Why were most personal computers colored beige? I seem to remember reading that some researchers (at 3M?) used focus groups to determine that beige was the most non-obtrusive color to use in an office setting, but I can't find a reference. If you know, email me at mark@well.com.

The world's best font shop, House Industries, has a new set of fonts designed by retro artist Shag. They're also selling a Shag sculpture and prints. Link

Sir Mix-A-Lot's "(I Like) Big Butts)" "Baby's Got Back." In Latin.

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)

Link (Thanks, chris242!)

Steve sez, "Indigo Som is an artist who is assembling a collection of every chinese restaurant menu in the US, she's got an art exhibit in Marin going on right now of her photos of the menus/restaurants and her site nicely explains the intent of her 'exploration'" Link (Thanks, Steve!)

I'm in Barcelona at the tech/art/culture confab Artfutura, listening to the two effects masterminds behind the Matrix trilogy: John Gaeta (right-hand side of the photo below) and Greg Juby of effects house ESC (Greg's at left in this photo).

ESC is the company created by the Wachowski brothers and John Gaeta to produce the complex work of visual effects in the Matrix series. Gaeta may well be the single most influential person in the last decade of visual effects, and right now he's talking to the audience of Spanish digital artists and tech developers here about the creative process behind the films, and what to expect in the forthcoming Matrix: Revolutions:

* "What will be different in Revolutions? It's the final, ultimate manifestation of Larry and Andy Wachowski's anime dream: to make am movie as close to an anime as possible. Take the best and coolest aspects of anime -- large scale robotics, entanglements between man anad machine -- and tranform it into a feature, live action film. You'll also see lots more bullets."

* "Subconsciousness needs to be redefined with every generation. Matrix is a stylized sci-fi story, but the root of the idea that you can have imagery placed into your mind is a very possible scenario, and I think that's a universe that our generation was finally ready to start dealing with. I grew up on Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and many other filmmakers that triggered ideas inside my mind -- that's how evolution works. One generation speaking to another. Larry and Andy [Wachowski] are preoccupied with those ideas, too, but they're also pop culture junkies and they share an obsession we also have with darker sci-fi threads in films you see in films like Bladerunner. It's no accident that some of the scenes in the Matrix trilogy are reminiscent of Bladerunner, because we've been dying all our lives to do that kind of work. "

* "I want to make an electrochemical movie. In the year 2099 I'll be 130 years old, but I think around 2063 I'm going to have my brain taken out and have it inserted into a clone who's about 21 years old. Maybe some bionic augmentation upgrades, too. In about 40 years, I'm thinking some sort of military-industrial-supercomplex-international-intelligensia supergroup will figure out how to export imagery to people's brains. If you can see it in your head while you're dreaming -- well, that image is created somehow. Someday, someone will figure out how to place that image into your brain. It'll be some combination of electricity and drugs, and they'll call it Rosebud.

A billion people will attend the first electrochemical movie premiere. Everyone in the audience will experience love again for the first time, and we'll become gazillionaires. I don't know how we'll make our electrochemical movie into a DVD, though. And distribution is definitely going to be a problem."

* "The most difficult thing about creating effects for the trilogy? Designing choreography that could never be actualized by human beings."

Link

Who needs Tibetan prayer-wheels when Buddhist theorists are out there reforming their theology to admit hard-drives as instruments of devotion?

Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser.

Link

Target hired Charles Anderson to design its Halloween campaign, and it looks amazing. "Asked to create the look of the store's seasonal identity, the design company took inspiration from the campy aesthetic of vacu-form plastic masks that many adults remember from childhood." Link

The FCC is ruling on the dread and dreadful Broadcast Flag, a technology mandate that would give Hollywood a veto over general-purpose PC and home electronics technology, in order to prevent the potential infringement of copyrighted movies on a potential national digital television broadcast network.

Breaking PCs and VCRs and PVRs and such today, before there's any evidence of any problem (indeed, Hollywood makes more money every single year, and just closed the books on its best year since 1959) -- it's stupid. Passing a technology mandate before anyone can point to a problem is about as stupid as eating your seatmate before the plane crashes.

Nevertheless, there's every indication that the FCC will make the Broadcast Flag happen -- unless we slashdot them with letters telling them not to. EFF has an action center item on this, a letter you can tweak and send in to the commissioners with one click of a mouse. A Broadcast Flag mandate today will make tomorrow's technology dependent on the sufferance of the movie studios -- the companies that Business Week called "The most change-resistant companies in America." If you don't want these companies speccing your PC in a couple years, send a letter now -- this is easily the most important thing you can do this year to safeguard your technology freedom. Tell your friends. Re-blog this. This is big, important stuff.

Hollywood is at it again, trying to control the design of new digital technologies. If the motion picture studios have their way, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will force all future televisions to include Hollywood-approved "content protection" technologies. Fair use, innovation and competition will suffer. What's more, the "broadcast flag" technology that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has proposed is so weak that it will do nothing to stem Internet redistribution of television programs. In fact, the only people hurt by this are legitimate consumers, innovators and researchers.

The FCC has promised a ruling before the end of October. We need you to tell the FCC that we don't need "broadcast flag" regulations that hurt competition, consumers and innovators.

Link

Stefan sez, "About ten years back, NPR's morning show ran an April Fools gag story about teens getting corporate logo tattoos on their earlobes in exchange for discounts. Now, a Pennsylvania company will give you free web-page hosting services for life if you get a tattoo of one of their mascots. By 'lifetime,' they mean of their company, of course." Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

Blogger and journalist Kevin Sites is back in Iraq, this time on assignment with MSNBC. He's also re-starting the kevinsites.net blog. Snip from his first post, this time around:

The blog is reopen for business. It has been seven months since this site went silent. Time for everyone to get back to work. To all of you who have made this place so interesting with your informed and intelligent discussions, I thank you. For all who have been so kind as to inquire about my welfare—I also thank you and apologize for not being able to respond. When CNN politely (I mean this sincerely) asked me to stop blogging I felt it was my obligation to do so immediately and completely. CNN was signing my checks at the time and sent me to Iraq. Although I felt the blog was a separate and independent journalistic enterprise, they did not. Period. We move on.

Now I am freelancing again, but currently on-assignment in Iraq with MSNBC. I had been a long time staff member with NBC News and feel comfortable back with my old friends. MSNBC has also agreed to allow me to continue with my PERSONAL and may I stress, NON-AFFILIATED weblog. However, there are a few understandable stipulations which I want to relate to you: 1) I’m here because NBC News has hired me to be here, therefore the observations and experiences in Iraq that I relate to you this blog would probably not happen without them. 2) They have the right of first refusal on anything that I write that relates to this assignment. That means I run it by them and if they want it they will publish it on MSNBC.COM. It will be republished here. 3) If it’s something they’re not interested in or not directly related to an assignment they’ve paid me to do—it can appear here first. I think that’s fair and bypasses any of the editorial oversight and ownership issues that we encountered in the first run of kevinsites.net.

That being said, I look forward to a renewed dialogue on the very serious as well as the inane. We hear so much about the “synergy” of media companies with the so-called vertical integration of different communication businesses, well here’s the chance for individual “synergy” to impact media coverage. I’d like to know what you see as the shortcomings of media coverage in Iraq and elsewhere. What aren’t you getting? What are you getting too much of? I welcome your well-conceived story ideas, relevant information and observations or valuable sources that may contribute to better journalism and a more informed public.

Link

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) -- the annual challenge to write a book in 30 days -- is fast approaching.

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Link (Thanks, Randy!)

Bill Scannell (the cypherpunk who has devoted his energies to outing Delta, Jet Blue, Cendant and the CAPPS II/TIA unpatriotism emanating from the Feds) needs help if he is to continue doing his good work. He's broke, basically -- spending all your time blowing whistles puts a big dent in your earning power. So he's soliciting donations.

Running the anti-CAPPS II campaign costs a lot of time and money. The Boycott Delta and Don't Spy On US websites require a team of graphic artists and web designers. As you can imagine, the bandwidth usage is enormous.

The over 40 million dollars in publicity generated for the ongoing anti-CAPPS II awareness campaign came at a cost of hundreds of media interviews, astronomical telephone bills, and all of my time and energy.

Up to now, I have funded this project out of my own personal savings. America has been good to me and spending money to keep our country free seemed only fair. Unfortunately, I can't do this alone anymore, which is why I am turning to you for help.

Link

Mouse Shoppe is a site apparently run by people who go to Disneyland, buy merchandise at full price, then resell it at a markup. Right now, they've got a bunch of the very tasty new Haunted Mansion stuff that was released last week, including the hoody I bought and wore to Club 33 last weekend -- eatcherheartout! Link

"Nano-turf," a new nanoscale material composed of teensy spikes is planned for use as a super nonstick coating for submarines ("which would glide through the water with much less resistance") and raincoats ("rain would fall and simply run off any garment").

"The surface is repelling water. It is densely populated so it will let the water flow against air instead of a solid surface, which makes it very slippery.

"When we roll a drop of water on this surface, we make it 99%, or more, less sticky than the flat surface."

Link (via Die Puny Humans)

Little did I suspect, when I slipped my pal Nelson a sheet-metal Bill of Rights, that it would be the source of a flash of horrible realization that we're in deep crap:

I'm not one to make displays like that so it was an accident it came with me to New York. But now where do I put it going home? In checked luggage, where security may find it while I'm not around and decide to punish me for being clever? Or in my hand luggage, where it may cause my bag to be searched and an awkward conversation? Maybe I should just leave it behind.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Then I realized, I was stressing about what people would think about me having a copy of the Bill of Rights! It's a terrible thing we've done to ourselves.

Link

Matt Haughey, he of Metafilter and seven other kinds of fame, has launched a project in honor of his 31st birthday called Ten Years of My Life. It's a website wherein he plans to post one daily photo for the next ten years. Why?

A few weeks ago I realized how quickly everything has been changing since I've turned 30, and how much I miss doing daily photos. I came up with the idea of doing it over ten years for a couple reasons. Although it sounds like a lot of work, it's only about 3650 images if I posted every single day, and I've taken more than that many shots in just the last year alone. During the upcoming ten years, from the time I turn 31 until I turn 41, I expect I'll be witnessing a great deal of major changes and would love to have a way to remember them.

Link

The "Paramilitary Wing of the Usability Movement" (a group of geeks who scrape and reformat badly designed websites) has tackled its most ambitious project yet. The site scrapes Hansard, the badly designed website for the UK Parliamentary record, reformats all the information to be had therein, and presents it in inforgraphic Tuftean glory, as a series of easy-to-digest and permalinkable charts, stats and so forth. Link (via NTK)

I'm in Barcelona at the 14th annual edition of Artfutura, a yearly conference on technology, art, and culture. Apart from being a mindblowingly beautiful city, filled with architecture that makes you feel like you've just dropped acid, Barcelona is home to a thriving community of bloggers. This afternoon, I'll be moderating a live discussion with the Spanish blogging community, and special US guests Anil Dash and Meg Hourihan. Tune in here!

UPDATE: Madrid-based blogger Marta Peirano of La Petite Claudine is doing a live blog throughout the conference at elastico.net. Check it out!

Tramp Lamps sells lamps made out of petrified women's undergarments. Link (Thanks, Kelly)

Stefan sez, "Scientists have located a part of the brain that becomes active when a person recieves a severe social snubbing . . . and believe that such slights are as unpleasant as actual physical pain." Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

Justin Hall has turned in agreat report on phone-controlled RC robots at the Tokyo Game Show for The Feature.

Tiny tanks controlled with mobile phones seem positively playful compared with Fujitsu Labs' Maron-1, a home security robot also run by mobile devices. A research prototype was announced last year; according to information on the web site, the Maron-1 robot comes with two cameras, taking pictures on command and sending them to a mobile phone. Also, the Maron-1 can be programmed to understand the house layout, traversing locations issued by mobile phone command, calling the police or a mobile device if there is a disturbance or intrusion. Best of all, Fujitsu announced that the Maron-1 has infrared ports built-in to control appliances, so perhaps a lonely Maron-1 can entertain itself by piloting Combat DigiQ tanks. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep indeed.

Link (Thanks, Justin!)

Thomas Pynchon is slated to do a guest voice on The Simpsons:

We also have a show where The Simpsons go to London and it includes guest voices from Ian McKellen, J.K. Rowling, Jane Leeves and Prime Minister Tony Blair, playing himself. We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-

...He's wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.

Link (Thanks, Tregoweth!)

Spencer sez, "In light of the recent post about Smart Playlists in iTunes, I thought this was timely: 'Announcing the launch of SmartPlaylists.com! This new website is a resource for creating, sharing, and chatting about iTunes' Smart Playlists. Why? Because they're cool and there are many ingenious ways to use them to keep your music fresh.'" Link (Thanks, Spencer!)

This year's "Virtual Book Tour" has kicked off:

In a nutshell, a Virtual Book Tour consists of an author "stopping" at a given number of websites in a given about of time, either to be interviewed, to take over the site for a day, to hang out with the site owner if they're in the same physical location etc. It's just like a traditional book tour except the cities are websites. The author never needs to live their living room, which makes it cheaper and easier than booking flights, hotel rooms, rental cars and all that jazz.

Link

A lightning strike in Florida has killed 20 pregnant cows and fatally injured two more. Link

The volunteer, nonprofit E-Democracy project has put together a good site with links to resources around the 2004 Presidential campaign. Link (Thanks, Steven!)

eMusic, having been acquired by Dimensional Associates LLC, has eliminated its all-you-can-download plan (the only thing that made the service worth the $10 a month), in favor of a 40-download-a-month plan, with a "premium" $15 plan that gets you 60 tracks a month. The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing -- downloading things on the chance that you'll like them, downloading songs for an occassion (such as Christmas songs, or the time I made my Dad a three-CD set of different versions of "Stormy Weather"), and other forms of no-risk, all-you-can-eat entertainment. Well, eMusic was fun while it lasted. Bye.

Q: Why is EMusic changing its service?
A: The music industry continues to suffer under intense financial, legal and technological pressure. As a provider of music downloads, EMusic is subject to a complex system of intellectual property rights and technological challenges that impose high costs and often uncertain risks on the company.

In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the current unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering, as described above.

Translation: Our industry is thrashing in the tar. We had a pretty decent service here that didn't involve treating our customers like crooks, but the studio execs hated how stupid that made their DRM-and-lawsuit strategy look, so they've made us break it. Our new plan, described above, doesn't taste so bad if you put a lot of ketchup on it and hold your nose. Won't some nice lawmaker please stop us before we hurt ourselves? Link to new Terms of Service, Link to Cancel eMusic Account Form (via MeFi)

Eileen Gunn (editor of the brilliant online sf magazine Infinite Matrix) has solicited comments from a number of science fiction writers on the Schwarzenegger gubernatorial victory in California:

William Gibson: I forget whether, in the Virtual Light books, Arnold is president of the US or merely Governor of SoCal, but, hey, it looks like I've gone and been prescient again. I hate it when that happens.

Harlan Ellison: To all the other 49 states — with the exception of Minnesota, whose election of a mountebank transcends even ours — the coronation of Ahnuld seems phantasmagoric. But not to us. We've done it at least twice before: George Murphy to the Senate, and Reagan to the White House. So, been there, seen that, done that. I thought, early on, that it was a great slate with Gary Coleman and Schwarzenegger both running: remember in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, the behemoth called "Master Blaster" — this seven-foot-tall brain-damaged, muscle-bound giant, with the midget strapped to his shoulders? Wow, what a terrific Governor we'd have if we just cranked Gary Coleman down onto Ahnuld's shoulders!! As long as nobody blew a high-pitched dog whistle, we'd be in sweet milk an' honey. So what do I actually think about all this foofaraw? To quote Thomas Jefferson, who was rewording Joseph de Maistre: "People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve."

Link

Island Song Lyrics is a collection of words (and the occasional accompanying music) to over 2,000 Hawai'ian and south-seas songs:

1602 Bora Bora Breeze
1603 Island In The Blue
1604 Anywhere You Are
1605 Dark And Velvet Sky

Link (Thanks, Larry!)

Ted Castranova (the academic whose game-world works have revealed such fascinating factoids as the GDP of Everquest ranking it among the world's top economies) has kicked off a group blog with a bunch of his fellow acadmic game-theorizers and observers, and it's fine stuff -- a kind of Crooked Timber for online gaming. Link (via Joho the Blog)

UK tea-vendor Quickbrew has put up a cute Flash thinggum wherein you pick from among lurid tabloid headlines and photos, enter a few personal details, and out pops a very plausible gossip-magazine cover starring you and your pals. 188K Flash Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Wired Magazine reports on a new kind of ISP: an "invisible" hosting service, based in the former Soviet Union, which uses a network of compromised machines and some redirection-fu to make it very hard to determine where a web-server actually lives. The service is reportedly marketed to spammers as an untraceable base-of-operations. I'm pretty skeptical about the untraceability of these systems -- I suspect that rather, they are resistant to some tools, not resistant to others, and not hard to write new tools to uncover. Still, it's juicy, lurid reading.

Another site hosted by the Polish group offers free credit consultations. Traceroutes to the site, removeform.com, also provided ever-changing results, ranging from a computer connected to a DSL line in Israel to another provided by EarthLink. However, the title of the site's home page consistently read "Yahoo Web Hosting," suggesting it was actually located on a server run by the Internet giant.

According to Tubul, his group controls 450,000 "Trojaned" systems, most of them home computers running Windows with high-speed connections. The hacked systems contain special software developed by the Polish group that routes traffic between Internet users and customers' websites through thousands of the hijacked computers. The numerous intermediary systems confound tools such as traceroute, effectively laundering the true location of the website. To utilize the service, customers simply configure their sites to use any of several domain-name system servers controlled by the Polish group, Tubul said.

Link

Here's a great assemblage of Hallowe'en recipes from last year, including a DIY Mexican sugar-skull formulation. Link (via Making Light)

Simson Garfinkel has written a great piece for Technology Review, describing the ways in which P2P technology could give us a more secure, stable, efficient Internet:

* One of the weakest points of the Internet right now is the domain name system, which is run by a loose confederation of name servers. Running DNS on top of a peer-to-peer system instead could dramatically improve its reliability.

* Today, if your business runs a small Web server and the site suddenly gets very popular, the server can crash from all of the extra traffic. But if all of the computers on the Internet were part of a global peer-to-peer Web cache, then small companies and individuals could publish their material to the multitudes. A good system would even prevent malicious modification of the Web page contents when they were served off other machines.

* In the event of a terrorist attack on the Internet’s infrastructure, a peer-to-peer system would be far more likely to recover than a system that depended on top-down control.

Link

Creative Commons has launched a series of technology challenges -- LazyWeb ideas for tools that could really help the effort along.

* License metadata validation web application.
* License claim embedding specifications for more file types.
* APIs for Creative Commons license metadata.
* GUI for embedding license claims in files and generating claim verification RDF.
* Build Creative Commons licensing into more content creation applications.
* Browser toolbar or plugin that extracts and displays license metadata embedded in a page.
* Media player and file sharing applications that read, verify, and display license claims embedded in files.
* Add license search to a major commercial search engine.
* Write a custom Creative Commons license-aware search engine.

Link (via Lessig Blog)

Eli the Bearded sez, "Long, detailed writeup of webserver getting 0wned by a sophisticated spammer. Through a PHP product security hole a webserver was converted to a full time spam machine following orders from a remote server. The author of this paper has found that this is not an isolated event and apparently has been going on for months. Got a server? Keep it patched, including any silly little add-ons like the photo gallery bit that got subverted here." 60k PDF Link (Thanks, Eli!)

From RobPongi's blog, which features lots of streaming media oddities from Japan and other Asian countries: "This is a very shocking anti-American propoganda video made by North Koreans and previously broadcast on South Korean and Japanese Television." Don't miss the part right after George W. Bush's head morphs into a bloodsucking vampire monkey, where they call America an "audacious" country that "stole the Olympic gold Medal from us." Link

Rob's Giant BonusCard Swap Meet is a site where you enter in your Giant grocery-chain "loyalty card" number and the site responds by serving you a printable barcode for someone else's loyalty card number. Paste the barcode over your own and help poison the Giant database. Link

In the wake of a lawsuit over "deceptive" hard-drive marketing in which it is alleged that hard-drive vendors mis-label the capacity of their products to make them seem larger than they really are, the tech site Wiebetech has published an easy-to-follow paper explaining the discrepancy. I wonder if it will be introduced as evidence in the hearing?

We’ve finally determined the math used by the operating system, which has converted our drive from a capacity of 123.5GB to a capacity of 115.04GB. The mystery is solved. This handy formula may be used by anyone for converting decimal GigaBytes to binary GigaBytes (with decimal representation). The mathematical conversion works the other way around as well, as shown below:

115.GB x 1,073,741,824 = 123,522,415,614 decimal bytes (assuming all digits of precision are used in the 115GB). (This allows conversion from operating system GigaBytes to Hard Drive Manufacturer GigaBytes).

76k PDF Link (via /.)

A Federal court has ordered the Minnesota telco regulator to stop treating Voice Over IP providers as though they were phone companies. This has been an area of great concern, since it made it appear that the Internet was going to come under the thumb of the thoroughly captured telco regulators, who'd trash our last great hope for bankrupting the telcos while insisting on the local equivalent of horseshoes for steam-engines.

The Minnesota PUC's August decision required Vonage to file with the commission as a telephone company, to receive official certification from the PUC in order to operate in the state and to begin making payments to support 911 service administration.

Link (via /.)

A new rechargable miniature (2.9 mm X 13 mm) battery intended for implanted medical appliances is shipping. The battery lasts 10 years, and is recharged when the body part it resides in is placed alongside an electrified pillow, which remotely juices up the cell.

"In the treatment of urinary incontinence, which is an area Quallion is focused on, the stimulation has to be delivered all day long so there's no good place to put an external coil," Loeb said.

The Quallion team decided to focus on urinary incontinence partly because the problem requires constant stimulation, but also because millions of people suffer from it.

"There are more adult's diapers sold in the world than children's ones," Fong said

Link

Patrick "e-sheep" Farley has published the third installment of his brilliant, scathing Apocamon strip, in which he interprets Revelations through Pokemon characters.

He's opted to charge $0.25 for 30 days' access to the strip, using the BitPass system that Scott McCloud was touting a little while ago. Of course, BitPass requires that you buy a $3.00 prepaid "card" in order to give Patrick his $0.25, and there's precious little else I want to buy with my remaining $2.75, so as far as I'm concerned, I've just spent $3 on this Apocamon installment, and as far as I'm concerned, it was worth it -- I'd pay that much for a comic book this good any day.

On the other hand, I'd own the comic book and be able to read it whenever I want to. Patrick's charging $0.25 or $3.00 (depending on how you squint at it) for 30 days' worth of access to his funnybook. Now, if I could only figure out a way to give Patrick the remaining $2.75 for permanent access (preferably without giving any money to BitPass). Link

The Bass Station is an old-school boom-box with a WiFi access-point built in, along with:

a 120GB hard drive, and an MP3 decoder, and that is controlled using a web browser. Besides being able to play MP3s, it can also stream audio to other devices in its local area network, double as a file-server for file-sharing.

Link (via Gizmodo)

Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave a speech on Monday at the Royal Television Society about the nature of the BBC's ambitious and grand Internet plans. It's a stunner of a talk, filled with extreme sensibleness:

Downloading and sharing this video is the final piece of the jigsaw and will create a killer combination that I believe could undermine the existing models of pay-TV.

The killer combination is broadband together with digital TV and PVRs, plus the ability to share this video in the same peer-to-peer model with which music files are exchanged on the net...

We are exploring legitimate peer-to-peer models to get our users to share our content, on our behalf, amongst themselves, transparently.

And as an industry, we should be more active in creating legitimate content download products, whether that's as a pay-model, or rights-cleared for free. We need to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry. Here's what we believe is the shape of things to come, a way for people to search for whatever they are interested in -- perhaps in the case of a natural history for a school project -- searching from Buffalos to Bears -- and then download it for their use.

Link (via Werblog)

A reminder: I'll be reading and signing books on Thursday night at Berkeley's The Other Change of Hobbit (2020 Shattuck Ave, 1-510-848-0413) from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there! Link

Scott sez, "Today I released my new DIY record, 'Where I've Been,' with a twist: the sliding-scale minimum price is $5, with all amounts over $5 donated to the P2P Defense Fund at downhillbattle.org to help out people who've been hit with RIAA lawsuits. The enhanced CD also contains MP3 versions of the whole record, licensed under a Creative Commons license." Link

In preparation for the blessed day at the end of November when cellular number portability arrives, the FCC has issued guidelines for carriers. They're non-binding, though.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said carriers should let defecting customers keep their old number even if their account has an unpaid balance. The FCC also found "no technical reason" why switching subscribers should have to wait longer than two-and-a-half hours before their old number is "ported" to their new dialing plan.

Link (via Gizmodo)

Leave it to the French Ministry of Culture to create this truly funkalicious pluriligual psychedelic 404 error page. Taste the pixels, baby. (Thanks, Jean-Luc)

Tomorrow (Wednesday), cyberdelic video performance pioneers Dimension7 will conduct the second annual Video RIOT! in San Francisco:

"This year, Video RIOT! will again showcase San Francisco's homegrown Vj community in a format that is a cross between an edgy electronic tailgate party and a real-time drive-in multiplex. Artists will join forces to create a massive outdoor wall of light just off the Embarcadero. All video projection and light based artists are encouraged to come, and can show if they have their own projector and gear."

Video RIOT! 2 will take place outdoors near the Dimension 7 studios (150 Folsom St. at Spear) from 8pm-11pm. Link

I've been fooling around with social networking service Tribe.net lately, and enjoying it thoroughly. The UI rules, the site performs pleasantly. The service seems particularly well-suited for folks who want to connect for purposes other than dating (not that there's anything wrong with dating). Like-minded users connect in groups called "tribes," formed around everything from photography to polyamory. One tribe.net user named Pauly recently created a "BoingBoing" tribe, to "further the banter and chitchat that goes along with boingboing". Pesco and I are both members, come check it out. Link to BoingBoing tribe, and recent Wired News story about Tribe.net: "Friendster meets Craigslist?"

BoingBoing pal Kenn Brown sends us this link to an illustration he produced in collaboration with fellow Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Hoey. It's a two-page spread on state-of-the-art unmanned, autonomous vehicles featured in this month's edition of Wired Magazine (pages 45 and 46). Buy the mag, it looks way better in glorious, hi-res, technicolor paper. Link

One of the UK's most esteemed psychiatric clinics says that some behavioral relationships with technology are addictions -- and that more and more of us are developing those geek dependencies. Case in point: textaholics, who spend way too much time punching out short messages by cellphone.

"There has been a huge rise in behavioral addictions," including excessive texting, said a spokeswoman for the Priory Clinic which treats 6,000 patients a year for a range of addictions including gambling, eating disorders and drugs.

Link

Here's a list of polling locations (site's been off and on all day with traffic overload). Link
Update: Marc Brown points us to moveon.org, which also list polling sites, and Cyrus F. points us to another list of locations, here.

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I'll speak with host Alex Chadwick about advances in computer-based voting technology, and controversy around the security -- or lack thereof -- provided by leading e-voting services. Many California voters will be using the systems for the first time during today's recall election. Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.

TypePad, the new blogging services from the creators of Movable Type, has launched. Subscription fees range from $4.95 to $14.95 a month.

Q. Is TypePad just hosted Movable Type?
A.TypePad was built upon the reliable,tested Movable Type platform, but it includes new functionality that is not in Movable Type. Most importantly, we rebuilt the entire interface from scratch to be simpler, faster, cleaner and more powerful. Then we added in huge new features like photo albums and statistics tracking right in the application itself, and integrated it with built-in hosting with plenty of space for your weblog entries, photos, and the flexible archives Movable Type users have grown accustomed to.

Link

In today's edition of Wired News:

Recent reports claim the software in Diebold electronic voting machines is insecure. But the policies and procedures for using the system in California's recall election raise concerns that the software isn't the only problem.

Link

From Kevin Kelly's "Cool tools" e-zine:

If you use a laptop, the Oysterdock is fabulous. Very very simple, but just what you've always wanted for your home workstation. It's a really simple idea, but they're good looking and solve an irritating problem: putting a laptop screen where its easy to see. You supply your own peripherals (all you want -- the dock organizes and hides all the cords). There are just a few laptops that won't work with it (i think they list them on the site), basically the ones that don't open to (nearly) 180 degrees.
--Martha Baer

They sell for $150 here, or at Amazon.

The most powerful computer in the world has burst into hurricane:

Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer...

Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that detailed features of the weather - such as tropical storms - can be included.

Link (via Robot Wisdom)

An Illinois school-district that deployed WiFi has been sued by a parents' group that asserts that WiFi radiation is dangerous to kids. Link

Greg Palast reports that Schwarzenegger is working with Ken Lay to ensure that Enron's ill-gotten gains are not returned to California's treasury.

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger...

The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.

Link (Thanks, Lisa!)

The familiar London tube-map is hailed as an example of brilliant information design -- indeed, it is -- because it manages to show the logical relations between the stations clearly and consisely. However, the physical relationships between the stations are not priorities for the map's designers, which means that you can find yourself riding the tube for five stops on two different lines to go between two points that are physically only separated by a few hundred yards, though you'd never know it by looking at the map. Rodcorp has taken a standard London tube-map and added "walklines" to it, showing stations that are separated by 500 meters or less. Link (Thanks, Rodcorp)

Boing Boing pal Syd Garon points us to this odd article from the BBC, claiming that "a boom in supply of hallucinogenic tablets" in Baghdad is causing all sorts of chaos. To me, the article seems riddled with total disinformation. According to the leader of the Iraq police's anti-drug unit, 10-15 types of tablets were first available for just a few US cents per strip. The article quoes a user who says: ""One type of tablet is called Lebanon - when I take it I see Lebanon. I've never been there, but it's in the tablet." Link (Thanks, Syd!)