Sony recently learned that you are selling a case for carrying an iPod personal stereo that is made from a WALKMAN tape player. The product is being offered at your website at www.retropod.com.

Your use of casings for such a purpose is a clear infringement of the SONY and WALKMAN marks because it is deceptive. Consumers likely will be misled and deceived into believing that Sony is somehow connected with the iPod personal stereo when in fact it is not. (and now the important part) Moreover, they will be misled into thinking that Sony is backward in its design of products and is going away from miniaturization, as the size of the tape player housing is quite large by today's standards.

As Lessig notes, Disney is right -- the Pan books are public domain. But as Jason Schultz demonstrates, the temptation to wax neener-neener here is nigh-insurmountable ("When will Disney stop stealing from the public domain? I mean really, it's just like taking a CD from a record store without paying for it... except that the record store owner is dead... and well, the store is really the compendium of human knowledge.. and the CD is part of our collective cultural history. Whatever. Theft is Theft, right?")

This weekend sees the UK premiere of a film about Barrie's life, "Finding Neverland" -- starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Dustin Hoffman. The hospital will receive royalties from book excerpts portrayed in the film.

But the hospital charity says is getting nothing from "Peter and the Starcatchers" -- which has been on the New York Times best seller lists, has had an extensive author tour and has its own Web site. They say the book has been published without its permission.

A spokesman for the hospital told CNN that Great Ormond Street held the copyright to Peter Pan in the United States until 2023 -- although it runs out in EU countries in 2007 -- and said: "We are considering our options."

Disney, meanwhile, has insisted that Peter Pan is out of copyright in the United States.

"The copyright to the J.M. Barrie stories expired in the U.S. prior to 1998, the effective date of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, and thus were ineligible for any extension of their term," Disney said in a statement to the Daily Telegraph.

'm very grateful to the people who are bidding on eBay for two chances to be a character in the book, and three chances to be its patron. But I realize a lot of people can't afford to bid. So I'm offering a drawing: You or a character of your choice, a person or a pet, now have the chance to appear for free in a cameo in the novel.

OK, but what does it all mean? BoingBoing reader Sameer says, "Dhishoom is like saying 'Biff,' 'bang,' 'wham,' or 'pow' -- Also the most common soundtrack dub during Bollywood fistfight scenes. Ususally used as "Dhishoom-Dhisoom.'"

BoingBoing reader Hal points us to Salon's coverage (Link), and describes the interview/buttkicking alternately: "Tucker Carlson gets his ass handed to him on a platter -- without falafel to sweeten the taste."

In Salon, Charles Taylor says:

I've heard people talk about "The Daily Show" as an oasis of sanity, a public service. I couldn't agree more. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was another public service. He went on and acted as if the show's purpose really was to confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling. Given a chance to say absolutely what he thought, Stewart took it. He accomplished what almost never happens on television anymore: He made the dots come alive.

Also, Ifilm has a stream here: Link

"It's available at Illegal Art. Scroll down to the Paul Harvey Oswald entry." Link

We were wondering why there wasn't slashdot for politics. Could it because there are already really good political blogs? Well, we think it's about time to use Slashdot's really good format where the efforts of a whole community go to make really good news stories. Thanks, Slashdot, for blazing this trail.

We have good reason to think that filesharing is participatory culture in the making. And that's what Downhill Battle is really about. Our next step is to hit the politics industry and we hope we can hit it big. We're working on getting something out the door that's participatory culture for politics; the same way that the current music industry isn't what music is about, participatory politics is not just about electoral politics. Our bread and butter will be housed at ParticipatoryPolitics.org in the future.

Mr Buchanan told the Australasian Sleep Association how a patient of his, who was a respectable middle-aged woman with a steady partner, would leave the house while sleepwalking and have sex with strangers. The woman was totally unaware of her double life until her partner became suspicious and found her engaged in the act. "He was aware of some sleepwalking and there was circumstantial evidence, including the unexplained presence of condoms around the house," Mr Buchanan told the conference.

Here's a screen grab of the page, since it's sure to be pulled soon. Click for enlargement. Link

I'm happy to announce that the BBS Documentary I talked about so much is now in pre-order on the page. If people order before the 10th of November, they can send me a paragraph that will be included in the 3-DVD set. Also, I'm having a "beta premiere" where I show it to folks before going in for the final round of editing. That's happening November 6th AND 7th (after all, there's 7 episodes) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's been a long three years!

Because of privacy policies, the library does not give out circulation records without a court order. When the FBI got a grand jury subpoena, the library filed a motion to quash it -- citing the rights of all people who use the library.

"Like the right to read and to read the material of one's choice without fear that someone will come around with questions about why you chose that book," said Garrett.

The FBI withdrew the subpoena, reserving the right to file it again.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office says they are not permitted to discuss anything that involves the grand jury.

If the feds had demanded the records under the Patriot Act, the library would have had to hand them over without question and without help from the courts.

Norway! Land of difficult spelling.
Hiding your beauty behind strange vowels.
Land of long nights, short days, and dots over 'O's.
Ruminating majestic reindeers
Tread warily on ice floes
Ever aware of what happened to the
Titanic.
One day I will sojourn to your shores
I live in the middle of England
But!
Norway! My soul resides in your watery fiords fyords fiiords Inlets.

As the years went by and Adrian aged, I found myself more and more engrossed in his life. Townsend, his author, walks us along a tightrope balanced over torture comedy (a la Fawlty Towers) and genuine pathos through the first five books:

1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters
2. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
3. True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend
4. Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
5. Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years

Book six is much, much better, though. Townsend is appalled by Blair's leadership and the invasion of Iraq, but rather than turning this into an anti-war manifesto, Townsend creates a convulsively funny running gag around it: Adrian has cancelled a holiday in Cyprus due to Blair's warnings that Saddam's WMDs could target the island, but his travel agent won't refund his £57.10 deposit until evidence of the WMDs is put forward.

I don't think I've enjoyed an Adrian Mole book so much since the original two. There's a lot of real pain and hardship in this story, not played for yuks at all, but whenever the tale gets too heavy, Townsend busts out one of Adrian's characteristic, tight-assed priggish observations about the world around him and just floors me.

A new Adrian Mole book is like a welcome letter from an old, beloved, frustrating friend. Link

In an effort to raise funds for The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, DisneyAuctions.com is holding a "spirited" event that will allow the winning bidder to receive a personalized "tombstone" in the finale graveyard scene of the attraction with a humorous epitaph (inspired by the lucky bidder's interests and hobbies) written by the team at Walt Disney Imagineering.

But wait. There's more. The winning bidder will also receive a one-of-a-kind miniature replica of the tombstone and a certificate officially recognizing him/her as an Honorary resident of the Haunted Mansion; and the successful bidder and a guest will be spirited away from his or her hometown to Disneyland in time for a midnight "burial" ceremony on Thursday, October 28, officially placing the tombstone in the graveyard of the Haunted Mansion.

When I see them in the river -- the 40-foot, olive-green boats -- all I can think of is Apocalypse Now. When, I wondered, would Captain Willard climb aboard and motor up the Mekong Delta on his way to terminate Colonel Kurtz's command with "extreme prejudice."

The surroundings even smacked of the cinematic version of Vietnam, muddy river banks broken up with patches of stiff, thin reeds, fisherman in small wooden boats plumbing the opaque green waters for tonight's meal.

But this is obviously a long way from that war zone. Twenty-nine years and a few thousand miles. We are on the banks of the Euphrates River in Iskandaria, Iraq. In moments we will be pushing off into a steady current and an uncommonly serene Iraqi dusk.

Update: BoingBoing reader Darryl says, "No to quibble, but the Satellite was a 'Gay' media and property development group that floated on the Australian Stock Exchange on September 23 1999. They went into administration (rather like bankruptcy in the US) in November 2000 and the court cases continue to this day. Here's an overview: Link. Business press comments "back in the day": Link. And the court case continues: Link."

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows.  It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into "right brain mode", and really focus on a problem. 

Unlike face-to-face conversation and 'phone calls, people can communicate via email without both paying attention at the same time.  You pick the moments at which you pay attention to email.  But many people leave their email client running continuously.  This is the biggest baddest reason why email hurts your productivity.  If you leave your email client running, it means anyone anytime can interrupt what you're doing.  Essentially they pick the moments at which you pay attention.  (Even some random spammer who is sending you a crappy ad for a get-rich scheme.)  This is bad.

In their study, the researchers first determined the Coke versus Pepsi preference of 67 volunteer subjects, both by asking them and by subjecting them to blind taste tests. They then gave the subjects sips of one drink or the other as they scanned the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this widely used imaging technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio signals are used to measure blood flow in regions of the brain, with such flow indicating brain activity levels. In the experiments, the sips were preceded by either "anonymous" cues of flashes of light or pictures of a Coke or Pepsi can.

fa·la·phil·i·a (n.)

1. Obsessive fascination with ground spiced chickpeas shaped into balls and fried.
2. Erotic attraction to or sexual contact with garbanzo beans, coriander, and cumin.
3. An abnormal fondness for being in the presence of middle eastern foods. Also called taboulehmania, hummulingus.
4. Sexual contact with or erotic desire for a falafel.

The technique uses specialized software to detect slight variations, or "intrinsic signatures," of printed characters, revealing subtle differences from one printer to another. Even printers that are the same model have slight flaws and variations in their mechanical systems. These variations result in subtly different characters.

"We have observed variability from printer to printer within a single model, " (researcher Jan) Allebach said. "That’s because for a company to make printers all behave exactly the same way would require tightening the manufacturing tolerances to the point where each printer would be too expensive for consumers.

Dad lights up his pipe and starts talking about nocturnal emissions.

DAD: One of these nights before too long you may find some of it (semen) passes off in your sleep . . .

BOB: (worriedly) But Dad, that's wrong, isn't it?

DAD: No, son, it's not wrong . . . No, it's true that to waste the seed deliberately - to do anything knowingly to make it come is a very grave sin. Because God designed that secretion in a man for one purpose. That is to be, well, like one of his raw materials in the creation of a new life . . . Wet dreams are different. Sometimes the supply of semen becomes too great before a man is married and these dreams are sort of a safety valve . . .

BOB: But Dad, why do fellas get these feelings before they get married?

Dad responds with a metaphor popular in the softcore films of Zalmon King. That is to say that God made sex as necessary as food for survival. Dad adds that sometimes this procreative desire inconveniently appears before the wedding vows are taken and the bloodtests are registered with the county seat.

UPDATE David sez: " Here are four mp3's from the Sex Instruction LP that you recently wrote about.

How Babies are Born

Girls and MenstruationThe Problem with Growing Boys (which you quoted)

The Marriage Union

The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.

Link to archived radio program. This NPR.org website feature includes three streamable songs from the duo, as well as some photos I took while we were cruising around in the ice cream truck.

Here is a more complete gallery of the images I shot during that most unusual of LA street adventures: Link.

Shown here: Shakespeare looks out the back of the multi-colored dub reggae bus (Link to full-size).

"You will notice how exceptional the drawings are - giving evidence to the premise that children learn so much more when the topic is of interest to them."

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

Wil has written a very good memoir of his journey to the present day, called Just a Geek (my blurb: "Here's the gimmick: Wil isn't *just* a geek. He's a geek who's come to nerdvana -- the Paramount lot where they dropped the first Trekbomb and forever changed the world -- to tell us that it's not all it's cracked up to be. He's also a geek who can *write*. Finally, he's a geek who's unafraid to sit at the keyboard and open a vein: there's a lot of scorching honesty mixed in with these convulsively funny memoirs."), published by O'Reilly.

Wil recently appeared at the Gnomedex convention and read an hour-long excerpt from Just a Geek, and the ITConversations people have put it online. Link (Thanks, Wil!)

Indymedia harddrives have been returned to Rackspace. Yesterday we received an email from a yahoo address that we could not confirm, but now we know for sure they are being returned. We are requesting that they do not boot them, and they are being treated as hacked/infected, we will dd the drives and then perform analysis on them. We still have no idea what the deal is:

We received the drives for these servers back this morning, they are currently in the servers.

Jeff:

I know that you have gone through more than I can possibly understand. I was just told that the court order is being complied with and your servers in London will be online at 5pm GMT.

I will pass along anymore information that becomes available and that I am allowed to.

Again, I do not have the words to understand nor express the feelings and emotions you have endured since this began.

Regards,

Jason Carter
Business Development Consultant

The telepathine playlist is donated music and performance by invited artists. It uses the radio.blog system to stream the audio as compressed Flash files. Most if not all of the telepathine artists have their featured works available as micropay or free downloads, accessed through their biography pages below. Mperia is telepathine's preferred stage for mp3 preview and purchase.

If the graphics throughout the website (and on-site at the RESfest event) look familiar, that's because they're the work of often-BoingBoinged artists Kozyndan. Remember that amazing panoramic poster they did for the SARS Art Project? Link to The Yum-cha Militia (My Mother thought she had SARS, but it turned out to be PMS) (buy a print online for $25! I have one on my office wall.)

"A friend of mine noticed that the giveaway electric toothbrushes in boxes of Kellogg's Rice Krispies breakfast cereal can double as vibrators. Dunno if they're being given away in the States, but in Canada you can't escape them. She took pictures; they're blurry, but the point is clear [particularly when the toothbrushy half of the two-part device is removed].

"This car runs off hydrogen that the vehicle itself produces using water and solar power. No big whoop, right? Car manufacturers have allegedly been exploring this technology for years. However, THIS particular car was built by high school students. Unreal!"

Hours after Bill O'Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below you'll find a copy of Andrea Mackris's complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O'Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters.

Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O'Reilly's more steamy soliloquies. For example, we direct you to his Caribbean shower fantasies [Ed. note: said tropical fantasies include use of falafel as a marital aid -- last graf on this page: "... I would take your other hand with the falafel thing and put it on your pussy." Step aside, Atkins Porn! ] .

While we suggest reading the entire document, TSG will point you to interesting sections on a Thailand sex show, Al Franken, and the climax of one August 2004 phone conversation. (22 pages)

[Judge] [New York Attorney General] Spitzer said the sale of the silver dollars — emblazoned with the World Trade Center towers on one side and the planned Freedom Tower on the other — is a fraud. He's investigating whether the silver actually came from the ruins of the twin towers.

Spitzer said the National Collector's Mint, based in Port Chester, N.Y., falsely claims that the coins engraved with "In God We Trust" are legally authorized silver dollars.

Spitzer said the coins, produced by a Wyoming company called SoftSky Inc., are advertised as nearly pure silver when they're only silver-plated.

UPDATE Here's an excellent Wikipedia article about the coin.

The microbe is also extremely tolerant of magnesium chloride. According to (University of Groningen scientist Henk) Bolhuis, this makes it a model organism for studying what life might be like in extraterrestrial corners of the solar system, such as the magnesium-rich brines on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

The European Patent office in Munich had granted a patent to Monsanto on May 21, 2003. The patent covered wheat exhibiting a special baking quality that Monsanto claimed to be its invention.

However, Greenpeace proved in its opposition that the wheat variety was bred by Indian farmers for improving its baking quality and it was not a genetically-engineered invention as claimed by Monsanto.

He suggests that there are virtual economy models that are resistant to eBaying, and which (talking to game devs) "may be suited better to your property, especially if externalizing virtual object markets will be harmful to the health and/or profitability of your product." He outlines one instantiation of such a model for an "eBay-resistant economy, designed for children to trade scarce virtual objects without fear of being cheated by smarter, craftier (adult) traders who are generating a lifestyle-supporting income from eBay-ing the kids’ poor trades."

"Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems declined to participate in this discussion."

"Some time back, one of the Boingers posted an article about the environmental effects of airplane traffic. To further support this article that may or may not exist, I submit today's Astonomy Picture of the Day that shows plane contrails like scars on the land. Link.

And a "contrail count for kids" program over the next two days: Link."

NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994.

Vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers was examined. Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /[open aye]/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex. These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women. They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.

Update: Dana sez: "Bailey is the author of a book titled _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, about transsexuals. Aside from the fact that he was sleeping with some of his research subjects (usually considered a bit of a conflict of interest), the guy has some rather... prejudiced ideas about gender and sexuality. He seems to be associated with a group called the Human Biodiversity Institute -- which sounds reasonable enough, until you find out it's a group of right-wing Eugenicists who argue for things like a 'gay germ' and support the guy who wrote _The Bell Curve_, which 'proved' that blacks are dumber than whites.

"There's an enormous clearinghouse of info about Bailey, the problems with his general theories, and the formal research misconduct (sex for SRS recommendation letters, frex) and ethics violation charges (practicing clinical psychology without a license) which are being investigated as I type."

Raph's intention here is to write a Understanding Comics for computer games: an accessible, lay-oriented text that explains, finally, what this medium means. Why are grownups playing games? What makes a game fun? What do games do to the way twe perceive the world? What do games do to the way we change the world?

Charlie Stross and I have been tossing around an idea for a novel set in a Massive Multiplayer Online game, revolving around the virtual-property-rights debate; Theory of Fun made me rethink big chunks of that book.

Theory of Fun is available for pre-order on Amazon now, with the pub-date listed as November. If you're a gamer, this should be your Xmas prezzie to your non-gamer friends; if you're not a gamer, this is the book for the gamer in your life.

In recent years, much study has been centered on gender differences in particular. One researcher in the UK, Simon Baron-Cohen, has concluded that there are “systematizing brains” and “empathizing brains.” He identifies extreme systematizing brains as being autistic, and ones just slightly less so as being those diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome. The distribution curve of systematizing brains versus empathizing brains, according to Baron-Cohen, is apparently influenced by gender. Men are more likely to have systematizing brains, and women more likely to have empathizing brains.

Gender differences have finally become acceptable to discuss without accusations of sexism. It’s important to realize that in all cases, we’re speaking in generalities, of averages. On average, females tend to have greater trouble with certain types of spatial perception—for example, visualizing the cross section of an arbitrary shape that has been rotated to a different facing. Conversely, males tend to have greater trouble with language skills—doctors have long known that it takes longer for boys to become verbally proficient.

It speaks of the power of videogames that they can actually change this. After all, the equation is both nature and nurture. There has been research showing that if women who have trouble with spatial rotation tests are given a videogame that encourages them to practice rotating objects and matching particular configurations in 3-d, that not only will they master the spatial perception necessary, but the results will be permanent.

According to Baron-Cohen’s theory, there are people who have high abilities in both systematizing and empathizing. One would surmise that these people tend to go into the arts, which are both heavily systematic and also require a high degree of empathy. Baron-Cohen postulates that having high abilities in both is a contraindicated survival trait, since it means that they are almost certainly not as good at either as the “specialists.” This may explain all those consumptive poets dying in garrets.

Lynch, 31, is one of a handful of iPod owners using the device to transmit FM radio stations from their car. He uses a bumper sticker on the back of his fender that reads "iPod @ 89.1 FM" to let passers-by know how to tune in...

"I put on some profanity. Comedy, R-rated comedy, Chris Rock's early stuff. Then I called [his friend] up on his cell phone and he was two cars behind me. I said, 'You're not going to believe this, but somebody up here is broadcasting swear words! Tune to 89.1FM.' He turns to the station and he's like, 'I can't believe I'm hearing this!' It was a big joke for a few minutes."

Once a friend suggested using a bumper sticker to advertise the frequency on which he was transmitting, Lynch was off and running. He became his own mini-pirate radio station.

"For four car-lengths around me was this little bubble of — me! Whatever I wanted to listen to! So I could be listening to Chris Rock talking about dating and meeting women in a club and then the next song go straight to Neil Sadaka."

I've gotten a couple of spam messages in the past month from some English teachers in Hong Kong. They're asking for people in the West to help back them up on a point about English grammar. Apparently, English grammar books available in Hong Kong misrepresent the rule about when you should use the present perfect and when you should use the simple past. The teachers sending the spam know the rule, but their students seem to consider the textbooks better authority than the teachers -- and won't listen when the teachers try to teach the correct rule. So the teachers decided to send out a spam appeal for native English speakers to try to get the correct rule into a publication so it would be persuasive to Hong Kong students learning English as a second language.

In my view, the present perfect is forbidden when the verb is qualified by an adverbial referring to a time period, except if the time period includes the present.

First, the entertainment industry is plainly mounting a frontal attack on the Betamax doctrine, seeking a radical rewrite of secondary liability principles.

Often described as the Magna Carta of the technology industry, the Betamax doctrine makes it clear that innovators need not fear ruinous litigation from the entertainment industry so long as their inventions are "merely capable of substantial noninfringing uses." In today's petition, the entertainment industry urges the Court to reverse that established rule and impose on innovators a "legal duty either to have designed their services differently to prevent infringing uses, or to take reasonable steps going forward to do so." Of course, on that view, Sony's Betamax VCR would never have seen the light of day, since Sony could have designed it differently (in fact, the movie studios suggested back in 1978 that Sony implement a "broadcast flag" system!) or modified it after Disney complained.

Second, the entertainment industry appears to think that it can treat the Supreme Court and Congress interchangeably in pushing for its preferred re-write of copyright law.

Having just been rebuffed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Induce Act, the entertainment oligopolists now demand that the Supreme Court rewrite the Copyright Act for them. The entertainment industry lawyers think this case is about how "principles of secondary liability apply to the unprecedented phenomenon of Internet services."

The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation's intellectual property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a "widespread" problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.

In an extensive report released Tuesday, senior department officials endorsed a pair of controversial copyright bills strongly favored by the entertainment industry that would criminalize "passive sharing" on file-swapping networks and permit lawsuits against companies that sell products that "induce" copyright infringement.

Subject: FW: Terrorist Attack on US Soil is Imminent Importance: High
LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE

At the meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) that was held yesterday in Houston, US Attorney Michael Shelby informed the group that a terrorist attack of 09/11/01 proportions was going to be carried out on US soil within the next 6 weeks.

Mr. Shelby stated that on 09/13/04, US Attorney General John Ashcroft had a conference call with all 93 US Attorneys, an event which is extremely rare. The US Attorneys were informed that without a doubt an attack was going to be perpetrated in the US within the next 6 weeks, prior to the elections. Mr. Shelby urgently requested that all law enforcement be aware of any situation that may be out of the ordinary and report the activity immediately. Mr. Shelby also requested that we get the word out to patrol officers and detectives to talk to their informants and report anything odd or remotely suspicious. Mr. Shelby ended this warning by saying that unless we get a bit of "luck" and the attack can be detected and prevented, that another attack of 9/11 scale will be carried out.

Please disseminate to all of your law enforcement contacts ASAP.

New Mexico Investigative Support Center

Direct Line: 505-541-7000
Fax: 505-541-7006

John E. Vinson, Director

Mike Outmesguine says, "I called the number at the bottom of the email and told them I'd seen this notice, and wanted to find out more about the source of the warning. A representative from the New Mexico ISC told me that they forwarded the notice along after having recieved it from the Southern District Anti-Terror Advisory Council in Houston. They gave me a contact at that organization, whom I phoned, but I only got voicemail. I've also contacted the public affairs department of my local FBI office. My question is if it is a regional notice for TX and NM, or if it's something much bigger and LA and other areas will be advised to go on notice."

And in related news, CNN reports:

A Democratic senator said he will close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, fearing a possible terrorist attack that could harm his staff or visitors.

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a "top-secret intelligence report on our national security" provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee "Based upon that information," Dayton wrote, "I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.

See also this earlier Cryptome post on a September memo warning of terror attacks, with links to earlier news coverage: Link

Networks Solutions is fucking up my livelihood. You may have noticed that some of the other Gawker sites are having problems -- weird name resolution, ad server going wonky, etc. Well it seems that Network Solutions (our internet name registrar) has decided to cancel and suspend our primary, life-giving domain Gawker.com because of a failed credit card transaction over a month ago. Not a missed payment, mind you -- we were registering a new name domain name and something went screwy (Choire probably left it on a dresser again), although their customer service never contacted us about it. In fact, we've registered two other names with them since, without issue.

So when I woke up this morning, I didn't expect to see that Gawker.com would be suspended, nor was I happy to learn that the renewal process, according to NetSol's Indian customer service rep Patricia 011, would take four days. We are now, as a company, bleeding money from our eyes because a single, unrelated credit card transaction failed. So keep that in mind if are using Network Solutions. They reserve the right to disable any of your domains if there is any random issue with your account, then drag their feet to remedy their fuck up. In the mean time, if you need to get to Gawker.com, the IP is http://67.18.39.132/. We'll get this resolved (oh ho ho) as soon as possible.

In 1999, Jim was commissioned to draw a picture of a hodag, a character from American folklore whose pseudo-scientific description is Bovinus spiritualis— a clawed, grinning ox-like creature of fearsome appearance that frequented Wisconsin and eastern parts of the United States. According to Eugene Shephard, the forester who in 1893 got the first prolonged look and whiff of the creature, the hodag had the "head of a bull, the grinning face of a giant man, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with a spear at the end." The beast subsisted on a diet of swamp things, but was known to occasionally snack on wayward lumberjacks and other unfortunates. It was also said to possess "the transmigrated soul of one of Paul Bunyan's oxen," and more obviously, a very obnoxious odor. So obnoxious that it took residents of Oneida County seven years of forest burning to purge the stink.

The day Don Simpson contributes one tenth of one percent to the world of comics what Robert Crumb has done (and continues to do) is the day one might -- MIGHT -- be tempted to take seriously rants like the ones Don's been hammering away at here.

Crumb is a private, quiet man whose prominence in the field of comics and art brings on massive, continuous, unwanted attention. He is under no goddamn obligation whatsoever to sign anyone's comics or chat with anyone, and which of his personal friends he chooses to see when and for how long is, emphatically, no one's goddamn business but his own. (Good grief!)

In fact, I would say that Don's supersonically shrill, nearly psychotic sense of entitlement vis-à-vis Crumb (carefully couched in sympathy for Crumb's jilted fans, although it's clear Simpson has just as much contempt for them as for Crumb) could be used as Exhibit A justifying Crumb's reticence.

In other words: Robert Crumb probably acts the way he does in large part to avoid assholes like Donald Simpson.

Last September I went alone on a canoe trip. On the very first day my canoe turned over in a rapid and I lost some of my equipment in the water. Fortunately, I managed to save my camping gear and my food. But I lost all my spare clothes. So I knew I would have to wear the same outfit for the rest of the trip.

Six days later, I was finally back home. The first thing I wanted to do was to change clothes and take a shower. But when I took off my sweater, to my amazement, I could see something sticking out of my belly button! I couldn’t believe it: something was growing in there!

Nikita [Khrushchev] pointed at the kitchen in an American display behind him, and made it clear to Nixon that he was not going to be made a fool of; "Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you've shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life... We have a saying, if you have bedbugs you have to catch one and pour boiling water into the ear." Nixon responded by saying, "What we want to do is make easier the life of our housewives."

"One of the most common and somewhat surprising comments we heard was that people were disturbed by our ethics of using living cells to grow living fabric," said (Ionat) Zurr, "while the use of leather obtained from animals seems to be accepted without any concern for the well-being of the animals from which the skin has been removed."

The tricky part is making sure the image of the veins is projected in exactly the right place. Get this wrong, and the system becomes worse than useless. The key is device called a “hot mirror”, which is transparent to visible light but reflects infrared (hot) wavelengths.

The video projector and camera are set at 90 degrees to each other facing the mirror, which is set at 45 degrees to both of them. After calibration, this ensures that a vein always appears within 0.06 millimetres of its correct position...

"VitalSense proved to be a real lifesaver in a recent study of wildland firefighters in Montana. The study was designed to evaluate heat stress in high intensity work environments. Canadian coaches used VitalSense to evaluate the physiological status of Canadian triathletes training for all three legs (swimming, biking and running) of their event in the 2004 summer Olympics. In another athletic related study, Nike® is using VitalSense to test heat dissipation in clothing."

Friends Michael and Cynthia Perry from Los Angeles gave me this Hawaiian dashboard diva (pictured here on my Baghdad balcony) as an early birthday present when they learned I'd be returning to Iraq for a long tour of duty. I've dubbed the bobbling-hipped, ceramic babe Layla Ukulele--and promised them I'd take a picture of her swaying on the dashboard of a humvee in Iraq.

It also got me thinking, that like the globetrotting Gallic gnomes in the French film "Amelie," Layla would probably like to tour as much possible. After all, being an inanimate object, what's she got to lose? I guess we'll see after she's traveled with me for the next four months, meeting new friends and maybe… even some not-so-friendlies.

Drop me a line and let me know where in Iraq or with whom--you'd like to see Layla swivel for next. As usual, I promise nothing--but perhaps Layla could visit one of your deployed loved ones here in the birthplace of civilization.

The towers and unmanned blimps, called aerostats, worked so well at detecting and identifying enemy forces and objects that Defense Department officials want to buy more of them. "We wouldn't have gotten the funding if it wasn't successful," said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, director of Army systems management in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology. Sorsenson spoke Oct. 7 at a Pentagon media briefing.

Army officials obtained $38 million in fiscal 2004 for 22 towers and aerostats for surveillance use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 84-foot-towers and 15-meter aerostats use the Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment (RAID) system to monitor the perimeter of the service's bases there, said Col. Kurt Heine, project manager of the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor, whose program oversees the force protection effort.

The RAID system consists of towers, aerostats, sensors and an operations center. The towers and aerostats carry an electro-optical and infrared sensor that detects enemy forces and objects at day or night. The sensors obtain the images then transmit them via a radio frequency to an operations center, which sends them via a network to warfighters and analysts for review and action, Heine said.

And BoingBoing reader Allan Janus says,

We had an Army airship flying around the Washington DC area, testing RAID, a couple of weeks ago - I even got into trouble taking pictures of it while on the US Capitol grounds. By the way, an aerostat is a tethered balloon - they may be blimp-shaped so they're stable in the wind, though.

Richard Thompson, a cartoonist for the Washington Post, had a wonderful cartoon on the blimp - I have it on my website, since the Post doesn't put his drawings online: Link. I also posted some of my photos of the blimp, and the sorry story of my encounter with the Feds - it's at 29 September: Link

This entry is about what struck me in the first week- stuff like toilets draining into a pond next to my house, the toilet the burns my poop, that there are no roads in town, stuff like that -- Link.

And this entry is about the first comercial venture in the village and the trash that comes with it. (I may expand on it with pictures soon): Link.

Image: Today I took my class outside to search for bugs for a science project. Another difference between here and Philly: you can take your class out of the building without worrying about permission slips, and more importantly, without worrying about anyone getting lost (or going AWOL). Link

[Ron Jeremy] picked up the sidekick upside-down, then turned it right-side up and took a few seconds to realize what he was looking at. He didn't express any serious shock or alarm but it did seem to be a genuine first-goatse viewing of the previously unfamiliar. "That's just some guy holding his asshole open, right?" He laughed a little and I think he was mugging a little for the camera when he saw me taking pictures (especially in the 7th image below). Then he laughed and showed the guy behind him and the other girls at the booth."

I'm lazy. If I want to buy one of your custom shirts off your site using paypal, it's about three clicks and a quick login that my browser already knows. It goes like this: 1) I want it! 2) hit checkout 3) login and 4) paid! It doesn't matter if I have money in paypal or if it just gets pulled from my credit card on file, it's still just a few clicks and I'll have a shirt in tomorrow's mail.

When I hit a full-on shopping cart payment system, I see forms and forms mean tedious work, and I know I have to dump my credit card into yet another database that I blindly trust won't get compromised anytime soon, but mostly it's the work involved that diminishes my impulse buy.

"Every guy with a record collection and a girlfriend should read Brett Milano's Vinyl Junkies with her as relationship therapy. The book follows die-hard collectors from different walks of life-from R. Crumb's country and blues 78s to several vinyl addicts in Milano's native Boston, where he writes for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald. The book presents an engaging look at a diverse subculture-from the rabid nerd completists to the musicians and industry types you would expect to have a serious relationship with their records (including R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore). But Milano also writes about "normal" people with jobs and relationships and whose fashion choices range outside jeans and obscure punk T-shirts."

Crumb Eludes Art Lovers, True Fans In Pittsburgh

Subject of a retrospective at the 54th Carnegie International, R. Crumb and his entourage blew into Pittsburgh long enough only to put in some face time at a $500-per-plate Friday night gala. There, perplexed white-haired dowager-patronesses gawked and pointed, as professional art buyers advised them on adding a priceless Crumb to their collections. After nibbling at the rack of lamb and downing several glasses of costly champagne in succession, the aging cartoonist abruptly took his leave, pausing only long enough to examine the gigantic display of his licensed products that had pushed aside the Picasso postcards in the museum gift shop. Lawyers stood by, taking notes as the underground cartoonists apparently nitpicked the presentation for several minutes, before rushing out the door. Autograph seekers who had waited outside in the rain for hours were shunted aside by thuggish bodyguards as Mr. Crumb was whisked into a stretch limo. There, his escorts -- three young call girls decked out in Milanese haute couture -- obediently awaited, another bottle of champagne chilling on ice. Then, off to Crumb's private jet, which was revved up and waiting on the tarmac. Gala attenders reported the 61-year old appeared "spry."

Members of the unofficial United Cartoon Workers Local No. 17 of Western Pennsylvania still maintained hope as the evening wore on that their hero would drop by the South Side pizza party they had thrown in his honor. But by midnight, word had spread that Crumb was already "wheels up" and flying over the Atlantic. Many sat dejectedly under the drooping banner that read "Pittsburgh Cartoonists and Flood Victims Welcome R. Crumb." Others sketched mindlessly on the placemats amid pizza crusts and cold pierogies, in emulation of their cartooning hero, hoping against hope that he still might show. "Crumb is the reason I became a cartoonist," confessed one now-middle aged man, fighting back tears. "We thought it would be nice to show him our love, you know, give a little something back. I mean, we can only afford paper plates on our budget, but I really thought he might appreciate the gesture. But he never responded to our invite. And apparently he switched hotels on us. Some kind of security measure."

Others in the crowd of fans and well-wishers were more hostile. "Man of the People, my ass! Crumb's best work is twenty years behind him," said a young heavily-pierced and tattooed cartoonist from Munhall. "I'm going home and burning every freaking Crumb comic I own!" Another local freelance illustrator wearing a tomato-sauce stained "Devil Girl" T-shirt said, "Boy, I've known people who got a bit of success and pulled up the ladder, but I never expected it from the guy who drew 'Motor City Comics'! I guess people change." Still others were more philosophical. "I've waited my whole life to meet R. Crumb, and this was probably as close as I'll come. I blame it on his handlers. He's just got layers and layers of people now, and they have their agenda. But I prefer to remember the struggling cartoonist with his sketchbook walking alone on the streets of Cleveland--not the remote, branded commodity who lives in France and flies around the world on the New Yorker expense account."

"Didn't he draw the Freak Brothers?" another fan wondered aloud.

The Crumb retrospective features 124 pieces of original art and will be on display until March 20, 2005.

“The Aquarius is a very good analogue for the space station,” says (surgeon Tim) Broderick. Just as in space, he says, it can take time to get a patient back to solid ground when they need emergency surgery underwater. “They have to decompress for a day before they can come up,” he says.

I've just been nominated to the board of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) and will be officially joining already seated members at the conclusion of the ICANN Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, December 1 - 5.

This is the end of a two or so year process of people telling me I should get involved and others warning me against it. Some of my wisest advisors urged me not to join saying things like, "you will make 3 mistakes in your life... this is one of them..." or "friends don't let friends do ICANN."

ICANN has its share of problems and a negative image associated with it in many circles. I've even taken my fare share of cheap shots at ICANN.

I am joining ICANN for two reasons. ICANN is changing and it's critical that ICANN is successful.

That was a bit of a disappointment. Somewhere around book seven, the series started to flag for me. The themes were a little tired, the character development had stalled, and the I just wanted the mystery to be resolved.

But with the Grim Grotto, the series revives admirably. The basic plot of the Unfortunate Events books is that the Baudelaire children (Sunny, a baby with a sharp tooth; Violet, a virtuoso inventor; and Klaus, a shrewd researcher) are orphaned when their house burns down. They are put into the custody of Count Olaf, a sinister villain who is plotting to steal their inheritance. After making their escape from Olaf, they endure a series of negligent and dangerous custodianships, chases, servitude and escapes, as they investigate the murder of their parents and the nature of the organization their parents belonged to, the V.F.D..

The books are full of adventure and intrigue that will doubtless engross little readers and with sophisticated humor and wordplay that will sail over their heads and into the astonished gobs of their grownups.

Grim Grotto features a really marvellous little morality play about villainy, in which one of the series's enigmatic villains is humanized, and in which moral ambiguity is put front-and-center; a real rarity in kids' lit.

These little, beautifully made hardcovers are only $10 or $11 each, and they can each be devoured in a couple hours flat. This is the kind of book I loved when I was, oh, 10-15; and it's the kind of book I love reading today, too. Link

I start out by creating a random couple. I build them a little room, seen below, with a door. One they've both walked in to check their "home" out, I get rid of the door. As you can see, the room contains the following:

* A ghetto chair
* A fireplace
* A clown painting

Because there's only one chair, directly opposite the clown painting, which Mr. Victim immediately takes, Mrs. Victim quickly becomes annoyed. They have no light, no bathroom, and no food source.

Speaking of geeks and skin, our twitching, bloodshot-eye'd colleague at Screenhead found a whole English-language site devoted to the Japanese Power Ranger Porn DVD we spotted a clip from last year and have been dying to see more of ever since: "'The Fighting Perverts' is a hilarious Japanese adult movie chronicling a team of heroes who fight to rid the world of evil naked women who wear ski masks ... Clearly, this is the stuff of legends." The DVD is now out of print and difficult to find, but don't despair: the site has a discussion board and information on tracking down a copy if you're as anxious to see the rest of it as we are.

"On the Boston level if you ollie through the glass windows on one of the buildings (it's one or two to the left of the one where Ben Franklin is hiding) you land in a living room with a flat panel tv on the wall. If you stand in front of the TV Ghyslain gets up and shouts something about watching Star Wars (which you're now preventing). Hitting O (on the PS2) will result in him showing off his moves."

Cuban, who has been fined more than $1 million by the NBA since buying the team in January 2001, already has matched the fine by donating $100,000 to the eff.org foundation which, he said is putting money toward fighting the Induce Act, which, Cuban said, could cost a million-plus jobs in the technology industry

According to WashingtonPost.com, Hunt Valley, Md.-based Sinclair has ordered its 62 stations, some of which are in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin, to show "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" during prime-time hours next week. The Sinclair station group extends to 24 percent of U.S. television households.

Like him or not--Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's determination is as indisputable as his temper.

Prior to our interview he shakes with his left hand--his right injured from banging it against a mahogany desk. But at the moment he is calm and focused. And like the different sides of his personality-- in two separate speeches recently he painted very different pictures of Iraq.

To the U.S. Congress in Washington he said his government was winning the war against the insurgents, but to his own interim assembly here, he said the nation faces some very grave challenges. I sat down with Dr.Allawi, in a one-on-one interview to discuss, among other things, which is the real Iraq?

NEWSWEEK has compiled a state-by-state guide of what to watch for in the coming weeks. Click on your state to see how it voted in 2000 and what the key factors are in the remaining days before Nov. 2. And remember: Just because any given state may appear guaranteed to vote for one candidate over the other, that’s no excuse not to go out and pull the lever (or touch the screen) on election day—especially when you consider the many close races for the Senate, where the Republicans currently hold a precarious one-seat majority. If 2000 taught the electorate anything, it’s that every vote counts.

BoingBoing reader John adds, "While electoral-vote.com doesn't describe the environment of each state as well, the site updates the probable outcome of the election daily based on polls. It provides all sorts or graphs and spreadsheets as well. It's got a nice, non-flash, interface to boot. Link. "

Mark Cutkosky, a professor in Stanford University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, is part of a team working on a family of legged robots based on cockroach locomotion. He says their team defines biomimetics as "extracting principles from biology and applying them to man-made devices—particularly robots."

Cutkosky says two forces are driving the "new wave" of robotics. First, biological research has exposed a huge amount of biological process data that roboticists can apply to their work. Second, advances in low-cost, power-efficient computing systems allow researchers to create robots that work outside laboratories. Cutkosky says that roboticists can "really put some of the lessons we're learning from biology to practice. Ten years ago, even if I had understood exactly what materials and mechanical principles underlie the cockroach's robust dynamic locomotion, I would have been unable to build a robot that embodied them."

"The 2005 Independent Games Festival is here, and the full list of entries includes some pretty well designed and innovative titles. My favourite so far is Gish, a physics-based 2D side-scroller from the guys who brought you Bridge It and Pontifex. Link to the awesome Gish trailer.

What: Public lecture on copyright, "Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You're Not Invited."

Where: University of Edinburgh Old College, Law Faculty, Lecture Theatre 175. It's #10 on this map. There's a reception afterwards in the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre, which is right next door.

When: Tuesday, 12 October, 2004, 6PM.

Hope to see you there! Link

"Daniel Raeburn looks closely at Ware’s career, work methods, and graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble-paper projects that require construction by readers. Based on many hours of interviews with the artist, Raeburn offers fascinating insights into the connections between Jimmy Corrigan’s biography and that of his creator. In addition, the book encompasses Ware’s many other works and examines his place in the world of literature, graphic art, and popular culture."