A student has invented a device for hand-free, no-attention "perfect pint" pouring that will empty a can of lager into a pint sleeve without your having to take your eyes off the football. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

Here's a Grade Eight test from a 1895 Kansas schoolhouse:

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane,fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced andindicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Link (via Kottke)

Update: If you're thinking of writing to me about Snopes saying that this is false, go re-read the Snopes entry. They don't dispute the authenticity of this document, only the conclusions drawn in the modern introductory text.

Here's a project by Matt from M@blog to collaboratively translate my DRM talk into Japanese, using a Wiki. Link (Thanks, Andreas!)

Todays' LA Times has a great story about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's obsession with expensive, exotic food. He sends trusted aides all over the world to buy morsels of gourmet food and eats sashimi carved from live fish, while his subjects dig in the dirt with sticks looking for bugs to eat.

Kim insists that his rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mt. Paektu, a legendary peak on the Chinese border, according to a memoir written by a nephew of Kim's first wife. He has his own private source of spring water. Female workers inspect each grain of rice to ensure that they meet the leader's standards. (The nephew, Lee Young Nam, who defected to South Korea in the 1980s, was assassinated by suspected North Korean agents in Seoul in 1997.)

Kim's refined palate is not merely a matter of idle gossip, but the subject of serious study by political psychologists trying to understand the North Korean leadership.

Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist who founded and was the longtime director of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, says Kim's obsession with eating the best food comes from being the son of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, revered by the propaganda machine as a god-like figure. Post diagnosed the younger Kim as a malign narcissist in large part based on information about his eating habits.

"This is how you prepare food and water for a god."

The former South Korean Ambassador says this is a good thing: "Kim Jong Il loves life. He is a drinker, a womanizer, a gourmet. To start a war requires an ascetic like Hitler who doesn't care if he lives or dies. But I can't see Kim starting a war that he will surely lose." Link

Ian sez: This is an update to the post on Kim Jong Il's food fanaticism. The link is an excerpt from a book by his former cook (who is now hiding) and it's very interesting. It's from the Jan/Feb issue of Atlantic Monthly, and I believe it's the only part of the book available in English.

Eric sez: " In reference to your post on Boing Boing about Kim Jong-il and his food habits, I thought you might as enjoy these:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK21Dg03.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK22Dg01.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK23Dg01.html

I read those a few weeks back and I figured those were what this post was going to link to.

FastCompany -- the tech magazine for the new economy -- has a spectacularily clueless policy on linking, in which they expect people who want to link to their site to fax a permission form to their legal department! Imagine if this were enforceable: the Web that Fast Company has built its business upon would crumble into a billion individuated and unlinked pages.

Due to the large volume of requests we receive, we do not have a reciprocal linking program. However, if you like, you may link to us at no cost. This option requires the execution by you and Fastcompany.com of a one-page Web-linking agreement. Please download and sign the agreement and fax it to 617-738-5055, attn: G+J legal, Fastcompany.com. As soon as you receive back the agreement signed on behalf of Fastcompany.com, you may begin linking to our content.

Here's some of the spectacularily clueless "linking agreement" Fast Company thinks it can force linkers to sign off on:

For good and valuable consideration, effective upon the duly authorized signatures of Owner and G+J below (the "Effective Date"), G+J hereby grants to Owner a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to create a hyperlink from the Linking Site to Inc.com from the Effective Date, unless and until such permission is terminated by G+J upon notice to Owner, subject to the following terms and conditions.

Owner hereby represents and warrants that: (i) any content displayed on the Linking Site shall not infringe upon or misappropriate any third party intellectual property or other proprietary rights, shall not invade any third party rights of privacy or publicity, shall be free from any libelous or obscene material, shall be accurate, and shall not otherwise violate any applicable law, regulation or non-proprietary third party right; (ii) the Linking Site does not and will not contain any harmful software code or viruses; (iii) Owner has duly registered the domain name of the Linking Site with all applicable authorities and possesses all rights necessary to use such domain name; and (iv) Owner shall use its best efforts, including any and all then-available technology, to prevent Internet users from downloading any content from Inc.com.

There are a lot of stupid organizations that have policies like this, but very few of them have the close relationship to the Web that FC has. The disturbing thing here is that FC's credibity as an authority on the Web lends credence to this bizarre and damaging idea of needing permission to link. Link (Thanks, Jordon!)

Update: Well, this is the kind of slow company that Fast Company has put itself in: Sellotape forbids linking to their site -- this is the kind of idiotic behaviour that Fast Company should be able to sell itself on: "Buy a sub to Fast Company and learn how not to be as stupid as Sellotape!" (Thanks, Reyhan!)

"Hinterland Who's Who" was a series of 1960s-era short nature films that used to air as interstitial material on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation when I was a kid, maddeningly interrupting the cartoons. There was a very funny sendup of these on an old SCTV episode, but other than that, I haven't seen these since I was a small child. Until today. Now they're all on the Web. Now, the Internet is complete. Link

Today, the U.S. Senate approved a proposal that will give federal prosecutors the power to file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers -- penalties include fines up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The so-called Pirate Act has raised alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer companies, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. They worry that the Department of Justice could be even more ambitious.

Senate leaders scheduled Friday's vote under a procedure that required the unanimous consent of all members present. Now the Pirate Act, along with a related bill that criminalizes using camcorders in movie theaters, will be forwarded to the House of Representatives for approval.

Link to Declan McCullagh's story on News.com.

Ice cream tycoons Ben and Jerry gave Penn State $600,000 to develop a refrigerator that uses sound waves instead of freon to keep food cool. The mad-scientist outsider-art design is excellent.Link

As Jess Hemerly writes on A Great Notion , "There's something about the way this Washington Post article is written that makes the entire scenario 3,000 times funnier." From the article:

"On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

'Fuck yourself,' said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency."

...Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes."

Link to Washington Post article (free reg. required)

In 2000, longtime bOING bOING editor Gareth Branwyn underwent total hip replacement to help relieve the pain of severe degenerative arthritis. A quintessential happy mutant, Gar wrote a smart, funny, and poignant deconstruction of his reconstruction, accompanied by "get well" illustrations by designer Jim Leftwich.

"During the initial visit with my orthopedic surgeon, he brought in an implant for me to play with. It was a gorgeous, awe-inspiring piece of modern machinery - almost Zen-like in its shining simplicity and austere precision. The cementless implant technology my doctor's clinic uses was co-developed by them and has been implanted into thousands of patients. The description of the implant reads like something from a William Gibson novel. I now sport a Duroloc(r) 100 acetabular titanium cup with sintered titanium beads for in-bone growth adhesion. I have a bleeding-edge Marathon(r) polyethylene liner with irradiated cross-linked polymers for tighter bonding and longer wear rates. My Prodigy(r) brand stem has a 28mm cobalt-chrome head and a cobalt-chrome femoral component with sintered cobalt-chrome beading for bone in-growth fixation. Where 2001's HAL 9000 was fond of telling people that he was made at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois, I can now boast that part of me was manufactured by DePuy Industries of Warsaw, Indiana."

Just yesterday, Gar updated "Borg Like Me" with recent post-upgrade reflections. "Do cyborgs dream of bionic upgrades?" he asks. "Yes they do!" Link

A BB reader sez: "This is the world's biggest database for comparing statistics between countries. Sounds boring, sure- but check out the 'Mortality' stats. They've got World Health Organization stats on how people die all over the world - e.g. Austria has the highest per-capita rate of deaths resulting from "Falls involving ice-skates, skis, roller-skates or skateboards". Heaps of Japanese die of 'drowning and submersion in bath tub". Check out "struck by reptile". Amazing." Link

A BB reader sez: This crashes firefox and mozilla browsers. PLEASE warn your users before clicking.

Boing Boing reader Zed says, "Someone's making a 'The Real Gilligan's Island,' a Gilligan's Island Reality TV show, promising 'situations drawn from the original series.'" Link

Here's a BRILLIANT Flash adaptation of J. Otto Seibold's magnificent Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up Book. 872k Flash Link (Thanks, Roboto!)

Office Space Wars is one of the funniest amateur video projects I've ever seen: it's a remake of Office Space, set in the Star Wars Universe, with Vader as the bad boss, Jar Jar as the stapler guy, and R2D2 as the bad printer.

Update: Erin, who was hosting this file, has been shut down by her lame-ass generous ISP (the ironically aptly named tera-byte.com). If you have a link to a more stable version of this movie (the filename is OfficeSpaceWars.wmv) mail it to me and I'll update the post

Update #2:Tera-byte was saving Erin from a huge-mongoose bandwidth bill, and one of their techs has posted the file on his personal site: 30MB WMV Link (Thanks, Emil, for hosting this!)

Update #3: For some reason, someone moved this link to point to the Michael Moore F-911 trailer in the middle of the night. Hardy har har. Anyway, it now appears to be pointing back to a mirror of the Office Space Wars short. Who knows if it'll last. Here's a mirror that Ari put up; here's another mirror, courtesy of Tian.

Update #4: Here's a torrent and here's a mirror of it -- thanks, Trousle! ,p> Update #5: Another mirror

Bob Bemer, inventor of the escape key and co-inventor of ASCII has died of cancer at 84. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Here's a chart of musicians getting significant "airplay" on the P2P nets, even though they're being ignored by the world's radio stations. Link (via Waxy)

Stefan sez: "Xtreeem rocket nerd Bob Fortune builds a flying model of the luckless, limbless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Link

The new album by HATEBEAK -- the world's only deathmetal band with an avian vocalist -- promises music so terrifying it will "make you vacate your bowels." Song titles inlcude Beak of Putrefaction and God of Empty Nest. "Hatebeak pecks your eyes out and assaults your ears in a flurry of pummeling riffs and grey feathers that leaves you lying in a pool of blood begging for more." Buy a clear vinyl 7" for $5 postage paid at this Link. (Thanks, Mara!)

Update: BoingBoing reader Justin reminds us that Judas Priest and/or Sony Music may not appreciate HATEBEAK's creative reappropriation of this album cover. Loukas points us to the fact that the band's logo was lifted from an album cover that blogger and SENT co-curator Sean Bonner designed for a Connecticut-based band named Hatebreed in which all members are human. And reader Jason gill says, "Don't forget this grindcore band who's lead vocalists are two pitbulls to go with your parrot metal!".

Update 2: BoingBoing reader Will says, "Naming the album 'Beak of Putrefaction' is probably also a nod to the grindcore band Carcass and their first album called 'Reek of Putrefaction."

Keep your beak glued to BoingBoing for an upcoming exclusive MP3 and interview with Waldo, the feathered frontman of HATEBEAK.

Link, click reload for a new one (about 20 total, some dumb and some sublime) (via Warren)

update: BB reader Eric Smith says, "I believe they are the remix work of Jay Pinkerton. His blog is fantastic (he writes for National Lampoon and other comedy outlets) - I highly recommend reading everything he has ever written. (the Ikea desk, the bad assss song, etc). He has done many other comic "things" over time - although I couldn't find any other Spiderman specific things on his site via Google. I suppose it is possible that he got them elsewhere, but I would say that they sound entirely like his sense of humor (and the fact that he does other comics as well makes me think that he is the source of these).

With Orrin Hatch's nation-destroying Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act headed for law, EFF has decided to create a real example of just what kind of "piracy" Hatch is targetting. Here's EFF's hypothetical complaint against Apple (for making the iPod) C|Net (for reviewing the iPod), and Toshiba (for supplying hard drives for iPods). All three of these activities fall within the scope of activity that Hatch's bill seeks to end:

As detailed further in Professor Expert’s report, the iPod would have been much less attractive to consumers had it been incompatible with the music files downloaded from P2P networks and had it not allowed consumer-to-consumer transfers. Professor Expert’s report also makes it clear that the iPod, in turn, enhanced the attractiveness of P2P networks by offering iPod owners expansive storage capability and lightning-fast data transfer, allowing them to listen to any number of infringing music files when away from the computer.

Surveys conducted by Professor Expert establish that a majority of iPod owners have used at least some significant portion of their iPods to store and play infringing music files, whether derived from P2P networks or promiscuous hand-to-hand copying. Upon information and belief, Apple was certainly aware of this fact from its own internal marketing research.

Link (Thanks, Jason (and good work!))

Boing Boing pal Tom Kalil, former President Clinton's "point person" on science and technology, suggests we take a close look at John Kerry's just-announced sci/tech plan to accelerate innovation. Worth noting in the plan, Kalil says, are promises of "increased funding for research in bio, info and nanotechnology, and more spectrum for unlicensed uses and 'cognitive' radio."

From the document:

"George Bush has failed to lead on science, technology, and innovation. He has politicized or ignored scientific and technical advice. His budget plan cuts almost every area of research that is critical to our future economic growth. And during his tenure, America’s position as a leader in broadband Internet technology has eroded from 4th in the world to 10th in the world.

John Kerry’s plan will be paid for by accelerating the transition to digital television while ensuring that Americans continue to enjoy free, over-the-air television. This will provide wireless broadband for first responders, expand the spectrum that is available for unlicensed wireless broadband and also free up $30 billion of spectrum for public auction – paying for his investments in innovation."

Link to press release. Link to PDF of the plan.

I have a new article online at TheFeature.com about a 60-year-old ham radio head who may have revolutionized antenna design:

Rob Vincent couldn't let anything interfere with love, even interference itself. In 1995, the ham radio buff moved in to his girlfriend's small Rhode Island house to live happily ever after. But there was a hitch. Her small piece of property wasn't big enough for Vincent, his significant other, and the 140-foot antenna he needed to reach his wireless buddies around the world.

Dedicated to both his future wife and his hobby, Vincent spent nearly a decade designing the antenna now standing in his backyard. The 40-foot-high pole bests conventional antennas three times taller. This week, the inventor and his employer, the University of Rhode Island, are filing a patent on the technology...

"The people saying that I'm a snake oil salesman... will have to order a great big plate of crow very soon," Vincent says. Link

This is painful. I've been a New Democratic Party supporter all my life, and was proud to cast my absentee ballot for Olivia Chow in this year's Canadian Federal election -- and would love to see Jack Layton in the PM's seat.

That said, the NDP's tech policies are rotten. For one thing, they support WIPO's punishing Internet treaties. I hope that this is a matter of ignorance and not a well-thought-out, stable policy. I'd be happy to talk to any NDP policy person about these treaties, and why they're so poisonous to liberty.

The NDP endorsed the Committee's recommendations on swift ratification of the controversial WIPO Internet treaties, and even more surprisingly, it gave its approval to an extended licensing scheme for educational materials, despite the heated opposition from the education community.

FWIW, I think extended licensing -- where all material is considered to be covered under a blanket license once a certain minimum of rights-holders have opted in -- is a great idea. It keeps holdouts from stalling blanket license regimes that simplify re-use and distribution. Link (Thanks, Tim!)

On MSNBC, a quick primer I wrote on the (as-yet-unfulfilled) promise of MMS. Link

I filed this story for Wired News today about one of the more interesting gadget demonstrations at this weekend's Erotica LA porn industry convention: remote-control, "scriptable" sex toys. Adult entertainment providers will soon sell celebrity-branded "scripts" for the devices (think: Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, Ron Jeremy, and the like), which work like mobile phone ringtones but -- well-- then again, kinda different.

Using a two-way video, audio and text chat interface, expo attendees were invited to control Doc Johnson-branded iVibe pleasure devices being put to use by models at an undisclosed location, in various states of undress.

"The device control works both ways -- the person on each end controls the speed and rhythm of the device the other is using," explained High Joy President Amir Vatan, as one attendee cranked his remote partner's iVibe to warp-speed intensity. The Internet-enabled products will become publicly available before the end of 2004, and will later be integrated into an assortment of Web porn destinations.

"It's the ultimate in site stickiness," said Vatan. "For online adult providers, more interactivity means more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue."

Link

Boing Boing pal Jean-Luc says,

For this year's "Music Day" (June 21, 2004), the French "Fete de la Musique" organization created a worldwide beautiful photoblog about what happens in music during this day on five continents. There are pics from Afghanistan, Zambia, Sudan, Bolivia and all around the world."

Link to "June 21: Like We Were There."

Bodyslamming Anal Chiropractors out of the #1 spot in my list of all-time worst/best porn movie titles ever, this new gem: Crack Whores of the Tenderloin. Another fine title from the same filmmakers, Bongwater Butt Babes, is described on the production company's website as "a poignant relationship study in the spirit of Godard."Link (via Fleshbot). More fun: a list of 100 ridiculous titles here.

The Associated Press wonders why it had to resort to filing suits against the Pentagon and Air Force in order to obtain President Bush's military service records, especially since the White House says they've already turned them over.

AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, told E&P [Editor & Publisher] the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush's record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with." Because the microfilm record has been in storage and "it can't be altered, that access to the microfilm would settle the matter," Tomlin added.

Link

Meanwhile, a watchdog group called Project on Government Oversight is suing Attorney General John Ashcroft for reclassifying certain documents pertaining to a translator who says she was bribed not to disclose information about a 9/11 coverup. (Reported previously in Boing Boing here and here) Link

Bruce Schneier's just published a fantastic editorial about how expanded police powers make us less secure:

The United States is admired throughout the world because of our freedoms and our liberties. The very rights that are being discussed within the halls of the Supreme Court are the rights that keep us all safe and secure. The more our fight against terrorism is conducted within the confines of law, the more it gives consideration to the principles of fair and open trial, due process and "innocent until proven guilty," the safer we all are.

Unchecked police and military power is a security threat -- just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

If your phone supports MP3s or WAVs as ringtones, you can download these clips of the three presedential candidates saying "I'm John Kerry and I approve this message," "I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message" and "I'm Ralph Nader, running for president and I approve this mess." Link (Thanks, PT!)

Ernest Miller has posted a line-by-line, "obsessively detailed" critique of Orrin Hatch's introduction to the dumbfuck, nation-destroying new INDUCE Act, which makes it a crime to "induce infringement."

Such beliefs seem common among distributors of so-called peer-to-peer filesharing (“P2P”) software. ["So-called," indeed. Hatch isn't about define what P2P software is because it would end up including things like e-mail, IM, VoIP, HTTP and plenty of other internet protocols. P2P is how much of the internet works.] These programs are used mostly by children and college students – about half of their users are children. [You can say the same things about videogames, as well as other popular technologies like IM and SMS. It is frequently the case that the younger generation adopts new technologies sooner than older users.] Users of these programs routinely violate criminal laws relating to copyright infringement and pornography distribution. [You can say the same thing about plenty of internet protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and so on.] Criminal law defines “inducement” as “that which leads or tempts to the commission of crime.” [Luckily, not every temptation is a crime or there would be more people in jail than free.] Some P2P software appears to be the definition of criminal inducement captured in computer code. [Software is a tool. This is the same as saying that bolt-cutters and crowbars are inducements to burglary.]

Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

With the Canadian election coming up in four days, Ray called up all the candidates in his riding and asked them what they thought of the Canadian version of the DMCA:

What I believe needs to happen is the creation of a new "industry model", one that understands that all music, programs, books, etc, will be distributed over the internet. What this means is that a huge infrastructure of advertisors, retailers, wholesalers, etc, are going to wither away and have to find new ways of making a living. Instead, modern technology will allow consumers and artists to interact directly. Until industry realizes that this is the new "rules of the game", they will be in the situation of King Canut trying to order the tide to not come in. Part of this realization will be the understanding that consumers simply will not pay the same price for a book, music, etc, that they download and print themselves off the internet that they would have to pay if they went to a physical store and made a purchase. And why should they? They have removed almost all the "middle-men" who previously had to do work to get it into their hands.

Link (Thanks, Ray!)

This DRM'ed ebook version of the US Constitution costs $3, and can only be printed twice per year. As John notes, "It would only take 7 years to get copies out to the 13 colonies. Even with the primitive means the colonists had, it only took a few months to distribute the constitution." Link (Thanks, John!)

There's a collaborative project underway to translate my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into Spanish. The core volunteers have put their efforts to date on a Wiki so that others can play along. Link (¡Gracias, Francisco!)

Crispin Porter + Bogusky -- the same ad agency responsible for the much-blogged Burger King Subservient Chicken meme -- have created a new BK campaign that features a ubersnotty fictitious fashion designer named Ugoff. Part Sprockets, part Queer Eye, part Zoolander, part hamburger. The TV spot was directed by Roman Coppola, who also happens to be kin of our current guestblogging filmmaker Christopher Coppola. Score by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Wes Anderson film soundtrack fame. Link to the website! of! Ugoff! with! videos! and! designer! pouches! (Thanks, Steve)

BoingBoing reader Adam Rakunas says:

So, last March, a bunch of Congresscritters and religious leaders held a little ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building for Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, owner of the Washington Times, and an all-around peach of a guy with a messianic complex like you wouldn't believe. During said ceremony, Moon and his wife are wrapped in ermine robes and crowned by an Illinois Congressman. The video appeared on the Church's site, some blogs found it, it got yanked, and now John Gorenfeld, whose site tracks Moon, has the video and has cranked out a BitTorrent of it. They can take away our press, but they can't take away our Torrents!

Link to the Capitol Hill ceremony heralding Rev. Moon's "declaration of God's fatherland and the era of the peace kingdom, the realiziation of God-centered families, and true peace."

BoingBoing reader Nora read our current guestblogger's post about a super-rad mobile espresso maker that plugs in to your car's cigarette lighter. She was inspired to do some googlesleuthing, and says:

"I needed to find the Millennium Coffeebreak Car espresso maker that Christopher Coppola talked about. Wooden spoons from Italy, Coffee mug art from Alessandro Bartolozzi. Plus french presses, frothers and funnels. Espresso is a beautiful thing."

Playa lattes, ahoy! Link to Caffe Tucano

Yesterday, the mother of all pop music fests -- Lollapalooza -- was canceled. Today, the mother of all tech trade shows -- Comdex. Wow. Fans of Sonic Youth and Morrrissey who have a penchant for middleware schwag are double-bummed. Link (Thanks, Michael Slavitch)

Ian Haig is an Australian geek pervert artist who makes wacky, futuristic sex toys from used tech stuff: discarded vacuum cleaners, food processors, and the like. Many of the passers-by who wandered into his booth at the recent Erotica LA expo assumed the devices were intended to be used. A scary prospect, given their appearance, but some people will get off to just about anything. Thankfully, Haig makes the devices for observation only. Think of it as socio-sexual nerdist commentary, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Just be grateful nobody's trying to plant one of these firmly up your cheeks.

I shot a couple of photographs of Mr. Haig and his "Futurotica" tools at Erotica LA: one, two.

Link to Haig's Futurotica website with image gallery and background. Link to Fleshbot's coverage.

Stefan Kirkl takes pictures of action figures that he's elaborately painted and posed, producing what looks like gripping battlefield photography. Link (via MeFi)

BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton of New Zealand says:

The New Zealand postal service just introduced a scratch n' sniff postage stamp (although they call it a scratch and "smell" stamp, since I guess they've decided us Kiwis don't "sniff"). It's a 45 cent stamp (the normal rate for sending a letter) that gives off the scent of New Zealand-bred magnolia when it's scratched.

The only draw back is that it's only available as part of a presentation pack of all 5 flower stamps. I've had a good go at a normal over-the-counter book of ten 45 cents stamps, and I'll I get is the faint aroma of offset lithography.

Link, scroll halfway down the page to find the special "smellies" gift pack.

Super-cool Space Invader stickers with which to plaster your walls. Link (Thanks, Damon)

As part of the antitrust settlement against the RIAA, the record labels are obliged to donate a large number of discs to public libraries. Rather than giving America's libraries decent music, the RIAA is dumping the worst deletes and cutouts in their warehouses, dumpsterloads of reeking liquid shit, and blaming it all on a computer error:

The Des Moines (Iowa) Public Library was on track to take the lead in redundancies, though the identification of the programming bug may come in time to avert what might have been a record overkill. Its crate of 2,647 CDs, due to arrive in the next couple weeks, was listed as containing 430 single-song discs -- 16 percent of the total -- of Whitney Houston singing "The Star Spangled Banner" at the 1991 Super Bowl, according to Steve Cox, of the Iowa State Library.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

The fourth World Wide War Drive has ended, and the resulting statistics include:

Unique networks in DB: 288,012
Networks with WEP: 91,050 (31.6%)
Networks without WEP: 146,688 (50.9%)
Networks WEP unknown: 50,274 (17.4%)
Networks with default SSID: 82,755 (28.7%)

link (Thanks, socalwug)

Today would have been Alan Turing's 92nd bithday (if he hadn't been hounded to death by the British authorities who forced hormone treatments on him to "cure" his gayness). Turing invented modern computer science and is one of my all-time heros. Link (Thanks, Pat!)

The world's largest truck is the Liebherr T 282B, used for hauling in the mining industry. At more than 24 feet tall and 47 feet long, the 224-ton monstrosity can still putt along at 40 miles per hour. New Scientist has published an interview with Francis Bartley, head of R&D for Liebherr:

"The first time I was in it at a mine, the driver started to drive away and actually ran into the back of a service truck. It seems we mashed it down to the ground. I saw someone yelling, but we didn't feel a thing."

Link

Alan has created a tool that automatically spits out a machine-generated cutup of my DRM talk:

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Link

The contest to design a commemorative quarter for this year's Canada Day was won by an 11-year-old from BC with this great, cartoony design. I think this is the best coin I've ever seen. Link (Thanks, Ben!)

After a Fresno peace activist died in a donorcycle accident last year, his obit revealed that he was not, in fact, a peace activist -- he was a Sheriff's Deputy. So this weird accident revealed that the Fresno fuzz was paying its coppers to inflitrate local peace groups, a chilling bit of McCarthy-era totalitarianism.

Now the Fresno peace group and the ACLU have successfully pressured the state Attorney General to look into this.

Fresno County Sheriff Richard Pierce won't confirm or deny that Kilner was spying on Peace Fresno. But he said in a prepared statement that his department reserved the right to conduct surveillance as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.

Russell and other members say their group has nothing to do with terrorism and spends most of its time organizing a monthly antiwar protest at Shaw and Blackstone avenues, one of Fresno's busiest intersections.

Bullshit-registration-required Link (Thanks, David!)

Here's a great printable one-pager that describes what you're legally allowed to take pictures of, and what to do if someone tries to bust you for it.

148K PDF Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Here's a printable cut-and-fold paper model of an eMac to go with all your other paper computers. 308k PDF Link (via Cult of Mac)

Lovely. I don't know much about this one, but I can tell you it's a school band covering Radiohead's "Paranoid Android." Kicking and squealing Gucci little piggy. Link to MP3 file.

Update: Boing Boing reader Brian says, "The ensemble playing is the UMass Front Percussion Ensemble. UMass has one of the best small-school drumlines in the country, and perhaps the best in the East."

Paging William Hung...

CONTRABAND, STOWAWAY LOUNGE:ARTIST-MADE KARAOKE VIDEOS
For screening at ISEA2004 CRUISE AND LOS ANGELES FREEWAVES FESTIVAL
Deadline: July 26, 2004
We are soliciting short videos for a global karaoke jukebox on a ferry between Helsinki and Stockholm as part of ISEA2004 Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. Videos for CONTRABAND, STOWAWAY LOUNGE should re-invent the pop-cultural medium of karaoke. From Tokyo to Tallinn, the ubiquitous, democratic form of entertainment activates national identity, nostalgia, sentimentality, and glimmers of rock-stardom. Individual performances transform this generic format into ironic, campy, critical and individualized meanings. Erupting within the entertainment-industrial complex, these do-it-yourself appropriations recode the corporate into the personal. We invite artists to create musical video-dramas for the crooners of ISEA2004, and later, Los Angeles Freewaves Festival.

Videos the length of pop songs should be submitted with vocals-free music. Read along lyrics preferred. Midi files, if necessary, can be downloaded for free off the web.

For more info, e-mail this woman. (Thanks, Mara!)

The photos from the Superman Festival in Metropolis, IL make it look like my kind of event. Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

Interesting NYT piece about the environmental pluses and minuses of eradicating mosquitos.

Another value of mosquitoes, perverse to some, obvious to others, is that they "keep out the riffraff," meaning human beings. Concentrations of pests offer protection to wilderness areas. The tsetse fly, which causes livestock disease as well as human sleeping sickness, has kept humans away from some wildlife refuges and has been called "Africa's best conservationist." Of course, this view has been described by others as ecological imperialism.

Link

The editor of Fleshbot dragged me to the Erotica Los Angeles convention this weekend to see if any geek news was hiding beneath the piles of neoprene genitalia and Paris Hilton DVDs. I met v14gr*a-spammers and gubernatorial porn stars. Took a bunch of snapshots, spotted a herd of Realdolls (shown at left) -- and I filed this report for Fleshbot. Link to full-size image at left. I'll be posting more snapshots from "the other Hollywood" soon.

EFF is hiring! EFF is the best employer I've ever had -- including myself, when I was self-employed, and the company I helped found -- and it's hiring a new Membership Coordinator: the person in charge of satisfying current members and increasing membership. If this sounds like you, apply!

The Membership Coordinator reports to the Director of Development and is a key part of EFF's fundraising team. The MC is responsible for managing all contact with EFF's 12,000+ members, helping to develop strategies to grow the membership, processing all donations to EFF, mailing regular "thank-yous"and renewal notices to donors, ensuring an efficient donation system, managing the donation pages of the website, and responding to any issues donors may have. The MC also manages all aspects of EFF's online shop, including order fulfillment. Additional responsibilities include various marketing projects, including oversight of the design and printing of t-shirts, hats, stickers, brochures, and other materials. The MC also attends a number of commercial conferences each year, managing the EFF booth presence and speaking informally with conference attendees.

Link

The Wrist Fashion Blog has a stunning roundup of super-sexy new timepieces, including this melting Dali clock and a kitchen table surfaced with electroluminescent film that displays a digital readout of the time. Link (via Engadget)

Hollywood is full of odd, smiling creatures, and Dessarae Bradford is one of them. I met her at the Erotic LA convention this weekend -- I was wandering around in a daze shooting photos, escorted by the editor of Fleshbot. The self-published book I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S is Ms. Bradford's purportedly autobiographical account of a colorful sexual encounter with the famed actor. She wouldn't talk details -- I think she wanted me to buy the book -- but the story includes strap-ons at least one dog. The number and position of asterisks in the title change from time to time, and evidently there's a fair amount of position-changing within the story itself. Snip from the book's promo site:

"In Sept. 2002, I fu**ed Alec Baldwin in his a** in a hot, sweaty, nasty sex romp. Read the story that will change lives. Be the first one on your block to have the nitty gritty about that night, that will be only told in my book. Grab the scoop before my story gets into the hands of the media, and they attemp to censor it. I had Alec Baldwin on all four's for me, and S/M was involved. Read the real story. Tell everyone you know about this site. Free Baldwin brothers, and family photos come with this book, and a free I FU**ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A** bumper sticker too."

I'm not so sure that the "free Baldwin brothers" offer will go over big in this town -- you might say we've had our fill. Is Ms. Bradford's story true? I don't know, but don't believe everything you read at a porn convention.
Link to book website, "Blessed Adventure Publications." I shot some snapshots of Ms. Bradford, including the one at left: snapshots one, two. Link to Fleshbot's coverage.

I wrote the cover story for this month's Wired Magazine, about Asimov's robot stories and the new I, Robot movie.

Yet Asimov's reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their "sexiness" on a scale of one to three. Today's social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, "So-and-so is indeed my friend," and "I trust so-and-so to see all my other 'friends.'" These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that's easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: "If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy." The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm ("allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself") is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net's underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.

This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock's autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It's likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as "lack of accord" and "certainty," to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.

Link

J.T. sez: "Simon Mason, author of "The Secret Signals" and longtime numbers stations researcher, has compiled a page of the no-speeding signs made by the schoolchildren of Kingston upon Hull, hung below every speed limit sign in the city. There are roughly 100." Link

The LipStick 5in1 is a USB keychain drive with a built-in voice recorder and a digital camera that can also serve as a webcam. Link (via Gizmodo)

Zelda Classic is a faithful (modulo updated graphics) recreation of the original NES Legend of Zelda game. It includes an SDK for making your own Zelda foes, levels and quests. Link (via Waxy)

Here's an iPod-based guide to the pizzerias of New York city, organised by borough. Link (Thanks, Steve!)

New research confirms the anaecdotal evidence of dogs accurately predicting epileptic seizures.

These dogs not only protect their charges from injuries, such as falling, but also seem to help kids deal with the daily struggle of epilepsy.

Nine of the 60 dogs in the study (15 per cent) were able to predict a seizure by licking, whimpering, or standing next to the child. These dogs were remarkably accurate - they predicted 80 per cent of seizures, with no false reports.

Link

There are Euro companies that specialise in camouflaged cellular masts and antennae, as a sop to people who worry that these eyesores irradiate their children's gonads. One such firm is now manufacturing an antenna disguised as a crucifix, intended to go on the steeples of churches where they need really good mobile reception. Link (via Engadget)

This photoessay, called "Commute," is a captivating collection of images from the morning commute in NYC. Link (via Kottke)

Interesting summary of a case where an indie label sued a major for copyright infringment, and where the indie is totally and utterly in the wrong.

Irdial is a tiny label that released a CD of intercepts from "numbers stations" -- the radio stations where a neutral voice recites mysterious numbers and codes, presumed to be part of the international espionage system.

WEA is the major label for Wilco, whose album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot samples the numbers stations recordings on Irdial's album.

Irdium sued WEA for copyright infringement -- in other words, they claimed that they owned the mysterious voices that float in the ether all around us at every hour of the day and night. They claimed that they, and not the spook who recited the words Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into his mic over and over again, were somehow the creators of the mysterious broadcast. Unfortunately, WEA settled instead of countersuing Irdium into a smoking heap of slag for proffering this notion that absolutely offends reason.

Joe Graz has some analysis on his blog:

They claim, first, that their recording is unique because of the radio interference that surrounds it, and that this interference gives them a copyright in the recording. Second, they edited the recording to make it more interesting. Third, they processed the recording to make it clearer . Each of these, they say, gives them exclusive rights in their recording.

I don't know UK copyright law very well, so I don't know whether this claim has more merit there. But under American law, Irdial probably would have lost had the case gone to trial. First, simply recording a radio broadcast does not give a person rights in the recording. A recording of a preexisting transmission does not have the requisite originality for copyrightability. Second, Irdial's editing may have been sufficient "selection and arrangement" to give rise to a copyright in the whole track, preventing wholesale verbatim copying. But from the description they give, there were no edits within the "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" sample; the sample Wilco used was an unedited slice of Irdial's source material, and thus Irdial's edits cannot have given rise to copyright in the sample. Finally, the equalization and processing. Irdial admits that the EQ was "to remove noise" – not for any creative purpose.

Link (via Copyfight)

Update: Christopher sez, "Despite their questionable copyright claims to numbers stations recordings, Irdial is not all bad. In the past they released much of their catalog under a "free" license, which to my untrained eye looks a lot like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. Hyperreal hosts a mirror of these files, including the numbers stations."

Luca Lizzeri is working to translate my DRM talk into Italian -- there's a Wiki where you can contribute! Link (Thanks, Luca!)

A student at at a Japanese high school dozed off in class last week. As punishment, his teacher made him write an apology letter.... in his own blood. Later, the teacher confessed to the principal. It gets even stranger. According to the principal, quoted in this Reuters article, the other faculty in the room didn't notice when the boy was handed a box cutter. Apparently, they didn't see him cut his own finger open and start writing either. Even more suspicious is that the teacher will be back at work in a few days and neither the boy nor his parents has asked for a transfer into a different class. Link
UPDATE: BB reader Roy Berman says that he found an article about this in Japanese and translated it here. The comparison is interesting!

Dan Gillmor has written an insightful column about Sprint's announcement that it will soon sell camera-free Treo 600 camera phones. Sprint wants to satisfy customers fearful of internal corporate espionage, but Gillmor says resistance is futile:

I suppose it's always better to sell what the customer wants. But I have bad news for Sprint's worried customers: This won't help much, because the pace of technology means cameras will soon disappear from view, embedded in clothing and eyeglasses, not just phones.

Sprint's move highlights one more set of issues we have to confront in a world of digital information. Whether we're talking about photos or videos or documents or just about anything else that can be converted into zeroes and ones, we're entering a changed world.

Link

Ground crew member Alan Radecki has posted his photos from the SS1 launch on his blog, here. Boing Boing pal Todd Lappin says, "I love this one (at left). It seems to capture so much of the backyard spirit of the adventure."

Reader eecue also photoblogged the scene at Mojave airport, and that's here. Plenty of news coverage and blog ruminations out there about today's launch -- the first-ever private manned space flight -- but this snip from a CNN story struck me as memorable:

[Scaled Composites co-founder Burt] Rutan mingled, talked and directed traffic with those who spent the night on the windy Mojave Desert floor across from the airstrip Sunday night. He saved one sign as a memento of the occasion: "SpaceShipOne; GovernmentZero".

Link, and link to previous BoingBoing post.

For sale on eBay, an old rotary-dial phone handset, modified to act as a self-contained, battery-powered Bluetooth handset.

there is an access hole to charge and operation is via a single rocker at the base (see picture) this enables volume up and down for the ear piece aswell as for the ringer volume. I will include the manual for operation.

Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

LVX23 sez: "Beware! You could be next! Net pundit & privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein was almost ensnared by the greedy talons of a Viacom/MTV "reality" charade. Thanks to some clever web research she was able to uncover the con and spare herself himself humiliation in front of a national audience."

"At first I found nothing again. But then I started working backwards from the contact phone numbers I had for the show's production staff. This time I hit pay dirt, and while the pages unscrolled on my screen a cold chill ran down my spine. As the recent, angry testimonials I had found recounted, with a matching of modus operandi that left no chance for error, the show on which I was about to appear was a fraud. Not really a debate at all, the show is actually a program for Comedy Central (yes, an MTV/Viacom network) called "Crossballs" -- and its sole purpose is the embarrassment and humiliation of the expert guests who are brought on expecting a legitimate discussion program."

Link

Remember our March entry about the Nevada Cowboy who was arrested for not showing his ID to the cops? He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost, in a 5-4 decision.

"Joining Kennedy's opinion were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen G. Breyer, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented."

By bizarre coincidence, the same five justices who ruled against our right to privacy are the same five who appointed popular and electoral loser Bush to be president. Link

Alan sez: "Regarding today's Supreme Court decision--The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer and the article you linked to did _not_ say that one must produce identification when ordered to do so, but that one must identify oneself. The Nevada rancher in question was arrested because he refused (eleven times, according to the NewsHour report) to give his name when a cop asked him."

Ryan sez: "Mark, Alan's update to the entry on the Supreme Court decision is not quite accurate. The Supreme Court said that one must say one's name when asked by police investigating a crime. Under the ruling, you do not have to provide an identification card, but it doesn't prevent police from asking for one. But oddly, the Court came up with this ruling and upheld Hiibel's conviction even though he was never asked the simple question "What is your name?" before being cuffed and put in the patrol car (which one assumes is the moment of arrest).

"If you watch the video, you see the officer never asks Hiibel what his name is, but instead asks for identification over and over and at one point, even seems to reach for Hiibel's wallet.

"Under the Supreme Court ruling, Hiibel had and continues to have the right not to show his identification card or even have identification on his person. But it seems under the Supreme Court's reading of the case, if police ask you for your identification card, you have the right to say no, but you also have to know that you have to state your name instead. The legal obligation falls on the citizen to volunteer his name, not on the police to ask the person what his name is.

"My feeling is that at the very least, the justices voting in the majority never even saw the video, even though it was easily available on the Internet at http://papersplease.org/hiibel.

"If they had, they could have come to the same conclusion about the necessity to identify oneself to police, but at the same time, logically, the Court would have

Science fiction writer and Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw was on TV for his lucky accidental photo of a tree being struck by lighting.

He snapped his camera just as lightning struck a tree in his backyard, capturing nature's awesome power. He says he didn't know he had captured the shot, saying the strike was so terrifying, he just turn and ran. It wasn't until he went back and looked at his shots that he realized what he had, first thinking he had a daylight photo mixed in there.

Link

Mechanical Music Digest is devoted to antique nickelodeons, musical toys, automatons, and other wonderful contraptions of yesteryear. The site is no beauty, but the content is magnificent, with articles on miniature player pianos, steam-powered calliopes, and even amazing fakes:

"Please be aware that there is currently a 'wave' of brand new, made-to-deceive old-looking automatons reaching the international marketplace.  The few different variants of this monkey 'hookah-like' smoker which we've seen are purposely constructed so as to allow no internal inspection..."

Link (via String Can Phone)

Here's a picture of a public toilet in Switzerland that's made entirely out of one-way glass. No one can see you in there, but when you are inside, it looks like you're sitting in a clear glass box. I don't think I'd be able to go. Link (Thanks, DocX!)

In 1977, magician Ricky Jay wrote the definitive book on card throwing--Cards As Weapons--with such chapters as "Cards and the Martial Arts" and "Self-Defense." From the Smithsonian article about Jay that I blogged a few days ago:

"According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Jay has thrown a card farther, higher and faster than anyone. He captured the records one day in 1976; one card he threw traveled 135 feet; another sailed into a window several stories up; another flew 90 miles an hour. He throws a card with such deadly precision it can pierce a watermelon at 20 paces."

While Cards as Weapons unfortunately is out-of-print and copies go for several hundred dollars, BB reader David Maduram has posted selections from the text on his Web site. Link
UPDATE: Numerous readers point out that a PDF of Cards As Weapons can easily be downloaded via P2P clients like BitTorrent, eMule, and eDonkey. If Ricky Jay had the book reprinted, I'd still be delighted to buy it though!

Cognitive neuroscientists at Dartmouth College have shown that the part of your brain that "gets" a joke is not the same as the region that deems it funny or not. To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on subjects while they watched Seinfeld and The Simpsons. From a Scientific American report on the study:

"The investigators found that instances of humor detection lit up the left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortices--the left side of the brain. Humor appreciation, in contrast, led to spikes in activity in the emotional areas deeper inside--specifically, in the bilateral regions of the insular cortex and the amygdala... Past research has shown the left inferior frontal cortex to be involved in reconciling ambiguous meanings with prior knowledge. And ambiguity, incongruity and surprise are key elements in many jokes."

Still, the results are preliminary. When SciAm asked an outside psychologist for his expert opinion on the research, he commented: "If some people don't find The Simpsons funny, it's premature to say that they have a defective frontal lobe." Of course, he's wrong. Link

A Cisco networking instructor got sick of Cisco price-gouging his students for textbooks so he wrote his own and is giving away the electronic edition and selling the print edition through Lulu for $20 -- and he gets $5 for every copy sold.

Tired of seeing his students pay exorbitant prices for Cisco Systems' high end computer training textbooks, Basham found a way to give the information away for free.

He wrote an 800-page, two-volume manual of numbers, formulas and test tips that can be obtained by anyone who sends him an e-mail.

Link (Thanks, Jon!)

Cory's giving a free talk in London one week from today, at the Stanhope Centre near Marble Arch. It's part of an afternoon event on technology activism, and my bit is called "Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight."

Date: Monday, 28 June 2004

Time: A panel discussion from 15:00 to about 17:00, with drinks to follow

Location: Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research (tube: Marble Arch, use exit #11 from the Hyde Park pedestrian subway) Stanhope House, Stanhope Place (at Hyde Park), London W2 2HH

Link

Dan Kaminsky, the Jedi master of packet-level hacking, has figured out how to tunnel ssh over DNS, a stupendously weird and cool feat. Ever been at an airport or coffee shop with WiFi that redirects you over and over again to the same captive portal page no matter what you do? With Kaminsky's tool, you could circumvent any captive portal that allows DNS to slip through. Here's the presentation he gave at the LayerOne conference in Los Angeles.

Reverse Serial Propagation

Can be quickly and statelessly deployed

* Scan networks with generic recursive probe
* For each incoming request seeking to service the probe, return whatever(TTL=0) and probe with an actual block request
 - If a block request comes back from the recurser, populate the server
 -If the population packet drops, the upstream should retransmit
* Move back through the file after each server group fills up
* Can be much slower to populate!

480k Powerpoint Link (via Oblomovka)

The Gamedeck is a purpose-built gaming chair that a giant articulated hunk of sound-surrounded rumble-vibrating steel with good ergonomics and badass aesthetics. Link (via Gizmodo)

The Space Woodstock Wireless edition. SpaceShipOne ground crew member Alan Radecki says:

Well, folks, there's now a big RV city sitting out there...and they're still lined up and coming in at 10pm. Lots of folks are wandering the flightline street, ooing and ahing. XCOR has their hangar open and are doing firings of their little rocket engines to show off for the folks. Someone on the [mojave airport mailing] list mentioned "Space Woodstock"...it certainly seems like it! There's a ton of press out here, too...it'll be neat to see how things play out.

BoingBoing reader Mike, who is en route to the Mojave launch site, writes:

We're currently southbound on I-5, 222 miles from Mojave, and intelligence from the front says that parking has been opened already and there's about 300 people there already. We have a wifi base in here connected to a GRPS cellular uplink and all sorts of insanity, so we are a moving open wifi spot, and we will be one of the many who will have a port open there.

And BoingBoing reader Peeter says, "The webcast links you pointed to earlier seem to be overloaded, but this one from MSNBC still works -- at least here in Europe."

History may change today -- if the launch is successful, it will be the first time a privately-built spacecraft carries a human into space. Link to news that Mike Melvill has been chosen as the craft's pilot, Link to Space.com's page dedicated to the launch (look for lots of updates there around 9:30 am ET) and Link to previous BoingBoing post.

Update, 7:48 am PT: the liftoff was successful. BoingBoing reader Flora says, " Here is another live stream from that bastion of good stuff, the BBC. You can also get the free trial RealOne pass and listen/watch the CNN coverage here.

One-stop subway ride from the Bronx to the Champs-Elysees. Link to MP3 mashup of "Hier Encore" meets "Looking for the Perfect Beat," and Link to parent website, Link to lyrics. (Thanks, JeanYES)

Asimo, C3PO and Robby the Robot were among the 'bots honored in this year's edition of the Carnegie Mellon University Robot Hall of Fame. This BBC piece on the winners and selection process includes photos. Link (Thanks, Rod)

Marvel Comics and Gotham Entertainment Group are introducing a new version of Spiderman regionalized for South Asian audiences. In the Indian version, Peter Parker becomes Pavitr Prabhakar; instead of fighting the Green Goblin he'll battle Rakshasa, a mythical Indian demon. He's wearing a sarong-like garment, and he has unstoppable spiritual powers of asskickage. Link (Thanks, Robin Pen)

John Carmack may be best known for the legendary electronic game Doom -- but his latest venture is the development of a space craft to compete in the $10 million Ansari Xprize. A craft built by Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace had a succcessful test flight earlier this week:

"The flight was perfect. It went 131 feet high, and landed less than one foot from the launch point," Carmack reported on his web site. "It can easily do flights three times as long, which may show up some problems before we hit them with the big vehicle."

Armadillo's rocket concept makes use of a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant.

Carmack said the vehicle's auto-land system worked perfectly, softly settling down on its tail section. "I had tried several algorithms on the simulator before settling on this one, and it behaved exactly the same in reality, which is always a pleasant surprise."

Link to space.com article with images and video, Link to Armadillo Aerospace home (thanks, Steve)