And so the stage has been set. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions will be arriving in a city full of citizens already hostile to the political party that has chosen to hold it’s National Convention in their city for reasons of emotional manipulation. The police and city officials have set up a number of strenuous and overly aggressive methods of control.

That this event will be anything less than similar to Sterling’s description of the Wende is doubtful. At the very least a very large number of protestors will participate in one of the most varied, vocal and interesting political protests in American history. At the most extreme, the massive disturbance will awaken a number of American citizens to what the Bush administration is really up to and set off a sequence of events that will alter our political landscape.

The TSA didn't take it well.

Kur5hin has an appreciation of Ms Arthur and her sense of humor today:

It should be obvious to us that an 81-year old woman committed a crime by making a snide remark when hassled for carrying a pocket knife? I'm just glad that she had the guts to call the security guards out for their ridiculous behavior, even if most Americans think she's crazy for making a joke.

As such, I present a simple proposition: Bea Arthur for President!

27.08.04 - Enzo's Testament

"[At my funeral] I want people to smile -- did you notice? Funerals always end up with someone smiling: it's natural, it's Life taking over Death. And let people smoke freely anything they like; I'd also be pleased if new love stories would come out, and I'd even consider some aloof sex as an offer to Life rather than an offense to Death.

At about eight-nine o'clock, with little or no cerimonials, bring my coffin silently to the crematory, while the party and the music should last until late night.

About my ashes... throw them into the sea, I'd say. Or do as you want, who fucking cares."

Many of the artists that comprise the current wave of “experimental folk” consider the Incredible String Band as a crucial inspiration and influence.  Devendra Banhart says (in typically Banhartian fashion) “Happy Birthday! not noodlemisters but Epic lizard man songs traversing the new universe holding sarods, our old hopes tightly, fiddles, chimes, udes, bagpipes, baby boars, banjos, mead, invisible ropes and on and on OH in this sweetcheese pond lies a perfect reflection of trueTRUE love! Happy Birthday Old Baby!"

Cory Doctorow, the London-based European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF, highlights two additional sources of worry. First, the US, represented in Geneva by the Patent Office, is demanding that the treaty include webcasting. If that proposal should pass, broadcast rights could apply to anything downloaded from any Web site, making it impossible to be sure whether even open-source software wasn't covered.

Second, Doctorow said, one proposal in the draft treaty requires that receivers, defined as any device that can decrypt broadcasts, must incorporate technology to protect those broadcasts. As currently drafted, he believes that would include general-purpose computers.

That clause in the draft treaty echoes recent US legislation that introduced the "broadcast flag," a technical control that must be implemented by July 1, 2005 for all devices for sales in the US that receive television signals.

Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff.

My main problem was that he seemed to write off Wikipedia based solely on how it was created and maintained, and not at all on the actual content. Along with my post, I sent an email to the writer, Al Fasoldt, giving him some additional information about Wikipedia, and wondering why, after telling us how you can't trust any random info online, he trusted the email from a random librarian claiming Wikipedia was somehow untrustworthy. The ongoing discussion with Mr. Fasoldt has been quite a lesson in watching how a journalist (a) continues to make unsubstantiated allegations (b) seems to prefer insulting me and putting words in my mouth to actually responding to my points or questions and (c) sticks steadfastly to his belief that only "experts" can be trusted with information -- and, in his case, only experts that he chooses. Yet, somehow, we're supposed to find him more trustworthy than a self-correcting community. Figuring he might appreciate the views of others in his profession (you know, "experts"), I sent him links to Dan Gillmor's article on Wikipedia and Steve Yelvington's recent realization of the power of Wikipedia. However, rather than actually look at that information, Mr. Fasoldt accused me of wanting "students to trust a source that's not trustworthy." After some back and forth of this nature, where Mr. Fasoldt responded to my request that he do a little more research by saying: "I'm glad you're not the publisher of a newspaper" (apparently, his publisher lets him do no research at all) and then telling me that anyone who wrote for Wikipedia obviously knew nothing (his phrase was: "100 times zero is still zero"), I suggested an experiment. I pointed to the Wikipedia page on Syracuse, NY where he apparently lives, and suggested he change something on the page, to make it provably, factually incorrect -- and see how long it lasted. Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was "outrageous," "repugnant" and finally (in another email) "dangerous," and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment.

On September 2nd, 2004, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us, it will be the low point of an incredibly exasperating week.

Until now, there have been only two options: miss the speech (either by screaming at the television or turning it off), or bottle up the frustration within us, causing irreparable psychological harm. The first option is unbecoming of citizens in a democracy. The second option is just terrible. But now, for the first time, we have a better way. At the moment we see the president on our television screens, we will rise. We will throw open our windows. And, as George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, "fuggedaboudit!"

This will be a peaceful, non-disruptive protest. We will stop yelling before the president starts speaking. Our goal is not to drown him out, but to communicate. (And vent.)

Glines describes his new site, Cartoon Retro, as being "devoted to celebrating and exploring the largely forgotten work of great artists, cartoonists, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, actors, musicians and industrial designers from what, in my opinion, was the peak of American culture: approximately 1925 through 1939." In addition, Shane posts some of his own work on the site, too

I just signed-up, and am blown away with all the great stuff available. If you are at all interested in the art from this era (like I am), the $5 / month fee is well worth it. I hope enough people sign up to convince him to keep up the great work. Link

Tried it in the shower this morning, and the stuff is awesome. It's not foamy, which is kinda cool, and you put a thin layer on your face and let it sit for 30 seconds, generating a sensation toeing the line between tingling and scorching. But then a zero-resistance shave that is far, far closer than the Gillette foamy gel stuff I've been using for a long time.

With respect, we maintain silence.

When he left for Iraq, Enzo left us in charge of Bloghdad and of all the articles and images he'd send from there. When he disappeared we wondered what to do. We knew Enzo well enough to realize he would have wanted us to continue to report the news of what was happening, and so we did until the truth of what had really happened to him surfaced.

Now we know that even after the kidnapping, Enzo is doing well and everything is being done to resolve the situation. There's little more to say: the situation is at a delicate and important stage and we fear that anything new posted on Bloghdad, both in the posts or the comments, might hurt Enzo. Out of respect towards Enzo and his family we feel that the best thing to do know is to keep silent.

We wish to thank all the people that have helped, criticized and encouraged us. Posts and comments will open again only when Enzo himself will do it. We hope it's going to be soon.

[John Kricfalusi]: Well I love extremes in different mediums. The extreme of a cartoon is surrealism, that cartoons can do anything. A character can explode, can fly into pieces and come back together, can have their heads blown off, squash into a pancake, turn into an erection, I love all that stuff. But that's not all I love. To me, if I make the character so real, so believable, and then do wild stuff with it, it puts you in a whole other world. It makes the weird stuff even more believable. Like in STIMPY'S PREGNANT the whole opening, after the puke stuff's over, turns into this realistic drama. Then when all the intensity is released and Ren accepts that he's going to have the kid, it's all happy and light-hearted. All the birds and squirrels show up, and then it goes right into gags. So it's about contrast.

Published in May with little fanfare, the 315-page paperback is a compilation of more than 100 true stories of technological blunder and misfortune. Some of the stories are bizarre, some are pathetic -- but all are highly entertaining.

Take, for instance, the case of the Ukrainian businessman who put 50 new pagers -- a gift for his employees -- in the back seat of his car and then promptly crashed into a lamppost when they all began beeping at the same time. The culprit? A welcome message sent by the pager company to each of the pagers.

Compounding the problems is the fact that the government can't seem to let go of secrets that just aren't valuable any more. It took the CIA 20 years to declassify the fact that Augusto Pinochet, Chile's dictator, had a taste for distilled wine. Overall CIA budgets from decades back are still kept under wraps. And the pace of declassification has slowed since 9/11: 43 million pages in fiscal year 2003, as opposed to 100 million in 2001, according to the ISOO. Not surprisingly, the amount of money spent on releasing information has also slipped, from $231 million in 2001 to $54 million last year.

At the same time, the public thirst for government information seems to have risen. More than 3.2 million requests for federal documents were made under the Freedom of Information Act last year. That's about 1 million more than in 2001.

The cost of keeping secrets, according to OpenTheGovernment coordinator Rick Blum, comes largely from maintaining the patchwork of databases and networks that hold the government's sensitive information. Physical security of classified information has also been a major cost -- and a major concern. The repeated misplacement of secret disks at Los Alamos National Laboratory has shut down the nuclear weapons center for the last six weeks. That means a big chunk of the lab's annual budget of $2.2 billion has been devoted to the security lapses, so far. Those figures weren't included in the OpenTheGovernment report card.

'People don't want open access, that's not what our customers tell us they want,' he said. 'Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts.'

"This is an added bonus," the service's regional director, Ronald Libby, told New York Newsday. "I want to know what he [a patrol officer] sees to make a decision. ... This takes the guess work out of it."

A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.

European countries that have been dealing with terrorism for decades, like the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain, don't have cute color-coded terror alert systems. Even Israel, which has seen more terrorism -- and more suicide bombers -- than anyone else, doesn't issue vague warnings about every possible terrorist threat.

Update: An anonymous reader sez, "In year 2000 they found this old guy in Helsinki who had been dead 6 years! Neighbours didn't noticed anything. All bills paid automatically."

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Update: Ah, what a pity. Someone at the realty website got wind of the fact that this was blogged on BoingBoing, Fark, MeFi, and everywhere else today -- and deleted the image. Good thing BB reader Andreas spotted the url to the jpeg itself (Link), and another copy is here (Link). Heh. Actually... stick this jpeg in a fancy frame, tack it to a wall at MoMA, call it a postmodern statement on the commoditization of the pornographized American id, and nobody'd know the difference.

Update 2: Reader Paul Camp alerts us to the fact that the realty website has now replaced the XXX photo in the original link with a Photoshop hack job that makes clumsy, guffaw-inducing use of the "blur" tool: Direct link to their revised image.

So, in 1964, Herman Miller's Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management.

...

Propst's forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system's huge potential for savings and tax breaks ... "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places."

* Understanding the origin of cosmic rays by 2010 (4/1 odds)
* The ATLAS experiment at CERN finding the Higgs Boson by 2010 (6/1 odds)
* The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detecting gravitational waves by 2010 (10/1 odds)
* Building a fusion power station by 2010 (100/1 odds)

“I’d be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1,” says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. “I’ve been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers’ money on us finding it, so I’d better put my money where my mouth is.”

une blague (blag) noun, feminine
1. a joke; a practical joke, a trick
2. a tall story
3. a blunder, a silly mistake
4. a tobacco pouch

Also:
blaguer (verb) = to joke
un blagueur / une blagueuse
1. (adj) ironical, teasing (look)
2. (noun, m/f) = a joker

"We have to be consistent across the board with the cap issue... There are, unfortunately in these days and times, groups that would mistake that as a different message and we don't want that," Jim Childress, Cincinnati Mills general manager, told WCPO. "In our business a customer is a customer. There is no distinction among age, religion, ethnic background."

Bad experiences with heavy-handed DRM have soured many potential customers on e-books, said Mike Violano, vice president and general manager of eReader, which equips its titles with a security key based on the credit card number used to purchase it. The approach give wide latitude to the original buyer while effectively thwarting illegal copying, he said.

"There are far too many standards and ways of doing things now, and that's a source of frustration for customers," Violano said. "If they have a bad e-book experience the first time, where they have trouble reading something they've paid for, it's hard to get them back."

Analyst Bedford said nervous publishers have emphasized security over opening new markets.

"There's no good DRM, period," she said. "Publishers all want heavy-duty DRM, but the problem is that anything you do gets in the way of buying and using e-books. My bias is to use a lot of psychological DRM. You put a price on it; you have statements...making it very clear you can use this as you would a print book, and you rely on the fact that by and large, most people aren't out to break the law."

I won't be following them. Not for lack of wanting. Miss the mess, just can't this year. Another friend who wouldn't be caught dead in glitter or elwire asked for words of advice to give his kid sister, a first-timer. IANAHCB (I Am Not A Hardcore Burner), or particularly clever. All I could come up with was this.

Do not drink the chocolate-marijuana absinthe. Do drink water until your gag reflex is triggered, then drink some more. Keep your hands off the bike seats on which sans culotte hippypersons have planted their naked nalgas. At least once, hit the Pancake Playhouse camp for breakfast, and raise gooey fingers in the air ("when soft rock is heard, pancakes will be served.") Pack extra copies of your Burning Man Bingo card.

Don't try to see or do everything, or think you're going to be able to find specific friends at specific places at specific times -- doesn't work like that. Be cool. Be prepared. Avoid hurting yourself, or anyone else, or that wide, white, alkaline ocean of old dust. Enjoy.

The best lesson of this thing? Joy need not be deferred.

(Snapshot at left from a bunch I shot last year: Link. There are better photos shot by other people here: Link. Previous BoingBoing post -- Book / This is Burning Man: Link. Thanks for the Burning Man Bingo reminder, kowgurl!)

Apparently our Australian PM - little Johnny Howard - has exploited a loophole in recently introduced anit-spam legislation which exempts charities and - wait for it - political organisations. So he's spamming the hell out of voters in his electorate with party propaganda. And it seems he's somehow managed to tie email addresses to first names, resulting in *personalised* spam and some pretty ticked off voters. It get's better - he's paying his son's company to do the mailing! (SMH is behind a subscription wall as of last week but bugmenot will sort you out - I had a running argument with a philosophy colleague about registration requirements on my blog last week here)

I switched to this from the Mach 3 Turbo, and frankly, I can't tell any difference between the shave I get with the two. Certainly not enough to justify the difference in price. I guess I've got loyalty to Gillette since they sent me a free Sensor razor on my 18th birthday or something (that ploy worked, eh?) and I've generally been pretty happy with their products and the results. But their constant need to find some reason to jack up the already-high prices of their razors is starting to wear thin.rally been pretty happy with their products and the results. But their constant need to find some reason to jack up the already-high prices of their razors is starting to wear thin.

"LSD is a strong hallucinogen. A rough form, ergotamine, which can occur in stored rye grain, is believed to have been the cause of the odd behaviour which triggered the Salam witch trials. This model of LSD can be used in conjuction with molecular model kits of other street drugs as part of drug awareness programs."

Yesterday's "call to arms" to resist the MPAA's cloying "Respect Copyrights" PSAs is off to a great start. In fact, some readers took the protest to the next, completely awesome level, leaving us somewhat ashamed that we didn't think this up in the first place. Pirate taunts! [One reader says:]

"So we took the 'put an end to piracy' portion of the Manny Perry ad and ran with it..... Imagine twenty coeds and their gentlemen friends standing in their seats hurling archaic curses and 'ARRRRRRRR's at the screen for the duration of the clip. Surprisingly, we drew chuckles, not Diet Cokes to the head, from our fellow patrons. Viva La Resistance!"

Until recently, much of the discussion among tech enthusiasts about a controversial anti-piracy bill known as the Induce Act has focused on the proposed law's improbability. Put forth by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the bill has been ridiculed by techies as so poorly written that it could unintentionally ban an infinite range of everyday tools -- iPods, DVD burners, even paper and pencil.

But since its introduction, nine co-sponsors have signed on, both Democrats and Republicans. And significantly, that list of co-sponsors includes two of Congress' most influential members: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota).

Also known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), the bill would punish tech companies and consumer electronics makers who develop tools that could "induce" or encourage users to make unauthorized copies of copyright material such as music, movies or software. With the present congressional session due to end in October, time for debate is running out. The coming two weeks may be the last chance for both proponents and opponents of the bill to make their voices heard.

Update: Opposition to the Induce Act is coming from many points along the political spectrum, from left to right. Heritage Foundation senior writer Andrew Grossman says with tongue planted in cheek: "You might be interested to know that '...even the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation has concerns.' (...) We have no position on the bill itself, of course, but we do think it's bad policy." Here's their study and statement regarding P2P, filesharing, and the Induce Act. Link

Federal agents yesterday took their first steps to go after individuals who illegally trade copyrighted music and videos over the Internet, seizing computers, software and related equipment at five homes around the country. After a months-long sting operation, FBI agents raided residences in Texas, Wisconsin and New York where people were suspected of operating "hubs" of file-sharers that were part of a system called the Underground Network. About 7,000 users connected to the network via file-sharing software known as Direct Connect, according to law enforcement officials. (...) No arrests were made yesterday, and no charges have been filed. But the raids for the first time throw the weight of the Justice Department behind what has been an intense campaign by the music, movie and software industries to curb online file-sharing that millions of computer users around the world use every day.

The Secretary of State announced a program in conjunction with the Department of Defense whereby Missouri military voters will be sending in their absentee ballots via email.

Increasing voter turnout is always a good idea, but this is a dangerous way to go about it. E-mail is not secure. E-mail is not reliably from the person named on the "from" line. E-mail is subject to all kinds of tampering. Every week we learn about new ways to hack into computers, and spammers know all sorts of tricks for forging e-mail headers. A common Internet worm trick is to send emails from hacked computers, or to pretend to send emails from other computers.

An e-voting system like this is an invitation for fraud, and sure to be a point of contention when the votes are counted. With this election so close and Missouri one of the major swing states, Missouri is setting itself up to be this election's Florida: the laughing stock of the nation.

If you remember, the SERVE Internet voting project was suspended because of security issues.

Someone snuck this one through. I am involved with two different groups of security experts who are dealing with voting machine and e-voting issues, and no one heard about this. There have been no public hearings on the issue. There has been no public selection process of vendors. There are no security or reliability constraints on the vendor. We don't even know who the vendor is!

"We shovel the processed waste onto the plants, almost like a mini-marsh," he said. "Then we use the plants to filter water out. We'll recover the water in the atmosphere above the plant by running it through a 'cold finger,' much like pipes sweating in restrooms. Using something cold condenses the water so that it can be captured."

You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?
There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

If so, there's no shortage of wacky stuff for sale. Among my favorite items: Two Tanita Pocket/Mini Digital Scales, 1479 & 1479V: "they would be great scales for measuring precious stones and metals or for laboratory use." (precious rocks like, oh, crack cocaine?) And, 75+ Money Clips, Lots of Logos & 1 Diamond.: "there is even one money clip that has a real Diamond mounted in it."

There's also no shortage of irony in the "seller feedback" section -- among the entries, what may be some of the sweetest praise ever heaped on California's action-hero-cum-Republican-spokesmodel:

# Very Professional !!!!!! Packed with OVERKILL !!
# GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD SELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLER
# Bogus deal will never buy from them again very ticked off.
# Great Leatherman tools!! Will keep all the men in the family HAPPY!! THANKS!!
# Thanks for the Great deal. Good luck on your new Job.
# THEY'RE ROUND AND SMELL GOOD! I AM BIDDING ON MORE! GO TO SACRAMENTO WAREHOUSE!!!

Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like "No more years" and "Re-defeat Bush."

"We just hope that they'll look down and ask themselves, 'Why, why do they feel so strongly? Why is it that New York feels this way?'" said Genevieve Christy, who has painted more than 80 banners since thinking of the idea a few weeks ago.

[T]he BBC has announced that next month it will surprise commuters by staging an opera at an unnamed London rail station, without any warning.

The 65-strong orchestra and three opera singers will swoop in unannounced, with selected members of the public joining in as a chorus after being contacted at the last minute by mobile phone text message.

As an intermediary, the Online Service Provider finds itself in a position to collect and store detailed information about its users and their online activities that may be of great interest to third parties. The USA PATRIOT Act also provides the government with expanded powers to request this information. As a result, OSP owners must deal with requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP's goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services. In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties.

For Rainer Kinnunen, life has been a bit of a blur since he signed up for a superhigh-speed Internet service three years ago. The 31-year-old Swedish student's computer has supplanted the television as the most vital link between his home and the outside world. He watches television shows and movies, makes phone calls, surfs the Web and plays multiplayer shoot-'em-up games through his high-speed connection -- often doing one or more activities at once.

His 10-megabit-per-second service from telecommunications company Bredbandsbolaget is up to 20 times faster than conventional cable modems, enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours. For Kinnunen, the result has been a lifestyle change that, though not revolutionary, is certainly noticeable. "If my child wants a movie, I can download it instantly," he said. "And I haven't been to the neighborhood music store in years."

Since going superhigh-speed, Kinnunen has set up two computer servers in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Eskilstuna. One supplies his digital photos to friends and family. On the other, he duels it out for hours a day with other players of the "Half-Life: Day of Defeat" online war game. And he has enough bandwidth and server space left over to broadcast his DVDs from his apartment to his friends' computers in case they want to watch along from across town.

Link to parody poster, cropped and thumbnailed at left (220K jpeg). Mirror 1, Mirror 2.

Recently, we were respecting the entertainment industry's copyrights in a $14 Cinerama Dome seat when Hollywood stunt coordinator Manny Perry began his impassioned plea for us to further respect copyrights by visiting the MPAA's scary website after leaving the theater. A chorus of groans rose up from the audience as the dreaded words faded into view: "Manny Perry Makes Movies." We don't personally blame Manny Perry for his misguided participation in the MPAA propaganda, as we assume that Jack Valenti was holding his wife hostage at gunpoint while threatening to feed his infant daughter to a poorly-bred pit bull in Manny Perry's ranch-style home in Chatsworth, but that doesn't mean that others are so understanding. Here's a representative sample of our readers' frustration...

Links to *.mov video files of the latest trailer: low, med, high.

Piano Salesman: If you see a potential customer eyeing a piano, estimate their age and calculate what year it was when they were 18 years old. Play a big hit from that year on the piano they’re looking at. With a lot of preparation and a little luck, you might play the exact song they were listening to when they lost their virginity, got married, or drove their first car. The emotional resonance will overcome sales resistance and even open their wallets to a more expensive piano.

Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.

"The internet is an international entity. This could be yet another incentive for websites to set up business elsewhere," said [business partner of veteran erotic photographer Suse Randall] Humphry Knipe. "This isn't a big deal for Hustler or Playboy, but what about some guy who operates a website out of his basement? Will he have to let agents into his home?"

Another requirement raising the ire of porn webmasters is a clause requiring that a statement regarding the location of the custodian of records be published in a typeface at least as large as that in which performers, producers, directors or company owners are displayed.

"If 'Playboy' is printed in 180 point type on a magazine cover, the 2257 disclosure would also have to be displayed in 180 point type," says DeWitt. "If you keep names in smaller size type, the law says it can't be smaller than 11 point type -- how does that work on websites or videotape, where font size is measured differently?"

"I could make a good case for the idea that these regulations are designed to harass people in the adult industry. We already have tough anti-child-porn laws," says DeWitt. "I see no good reason for many of these conditions, other than imposing an unnecessary harassment for people in a business which is a stated enemy of the Bush administration."

A BoingBoing extra: First Amendment attorney and AVN columnist Clyde DeWitt, who I interviewed for this story, submitted an extensive set of opposing comments to the DoJ yesterday. You can read them here Link (PDF, 37 pages, 216K)

""The finding makes sense in evolutionary terms," says Professor (Josephn) Forgas. "Animals that are wary of their environment are more likely to perceive threats to their survival."

"The (house) design that engineers and designers came up with is a sphere-like structure - one of the most stable self-sustained shapes. As it stands on legs it is isolated from any movements underneath it as it basically glides on top of the Earth. In its current design the SpaceHouse can withstand vibrations from earthquakes of up to 7 on the Richter scale, wind speeds of up to 220 km/h and up to 3 metres of flooding – specifications that came out of discussions with the insurance industry for a typical European location. The house is designed to be autonomous. It uses energy-efficient solar power as well as advanced systems for recycling and cleaning water. Another idea, now on the drawing board, is to include a system to remove pathogenic particles in the sub-micron range from the air."

That's right: as my cow-orker Fred "Total Grokster Victory" von Lohmann notes, "So Guthrie's original joins the Star-Spangled Banner, Amazing Grace, and Beethoven's Symphonies in the public domain. Come to think of it, now that 'This Land is Your Land' is in the public domain, can we make it our national anthem? That would be the most fitting ending of all."

The most delicious aspect of this is that Ludlow could have gone on treating Guthrie's song as a copyrighted work, collecting licensing fees from anyone who was not making a fair use of the song -- say, someone making a [puke] car commercial -- had they not decided to pull a Lord Vader on JibJab, the poor, abused parodists. Reminds me of when Sony sued an Aussie dictionary for defining "walkman" as a generic personal stereo, which resulted in the court finding that the dictionary was correct, Sony was wrong, and walkman is generic. If they'd just kept their lawyers in their pants, they'd still be sitting pretty. Link (Thanks, Donna and Chris!)

I conducted a quick (3 hour) safari on the internet looking for odd and quirky toilet paper roll holders. The results are summarised in this blog entry. Really weird what you find sometimes... I'll do toilet brushes next!

Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?
Give people a break.

A break from what?
A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.

What poses the major threat to that survival?
Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.

This is Allehe reporting live from a staged protest outside Theed Starport. Just a few moments ago protesting cartoons went suddenly missing -- warped outside our great galaxy. Where have they landed? This we do not know. What we do know is people are angry...and showing their support in banning CREDIT Dupers...also known as cheaters. It appears the Great SOE GODS are favoring the cheaters over the fair and honest gameplayers. I will remain here until there is no news...

This is Allehe
Reporting live from Theed Spaceport, Naboo, Intrepid.

Back to you Dan.

"Please, the focus of your post on 80's era video game heroes should have been Billy Mitchell. In addition to being the goofiest of all the LIFE magazine participants, Billy still organizes video game contests, runs the primary video game record site and is apparently in a heated (and ongoing) fued about who holds the all-time record on Missile Command.

The man who claims to hold the record? Roy Shildt -- aka, "Mr. Awesome." This website is all about the dispute. Check out the circa-80's picture of Steven Spielberg kicking it in front of a Missile Command machine about 1/3 of the way down as well as the pics of Billy getting some video game award from a group of fawning Japanese people. If you want more on Mr. Awesome, here's the webpage where he sells his book on how to meet ladies. I only WISH I were kidding.

Q: So Bjork is not superstitious then?
A: "You know, its ironic that just at the point the lawyers and the businessmen had calculated how to control music, the internet comes along and fucks everything up." Bjork gives the finger again, this time waving it into the air. "God bless the internet," she adds.
Q: And what about you, then?
A: "I'll still be there, waving a pirate flag."

Update: BoingBoing reader Josiah says, "The new album is on sale now at One Little Indian (two weeks before the official release). There was a 'secret' (but public) link sent out to members of her email list. The CD comes from the UK so it equates to between $24 - $30 per CD with shipping to the US, but for people in the UK it's regular price. Link."

This is Burning Man is a new book about Burning Man written by our good friend Brian Doherty, who is based out of Los Angeles and is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

This is by far the most extensive historical account of Burning Man in print, as well the first book distributed through a major publisher (Little, Brown and Company). If you are on your way out to Black Rock City this year or even if you no longer attend, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the origins of Burning Man, the people involved and how the event is organized, operates, survives and grows.

"'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?' That was enough inspiration for us to start the project, and we soon added Skippy the Hamster to the Otherpower.com payroll. He's a Syrian Hamster, and we chose that breed since they are nocturnal and like to run on the exercise wheel.

But as Gilmore has argued, real security doesn't often have a great deal to do with knowing who someone is, or who a card says he or she is. (Even the most biometrically sophisticated of modern ID documents will be potentially forgeable for those with a strong incentive to do so.) Real security has much more to do, in Gilmore's airline context, with making sure people, whatever their card says, don't bring weapons or bombs on planes—or making sure that trustworthy people on planes, whether pilots or air marshals, are empowered to resist miscreants. (After 9/11, normal citizens have almost certainly gotten the message to resist at all costs.) The government still doesn't want to allow the good guys to defend themselves on planes effectively, and thus are all the more insistent on the security theater of showing an ID card.

"*Extremely* well done. I'm pretty floored. It really is a perfect fit." Link

UPDATE Cliph sez: "That fan re-edit of Planet of the Apes is excellent. The site was a bit slow to serve the file when I tried so I've made a torrent. "

This is the new way soldiers will train for battle. In September, a select group of Army infantrymen, Marine corpsmen, Navy sailors, and Air Force pilots at Fort Sill will become the first military personnel to learn the art of combat and the rules of engagement from surround sound action movies starring themselves. The installation is the brainchild of the Institute for Creative Technologies, an Army-funded R&D group at the University of Southern California. ICT brings together videogame developers, f/x artists, research scientists, and Pentagon experts to create faster, cheaper, and more effective ways of preparing recruits for their jobs on the front lines. If all goes well, similar facilities will go up at bases from Fort Bliss to Fallujah.

The military has been using flight and tank simulators for decades ("War Is Virtual Hell," Wired 1.01), but the installation at Fort Sill is the first attempt to duplicate battle conditions for troops by combining wartime science and theme-park showmanship. The Joint Fires and Effects Trainer System, or JFETS, is the product of an unprecedented level of cooperation among the Pentagon, film and gaming companies, and Silicon Valley - a synergy that Stanford history professor Tim Lenoir calls the military-entertainment complex.

Virtual war will never fully replace the mainstays of boot camp life: live-fire exercises and ass-busting field training. But as weapons systems grow smarter, they become more expensive to deploy in real-world war games. Now that consumer gaming engines like Unreal are able to render cinematic-quality graphics in real time, even big-ticket munitions are trivial to simulate.

The group included Ned Troide, best known for having played DEFENDER for 62 1/2 consecutive hours on a single quarter. The games have their critics, of course. Physicians claim that maneuvering a joystick too many hours can lead to "video elbow" and "arcade arthritis." The mental side effects can be equally serious, according to U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. "There's nothing constructive in the games," says Koop. "Everything is kill, destroy, zap the enemy." Retorts TEMPEST virtuoso Leo Daniels, "I think Koop is a quack."

Update: BB reader Andy Thomas says, "I Googled Leo Daniels and this is what i found. Watch out, the lion really roars! God bless him."

But now we realize we have it pretty good, since it looks as if we may lose our space at any time. The building that has housed TBT for all this time has been sold to a new owner, and we haven't the foggiest idea whether or not he'll let us stay. If we can't find a new location, we'll have to close. It almost brings me to tears to think about it. We touch so many lives... our customers range from middle class parents bringing their children, to college students bringing themselves, hoping to save on textbooks, to schoolteachers from impoverished schools, to the curators of prison and homeless shelter libraries. Quite a number of our 'patrons' ship books to their homelands, the Philippines and South Africa (for example), because books are hard to come by there. And we are touched, as volunteers, because we get to do something good for the world—and it's an indescribable feeling that you can only get through exchanging your hard labor for others' happiness and well-being.

Help me find a new location, and save this dusty Baltimore jewel for everyone's sake!

We need, basically:

* 4,000 sq ft+
* heat
* ideally, a/c as well
* a bathroom
* handicap access
* free or very cheap

San Francisco Giants (SBC Park): The home of the San Francisco Giants has one of the most accommodating policies regarding camera usage around: "All cameras still and video are permitted into SBC Park for Giants games. Tripods are permitted, but may only be set up in areas where they do not obstruct walkways or other guests' view of the game action." According to Rick Mears, Vice President, Guest Services, "if there isn't a very good and demonstrable reason (guest safety, or for the greater good of all guests' ballpark experience) for having a restrictive policy on our guests we won't have the restrictive policy. We want our fans to feel like honored guests when they visit SBC Park because that is precisely what they are."

* The Tale of the Otter and Abalone--a story of counter-intuitive evolution

* Boundaries Unbounded--the mathematics of inkjet printing, MRI brain scans, and microchip manufacturing

* The Evolutionary Secret of Body Segmentation--the odd anatomy of arthropods

(BBC News story says:)
But there is a downside to the virtual girlfriend - she will require more flowers and gifts than many real women. Artificial Life is hoping to launch the new game later this year, on the latest 3-G mobile phones. All virtual girls will look the same - but each girl will behave differently - depending on how much money is spent on her. On top of a general subscription, men will be charged a fee to buy flowers and gifts for the virtual girlfriend. In return, she will introduce them to different aspects of her life, like letting them meet her female friends - also electronic images.

(Press release says:)
The behavior of the virtual characters is based on scientific principles and algorithms inspired by the computer related artificial life sciences and is using artificial intelligence technology to achieve human like behavior and responses.

We are scarcely less related to the wheat or the yeast in a loaf of bread than we are to our fellow animals. We can no longer hide behind the idea that these life forms are not our kin, nor can we rationalize our mistreatment of them by saying that plants, fungi, and microbes are incapable of suffering...

If we refuse to eat our relatives, what CAN we eat? Fortunately, the same sciences of chemistry and biology that reveal our kinship to all life have freed us at last from the need to kill. Although most people are suprised to hear it, it is possible to live and thrive on a diet consisting entirely of foods of mineral origin. This is because every one of the several dozen nutrients the human body requires - carbohydrate, amino acids, fats, vitamins, and of course minerals - can be synthesized or extracted from air, water, and rock without the involvement of any life form, aside from the chemists who perform these miraculous transformations. The Mineralarians are an international association of people, diverse in other respects, who share the common determination to subsist on foods of mineral origin, thereby sparing our fellow beings the victimization that has been their lot, at our hands for the last million years, and before that at the claws and jaws of previously dominant species.

Anonymous BB reader sez: "I've got 10+ years clean & sober now, but I can tell you that crystal meth already comes in almost any color you can imagine. Most of it is the same pale yellow or translucent, but there used to be several "neon" colors that were quite the novelty.

"The part about hard to dry might be a deterrant, but the second part about wanting a clean looking drug? HAHAHAHAHA just like you said, it's not going to make one bit of difference. Have you seen tar heroin? That stuff is like pure thick gooey oil, who knows what they cut it with? and as far as the 1000's of varieties of meth, there are very very few speed freaks who can afford to care what the drug looks like. It's cut with all manner of nasty, dirty junk.

"If anything, the dealers will say it's stronger, cut back on the filler for a few weeks, and people will pay a premium for it. I'm not an expert or anything, never did make a drug, just used them a bunch. But like I said, 10+ years clean."

UPDATE A BB reader sent in this odd story about pink speed:

I live a ways outside Ft. Lewis in Washington state, and the following happened a few years back.

I was at a large, mostly punk house-party when a nervous-looking kid with a flat-top showed up. The party immediately became quiet because he was utterly vanilla-looking and built like a brick shithouse. He then began to ask quietly if anyone "wanted some drugs." He was laughed out of the house, pegged as an undercover cop. A while later my friends and I were sitting on the front porch, in the dark, when the kid reappeared. He asked some other people on the porch, again, if they wanted some drugs. He then insisted that he had to get rid of it quickly, which caused pretty similar reactions to the first time he offered. For some reason we started asking him a lot of questions, and point blank told him that we pegged him as an undercover cop. The resulting story was pretty strange.

He told us he was in the Army and then produced his military ID. It looked pretty real and put him at 20 years old. He told is that he was assigned to the infirmary as an assistant when he entered, and he did so well the first year that they started letting him do more on his own. Long story short, he discovered that the Army was packing it's own gelcaps with "supplements" to distribute to the troops, and he had access to the bulk packages of those "supplements." Well, it didn't take him very long one night to test the "energy supplements" with a military grade urine-analysis kit for drugs, resulting in a definite positive for methamphetamines. We all laughed at his story, since of course the military is jacking everyone up with speed, and then the kid dropped this bomb: in a recent shipment, there was an unaccounted for unit of the "energy supplements." He stole it.

I'm not generally a sucker for stories like that, but he seemed to be, at least, truly nervous about something. One of my friends asked "So where is it?" and the kid produced a small packet of *neon pink* crap, this strange, slightly damp, almost granular powder that smelled like poison. He said they dyed it pink so that it was readily identifiable, and so that no one would use it for any method but oral. He said the remainder of the *pound* was in his car, and he'd go get it if we wanted to buy it. He then asked us how much meth went for. Well, we were stumped, not being connoiseurs ourselves, and said thanks but no thanks. He left.

A few days later, talking to some friends of mine that had been at the party, he said that they had actually *purchased* some of the meth and had done it and, indeed, it had been the cleanest, most frighteningly powerful speed they had ever taken, but it had dyed their fingers and noses pink, so they had tossed it. I was baffled and delighted at the same time (wowee, conspiracy theories!).

So imagine me reading the link that they want to "start dying" the fertilizer. It's been done for a while now, it appears, and with some success, but not for civilians. Also, in the case of my associates, the drugs being pink was a deterrent. Then again, they were never addicts.

For some reason, the alarm didn't go off when my wife left the store, which is too bad, because I ended up trying to take one off using the tools in my toolbox. I thought I would be able to easily pull the pin out with a couple of pairs of pliers. Turns out it was very hard to take the pin out (I ended up using a pair of wire cutters to chew away bits of the rock-hard plastic until I could get a screwdriver inside and pry the pin off) and I made a little hole in the shirt. I'm too lazy to take the clothes back to the mall to have them remove the devices on the other garments, so I'm asking the readers of Boing Boing to help me out. How do you get one of these things off without mangling my daughter's clothes? Email your solution to me. I'll publish the best one.

UPDATE Most people suggested using a magnet, which did nothing. Another large group of people said take it back to the store and have them do it. Screw that; it's more fun to try it myself than to give up and drive to a loathsome mall. Some people told me to try putting a rubber band between the two pieces and twisting more and more loops around the the pin. That didn't work either. Other people suggested pinching the "nose" part of the clip on both ends with two pairs of pliers, and then pulling out the pin. Nope. Finally, I tried one guy's suggestion to hit the button with a hammer, which would cause it to split the clip open. The only thing that did was pinch the button down against the shirt. Since I already had the hammer, I hit the side of the clip, along its seam. After a few whacks, it split open. Here's what the innards look like. Nothing magnetic in there. I think the people who suggested pinching or bending the clip were on the right track.

"Regarding that post, I want to clarify a couple of potential misunderstandings that could arise based on feedback you received from a reader.
- NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is not a racist/fascist organization.
- The bugmenot.com site was probably *not* incorrectly filtered by WebSense.

Your reader is quoted below:

With regard to bugmenot leaving a host that sold racist paraphernalia -- their new web host provides service to a combat18 / redwatch site.

This is true. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a service founded on the principles of an equal voice for *all* people, without regard for their race, gender, religion, or beliefs. That still applies when the beliefs being expressed are antithetical to our own.

[If they moved because] they didn't want to be blocked by censorship software... Bugmenot had better hope they're not on the same server this time.

If I understand the situation correctly, the second host bugmenot tried, dissidenthosting.com forwarded www.bugmenot.com traffic to another established site with racist content. Presumably, it was *that* site that was blocked by web filters and not the bugmenot site. Ironically, if this is correct, it sort of means that the filtering did its job properly and blocked the racist content. I felt this might not be clear based on your reader's message. Makers of web filters long ago learned that blocking traffic by IP address was not a successful practice. There should be no danger of bugmenot.com, or any site hosted by us, being filtered except upon its own merits (or lack thereof). Of course, some clueless sysadmin somewhere will prove me wrong, but if I am only wrong once today, it will be a good day. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET never redirects 404 errors or offline sites. Again, quoting from your post:

[Ed note: a banner ad on Redwatch plugs a hosting service identified as "Nigger Free Hosting," but the site does appear to live at nearlyfreespeech.net.]

I have long hoped that the 'Nigger Free Hosting' site is some sort of puerile racist joke; the site hardly appears developed enough to be a real hosting company. But whether it is or not, we are not affiliated with it in any way. We are thrilled to have bugmenot.com hosted with us. As you can see, we don't always get to say that. It's clever, it's useful, and it's one guy making a difference. I don't know what happened to the first hosting company to get the site shut down. Probably we're going to find out, and there's a good chance it's going to suck. But we will not go down without a fight, and we will never go down quietly. Not when sites like bugmenot are the whole freakin' point of our service. Thanks!"

“On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn't work. That's why he chose to stay near the house on those days.”

"On the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, in the context of the PATRIOT Act, advances in technology, and the Presidential election, Demonstrate provides 24 hour public access to UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, where the student movement originated. The installation combines the world's most advanced networked robotic camera, a visual database, and a mathematical model of socio-ocular behavior. Beginning September 1, Demonstrate will be featured on the Whitney Museum of American Art's artport website."

dvd jon: Is that a Battle Royale DVD?
lil jon: YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
dvd jon: That's the Chinese flick with Go-go from Kill Bill?
lil jon: YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
dj: You can't watch that here.
lj: What?!
dj: You can't watch it.
lj: What?!?
dj: It's "region 3"?
lj: What?!
dj: It won't work in your player.
lj: What?
dj: Give it to me. I'll fix it.
lj: OKAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!

-Perform a controlled boot to capture CMOS/BIOSinformation and test functionality. * Boot sequence (this may mean changing the BIOS to ensure the system boots from the floppy or CD-ROM drive).
* Time and date.
* Power on passwords.

- Perform a second controlled boot to test the computer’s functionality and the forensic boot disk.
* Ensure the power and data cablesare properly connected tothe floppy or CDROM drive, and ensure the power and data cables to the storage devices are still disconnected.
* Place the forensic boot disk into the floppy or CD-ROM drive. Boot the computer and ensure the computer will boot from the forensic boot disk.

- Reconnect the storage devices and perform a third controlled boot to capture the drive configuration information from the CMOS/BIOS.
* Ensure there is a forensic boot disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive to prevent the computer from accidentally booting from the storage devices.
* Drive configuration information includes logical block addressing (LBA); large disk; cylinders, heads, and sectors (CHS); or auto-detect.

Customer: Hey, so, I got an important package in the trunk, but I think I locked my keys in with it when I was dispatching...er...loading it.

OnStar: Not a problem, sir, I'm unlocking the trunk now.

Customer: [sound of trunk opening] Whooo...Jesus, that stinks!

OnStar: Are you OK, sir?

Customer: Yeah, yeah. I just got to get rid of this package as soon as possible. Say, can you give me directions to an abandoned quarry, or maybe some remote wooded spot where I could leave my package?

OnStar: Sure thing. I'm showing that there's an empty shaft at an old silver mine three miles southwest of your location.

Jenny Levine (AKA the Shifted Librarian) works at a library where the RIAA care packages have started to come in. She reports on the contents thereof:

Several of the boxes are literally cut on the side, and the cut goes into the jewel cases themselves. Hence my declaration that we received a ton of "cut-outs." Some of the boxes even have dates of 2001 and 2002 posted on the labels, which I hope doesn't mean the date they were boxed up and put into storage. There is no way these boxes were packed by mistake as the result of a computer glitch. Some of the labels very clearly say 30 copies of this or that title, and I highly doubt the labels were supposed to cut the boxes after boxing and labeling them.

Update: Thom sez, "Since the feds were notified that the RIAA was sending out boxes of crap there has been an effort to ensure that the shipments were indeed relevant. I work for a public radio station and we received well over a thousand CDs in boxes last month as a part of our end of the settlement. I was expecting to unpack Whitney Houston, but was shocked to find tons of great jazz, opera and classical. There was about 7% crap, but hey it's free crap."

The thing that always intrigued me about technothrillers was that technicians are support staff rather than protagonists. I mean, who makes a worse enemy -- James Bond, with a "license to kill" -- or H. Ross Perot? Perot's a weedy-looking Wally Cox mainframe nerd, but he doesn't hesitate to hire ex=Special Forces types and conduct private black-bag operations in Iran.

As I type this (but not as you read it -- this is being posted on a several-day delay), I am sitting just a few metres from the Toronto Island Water Filtration Plant, where the water-pumping takes place. The plant has a lot more barbed wire and fences than it did this time last year: I guess I know why now. Link

Update: Michael Kalus notes, "the way this system works is that the water is pulled out of Lake Ontario, then at the John Street pumping station is fed through a head exchanger that cools the office building. The "warm" water is then cleaned and used as drinking water in Toronto, not just merely dumped back into the lake.

"In essence nothing has changed from before, only that the water is now pulled out of a deeper part of the lake and I am no environmentalist, but I would guess that the impact on the lake is neglectable as there is already a huge volume of water taken out of the lake anyways."

Alas, the site-author, who has appropriated hundreds of images from various artists, has decided that s/he should be immune from this treatment: right-clicking on many of the links and images yeilds an insulting Javascript popup that says, "Please don't take my images." Er, your images? Link (via The Disney Blog)

"So, I'm standing there eating it, and all of a sudden the guy standing behind me says, 'That thing that guy's eating looks pretty good, can you make me one of those?' And, it was like a movie scene, the next 10 people order the same thing. So, I'm like, 'Whoa!' like I think I might be onto something. And the guy is like, 'Hey, man, this is cool.'"

That guy who assembled the sandwich was Abdul Eid, working in an R.U. Hungry food truck, parked in a campus lot in New Brunswick, catering to beer-soaked undergraduates with the late-night munchies.

Eid now runs R.U. Hungry Grill & Pizza, a store he was able to open in part due to the success of the $4.75 Fat Darrell, the flagship of R.U.'s "Fat" line.

And if something is not my cup of tea, I try to pass it on. For example, I'm not a huge fan of hip-hop, though I certainly like some of it. Whenever I show up at my local with a pile of records I've scavenged, Andre, one of the barmen, will probably say, sounding genuinely offended, "How come you never get any for me?" A few months ago, I spotted a gigantic stack of mostly hip-hop 12-inches awaiting the Sanitation Dept. I grabbed a gigantic pile, as many as I could carry, and made my way back to the bar, where I'd just seen him. "Hey, Andre, I got a present for you…" I said, and dropped the discs on the bar. "I'll be right back--there's more." It was worth it just to see the startled look on his face. (Out of the whole bunch of maybe 250 I kept about 8 or 10.)

And then there are 78s, which most people don't have the machinery to play. I've become interested in old 78rpm records ever since my father gave me his collection of jazz records--as well as a turntable to play them on--not long before his death. While there were some LPs in the bunch--and some of those were amazing ones--the majority of the collection consisted of jazz 78s, mostly from the 1940s, but some dating back as early as 1929, which means I'm the third generation to own them, since my father was only 15 that year and obviously acquired those records secondhand.

Margaret and Mark Phillips, who own the Tynllidiart Arms and the brewery, said the beer had a secret recipe.

"The previous owner of the pub moved out two years ago and up until two weeks ago the pub was closed and the brewery was too," said Mr Phillips, who moved in just two weeks ago.

"We thought it would be nice to brew our own local beer and luckily we had a brewer living a few doors down who was able to help.

Here's why you should applaud today's decision: It brings us closer to monetizing peered sharing and putting real money in the pockets of artists, labels, publishers, and other rights holders. How? Because it moves them one step closer to the correct judgment, which is that it is now impractical and inefficient to control the quantity and destiny of digits -- especially so those that carry mass media like music -- in the increasingly friction-free world of digitization. When that judgment is drawn, service licensing begins. Until that judgment is drawn, product-based control continues in vain. Publishers long ago accepted technology and license it today -- they licensed Napster -- and their revenues are climbing; sound recording companies continue to resist every new technology and refuse to license, and their revenues are falling. This decision will benefit the music business the same way getting arrested for drunk driving benefits an alcoholic, summoning forth the day of reckoning and hastening rehabilitation.

This judgment doesn't destroy distribution -- it enables licensing. How? It reminds one of the parties in the licensing battle that one of the vines it was relying upon to to cling to the past will no longer be viable. Hyper-efficient delivery destroys distribution, meaning that the just-in-time delivery of digits will eventually destroy their distribution entirely. That is a ways off, but from what I'm hearing back-channel it is not too far off, as Apple prepares its tiny wireless iPod with no hard-drive but enhanced Wi-Max (metropolitan-wide high-bandwidth wireless) connectivity; it won't destroy downloading over night, but it will take a whack at its market share, and slowly but surely shift the market away from distribution/downloading and towards delivery/streaming.

Update: John Parres notes "Actually *I* am the founder of the pho list and Jim is the founder of the pho brunches so we round it off and call ourselves the co-founders of pho."

Update: An anonymous tipster sez "this pamphlet was done by the wonderful Katya Komisaruk over at the Just Cause Law Collective. At her site, lawcollective.org, there's the pamphlet and tons of other info about how to not lose your rights when dealing with the po. (Including Komsiaruk's book, set up much like the pamphlet, 'Beat the Heat.' Komisaruk applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School while in federal prison for anti-nuke demonstrations. She went to HLS while on parole and graduated with honors. Now she's one of the most active anarchist lawyers in the U.S."

"Sir, you can't use the Internet outside the library."

I said, "What?" (I'm pretty clever under pressure.)

The officer in question (whose conduct was entirely professional, firm, and calm behind those mirrored shades) solemnly assured me that in order to use the library's open wireless signal, I had to be seated within the library. The officer then wandered on back to the nearby police station.

I dutifully, if reluctantly, turned off the power to my Airport card and, since I had only been on the bench a few minutes, began working -- offline -- on what turns out to be this post. I had noticed two other weak but open signals in the area, and I figured that I could post this perplexing moment via one of the other open signals, then scuttle back to the studio. As I was writing, the officer returned and -- as the officer walked straight for me -- I held up my TiBook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that my card was off.

"Why don't you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?'

I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. "I did notice several other open signals in the area -- am I allowed to connect to them?"

"Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it's a new law, sir; 'theft of signal.' It would be like if you stole someone's cable TV connection."

UPDATE Zoodle sez: "Guy shot buy Chinese cop found alive in coffin."

The visible stain, even if washed off, was still detectable by ultraviolet light 24 to 72 hours later....

"Most people that are drug users, they like a clean-looking drug if they are going to ... put it in their body," Clements said. "We know the end-product is not pretty at all."

Snort it, and it turns the nose fluorescent pink. Inject it, and the telltale pink shows up at the injection site, he said.

Two masked robbers ran into the Munch Museum, threatened staff with a gun and forced people to lie down before taking "The Scream", an icon of existentialist angst showing a waif-like figure against a blood-red sky, and "Madonna". They escaped in a black Audi A6 driven by a third man. The pictures, worth millions of dollars and among Munch's best-known works, were later cut from their frames which were found in another part of the city.

Update: This analysis piece in the London News Review has more background:

The Scream is not only Edvard Munch's most famous work, it is also his most stolen. A different version of The Scream (having more than one version helps) was purloined in 1994 during the Winter Olympics, and recovered after 3 months. This fact -- that The Scream is forever being stolen -- has added a new layer of meaning to the original. The sickly fear, the angst which radiates out from the ghoulish face of the screamer, is now shot through with the uncertainty that at any moment the canvas might be wrenched from the wall and shoved in the boot of an Audi. The scream is as much a cry of help as a cry of anguish. The strange stretched lips twist to form the plaintive words: "Please stop stealing me" -- but in the empty eyes you can see the dreadful certainty that the theft will take place.

"In today's corporate environment, there are very few legitimate business uses for consumer P2P file sharing," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "Unauthorized activity within an enterprise network creates situations in which companies run the risk of security leaks or illegal activity. Products like Akonix Enforcer allow IT departments to block and monitor all P2P activity, removing another security concern from IT managers and freeing up network bandwidth for legitimate business communications."

"BitTorrent is a growing and popular P2P file-sharing network, particularly for movie files. In addition to the risk of music copyright violation, disclosure of corporate data and potential virus infection, BitTorrent users expose their company to potential legal action from organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America," said Francis Costello, chief marketing officer at Akonix Systems. "We are continuously working with more than 250 customers, including three of the largest global media companies, to address the latest security threats from file sharing. Blocking users of the BitTorrent network provides our customers with the most complete solution for managing P2P available."

Trazir would fly around the Minmatar newbie sectors, offering 10,000 credits to anybody who would join our corporation. All they had to do was click on "accept" when Trazir made the offer, and they became a part of our corporate family. Since many of the people he encountered were only days, hours, or even minutes new to Eve, a great deal clicked "accept" and were subsequently given 10,000 credits. I did the same in the Caldari newbie regions, and within a couple days, ZZZZ Best was burgeoning at the seams with 18 clueless members. We had to act quickly and peddle our deal, as well as maintain member numbers, because there would no doubt be a good deal of turnover as people realized that they belonged to a corporation which did nothing for them and which they did nothing for.

As such, they are terrific. I would much rather read a Stealing the Network volume than any hundred HOWTOs and Anarchy Filez: STN has the tone of a really good bullshitting session at a DefCon or Hackers on Planet Earth, hackers spinning war-stories about hacks they've pulled off, or have conceived of. Make no mistake, these are imaginative and brilliant technical people.

As stories, these pieces are sometimes clumsy. The prose rarely rises above journeyman level (it's at its best when the authors stick to declarative, Hemingwayesque sentences, but too often they stray into "colourful" similes and descriptive phrases that can be cliched and even unintentionally funny), and there's not a lot of characterization to be had, and virtually no character development. That said, the book is still a rip-snortin' read, mostly because while it's not the best fiction ever written, it is some of the best, most engaging technical nonfiction you're likely to find.

A couple of the stories are very funny -- I'm particularily fond of the "A Real Gullible" piece, which is an homage to one of the great hacker farces of all time, Real Genius. There's a lot of that kind of nerd humour and nerd folk art sprinkled throughout this volume, and for that alone, it's worth reading.

It's a good formula and a smart one, too: how else could you produce a tech book that was still worth keeping in print 18 months later? Link

Giblets is living even farther into the future, in a time when terrorism and pinko-tyranny are both irrelevant! Giblets demands that we spend 1.8 trillion dollars on an array of massive space lasers pointed outward to defend Earth against the onslaught of immense insectoid invaders who will strike from beyond the asteroid belt! Giblets will not allow the tyrant Bug Emperor to lay its death spores in our atmosphere - and the whiney pleas of those stuck formulating "today's" foreign policy to secure the former Soviet nuclear stockpile will not get in his way!

Once more Giblets outdoes George Bush at every turn! Whose vision is grander? Who not only bypasses today's wars to fight what we think are tomorrow's, but gives tomorrow a pass for sometime next week? The answer is clear: Giblets!

Paul Pressler had convinced everyone on the Parks & Resorts team that Disney's California Adventure would be an unparalleled success. In the days leading up to the opening of California Adventure, the Director of Attractions at Disneyland, Paul Yeargin, openly discussed his concerns that Disney's California Adventure would fill to capacity every day. He thought the resort's biggest problem would be disappointed guests, who, after traveling a great distance to see California Adventure would have to settle for Disneyland instead. Yeargin and other Disneyland executives made decisions based on this premise. Including a now infamous decision by Disneyland Resort President, Cynthia Harriss, to restrict Annual Passholders from using their passes at Disney's California Adventure for the first few months after opening. This decision only served to anger the already disgruntled 400,000 passholders who provide a significant amount of revenue for the resort. Harriss and Yeargin, like many of the Disneyland executives, had followed Pressler over from the Disney Stores and had no previous theme park experience.

Then in February 2001, the world saw what had been festering behind closed doors at WDI for the past several years. Disney's California Adventure opening in the old Disneyland parking lot. It was a mix of off-the-shelf carnival rides and film-based attractions. When Walt's close friend and long-time Imagineer, John Hench, saw the park for the first time he said, "I liked it better as a parking lot." WDI would try to fix California Adventure any way they could. They threw attractions at it left and right...Who Wants to be A Millionaire, a bug's land, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, even the Main Street Electrical Parade would come out of moth balls. None of it worked, of course.

Recall that an action is vulnerable to a temptation if when the short-run players participate, the temptation lowers the probability of all bad signals, and increases the probability of all others. In this case the bad reputation result requires the exit minmax condition, as demonstrated by the example in Section 4.4. Notice, however, that in the example the relative probability of g and r is changed by the temptation. If the temptation satisfies the stronger property that the relative probability of the other signals remains constant, then we can weaken the assumption of exit minmax. In this section we develop this result, and give an application to games with two actions.

1. These is a stated legal conflict on the Sony standard as between the 7th and 9th Circuits;
2. The 7th and 9th Circuits disagree (albeit in partially in dicta) on the relevance of willful blindness to secondary liability;
4. The Court has these matters in hand: it has granted cert. in many similar cases historically (Sony, 1980s, White-Smith (the Piano Roll case) 1909, Teleprompter and Fortnightly (Cable / Broadcast, 1960s & 1970s);
5. The Court has a vague sense that some far-out stuff is going on in the field of “Computer Law” that maybe it should check out;
6. Law clerks use KaZaA & BitTorrent to plan basketball games;
7. Stevens and Breyer deeply dig this stuff;
8. Scalia likes anything having to do with property;
9. Souter got his first computer last week.

And most importantly,

10. The Court loves to be the center of attention, and this would make it so.

Theater managers took four video projectors, set one up in each of four theaters with a Microsoft XBox video game system connected to it, and then let the fun begin for more than 60 people.

"Tonight blew our minds," theater co-owner Calvin Timothy said afterward. "We're definitely going to keep doing this."

The game Friday night: "Halo" -- a first-person shoot-em-up game in which four people can play on a team against four others. The evening was set up in a tournament format where 16 teams battled each other until the wee hours of Saturday morning to find out who the kings of gaming are in the valley.

It was lying.

This New York Times infografic traces the financial connections between the organization and the Bush administration's staff, financiers, and cronies.

It also delves into the Lying Veterans' own on-the-record statements, like George "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam" Elliot's 1996 statement that "The fact that he chased an armed enemy down is not something to be looked down upon, it was an act of courage. And the whole outfit served with honor." Link (Thanks, bomark!)

According to one report two Australians, including a knight who has lived in Britain for 44 years and a writer with a degree in English, have been rejected under the new rules.

AWoL users pour a shot of their favorite spirit into a diffuser capsule, which is connected to an oxygen pipe.

Oxygen bubbles are pumped through it, absorbing the alcohol and creating a smoky-looking vapor, which is then sucked through a tube and inhaled.