers, you will be sniffed, eventually. We've got good, public-key cryptosystems at our disposal -- we should be incorporating these ciphers into all of our "private" communications. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Addicted to games

Here's a slightly FUDdy article about the addictiveness of multiplayer videogames, like Everquest. Notable for the coinage of "heroinware," to describe addictive software. Another good, related coinage that never caught on is "terminal cancer" -- the illness associated with an inability to put the computer away (from a fantastic SF short story by David Kirkpatrick called "The Effects of Terminal Cancer on Potential Astronauts," in the first Tesseracts anthology)

"I had one young man who was trying to get on Social Security disability for agoraphobia," he said. "He didn't have a mental disorder; he just didn't want to leave 'EverQuest' or instant messaging."

Some have suggested that warning labels be placed on "EverQuest," which has more than 400,000 paying subscribers. Scott McDaniel, vice president of marketing for "EverQuest" publisher Sony Online Entertainment, said the company relies on players to employ good judgment.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The UK jumps on the broadbandwagon

With the advent of cheap, home-installable DSL, broadband in the UK has taken off look a rocket.

Some websites where people swap broadband information, such as ADSL Guide, have also reported a steep upsurge of interest.

At the same time online stores are reporting shortages in the microfilters that people need to use to convert their phone line into one that can handle ADSL.

Also proving popular are the network hubs and routers that let people share their broadband link, be it cable or ADSL, between several PCs.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Using a game cabinet as an MP3 jukebox

Recycling coin-op game-consoles is old hat -- we've seen a fair number of hackers who've put powerful PCs and multifarious controllers in vintage cabinets, then run Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator to turn the cabinet into an Ur-game that can play anything.

There's something indefinably cool, though, about this project, where a hacker has installed a giant hard-drive and a decent set of speakers into an old console, and turned it into a nerd-wet-dream MP3 jukebox. It's the anti-iPod (even runs Win98!), but I want one, anyway. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:02:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Learning from fruit-flies to solve cellular problems

Slashdot's on fire this morning -- tons of great stuff there. Let's start with this story, on researchers who are solving the cobinatorial explosion you get when you try to optimize which cell-tower will transmit on what spectrum, using autonomous computing techniques modeled on the way that embryonic fruit-fly cells manage the relative density of exoskeleton to sensory bristle.

My friend Geoff Cohen turned me on to a book called "Cat's Paws and Catapaults," which examines the historical failure of mechanical designs based on nature -- for example, the ornithopter. There are rare exceptions, like Velcro, but for the most part, nature's designs suggest mechanical dead-ends when applied to human engineering.

It seems that this is not the case in networking. Eric Bonabeau's Ant Colony Optimization research (which I've written about here on several occassions) has been used to solve real-life networking problems and to approach optimal solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem inherent in Southwest Airlines' routing. The Santa Fe Institute has also used cellular automata research to solve complex traffic and urban-planning problems.

The amazing thing about evolved solutions is that they're typically counter-intuitive. The Santa Fe institute will recommend that town planners reduce the number of lanes on certain roads (rather than building alternate routes) in order to reduce traffic congestion. Southwest Airlines' jets fly seemingly nonsensical routes ("Announcing the arrival of Southwest Airlines flight 432 from Denver, continuing on to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Orlando"). Autonomous cellular towers will choose spectrum via a complex negotiation that will not only be non-deterministic, but also utterly unpredictable.

I think this points to a world that is not human-readable. We will be surrounded by autonomous systems that pursue optimization by zigging and zagging in ways that we can't make any sense of, at least not without serious and determined study (just as now, a compiled binary is nearly opaque to human comprehension). What a strange world that will be -- our virus and anti-virus software will collaborate across networks to modify themselves and their behavior; our spamfilters will collaborate in much the same way; search-engine results based on network analysis (like Google) will grow even more magical and defy comprehension even further.

A time traveller brought here from 100 years back would be mystified, I think, by our systems and social conventions, especially those created by the ability to communicate at a distance (why make plans in advance to meet friends after work when you can just call around and see who's available once you shut down your computer, and then zip over to their location at taxi-speed?). At root, though, these interactions will be designed by humans, for humans. They are, at root, comprehensible. Our time-traveller will slowly but surely adapt. What about a world where all of our interactions, lcoally and at a distance, are governed by unknowable, evolved and adaptive mechanisms that serve us, but are not of us?

When a fruit fly is developing, its back needs some cells to develop into its exoskeleton and some to develop into sensory bristles. Too many bristles, and the skeleton isn't strong enough; too much exoskeleton and the fly is ill-equipped to sense its environment.

But there's not a central system that dictates which cells will develop into exoskeleton and which into bristles. Each cell holds the potential for both, and when a cell starts developing one way, it sends a chemical message to its neighbors. A bristle developing in one cell will tend to suppress bristle development in its neighbors, so equilibrium is established, Shackleton said.

This decentralized model, in which each cell or base station settles with its partners, works in Shackleton's tests. "It will come up with a useful plan which minimizes interference" and can better adjust to changing usage patterns, he said. Which antennas use which frequencies would no longer be BT's problem. The antennas could simply work it out among themselves.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:40:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The great Catholic School knee-sock stand-off

Catholic Schools in Ontario have given up on trying to regulate the length of kilts (student roll their waistbands or get caught by unexpected growth spurts) and so they're banning knee-socks instead, in favor of tights. When I was a kid in Toronto, the girls at the alternative schools I attended would point to the Catholic schoolgirls' knees and say, "See, wearing a short skirt in winter makes your knees fat -- your body tries to keep its joints warm." The schoolgirls are enganging in civil disobedience, blatantly sporting knee-highs and leaving their tights at hime.

"A lot of girls have their kilts shorter (than allowed) and they wear shorts underneath," Jalsevac said. "But there's a handful of girls who have decided the new thing is to not do that. And they've ruined it for everyone."

Both Gallo and his students blame a small clique of Grade 9 and 10 girls who are wearing thong underwear under their kilts.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 13, 2002

Math humor -- ar ar ar ar ar

Nerdiest domain-name ever:

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097.org Link Discuss (via Vitanuova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Frankston on SMTP

Bob "Connectivity" Frankston gets very close to nailing a point I've been trying to figure out how to nail for a long time, using SMTP as an example. Email seems like something hellishly complex, requiring a great deal of forethought and planning to work properly. A whole gang of serious labcoats and hairfaces and suits gathered to establish The Master Plan for Scalable Email, called X.400, and while they were jerking off carefully planning, some hackers whipped up some extensions to telnet, a basic call-and-response with a very limited vocab, called Simple Mail Transport Protocol, and unleashed it. Today, email lives in SMTP and X.400 is nothin' much but a stack of very carefully worded requirements docs laid to rest (by REST!) on the trashheap of history.

So what's the point I'm trying to get to? I'm still not sure how to articulate it. It's kinda Cluetrain-y. People are smarter than organizations. Lots of unplanned approaches with a marketplace for picking winners and losers is better than a monolithic "enterprise" approach. Release early, release often. It's a two-way world. Damn the Pareto Principal and let the other 80% talk. Blogs are better than newspapers because they publish immediately, then iterate towards truth, instead of the tedious business of committee-editing, fact-checking, type-setting, proof-reading, etc etc etc. Technologists should be free to release stuff without going through Congressional review. You don't need to be exhaustive, nor do you have to be authoratative, before releasing or stating something. I dunno. Link Discuss (via Scripting News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Perens writes to the CEO of Lindows

Bruce Perens has written an open letter to the CEO of Lindows. Lindows is a Linux distro that runs (will run) a bunch of Windows apps right out of the box, which is certainly interesting news for MSFT (who have tried a bunch of bullshit lawyerpoint tactics to nail Lindows for trademark infringement, to which I say, you keep using that word -- I do not think it means what you think it means). Anyway, Lindows has done lots of good stuff for the Open Source world, throwing money at good projects and people and conferences. This is all to the good, and they deserve to be applauded for it.

But there's a problem. Lindows has been in a closed beta test for some time now -- with beta-testers paying ~$100 each in order to participate in the program -- and they haven't released their source code (the GPL license which governs the code they adapted for Lindows requires that source be made available with public distributions). Rabid Open Sourcians have called bullshit on Lindows and told 'em to cough up the source of be held in contempt of nerd.

The CEO of Lindows did a little interview where he slammed his critics as empty doctrinaires who punish model open-source citizens (like Lindows) who put all kinds of resouces into the community for failing to live up to the letter of the license. Don't worry, the Lindows people say, we'll release the source once we go 1.0 -- we're just keeping it locked up until we get out of beta.

To which Perens says, essentially, Oh, come on. It's swell that you put down the cash to fly people to conferences and stuff, but that's window dressing. It's not an Open Airfare license, it's an Open Source license. Lindows is built on millions of lines of code written by hackers around the world, contributed under the terms of the GPL. It's all about the source, sir, so release it. Now.

But Michael, please remember that we are partners. For all that you've done for the Free Software community, we've done at least as much for you. And our partnership has rules that we are both honor-bound to follow. In the case of my work on Lindows, those rules are the terms of the GPL. You accepted those terms, and became my partner, when you chose to incorporate my software into your product and distribute it to others.

There is a pragmatic reason that I ask you to fulfill your source-code obligation any time you distribute a copy of my work from one legal entity to another: Sadly, some companies never make it to release 1.0. In that case, the pre-release versions provide the only opportunity for a company to fulfill its source-code obligation. Another reason is that if we're lax in enforcing our terms with you, other companies will think they can violate those terms with impunity.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:04:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gateway Computers does the right thing -- Hillary Rosen spazzes out

Gateway's new Consumer Advocacy ads are fantastic. The computer manufacturer's TV spots feature their CEO and a cow (natch) driving side-by-side in a sixteen-wheeler, singing along with "Sundown," while text appears on screen reminding you of your right to legally download music, burn it onto CDs and load it onto your computer or MP3 player. It goes even further, and tells consumers to guard against new laws that would limit our rights to use our legall acquired music the way we want to.

Of course, this has put a serious wild hair up Hillary "RIAA" Rosen's ass, who vomited this nonsensical FUD:

"The Gateway commercial is fun, but their website is nothing but a gateway to misinformation. No one has proposed anything that would 'prevent all digital copying.' If Gateway truly believed that illegal copying hurts all artists and labels who make the music we enjoy, they wouldn't be relying on these misleading scare tactics -- they'd be working with us to find a solution to the piracy problem. If only they would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars they're spending on this ad campaign to help stop illegal downloading...but that wouldn't help them sell more CD burners, would it?"

Uh-huh, right Hil. That's what it's all about -- technologists want nothing more than to steal from the music industry. This isn't about anti-democratic initiatives like the BPDG that would replace the innovative world of today with a world where no new technology could be legally brought to market without the say-so of coked-up Hollyweird fatcats.

BTW, the EFF is running a campaign to get consumers to thank Gateway for doing the right thing, which you can participate in here. Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor's eJournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simpsons to Brazil: Sorry!

The producer of the Simpsons has apologized to Brazil for last week's edisode.

"We apologize to the lovely city and people of Rio de Janeiro," Brooks said in a statement on Friday.

"If that doesn't settle the issue, Homer Simpson offers to take on the President of Brazil on Fox Celebrity Boxing," he added, clearly unable to resist having a little fun.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:07:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 12, 2002

Netuicles: like dog testicles, but better!

Sure, you want to neuter your pet, it's the right thing to do. But why should you or your beloved moggy (horsie, bullie, doggie) have to endure the unsightly absence of testicles after the operation? Neuticles to the rescue! The patented pet-testicle replacement technology will restore the natural look and feel of pet-testicles without any of the traditional, testicle-driven aggressive behaviours. At $30 a pair (no word on whether you can buy onesies), can you afford not to give your beloved critter a fair pair-o-nuts? This is weird enough (and funny enough) to be a hoax, but please let it not be.

Do Neuticles come in different models?

Neuticles are available in 3 models: NeuticlesOriginals, NeuticlesNaturals and NeuticlesUtra. Each are crafted from FDA medically-approved (for human use) materials- replicating the animals testicle in size, shape and weight.

Do Neuticles come in sizes?

Five-sized Neuticles are available for any-sized canine or feline. One size is currently available for equine and bulls. Refer to sizing chart for additional information and 3D sizing chart. Custom sizing is available.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:02:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

J. Guevara

Forget Che Guevara, say hi to J. Guevara. Excellent photoshopping of Jakob "Usability" Nielsen discovered in this week's NTK. Link (Thanks, Julian!) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:29:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Autobloggin'

Will wrote in to remind us of his automatic blog-entry generator, which uses a madlibs engine to generate plausible-sounding pointers to items of note on other blogs, i.e.,

Powazek.com says Internet-related robots are spying on God.
xblog maintains underage angel investors are spying on weblogging tools.
WebWord says conversational desktops like to play at software piracy.
120 Degrees says AI-inspired cars love new technologies.
Robot Wisdom states evil laptops distress God!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:19:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Printing circuits with inkjet printers

New Scientist article describes how an inkjet printer can be used to homebrew printed circuit boards. There's every indication that inkjets have some pretty powerful applications; we've already seen inkjets that use edible inks to print high-res photos on sheet-cakes, and inkjet "Napster-fabbers" that lay down layer after layer of goo that hardens into a 3D form of your specification.

The researchers have so far used the technique to make simple organic LED arrays that display images when connected to a power supply, as well as power-generating solar cells. But Jabbour believes the technique could be used to create many different types of device.

This flexibility comes in part from the ability to print semi-conducting polymers on many different surfaces, he says: "We have put them on to textiles, silicon wafers, plastic, glass - you name it."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Let's put Verisign to death

The best thing to come out of the Enron debacle was the swift and unrelenting vilification of Andersen. Enron may have been run by a pack of theiving, lying bastards, but that didn't come as a surprise to anyone -- they were in the energy-trading business, not the trustworthiness business. But Andersen, ah, they were in the trustworthiness business. Their entire value was as a disinterested, brutally honest third-party auditor. It's become clear -- to my surprise -- that Andersen can't ever rehabilitate their reputation. They have been sentenced to death by the marketplace for betraying its trust.

Another trustworthiness company, Verisign, deserves the same swift retribution. Verisign is a certifier of certificates, a manager of critical Internet infrastructure, and a pack of bumbling, cheating incompetents. Their Network Solutions division -- whose practices Verisign endorses with liberal sprinklings of logos and checkmarks -- is notorious for failing to do its duty to the Internet in maintaining the integrity of the Domain Name system that is in its charge.

NetSol's only significant One of Verisign's most signficant assets is its ICANN charter to run big hunks of DNS. It is this asset that Verisign purchased when it acquired NetSol. Now, even ICANN recognizes that NetSol can't be trusted to manage the .ORG top-level domain. Verisign gave up its charter to run .ORG recently, and with any luck a little push from the Distributed Republic of Blogistan will cost it the rest of its charter, putting it to death for the crime of betraying our trust again and again (and again and again).

Here's a rallying point: A domain, hoopla.com, has been stolen with NetSol's complicity. A guy in Berlin faxed in a regstration for the domain (which was not set to expire until June) and NetSol handed it over to him. Instead of rectifying their error, they have told the owner to go to hell, negotiate to buy the domain from its new "owner," or just get lost.

Let's put NetSol to death. We're the Alpha Geeks of our social circles. When people ask us about registering domains, let's be sure to tell them to register anywhere except NetSol, because they will sell your domain to someone else and do nothing about it. When we attend conferences where NetSol or Verisign execs are speaking, let's hijack the Q&A and hound them about why we should trust them when they so cavalierly robbed hoopla.com's owner of her property. If NetSol resolves this issue (ha!), then ask pointed questions about why it took such a massive putsch to get them to do the right goddamned thing. If you're at an ICANN meeting, raise hoopla.com and your own horror stories and demand that NetSol be stripped of its charter. Tell your company to certify with companies other than Verisign. Don't use Verisign for credit-card processing.

Let's come up with some good insulting memes for describing Verisign and its business-units: "Arthur Verisign," "Enron Solutions," "Not Very-Sign," "Network Problems," etc. Let's put them to death. Let's spam their mailroom with FuckedCompany t-shirts. Let's go to their bankruptcy auction and buy their laptops and publish their embarassing emails on our blogs. Let's never put our trust in Verisign again.

(Thanks for Paul Hoffman for setting me straight about Verisign and NetSol's relationship to one another)

Link, Link, Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Who needs Blue Helmets when you've got Jackboots?

The UK Labor Foreign Secretary suggests using private mercenaries as peace-keeping forces abroad, displacing the traditional UN forces. Labor politics ain't what they used to be, apparently. This guy apparently doesn't understand the difference between "peacekeeping" and "pacifying." Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is it OK to digitally mask a billboard?

The upcoming Spider-Man movie is in legal problems. The producers took money from USA Today it upon themselves (Thanks, Rebecca!) to digitally mask a Samsung billboard on one of the buildings that Spidey swings from with a USA Today billboard, and the building's owners are suing. Samsung thinks that the production chose its billboard because it competes with Sony, the studio behind the film. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taliban chat client

A Pakistani programmer has released a custom IRC client for use by the Taliban:

The program's "Islamic Tulz" menu features goodies such as the ability to paste canned "facts" about Jihad and the Taliban into a chat room, as well as an Azan Caller, which announces prayer times by song with an audio recording.

Available at Talibanonline.info and at mirror sites including Talibanonline.cya.cx, the program also displays a photo of American Talib John Walker Lindh in the corner of chat windows.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christian Apocalyptic Fiction

Fundamentalist Christians have been gradually seceding from America over the last decade. This has signficantly dialed down the gain on efforts to Christianify the world through governmental intervention; it has also given rise to a shadow world of Christian culture: Christian themeparks, movies, and an entire genre of Christian Apocalyptic science fiction, a literature of the end-times:

On a related front, Christian apocalyptic authors, like science fiction authors, are interested in aliens. But again, they don't like them. Although C.S. Lewis could fit other worlds with sentient beings into his Christian beliefs, this is not the case for the Christian apocalyptic fiction that I've seen. In such works, extraterrestrials are usually just a hoax -- but if they exist, they are actually fallen angels. In Nephilim, the demons look just like the greys. In We All Fall Down, the demon aliens (called the Celestine Prophets) give a long speech to explain away the Rapture in terms of alien intervention, but the apocalyptically savvy protagonist just laughs at the devil's obviousness: "Nice try, c@#$s!@#er. Next time why don't you just try offering me the f@#!ing apple." (92)

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 11, 2002

Smoking makes you nuts?

Does smoking make you crazy?

Jeffrey Johnson, of New York Psychiatric Institute, found that people who smoke a packet of cigarettes a day at the age of 16 are 16 times more likely to develop panic disorders, seven times more likely to become agoraphobic and five times more likely to develop generalised anxiety disorder than non-smoking peers.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why CD sales are REALLY in decline

The music industry wants you to believe that P2P file-sharing has hurt CD sales, but the actual figures point to this being raw, steaming FUD. The music industry is losing CD sales because they're a bunch of monopolistic price-fixers. George Scriban -- a freelance analyst and researcher who could use a job, hint hint -- has posted a remarkable piece of original research to his blog that demonstrates the relationship of the labels' price-fixing practices and the decline in unit sales. In other words, when CDs cost more, people don't buy as many of 'em.

so, the RIAA says that the price of a CD fell more than 40% in 13 years. the states' attorneys general cite CD prices as dropping from $15 to $10 in about a year. that would seem to indicate that 80% of the RIAA's vaunted price drop happened in the last couple of years of the period they cite, when discount merchandisers like Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target touched off a CD price war. in other words, CD prices didn't drop until some cowboys came along and screwed with Big Content's cozy little arrangement -- you can guess what happened next.

coincidentally, the RIAA doesn't post any figures on the average price of a CD since 1996, right about when the FTC and the states say the RIAA's members started their price-fixing scheme.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oulipo lit!

Eli sez:

You probably would like the Oulipo.

These are the authors who write books without using the letter 'e' (it is called a 'lipogram'.)

This site is about the book of the same name. The book is about the Oulipo, a group of authors whose work comes from a blend of mathematics and Dada. Check out the excerpts section for examples.

I own a copy of this book, but I'm not trying to push it. It is just that since most Oulipo sites are in French, and this is a rare good English one.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Multiple-choice Nixon

The Nixon tapes quiz! Heather sez:

4. Which world leader did Nixon hate so much that he could hardly refer to him without using the words "son of a bitch"?

(a) France's Georges Pompidou.

(b) West Germany's Willy Brandt.

(c) Canada's Pierre Trudeau.

(d) Chile's Salvador Allende.

mwa ha ha!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Heather!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dragonball Z toy Engrish

Here's some lovely Engrish from the packaging on a cheezy Dragonball Z toy. Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:36:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gibson documentary on DVD

No Maps for These Territories, a brilliant documentary on William Gibson, is out on DVD! Here's a quote from my review of the film for Wired:

The original cyberpunk, a hunched beanpole of a man, puffs cigarettes as ideas roll off his Southern tongue. Though his languorous musings are nothing like his intense and furious prose, Gibson's speaking and writing styles share a signature density. He tosses off one-liners effortlessly. Describing the "post-geographic" frisson he experiences when an ATM in Santa Monica, California, reports his Vancouver bank balance, Gibson says, "We've been growing a prosthetic extended nervous system for the last 100 years or so - and it's really, really starting to take."

Neale uses two MiniDV cameras to create restrained visuals that complement Gibson's slow brilliance. The film's defining image is of Gibson sitting in the back of the limo. Additional footage from the trip and from archives - vacant fields, the Sunset Strip, nuclear explosions - provide a sly counterpoint. Intercut with scenes from the ride are short conversations with Gibson's friends:Writers Jack Womack and Bruce Sterling discuss his work and its cultural relevance, and Bono reads from Neuromancer.

Back in the car, Gibson comes clean about the faintly embarrassing adolescent attitude that 1984's Neuromancer displayed. "It's a young man's book," he says. "I don't have access to that material now, and if I did, it'd be bad news."

I might just have to pick up a copy of this thing -- it's been a year since I saw it, and I wouldn't mind having it around. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Web Service of the decade from the search engine of the century!

The Google API is UP! Woo hoo!

Program Ideas

* Auto-monitor the web for new information on a subject

* Glean market research insights and trends over time

* Invent a catchy online game

* Create a novel UI for searching

* Add Google's spell-checking to an application

Link Discuss (Thanks, Nate!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:15:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indian Atlantis discovered

Divers have discovered a 5,000 year old sunken city off the coast of India:

The myths also state that a large city once stood here which was so beautiful the gods became jealous and sent a flood that swallowed it up entirely in a single day.

One of the expedition team, Graham Hancock, said: "I have argued for many years that the world's flood myths deserve to be taken seriously, a view that most Western academics reject.

"But here in Mahabalipuram we have proved the myths right and the academics wrong."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:35:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New pill threatens to bankrupt gyms

A new pill could build muscle without exercise. About freaking time:

In the study, Williams and colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas created a group of mice with genes that made a surplus of a protein called calmodulin-dependent protein kinase, or CaMK. When this protein is activated, it and another protein, calcineurin, trigger the physical changes that muscle cells undergo after intense exercise.

Williams said mice with a high level of CaMK developed more mitochondria in muscle cells and saw an increase of a type of cell called the "slow twitch" muscle. These are muscle cells that power sustained activity, such as that required by marathon runners.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Perhaps the terrorists haven't won after all

The US Military has perfected the indestructible sandwich.

Capable of surviving airdrops, rough handling and extreme climates, and just about anything except a GI's jaws, the new "pocket" sandwich is designed to stay "fresh" for up to three years at 26 °C (about the temperature of a warm summer's day), or for six months at 38 °C (just over body temperature)...

To tackle the problem, researchers at Natick used fillings such as pepperoni and chicken to which they added substances called humectants, which stop water leaking out. The humectants not only prevent water from the fillings soaking into the bread, but also limit the amount of moisture available for bacterial growth.

The sandwiches are then sealed, without pasteurisation, in laminated plastic pouches that also include sachets of oxygen-scavenging chemicals. A lack of oxygen helps prevent the growth of yeast, mould and bacteria.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Starchy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tom Corbett, Walt Disney and Von Braun

Moon-landing conspiracies are a dime a dozen, but it's not every day you find one that manages to tie in Wener Von Braun, Walt Disney and Tom Corbett, Space Corbett.

Before you scoff and dismiss the notion, as our critics invariably do without offering an alternative scenario other than a pejorative out of hand dismissal, consider this: NASA and the American rocketry program has had a long history of partnering with Hollywood to produce programming related to the space program. One such film was recently re-shown on the Disney Channel. Entitled "Man and the Moon." The science adviser of the film was Dr. Werner Von Braun, a close friend of Willy Ley and Walt Disney. (Thanks to Rick L. Sterling for this info). 

Link Discuss (Thanks Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:26:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Streetplane!

Not much by way of news, but dig that pic: A jet rolled out of a maintenance hangar and into an LA side-street. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unforseen health-benefits of Kosher salami

The lovers of circumcised, moderately promiscuous men are significantly less likely to contract cervical cancer than their turtleneck-lovin' counterparts. Turns out that foreskins harbor the cancer-causing human papilloma virus, or H.P.V. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:10:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Choosing deafness

A deaf lesbian couple have disclosed that they sought out deaf sperm donors for their two young children, both of whom are deaf. The couple believe that deafness is a cultural identity as well as a physical reality. As I understand it, this is the same reasoning behind the rejection of cochlear implants by deaf parents for their children. John Varley's award-winning story, "The Persistence of Vision" explores the idea that people with different sensory capabilities develop unique cultures that can be detroyed by "curing" their "disabilities." Another intersection of science fiction and real life. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if the parents were a straight, deaf couple -- the artificial insemination makes all the difference here.

After their daughter's first hearing test, the couple wrote happily in her baby book: "Oct 11, 1996 - no response at 95 decibels - DEAF!'' Their daughter attends a special kindergarten for children with hearing problems.

After tests on their baby son showed he also had severe problems, they decided against giving him a deaf aid in the one ear that still has some hearing, saying they will leave the decision to him when he is older.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

(Sur)real-time

Here is a pretty neat JavaScript clock! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:18:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P Spam Filter

New Scientist story about "Folsom," a P2P spam filtering system. When a user on the network tags something as spam, Folsom assigns a unique signature to it, and then blocks email with the same signature from being sent to other users. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:43:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The coroner versus the rats

Rats are eating the corpses in the LA County Coroner's meat-locker. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

They have blogs!

Forget They Fight Crime, 'cause now They Have Blogs!

He's a terminally ill pompous defense attorney with an extensive stamp collection. She's a righteous hippie copyeditor with a huge crush on Angelina Jolie. They have blogs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 9, 2002

Virtual dissection

The virtual frog dissection at Froguts.com is one fo the coolest interactive educational apps I've ever seen. The detailed hypertext, the cool little animations, the stills from recycled classroom frogs -- wow. Link Discuss (Thanks, Don and Karen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly reports from the future

Tim O'Reilly describes the future as writ by the alpha geeks that his publishing company mines for inspiration. Great editorial!

All of these things come together into what I'm calling "the emergent Internet operating system." The facilities being pioneered by thousands of individual hackers and entrepreneurs will, without question, be integrated into a standardized platform that enables a next generation of applications. (This is the theme of our Emerging Technologies conference in Santa Clara May 13-16, "Building the Internet Operating System.") The question is, who will own that platform?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hip to be square, hipper to be irregular

Who needs business-card shaped CDs when you can make Texas-shaped CDs? I wonder what happens when you spin these up in an 80X CD reader and the asymmetry sets the drive to shakin'. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:19:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another nail in fair use's coffin

A tech company in Arizona was shaken down for $1,000,000 by the RIAA's lawyers as a punishment for allowing its employees to put their MP3 collections on a communal server so that they could all listen to each others' tunes. This isn't Napster -- this is playing your favorite music for your co-workers. Would the RIAA have had a case if the employees had kept a communal bin for their CD collections? The alarming thing is that the RIAA is holding itself up as a champion of fair use, as an appropriate arbiter of new technologies. They make my skin crawl. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Can the elderly be comforted by robots?

Brave gerontological researchers in Indiana are unafraid to ask the musical question, "Are robot dogs theraputic company for old people?" Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Quidditch for Muggles

Pat sez: "A clever gym teacher has adapted Harry Potter's favorite game for everyday kids by eliminating the brooms. But there are still quaffles, bludgers, and golden snitches! Where was this teacher when I was a kid?" Ya think that Time-Warner-AOL-Netscape-Bushmills-Mr Pibbs will sue over this? Probably. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:29:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hideous Phony Vintage Radio Depresses Me

There ought to be a law against making faux-retro crap like this radio, and the PT Cruiser, for that matter. This kind of stuff depresses the hell out of me. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:01:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Koran on your iPod

Contacts on the iPod. Notes on the iPod. RSS on the iPod. Now: the Koran on the iPod. Fundamentalist Christians, take note: until the King James is shipped for the iPod, your religion will suffer from a massive faith-based MP3 player gap. (note: it appears that this application has been taken offline) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Students suspended for online criticism; national media attention follows

High-school students whose website criticized their school administration got suspended for their trouble. Their coverage of this suspension garnered national press attention, which is neatly parallel to other cases of online bullying -- as when the Church of Scientology had links to xenu.net removed from Google's database at lawyerpoint and ended up creating international attention for xenu.net's criticisms of its policies. I've forwarded this story on to the students at my old alternative school, who are fighting a bureaucratic axis of evil that would have them shut down and integrated back into the mainstream, in the hopes that they take a page from the South High playbook. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Missouri versus the Goths

Depressed teenagers beware! $273,000 have been earmarked in Missouri to "combat Goth culture." Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Burning acid tears

Peter Parker was bit by a radioactive spider and got super-powers. A Welsh teenager was exposed to a cloud of toxic gas from an overturned truck and now she cries searing, acid tears.

"It has got progressively worse and now when I cry my face burns and begins to blister," she said. "I haven't been to school for 11 weeks."

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inuits cope with global warming

Global warming is changing Inuit language, culture, lifestyle and diet. (Funny, in Canada, we say "Inuit," never "Eskimo." I was taught that "Eskimo" was a racist term in Iriquois ("Eater of Raw Fish") and that Inuit ("The People") was the preferred term. Here in the US, I never hear "Inuit"). Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simpsons go to Rio -- Rio sues

Rio's tourist board will sue the Simpsons over an episode that negatively depicted Brazilian beach-life.

n the episode the Simpson father, Homer, is kidnapped by a taxi driver, the family is assaulted by begging Brazilian children on a beach, and the family visits Rio slums infested by violent monkeys.

Tourism Secretary Jose Eduardo Guinle asked the lawyer for Rio's tourism agency, Riotur, to file suit in U.S. courts for damages caused to the city's image.

Riotur has invested $18 million to promote the city around the world, officials said.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder, which is really outdoing itself these days))

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:41:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The communionator

A new invention saves megachurches by automating communion.

Last year, Greenlee invented, marketed and sold a communion dispensing machine, which allowed volunteers to fill communion cups with grape juice for 10,000 people in just 32 minutes -- a task that formerly took 21 hours. The machine, marketed to churches with congregations in the thousands, has been sold in more than a dozen states.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joseph !)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fishy blog

Aquarium blog! Takes me back to my adolescence, it does.

The 44 gallon tank is coming along nicely. There are 20 fish in it now, including 2 new dwarf puffers. Very cool looking fish (click the link in the sidebar for a picture). Also, the fry are growing nicely. They're quite fond of live brine shrimp, so I expect they'll grow nicely. I left them alone for a long weekend w/o food, and they all survived, so these are tough little buggers. Of course, I don't have room for 20 or so swordtails in my tanks, so I'm going to have to find a home for some of them...

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The incestuous universe of late capitalism

TheyRule is one of the most amazing Flash apps I've ever seen. It's an interactive explorer for interlocking directorships of major corporations, in which you can trace the relationships between, say, Coke and Pepsi (Robert E. Allen is on Pepsi's board and Bristol-Meyers' board; James D. Robinson III is on Coke's board and Bristol Meyers' board), or the conglomerated media giants. Pop-up menus take you to details on the people and companies, allowing you to explore further. If you want a graphic, vivid account of the incestuousness of late Western capitalism, look no further. Link Discuss (Thanks, George!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 8, 2002

The Copyright Office wants to ban iTunes

Fred "My Co-Worker" Von Lohmann has drafted a doozy of a comment to the FCC Copyright Office on their CARP proceeding to establish the rules for webcasting -- rules that require webcasters to maintain invasive records on all their listeners' habits. What's more, these requirements would outright ban webcasting to open, unserialized players like iTunes, since the absence of a serial number would make it impossible to gather the stats.

Nevertheless, an ambiguity in the "Listener's Log" provisions may create unintended uncertainty in the marketplace. Section 201.36(e)(3)(vi) requires logging of "the unique user identifier assigned to a particular user or session." This provision may suggest to some a requirement that "serialized" player technologies must be used (e.g., player software with a unique, persistent serial number). A requirement of serialized players, however, would strongly favor proprietary server-player systems (such as those deployed by Microsoft and RealNetworks) at the expense of systems that support open streaming media standards (such as streaming MP3 or Ogg Vorbis). Services that choose to utilize an open standard, such as streaming MP3, are not in a position to insist that listeners use a serialized player, because listeners are free to choose any interoperable player. For example, because Shoutcast offers its webcasts in streaming MP3 format, listeners may tune in using Apple's iTunes software, AOL's WinAmp software, or any of a myriad of other MP3 player software, whether or not the software contains a unique serial number or similar identifier.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:43:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cowardly, vindictive sock-puppet masquerading as a journalist tries to get critical readers fired

WashPo reporter and Ken-Starr-witch-hunt-sock-puppet Susan Schmidt has taken to contacting the employers of readers who send her angry, critical emails and trying to get them fired. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:33:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Using dog-hair to trace explosives

Dog-Hair Phase-Stabilized Ammonium Nitrate is a bomb-making ingredient also used in model rocketry and fertiziler. Stanford Systems is "tagging" its PSAN with dog-hair, which means that any PSAN recovered from a crime-scene can be traced back to Stanford through simple chem analysis. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:22:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pen-and-paper to stylus-and-screen

Groovy Palm gadget: a smart pen and pad-clip that coverts your penstrokes to digital ink on your PalmOS devices. Basically, this is the CrossPad (I think), but PalmOS compatible. Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Penthouse can't compete with pr0n

Bob Guccione is folding up Penthouse, because he can't take the competition from free Internet porn.

Mr. Guccione's publishing practice of objectifying every body part of a woman save her tonsils, along with his penchant for massive gold jewelry, positioned him as the more transgressive half of the duo of Hefner/Guccione. But he was conservative in his personal habits, choosing not to drink, smoke or use drugs, and he was a devoted husband, according to friends and associates..

In the mid-90's, Mr. Guccione responded to the growing threat from digital pornography by making his magazine even more explicit, depicting various sexual acts. The change did not please newsstand vendors, and what had been a mainstream publication became a magazine whose distribution was often restricted to pornographic bookstores.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Witch-doctors settle with the Ivory Coast

GhananIvory Coast (Thanks, delta!) witch-doctors who were hired to give the national team a boost during the African Nations Cup have settled their non-payment dispute with the Ghanan government of the Ivory Coast -- they had to threaten to curse the team to get paid, though. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Embargo? What embargo?

Despite the embargo against Cuba, more than 100,000 Americans visit Havana every year illegally, booking their flight through Canadian travel agencies.

"Most Americans around where I live don't even know the embargo exists," said Delia Hernandez, a 20-year-old communications student from Washington State University, as she hung out with some Cuban friends at the bar of the Hotel Victoria, a few blocks from the cinema.

"The embargo is so unfair. It's so hard on the ordinary Cubans who can't buy medicine or the food they need because of it," she said. "There has to be a way of getting ahead in life that isn't all about the American way."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shoes for the bound-of-foot

The Zhiqiang Shoe Factory in Harbin, China, is the last factory devoted to the manufacture of shoes for women whose feet were bound in their childhood, and they're tryign to figure out what they're going to do once the last of their clientele die. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

News delivered to your iPod

PodNews is GPLed software to synch your favorite RSS feeds with your iPod. (Update: the hacker who wrote this is 14 Link) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:05:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 7, 2002

Hoosier Hotshot Heaven

Holy crap! NINE volumes of classic slide-whistle and zither C&W novelty music by the Hoosier Hotshots, culled from tapes, LPs, films and 78s. I am in Hoosier Hotshot Heaven. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wacky Packs uber-poster

Check out this amazing click-to-zoom imagemap of all 504 Wacky Packages stickers. I have an uncut Series I sheet that I got dirt cheap at the Chelsea Antiques Market in NYC a few years ago, and it's just about my favoritest wall-hanging. What's more, the guy who made this is in Toronto and he sells homebrew posters with all the 'Packs on 'em. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Episode II script

Allegedly, this is the leaked script for Star Wars: Episode 2, Send in the Clones. Lots of OCR errors. Link (ZIP archive of the JPEGs: Link) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Annotated Jack Valenti

LawMeme has posted a scrumptious annotated deconstruction of Jack Valenti's disingenuous statement on the CBDTPA:

What rights [being taken away] are we talking about? [Just a little one, called the First Amendment] I'm not trying to be glib. [Well, actually, yes he is.] A lot of people who haven't thought it through believe that anything on the Internet is free, that you can just go and take down a movie from Morpheus. [This is called changing the subject or dodging the question. When asked about the rights being taken away, start talking about the horrors of piracy instead.]

But most of the people know what they're doing. [Translation: I'm still not going to talk about the rights Hollywood wants to take away.] I know a lot of students know what they're doing is not right. [Of course, it goes without saying that Valenti also knows that what he is doing is not right as well. But that has never stopped him before.]

Link Discuss (via Salad With Steve)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:33:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 6, 2002

Sacred monkeys terrorize girls' school

Another lede I'd love to have written:

Scores of monkeys have swamped a girls' college in the hill resort of Darjeeling in eastern India, destroying thousands of books, stalling classes, clawing and slapping the students.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The ultimate geek vanity tag collection

Gene "Infrasearch" Kan has completed his collection of geeky California vanity plates. He notes that "MP3PIR8 is for Shawn Fanning, but he hasn't gotten it yet." Link Discuss (Thanks, Gene!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google will have an API

Google will offer an API! I've known about this for a while, but I was sworn to secrecy. Now that it's hit Slashdot, though, I think all bets are off. Can't wait to see what apps people build on top of Google's citation database. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:25:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Looney Tunes lyrics

Lyrics to Looney Tunes tunes -- I found this while looking for a public MP3 of Lulu Belle and Scotty's "When I Yoo Hoo in the Valley."

BOOBS IN THE WOODS
(McKimson-1950)

Oh people call me Daffy
They think that I am goony
Ah just because I’m happy is no sign I’m looney tooney
Oh when they say I’m nutsy
It sure gives me a pain
Please pass the ketchup I think its going to rain
Oh you can’t bounce a meatball
Though try with all your might
Ah turn on the radio I want to fly a kite
Good evening friends

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:45:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Dvorak is apparently still alive

It's a good thing Byte PC Magazine (Thanks, Marky!) is still in business, 'cause otherwise, John Dvorak would have to stuff envelopes to pay his bills -- he's managed to land the only paying gig where the job description consists of writing flamebait. His latest spew is a pointless, clueless indictment of blogging. There but for the grace of Byte PC Magazine goes yet another Usenet Troll. (My first reaction on seeing the column was, "John Dvorak, is that guy still alive?" I'm still not sure that I know the answer -- maybe's he's been replaced by an ElizaBot with a crappy attitude.) Link Discuss (Thanks, Phil!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:15:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 5, 2002

Charlie's collection is out!

Charlie Stross's short story collection is out. Charlie is a king-hell extropian, post-Singularity skiffy writer. I don't have a sample to hand of Charlie's solo stuff (damn, Charlie, post some excerpts! Also: cover art!), but here's a hunk of "Jury Service," which Charlie and I co-wrote last month:

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshke brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth's RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures and spiritual systems.

A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always *someone* who'll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin. There's always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let's-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There's always a fucking geek who'll do it because it's a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.

Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain its motives roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.

But until that happy day, there's the tech jury service: Defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.

Link Discuss (via Charlie's Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time-travel prof: "I'm not a nut"

A prof claims to have a working time machine: "I'm not a a nut." Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oprah sez: "Literature is dead"

Oprah is discontinuing her book club because there aren't enough good books. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:08:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Your daily brain-teaser

Braingle feautres a new brain-teaser every day. This one totally fooled me:

When Sandy was six years old she hammered a nail into her favorite tree to mark her height. Ten years later at sweet sixteen, Sandy returned to see how much higher the nail was. If the tree grew by five centimeters each year, how much higher would the nail be?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jake!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless FUD from the Economist

The Economist reports on the WiFi panel I chaired at PC Forum, ang gets all the details wrong (I used to live near Hwy 101, I saw the occassional commuter checking mail, and no one has ever reported real world example of making "a free [wireless] network available to everyone... some people will abuse it to hog bandwidth or send junk e-mail." It's amazing what a bogey-man that is for suits from the mainstream press -- "People will hog your bandwidth! The sky is falling! You'll be used as a jumping-off point for hackers!" Blah-dee blah blah blah. The love song of a journalist in the throes of a technophobic panic!)

The bottom-up approach has problems too. Enthusiasts are building free networks in cities around the world. Stick a Wi-Fi antenna on your roof, enter your location as a “hotspot” in an online Wi-Fi directory, and passers-by can use your Internet connection. At PC Forum, a recent industry conference, Cory Doctorow, a Wi-Fi enthusiast who lives near Silicon Valley's Highway 101, reported a regular stream of cars pulling up outside his house as itinerant workers stop to check their e-mail. But this co-operative approach tends to break down when a technology goes mainstream. Make a free network available to everyone, and some people will abuse it to hog bandwidth or send junk e-mail.

Link (don't bother clicking, you'll have to pay the Economist $3 to read the story, and it's not worth it) Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi, Blogging and conferences -- the end of the one-way "conversation?"

Esther Dyson comments on the changes that WiFi-connected bloggers are making at conferences -- what does it do to a talk (or, by extension, to any instruction), if the audience in interconnected and conversing and commenting while the speaker flaps his gums?

In some sense, the power of the conference moderator is reduced. Bloggers can add their own value ... and they can relay their version from inside the tent to those outside the tent and out of the organizer's control.

A paranoid organizer (or speaker or board chairman) could forbid real-time blogging: Please turn off your cell phones AND your wireless devices as you enter! But I hope the audience will object.

Meanwhile, the smart conference organizer will see this for what it really is -- an open-source-style phenomenon where everyone can add value to the event.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boot camp trains better, more organized offenders

A UK study shows that sending minor youthful offenders to boot-camp produces serious, well-disciplined, healthy, confident serious offenders. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sledgehammer solution to lemon PC

After five attempts to get a local shop to fix his lemon PC, a Wisconsin man brought the box to the shop, smashed it with a sledgehammer, wished the staff a nice day and split. He was arrested for disorderly conduct. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clone, clone on the range

An Italian fertility clinic claims to have knocked up one of their customers with a clone, and she's eight weeks along. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 4, 2002

Top Shelf Comics saved!

Top Shelf Comics has been saved by netizens who rushed to buy their stuff to keep them in business after they were nearly fatally stiffed by a bankrupt distributor. Well done, Internet!

On Tuesday, after we made the announcement of our book trade distributor filing for Chapter 11 (and the subsequent fatal impact that this had on our own operation), we received over 200 phone orders and 850 on-line and email orders to boot. This staggering 1000 orders has not only made us operational again (and put several thousand copies of our graphic novels into circulation), but has also reaffirmed to us that the comics industry is back, revitalized, and ready to take on the world. We're even estimating that over 100,000 people received the news or were personally involved in the discussion of this on-line event on that day.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Remi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:11:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hard-science Tolkien fan-writing

Stefan sez: "I recently put my game designer hat back on and am revising a long-out-of-print roleplaying sourcebook for David Brin's SF universe. This means doing lots of "research," trying to suck timelines and hard science facts out of prose written to entertain. A web-search showed that someone beat me to it: Alberto Monteiro, a former net-acquaintance. But even more remarkable than his Jijo timeline is the way he determined the orbits of the three moons!) is his hard-science analysis of Middle Earth history." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OS sucks-o-meter

The Operating System Sucks/Rule-o-Meter mines Altavista for references to "Windows sucks," "Windows rules," "Linux sucks," "Linux rules" etc etc, and plots a chart of the results. Link Discuss (via Doc)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Self-reproducing, mobile cuteness memes

 
Here's a gallery of ASCII-art anime characters, suitable for emailing to your pals with your DoCoMo phone. The cool part is, the ASCII isn't random, it's ANSI-standard C code that can be compiled to generate more copies of the same picture. Link Discuss (Thanks, U.J. Foobar!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lip-reading cellphones

NTT DoCoMo plans to put lip-reading cellphones on the market in five years -- everyone in a subway car can make a call without making a sound, and the callers on the other end will get text and/or synthesized speech. Will this replace SMS as the cellphone technique of choice for the deaf? No word on subvocal-implant phones -- yet. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shampoo at root of early puberty

Hormone-enriched shampoos targeted at black people may be the cause of unprecendented early puberty in African American girls as young as eight. Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage tourist poster stamps

The USPS is issuing these great retro tourist-poster stamps, one for each state, tomorrow (wish they'd do a matching line of luggage-stickers!). The USPS site is down as of this writing, but here's a mirror of the sheet. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:23:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

They like it sloppy

The SF Weekly delves into the ooky realm of mess-fetishists:

Pie throwing, however, is just the tip of the cream puff; it is a particular titillation accepted within a larger community of mess lovers known as "sploshers" (an onomatopoeic title for folks who love to loll in such gooey substances as porridge, pudding, or mud) and "wammers" (WAM stands for "wet and messy," and wammers include folks with a purely water-based focus, as well as lovers of more substantive goo). Gates traces the public emergence of "messy fun" back to the mid-'80s, with the Texas Mudmen (currently titled Sludgemaster) and the UK's Society for Lovers of Slapstick Happenings (or SLOSH). By the late '80s, Splosh!, the first magazine dedicated to mess, appeared in England, and John Waters publicly lauded the quarterly publication in interviews with People magazine and Jay Leno. Fringe photographer and subculture chronicler Charles Gatewood quickly added mess to his extreme repertoire, and New York nightclubs began splattering their go-go dancers with liquid latex.

Link Discuss (via Daze Reader)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 3, 2002

Save the comix!

Top Shelf Productions, a cool indy comix distributor is on the brink of ruin since their distributor filed Chapter 11 and screwed them out of piles of money.

We have just been informed this week that our book trade distributor has filed for bankrupcy (Chapter 11). They will continue to operate and hopefully recover ˆ and we will support this all we can (as our industry needs them, and they are good people) ˆ but unfortunately, this has happened at a time when they owed us an enormous sum of money (over $80,000.00 minus returns). And to make matters worse, the most recent check they cut us, for almost $20,000.00, bounced this week, in turn causing the last 30 checks we wrote to printers, conventions, cartoonists ˆ practically every aspect of the business ˆ to bounce (or be held) in turn.

To put it bluntly, even with all the hard work we've put in over the years, if we don't raise $20,000 this month, it could realistically force us to suspend publishing operations for the foreseeable future. It's hard to believe but a big domino has fallen right on top of us at the worst time possible. So, that leaves us no choice but to be honest and ask for your help.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kip!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Water profiteering

New York's water-shortage has turned into a profiteering opportunity for restauranteurs who won't serve tap-water ("Just doing our civic duty!"), selling you bottled stuff instead. Link Discuss (Thanks, Glenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes: Research from the Berkeley College of Engineering

Every month, I write Lab Notes, a research digest about UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. I'm the "writer-in-residence" there, a dream gig for me because I get to bug all the researchers to explain their cool projects to me. The latest installment is a special issue devoted to wireless research at Berkeley: sensors that use their own TinyOS to self-assemble into networks; why channel fading is actually *good* for wireless networks; PicoRadios (see Cory's post below); and other fun nrrrdy bits. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:53:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suggest form is broken

Many of you have written to tell me that the Suggest a Site form is broken. It sure is. I'm logging in from a coin-op (!) Ethernet jack at a hotel in LA, attending a BPDG meeting and can't fix it. Just email me or Mark direct until I get it fixed, OK? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:07:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Testament to the value of a Free Market Economy

Moscow entreprenuers are building the world's largest Ferris Wheel.

A factory that used to build supersecret armaments for the Soviet military has been handed a new mission: to construct the world's largest Ferris wheel – with a mini-bar and washroom in every car – and erect it on a hill overlooking downtown Moscow.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:05:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The real, old-skool EPCOT

Chob sez: "Great site devoted to Walt's original plans for EPCOT. I hadn't been to the site for a while, but when I visited it the other night, I noticed that they've just added Quicktime clips of 'Walt's Last Film' in which he presents his vision for the Florida Project. They'll be presenting three new clips per month, between now and June."

Waltopia...the real EPCOT A comprehensive award winning site about Walt Disney's original plans for Progress City, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) in Florida.

The purpose of this site is - through research and discussion to...

* further the understanding and appreciation of Walt Disney and his original vision of EPCOT,

* describe the various facets of Walt's EPCOT,

* and illustrate how the Walt Disney Company has made Walt's dreams a reality

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:51:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How rude!

Bad behavior is on the rise in America:

Poor customer service has become so rampant that nearly half of those surveyed said they have walked out of a store in the past year because of it. Half said they often see people talking on cellular telephones in a loud or annoying manner. And six drivers in 10 said they regularly see other people driving aggressively or recklessly.

Many people admitted to rude behavior themselves. More than a third said they use foul language in public.

About the same percentage confessed to occasional bad driving.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:40:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Librarians as Napsterians

This week's old (Thanks, Zed!) Tom the Dancing Bug tackles those notorious pirates, the Librarians. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bonnie has a Blog

Bonnie Burton started her own blog -- Yay! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:24:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Everquest Killed My Son"

The mother of a young man who committed suicide just minutes after playing EverQuest is suing the game publisher for getting her son hooked. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bonnie!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:14:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A photocopier for CDs

Australian convenience-stores install coin-operated CD duplicators.

The machines are able to operate under the same legislation as public photocopiers, where the burden of responsibility for copyright breaches lies with the user and not the owner of the equipment.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science Holiday

Science Holiday is a discordian look at the constructed reality of Las Vegas, from the PoV of a Disneyland enthusiast/high-weirdness afficianado.

The first thing to go in Las Vegas is your sense of scale. The highway sign says that you have 14 miles to go, but there it is, larger than life. One immediately gets the sense that this is a work in progress. Every vacant lot along the strip on the way into town has the same sign: AVAILABLE-ZONED FOR CASINO. The implications of this become really clear once you have attempted to find your way into and out of a super casino on foot. It is like they are saying that a dozen new Disneylands will open here soon. Plans are already afoot to build a bigger airport quite a distance from the strip. It is plausible to assume that the whole of this desert between this new airport and the current strip will one day be a vast amusement park. While entertainment resorts are not a new concept (Disneyworld and Epcot Center are decades old), the idea of a series of separately owned and operated entertainment centers in an area this concentrated is. There has never been this much room available before to do it. The current batch of super Casinos in a relatively finite space are already forming tentative alliances, offering monorails between venues that are separately owned and operated.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamyang!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kidrobot

Lia sez:

Have you seen kidrobot.com yet? They sell all sorts of really neat action figures and toys from Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan that I'm sure some boingboing readers will find cool.

Well, I sure find it cool! Link Discuss (Thanks, Lia!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet history

Links to thousands of essays on the history of the net. The search engine histories are wild, and the growth stats make me nostalgic for the boom, when every Internet-related article featured a graph showing expontential curves screaming skyward. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Karaoke++

No more off-key drunken louts harshing up your Karaoke Mellow:

Using the "Csound" computer music language pioneered years ago by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Barry Vercoe, Taito will market a system this summer that adjusts sing-along music automatically to the pitch and tempo best suited to an individual singer.

Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Musee Mechanique on NPR this morning

The Musee Mechanique is on NPR's Morning Edition today, and in honor of the event, they've posted a great writeup with a beautiful gallery of photos of Musee machines.

The winding rooms of the museum are lined with odd devices, including some that look like industrial sausage grinders on legs, with a crank on one side and a sort of viewfinder on top. They’re Mutoscopes, made in the late 19th century by the American Biograph and Mutoscope Company. There are music machines, too -- player pianos and orchestrions, which combine a number of automated instruments in one box.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woman trades daughter for puppy

So much for maternal instinct.

Prosecutors said Smith offered to give her mother's neighbor custody of her 7-month-old daughter if the woman gave her a Chihuahua she was selling for $200.

Smith later upped the price to $2,000, authorities said. The neighbor told police she agreed because she believed Smith was neglecting the child and she wanted to help the girl, authorities said. The deal was never completed.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Picoradio -- cheap, underpowered and everywhere

Picoradio is a UC Berkeley project to build fantastically cheap, shirt-button-sized radio transceivers. The radios have sensors built in and environmental power converters (either solar or piezo, so that they can convert shocks into electricty). The idea is to deploy a swarm of these devices, which will form a short-range, low-bitrate network for environmental sensing and control:

"It's almost like querying a database," says Rabaey. "If I send a request into the network saying, 'Give me the temperature in the kitchen,' it propagates through the network until it meets a node that says, 'I'm in the kitchen, and it's 70 degrees.'"...

Rabaey's work has generated a fair amount of interest—and money—from both government and industry. Potential applications go far beyond checking temperatures. Since each node is essentially a blank slate that can do whatever it's programmed to do, the network can be used for other jobs that employ radio frequency identification technologies, like tracking items or people in a contained space. Bob Graybill, program manager of DARPA's Power Aware Computing/Communication, says that Rabaey's research "is one of the key technologies that we'll be evaluating over the next few years for our distributed-sensor technology."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 2, 2002

Waiting for a response from me?

If you sent me mail (not including blog suggestions) in the past week or so and I haven't responded yet, please re-send it. I lost all of my tickler-file mailboxes (where I keep mail that I intend to answer ASAP) in yesterday's computer mishegas. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Compaq laptop woes

Mitch is at the end of his tech-tether. He bought a $1900 lemon Compaq laptop, and their customer service people have given him an incredible run-around. He's created a page detailing his tale of woe -- maybe if he gets enough blogjuice, someone at Compaq will wake up and take care of him (maybe they'll change their anti-customer service policies, too!).

The moral of this story is: if you feel like buying a Compaq notebook computer, go out and buy yourself a lump of clay SHAPED like a notebook computer. You'll get about as much use from the one as from the other—actually, now that I think of it, you can make the lump of clay into an attractive ashtray that you can give your Dad on Father's Day, which is more than I can say for the notebook computer.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mitch!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inflation calculator

The Columbia Journalism Review has put up an inflation calculator: pick a year (1800-2002), enter a dollar amount, pick a target year (1995-2002) and it'll tell you what the buying power of your dollar figure is in target-year-dollars, adjusted for inflation. Pat points out the value of this for writers -- if I were going to attempt a work of historical fiction, I know where I'd turn... Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mesh-o-rama

Meshphoto: Oodles of photos of wire mesh. Mesh mesh mesh. Zoom in, zoom out. See alternate views. Order mesh. Mesh. Mesh. Mesh. This stuff is hypnotic. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monstrous Connectivity

Check out this incredible Godzilla FireWire hub -- oh, to live in Japan, land of extreme technology coolth. Link Discuss (Thanks, Porsupah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY toy robot parts

I found this article on Alphadrome, an excellent toy robot/raygun site. How can you not love a site with instructions for casting your own toy robot replacement parts? Warning: The Java and Javascript on this site consistently crashed my IE 5.1/OSX, and I was only able to view it with OmniWeb.

1 Get an original part and embed it in moulding clay. Put register holes around the edge to allow for keying two halves of the mould together. Place rods to leave holes down which the casting material can run, and out of which air can be released. Cover with plaster compound and leave to dry. Repeat operation for other half of mould.

2  Here are the two halves of the mould with the original part still in situ.

3 And the completed mould.

4 Fasten mould halves together and carefully fill with casting compound, ensuring all bubbles are removed and mould is fully filled. Leave to set.

5 Here's the completed repro part in the mould, with the pouring sprue and the vent sprue still attached. Carefully remove them and tidy up the part.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:24:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Finders, Keepers

Fun site of random found photos, notes, and even audio tapes! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:13:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teoma Goes After Google

Teoma, a new search engine, claims to be better than Google, because it "identifies highly authoritative web pages, not just relevant web pages." The fact the AskJeeves, the world's dumbest search engine, bought Teoma, is not encouraging. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:55:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless Mobile Gameboy Cartridge

This company claims to have developed a module that adds e-mail, instant messaging, and e-book reading to the Gameboy. The site is short on details, but it smells fishy to me. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:51:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Wonderful World of Bill Barol

I recently learned that Boing Boing reader Bill Barol is one hell of a good writer. I love the Esquivel obit he wrote for Slate and everything else listed on his site, too.

Because he was rediscovered in the lounge-music boom of the mid-'90s, Esquivel tends to get lumped in with band leaders like Martin Denny and Les Baxter, whose claims to exotica were more strenuous and less interesting. But Esquivel is to Denny or Baxter as Tex Avery is to Walt Disney—a wild man standing next to a deacon.

With guys like Barol and Lileks around, I realize I should have continued my career as a mechanical engineer. Except I was a really lousy engineer. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:45:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Violent "Sleep Sex" Offenders Can't Remember a Thing

Stanford researchers have identified a condition they call "sleep sex." Mild cases of the condition cause "disruptive moaning," while extreme cases lead to violent acts of attempted murder and rape. Unsurprisingly, when sleep sex sufferers wake up, they say they can't recall trying kill their bed partner.

Guilleminault divided the patients into three groups depending on the severity of their behavior. Those whose disturbances were simply annoying included two women who made sexual moaning sounds during the night. Though relatively harmless, one woman felt embarrassed and guilty that her moaning disturbed her spouse and children.

The second group consisted of a man and a woman whose disturbances placed them at physical risk. They experienced periods of violent masturbation that left bruising or soreness. The man also reported breaking two fingers trying to escape from restraints he had used to prevent the behavior.

The third group included six men and one woman who made unwanted - and sometimes violent - sexual advances on their bed partners while asleep. In one case, the patient tried to strangle his wife. A teenage child in the home heard the disturbance and called the police, eventually leading to a referral to the Stanford Sleep Clinic.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:59:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cartoon Network Bans Speedy Gonzalez

No more Speedy?

“The problem with [Speedy cartoons] is the references to drinking, laziness, drug use, and womanizing (‘Speedy knows my sister, Speedy knows EVERYBODY’s sister…’),” according to Daniel Wineman, of the Cartoon Network Programming department, in a recent e-mail posted by Jon Cooke on his site.

I suppose Pepe LePew is next, since everyone knows he is a cruel stereotype of soap-apobhic French people. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:39:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

High-res boom-shrooms

The Department of Energy hosts this fantastic gallery of hi-res shots of open-air A-Bomb tests. Pictured here is Priscilla, "a 37 kiloton balloon shot fired June 24, 1957 at the Nevada Test Site." Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix, which just keeps on getting better and better)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-Unix site hosted on Unix box

Microsoft and UNISYS's anti-Unix smear campaign is being run off a webserver running Unix. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 1, 2002

Consensus at Lawyerpoint

The Broadcast Protection Working Group is an obscure cabal of Hollywood Studios and cowed technologists who're skating down the slippery edge of the wedge. They're building a "consensus" standard for digital television devices.

On the face of it, this seems pretty innocuous. Who cares about digital TV? What's wrong with a consensus? And what do the internals of set-top boxes matter, anyway?

Don't be fooled. All over-the-air TV signals will be digital by the year 2006 (so sayeth the FCC), so the standards set down by the BPDG will govern every television set in four years time. What's more, the range of devices that the BPDG's standard extends far beyond simple TVs. If your computer has a capture card, the BPDG's decisions will govern the card's design and will therefore influence your OS vendor your hard-drive supplier, and the specs for your video card, cables and motherboard. (Don't even get me started on the illegality of making open-source software that works with digital TV broadcasts)

The worst part is that this "consensus" won't be optional. Once the BPDG signs off on its technophobic panic, they will go to Congress or the FCC and quietly get their "standard" written into the law. This is how the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act may come into law -- not with one sweeping bill that inspires a Million Geek March on Washington (Why Washington? Why not Hollywood?), but with a series of mini-SSSCAs, each one picking off another technology.

The BPDG isn't a secret, but they're just not telling anyone about ti. It has an "open" mailing list that no one outside of the cabal receives and "open" meetings that no one outside of the cabal attends 00 and that the press is barred from.

Time to shine a light on the "consensus." The EFF's first-ever blog is a true account of the undertakings of the BPDG. If the BPDG isn't going to explain its workings to the world, someone's gotta. This is one of those situations where Google makes the bad guys crings -- by the time the BPDG's spin-doctors get their act together and put up a brochureware site full of bland, reassuring homilies about the wonderful high-def utopia on the horizon, the EFF's BPDG blog will have so much Googlejuice that it will rule the top slot on BPDG queries forever.

<nelson>Ha ha</nelson> Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All my technology is broken today

What a crappy day. My iBook's drive went corrupt, and my last backup is stale and corrupt. My Visor died. I am kerfuffled. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Digifest 2002

Mindjack reports in from Toronto's Digifest 2002:

One fellow's presentation riffed off Buckminister Fuller. He focused on the glitzy side of vizible.com's work, using a sphere instead of a window as a model. Perhaps his work wasn't quite as a revolutionary as he'd hoped, or at least not obviously so. I noticed that some presentations seemed to suffer from their emphasis on appearance rather than substance, even though the material has depth. Underlying the surface were the presentation and searching techniques employed along with his sphere concept. I got the sense that much was left unsaid.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Donald!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tinybooks

Fantastic collection of tiny, perfect reading Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:02:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fostering terror in foreign policy

How to make a Mujahadeen: "In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

"The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code." Link Discuss (Thanks, Gnat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LED bike decor

Hokeyspokes: "unique bicycle safety lights that allow riders to display computer-generated images and text inside the spoke cages while riding at night. Not only are Hokey Spokes fun and interesting, but they also provide important side visibility, which is mostly unavailable in today's standard bicycle lights." Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transgendered comix

Hundreds and hundreds of comic book covers, photoshopped into transgendered whackiness. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new Guerrillanews

Boogah sez: "Well, this is a bit of self-whoring but I've just launched the next version of my hacker/computer security news site GuerrillaNews on it's birthday. The change isn't cosmetic however as I've opened the posting up to anyone a la MeFi and Kuro5hin. I'm hoping that people will find it to be a refreshing change from all the other hacker news sites out there, and if I could get the word out here that'd kick plenty of ass..." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:23:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Republic of Free

A couple of Aussie teenagers have planted a flag on the abandoned Tuvalan island of Asau (which is sinking) and have declared The Republic of Free, a sovereign nation. Email them and they'll make you a citizen! I want a Free passport, please. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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