Meanwhile, here's my schedule for the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston this Labor Day -- hope to see you:

* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:

4PM: Unlimited Access: Issues involving unlicensed access to spectrum. With Harold Feld from the the Media Access Project.

* FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3:

10AM: Group reading from The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

11AM: Locus Award ceremony

5PM: Drunk on Technology: With Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charlie Stross

* SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4:

12PM: The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age? With Charlie Petit, Daniel Grotta, Steve Miller, and James M. Turner

1PM: Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security, and Privacy. With Joseph Lazzaro, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Don Sakers

2:30-3PM: Charlie Stross and I will be signing our new short novel, Rapture of the Nerds, just published in the new issue of Argosy Magazine, at the Borderlands Books table in the Dealers' Room

5PM: Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms. With M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Charlie Stross

* SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:

10:30AM Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. A recapitulation of my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference

4PM: Reading

5PM: Sign at the Asimov's Magazine table in the Dealer's Room

* MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6:

11AM: Kaffeeklatsch

12-12:30: International Copyright Issues

Link

Tristan da Cuhna is an island in the South Atlantic. It is a British dependency. At 37 degrees south by 12 west, with about 250 permanent residents who literally live on the side of a volcano, it is considered by many sailors to be the remotest town in the world.

The residents, about 100 households which may have any of seven surnames and who are all apparently related by blood, make a living from issuing exotic postage stamps which have a following in the collector market, and by lobster fishing. There is no access to the island by air, and only a few boats per year put into the notoriously dangerous harbor.

Tristan has an online newspaper now though!

Aubrey Sheiham, professor of dental and public health at University College London said that products high in very refined starch were often just as bad on the index as those high in sugar.

Reducing the sugar from 38% to 25% was unlikely to help in terms of tooth decay either. "When you have very finely milled starch and sugar together the effect on teeth can be worse than sugar, perhaps because of the stickiness," he said.

Also, we're looking for a sharp office manager type who has a few hours a week to work with us keeping track of things, in particular the administrative needs of our wonderful sponsors. This is not a full time position, but a chance to freelance with us and help build out an even better Directory of Wonderful Things. If you're interested, email John at jbat at boingboing.net.

The final results of the survey will be published for all to see at the conclusion of the survey. Link

I have grave misgivings about John Kerry, but I certainly don’t have misgivings about Kerry that equal the terror I have about another four years of Bush. What he’s done to aspects of the Constitution that are there to assure individual rights is breathtakingly bad.

...

I had a conversation with Kerry. It was pretty disheartening. I asked how he felt about civil liberties. He said, "I’m for ’em!" That’s great, but how do you feel about Section 215 of the Patriot Act? He said, "What’s that?" I said, it basically says any privately generated database is available for public scrutiny with an administrative subpoena. He says, "It says that?" I say, "You voted for it!"

To wit:

"It has always been my belief that various industries have actually earned more revenue as a direct result of file sharing, and that file sharing works FOR the industry. Recent figures such as the music industry's latest earnings report have shown results contrary to what the RIAA has consistently complained about in that file sharing hurts the industry. So if you would like to contribute, click submit above. Post your merchandise, how much you paid, and why you wouldn't have bought it if you first hadn't downloaded something. No IP addresses or personal information is logged - so there's nothing to subpoena. The complete (growing) catalog is available for review by clicking here. The totals shown below are only temporary, and may be reduced later once the logs are crunched through a filter (to detect bogus entries or flooding), or as users help identify suspect or bogus entries."

"I tried to take care of her the best I could," said 54-year-old Herman Thomas, who lived with Grinds in the duplex apartment in Golden Gate, south of Stuart. "I tried to get her to get up, but it wouldn't do no good."

He said the woman that he called his wife hadn't been off the couch for six years. No record of their marriage could be found.

"I wish I could have pulled her off the couch, but she wouldn't let me," he said, covering his face and sobbing.

Inside the home, the floor and walls were matted with feces, and trash was strewn across the floors, some which were bare concrete. Furniture was toppled, and pictures were knocked off walls.

Atlas said sheriff's detectives will look for potential "negligence issues" related to her care and death.

Faced for the first time with losing significant back catalogue profits, the industry is lobbying to change the law. The industry describes the law as a "loophole". In fact it is anything but.

For every one recording that has the power to reach number three in the commercial charts fifty years after its original release, there are hundreds if not thousands of tracks that do not.

Although these recordings no longer have any commercial value to their rights holders, they are of tremendous value in terms of our cultural heritage. But the mechanisms of copyright law mean that, should the European Parliament choose to heed the music industry, keeping Elvis out of the public domain for a further 45 years or even more, the King will drag down with him this huge body of commercially worthless but culturally significant work.

- EFF is deeply involved in projects to ensure honesty in e-voting. In California, she said, voters have the option to choose a paper ballot. "I'd like to see a significant percentage of people choose the paper in California. this will make the case to the rest of the country that this matters."

Many voting-rights advocates are urging people to sign up for absentee ballots--problem with that is that people order absentee ballots all the time, and legislators will assume the ordering is going on for normal reasons. Only people requesting paper ballots will make a case to legislators that people don't trust e-voting machines.

- EFF is also involved in a project called TechWatch, looking for technical people who want to be involved on election day, serving as, essentially, poll watchers, to document technical snafus on Election Day. More info and sign up on VerifiedVoting.org.

"I am concerned we will have some train wrecks involving the technology. We may not be able to prevent it but we can mitigate it and, more importantly, make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Because more receptors mean stronger connections between brain cells, manipulating this process may one day provide a means of boosting brainpower in the hippocampus, where long-term memories are stored."

My friends seem to spend an inordinate amount of time inside wind tunnels, aboard locomotives, and underwater. At least, that's what it sounds like when they call me from their cell phones. Blame it on the background noise. Unlike calling from home or a telephone booth, we have little control over the noise pollution that surrounds us out there. It's sort of like extra baggage that our voice is forced to carry when it travels across the wireless ether. Now though, researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a novel bit of technology that may someday alleviate us of the audio aggravation.

* As a rule, kids should never carry a bag that weighs more than 10% of their body weight. This rule applies to all students, no matter what age. “If your child is unable to stand up straight with the pack on, the load is too heavy,” explains Hickey.

* Remind your kids about the value of lockers. Reducing backpack poundage will prevent any serious back pain in the future.

* The bigger the bag, the more stuff kids will cram into it. Purchase a smaller backpack that will only fit the bare necessities. This will prevent kids from lugging around those leftovers from lunch, notes passed in math class, or half-melted chapsticks.

* Periodically remind your child to clean out trash and remove old papers and homework to lighten his or her load.

Think of them as eBay crossed with Napster, then injected with Friendster DNA. The newest social networking services merge three powerful Web functions - auctioning, file-sharing, and friend-of-a-friend socializing - to build digital barter economies. Unlike first-gen social networks, these communities are about more than getting laid and getting paid. These "social swap nets" help like-minded members pool digital resources - music, movies, games, even hardcover books.

Mediachest and SongBuddy are two early examples. They're still small (and size matters when it comes to a well-stocked "sharing pool"), but their very existence points to a new era in networked transactions, one in which online exchanges become more useful.

Here's how they work: Members browse one another's collections online using filters such as friend groups, geographic location, or other affinities. This isn't file-swapping in the old outlaw Napster sense. They can access one another's stuff, but the original copy literally traded with others, rather than downloaded and duplicated via P2P. Getting hold of the goods is mostly a low tech affair. Members often mail or hand-deliver items.

The wireless4development seminar & workshop brings together many of the people who are doing exactly that. Using low-cost wireless technologies to bring Internet connectivity to parts of the world, and to parts of society, where there are no real alternatives. For one week in September, wireless and free networking activists from around the world, will meet up to share skills and experiences gained in some of the most remote regions of the world. Participants have experience from some of the most innovative uses of Open Spectrum (license-exempt) wireless technologies, ranging from wireless connectivity at the Mt. Everest Base camp, over pedal-powered connectivity in rural Laos, to connecting local radio stations across Mali. These projects illustrate the true power of low-cost, locally run wireless networks.

wireless4development will present workshops on a variety of subjects related to wireless community networking, and brings experts from around the world to discuss these subjects. Presentation subjects include Voice-over-wireless, Solar- and Bicycle-powered wireless networking and Mesh Network.

Enter the caoqiang jiuchuo or "super-correcting" Chinese model of DVD player. Developed by the Jiangsu Shinco Electronic Group and selling for about half the cost of brands such as Philips and Sony, it is designed to cope with the poor quality of pirated video discs.

Along with half a dozen domestic brands that have followed its lead, the company's Shinco brand has grabbed about 80 per cent of the Chinese market. Its factories produce 5 million DVD players a year, and, says Zeng Ming, a management expert who has studied the company, its annual sales are about $US1 billion ($1.35 billion).

Anyway, the site is no longer providing this free service to Windows users, because the company threatened to sue them if they kept it up. Lucky MSFT customers, huh?

Microsoft sent DMCA takedown notices to our two webhosts, one of which was just linking to a torrent file on another server. We've stood up to these kinds of legal threats before (see the Grey Tuesday protests), but we decided not to bother this time, because we started this site primarily as a demonstration and to that end it's already been a huge success. SP2torrent.com showed how filesharing technlogy gives people without budgets or huge servers the power to solve problems themselves, without waiting for the government or some corporation to do it for them. For another demonstration that's still in action, check out p2pcongress.org. If you need Windows XP SP2, you can download it from Microsoft's inscrutable webpage:

I called them up and spoke to their tech support people. "Oh yeah," they said, "your paid service ended a month ago but our billing system was broken so we didn't send out a notice. So we terminated you for nonpayment. But dude, you're lucky! We gave you a free month's DNS!"

Lucky lucky me. I got a free month's DNS and to pay for it, I was bouncing mail all over the Internet and my Website wasn't resolving. Bastards. I bought two years' worth of DNS and vowed that when the domain came up for renewal, I'd switch away from Dotster. I sent them an email telling them as much and got an email back apologizing and saying that they would certainly never terminate my DNS wihtout notice again (you see where this is going, I trust)

Craphound.com is up for renewal at the end of August. Not wanting to leave things to the last minute, I changed over early this month, switching registrars to Domain Direct, who are now the registrar for all of my domains, and boingboing.net besides.

I didn't move over the DNS -- I figured I'd paid Dotster for another year's service, I might as well get it. Instead, I left myself a reminder in my iCal for next July to set up DNS at DomainDirect a month ahead of the service running out on Dotster.

This morning, Dotster terminated my DNS. Without warning. And when I called, they told me there was nothing they could do about it. Even though there's nothing in my DNS contract that says that DNS is provided to domains registered with Dotster and no others, that is, apparently, their policy. And they can't make exceptions. Not even for 48h while I effect a graceful change to DomainDirect (who have been fantastic throughout and now have 100 percent of my domain registration and DNS business).

Bastards.

CaBOOM is an experiental trade fair and festival showcasing designers and resources from the contemporary architecture, landscape and interior design communities at LA's Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Boing Boing readers are invited to tonight's opening night extravanza which benefits the LA Conservancy, and are offered a 40% discount on festival passes (Discount code: PET9976). Event opens tomorrow, continues through Sunday Aug 15th.

It's well and good to tell atheletes that they compromise their integrity and shame the games when they take steroids, but what about the perceived integrity of the game when a ticket-holder is turned away for carrying the wrong brand of bottled water?

Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.

Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at the gates or be shut out. High on the list of blacklisted beverages is Pepsi, but even the wrong bottle of water could land spectators in trouble.

I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express.

The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.

AirPort Express RSA Public Key, Modulus: 59dE8qLieItsH1WgjrcFRKj6eUWqi+bGLOX1HL3U3GhC/j0Qg90u3sG/1CUtwC
5vOYvfDmFI6oSFXi5ELabWJmT2dKHzBJKa3k9ok+8t9ucRqMd6DZHJ2YCCLlDR
KSKv6kDqnw4UwPdpOMXziC/AMj3Z/lUVX1G7WSHCAWKf1zNS1eLvqr+boEjXuB
OitnZ/bDzPHrTOZz0Dew0uowxf/+sG+NCK3eQJVxqcaJ/vEHKIVd2M+5qL71yJ
Q+87X6oV3eaYvt3zWZYD6z5vYTcrtij2VZ9Zmni/UAaHqn9JdsBWLUEpVviYnh
imNVvYFZeCXg/IdTQ+x4IRdiXNv5hEew==
Exponent: AQAB

Update: Mark sez, "Just a little nit-picking... 'The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh' is pretty much a retelling of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' which means that his father is (or is a descendant of) a Deep One cross-breed, not Cthuloid. Big difference to someone overly obsessed with HPL, but probably not to anyone else... anyway, that was a damn funny link."

1954 was a GREAT time to be a kid. I know, I was one. I was the most enthusiastic 8-year-old that ever was or ever could be.

There were a couple of hundred reasons, For one, it was the last year of glory, before things got so bad, because of congressional investigations and Reader's Digest articles by Dr. Wertham, and the adoption of the Comics Code Authority (the publishers' equivalent of the Motion Picture Production Code that had kept movies from having any ideas that would shock the vicar since 1934...) In late 1954, there were still all the great horror comic books around. ECs — filled with puns, good writing, great art, and gore! — go get some of the hardcover reprints and look at Shoe-Button Eyes or By George! or some of the adaptations of Ray Bradbury's stories from The Martian Chronicles in them, and see what I mean. Besides the ECs, there were crime and horror comics by publishers ranging from the near-EC level to that of the barely literate. There were something like 300 different comic book titles a month published, 52 or 48 pages, all in color for a dime (except Classics Illustrated, a.i.c. for 15¢) Gore! Bats! Skulls! Guys in tanks disintegrated into green goo by acid in Blackhawk! Airboy, and The Monster of Frankenstein were still running. Airboy had The Heap in it, a sort of Old Testament revenge-minded haystack golem. Dick Breifer's Frankenstein was sui generis; it had started as a horror feature in Prize Comics in the 40s, then transmogrified into a humor comic in the late 40s, and changed back to a horror comic in the early 50s. Guys feeding babies to man-eating plants! Guys pinned to town clocks by the broken-off hour hand! Fights with mummies in the tunnels beneath the pyramids! Gah! (I remembered when I'd covered my eyes to keep from seeing the Queen transform into the witch in the 1952 release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the next day, with a rare dime I'd gone out and bought a Frankenstein comic book. My mom had a shit-fit: "How can you not watch Snow White and then go out and buy that!?" As I said somewhere else, being a kid I didn't have time to explain the difference between the low and high mimetic modes of narrative...)

The videotapes, which had titles like "Dogs and Horses and Pigs and Chickens," contained graphic scenes of bestiality and other sexual activity that involved excretory functions, Mercer said. Transportation by common carrier of obscene material in interstate commerce is a crime, Mercer said, and is not protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that to be obscene, material must appeal to the "prurient interests," be "patently offensive" and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The court said obscene material should be judged by local standards. Ultimately, the local standards would be decided by a jury.

http://www.jucci.com/bp.asp?p=bond-age-5-700.jpg
^700^519^center&t=Bond+Age+Beanie&s=Naughty+but+nice!+
Introducing+our+racy+new+model!

http://www.jucci.com/bp.asp?p=bond-age-5-700.jpg^700^519^
center&t=Fuck+Bag&s=Whip+My+Tender+ASP+
With+Your+Hot+Throbbing+Pageview+Totals

In another session, McMaster University philosopher and editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Mark Walker gave a talk on "Genetic Virtue", the ethics of bioengineering children to be virtuous. Walker began by pointing out that parents and communities already spend a lot of time and effort trying to instill virtues in the young. Assuming that genes that predispose people toward being honest and caring for others can be found, what would be wrong with allowing parents to use biotechnology, say, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to increase the chances that their children are born with those virtues? Walker concluded that if we accept that the goal of ethics is to make our lives and our world better, then we ought to explore the plausibility and possibility of genetically instilled virtue. One audience member suggested that this would remove a child's free will, but I pointed out that a child doesn't get any extra measure of free will just because they have randomly conferred genes.

This morning, they're doing bag searches again to get on the ferry. And the guy doing the searches pulls me aside and says, "Sir, I feel that I need to confiscate this book."

I pause and say, in that tone of voice that most people would recognize as meaning, "have you lost your grip completely, chuckles?": "You need to confiscate... a book."

"Yes. I feel it's inappropriate for the other people on the ferry to be exposed to it."

...

He gets all pissy at me and says, "Don't you understand this is for your safety?"

"Confiscating someone's gun or bomb is for my safety. PErhaps confiscating someone's pocketknife or nailfile may be for my safety. What's so damn dangerous about my book?"

"It's INAPPROPRIATE!"

UPDATE Game designer Greg Costikyan took the time to send email to the NY Waterway to protest the rogue imbecile security guard who tried to confiscate the game manual (How much do you want to bet that the rogue imbecile security guard wanted to confiscate it so it could take it back to his home and use it as a masturbatory aid?).

Greg Costikyan: Just spoke with people from New York Waterway, who say:

1. They're trying to track down mephron (the original poster) to get more detailed information from him--e.g., time and ferry route.

2. If the story is true, it is not only a violation of company policy, but also of martime regulations, and if it is true, they wish to correct the situation as quickly as possible.

3. Anyone with further information about it are invited to contact them directly.

Sounds sensible to me...

According to this FAQ : Triops longicaudatus are crustaceans that are also called Dinosaur shrimp or Tadpole shrimp that look like miniature horseshoe crabs.  They have a short life-cycle of 20 to 90 days - growing very quickly in this time to about 2 inches in length !" Link (Thanks, Jonathan!)

UPDATE Andrew sez: "American Science and Surplus has had triops for sale for some time. The same as Uncle Milton's Aquasaurs that Mark recently blogged, but for only 8 bucks. I ordered them a couple of years ago and they were a lot fun. An added upshot is that sciplus has a 10 dollar minimum order so you can order some other cool stuff while you're at it, and there's plenty of other cool stuff (I have no affiliation with sciplus, just love their stuff)." Link

UPDATE Simon sez: "My God, are you completely insane? Triops are the vilest creatures that have ever lived. Someone gave me a set, and they immediately hatched into hundreds of awful little crawly things with big teeth and millions of incessantly moving legs. A friend said "Triops: worlds most awful pets." And he was right - their food is sea monkeys, for pete's sake. You can't clean the tank because they eat the brown sludge that forms on the bottom, they eat each other, and they eat goldfish if you put them in the tank - the instructions say so. After a few weeks all you can see in the vat full of filthy water is two inches of sludge with little tracks moving through it where the triops are. When two meet there is a brief explosion of activity and only one track leaves. Sometimes bits of the loser drift out of the ooze. Eventually all life in the tank ceased and we threw it into a dumpster with immense relief. I still shudder when I think of those awful things. If you like triops you would probably like a suggestion by the same friend: body crabs raised on a sock stretched over a forty watt lightbulb. I added that, unlike triops, when you got tired of them you could kill them with Raid, but he countered with "Oh, no, you can't kill crabs with Raid. Believe me, I should know." Not a pleasant thought, but a walk in the park compared to having a stinking vat of thrashing triops on one's kitchen counter.

Hmmm ... how to end politely...

Thanks for an interesting article,

Simon"

WN: What role do blogs play in all of this?
Gillmor: They have joined the journalism ecosystem. It's more symbiosis than rivalry. I disagree with Big Media partisans who feel blogs are irrelevant, and with blog promoters who see the demise of professional journalism.
WN: How did you see some of the issues in your book play out at the Democratic Convention? What sorts of trends and activity patterns do you anticipate as the November elections approach?
Gillmor: Bloggers became pets for the Big Media. You could almost see the establishment journalists petting bloggers like poodles and cooing, "Oh, good bloggers, aren't you cute!" (Apart from the ones who put on body armor and said, "Omigod, these pit bulls are dangerous!") It'll take a few more conventions -- and a time when blogs aren't a novelty -- for everyone to sort this out.

EasyMobile is to be launched in December at the latest on the British market and if all goes well the service will be expanded to the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain.

They plan to duplicate early-stage embryos and extract stem cells from them which can be used for radical new treatments.

The embryos are destroyed before they are 14-days old and never allowed to develop beyond a cluster of cells the size of a pinhead.

The green-light was given by the research licensing body the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority after weeks of discussion.

Dr Miodrag Stojkovic, from the university’s Institute of Human Genetics, said: “We are all set up and ready to go immediately as soon as the paper work is sorted out.

* Who Told You to Paint it Black?
* Call Me Already
* Bang a Gong (Not Too Loud)
* Sympathy for Your Sister
* Let It Be (See If I Care)
* Here Comes the Sun (And I Forgot My Sunblock)

Update: Leo sez, "You can read some excerpts (three hacks chosen by Rael) from the book here and see plus learn how to make that iOscillate thing.

When journalists don't cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar[10] - they have no signal to reinforce. There aren't enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what's really going on, nor will there be for many years to come. None but the largest news agencies are able to pay the travel costs and insurance for reporters to cover these stories. Most choose not to cover a conflict that's bloody, dangerous, difficult to summarize in a soundbite and unknown to most of their readers or viewers. The net result - we simply don't have information about many parts of the globe relevant to world debate....

Blogalization is a new project that attempts to address the translation issue, by combining the efforts of multilingual bloggers into a single site. The logic behind the site: "if I have languages A and B and you have languages B and C, we can share memes across barriers of mutual incomprehension." [38] Blogalization participants index dozens of multilingual blog[39] and wiki[40] catalogs in the hopes of giving contributors raw material for translating key posts for a global audience. They make a point of selecting posts with key ideas that they think have currency for their international audience, "memes" likely to be adopted and transmitted by their readership. Another site, Living on the Planet takes a similar tack, though unidirectionally, from various languages into English With sites focused on China, Latin America and India, bloggers summarize local media for an English-language audience. The project plans expansion into Europe, Central Asia and Africa, as well as an agency to represent the commercial interests of photographers, bloggers and writers, selling to U.S. and European markets.[41]

alivo
hi there i am male 24 from isb, and love to have fun, feel free to contact me for some fun 00923008550948

kukucoo
I AM TO SEE AND FEEL HOW BEAUTIFUL YOU AS A WOMAN ARE.

LostAlone
well i m 23 male from islamabd looking for such meeting any body can contact me free 03005130953 i m 5 11 fair having big mustaches, haaa dont be afraid .. i m doin mba it ths itt

The new TVs will be equipped with chips used in the company's PlayStation 2 home-use game consoles and PSX DVD recorder/game consoles. Sony fabricates these chips at a group plant in Nagasaki Prefecture.

The chips' ability to handle detailed computer graphics will improve the TV's image-processing capacity, leading to faster on-screen control for selecting the type of TV broadcasts or viewing image data stored on digital or video cameras, for example.

Sony says the chips, which are already widely used in its game consoles, will enable it to boost the functions of its TVs at little cost.

The Secret Machines - Nowhere Again. I know what you're saying. The Secret Machines, this is old news. Well, actually, it's not. This is a new development, because not only do we have permission to post this track, but Warner Brothers Records contacted us and wanted to help out. Crazy, right?

It's beyond my comprehension that anyone would do this, but it's to enhance the performance, to make the udders bigger and more beautiful, and that's a plus in the judging criteria," said RNA president Vivian Edwards.

Birthrates are plummeting worldwide.  Already half the world has "sub-replacement" birthrates. The dearth of babies coming means the makeup of human populations is about to change drastically, and that will affect everything.  Radical population increase defined the 20th century; radical population decrease could well define our current century.  This form of decrease---losing the young and keeping the old--- is something humanity has never experienced before.

"The Depopulation Problem," Phillip Longman, Friday, August 13, 7pm, Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco.   Doors open for coffee and books at 7pm; lecture is promptly at 8pm.  Special showing of Robert Frank's 1969 film "Liferaft Earth" at 7:15pm.  You may want to come early to be sure of a seat.  Admission is free (donation of $10 very welcome, not required).

Many of the homepages and forums have been disabled but a plethora of sites can still be easily found. Anorexics can now go online and for between $US3 ($4.30) and $US25 buy a red-beaded "ana" bracelet - a symbol of solidarity that identifies them to the rest of the community. The bracelets are designed to help anorexics resist their hunger by being worn on the hand used to eat with. Red bracelets signify anorexia and blue "mia" bracelets represent bulimia. Green symbolises recovery. Health professionals believe these sites can influence their anorexic patients, including those who end up in hospital with life-threatening conditions.

Let's check out the Terms and Conditions...

3. Content Restrictions:
You further agree not to use the PhotoStamps website or service:
B. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, unlawful, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy or publicity rights, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, illegal or otherwise objectionable;

Aw, Crap. Otherwise Objectionable? That's a catch-all if I ever read one." Link

How do surfers enforce their wave rights? For the most part, they rely on the gentle arts of social suasion. Surfers bobbing in the line-up make up a community of sorts, one often strengthened by the presence of locals who know and look out for each other. Getting the stink-eye for dropping in on somebody else’s wave stings badly enough. Sanctions against repeat offenders may escalate to sharp words or, in extraordinary cases, to physical violence. When someone dropped in on me recently, for instance, I first forebore the offense, then took alarm at his unsafe proximity and verbally warned him to back-off. Finally, when that proved unavailing, I put my hand on the punk’s chest, shoved him off his board, and finished out my ride.

Don Manuel is a Mayan priest and K'iche language instructor who lives in a small Guatemalan village called Nahuala. He saw and experienced a lot of suffering during the country's civil war. The "hot war" is over, but life is still extremely hard for many indigenous people like him. Not much justice, not much economic opportunity. There is a longer story behind this image, for another time. But for now, I'll just post this. I shot it with a micro-mini Canon elph in front of the Versace boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. This was the first time he'd ever been outside of Guatemala -- a trip to the US to work on a translation project involving historic Mayan texts. A few minutes before, I walked down Rodeo with Don Manuel, escorted him inside a few of the couture shops. We stepped inside the Gucci boutique, where a mink-lined doggie carrier was for sale. He asked me how much it cost, and when I calculated the five-figure price into Guatemalan quetzales for him, his jaw dropped. A few moments later he said in Spanish, "In my country, dogs live on the street. So do many people. This house for a dog costs many times more than the building that houses my entire extended family in Nahuala."

"Broadband providers and Internet phone services must comply with wiretapping requirements designed for the traditional phone network, the Federal Communications Commission said in a preliminary decision Wednesday."

Thanks!

Cory

I first met Greg in the course of a feature I was writing for Grammy Magazine (Link to gif scan), and had the good fortune of developing an aquaintance with his work and his warm, kind personality over time. He was a good man, which is something of a rarity here in Hollywood.

His body of work included a number of film soundtracks, and a series of wonderful pieces that digitally remixed/rethought/reinterpreted old historic folk song recordings from the Library of Congress. Probably the most widely-exposed of these was a haunting tune called "Boll Weevil" (Link to streaming MP3)

One of the things that was so amazing about his work was the way he used these old recordings -- he wasn't just sampling them and slapping them on top of a techno beat, Moby-style. He was really turning them inside out, composing through them and around them and retooling both the original and the new elements in an incredibly sensitive way. It was great work, and a fine reminder of the fact that valuable new art often owes its creative DNA to prior work.

When I interviewed him, he talked about what he went through to obtain permission from the Library of Congress to use some 60-year-old Alan Lomax field recordings of black southern folk singers -- this permission came with an odd condition. Since he was planning to use these source materials to create a new song for a feature film (The General's Daughter, starring John Travolta), some portion of the movie's proceeds must go back to the heirs of the original singer. Greg agreed. This resulted in a surreal scenario: after a long, challenging search to locate the descendants, a suited-up Paramount Pictures executive drives a winding road out to an overgrown southern plantation in disrepair, hands a check to an elderly woman, asks "So, what are you going to do with the money?" She replies, "I'm gonna finally go out and buy me one of them telephones, that's what I'm gonna do."

Some audio clips are here. His partner Laurie says she plans to keep Greg's studio in operation, and has no intent of allowing his creative legacy to fade. He was a gentle, insightful soul. He was also an unbelievably gifted artist. I'm deeply saddened to learn of his departure. Link

he prime example is Vonage, which states among other things that 'If Vonage, in its sole discretion believes that you have violated the above restrictions, Vonage may forward the objectionable material, as well as your communications with Vonage and your personally identifiable information to the appropriate authorities for investigation and prosecution and you hereby consent to such forwarding.'"

"Don't forget the obligatory 'we can change these terms of service whenever we like and they become effective immediately when posted to our website.' Read for yourself here(1), here(2), and here(3). I won't put up with this kind of thing in my software and I certainly won't put up with it from my phone company!"

"The Stonner", a 1,000-calorie, deep fried pork sausage kebab has been dubbed the most dangerous fast food in Britain.

Sky News reported Monday the kebab contains 46 grams of fat and is double the calories of a Big Mac hamburger.

However, the Ruby Chip Shop in Glasgow, Scotland, that sells the kebab has provided a health warning to customers: "Due to the severe health damage of this fine dish, we can only supply one Stonner supper per customer per week," reads the sign provided by the restaurant's owner, Saei Sangag.

Update: Kevin sez, "As a chemistry student, I’ve noticed many people mistake 'calories' (used in small-scale scientific calculations) and “Calories” (kilocalories; 1000-calories). A 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola contains 140 Calories or 140,000 calories. This sausage you speak of therefore contains one MILLION calories. Holy crap that’s unhealthy."

Update #2J sez, "Wannabe-chemist Kevin is being silly and disingenious converting kilocalories to calories to create the scary ONE MILLION number ('a ten-ounce bag of pretzels contains ONE MILLION calories'), and the original story is simply inane (and good advertising for the restaurant).

"Peanut-butter and jelly sandwich: 2 slices of bread @ 110 kcals each, 2 tbsp peanut butter @ 190 kcals, 1 tbsp grape jelly @ 50 kcals = 460 kcals.

So, this remarkably dangerous snack is equivalent to two PB&J's, maybe three if you use low-cal bread and skimp on the filling. The PB&J's will also have more fat (64 grams). The story also fudges the truth a bit on the 'two Big Macs' comparison: McD's web site claims 600 calories and 33 grams of fat, so it would be more accurate to say'"83% as many calories as two Big Macs, with only 70% of the fat'.

"For a more commercial comparison, it's about the same as three Krispy Kreme Glazed Blueberry doughnuts."

"Discover An Amazing 'Technology' That Will Give You An Unfair Advantage Over Your Competitors And Increase Your Rankings... GUARANTEED!"

RSS Equalizer is the most important tool you need to get more pages listed in the search engines. Having been one of the first people to utilize RSS Equalizer, I was really excited to see the results.

It was nothing less than AMAZING!

The number of times the search engines hit my sites, have TRIPLED in just a few short days. I can't say what this means... IT'S AWESOME!

This is the tool you need to help you get targeted traffic and get the search engines to wake up and take notice of your sites. Nothing else compares!

When Kate discovers that her roommate identifies as a demoness, she figures it's too sacrilicious a secret to keep to herself: she tells all on her blog, roommatefromhell.com.

This is the basic gist of my new book, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, a tale of the urban occult told entirely through Kate's entries. Starting today, I'll be posting one a day to the faux roommatefromhell.com blog until all 88 entries (the whole book) are up. After that I'll be writing a spinoff story based on how the poll on the site goes.

UPDATE Rob sez: "Yahoo, via Bill Mesfin and API, have a slightly better version of the Koko story. Of particular note:

"Her teacher, Francine Patterson, was at her side when the anesthesiologist prepared to put her under in the morning, and apparently Koko asked to meet her specialists."

"They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate."

The bullet proof polycarbonate barrier is designed to stop bullet penetration, blows from impact, forced entry and provide a sealed temporary safe room and environment from burglars, terrorist or harmful gasses and also provide protection from the destructive forces of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. The unit can also be fitted with defensive devices customized to the requests of the purchasers such as tear gas spray, robotic arms, or projectile weaponry. It is designed to enable the person(s) inside the unit to see out and prevent those outside from seeing in.

Update: Joshua notes, "the tagging system in flickr was inherited from del.icio.us"

A colleague who knows a Canadian athlete writes to tell me that the athlete has been told there is no blogging once you're at the Olympics and staying in Olympic village. Apparently it's against the "media rules" there. Anyone have any more info on this? What are the rules? How are they enforced? What are the sanctions?

UPDATE Harry sez: I just wanted to point out your most recent boingboing post about the eboy icons is not quite correct in terminology. You're looking for "aliased" as the description for the icon style, not "unaliased". "Anti-aliased" is the opposing term, which describes an image where colors blend together as a result of supersampling the image. "Aliased" is the term to describe the stair-stepped pixel style used in the eboy icons.

It's a common mistake; I think it stems from the fact that people regard the term "anti-aliased" as a negative term, where something is not done, and think of it in relation to "smoothed" versus "not smoothed". If it's "anti-", it must be the "not smoothed" state. So folks often flip the terms, and don't want to use the more positive-sounding "aliased" for what they often see as the less sophisticated computer graphic style.

"In a now-famous study from more than a decade ago, about 500 Secret Service agents, federal polygraphers, and judges watched 10 1-minute video clips of female nurses describing the pleasant nature films they were supposedly watching as they spoke. Half the women were instead watching what Ekman calls "terribly gruesome" medical films. The legal-system professionals were asked to determine the truth by reading the women's faces, speech, and voices... Most of the observers uncovered lies at only about the level of chance. One group, however, outperformed the others. The Secret Service group had a better-than-chance distribution, with nearly one-third of the agents getting 8 out of 10 determinations correct, the San Francisco psychologists reported in 1991."

Disney's BoardWalk Resort: Convention Center Hallways/Common Areas, Resort Lobby, Main Swimming Pool Area, Concierge Lounges, Bellevue Lounge

Disney's Contemporary Resort: Front desk sitting area, 14th Floor Concierge - sitting area, Outer Rim Bar (near Concourse Steakhouse), 1st Floor Convention Center Lobby, 2nd Floor Convention Center Lobby, Feature Pool.

Disney's Coronado Springs Resort: Main Hotel Lobby, Convention Center Lobby area, Feature Pool, Francisco's Lounge.

Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa: 1st Floor Lobby area including Tea Room, Convention Center Lobby area, 4th Floor Concierge area - sitting area.

Disney's Yacht & Beach Club Resorts: Main Lobby area (both resorts), Concierge sitting area (both resorts), Convention Center Lobby area, Stormalong Bay Pool.

"In the future, we'll all dress smartly. Well, sort of. Advances in electronic textiles promise evening wear that changes color based on mood, undershirts that dispense medicine, and wirelessly-enabled coats that forecast the weather. While the science fiction vision of electrified clothing is not new, the enabling technologies are only now beginning to emerge from university and industrial laboratories. Far from the catwalk, researchers at the intersection of materials science, electrical engineering and fashion design are designing the computer couture of tomorrow."

The Canadian Recording Industry Association's call for what is effectively a notice and termination approach to removing allegedly copyright infringing material. CRIA's counsel told a Parliamentary committee that once an ISP receives notification that a subscriber is offering copyrighted works for download, the ISP "ought to kick that subscriber off the system." The approach would be the most radical worldwide as the proposed removal would presumably come without a court hearing or other due process. Given that CRIA lost its file sharing suit in Canada earlier this year, this would appear to be an end-around the court system by attempting to force ISPs to terminate subscriber service based on a mere allegation of activity that may or may not constitute copyright infringement.

"Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:

"While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!

"We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.

"My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We’re investigating the situation now and will act accordingly."

And if you're wondering what the catch is, it's this: Dave wants to know (as, I have to admit, do I) how many of the people out there in internet-land will actually go and do things that don't involve passively clicking on a link and going somewhere interesting. So what you have to do is write Dave a letter (not an e-mail. Dave doesn't have e-mail) telling him that you read that he'll send you a signed Cerebus, and telling him why you'd like him to send you a copy. It's as easy as that. And, quite possibly as difficult.

The address to write to is:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674 Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

In this respect, the Atkins diet is a curious cousin to the organic and Slow Food movements, and, indeed, to aspects of vegetarianism. Obesity, and such related conditions as type-2 diabetes, are, in the Atkins cosmology, diseases of the special civilisation that makes and markets refined carbohydrates. The result of all this making and marketing is addiction. The appetites are perverted; a monstrously hybrid self is produced, whose appetites are parsed between the natural and the unnatural, the ones to be gratified and the ones to be disciplined and eliminated. And the unnaturalness of that self is an internalising of the bad order of society - what the Yale psychologist and obesity expert Kelly Brownell has catchily called 'a toxic environment'. A bad society makes bad food and bad food makes badly motivated and badly functioning people. This sensibility is important enough to have made it into The Simpsons. In 'Sweets and Sour Marge', when it is determined that Springfield is the fattest town in America, Marge goes on a crusade against the sugar companies, which have turned the citizens into obese zombies. She wins a class-action toxic tort suit against 'Big Sugar' but 'Marge's Law' is soon subverted. When Homer himself becomes a sugar bootlegger, Marge realises she can't win against the dark forces of carb-addiction and gives up.

Groovelily, the band I went to see, are in many ways, poster children for the middle of that fame curve. They're not a super-famous act, but they are deeply loved, with a "street team" of 300 volunteers who flyer and promote them in their towns, and a range of fans and casual supporters who'll let them play gigs of over two thousand in some venues, or twenty or so in my friend's house. Surrounded by an audience of their fans, they're happy and hardworking, and as far as I could see doing just fine financially.

A lot of their songs, though, speak of the hardness of that road: the envy of the success of peers. The self-doubt that eats at you when you don't get that break: that leap up the spike to the top of the curve. The emotional core of their songs described the state of that life as one of perserverance until you reach a glorious goal; the most self-referential of the musical archetypal song plots.

An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater...

The DWI said the Prozac was unlikely to pose a health risk as it was so "watered down"...

The exact amount of Prozac in the nation's drinking water is not known.