Ralph "Don't Run" Nader has won a key legal battle against Mastercard. Mastercard sued Nader over a parody of its "priceless" ad campaign that Nader maintained was a fair use -- and today the NY Southern District Court ruled in Nader's favor. My cow-orker Jason Schultz has the scoop.

Back in 2000, Ralph Nader ran a bunch of ads critiquing the corporate interests behind the Bush and Gore campaigns. To make his point, he used the style and some of ideas behind MasterCard's "Priceless" ad campaign -- specifically calling out the dollar amounts that corporate interests paid to candidates to secure their positions on the issues.

Link

Priceless Craig's List post from a Pokemon addict looking for co-religionists to do group-gaming on an NYC subway car.

I've been playing Pokémon Sapphire on the N expréss each morning from 59th St. to Union Square. If anyone else is commuting from Sunset Park to Manhattan each morning let's coordinate our schedules so we can battle, make pokéblocks, trade rare pokémon and éxchange ideas for training harder and raising our pokémon to greater heights of pokéness.

Link (via Kottke)

W00H00! EFF is suing the friggin' FCC for sucking up to the Hollywood studios and enacting the loathesome Broadcast Flag without a shred of evidence that it was necessary and without a shred of evidence that it could stop "piracy" -- unless, by "piracy," you mean "inventing VCR-like technologies without the permission of scaredy-cat studio execs." So we're suing them! I love my job.

"The FCC's digital broadcast television mandate is a step in the wrong direction because it would make digital television cost more and do less, undermining innovation, fair use, and competition," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann, "The FCC overstepped its bounds, unduly restricting consumers and manufacturers when it issued its broadcast flag ruling..."

The lawsuit, called ALA v. FCC, was filed in the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and charges that the FCC exceeded its jurisdiction, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and failed to point to substantial evidence in adopting a broadcast flag mandate.

Link

This notional bumpf for an 1876 PhoneCon, celebrating the marvel of the voice network, is funnier'n hell.

As you know, the emerging power of the Telephone as a tool to shape democracy, our flour and cotton mills, and our understanding of Rhode Islanders, is just beginning to be understood. That's why it's so important for telephoners to get together in person to talk about talking on the phone.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

-Do you have a telephone?
-Do you talk on your phone regularly?
-Do you wonder where the telephone's headed?

Link (via Ambiguous)

This online data chart released today by the Center for Disease Control shows that lack of physical activity and poor nutrition are catching up to smoking as a top cause of death in the United States. There's an analysis in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association (link), and a summary here from AP.

Topps is bringing back Wacky Packs stickers. The original series included illustrations from Art Spiegelman and Norman Saunders and lampooned the brands of the 70s; the new series will bring back some of the original talent to mock modern brands -- for example, turning "Ring Pops" into "Bling Pups." Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

Nice interview with Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh project at Apple and bOING bOING contributor.

very confused as to its use and when I was designing the software for the Macintosh, in designing the interface, I figured that if there was only one button, there would never be any question on what you have to press the number of ways of using a one-button mouse. I think this was probably a mistake, in fact there is an appendix in my book which discusses why I think this was a mistake and what I think I should have done. One of the reasons I made the mistake is that there is a certain school of industrial design dating back to the Bauhaus which says that designs have to be simple, uncluttered, and clean. In particular, don't put writing on it except for brand names or logos. If we had had a multiple-button mouse with two keys, labeled something like "select" and "activate," it would have been much easier to use, but the idea of putting writing on keys did not occur to anybody, including me. So if I was designing one today, it would have two buttons and they would be labeled. The labeling also the other good effect of forcing software designers to use them as labels otherwise it's clear that they are being misused.

Link

I'm guestblogging at the resurrected Industry Standard. Come on by. Link

Clay Shirky's posted a nice little analysis of the evolving user-interfaces for social network services on Many2Many. The thing he nails down really tight here is that negotiating friendship is something we're actually pretty good at -- until we're asked to port representations of those relationships to the digital realm. Computers are best used to do stuff that's hard or boring (repetitious counting and sorting, for example) and, IMO, it's a bad idea to ask them to take something that's neither hard nor boring and make it a little of both in the service off some ill-defined reward. By which I mean: I already know who my friends are, and it's not hard to know that; but exposing an exhaustive list of my nuanced social relations is damned hard, and none of the YASNSes offer me any serious benefit for doing so.

[N]ow [Orkut has] added this linear scale of friendship that would be laughed out of a freshman sociology course, and then they say tell me the data is private. Of course it's not private -- that data isn't for me, it's for Orkut. I don't need it in the first place, because I am a monkey, descended from a long line of such monkeys, whose main talent consists of keeping track of relationships. Measured on the time scale of our social capacity, fire is a recent invention and agriculture is still a novelty.

The "how good a friend are they" data is useless or worse for me, but useful for Orkut, because they are desperate to represent social networks numerically, which is why they keep adding things to an interface they should be subtracting things from. The problem isn't the cost or refinement of accepting a friendship transaction, the problem is that friendship isn't a transaction, something almost no social networking service understands.

Link

Steve Balmer's infamous dance-monkeyboy-dance video, rendered as a moving iPod sillhouette ad. Link (Thanks, Nick!)

The essential list of required ingredients in Indian popular cinema:

# Two brothers separated in childhood will always grow up on different sides of the law. The law-breaker, however, will suddenly turn over a new leaf before the end, bash up the villain (who is the real bad guy), and be pardoned for all his sins before the last-scene family reunion.
# Any movie involving lost+found brothers will have a song sung by:
(a) the brothers
(b) their blind mother (but of course, she has to be blind in order to regain her sight in the climax)
(c) the family dog/cat.
The amazing thing is that these folks remember the song after 20 years in the movie, and you can't remember it 2 minutes after coming out of the theatre.

Link

Feedster turned one year old yesterday. Happy Birthday, and congrats to Scott Rafer, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte. Link

The nightmarish QuickTime short "Beauty Kit" parodies toy ads for children, instructional health videos, and modern-day body image psychosis by way of a do-it-yourself breast augmentation kit for young girls. When you live in LA, this is not such a far stretch of imagination: I've heard testimony from SoCal teens of late-teenage daughters in wealthy families receiving plastic surgery as gifts from adult family members. For real. While you're on this site, check out the rest of pleix.net's short films, which are fantastic. For instance, e-baby -- utterly chilling.
Link (from Ticklefight, via El Fabuloso Mas Macho).

The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) is the world's only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms. "We do not tire in our efforts to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences," reads the MOBA manifesto. At left, the piece that started it all -- Lucy In the Field With Flowers, oil on canvas by Unknown, acquired from the trash in Boston. "The motion, the chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the expression on her face -- every detail combines to create this transcendent and compelling portrait, every detail cries out masterpiece."

Link to MOBA's online collection (via Buffoonery). BoingBoing's founder, the ever-prescient Mark Frauenfelder, covered this years ago in Wired Mag -- Link to article.

Asia foodie, B2.0 senior editor, and former guestblogger Todd Lappin confesses:

While looking for a good recipe to make gyoza (Japanese dumplings) last night, I came across this luridly graphic website, which shows how the delicious treat is made. Step-by-step, full color gallery! Hot hot hot hand-wrapping action! No password required! I haven't seen anything this seductive since the ramen scene at the beginning of Tampopo. Be advised: Probably not work-safe before lunch or dinner. Here is the picture that's worth 1000 words.

Link

If you (1) are a robot-lovin' geek, and (2) have access to satellite communications, aim your dish toward the raw news feed from the DARPA Grand Challenge Race kickoff on March 13. If you lack (2), find someone who does, and badger/bribe/beg them into taping or TiVoing it for you. According to Paul Grayson (by way of an informal Grand Challenge e-mail list), DARPA will provide same-day coverage via satellite of the Grand Challenge start and highlights on Saturday, March 13 at the following times: Live coverage of the start: 6:30 - 8:30 Pacific/9:30 - 11:30 a.m. Eastern Video news release: 11:00 - 11:30 a.m. Pacific/2:00 - 2:30 p.m. Eastern. Coordinates for both feeds: Satellite: AMC 9, Ku, Transponder 03. Space is: 36 MHz. Downlink Frequency: 11760.000. Downlink Polarity: Vertical.

Related updates on the race in today's Wired News, here.

Some wise-ass Simpsons fan wrote a letter to "Dear Abby" based on an episode of the popular Fox network show. "Abby"'s response was yanked prior to print.

In both the letter and the Simpsons episode, the husbands grow suspicious when they stumble across bowling gloves - obvious gifts to their wives from the other man. In the television show, Homer responds by ineptly professing his love for Marge, who later goes to him at the nuclear power plant where he works. He lifts her up and carries her out of the plant as his co-workers watch and cheer. (...) Jeanne Phillips, who writes Dear Abby, told "Stuck" to tell her husband why she strayed. "To save the marriage," she wrote, "he might be willing to change back to the man who bowled you over in the first place."

Link (thanks, Jonno mas fabuloso!)

Brilliant sociological analysis of organ and tissue donation and the relation and disjoint thereof to the gift-economy on the Crooked Timber groupblog.

Over the past twenty years or so in the United States, a very large and complex system of tissue procurement and distribution has grown up, mostly to service the demand created by new medical technologies. Some of these, like heart and kidney transplants, enjoy broad public support. Others, like the use of processed cadaveric skin for lip enhancement and penis enlargement, bone screws for orthopedic surgery or cadavers in automobile crash tests are less well known.

Link

I did a mini-interview with Gizmodo yesterday, in which I was asked to empty my pocketses and talk about what gadgets I was carrying and why:

Fido Vtech prepaid mobile: this is the worst mobile phone I've ever owned. I have a bottom-of-the-line Nokia I use in Europe and a similar one that T-Mobile sold me in San Fran, and when I turned up in Toronto last week, I figured I'd just put a prepaid SIM into that one and go with it. However, the scumbags at T-Mobile *locked* the fucking thing, which meant that I had to go buy *another* phone (that's THREE phones in total, now!) and I ended up buying the Vtech used for 60 Canadian pesos at a counter in a Chinatown mall. It receives and sends SMS, but it doesn't have T9, so it's basically impossible to use for texting. The UI is utterly martian, like something designed by throwing dice, and the phone itself feels like it's made out of dried spittle and chewed-up paper. Worst. Ringtones. Evar. Oh, and it's FUCKING LOCKED to Fido. Rilly. Christ.

Link

Belkin has shipped a six-in-one media reader that plugs into your iPod -- plug the reader into your iPod, stick the Compact Flash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick or whatnot from your camera into the reader, and your photos are offloaded onto the iPod's hard-drive, freeing you up to take new shots. When you get home, plug your iPod into your computer and offload your archived photos. Smart, smart, smart. Link (via Kottke)

The new HP DVD/CD burners can use their built-in lasers to etch a high-rez, monochrome image right into the surface of the disc, obviating the need for printing labels and sticking them onto the platter. They're due in six months, will cost $10 more than current DVD/CD burners, and will require special media that "will cost about a dime more than today's discs" -- no word on whether "today's discs" are the premium CD blanks that go for $1 or more, or the el-cheapo ones you buy in hundred-packs for $3 through web-specials, though I suspect the former, since HP has almost certainly locked up production of these discs through patents... Link (via /.)

This collection of dirty origami -- mostly explicit sexual stuff -- is hilarious. The Kama Sutra pieces are nice, and folding a vulva out of a dollar bill is a great dinner-table trick, but they're not a patch on this pooping doggy origami. Link (via Fleshbot)