The Mac-ITX is connected to Sharp's TV and stereo, and functions as his DVD player. It runs Windows 2000, and uses Windows Media Player, WinDVD, iTunes and Real Player. Sharp's concoction also features a 40-GB hard drive, slot-loading DVD/CD burner/player, video out (S-video and composite) and USB 2.0 and Firewire ports. It all works by remote control.

"With it all crammed together it works like a dream," he reports.

OhmyNews is one of the most important new-media experiments anywhere in the world. It was the right publication at the right time.

I do discuss some work outside the U.S., though the book is based more on what's happening here than elsewhere. It turns out that I have a longish section about OhmyNews, as I visited them about 18 months ago while researching the book. I was dazzled by what I saw.

OhmyNews was launched in a place that was already well-wired for the Net. The news environment was ideal, in a sense, for a genuine opposition publication -- because three big newspapers had about 80 percent of the market share. Korea was at the cusp of political changes, and the reform-oriented candidate was a great vehicle for OhmyNews, which clearly helped elect him.

Party pooper and BoingBoing reader Hudson points us to the *actual* story behind the "wood" reference in last night's debate. Link to unphotoshopped image. Here's the debate snip:

Kerry: The president got $84 from a timber company that owns, and he's counted as a small business. Dick Cheney's counted as a small business. That's how they do things. That's just not right.
Bush: I own a timber company? That's news to me. Want to buy some wood?

Image: "Insignificant Other" (detail), Justin DeGarmo.
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). And while we're at it: a special sponsor shout-out to the illomonsters at Mondolithic.

"Sixty Cameras Against the War," a multichannel documentary of the NYC peace demonstration on February 15th, 2003 is available for download from Archive.org under a Creative Commons license.

"60 CATW" took footage from 60 different videographers at the demonstration, and displays it in multiple screens at a time (up to 60) to give a range of activists' experiences in Manhattan as the NYPD used barricades, horse charges, and pepper spray to cleave the march in two.

There are three elements of Going Postal that I completely loved:

1. (Nearly) all-new characters. The Discworld books have the signal virtue of being comprehensible no matter what order they're read in, but that said, there are a number of recurring characters, some of whom are getting a little shopworn. For Going Postal, Pratchett invents a suite of new and extremely likable characters, including an obsessive collector, a wonderfully cynical activist woman, and a pair of con-men (see below).
2. The Big Con. I'm a sucker for stories about cons and graft (see my review of the canonical text in the field), and Going Postal revolves around a fantastic and daring series of cons that are by turns nail-bitingly tense and gut-wrenchingly funny.
3. Tech savvy. Going Postal's mcguffin is the "clacks," a system of mechanical semaphore towers that have been strung across the continent in a kind of primitive telegraph/Internet. Pratchett completely nails the pioneering spirit, hacks, grift, and ingenuity present at the birth of every network, and his accounts of the technical workings of the clacks are nearly as gripping as classic real-world accounts of hacking derring-do.

We start, as any trawl through the inferno should, up to our thighs in spam.

This month, Redmond's lawyers sprayed a unique license from its hind-most intellectual property glands - all over the IETF's proposal for an anti-spam mail authentication standard, Sender ID.

As ever, open source kill-joys had a few problems with Microsoft's license. First, the patent license they offered wasn't transferable. So everyone who got the source had to sign a deal with Microsoft to use their super-special patented technology.

The first report from St. Louis is in - and presidential candidates Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green Party) were just arrested. Badnarik was carrying an Order to Show Cause, which he intended to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Earlier today, Libertarians attempted to serve these same papers at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the CPD - but were stopped from approaching the CPD office by security guards.

Once you start to slide in Iraq, it's hard to right yourself. There's enough to piss you off on a daily basis that if you let it compound there's bound to be trouble. For Iraqis--car bombs, roadside bombs, city-sieges, instability, uncertainty, and loss of hope--this is their daily diet. I asked one of our drivers, Wesam, how he was doing the other day. It was just a typical faux question in passing. He stopped me in my tracks with a heartfelt answer.

"We are so unhappy, Kevin."

"Who's unhappy? You? Everyone?"

"Everyone--its such a very bad situation. We don't know what to do."

Neither does anyone else here-- so it seems. We are bound together in this bloody conflict where the body counts have to break double digits to really get our attention anymore. It's a spiritual malaise as easily caught as a common cold. Big Daddy spelled it out best with one word in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," – mendacity.

Mine comes and goes depending on how much time I've spent quarantined in the hotel as opposed to out in the field. This week I've got it bad

The press release about the book describes his work better than I can:

In the 1940s and ’50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins fingering cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives.

Up until this book, my exposure to Flora's work has been limited to several smallish reproductions in a book about album cover art, a record cover I bought at a garage sale, and Irwin Chusid's web site about Jim Flora.

I already thought Flora was one of the greatest illustrators ever, but I wasn't prepared to have my mind blown all over again. This 11" x 10" book has hundreds of large, clear, bright reproductions of Flora's work, and Chusid has done an amazing job of compiling a bunch of great stuff about Flora, including interviews with him, and remembrances from other artists who loved his work.

I can relate to what Tim Biskup said when he first saw Flora's work: "'This is going to change the way that I draw,' I said out loud in a record store. I was holding a copy of Shorty Courts the Count on LP." Link

Max Lungarella, of the University of Tokyo, believes one of the more noticeable themes at this year's conference is the way robotics is feeding into areas of research relating to intelligence. As roboticists succeed in making ever-more intelligent machines, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and even behavioural psychologists are becoming interested in studying their creations, he says.

"This antique real human skull  from private collections is estimated at least 500 years old. It is HEAVILY carved with mysterious buddhism objects, symbols and Tibetan letters.... Sold for the purpose of educational and medical purposes only."

Cross-dressing students said their freedom of expression was violated and that the prohibition sent the wrong message to transgender students who may want to cross-dress regularly...

Josh McConchie, 16, who wore a pink skirt and high tops, said that "certain students in the school feel it's derogatory towards gays or cross-dressers because they feel we're making fun of them, but actually we're trying to make them fit in."

Stone and Parker talk about some of the many creative challenges they encountered while producing a comedy action flick with puppets. Here's one snip from the interview that didn't make it in -- the film lampoons world leaders, and pokes bitter fun at the so-called "war on terrorism." I asked Trey Parker whether or not they timed the release in relation to the upcoming presidential elections. He replied, "(laughs) -- People assume we're trying to affect the election. But if you're going to change your vote based on what you see in a puppet movie, honestly -- you really should not be voting in the first place."

Link to today's "Day to Day" show, with archived audio. Includes streaming video clips of Kim Jong Il singing a reflective ballad, then feeding weapons inspector Hans Blix to live sharks.

Image: Trey Parker and "Kim Jong Il" -- the marionette, not the actual North Korean dictator -- on the set of Team America: World Police (Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount).

The licensing pact demands hotspot operators pay Acacia $1,000 a year for up to 3,500 redirected connections. After which, operators would have to pay 5 to 15 cents for each redirected connection.

"Anybody who operates a hotspot with redirection can assume they'll hear from us," Acacia's executive vice president of business development and general counsel Rob Berman told Wi-Fi Networking News.

Seth's notes suggest some avenues toward breaking this DRM (beyond screenshotting, of course, which still works just fine!). This is a good avenue of research, possibly even worthy of a Mozilla variant optimized to circumvent the Google DRM.

If you wanted to write a proxy that would make Google Print pages capable of being saved to disk, you would presumably want to match

background-image:url("http://print.google.com/\([^"]+\)")

(although you'd need to be careful to match only the one in the definition of ".theimg", because it looks like there may at least one other background-image:url) and then replace

<div class="theimg"

with

<div class="x"

and somewhere nearby (I'm not sure how many tags up you'd need to go) insert a plain old

<img src="http://print.google.com/$1">

I haven't tried this because it felt like too much work relative to the previous two methods.

Contrary to what I expected, Google Print does not seem to check referer, so it seems to be possible merely to extract the URL from the definition of .theimg, and then to load it directly. Perhaps that will change in the future.

You can build enterprise software that doesn't work on a Mac but you CANNOT build social technologies that don't work on the Mac. Who are key driving forces behind sociable technology? Freaks, (independent) geeks, academics and other marginalized populations. What do marginalized groups use when it comes to technology? Surprise - they use subversive tools. Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.

It doesn't. But it does matter, particularly if you're building sociable technologies and you want the attention of the geeks, freaks and academics. This includes the bloggers, who are often bleeding edge geeky freaky academically-minded folks.

Sociable technologies are not enterprise technologies nor are they low-end consumer technologies. They require connecting clusters of people. And to do that, you start with the "mavens" to get to the hubs. Mavens are not mainstream users; they don't play by mainstream rules. They value their position as outsider, alternative. They love new gadgets that have cultural value. This is the type that Apple has done a fantastic job at attracting and maintaining.

Alan took some great photos out there earlier this week, and has just published them online. He maintains a blog about the Mojave airport, and has a new book coming out -- Mojave Scrapbook -- about the site's rich aerospace and aviation history.

Link to Alan's latest batch of photos. This one's pretty magical. (Thanks, Wayne, and thanks Todd Lappin!)

Hatch canceled plans Thursday to present the bill to the Judiciary Committee, and participants in the talks said there would likely be no movement on the proposal in the immediate future. Hatch has previously said he intended to pursue the legislation next session if a bill wasn't approved. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is expected to take over as Judiciary chairman early next year.

The chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America, Mitch Bainwol, acknowledged Thursday that negotiations need more time.

"So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said.

Rod (to Jane): "Do you want to blow on my pipe while I'm twanging away?"

Jane: "Oh no Rod, I was blowing a lot with Roger last night. But would you like to play with my maracas?"

Zippy: "No, let's just pluck away with our twangers."

Bungle: "Yes, it doesn't matter what size your twanger is."

Zippy: "I've got a big red one."

George: "I've only got a tiny twanger. But it works well and I like to play with it."

Geoffrey (to viewers): "Well, have you got your twangers out? And remember, you can bounce your balls at the same time. If you haven't got any balls, ask a friend if you can play with his.

UPDATE: Michael sez: From imdb: 'There are currently rumours doing the rounds that Rainbow was nearly axed due to an 'obscene' edition being made that contained a lot of sexual innuendo about balls, twangers, plucking and so forth, a clip of which was shown on a late-night Channel Four comedy show. In fact, this edition of Rainbow was never meant to be broadcast 'properly', it was an in-joke performed by the cast and crew for a Christmas party at the production studios. It has long been a tradition within the British television industry for the videotape editing department to produce 'Christmas shows' consisting of bloopers, X-rated moments and suchlike fare to be shown at the seasonal gatherings, and the 'adult' Rainbow was produced with that in mind.'

At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting.

UPDATE: Satirista sez "AP is now saying the article was a "test article" (WTF?) that was "inadvertently" picked up by WBAY. Now, I've been a freelance writer/journalist for quite awhile, as have you, but I've never heard of writing "test articles" in advance, other than advance obituaries for celebrities. Have you? Furthermore, I Googled '"test article" journalism' and came up with nada."

And, now, if you go to the Link, the site says only " You have reached a page that is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please use your browser's BACK button to return to the previous page." I hope they keep changing the page. It's funny!

UPDATE: From: michael@slavitch.com Subject: Site Suggestion - for boingboing Date: October 8, 2004 7:05:52 AM PDT To: doctorow@craphound.com, xeni@xeni.net, mark@well.com ----------------begin submit------------- email_name: Michael Slavitch sez: "Remember that TV station that posted the AP article about electing Bush one month early? I sent them a snarky letter, and got a rather elegant and thoughtful response.

"Go figger!"

Dear WBay Staff;

You've made your station a laughing stock, so I suggest explanation far more detailed than "our apologies", unless you want to be classified with Fox News as a propogandist joke.

------

From: Miller, Ted
Subject: Electing Bush

Hi, Michael. As soon as we learned about the article, we had it removed. Unfortunately, we're not able to post another story in its place, so we posted a correction on our Home and News page that has a higher prominence (on our site at least) than the original article which was on the web site for 35 minutes.

We use an automated system for Associated Press national news, politics, science, entertainment, etc. If you see how much news we have on the site, you'll understand why we use automation (I am a department of one). If we did not have this system, there would simply be too many gaps in how often the entire site is updated.

The Associated Press tests about 4 times a week for a month prior to an election to help TV stations and newspapers make sure their publishing systems are working properly (yes, I see the irony). The AP's numbers are completely random with every test; if this error happened yesterday or tomorrow it just as easily could have declared Senator John Kerry or even Ralph Nader the winner.

We are sorry for the mistake, but it was unintentional on everyone's part and we responded quickly to remove it.

Ted Miller
WBAY Web Manager

But the big news is that Laszlo is now Free Software -- free as in beer and free as in speech, licensed under an open source license from compiler to server. To recap: I came for the eye candy, I stayed for the liberty. This is nice stuff. Link (Thanks, Tobias!)

A few minutes ago our host (Rackspace) in London received a federal order to turn over the hardware that hosts several Indymedia websites to the FBI.

Rackspace complied and handed the server over to the FBI, but they must have felt bad because they are building us a new server that will be online as soon as possible, oh and they apologized for the abruptness because they think that they are "required to comply with all federal orders of this nature". The servers hosted numerous local IMCs including Belgium and African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, and Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal, and more. We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters. Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police... can I be the first to say WTF?! Also on the IMC servers stolen by the FBI were a lot of icecast radio stations, the Indymedia PGP public keyring and BLAG (an Anti-corporate GNU/Linux distribution with a suite of media tools designed to be used to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and free software... put out by the Brixton Linux Action Group). Rackspace has been asked by the EFF for a copy of the order, but Rackspace claims they dont know if they can give it up.

I have been in contact with [Rackspace's] regional director responsible for the federal order. He has stated that [he] can not provide any information regarding the order. I am going to follow up with our law enforcement liason to verify this.

America (The Book) is the kind of thing I wish I'd had when I was about 20 years old -- a cross between Schoolhouse Rock and the political editorials in the NYT and Washington Post and the gonzo poltiical journalism of books like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Amazon has posted a (slightly lame) video intro to the book by Jon Stewart and a (very good!) interview between Stewart and an Amazon section editor -- it's a shame about the weird Windows DRM stream format, but they're worth checking out on your way to ordering the book. WMV Video Stream Link, WMA Audio Interview Stream (Thanks, Arlo!)

Update: Alex sez, "I was really stoked to read this, even more excited after watching the film, and ready to tell the world about Thandi Mathobane, Journalist of the Future! The only problem is, she doesn't exist... Though you'd never know it, film is fictional. Here's the deal. That said, everything she does in this film is certainly possible now. Copyleft is definitely worldchanging for the developing world. But it does seem important to keep track of the difference between what we know and what we imagine....

"He says most of the ground in the area isn't soft enough to take a footprint, but a blanket of ash could provide a good medium. Meldrum owns more than 150 casts of mysterious ground tracks that fall somewhere between human feet and primate feet and says his study of them has convinced him that Sasquatch are real."

The credit card-sized shotgun is a muzzleloader, meaning it doesn't use shotgun shells. The user has to measure out some gunpowder, pour it in each barrel, drop seven BBs in each barrel, and tamp in a small wad of paper. A knob on one end serves as a safety, and two buttons set into a hole in the body are the electrical triggers. Each barrel fires with a loud pop. "This is no more deadly than a .22," Teel said. "But the difference is you have multiple wounds, which means you'll try to get away quicker, and it will cause more pain. ... There will be more blood, which the cops will be able to see."

The facts aside (and it's impossible to dispute the facts in Track Down, because there's no attempt to be accurate at all), Track Down is simply not a very good movie. Director Joe Chappelle has the unenviable task of helming this mess, having formerly directed a scant few films -- including Halloween 6 and Hellraiser 4 -- that couldn't have presented much of a challenge at all. With Track Down he must have found himself in a huge mess, stuck with a highly technical and convoluted plot and rising stars to coddle. You can almost hear him saying, "Ah, fuck it, let's just put a car chase in here."

"The mantra in the nanotech industry is to learn from the mistakes made in biotechnology and the public rejection of genetically modified organisms. Partly to blame was a "top-down" attitude taken by a scientific establishment that was much too self-important to bother with public attitudes and perceptions. So, consideration of "societal and ethical implications" is No. 1 on the nanotech industry's list. However, part of that process involves paying attention to the separate philosophical and religious societies in the world. Not the abstract "society" of a scientist's dream -- one that will listen to scientific explanations and reach "correct" conclusions based on the strength and logic of their arguments -- but the real society that's out there, the one that laughs at, or adores, Madonna and wears red strings, the one that crowds around old barns in rundown villages to gaze at a stain that they swear is the image of the original Madonna, the one that drops to its knees and faces Mecca five times a day, or faces toward Jerusalem every Friday night to welcome the bride of Shabbat."

"Epidemiologists have been studying this stuff for a little while, and have some pretty good models that might be worth explaining briefly.

"I started to write a response to the Boing Boing piece, but it got so long it turned into a blog piece." Link

Rebecca Loos, Beckham's former personal assistant, who gained notoriety earlier this year when she alleged she had conducted an affair with the England captain, carried out the procedure on Five's reality show, The Farm. Viewers were shown explicit footage of Loos, who donned rubber gloves to arouse the animal before collecting around a third of a litre of semen in a flask. Having completed her task, Loos told her fellow contestants: "My arms are aching! It lasts for about 10 minutes and he starts thrusting really hard and then I grip!" Fellow farm hand Debbie McGee told her: "You must do it really well." Andrew Butler, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said... "It doesn't help to see Vanilla Ice jumping on the back of a pig and riding it around..."

The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Brazilian pop legend Gilberto Gil will appear on a new CD along with 13 other artists next month--not exactly earth-shattering news. But what's unique about the disc is that diehard fans are not only likely to end up copying, remixing and swapping it online; they're actively encouraged to do so. The compilation, due out at month's end, is both a legal experiment and the opening salvo in a war against the music industry's zero-tolerance policy on file sharing. And if the folks behind it have it their way, both the artists and their fans will come out winners.

Now that there's a widely available nude patch for "The Sims 2" that removes the pixelated blur when your wee animated minions take a shower or jump in the hot tub—not to mention hundreds of add-on objects ranging from latex catsuits to high-tech sex chairs—we expect to start seeing a lot more hot and heavy foreplay scenes and WooHoo! sequences that don't leaving us feeling limp.

Link to Susannah's new thing. Welcome back! Chris Bishop did some nice work with illos and UI here.

The Robot Fighting League's 2004 National Championships are this Saturday and Sunday, October 9-10th, 2004! See the metallic stars of TV gather to fight it out to decide who's the champion - in robot weight classes up to 340 pounds. Thrill to the spectacle as robots fight only a few feet away from the bleachers!

Famous robots from TV competitions and regional matches across the country - including this spring's ROBOlympics - will fight it out in grand style in the place where it all started: Fort Mason. Robots will bash it out in our specially-built bulletproof robot fighting arena - so you can watch the carnage up close and personal that will lead to Number One! We're firing up the barbecue and chilling the kegs in preparation for the families that filled the bleachers during ROBOlympics.

With all the joy that an MMORPG romance can bring there is also a dark side to all this: jealousy, betrayal, and the inevitable breakup. In Star Wars Galaxies players can get married in the game by exchanging rings (which are either player created or looted). One toon has both rings in his/her inventory – targets the other player and selects “propose union” from a radial menu. If the other person accepts the second ring is transferred into his/her inventory and also placed on a finger. Now here’s the fun part, to remove the ring you have to select “divorce” from the radial menu. D-I-V-O-R-C-E rears its ugly head even in the fantasy that is Star Wars. To make the situation even more dramatic the ring, upon closer inspection, shows sign of wear and decay.

Unless a User has a written agreement in effect with us which states otherwise, User may only provide a hyperlink to the Site on another Web site, if you comply with all of the following: (a) the link must be a text-only link clearly marked "snap.com" or "www.snap.com"; (b) the link must "point" to the URL "http://www.snap.com" and not to other pages within the Site; (c) the link, when activated by a User, must display the Site full-screen and not within a "frame" on the linking Web site; and (d) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link must not be such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with our name and trademarks or create the false appearance we are associated with or sponsor the linking Web site. Perfect Market reserves the right to revoke its consent to any link at any time in its sole discretion.

Search engines demand our trust and our goodwill, and they cry out to be an authorative namespace for locations relevant to query terms. For Snap to assert that it can own how you can link to them -- despite the fact that this is nonsensical in both law and practice -- displays such an imponderable depth of contempt and ignorance for the Web's norms that it is truly unforgivable. I've just removed playing with Snap from my list of things to do for the next hundred years or so. Maybe you should, too. Link (Thanks, Jim!)

Update: Snap founder Bill Gross sez, "Cory, thanks for catching that and posting. We're changing the policy, so thanks!"

No word on the rest of the copyright policy, which includes a ban on "creating derivative works" with Snap results.

If the FCC adopts the proposal, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and nearly all VoIP companies will have to design their systems to be tappable. This isn't nearly as tidy as it sounds. The law distinguishes between two kinds of information that can be gleaned via telephone surveillance: "call identifying information" or CII (numbers dialed and when), and "content" (actual conversations taking place). Telephone network technology allows a law enforcement agent to gather these two kinds of information separately, in isolation from one another. There is no danger that an agent seeking CII will accidentally get to listen to the content of his target's conversations. Or that he will accidentally hear the conversations of everybody on the same block as his target.

Competition objectives include seeking to meet the greatest challenges and opportunities facing humanity in the 21st century. The X Prize Foundation (XPF) and the World Technology Network (WTN) will be announcing the launch of a public outreach period to help select and sponsor a series of new technology prizes, the WTN X PRIZES, developed on the heels of the successful ANSARI X PRIZE competition. Intended to spur innovation in a variety of critical scientific and technological arenas and in response to great technological, social, and environmental challenges, areas of focus might cover goals in fields such as energy, medicine, information and communications technology, and nanotechnology. These "holy grail" goals might include cures for major diseases, teleportation, molecular assemblers, cold fusion and a wide variety of others with truly major societal implications. Announcement of the public challenge suggestion process and other competition details and entry criteria will occur at the WTN's 2004 World Technology Summit And Awards.

I know people are concerned about the possibility of a "bird flu pandemic".  The news media is not helping to calm these fears. The truth is, from the last news clippings I have, that there have been 22 human fatalities in Vietnam and Thailand. The incidence of this cause of death is twice as high as the probability of dying in an airline accident -- but to keep this in perspective, you are 20 times more likely to be killed by lightning in Colorado than a Vietnam citizen is likely to die of bird flu!!  All human incidents of the disease have been in people who handled sick birds. There is no known mutation of the virus to a state that would allow transmission between people. There have been no instances of humans becoming sick from eating properly cooked poultry.  80 million chickens & ducks have been exterminated in the Asian countries whose poultry has been infected.  My sense is that there is less and less concern as time goes on, and the efforts of the governments to control the outbreak in the bird populations is resulting in a reduction of the problem.

...the probability of dying from SARS in Taiwan was roughly the same as the probability of being hit by lightning in Colorado. 

UPDATE: Aalia sez:

I enjoyed your post earlier on the low risk of catching bird flu. However I hate to nitpick but I'd just been reading a few articles on the subject and couldn't resist pointing out that there is a probable human to human case of transmission in Thailand, under investigation by WHO.

This was reported in ProMed Digest today:

"Thailand went on high alert last week [final week of Sep 2004], after it reported that an earlier avian influenza victim died after probably contracting the virus from her daughter. She was the 1st person in this outbreak believed to have contracted the disease from another human, rather than from poultry." Source cited in ProMEDmail

The Promedmail's moderator notes :

"[A preliminary account of this case was included in ProMED-mail post "Avian influenza - Eastern Asia (120): Thailand 20041003.2731. If confirmed by the World Health Organization, this case will raise the total number of cases recorded in Thailand to 16 (with 10 deaths). Taken together with the 27 cases in Viet Nam, the total number of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus cases in East Asia becomes 43 (with 30 deaths). - Mod.CP]"

So there may be one case...

As there's already clear evidence that the virus can cross species to cats, dogs and humans, its not really that shocking that it there will be the occasional likely instance of human to human infection occurring. I calculate the raw probability of infection at approximately 1 in 4 million on the current reported infection rates reported in Thailand. Pretty remote chances indeed.

http://www.promedmail.org - best place I know of to keep track of this stuff. If you need to follow it up just put bird flu and Thailand in their search engine and you'll get more info on the Thai cases than you probably ever wanted.

UPDATE: Quinn sez: "i've put up a long post about what makes the bird flu more dangerous than it seems at ambiguous, inspired by your post. fundamentally, i agree with the point that there's no reason to *not* take business trips to asia, but i wanted to highlight why the bird flu matters, despite how little direct danger it presents at the moment, especially in light of the recent flu vaccine news."

However, once I thought the initial burst of energy was well spent and a fair chunk of the better writers absorbed into the gaming press in one form or another, State produced something that managed to embody everything I'd want the New Games Journalism to be. It's by a gentleman who works under the name of Always Black, and is entitled "Bow, Nigger".

It's a memorable piece of writing in at least a dozen ways, but is firstly notable for reading like games journalism without being anything like a piece of any games writing you've ever read. It's going to lead to a lot of copyist features, the huge majority will vary between average and utterly rubbish. Which is fine. Innovation tends to do that. How many uninspired Hunter S. Thompson riffs have we had to sit and shudder through? What, hopefully, we'll also get are the pieces that Hunter's verve and vision inspired without being simple plagiarism.

"Bow, Nigger" lies outside the main thrust of "serious" games journalism: that is, the analytic tradition. A bad games journalist would write in imprecise generalities, talking about something's "gameplay" and urging you to "try before you buy" or similar page-filling rubbish. A good one would look at the game, take it apart, try and understand how it works and inform the reader of their findings.

"HYPER-RUNTs raise uneasy questions pertaining to the nature of art in the realm of artificial life forms, media viruses, robot psychology, and inter-species cultures. They flirt with the possibility of a "post-human" future in which the paradigm of art and civilization gives way to a hyper-biology of emergent processes. A HYPER-RUNT might be seen as an ornery cultural lifeform, an élan vital, unexpectedly rearing its head in the turmoil brewing between artist, audience, technology, and ecosystem."

When IBM submitted DES as a standard, no one outside the National Security Agency had any expertise to analyze it. The NSA made two changes to DES: It tweaked the algorithm, and it cut the key size by more than half.

The strength of an algorithm is based on two things: how good the mathematics is, and how long the key is. A sure way of breaking an algorithm is to try every possible key. Modern algorithms have a key so long that this is impossible; even if you built a computer out of all the silicon atoms on the planet and ran it for millions of years, you couldn't do it. So cryptographers look for shortcuts. If the mathematics are weak, maybe there's a way to find the key faster: "breaking" the algorithm.

The NSA's changes caused outcry among the few who paid attention, both regarding the "invisible hand" of the NSA--the tweaks were not made public, and no rationale was given for the final design--and the short key length.

UPDATE: Ian sez: This is FEEDBACK in response to Mark Frauenfelder's kudos of

Re: Zoomquilt is a fantastic zoomable painting

It is also quite impossible [in Firefox OSX] to break out of, ie. stop the endless rendering, once you get it going. Nothing short of force quotting the app, thus forcibly closing all the windows with their accumulated content, will do. I thought it may have been embedded in the Shockwave Director file, but on closer inspection of the calling page, this malfunction appears to have been DELIBERATELY disabled in display parameters block... Either way, this is clearly not a good thing.

value="swSaveEnabled='false'
swVolume='false'
swRestart='false'
swPausePlay='false'
swFastForward='false'
swContextMenu='false' ">

Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not a non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything), Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc.

26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about $60K and takes up one bookshelf.

Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing).

It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too.

A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive -- to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all the books.

Update: The Weblogs, Inc Web 2.0 blog has got Brewster's talk in MP3 as well as plenty o' pix.

For their part, the factcheck dot ORG folks say:

Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton. In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.

Update: BoingBoing reader Dave Hayden points us to an AP story which says:

Cheney cited FactCheck.com, a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands. The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits -- ” about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.

"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.

They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.

Last night, Dick Cheney said, "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight." Turns out that this isn't true. Soon after the debate, the media was given a photograph of one such meeting: Link. Well, after doing a bit of searching, I found another such meeting! In fact, I found video, took screenshots, and so on...

The human body is like a car. Take care of it, and it might even last a lifetime. If it has problems you may have to bring it to the mechanic, your doctor. Once you're there, though, the knocks and pings always seem to disappear, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do. Ideally, for treatment's sake anyway, your physician would follow you around and do an instant examination at the moment a symptom rears its ugly head. That's the idea behind UbiMon, a wireless sensor network of medical-monitoring devices that will eventually be implanted right into the body.

Determined to win the post-debate spin war on Tuesday night, the Bush campaign called on its supporters to flood the news media with quick declarations that Vice President Dick Cheney had come out ahead. Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, delivered the request in an e-mail message to supporters early Tuesday morning.

"Immediately after the debate, visit online polls, chat rooms and discussion boards and make your voice heard," he said in the note, sent to the six million supporters on the campaign's e-mail list. "People's perceptions are shaped as much by their conversations around the water cooler as by the debates themselves."

The note - which is a mirror image of one sent out by the Democrats just before the first presidential debate last week - also exhorted supporters to follow up by writing letters to their local newspapers and by calling in to radio talk shows.

"I create this music live. No multi-tracking, no playback of pre-recorded material, no sampling. The raw signal of voice and Jew’s Harp feeds into a portable bank of automated processors. Here, various programmatic, architectonic sound spaces frame rhythmic zones within which certain acoustic potentialities reside. These sonic holograms manifest my musical explorations as shape-shifted sound. Seminal acoustics are gestated into new aural forms to birth multi- dimensional soundscapes of interpenetrating pulses and harmonics."

"I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it."

When the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadcast flag mandate goes into effect next year, it will be unlawful to sell devices that can tune in digital television without imposing copy protection on the signal. Many groups have argued that the mandate will hobble people's ability to make fair use of their media. And late yesterday, nine public interest organizations -- including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge (PK), and the American Library Association (ALA) -- told the US Appeals Court, DC Circuit, that the FCC exceeded its authority by imposing the broadcast flag regime.

Described by the SF Weekly as "exquisite, lush, and positively poetic," the noirish compositions by Jill Tracy and The Malcontent Orchestra have developed a fervid following of devotees, critical acclaim, and multiple Bay Area Music Awards nominations. Their original score to F.W. Murnau's silent vampire classic "Nosferatu" has only enhanced the band's reputation of sophistication and musical virtuosity. The San Francisco Examiner described the score as "remarkable....lyrical and lovely." The Marin Independent called it "unforgettable." The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Nosferatu "deliciously macabre."

"What have you got, kid?" The old man asked me around his cigar.

A banjo!" I replied.

"I know that you little dipstick." He said rolling his eyes "You think somebody as old as I am hasn't seen a banjo before? What have you got? Play something."

I thought about trying to say something to get out of this. As I stood there fidgeting the old man shook his head, picked up his guitar and started to walk away.

Oh man, I thought to myself, I'm really blowing something here. It was an August day. The festival was being held on this big open field and the sun was just hammering down on us. I knew a total of three and a half songs. I didn't want to make a fool out of myself but I also had the feeling that if I chickened out here I was going to miss out on something. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath, moved my banjo strap a little bit on my shoulder and started to pound my way through a tune called "The White House Blues".

The old man cocked his head and nodded a little before he turned around. He stood there holding a beat up guitar while cigar smoke billowed around his head. He seemed to enjoy listening to me ruin a perfectly good song.

The problem is that bloggers and other individual and small-time message-board hosters don't have plenty of lawyers on tap to tell them whether they'll be safe in ignoring a takedown notice. The fear is that if liability shifts to message-board hosts, then the little guy will have to become overly cautious, treating every libel claim as valid, censoring his message boards willy-nilly.

In order to change the court's mind, EFF is looking for stories about small-time message-board hosters who've been threatened with legal action because of allegedly libellous remarks on their boards (we had one such incident, back in the old days).

Have you been threatened? Email Lee and help keep the net free! Mailto Link

"Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. Some said this continued into a q & a. And on the night of 9/11, when Bush appeared on television to address the nation, viewers of one television station in Quincy, Massachusetts heard another voice speaking, slowly and carefully, a few words at a time -- words which were then recited by the president. The voice was nondescript, male, definitely not the president's voice, says Quincy resident Robyn Miller. This went on for at least four sentences, she says, and then the "extra" feed was cut off."

UPDATE: I was tricked! Matt Katz sez: "RTMARK is a way to provide funding for activists in a way that mirrors the stock markets. Looks like mark frauenschadenfreude's piece means that this particular fund is going to pay out! Link

UPDATE: Brian Carnell sez that Bush's speech will not be shown on television. If that's the case, then I take back my comments about equal time for Kerry: "Okay, now you're just getting plain out there with the knee-jerk anti-Bush stuff. 'Will Kerry be given euqal time on the networks?' Um, Mark, the broadcast networks don't run campaign speeches like this live -- why would Kerry need equal time?"

The Motion Picture Association of America is demanding an NC-17 rating for South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker's new film : Team America: World Police, in part over a puppet sex scene mentioned here on BoingBoing over the weekend. Link to previous BoingBoing posts: Team America preview, tech backstory in Wired.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. I've seen the movie, and the scene, and the puppets don't even have any genitals. The scene doesn't read horny or icky, just really goddamn funny. Were someone to leak a clip online, it wouldn't be one-handed material -- unless you were a particularly desperate puppetophiliac. In which case there are far more explicit destinations for your type, anyway.

This is particularly tough for Stone and Parker, because the filmmakers are contractually obligated to deliver an R film to the studio. In related news, Paramount announces that the film will be sneak-previewed for a one-day-only release in 800 US theaters on October 9, followed by its previously scheduled wide release on October 15.

Quoth the film's producer, Scott Rudin, in the LA Times:

"There's nothing we're asking for that hasn't appeared in other R-rated movies, and our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show them doing, all they'd get is splinters," Rudin said.

Update: Reuters reports that film has been granted an "R" rating by the MPAA, pending scene modifications. Link

Short form: The rise of online distribution and its unlimited shelf space is leading to a dramatic shift in the entertainment business from hit-driven economics to niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences. The interesting work is now in finding way to push demand down the Long Tail.

LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He started Wikipedia.com, a Web site functioning as both a free encyclopedia and a wiki community, which allows users to add information to posted articles. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five.

Wikipedia was started on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and a few enthusiastic English-language collaborators.

BoingBoing reader Nick Brogna, who joins me in saluting our alien overlords adds, "It's rather amusing that, aside from the part about him, er, founding Wikipedia, the other lines have been copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article on him."

Update (03-06-2005): Joktan (Joe) Kwiatkowski says:

Xeni: I am the journalist that you referenced in your blog entry for October 05, 2004 titled "Lyndon LaRouche founded Wikipedia?" -- The issue was over this portion of my story on the LaRouche political action committee:

"LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He started Wikipedia.com, a Web site functioning as both a free encyclopedia and a wiki community, which allows users to add information to posted articles. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five."

The change was done by a copy editor at our newspaper without explanation, and not myself. This was the correct form:

"LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five, according to Wikipedia.com, a free online encyclopedia."

As you can see, there is absolutely no way that anyone could have confused a reference to Wikipedia.com with that of an individual founding the web site. That editor had personal problems and was known for changing information without telling others. She also had conflicts with other editors, and I was not the only person she affected. She is no longer at The Lantern.

This was an extremely sensitive issue for me, since it was the first time I had submitted an article for The Lantern, and I was unfairly characterized as inaccurate.

Stories at newspapers go through the hands of different editors before they are printed on paper. However, I understand that not many people know this, and therefore it is easier to ridicule the writer rather than investigate the issue.

You also said that a reader of yours, Nick Brogna, observed that lines from the Wikipedia article on LaRouche were copied “verbatim,” which also is unfair and inaccurate. I paraphrased information from the article and I also attributed it in my original copy, as you can read above, but because the editor changed it, people were not able to see this.

"(The rocket's) commercialization will have the effect of familiarizing people with space research," said HASTIC, which is selling the product.

The Jhai PC, meanwhile, appears to have exposed an odd little niche. There appears to be quite a few places on the earth which are tantalizingly close to Net connections and telephony, but have no electricity, no cellphone coverage, and no landlines. Think of it as the developing world's equivalent of the last-mile problem.

Parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, although unlikely to get electricity or telephony, are within ten miles of the IP network built out for the DRC's university system. Again, the villagers there want to stay in contact with the extensive ex-pat network that war-torn countries inevitably create, as well as improve their finances. A Jhai PC network seems like it may be the most affordable way to do this. There's a project, led by a Congolese graduate working out of South Carolina, using funding raised by from the Congolese themselves, to build this network.

Hey Jonathan, why did Sun need to steal Kodak's precious intellectual property - and if you didn't, perhaps, having experienced the wrong end of US patent law, you can reconsider your position on software patents?

He has two recent essays available from his blog, which he describes thusly:

The first talks about terror threat warnings -- both the color-coded kind and the more specific ones -- and how they're both an ineffective security countermeasure and a political tool. It appeared in a magazine called "The Rake."

The second (published today in the "International Herald Tribune") discusses RFID chips in future passports, and how that endangers the security of people who carry them. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing them for both American citizens and foreigners, and the only possible reason I can think of is that they want surreptitious access to identity information.

Juan Valdez has his name and likeness on a bunch of new Cafes, one of which just opened in NY. I went down there today and took some pictures and did a write up on my impression. I braved the front lines in the war on Starbucks to bring you this special report. Enjoy!

In this clip (wmv), a wonderful bit of video from a camera in Peter Clay's two-staged Quantum Leap rocket. A few seconds into the flight, the fins appear to warp and distort. There's a raging debate over whether this was an optical illusion or an actual spasm in the fiberglass as the model plows through the "sound barrier."

It's been almost six years now since I started working on what became the company I sold to the company we started talking to two years ago because of the product we launched five years ago. Six years is a long time. Or a little. Depending. For me, it's a little under 20% of this life on Earth. And it's the time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What should I do next?

This was spurred by a longstanding BBC News aversion to linking to external news sources, something out of keeping with the character of the Web.

News Online doesn't engage with its users, it doesn't provide tools that allow me, the licence payer, to slice and dice their stories, and by refusing to link from its body text, it fails to understand how hypertext works.

Also, with its conservative link policy (I can't show you an example of the news stories where the tech described above is working, because the links get removed after 2 days, because they might break), that only connects the BBC to established brands, it snubs the wider web, the great teeming mass of creativity. Patrician is not authoritative. Aloof is not respected. Conservative and fearful is not engaging. The gap between the BBC's utterly laudable self image and ambitions and delivery could not be any clearer than at News Online.

Finally, by not really allowing user interaction or commenting, News Online forces that debate and activity away from its site, and out onto the wild wild web...

* retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out "Capitalised Phrases" and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it's turned into a hyperlink

* uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who's talking about the story from the story itself

* as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I'm not fixing it.

* because that's how links should be, my links are underlined.

* reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace.

This article analyses the rhetoric of "protection" ubiquitous in Canadian discussions of copyright policy, and identifies among the various uses of the term both a problematic assumption that protection is or should be the primary function of copyright, and overblown claims about copyright’s power to protect Canadian culture and creators. These "common sense" ideas, fostered by rights–holder lobbies, emerge out of a peculiar Canadian history of cultural nationalism(s), but they may not promote the interests of Canadians. Ironically, while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital. I explore a proposal to license educational Internet use, endorsed by parliamentary committee, as one example of the relationship between protection rhetoric and policy development. By casting the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity, copyright policy developers in Canada are gravely misunderstanding and threatening Canadians’ use of this medium. The participation of Canadians in national and global interaction is crucial to the Canadian public interest, and must not be forgotten in the rush to protection.

Such is Disney's faith that China's communist youth will embrace the likes of Mickey Mouse and Sleeping Beauty, the company is doing little to dampen speculation that another theme park will eventually be built in Shanghai.

"There's very little doubt in my mind that there will be a market further north in China for a second Disneyland," said Mr Rasulo.

UPDATE:Art sez: "Here's a picture I found on Flickr's feed. It's all about the Russian Olympic team, with Cheburashka as the mascot, all torn up and thrown away in a field."

Before SS1 took off this morning, its designer Burt Rutan said he hoped it would top the 354,200 foot altitude reached 40 years ago by X-15 pilot Joe Walker, also out of Mojave. The X-15 program was a joint NASA/Air Force effort preceding the space shuttle program (NASA photos, videos). And SpaceShipOne did indeed beat that record, climbing to an unprecedented 377,591 feet, then returning to earth in a smooth arc.

At last week's Mojave SS1 launch, I met Richard Russell and USAF Major Greg Frazier, aerospace historians who run an organization called West Mojave Aviation Archaeology. They work to preserve crash sites like the one where a later X-15 pilot, Maj. Michael J. Adams (bio link) lost his life in 1967 during an X-15 research flight. He was the first American astronaut to die on a space mission. Adams' fatal mission was the 191st flight in the X-15 program, and his first suborbital mission. His aircraft crashed after re-entering earth's atmosphere. The X-15 program was canceled the following year.

Frazier led an effort to create a monument to Adams at the X-15 crash site, unveiled in May, 2004 (Link). They're now working to get some of the ship debris into the Smithsonian Air and Space museum, and trying to raise awareness about these sites to protect them from vandalism.

"Florida got all the recogniation for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and the Antelope Valley here is more known for aircraft achievements -- but X-15 was a spacecraft, so there is some space flight history here," Frazier told me, "Now, with the advent of Space Ship One, there's a whole lot of new history out here."

Link to today's "Day to Day" show on XPrize and X15 history, Link to last week's NPR segment: "First X-Prize Flight a Success for SpaceShipOne", with some of Jason DeFillippo's photos.

See also John Schwartz's fine Xprize/SpaceShipOne coverage in today's New York Times (Link), Dan Brekke's items in today's Wired News (Link), and on-ship footage from the webcast (Link). Also: The New Yorker has a great piece on Rutan this week, but it's not online.

And finally: BoingBoing reader Kevin T. Keith says, "Check out Google today - their logo includes a caricature of SpaceShip One in orbit (being greeted by little green men)."

Image: shot by BoingBoing pal Wayne Correia (background link, email link), who says, "It was so beautiful to watch it shooting straight up from 47,000 to 370,000 ft. when the pilot ignited the rocket. When the craft landed, Paul Allen, Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson went out in a pickup truck to the tarmac so they could greet the pilot and tow it back to their hangar... the three of them were just hanging off the back of the tailgate with the craft in tow, the pilot standing on the roof of the aircraft holding an American flag which he'd just taken into space." Link to Wayne's full-size photo.

Make News No. 2

October 4, 2004

==============

Welcome to the second issue of the Make magazine newsletter. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you to suggest a name for this newsletter. Dozens of people replied -- thanks!

Here are some of the suggestions that came in:

Makefile

Modifications

make /usr/share/hack

Create It

Done Deal

DoItNow

Make it Mine

Makers

Make-up-date

The Make a Cake NL

MAKE: The News

Re:Make

We had a lot of good submissions to choose from, but our favorite was "Make News." Matthew Morrisson was the first to submit it, so he wins the prize -- a title of his choice from O'Reilly's Hacks Series. Congratulations, Matthew!

***

In the first issue of Make News, I also asked you to send in your ideas for Make. A bunch of you wrote back asking for writers' guidelines. Here they are:

Make Submission Guidelines

Make is a do-it-yourself technology magazine written by makers. When you write something for Make, use your voice. Tell us the story behind your project.

There are four types of content in Make: Projects, Features, Reviews, and Everything Else. (If you have an idea for something that doesn't fit in one of the first three areas but is still related to do-it-yourself technology, we'd like to hear about it, too -- hence the Everything Else category.)

We pay $100 for a review. Payment for other types of content will be negotiated.

To pitch an idea, email it to Mark Frauenfelder (markf@oreilly.com).

1. Projects

If you've made something cool (or have come up with a cool hack or tweak for something) and want to show other people how to make one, we'd like to publish it in our projects section. (Note: We're interested in hearing about things you've already made, not things you are just thinking about making.)

Remember this when you are writing for Make: you're the readers' coach. Think of your reader as a smart person who doesn't necessarily know what you know. Imagine the questions he or she might have about your project. Explain everything they need to know to recreate the thing you're writing about.

We have two kinds of projects. One is called "DIY." This section is for shorter projects (like swapping a battery out of an iPod, or installing open source software on your TiVo.) DIY pieces run between 200 and 750 words. When writing a DIY, keep it conversational. These are very much like explaining to a friend how you did something. Describe difficulties you encountered, and suggest workarounds. Take digital photos of each step along the way. Photos should be at least 2 Megapixels.

The second kind of project is a "Major Project." These are more complex projects that would require a reader at least several hours, if not days, to complete. If we accept your proposal for a Major Project, you will need to submit the article in a format that fits our template. We'll provide you with further instructions.

2. Features

We have several sections with articles about interesting things made by people or groups of people. "Made on Earth" is a section with large photos of projects and their makers, along with 200-word stories about them. "Maker" is a longer profile of a dedicated maker-of-cool-things. And we also have 600- to 1,000-word articles about groups, companies, clubs, and technologies relating to DIY projects.

3. Reviews

Is there some gadget, tool, web site, newsletter, instructional video, book, magazine, CD-ROM, or instrument you already own and love? Then send your review to "Toolbox," Make's recommendation section.

Reviews should be approximately 300 words, and be written in the first person. Think more "recommendation" and "experience" when you write these than "review." We want to hear about your involvement with it.

The old Wired guidelines for reviews went like this: "Write your review. Then write us a letter explaining why we should devote space to your item. Throw away your review and send us the letter." That's the way to do it.

4. Everything Else

Do you have an idea involving DIY technology, but doesn't fit in any of the above categories? Is it interesting? Let us know about it. Tell us about the time your dad made a homebrew computer based on the Apple II schematic. Tell us the funny story about the motorized surfboard you made. What's the strangest experience you've had making something? If it's surprising or funny, we'll run it.

***

Remember, the first issue of Make is coming in January, so start clearing off your workbench!

Best regards,

Mark Frauenfelder
Editor in Chief
Make
markf@oreilly.com

One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

UPDATE:Tom sez: Anti-matter is easier to come by than one might think. 22Sodium isotope naturally emits positrons and this property is used in many nuclear metrology applications (PET scans, positron annihilation spectroscopy, etc.). So a bit of isotope table salt might fit nicely in Mark's ring. Link to PDF file

"I try to work with material accessible to kids," she said. "All the guts are filled with what would be inside Beanie Babies."

Combining a childlike stuffed animal with the gore of intestines bursting out appealed to the artist....

According to Black's artist statement, "Dead Pets for Sale" was the embodiment of her upbringing -- she said she grew up in a violent atmosphere -- and a viable truth she learned that can pertain to all subjects: that the grotesque can be beautiful and vice versa.

(Researcher R. Andrew) Holbrook noted that some observers have been especially concerned about programs like The Daily Show, which has elements of news and entertainment. Some believe that such shows might be confusing to viewers.

“That’s not the real issue,” Holbrook said. “Our results suggest that people don’t have neat dividing lines in their brains between entertainment and political news.

“People go back and forth between the two rather easily. That doesn’t mean they don’t know the difference between entertainment and reality. But they find they can use examples from television programs to illustrate points in real life.”

Boing Boing doesn't believe in linking policies. They're dangerous, have no basis in law, and they break the norms that make the Web possible. They're a wicked, stupid idea.

That said, if you believe in linking policies -- that is, if you believe that people who make websites should be able to control who links to those sites and how -- then have we got a policy for you:

No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever.

Billing Microsoft as the good guys and Apple the villains of the piece - at least as far as corporate America, rather than users, is concerned, Ballmer said: "We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."

"Part of the reason people steal music is money, but some of it is that the DRM stuff out there has not been that easy to use. We are going to continue to improve our DRM, to make it harder to crack, and easier, easier, easier, easier, to use," he said.

We've been foiled at every turn by the maximalists, the movies studios and the trademark offices, the patent-cops and the recording industry lobbyists and the IP lawyers' associations.

Which is why this is such good news: at the general session of the WIPO in Geneva this weekend, the Assembly as adoped a decision to put development and the promotion of creativity front-and-center in its goals. That means that from now on, WIPO isn't an organization that blindly supports more IP no matter what, but rather one that seeeks to improve the world by whatever tool is best suited to the job.

Jamie Love and the Consumer Project on Technology gets the credit for this: they were the ones who started this fight, and they've been the ones who led it all along.

This is the day the tide turns.

Bearing in mind the internationally agreed development goals, including those in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, the Programme of Action for the Least Developed Countries for the Decade 2001-2010, the Monterey Consensus, the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action of the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society and the Sao Paulo Consensus adopted at UNCTAD XI;

(1) The General Assembly welcomes the initiative for a development agenda and notes the proposals contained in document WO/GA/31/11.

(2) The General Assembly decides to convene inter-sessional intergovernmental meetings to examine the proposals contained in document WO/GA/31/11, as well as additional proposals of Members States. To the extent possible, the meetings will be convened in conjunction with the 2005 session of the Permanent Committee on Cooperation for Development Related to Intellectual Property. The meetings, open to all Member States, will prepare a report by July 30, 2005, for the consideration of the next General Assembly. WIPO-accredited IGOs and NGOs are invited to participate as observers in the meetings.

(3) The International Bureau shall undertake immediate arrangements in order to organize with other relevant multilateral organizations including UNCTAD, WHO, UNIDO and WTO, a joint international seminar on Intellectual Property and Development, open to the participation of all stakeholders, including NGOs, civil society and academia.

An online petition calling for Chapman to remain in prison for the rest of his natural life has been signed by nearly 2,000 fans - and includes angry threats to Chapman's life should he be freed.