Update: Piggy sez: "I couldn't access the mov file posted for the Galang video, so I found this link to it in Real format."

Reader F-Bomb sez:

I also had the same problem with the video link, so I found this one in Quicktime Format as well: Link.

Ruben Fleischer is an incredible director who directed the M.I.A. video. You've probabyl seen hs Burger King commercial, but his video for DJ Format/MC Abdominal's "Hit Song" could be some of the finest video work I've seen in a while, featuring a great song and impressive graphics: Link

This is link to a mashup of the M.I.A. Galang w/ the Super Mario Brothers theme. It's a bit of an improvement: Link.

UPDATE: Russ Kick says: "Cigarette removal has also been done to the Beatles, Courtney Love, Robert Johnson, Jackson Pollock, James Dean, and Paul Simon.

"While I'm not saddened that there are fewer public places where I have to inhale second-hand cancer, this revisionism is ridiculous. If this keeps up, it may appear as though no one in history ever smoked!"

Greg Costikyan: I don't know about you but I could have been a lawyer, or a carpenter. or a sous-chef. How many of you are here because you're after a paycheck? [One bloke raises his hand, audience laughs and crows]. Ahuh. And how many of you are here because you love games? [all hands go up]. Right. So we're being told that everything's going to get bigger. Paychecks. Budgets. Consoles. But is it going to get better? I've been researching old board games and I've spotted a pattern. A new genre: it's called One Hit Game And Its Imitators. One fishing game appears in mid-19C and dozens follow. Games grow through innovations. Creations of new game styles that spawn imitators and whole new markets. The story of the past few decades is not about graphics and processing power, but startling innovation and industry. That's why we love games. BUT IT'S OVER NOW!

As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don't know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation. Was your allegiance bought at the price of a television? Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard's chest did he carve it from? [audience falls about]

How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can't afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it's ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of redwood city! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation's time there are still games to love. You can start today. [standing ovation]

My name is Robert MacNichol and this name is coming up on the Blair Witch Vol. II site at:

http://gr.bolt.com/games/codes/pc/blairwitch_vol2_coffin_walk.htm

I'd like some explination as to how this happened. I want my name off your public domain and diconnected with anything relating to your business. Please advise Rob...

Thank you. I'm wondering if my name shows up on some NAMBLA site---which I won't even click on out of curiosity. I got a couple of lawyers--I know--looking into it now. Usually they say forget it. not yet on this one. You're probably on track when you imply I can shove it if I don't like it. I got a scathing bunch of e-mails calling me a whack job because this popped up when someone typed in my name. Damned embarrasing. I wasn't threatening to sue. I was asking for some solution other than that. If I do. And if I win big--hahahahahahahahaha!--I'll remember you and the site...and your pointer about reality. Someone got rich when they spilled a cup pf coffee in there lap at McDonalds. I ought to be able to get my name off a whack site don't you think? My favorite all time game was River Raid by Atari(?) as I recall. The only other one I like is Pong , oh! and Brick Attac k--on my cell phone. I know a lady who "became" a witch. Blair Witch wadda .... wadda.... I can't even think of the term. The VN thing is me. A Canadian liblosrer? Naw. Helen who? I get your point...never the less wish me luck. I may be paving new ground on the WWW.

Candy wrappers are designed to communicate with consumers, - even though the communication may often be one-way. The bright colors, shiny paper and animated logos speak to our culture in the most friendly and trusting tones. We know that each wrapper holds the promise of something good - at least as good as Grandma used to make.

"Reminds me a bit of the Disneyland mosaic murals. This, though, incorporates bits of metal, parchment, felt, linen, natural foliage, and soil from all 58 counties of California and Hawaii. This technique is called “endomosaic," although Google isn’t showing any info on it. It was done around 1958. Swell, eh?"
Link

As I relax into the chair, the questioning begins. An automated voice instructs me to answer a series of questions with a simple yes or no. "Is your name Susan?" Yes. "Do you understand that I will not ask any trick questions on this test?" Yes. "Did you stab that woman downstairs this afternoon?" No.

My voice remains calm and even, and I feel no sense of flushing as I continue answering questions and read through a list of potential murder weapons, including the one I guiltily remember using earlier, a screwdriver. But as Ryan's colleagues look through the data afterwards, they pull out two images and set them side by side. The first image looks normal. On the second, large highlighted rings of blood encircle my eyes.

If I were a real criminal, that picture could be big trouble for me.

After a few days of administering the beer diets, the scientists laced some of the animals' food with either of two heterocyclic amines (HCAs)—the carcinogens from cooked meat....Beer diminished by some 40 to 75 percent the number of HCA adducts (abnormal DNA structure) that formed, depending on the type of tissue (studied after dissecting the mouse) and quantity of beer ingredients ingested, the researchers report in the Feb. 9 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Good news for beer drinkers: Both light-colored lager and a darker stout proved protective.

There's another old saying in my profession: The mission of journalists is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Apple looks comfortable, even smug, by insisting online publishers such as the 19-year-old Harvard University freshman who runs ThinkSecret should face huge financial liabilities just because it's embarrassing for you to introduce new products at the big Macworld show after details have been revealed in advance online.

You don't want to look hypocritical. You've grabbed the media spotlight with both hands, much to Apple's benefit, so you shouldn't suddenly complain the beam is too bright.

Someone posted [this Stileproject] video clip of adults dressed up and re-enacting a Dungeons and Dragons melee to our forums, then decided to remix it in slomo to the tune of Bon Jovi's Blaze of Glory. The result is fantastically humorous. An homage to all things geek.

The humanoid can put on facial expressions suitable for the more than 2,000 types of answers it can give, but it may refuse to answer to some questions for "privacy reasons," making an X with her arms and bowing. She also has a sense of irony. When asked if she is a robot, she says, "Y.e.s, I. a.m. a. r.o.b.o.t" in a disconnected voice and moves about clumsily. A moment later, she says "Just kidding" and starts a natural flow of movements.

Radio Free Mars is a free online streamed audio eclectic collection of space related interviews, lectures and music. I especially like this interview with Apollo Flight Director Gene Kranz: Link

The question has been a live one long before it entered the deep entrails of the European Union’s legislative process. Since the commercial software industry emerged around 1990, technologists have argued that code is different from other inventions: it does not need protection by patents. In software creation, open standards – code as common knowledge – are the key to fermenting progress. To patent code is to add disabling and unnecessary burdens on software enterprise that can kill its potential in this crucial, formative stage.

These fifteen years (a shorter timespan than the average patent) have seen the birth and maturing of the World Wide Web, all thanks to a protocol known as Hypertext Transfer (http). Tim Berners-Lee, the man who conceived the code that embodies this protocol, did not patent it. Thus it became an open standard: anybody could use it to contribute new programmes designed to run on the web. And use it they did. To the extent that the multiplying, democratising life-forms of the web now challenge the dominance of corporate media and orthodox models of economic activity.

How about a Flickr uplaod button -in game-. See something cool? Hit the button, add the tags, designate it to your guild, upload. I suspect this would mean tens of thousands of accounts for a service like Flickr, but on a more macro level, people are going to start moblogging their virtual worlds just as much as the real world, why not use Flickr.

Update: BuhBuhCuh sez, "a user of the MMO Second Life has already created just this. Players are already using it to document their own narritive and explorations throughout the virtual world. All they need to do is use SL's 'Postcard' feature to email Snapzilla a screenshot with a title and a comment."

Update 2: Andrew sez, "SixApart employee (and blog innovator) Mark Paschal had this running since last August over at TypePad."

As the Tibetan people wait for His Holiness the Dalai Lama's national address of 10 March, hackers in Beijing are working overtime to sabotage the cyber world of Tibet movement. Offices of the Tibetan exile administration have recently started receiving emails disguised as originating from Sonam N. Dagpo, "Additional Secretary" (sic) of the Department of Information and International Relations (DIIR) in Dharamsala, and purportedly carrying the text of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's 10 March statement as an attached file.

Promptly denying authorship of the insidious emails, Dagpo, Secretary (no longer additional secretary), warned us that the attachment was actually a virus. Dagpo warned us also not to open any attachment purportedly coming from the official email addresses of other DIIR staffers, such as Tenzin Lekshey and Masood Butt. Once opened, the attachment is designed to plant a Trojan Horse on the unsuspecting recipient's computer, making its content accessible to the attackers.

The source of the eavesdropping devise was traced by Washington, D.C.-based International Campaign for Tibet to China Railway Telecommunications Center in Xicheng District, Beijing. This makes it the third round of cyber attacks coming from Beijing and targetting the Tibet movement.

Chuck Lorre, creator of "Dharma & Greg" and co-creator of "Two and a Half Men" has been putting vanity cards with messages at the end of his episodes since the first Dharma & Greg. Since they're on the screen only for one second at the end of the episode you've got to pause very precisely or go to his website to read them. They range from sublime to jejune but this week's takes a swipe at network censors who made him cut down a scene showing a woman's naked back, complaining that they "are perfectly at ease with graphically detailed autopsy scenes that show female corpses being carved up" and are "more comfortable showing a dead naked body than a live one." Two and a Half Men runs on the same network as the three CSI series.

In the 1980s the kind of "long-duration" space missions (Kansas had) written about were beginning to happen. The Russians had the space station Mir in orbit and American astronauts were on board for lengthy visits.

These were trying situations. "Most anybody can get along with any body for a week or two," Kanas observes. But longer stays in cramped conditions with no real opportunity for escape are different. Kanas used questionnaires completed on board to discern issues of tension, cohesion and "displacement," the tendency to redirect anger at others. For the cosmonauts and astronauts that was often the ground control.

Kanas looked for what crews at Antarctic research stations call the "third-quarter syndrome." Halfway through any stressful stint, it becomes more difficult to keep anger and resentment at bay. "Think about being with the same person for six months and you don't have a way out," Kanas says. "The groups become less cohesive as time goes on."

In 1953, moviegoers experienced a new dimension in fear, or at least campy horror, with the release of House of Wax. The Vincent Price shockfest was the first 3D feature produced by a major film studio. Unfortunately though, director André de Toth couldn't fully enjoy his own creation. The 3D illusion depended on binocular vision, but de Toth only had one eye.

In some ways today, we're all faced with the same problem. Mobile devices are now equipped with 3D graphics chips to bring a heightened sense of realism to the small screen. Videogame designers are cranking out dazzling 3D experiences that will soon put the playpower of a console in our pockets. The rub, though, is that the vast majority of our displays are stranded in flatland.

"Most games and many other applications are written in 3D although the final image is shown in 2D," says Ian Thompson, director of business development at Sharp Laboratories of Europe. "In nature humans see the world in 3D and yet we have become accustomed to seeing flat images"

That may be true today, but researchers in many laboratories, including Sharp's, have their eyes set on the next generation of 3D technology. If mobile displays are necessarily limited by length and width, the only option is to increase their depth. And unlike the 3D movies of yesterday (and even today), the new 3D displays don't require any special eyewear.

Between songs, someone handed the lead singer of the Starlight Band a note. "I have an announcement. It's someone's birthday today, Eliot Spitzer," the clueless frontman said. "Where is Eliot?" The place went silent. Express Scripts executives started rushing to the stage and someone yelled, "He's in goddamn New York." But too late — the band had launched into a version of "Happy birthday, dear Eliot." One witness said, "It was the funniest thing I ever saw."

It's been a long time since movies were only available in theaters. But now there are movies on demand over cable TV; compressed films in digital files; and DVDs in the mail. Technology is changing how we watch movies, and it may even change what we watch. We examine the future of movies Chris Anderson, editor in chief, Wired magazine Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix Dean Garfield, legal affairs director, Motion Picture Association of America.

Reader Anne Kinner says,

As soon as I saw this Boing Boing post, I remembered a video that I watched about Berlin in preparation for my trip there which featured a similar restaurant. I tracked it down through Google and found an article from the Financial Times (Link). The article states that the first Unsicht ("invisible bar") opened in Cologne in 2001. There seems to be quite a bit of info Google wise and is incredibly interesting. It seems, from articles and the video I watched, that the goal is trying to make people concentrate on the flavor, the texture, and the experience of food. Perhaps hinges on the concept that if you lose one sense, another will be heightened.

Update to the "eating without seeing story": the "Dans le Noir" restaurant in Paris exists since 1999, and is the "father" of Zurich's Blind Cow: Link

Here is a review of a "dark dining" restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, that also touches on the history of "dark dining" -- Link.

"A few of us at Alternative Law Forum have been working a response to these comics, and we have now finished version 1.0 of the response to the Copyright Comic and are working on a response to TM and Patent Comics.What we have done is basically use the base comics to create a counter story, by changing the dialogues in the blurbs and adding images etc, in other words a remixed version of the WIPO Comics. Hope you enjoy it, and anyone interested in making changes to it, helping with the next versions on patent TM etc please feel free to contact the ALF. Link (Thanks, Siva and Donna!)

The scale of 1 to 15 million reduces the distance between the Earth and the Sun to about 10km (6 miles).

All the models have 1m diameters. "If the sizes were also scaled, the Sun would be almost 100m across with Pluto about the size of a melon," said John Thomson, education consultant to the project.

"Mister America walk on by your schools that do not teach
Mister America walk on by the minds that won't be reached
Mister America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside
When once you find the way you lied
And all the corny tricks you tried
Will not forestall the rising tide of HUNGRY FREAKS, DADDY!"

(Police) said the 17-year-old Coeur d'Alene High School student was upset after a prank in which the other student put peanut butter in his cheese sandwich days before. He told a school resource officer that "he hated peanut butter and it made him more mad than he could explain," according to the police report.

Namco has also begun working on "barrier-free entertainment," meaning entertainment products for helping elderly and physically impaired people. Namco's first "rehabilitainment" ("rehabilitation + entertainment") product is the TalkingAid, a vocal keyboard. Taskagi expects the company to expand into the educational space.

"They hide in trees and swoop on unsuspecting children loitering about in the temple premises or walking by, clawing them and even sucking a bit of blood," said Bani Kumar Sharma, a priest at the Kamakhya temple in Assam state.

"There's a lot of criticism of PowerPoint" — for encouraging users to do things in a particular way and discouraging them from other things, such as putting more than seven bullet points on a slide, he acknowledged. "But if you can't edit it down to seven, maybe you should think about talking about something else." PowerPoint restricts users no more than any other communication platform, he asserted, including a pencil: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting — you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colors.'"...

Ultimately, Byrne said, he just enjoyed playing with the program, and continues to do so. "I made a presentation recently that was just colored slides fading in and out, like a rainbow. I put this gospel music to it — it was this wonderful, uplifting celebration," he said. "Who knew? Sometimes you only find out what's in there when you take everything out."

You're probably sending e-mail because you're deep in thought about something. Your reader is too, only they're deep in thought about something else. Even worse, in a multi-person conversation, messages and replies may arrive out of order. And no, it doesn't help to include the entire past conversation when you reply; it's rude to force someone else to wade through ten screens of messages because you're too lazy to give them context. So, start off your messages with enough context to orient your reader.

BAD E-MAIL:
To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive

Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

GOOD E-MAIL:
To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive.

You asked if we want apple pie. Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

(The Mobile Market is) cleverly designed so that, when it's parked by the side of the road with its ramp extended, it is a fully stocked but very tiny natural foods store. In addition to the sumptuously fresh organic produce, the Mobile Market carries a little bit of all the basics you'd expect to find in any upscale food store. A row of bulk hoppers dispenses organic cereals underneath a small shelf of skin-care potions. A little glass-fronted fridge entices shoppers with juice blends and natural sodas, and a shelf of organic treats near the entrance gives kids who visit the Mobile Market with their parents something to linger over.

In operation for almost two years, the Mobile Market has become part of the fabric of the community. Shoppers greet one another as though they were in the neighborhood grocery store, not a vibrant purple-and-orange van decorated with hip-hop lettering and pumping out beats (solar powered, I learned later) from its roof....

The Mobile Market is able to make inroads in the community in large part because it offers these healthy foods at a low price. The People's Grocery receives significant discounts from Mountain People's Distributors -- one of the nation's largest organic-food distributors -- so food in the Mobile Market is sold at wholesale prices. This means that, for the 160 families that shop at the Mobile Market each week, a healthful organic diet costs no more than a menu of ramen and Ho-Hos from the liquor store.

IDF does not approve of this unusual hobby and prevents D&D players from being considered for sensitive army positions by labeling them with low security clearance.

"We have discovered that some of them are simply detached from reality," a security source told Ynet.

Game enthusiasts are aware of their problematic image in the army and prefer to maintain their anonymity. Many of them are from the former Soviet Union, where the game is very popular...

"These people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment, a military official says. "They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality - elements which lower a person's security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions."

Of course, back in those days most of the studios were embroiled in a lawsuit against Sony for selling VCRs, which they viewed as tools for infringement, and they were all swearing up and down that they would never release their movies on video. it took brains and guts to open a video store that rented out Hollywood movies at a time when Hollywood was swearing enmity to the VCR and proposing to have it banned by law. Link (Thanks, AV!)

I. The Internet is a foundation of democratic society in the 21st century, because the core values of the Internet and democracy are so closely aligned.

1. The Internet is fundamentally about openness, participation, and freedom of expression for all -- increasing the diversity and reach of information and ideas.

2. The Internet allows people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems.

3. The Internet unites families and cultures in diaspora; it connects people, helping them to form civil societies.

4. The Internet can foster economic development by connecting people to information and markets.

5. The Internet introduces new ideas and views to those who may be isolated and prone to political violence.

6. The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.

Update: Bill Thompson points us to "the Atocha workshop tomorrow, in the station -- where Joi and Dan will be talking again, and Meeting on March 11 -- giving people around the world a chance to remember victims of terror and talk about what's happening in Madrid - including the role of the Internet!"

Online record label Magnatune and Samsung spinoff Hana Micron today launch TunePlug-a reusable USB Flash Drive that will feature 10 complete albums from 10 leading Magnatune artists as MP3 files. The newest way to distribute music, TunePlug offers consumers a simple way to experience emerging music on an easy-to-use, transferable information device.

What first caught Pierce's eye, she said, was a heading titled "possible Texas criminal history." A short paragraph suggested additional, "manual" research, because three Texas court records had been found that might be connected to her. "A manual search on PIERCE D.S." is recommended, it said.

Pierce says she's only visited Texas twice briefly, and never had any trouble with the law there.

"But if I was applying for a job, and there were other candidates, and this was on my record, the company would obviously go for another person," she said. "It raises a question in your mind."

But in this case, the email is a legit message to Mako, a prominent Debian developer, from a Nigerian who wants to pitch in on a free software project that Mako is involved with. Mako ruminates interestingly on this:

...it made me think about the impact that these 419 scams must be having on legitimate Nigerian mail. I've heard it said that most 419's were, at least historically, are actually run by Nigerians although I don't know if this is still the case. In any case, it seems that many people have come to associate Nigeria and Nigerian email writing styles as indicative of scams.

It seems possible that Nigerian Internet cafes are full of emailers with names like Mr. John Richard who use yahoo email addresses and who come from a culture where it is common to write subjects in ALLCAPS. When they write to people they don't know, they -- quite sensibly -- start mails apologizing for the fact that they may have surprised their readers with an unannounced missive. Spammers and scammers put all these more upstanding folks at a real disadvantage when it comes to getting their message out.

The dark moment of the soul came in a Hooters in Pasadena. Mr. Wheaton wandered in one day in June 2000 with a buddy for lunch, and the waitress - her name tag, he swears, read "Destiny" - asked, "Didn't you used to be an actor?"

He responded at high volume. "Used to be?!" he shouted. "I still am!" The resulting funk lasted for weeks, and he emerged with a determination to let people know that there was more to Wil Wheaton than "Star Trek," that it wasn't a mistake to quit the show, that he is not just a former child star, and that life - his life - goes on.

Thus was born wilwheaton.net, a site that celebrates his current roles: husband, stepfather to two boys, member of a comedy troupe, technophile, writer and, yes, honest, still an actor.

Frank: I was just going to say that the Arkham sound is something new, something natural, something that grew out of the local scene, something that doesn’t sound like anything else...

Nancy: Organic.

Frank: Yeah, like Nancy said. Organic. Something that grew like a living thing, not something manufactured.

Nancy: But not something cultivated. Something that grew wild. A wildflower.

Cameraman: What sort of flower?

Nancy: (laughs) I don’t know. Christ, I can’t believe you’re going to hold me to that metaphor.

Frank: (thinks. answers very carefully) A moonflower.

Nancy: What?

Frank: It’s a type of morning glory. It only blooms at night.

Interesting comparison by Ben Edelman of the bundle-ware and EULA payload of major P2P applications:

The study was commissioned by LimeWire, which proudly demonstrates that it has absolutely no bundle-ware.

eDonkey's EULAs fill 90 on-screen pages.

iMesh's EULA is 56 on-screen pages. (I assume this is the version of iMesh from before they shut down). v Kazaa's EULA fills 182 on-screen pages. The app writes 845 registry keys upon installation.

Morpheus shows you 44 on-screen pages of EULA for its bundle-ware, DirectRevenue.

LimeWire has no EULA and no bundle-ware. If you already have the Java Runtime Environment installed, it also has the smallest install footprint of any of the apps (cuz it's a Java application).

We demand TRANSPARENCY within WIPO and strongly reject any kind of disproportionate representation.

Yet, we call for an immediate PARTICIPATION of civil society and consumer-interest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within WIPO's activities. Specifically, but not limited to accepting applications from NGOs to serve as ad hoc observers at the upcoming Inter-sessional Intergovernmental Metting next 11-13 April 2005, and for the Permanent Committee on Cooperation for Development Related to Intellectual Property, next 14-15 April 2005, in order to provide a BALANCED discussion on the Development Agenda and on the IP system in general, observing an equilibrium between IP right holders and consumers.

Furthermore, we urge that WIPO, as a United Nations (U.N.) specialised agency responsible for promoting creative intellectual activity and for facilitating the transfer of technology related to industrial property to the developing countries in order to accelerate economic, social and cultural development, plays its role in making ACCESS to knowledge feasible for humanity, bearing in mind different needs (including, but not limited to, those of the visual and audio impaired) and stages of development.

Mayor (Luis) Sanchez says the reading scheme for his 1,100-strong municipal police force will make them better officers and better people.

The list of recommended titles includes such literary classics as Don Quixote, The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, and, on a lighter note, The Little Prince.

Now, if only Apple would follow suit... Link to Dan Gillmor's editorial on why Apple's legal action against blogs is bad news.

If any Apple attorneys are reading -- I might suggest this particular arrangement for the blogger on your list, given our collective rep for navelgazing: link.

Previously: Fred Durst sues Gawker Media over much-blogged sextape

Update: Let the Fred-Durst-sextape / Soviet animation mashups commence! Can it get any more meta? BoingBoing reader Spinneyhead blogs:

Just a little experiment before I try any more complex lip-synching. Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst recently joined the long and boring list of C-list celebs to have sex tapes released onto the internet. Fleshbot claim to have been traumatised by his commands to "touch my balls and my ass", so I sampled this bit and used it to voice the parrot in a piece of Soviet animation found by BoingBoing.

Update: William of Occam sez, "the American Chemical Society (ACS) announced today that they are granting access to all of their 33 journals on a delayed-access plan (one year after publication it goes public). This is a pretty important addition to this movement because of ACS's size (largest professional scientific organization in the world) and the caliber of its journals."

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say "Oh, I've written about that, just google for XXX and I'm on the top page" or "Oh, just google my name."
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you're more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you're an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you're in marketing, you'll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It's a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

Today Wilco released an 5-song EP that is supposed to only be accessible by those who purchased A Ghost Is Born. Turns out that all the CD does is give you a URL to the mp3s, meaning that anyone can get at them (in what I'm guessing is a legal fashion). I posted a link to the directory all the mp3s are contained in on my blog.

Previously: Xeni's Wired News Interview with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco: "Music is not a loaf of bread."

Regarding worm music: I have a short video of a live worm controlled sonic sculpture displayed at a Bent festival (circuit bending, or hacking electronic music toys) in NYC last April. The guy took a flatbed scanner, replaced the sensors and hooked it up to this percussive rube goldberg-ish contraption. Then he dropped a bunch of live worms on the scanner to control it.

This is a photo of an ancient Chinese dildo, and here are links to the source (on Sina, one of the big four portals of China). Chinese media is changing very fast, and a lot of weird stuff makes it into Chinese newspapers, websites and even TV. Boing Boing previously linked to a Danwei post about sex blogger Muzi Mei: link. There's also plenty of stuff about transsexuals: Link. Lastly, if North Korea actually declares war on Boing Boing, you might need the help of this man: Link

According to a Peoples Daily report on February 27, 2005 a televised anti-piracy concert watched by 150 million included one performer asking "A copyrighted CD for 200 yuan [$24], pirated one for 10 yuan, what will you buy?" "The pirated one," answered the thousands of people in the stadium.

Update: Andrew provides this torrent of the video -- thanks, Andrew!

For example, article 4a of the Council document states that "A computer program as such cannot constitute a patentable invention. Accordingly, inventions involving computer programmes, whether expressed as source code, as object code or in any other form, which implement business, mathematical or other methods and do not produce any technical effects beyond the normal physical interactions between a program and the computer, network, or other programmable apparatus in which it is run shall not be patentable."

However, article 2a of their document defines the term "computer-implemented invention," which the document uses later to describe inventions that are patentable. It states that "'computer-implemented invention' means any invention the performance of which involves the use of a computer, computer network or other programmable apparatus, the invention having one or more features which are realised wholly or partly by means of a computer program or computer programs."

Confused? You should be. Some recitals in the proposal are phrased in such a way that they seem to indicate restrictions in patentability, while many of the legally binding provisions in the articles confirm the 30,000 software patents already approved by the European Patent Office and leave the door wide open for further patenting of software. The Parliament text of 2003 made the distinction close to watertight.

In this article, John presents a primer for British music pros on Creative Commons licenses, explaining how it all works:

Magnatune, like many businesses, exists to make money. As such, I wasn't willing to allow commercial use of our music for free. However, I reasoned that non-commercial use, such as our music appearing in a student film, or having the music appear on music recommendation web sites such as www.webjay.org, would serve as free advertising and create enthusiasm for Magnatune.

When uses of our music are non-commercial, no one is making money from it, and the likelihood of my being able to charge for that use is pretty low. Furthermore, Magnatune's music is widely distributed through these free non-commercial uses, essentially providing us with free advertising. And since Magnatune also licenses its music for commercial use, I reasoned that film students have to eventually graduate, and will then want to pay for our music because of our earlier generosity.

Fore-edge paintings are watercolour decorations, painted on the ends of the pages of the fore-edge of a book. In most cases, a fore-edge painting is only visible when the pages are fanned out, expanding the panel formed by front edges of the book and exposing the painting.

The earliest records of fore-edge paintings date back to the 10th century, although the art did not flourish until the late 1600s. Fore-edge paintings are still being produced today and have evolved through the centuries to offer a complex and elaborate variety of paintings. In addition to the standard painting, sometimes known as a 'single', there are split, panoramic and double variations. Split paintings are those in which each half of fore edge bears a different painting. In 'Panorama' types the illustration covers not only the fore edge but the top and bottom edges of the book as well, giving a near-360-degree panoramic view. The 'double' type is amongst the rarest and most collectable. It shows an illustration when the fore edge is fanned out the usual way, and a completely different painting when the pages are fanned out in the opposite direction.

Liz Ashdown, brand manager at McVitie's, said: "Eating lots of biscuits is obviously an enjoyable prospect for most people but we haven't yet found a human who can test on this scale."

Walt and Lily scoured New Orleans antique stores to find unique and lovely objects for his Club. He even had the Imagineers copy an old-fashioned elevator that caught his fancy in a Parisian hotel. "Walt and Lily wanted to buy the lift, but the hotel wouldn't sell it. So they had an exact copy made," Club 33 manager Jeff Plumb tells us.

Sadly, Walt never lived to see this piece of his dream become reality. Club 33 opened after Walt's death, but, except for the private apartment (that space, above Pirates of the Caribbean, is now the Disney Gallery), it's just what he envisaged.

The club's members (there are currently from 470 to 490 of them) enjoy gourmet cuisine like champagne risotto, roast muscovy duck, and lamb osso bucco in two lovely dining rooms. A staff of around 70 is on hand to cater to members and their guests. "We know what our members like, we try to remember everyone's preferences," Jeff tells us. "We have one member who visits every year from Australia – he loves salmon and when he comes, we make sure he gets his salmon – whether it's on the menu or not!"

Bottom: a snapshot from Boing Boing reader Brian.

See also this sequence of pictures of Mt. St. Helen's eruption taken on a hilltop in Portland, Oregon by Jenn Mac Donald: Link to flickr gallery.
Previously: Mount St. Helens burps big cloud of steam, ash. See also the USGS Mount St. Helens Information Statement, and this live volcanocam.

"Many of the functions and capabilities of the MilesTag design were modeled after the MILES 2000 weapon training system currently in use by US Armed Forces. A lot of inspiration and ideas are also drawn from computer- and console-based First Person Shooter games and Role Playing games. Unlike most DIY, consumer and commercial laser tag systems, MilesTag uses a digitally encoded signal that allows differentiation between up to 32 players and 7 teams, and supports a wide range of weapon types, including mines, area-denial and even non-conventional weapons. Damage inflicted by each weapon is scalable..."

The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.

After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, "I kept losing information," and "I just lost track."

Okay, there's no national coverage yet (they're trying to figure out what to say), but Mount St Helens did something. A big cloud of steam and ash that is trying to be classified (eruption? emission?) busted out of the crater. We saw it from work. Bye bye, Tulutson Glacier.

Spud trailed me by twenty feet or so, and the door was, well, now that I'd jumped up on the porch of the Nature Hut it was just two giant steps away. I grabbed the screen door and threw it open just as Spud leapt up onto the end of the porch. I had about three seconds, plenty of time to dash into the Nature Hut and close the door behind me. A detail from a bad dream, but true: I threw the screen door open only to find the second door locked. I tried to open it--chunka, chunka, chunka---just as Spud, still shrieking, leapt into the air.

And directly he was on my shoulders. I raised my arms and stumbled away from the door. Spud grabbed the collar of my t-shirt and was pulling on it, his feet on my back, now both of us shrieking.

A substantial group of Canada's security technology companies have sent a public letter to the Industry and Heritage Ministers to express concern about the potential for DMCA-like legislation in Canada.  Years of discussions and no one bothered to ask these guys what they think.

The public letter has been posted online.

A release and backgrounder.

This might be a sign of Canada's technology community waking up to the implications of copyright reforms that directly impact their businesses.

Last year I batted about 50/50 sitting in on good/miserable panels. I will absolutely not name names, but I was furious at certain panelists who clearly prepared nothing for their session and expected to wing it or fill their entire hour with Q&A ("So... I think I'd like this to be a conversation... any questions?" grrr...) . I frequently hopped between panel rooms when the sessions started to stink; my advice to you would be: express selfishness with your time... if the panel isn't interesting or useful, I'd leave to find one that is... You should only feel guilty for the seconds it takes to step over your neighbor as you make your hasty retreat, especially if the panelist didn't do his homework.

If I may be frank: The problem, which is a blessing and a curse, is that this industry has an abundance of relatively young and inexperienced trailblazers. They have incredible ideas, have the "audacity" to actually execute on them, and create amazing results. These people are honest-to-god genius guerilla marketers and technologists.

Unfortunately, very rarely do they know "how to be a panelist," and they even more rarely have the modesty to admit they don't know everything, much less haven't done respectable research on their so-called "expertise."

As you browse the scans, remember: at the time, design was 100% Photoshop-free, making these all the more awesome.

Link to gallery. I'm pretty sure this image is my favorite: Link. (Thanks, Jason Grier).
Previously: Awesome hip-hop flyers from the '70s, '80s.

Update: Robin says,

Nina Hagen is still around and recently set up her own fashion label "Mother of Punk". She hasn't let go of her old look, just made it all new again.

And BB reader B.D. sez:

Nina Hagen is indeed still kicking. She's playing a live show in Seattle tomorrow night at Neumo's. She'll be in Portland on Saturday night. This is part of her "50th Universal Bearthday Concert Bash".

Update: Jon's made a nifty graphic illustrating the "dinosaur blog" notion.

Bloggers of America, chill. Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to "crack down" on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated.

First of all, we're not the speech police. We don't tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There's got to be some money involved, or it's out of our jurisdiction. Second, let's get the facts straight. Congress, in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, limited how one can pay for communications that are coordinated with political campaigns, including any form of "general public political advertising."

The commission issued a regulation defining those communications to exempt anything transmitted over the Internet. A judge struck down that regulation as inconsistent with the law. So now we're under a judicial mandate to consider whether anything short of a blanket exemption that will do.

The Institute for the Future of the Book and Flickr.com issued a call today for photos and stories documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates Project in New York's Central Park. Using Flickr's unique photo-sharing platform, the Institute for the Future of the Book will gather pictures of the Gates from anyone and everyone who wants to contribute. The aim is to harness the creativity and insight of thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine - one that is designed not just for the moment, but as a lasting and definitive document of the Gates and our experience of them. "The photographs are a jumping off point for further exploration," says Ben Vershbow of the institute. "Ultimately, we are interested in collecting anything that can be shared over the web - film, audio, text - parodies and remixes."

While the photos and stories are being collected, the institute will encourage discussion and debate on how best to present the archives in hopes of finding new, unexpected ways to view and bring meaning to the content. The institute also welcomes the possibility of collaboration with designers, developers and web curators.

  "This project is the beginning of a long-term exploration for us," says Bob Stein, director of the Institute. "Through this work, we are asking: how do we use social software to create works that are in the spirit of the web - i.e. free-form, ad hoc, always evolving, and driven by people's enthusiasm to share - but are also edited and shaped into something of lasting value? It is that tension - between frozen and fluid works - that we aim to explore. We are excited to see the ideas people will bring to the table."

"A couple of weeks back, Boing Boing linked to my story about a hamster-powered MIDI sequencer. That was nothing. Here is my post about a homebrew synth with a patchbay which is controlled by wriggling live worms. And apparently they enjoy the electrical stimulation. The guy sells kits so you can build your own."

Under an agreement with prosecutors, Dhaliwal was sentenced last month to a three-month deferred jail sentence, three years of probation, 200 hours of community service and a $5,400 fine. The judge in the case also ordered him to take a copyright class at the University of Arizona, which he attends, and to avoid file-sharing computer programs.

"Generally copyright is exclusively a federal matter," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology civil liberties group. "Up until this point, you just haven't seen states involved at all."

Purnima Verma always scans the outdoors carefully through her heavily grilled front window before leaving her home in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. She'll step out only if she doesn't see a rhesus monkey. Even then it's only with a heavy stick. The 35-year-old homemaker doesn't want a repeat of what happened in July, when a monkey attack left her with a mangled arm, a scratched face and a ripped ear.

A half dozen business schools were swamped by a wave of electronic intrusions Wednesday morning, after a computer hacker posted instructions on a BusinessWeek Online message board. Harvard is the second school to say definitively that it will deny the applications of proven hackers. The first was Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, where only one admission file was targeted...

''Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world," (dean Kim B.) Clark said in yesterday's Harvard statement. ''To achieve that, a person must have many skills and qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment, and a strong moral compass -- an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this website have failed to pass that test."...

One admissions consultant, Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, which helps students apply to elite US business schools, said he thought Harvard was overreacting.

''What they did was stupid, but that's all it was," Kreisberg said. ''This seems needlessly harsh and rigid. I think it's inflexible, and it's wrong, and it doesn't treat individual circumstances."

...the university's ethics committee approved the research, under certain conditions. Prof Henry Greely, the head of the committee, said: "If the mouse shows human-like behaviours, like improved memory or problem-solving, it's time to stop."

tinyjudas says: "Guardian Online story about the Ig (thanks, Dan!) Nobel Prize being awarded to a man investigating homosexual necrophilia in ducks. apparently he watched as a duck flew straight into his window, killing itself, before another male duck came up and had its way with it several times."
Link

Number 2: IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceeding well prepared for my old age’ he said.

I have a Sprint network card that plugs into my notebook so I can get on the Internet anywhere. That is the good news. The bad news is, it’s pretty slow. It is just now receiving radio signals originally broadcast by Marconi.

My phone is a Treo 600. It’s a bit too big, but I like that it syncs easily with my computers, and it has everything in it — contacts, calendars, email, and a really, really bad camera, which I call “The CrapCam.” I take pictures on it and post them to my blog, mainly because the quality of the photos enrages the blog readers and causes them to rant in an entertaining manner.

I've just been informed by Tuomas that the Deputy National Police Commissioner had found the demand made by the Oulu police to remove my posts to be unlawful. He had also admitted something that to me seems an important point: "the law regarding the freedom of speech and mass media is not known well enough among the police." This to me is what the whole mess was about: I never considered the officer in question to be evil, he just didn't know the law he was wielding.

That in itself is a serious matter, naturally, since the police of all people should know the law by which they come to dealings with people. However, I'm happy to find the police in this case willing to admit that a mistake has been made.

The DigiBarn Computer Museum is engaged in an online project to tell the whole 30 year story of personal computing, its culture and people. We have over 50,000 objects on our web site, many of which are "orphaned works" (scans of brochures, photographs, video and audio clips, text, articles, etc) from now defunct firms. We have a statement on every page on our site offering to remove works if the original copyright holder objects. In 5 years we have never once been challenged about any one of the works on our web site suggesting that a large part of these materials are in fact bona fide orphaned works. However, as professional and amateur historians we could very much utilize a formal definition of what constitutes an orphaned work. This will greatly clarify use of this material and the work of this large group of historians...

A couple of years ago, my in-laws were going to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, so my wife and I decided to throw them a party. In preparation, I took old portrait photos of my in-laws to a local photo shop to have enlargements made (we wanted to display the enlargements at the party). The photo shop refused to make copies of the photos, since...according to the shop, the shop that took the photos still had the copyright, and they could get in trouble for making copies. The facts that a) the photos were at least 40 years old, b) we had no idea what portrait studio originally took the photos, much less if it still existed, c) my in-laws *hired* the studios to take the photos in the first place, and d) the enlargements would only be displayed in a private party...all made no difference. The shop's fear of the potential penalties for even this extraordinary slight chance of copyright violation kept them for performing the enlargements (not to mention making a hundred bucks in the process). So we don't get to have a nice little surprise at a family party, and a local business doesn't get to make a little money, all because of an unfortunate clause in copyright law.

Second Life allows users to collaborate and teach each other. Learning scripting: it’s easy, you have immediate feedback, and other people are willing to help. People spread knowledge and do FAQs. SL really encourages this. As an example: skydiving classes, ingame. Players sell lessons and parachutes. Skydiving became a huge fad in SL for a while. Abbot’s Skydiving sells equipment and airplanes to go up in. An elevator to 4000 feet. Total freedom to create. A service.

Another example of collaborative business: VERTU is a group in RL. They contacted the EFF and wanted to do a fundraise in SL. They raised 1700 bucks. Next month (for Charity X) they did 1900. Then for Hurricane Relief = 2000 US. People in these spaces recognise the virtual currency has value. Philanthropy, giving .. having an impact back on the RL is a real possibility.

Tringo, the current SL fad. A cross between tetris and bingo. Someone in SL wanted a fun social game to play ingame. He created Tringo. In the 3 months since, he’s generated the equivalent of 4000 US in Tringo. He just licensed the realworld distribution rights to Tringo to a mobile game company. Because SL lets him maintain the rights to his IP, he can distribute said rights in the real world, although apparently part of the deal is that he continues to manage the rights individually ingame.

Virtual Hallucinations. Done by a medical doctor who built a place that looks sort of like a hospital. It plays voices from interviews with schizophrenics as you move around the environment. It recreates hallucinations similar to those experienced by schizophrenics: voices from objects, objects that don’t actually exist. There’s a survey at the end. Did this explain schizophrenia to you? Did you find this disturbing? He got about 700 survey responses (for free) so far. He took real-life doctors and schizophrenics families through.. it’s early prototype work, but it’s a very powerful direction for the game to go in.

The Chinese-run shops in Serbia and Montenegro, known as kineskae, carry products in every possible variant of honesty and dishonesty. Running shoes most Westerners have never heard of - Die Xian, Gui Ren, Renke - sit alongside knockoffs with Nike-like names such as Wink, not to mention blatant acts of deceit like my bogus shoes. Of course, you can also buy real Nikes for the crippling international price. The shiny, glass-fronted stores that sell them grimly alert shoppers to their anti-shoplifting technology; mom-and-pop kineskae make no such fuss.

Kineskae represent the former Yugoslavia's choice to step outside the global economy and embrace the criminal underground. Phony brand-name items - which account for 6 percent of international trade - have become an integral part of the pernicious flow that includes narcotics, small arms, oil, and the sex trade. They have the relationship to genuine products that corrupt gov­ernment has to legitimate representation, rigged balloting to fair election, captive press to free expression. Bogus products are part and parcel of the worldwide marketplace - more so than dated symbols of globalization like Coca-Cola.

Serbia and Montenegro isn't a failed state like Iraq or Sudan, but a faked state. This purported country, which has had serious problems settling on an anthem and a flag, is best understood as a giant covert operation, like Iran-Contra or Enron. Nobody is less likely than a Serbian to collaborate with the ever-more-anxious overlords of intellectual property: the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Customs Organization, and Nike's own clique, the US Council for International Business. For all their treaties and trade agreements, these paper tigers might as well be waving bread sticks as billy clubs.

This isn't the first clash between the administration and the journalism program. For the past year, they've grown increasingly upset with the student-run campus newspaper. The President publicly referred to it as a "tabloid" and "yellow journalism." Students have been advised to "stay away from hard news stories." After one article discussed shortcomings of the campus library, all issues of the paper were removed from school grounds overnight. And, in a clear violation of First Amendment rights, the administration decided to form an advisory board to read and review all stories before they went to print.

The budget crisis facing community colleges is serious, but it's being used as a scapegoat to remove the student body's right to free speech.

Before my mom got her Master's degree, she worked in public relations. As you can imagine, the board meeting tonight should be very interesting. So far, the LA Times, LA Opinion, Daily News, Ventura County Star, KEYT News (CBS), and three radio stations are covering the event. The First Amendment Coalition, Student Press Law Center, and MECHA will all be represented, along with the local and state divisions of the JACC.

And what about Circuits, our much-imitated technology section? We intend to continue the great journalism that section has pioneered, but no longer as a weekly stand-alone section. Like the technology industry itself, which is no longer concentrated in a little enclave in Silicon Valley, the coverage has already been migrating into the mainstream, including the front page. Circuits will end as a standalone section with the edition of March 24 -- much of it merged into Bizday, and other features distributed to other venues. We're also studying plans publish Circuits as a special section on a regular basis.

Update: Tycho sez, "RemixFight is even cooler. Artists take the same WAV samples and make wildly different and innovative creations."

Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announced that it will shut out most public interest organizations at two important meetings devoted to intellectual property and development. As a result, WIPO delegates from 182 nations will discuss these issues without hearing from many of the world's best-qualified experts.

Scheduled for next month, two WIPO "Development Agenda" meetings will focus on the impact of copyright, patent, and other intellectual property rights regimes on the developing world. Without the public interest organizations, the discussions will be heavily weighted toward major motion picture studios, broadcasters, pharmaceutical giants, and other powerful interests that want to expand copyright and patent law.

"This is an embarrassment for WIPO," explained EFF European Affairs Coordinator Cory Doctorow. "Settling the debate by locking one side out of the building isn't the way the UN is supposed to work. We love the Development Agenda -- it's supposed to be a new direction for WIPO. A one-sided discussion isn't a new direction, though. It's just more of the same."

Games are training us to find underlying patterns. Games are teaching us to find patterns in a systemic way. The downside to learning is that you only get to do it once. Once you've learned something, you're done .. until you forget it, of course. Take Tic tac toe. It's a finite mathematical space. Any six year old can tell you that tic tac toe is a stupid game. oh that's dumb, it's always a tie. Read BLINK, it's a great hi level intro to this. Once you've chunked this and figured tic tac toe out, it's time to move on.

 All games are entertainment. Tetris: spatial relationships. Some games - Mario - teach you to explore. This is an interesting and subtle lesson to teach; the fact is as adults, as we build a large library of chunks, we get lazy. "I don't need any more chunks, I have enough to survive now". Then we get Alzheimer’s and die. Seeking out new information, hidden behind bricks, books, people, is actually pretty important. There's interesting work in early stage Alzheimer patients … learning a new language or playing videogames both retard the onset. Some games teach motor skills. A recurrent internet meme is this web based bubble wrap popping. I submit that this memegame and Quake 3 are the same game. Finding a point in 2d space and clicking on it... 

Jason, who's sleep-depped in Shanghai at 645am right now, tells Boing Boing: "Every week I showcase a movie and run a little filmmaker interview." Sounds a lot like what he did previously with The New Venue, only (a) this time he's just curating on behalf of Nerve, and (b) this time, boobies!

He says, "I'm looking for future content (my nerve email address is on the page) and the type of material I show down the line will depend HEAVILY on what people submit or point me towards. That said, I've already selected the first 2-3 months worth of material and I think it's a broad lineup covering a variety of subjects and styles."

About this week's video:

A few months ago, I was researching an article about short films online and stumbled across the sexiest commercial for Microsoft Windows I'd ever seen. It involved a hot girl in her skivvies, and I could imagine Bill Gates popping a big vein in his forehead the first time he saw it. The clip had been archived by some random webmaster alongside hundreds of other obscure little movies, its pedigree unknown, the director's name conspicuously absent from the webpage. But it was a hit, one of the top downloads on that site. This clip, in particular, came from Switzerland. I tracked down the director, Chris Niemeyer, who lives and works in Zurich. — Jason Wishnow

You may also recall Jason Wishnow's two infamous Star Wars documentaries -- Tatooine or Bust, and Star Wars or Bust. Previously on Boing Boing: his eight-minute rendition of Sophocles' classic patricidal/MILF tale, performed by fresh produce: Oedipus The Movie.

By the time Crumb was nine, he had become an obsessive collector, obsessive cartoonist and obsessive nostalgic. He already had a sense of yearning for an America he had never known. His mother used to tell him he was like a little old man. Did he think he was weird? "Oh, yes. I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn't like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn't like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy."

...It's strange talking to Crumb - his words are depressive and lugubrious, and yet he appears mellow, laughing easily through his existential nausea. The most terrible stories amuse him as much as they pain him. He tells me how a best friend killed himself by swallowing four bottles of paper correction fluid, and he chortles. He talks of his own despair, and giggles. He admits that he could never have imagined a life quite so fulfilled - with Aline, and his beloved daughter Sophie, also a cartoonist, and success and money - and says he's still miserable as hell, and laughs.

This old hippie magazine is the only place to keep current with back-to-the-land news. The old dream of thriving on a few acres of land is still serviced with enthusiasm here. Familiar subjects like backyard animals and all-year gardens are reliably addressed, but they also have solid reporting on the such technological innovations as the latest in modern cabin toilets, microgenerators, the best chain saws and solar panels, and so on. However, since a lot of homesteading chores haven't changed much, their website offers 35 years of back issues online -- some of the best stuff they published was written in the 1970s. (You can also get the archive on CDs).

UPDATE: Greg says: "Just a side note -- Mother Earth News has recently lost a lot of its appeal for the back-to-earthers (like me). It was bought out by a large publishing firm, and the majority of its staff left to create Backhome , which more closely follows the 'feel' of the original M.E.N. I've got subscriptions to both, and both have good articles, though I find that Backhome doesn't concentrate so heavily on celebrities and making gobs of cash. M.E.N. recently took a lot of flak and lost some readership by allowing ads for 'safe' cigarettes. They had to pull them after only one issue.

"I'm one of a growing number of geeks who are heading out of the cities and into the small towns. There may be a story there. *shrug*"

UPDATE: SSG Terry L. Welch, currently stationed in Bagram, Afghanistan, says: "I would like to add my two cents to Greg's comments about Mother Earth News. I used to edit a small collectibles magazine for Ogden Publications, the current publisher of M.E.N. Over coffee one day, I mentioned to the publisher that I had been raised on M.E.N., my dad being a do-it-yourselfer, and I noticed that the mag's character had changed since Ogden had taken it over. He said that it wasn't a magazine for hippies anymore. It was, instead, a magazine for suburbanites who didn't want to admit to themselves they'd sold out. I'll always remember that he said that people's magazine purchases "reinforced their self-image." In other words, people who buy M.E.N. aren't going to go build themselves a cabin anymore than guys who buy Men's Health are going to look like cover models anytime soon. He had a point, but I remember the original M.E.N. being a positive magazine which wanted people to change their ways, not cynically reinforce their shitty habits."

The explosion appears to kill and injure some girls, sparking panic and chaos among parents and other children. Shrieks of horror are heard through much of the spot, and a father is shown cradling his daughter's lifeless body, moments after celebrating a goal she had scored.

It closes with a tag line reading: "If there were landmines here, would you stand for them anywhere? Help the U.N. eradicate landmines everywhere."

This is the only wedding ring purchased by the King of Pop, given to Debbie Rowe on their wedding day, November 15th, 1996 in Sydney, Australia. This beautiful ring was given to Debbie and she would love someone to have it who appreciates the beauty and intention in which it was given.

Shouldn't *that* be its own news story? Link

I remember the time my sister and I were in a pet store in Boulder Colorado, called the Golden Leash. This was in the early 70s and I was about 10 and my sister was about 6. We were eating those little candy buttons that come on rolls of paper. A small monkey saw the candy and flew into a rage. He grabbed one of my sister's ponytails and yanked he head against the bars of the cage. He reached through the bars with his other hand and stretched his hideous little fingers. He seemed to be saying, "I'm not letting go until you hand over the candy."

I took my sister's candy and gave it to the monkey (I didn't want to give him my candy). He let go of my sister's ponytail and deftly peeled the dots from the paper, licking them frantically, like they contained some kind of miracle nutrient that he needed to eat immediately to survive. Where was the pet store owner during all this screaming and fussing? I have no idea.

Similarly, the publisher of the Bake Town blog wrote a story about the time a monkey attacked her as she was eating a hamburger in her backyard.

As I was ... enjoying the first bites of the tasty burger - I was startled by a frightening sight. A Spider Monkey came flying (Wizard of Oz style) over the fence and leaped onto the table RIGHT IN FRONT ME. Baring his tiny, sharp teeth, he began screeching and clawing his boney little fingers at me. Let us all pause for a moment to take in how COMPLETELY terrifying and OUT OF THE NORM this experience would be FOR ANYONE - let alone for a little girl living in small town Bakersfield.

Needless to say, I totally freaked out! I ran into the house and slammed shut the sliding glass door. By this time, with me sobbing uncontrollably, my family joined me at the window. The monkey proceeded to consume my burger, clenched in his tiny fists, while continuing to shriek at us all gawking at him through the window. Now, I know this sounds awful, and crazy, and surreal, but trust me, it gets worse. After devouring my homemade, yummy, BBQd cheeseburger, this animal, THIS BEAST, then began to jump and claw and scratch at the sliding glass door behind which my family and I had taken refuge. He basically tried to attack us – begging for more tasty burgers.

"These latest results... suggest that rhesus monkeys can do much more than just follow the gaze of others; they can also deduce what others see and know, based only on their perception of where others are looking. These data potentially push back the time during which our own abilities to "read the minds of others" must have evolved. Moreover, they suggest strongly a reason why these abilities may have evolved in the first place, namely for competitive interactions with others. Finally, these results lay the groundwork for investigating the neural basis for this kind of social reasoning in a readily available laboratory animal – an urgent endeavor for developing a better neural understanding of diseases such as autism, in which this kind of social reasoning appears impaired."

CPCM is intended to create a trusted system analogous to Microsoft's trusted computing platform – now known as Next Generation Secure Computing Base. Commercial content is acquired from a broadcast, data stream, or shrink-wrapped medium. It comes wrapped in metadata known as USI (for Usage State Information) that specifies how the content may be used: for example, how many times it might be viewed, how long it can be kept available, whether it can be copied, how it may be output, and so on. Knowing that increasingly people will have many networked devices from which they want to access "their" content, CPCM creates an Authorized Domain – loosely, a household – that recognizes these restrictions and within which the content is allowed to flow freely. So what about those 30 monks? Are they a household for the purpose of watching last week's Desperate Housewives?

The effort to create CPCM goes into such scenarios. There are, in the draft, according to Mark Jeffrey from Microsoft, provisions for merging domains (marriage), splitting domains (divorce), frequent arrivals and departures (business travelers or kids of divorced parents), and many others. Simply, whenever you turn on a CPCM-compliant device, it looks around for a domain. If none exists, it creates one with a unique ID number; if it finds one, it joins after negotiating a series of tests that are meant to be "transparent" to the user. These devices are all peers, so that if the first one is not present the domain continues to operate just the same. The system is intended to cover only commercial content from trusted sources; personally generated content remains outside it.

Even so, CPCM systems will likely behave differently from what we're used to. For example, the European Broadcasting Union's Phil Laven explained that tomorrow's HDTV set top boxes will stream only to protected devices. Within USI, according to the presentation by Chris Hibbert, who works at Disney and chairs the DVB copy protection effort, will be ways of signalling if content is restricted to a particular geographical area or the location where it's received, and whether it may be exported to non-CPCM systems such as the many proprietary systems currently in use. He mentioned specifically older analog protection systems which may be authorized, but it seems clear from what he said that one effect will be to plug the analog hole. Of course: an analogue copy of protected content could be redigitised without its copy protection and redistributed.

This sounds an awful lot like what's known as "selectable output control". SOC, along with the down-resolution of broadcast pictures, has already been explicitly rejected in the US by the Federal Communications Commission (DOC) to "ensure that consumer expectations regarding the functionality of their digital cable ready televisions and products are met."

RK: A few years back I interviewed the chief scientist for the Army's simulation command and he explicitly mentioned Ender's Game as the novel that many military people read and said, "That's me!"

CD: Yeah, it's part of a tradition of military science fiction like Starship Troopers and so on that kind of glorify the military training process and what it means to become a military man and go through that process.

Heinlein and lots of other writers have written these stories where nerdy but very intelligent people try to find a way to make their outsides match their insides by going away and joining the military and becoming physically strong and proving themselves by engaging in military bravery. There's certainly a strong thread of that running through Ender's Game; it's really about someone who becomes strong in body and mind and becomes a kind of ascetic--it's got its pluses and minuses but I thought it was worth talking about a different way that children find themselves used in online worlds and what it means to have a truly global online world.

In Ender's Game there's a kind of One World government, where you have these people from all over the world gathered together to defend humanity and so on, and he kind of glosses over what it means to have people who come from great economic disparity all join together in a virtual environment in the same system of governance. And I thought it would be worth taking a couple of pokes at that anthill and see what comes up.

I don't think anyone seriously thought that Apple would get anywhere by trying to do the whole defining who is a journalist thing, even Apple didn't go at that too hard. One of the other rules of Mitchell is that the plaintiffs have to exhaust all other reasonable means of getting the information they are after. This is where Apple was super lame. Opsahl told the judge that Apple hadn't exhausted other options, and the judge was still nodding awesomely. He went on to say "instead of using discovery as a last resort, they are using it as a first resort." Kurt was schooling all these suckers so fast that the court reporter had to ask him to slow down twice, it was way too much science for her to handle. But I'm totally used to it, so I was just like "damn, this is dope!"

Apple Computer's attempts to strong-arm Web publishers into divulging their confidential sources illustrates how bloggers, Internet journalists and other online scribes remain second-rate citizens.

After an extremely successful launch event, we're running a remix competition. Over the next month, we want to see who can create the best remix of a piece of work already on the website.

There will be four winners, one in each category (audio, image, text, video). They will each receive the following great prizes:

* Your work on a LOCA Records compilation CD (if LOCA like it enough)
* A Creative Commons t-shirt
* A DVD full of great Creative Commons videos
* A copy me / remix me compilation CD
* A copy of the Wired CD and that issue of the Wired magazine
* A CD from LOCA Records
* Stickers, badges and fake tattoos

We really want to see some cross-genre mixing (e.g. a punk version of some electronica) and cross-medium mixing (e.g. a video to accompany music or a poem based on a photo).

It is absolutely unfathomable what happened today. I cannot see how the promoters of the European Constitution can still support it with a straight face. This event shows that something is clearly rotten in the city of Brussels at the Council building. Why on Earth do we still have the rules that state that national parliaments should be taken into account by the Council?

Things would be much easier if we scrapped all those rules and simply wrote down "The Council presidency and Commission can do together whatever they like". There's no need for those pesky democratically elected parliamentarians to interfere with the smooth decision making process of the Council, since its only goal appears to be to please big business and to produce as many texts as the sausage machine can bear.

This is absolutely disgusting.

Update: Tom sez, "Re: the swpat story... the directive hasn't passed (as in it is now law and we're all screwed). The Council has just officially adopted their (dangerous) version. It's now back Parliament... we still have three more rounds to stop the thing. Everyone should be arranging to meet their MEP right now!"

Update: Justin sez, "The torrent is meant for use with the way super cool SXSW4Pod (by our friends at citizenPod), which allows you to keep the entire SXSW schedule on your iPod. Downloading the torrent enables you to listen to the associated audio while browsing the schedule on your 'pod. Killer, no?"

Update: Here's a torrent of it, courtesy of Gary Lerhaupt.

However, when Lawrence Lessig argues for shorter copyright terms, he bases his stuff, in part, on the fact that old stuff is all out of print and can't be brought back into print because of the cost of clearing the copyright to the work.

Are Lessig and the Long Tail irreconcilable? Anderson says no:

Many of those extracting new value from old content are not the original creators or rights-holders. Some of them are repurposing older material, and others are aggregators who have found ways to find new markets for material that's fallen beneath the commercial radar. Either way, they typically aren't the original record label, film studio, publishing house, TV production company or any of the other names that might be on the copyright declaration. They are someone else, probably someone entirely unexpected. This is, after all, the dawn of Remix Culture.

What's changed is the presumption that the primary rights-holder is the best at extracting the commercial potential of creative material. Instead, anyone can do it: the advertising company that remixes an old movie to sell a car; the Linux t-shirt done Warhol-style, or just plain old DJ magic. What you need to encourage this multiplicity of commercialization potential is tiered alternatives to one-size-fits-all copyright, from allowing derivative works (good marketing!) to shorter terms for the sake of the remix-culture social good. I can't think of a better example of that than Lessig's own Creative Commons, which has already become the license of choice for the right side of the Tail, where the commercial imperative is less all-consuming.

Jerome Frank might, in a profound sense, have changed the course of American history that afternoon. He could not do it. He was a prisoner of the system he served. As a liberal, as a progressive, he had risen to a position of leadership in society. He would jeopardize the usefulness of those labels and, accordingly, the position they afforded him if he participated in the act of courage that Judge Swan, the conservative, was prepared to take. The labels themselves, Frank's "liberal" past, imprisoned him - kept him from the course he would have taken if he were "as young as" we were. When we were "as old as" he was, he was telling us, we would understand that to preserve our position in society, we must compromise with those in control.

... [Frank] was afraid - afraid of threatening the already shaky position of himself, of all the liberals, of the progressives, and even of the Jews - although that was a thought which I, as a young Jewish person, was most reluctant to face. It simply was not prudent for a "liberal Jew" to be the one to save the two "Jewish atom spies." This was what we would understand only when we were "as old as" he."

'My view is that the quality of the Florence Nightingale entry is exceptionally poor,' said Alex Attewell, director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in London yesterday. 'There are two errors in the first paragraph, for a start. Many are mistakes that would be spotted by anyone with a basic knowledge, but I am more worried by the attitude of the entry. It diminishes Nightingale's intellectual legacy by claiming she rejected the germ theory of disease. In fact, after the Crimean War and after Pasteur's discoveries, she was very influential in improving ward hygiene, issues that are still key today.'

Similar errors have infuriated Jane Austen scholars. 'There are some 70 factual errors, wrong names, wrong dates, wrong family relationships, wrong dating of events, as well as omissions of useful information,' according to the distinguished Austen specialist and author Deidre Le Faye. 'The longer this entry remains uncorrected, the more readers will be misled by it.'

Other entries judged to have failed by informed readers include those for Sir John Malcolm, the 19th-century soldier and diplomat; Peter Monamy, the 18th-century artist; and Henry Winstanley, a 17th-century lighthouse engineer.