An anonymous Boing Boing reader says that "Technologic," the second video for Daft Punk's new album "Human After All," can be found right here.
Link to torrent. And you can buy some neat little alien robot action figures on the band's website here.

Update: BB reader Tokumei sez:

The action figures on sale at the Daft Punk site are not in fact robots at all! They're actually characters from the anime Interstella 5555: 5ecrets of the 5tellar 5tar 5ystem, which uses the Daft Punk record "Discovery" for the soundtrack. The first four chapters from the movie were also released individually as music videos.

Updpate: Here's a link to the video in *.mov.

Profile of Michael Pilmer, a 38-year-old Devo fanatic whose awesome collection of band memorabilia consists of thousands of items. He's now webmaster for the Devo website. Boing Boing reader (and my old-school pal) Charles O'Donovan says, "This guy used to work for Alienskin Software who make awesome plugins for Photoshop. I met him a few years ago."

Snip from story:

The little white house in Oakwood doesn't look like a shrine. But step through the door and into Michael Pilmer's world. Gaze in awe at the massive autographed poster of Devo above the dining room table, the authentic Devo concert costumes, the Devo pins and shirts and ephemera carefully arrayed throughout the house.

Yes, here in Raleigh, half a block from Oakwood Cemetery, is the planet's biggest collection of artifacts from the band best known for the 1980 hit "Whip It."

"It's the ADD that keeps me going, I guess," says Pilmer, 38, a tall, lanky redhead (it's dyed) in a homemade T-shirt with Mickey Mouse sitting on a toilet. "I'm definitely kind of obsessive, so I just figured I would channel that into one thing."

Link (Thanks, Charlie!).

Update: BB reader James Allenspach says:

The story makes passing mention of Implied Regurgitation, a sticker art project that Michael devised which is sort of like the Andre the Giant/OBEY sticker project, except that instead of a scary Andre head Michael's stickers are word balloons that say "I threw up."

Link

Sean Bonner and Wil Wheaton whipped up these t-shirts commemorating the Great Star Wars Line At The Wrong Movie Theater of 2005. Previously on Boing Boing: Star Wars geeks in line at Grauman's will answer pay phone, and more details on blogging.la: Star Wars geeks already lining up @ Grauman's
Link to t-shirt site (Thanks, Sean).

This is stupendous video of some guys sinking a series of jaw-dropping baskets in what looks like a skate-park. The shots are so fantastic that I have to assume there's some trick photography here -- these shots are the kind of amazing that makes you rock with surprised laughter -- but if this is CG or more traditional trick photography, then it's so well executed that we can move our praise on to the effects-wizards. 8.8MB Quicktime Link (Thanks, Christopher!)

Update: Brian sez, "the video is actually from DC shoes."

Rick Prelinger writes: "Corbis, the image licensing company owned by Bill Gates, has bought the Roger Richman Agency, who represents, in its words, "a roster of legendary personalities including actors & actresses, comedians, musicians, film directors, sports figures, fictional characters and historical icons."

"What Richman, and now Corbis/Gates, control includes "full persona usage, consisting of name, voice, signature and image (photo, illustration, animation and/or look-alike)." Dead or alive.

"And guess whose personas Gates now controls: Boris Karloff, Rod Serling, the Marx Brothers, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Asimov and yes, Bucky Fuller.

"As far as I know, this is the first time an image licensing company has integrated with a personality licensing company." Link (Thanks, Rick!)

Next week, non-governmental organizations, rightsholder reps, and national delegates from all over the world will converge on Geneva to meet at the World Intellectual Property Organization, for a landmark meeting on promoting development through copyright, trademark and patents.

This comes out of last fall's "Development Agenda," where India, Brazil, Argentina and other developing countries held WIPO's feet to the fire and demanded that it adopt a formal policy to act like any other UN agency: that is, to promote humanitarian goals, not higher levels of copyright restrictions.

In the interim, it's been clear that WIPO and the rich countries it has traditionally served aren't exactly thrilled about this -- for one thing, they stabbed the public interest groups in the back and arranged to lock nearly all of them out of the room.

With the meeting about to start, the national delegations have started to produce documents describing their proposals. Mexico -- captive state that it is -- has produced an embarrassment of a document calling for more copyright to save development. The US has produced an even dumber document saying that the solution to development is to assign developing nations "buddies" from the developed world to show them the ropes. The UK's document says that they think this stuff is important but aren't willing to do anything about it.

Shining out like a single rose on top of a mountain of crap is a 12,000-word detailed analysis by fourteen nations ("the friends of development"), explain exactly what they mean when they talk about facilitating development.

Jamie Love's done a great analysis of the proposals, with a scorecard on which buzzwords the different papers use, and how often they use them:

USA
All words 3059
Abuse 0
Access 3
Access to knowledge: 0
Anticompetitive 0
Consumer 0
Doha Declaration on the TRIPS 0
Education 6
Exceptions 0
Human Rights 0
Limitations 0
Market failure 0
Monopoly 0
Open source: 0
Poverty: 0
Public Health 0

Link

This hack on Craigslist and GoogleMaps is amazing: the service places all the houses/apartments for rent/sale on Craigslist as waypoints on a Google Map, color-coded by price, with links to the Craigslist ads. Wow. Link (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

Here's the perfect tee-shirt for those long weeks camped out at the wrong theatre for Star Wars tickets -- damn the controversy, if you love the Force, you shouldn't be afraid to tell the world. Link (via Preshrunk)

Update: Richard sez, "we gave the phone a call on The Gadget Show news podcast this week and spoke to Caroline, an Aussie who made the trip just to stand in the line for over a month."

A woman who swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking went to her doctor to complain of nosebleeds and nasal obstructions. Turned out, she has a LEECH IN HER NOSTRIL. And not just in her nostril. She had a leech partly in her nostril and PARTLY IN HER SINUS CAVITY. They had to anesthetize the leech and then tweeze it out. Ew, ew, ew. Link (via JWZ)

My pal Suzy Conn maintains the Blogway Baby blog devoted to Broadway musicals. For as long as I've known her, she's been working steadily at a musical called "Plane Crazy," a singin', dancin' tribute to swinging sixties stewardesses in the age of the Pill, the jet, and the sexual revolution.

A year ago, I got to see the musical performed at a workshop at Toronto's Poor Alex Theatre and it was fantastic: funny, catchy, engrossing, with a really authentic sixties-kitsch feel: like Hair at 30,000 feet, with seasonings of Jesus Christ, Superstar and Germaine Greer.

The play's going to Actor's Equity Showcase production this summer, and Suzy's launched a website for it that includes MP3s/MIDIs of all the songs from the production, as well as synopses and background material on the era.

Plane Crazy is set during an explosive time in history: The intersection between the dawn of the Jet Age, the introduction of the Pill, the genesis of the modern Feminist Movement, and the Golden Age of Advertising.

Stewardesses represented the first-wave shock troops in a changing world. This was an exclusive sorority of women who had freedom. Freedom to travel wherever they wanted. Freedom to have sex with whomever they wanted. And freedom to have a career without needing the support of a man.

Alas, men were not as quick to adapt. Most guys were interested in a woman who was a cross between Betty Crocker and Betty Page - they didn't want a Betty Friedan. Society itself, as typified by the advertising industry, was also slow to adapt.

Link

This is a long list of science fiction writers grouped by "religion," though there's some confusion (I'm listed as "Jewish," even though I'm an athiest; I'm ethinically Jewish but it's certainly not my religion). Still, it's fascinating to see the number of Mormon, Lutheran and Baha'i writers in the field. Link (Thanks, Isaac B2!)

The Internationale is the hymn of the Fourth International Communist Party. My parents, being good reds, used to sing it every New Year's Eve at the stroke of midnight, with all the comrades at the socialist New Year's gathered round the record player to sing along with the soundtrack from Reds. It is quite a stirring anthem, and has been translated into dozens of languages, and is sung the world 'round.

Weirdly, this 19th century song is still in copyright in France, and a French filmmaker has just been fined about $1300 for letting a character in one of his films whistle the tune (you can hear a very modern synth-pop take on the tune courtesy of Maxx Klaxon here).

The irony factor here is much deeper than, say, the irony surrounded JibJab's appropriation of Woody Guthrie's This Land. Guthrie was a socialist, sure, but the Internationale is a call to arms to abolish private property, eliminate international borders, and throw off your chains and rise up to smash the state. Hard to imagine that the long-dead creator of that song is having his wishes honored by French collecting societies shaking down people who make use of it for cash.

The 19th-century revolutionary hymn was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 and set to music by another Frenchman, Pierre Degeyter, in 1888...

Under French law, "The Internationale" won't fall into the public domain until 2014 — 70 years of post-mortem protection plus extra time to cover the world war. Degeyter died in 1932....

[The film] hardly paid its own way, opening briefly in a single Paris theater and selling just 203 tickets, Le Monde reported.

Link (Thanks, Maximus!)

An article in the Register today reports that it is possible for more than one person to share a username/password simultaneously on Napster's digital music service, so they don't have to pay for separate accounts.

Over the past couple of days MusicAlly has run several tests, during which we were able to download and stream simultaneously from four separate computers across two separate Internet connections for good stretches of time. Our findings so far suggest this situation is the same whether we use a trial account, a paid-for credit card account or the £14.95 Napster To Go service. By comparison, several other Internet subscription services, including Real's Rhapsody, log the first user out automatically if a second user logs in using the same username and password.

Arguably the fact that one of the subsequent users could order one of Napster's paid-for permanent downloads, thus adding a charge to the original user's card, provides a small disincentive against sharing usernames and passwords. But Napster requires users to insert their credit card security number before making a major purchase, such as the upgrade from the £9.95 service to Napster To Go. What's more, the credit card numbers themselves are not exposed on the accounts page, so there's no danger of having your card details ripped off by someone with whom you're sharing the music service.

Link

Ernest sez, "Disneyland is fighting a California appeals court decision that its rollercoaster-like rides (Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Matterhorn Bobsleds, etc.) must adhere to the same safety standards as public buses and actual railroads. The court decision would require rollercoaster operators in California to use 'utmost care and diligence' as opposed to merely 'reasonable care,' which is the current standard. I'm not quite sure how 'utmost care and diligence' is compatible with rollercoasters at all."

Disneyland's coasters have been falling to pieces, killing people, and going down for multi-year unscheduled maintenance ever since an ex-McKinsey consultant was put in charge of the park and heavily slashed the preventative maintenance regime while firing the park's most senior operators, many of whom had run the one-of-a-kind rides since the day they opened and were familiar with their many quirks.

This move is in marked contrast to the stuff that Disney got up to in Florida, where they essentially bought an entire township (actually, an "improvement district" which is like a town but more autonomous) so that they could write their own building code (among other reasons). The building code they wrote let them build things like fiberglass castles, which are not in the usual town codes -- and the castles and other structures they built have stood the test of time.

But in Disneyland, it seems to me that they're pushing for the right to remain negligent, not the right to innovate beyond the imagination embodied in a construction code.

Richard Derevan, a lawyer for Disney, told the justices that under the higher standard of care, "something could always be safer. The ride could be slower, the curves less sharp, the hills less steep. The ride may lose its purpose for being."

The case involves a claim filed by the estate of Cristina Moreno, a tourist from Spain who visited Disneyland in Anaheim on her honeymoon in 2000. Her family says she suffered a brain hemorrhage after riding the Indiana Jones Adventure, which simulates an off-road jeep ride. She died a few months later.

Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

Rich Gibson says:

We all curse the patent office for granting patents on things which we find obvious, but they don't always mess up.

The courts have denied Smucker's a patent on what appear to be little uncooked peanut belly and jelly raviolli analogues.

I love the almost aggrieved tone of the Smucker's rep:

"A spokeswoman from Smucker couldn't immediately be reached for comment Friday. In a statement released earlier, the company said it had purchased "a unique idea for making an everyday item more convenient" and made a significant investment in a "unique manufacturing process" for making the product."

Right...because PB&J has always been a problem in daily life. She did not add 'and I want a pony.' Link

Mel says: "The photo retoucher's site is offline because of all the traffic - so here's another one if you want it. The two best examples are http://homepage.mac.com/gapodaca/digital/blonde/index.html and http://homepage.mac.com/gapodaca/digital/bikini/index.html.
Link

Amid says: This post is a primer about DVNR ("digital video noise reduction"), a technology that is used by movie studios to clean up dirt and grain from film prints. It works fine in live-action, but when used with animation, it has a tendency to erase and distort parts of the image.

Recent releases of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Woody Woodpecker, Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes have all been marred by DVNR technology. This is not a new problem and DVNR has ruined many cartoon releases since the early-'90s, but it's been angering a lot of cartoon fans in the online community recently. The post has links to other articles and discussions of DVNR and cartoons.
Link

Boing Boing reader Bill Bibo says:

I read your post about the elvi listing and thought you might want to know I have a bit a strange little site where I have collected over 100 autographed photos from various Elvis imps all over the world. It is the Hall of Kings at www.biboland.com.

Sadly, my favorite is no longer performing -- Miss Cybelvis Monroe. She was a professional Marilyn Monroe impersonator who did Marilyn impersonating Elvis. I even had the chance to accompany her on ukulele at one gig. Great stuff, hysterical. She gave it all up to pursue an art career (Link).

My collection all began with El Vez, one of the best Elvis "interpreters". PS: I love Boing Boing and try to read it every day.

Link

Previously on BB: Database of Elvis Impersonators

Boing Boing reader Patrick O'Neill says:

Sorry to be a pedantic dick about it, but the real fake genitive plural of "Elvis" is "Elvum". Back formations are tricky that way.

Mark Hurst of Good Experience interviewed New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, who is working with the psychology department at the University of Michigan to research how humor works in the brain using cartoons as the input.

The experience of humor is similar to the “ah-ha” moment of two things coming together. For humor, two things have to come together to produce the experience of laughter. Normal and abnormal; these things reconciled in a moment, and usually it’s a normal situation violated in some way that we can tolerate. You have to have something normal that becomes abnormal, or something that looks abnormal and then become normal.

So, normal: there’s a guy on the phone, saying “No, Thursday’s out. How about never - is never good for you?” Everything is normal - the office, the syntax of politeness - and yet the message is rude. We have a violation where we have a normal situation.

Link

In the new issue of Technology Review, Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand outlines a surprising new plan for saving the environment, including a case for going nuclear:

So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Nuclear certainly has problems—accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a “hydrogen economy,” combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.

The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see “A New Vision for Nuclear Waste,” December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That’s the kind of idea that can go from “Impractical!” to “Necessary!” in a season, depending on world events.

Link

Science fiction legend Robert A. Heinlein's agent, his executor and a Heinlein scholar have blessed a 46-volume "definitive" edition of his works to be published by Meisha Merlin, in a 5,000-copy limited edition. Weirdly, they're leading with I Will Fear No Evil, a book that I think of as not just weak, but actually embarrassing (there's lots of Heinlein I love, but the 500-page bricks he wrote later in life are not among them). It's tempting to make a crack about there being only 5,000 people around who'd shell out for I Will Fear No Evil, but the fact is that if I had a bigger place, I'd be seriously considering buying this set.

The project will consist of 46 titles spanning the entire writing career of the legendary SF author. The Virginia Edition will contain all of Heinlein's novels and short stories; all of his nonfiction titles; several volumes of his letters and personal correspondence; and the vast majority of his interviews, social commentaries, speeches and articles, the site reported.

Link

My April issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering is now online. Inside...

* Simulating You: Digital doppelgangers for medical applications

* Hunting for Black Gold: Arming wild-catters with 3D ultrasound

* Community Water Works: Cheap water purification for developing nations

Link

A restaurant in Perth, Australia was blown to bits on Wednesday by several dozen anti-cockroach bug bombs. A pilot light in one of the oven seems to have ignited the DIY fumigation chemicals. Two people were injured and property damage is estimated at $500,000. From The Mercury:

John McMillan, manager of the state fire investigations unit, said the pressure wave from the blast was powerful enough to lift the roof off the building.

"The restaurant owner has used the principle that if you use twice the soap, you get your hands twice as clean," Mr McMillan said. "He's just overdone it....This (cockroach bomb) is a good product, but this incident shows if you don't read the manufacturer's instructions, there can be very serious consequences."

Link (via Fortean Times)

quit staring at my pranks
college pranks
harvard sucks
starbucks emails
the jim thompson letters
incoming pizza calls
project foil
anti-gravity room
post office experiments
the credit card prank
improv everywhere

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

Yahoo has agreed to provide free hosting to Wikimedia.

Yahoo will dedicate a significant number of servers in one of its Asian facilities for hosting Wikimedia's free content websites. (..) Yahoo!'s donation is a gesture of support for the charitable goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and does not imply any ownership of the content. Yahoo! does not expect Wikimedia to host advertisements in return for this support. As of April 7, Yahoo! will also test the integration of Wikipedia content in its French-language Yahoo! Search shortcuts (Link), to be followed by other languages to accommodate users in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the U.S.

IOW, the result for a query on "goatse" would result in: http://fr.search.yahoo.com/search?p=goatse. Link to press release. (Thanks, Stephane)

This Minneapolis Star-Trib article explores the challenge for libraries of how to serve 'millennials' -- the current crop of young people, who are more familar with search engines than the Dewey Decimal System.

There they were, 11 college students, lined up like some alien species before a curious group of about 50 college and university librarians. One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken. And when was the last time he was in the U's library? "Last year," he said. The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What's a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?

In one of the kickoff sessions of the national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the group spent seven hours Thursday at the Minneapolis Convention Center puzzling over the habits of the so-called millennial generation. Confident, sophisticated, tolerant and practical, they are "Internet natives" who are more likely to use Google to research a paper than go to the library. Accustomed to getting information at the click of a mouse button, they are impatient with the slower, word-based searches and single-use computers that many libraries use.

Link (Thanks, Rico)

BB reader Jason says:

Hi, we were hoping that BoingBoing readers would be perfect for a research project we at the Institute for the Future are starting. We're creating a history of video games, not just with input from experts (we'll use some of course) but primarily using a lot of real players' experiences with the role of video games in their lives. Since we're a non-profit a lot of our work goes public; this history map and the future forecasts we create from it will go on our web site when we're done. Thanks!

Link

Someone writing headline copy at Reuters this morning committed a hilarious crime against the English language.

Catholic monks living on an island off the coast of Wales have flown in a satellite dish to watch the Pope's funeral.

Despite the flying saucer image this conjures, the monks in fact merely ordered a satellite dish for the monastery, which was then delivered to their island by helicopter. Link. Screengrab here (Thanks, Liz Upton)

Last week, I blogged about the Reith Lectures, the BBC's annual learned talk series on Radio 4. This year's theme, "The Triumph of Technology" is near and dear to my heart -- and now you can get the audio of the lectures as podcasts! Link (Thanks, Mike!)

The MPA and IFPI (international versions of the MPAA and RIAA, respectively), has produced a report describing the code of conduct they'd like ISPs to embrace -- basically, they want ISPs to act like AOL in the old days. Any ISP that adopts this code of conduct is cutting its own throat -- seriously, this thing is a frigging embarrassment, it really makes the IFPI/MPA people look like they live in Narnia. The MPA/IFPI people I've met on the road are generally lightweights, prone to telling easily countered lies, ignorant of the law, fumble-tongued and ham-fisted. This report tells me that my impression of them was dead on. Here are some callouts from CoCo:

* "remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders".'

* "require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property infringement by an established right holder defence organisation or by right holder(s) whose intellectual property is being infringed"'

* terminate contracts of recidivist'

* implement instant messaging to communicate with infringers'

* implement filtering technologies to block sites that are 'substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services.'

* voluntarily store data for copyright enforcement...

"To enforce terms of service that prohibit a subscriber from operating a server, or from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth where such consumption is a good indicator of infringing activities."

Link (via Copyfight)

Wikipedia will be issuing a DVD/CD edition of the English version of the encyclopedia, trimmed to exclude entires of dubious merit and those that may infringe copyright or plagiarize other sources. I love this -- I would also totally love to have a daily .torrent of the entire Wikipedia on a language-by-language basis for those of us who want to keep local mirrors.

"We want one last level of review to get to a stable branch," said Wales. Wikipedia volunteers will also double-check articles to ensure there is no plagiarism or copyright violation.

"We already have a strong policy against plagiarism and copyright violation, but we'll be reading through things again and making sure everything's confirmed," said Wales.

Link (via /.

The Canadian Petition for User Rights, a statement signed by hundreds of people asking the Canadian government to set out its Internet copyright policies to respect privacy, fair dealing, and due process, was presented to Parliament yesterday. Congrats to Digital-copyright.ca on a job well done.

The second petition is signed by several hundred people, Mr. Speaker, from both Burnaby--New-Westminster and throughout Canada, and focuses on the Copyright act. Petitioners want this house to maintain the balance between the rights of the public and the rights of the creators. They demand that the government not extend the term of copyright, and preserve all existing users' rights to ensure a vibrant public domain. The petitioners also call upon parliament to ensure that users are recognized as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about any proposed changes to the copyright act.

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Next Wednesday, as part of the festivities in Seattle's Computers, Freedom and Privacy confernece, EFF will host its Pioneer Awards, at 7PM at the Sci Fi Museum. Today, the org released the list of (very) distinguished winners for the year:

Dr. Patrick Ball is a leading innovator in applying scientific measurement to human rights. He directs the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) at Benetech (www.benetech.org), a nonprofit organization that combines the impact of technological solutions with the social entrepreneurship business model to help disadvantaged communities. He served as the catalyst behind two open source software tools for the human rights community, "Martus" and "Analyzer," which aid in the secure storage and analysis of data on human rights violations. He will be accepting his award from East Timor.

Edward Felten is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton University whose research interests include computer security and technology law and policy. He brings these scholarly interests to his work as an activist. In 2001, Felten and EFF sued the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Felten is also author of "Freedom to Tinker" (www.freedom-to-tinker.com), a highly regarded weblog exploring the ways government and industry attempt to limit technological innovation and what activists can do about it.

Mitch Kapor is President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a nonprofit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer app" that made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980's. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and served as its chairman until 1994.

Link

EFF has released a guide to blogging anonymously, with "basic measures people can take to keep their blogs anonymous and explores what the law says about discussing work-related issues online. Some advice is common sense; for example, don't post a picture of yourself if you want to stay anonymous. But for bloggers who want strong guarantees of privacy, EFF suggests using technologies like Tor or Anonymizer to prevent your blog-hosting company from logging your computer's unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Bloggers who fear they could be fired for blogging are also given an introduction to laws that prevent an employer from punishing them for speaking out online."

The bad news is that in many cases, there is no legal means of redress if you've been fired for blogging. While your right to free speech is protected by the First Amendment, this protection does not shield you from the consequences of what you say. The First Amendment protects speech from being censored by the government; it does not regulate what private parties (such as most employers) do. In states with "at will" employment laws like California, employers can fire you at any time, for any reason. And no state has laws that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or otherwise.

One way to make sure your blog doesn't earn you a pink slip is to make sure that you write about certain protected topics. Most states have laws designed to prevent employers from firing people who talk openly about their politics outside of work, for example. Be warned that laws like this do vary widely from state to state, and many are untested when it comes to blogging.

Link

Mike Chambers of Macromedia says:

Lawrence Lessig spoke at the FlashForward conference last night in San Francisco. In his talk, title The Cost of Copy Right, he stressed to the Flash designers and developers the necessity of a culture of sharing. While the Flash community has actually been a very open community, sharing content and source, the Flash Player does not provide an easy or standard way for Flash content developers to allow viewers to download their source code (Flash files are separate from their source).

So, I have put together a simple ActionScript library for Flash that allows Flash content creators to easily allow anyone to download the source to their content by right clicking on that content. I have also added a context menu item that allows a distribution license to be specified. Finally, in a nod to Mr Lessig, I have released it all under a Creative Commons license. More info here and a screen shot here.

Link

Ethan Zuckerman sez:

Isaac Mao is one of China's best known bloggers, and part of our Global Voices posse. He posted a funny and provocative post on April Fools day - it read in part, "Isaac Mao was exiled to Siberia... what do you want to visit now?" and linked to various funny net memes.

Evidently, the Chinese internet censors didn't think it was too funny. Either because of the April Fools' joke - which got a lot of traffic - or a diagram Isaac recently posted, illustrating how he believed the Chinese firewall works, his site has been blocked by his ISP, probably under pressure from Chinese internet censors. Isaac's a wonderfully funny guy and has reassured readers on his backup site - which he helpfully titles "Not IsaacMao.com" - that he sees the situation as a great way to learn about internet censorship in China. GV and others have offered him hosting in the US, but he says he'd prefer to continue hosting in China so he can understand more about how filtering and censorship are working.

Link to Issac Mao's original domain, and here's where his site currently lives. More details here: Link.

"Craziest" is an intriguing first in a series of short stories offered online in Flash and in audio podcast. The subject, loosely speaking: braniacs who think too much. Editor Liz Dubelman sez:

The inspiration for CRAZIEST came one day while I was listening to Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW (my local NPR station). I am an NPR junkie. I feel lonely when I don’t have it on in my car or streaming out of my computer speakers. Anyway, his guest was Myla Goldberg, who wrote "The Bee Season." I thought, if spelling bee champions are weird, Scrabble players are at least as weird. I began to explore people who build “thought castles” ­ people who take thinking too far. What would make someone need to create her own order? Who would that person be that would have such a strong need for magical thinking?

Link to CRAZIEST, and here's the vidlit project site: Link (Thanks, redjar)

I stumbled accross this photo just now on Flickr when I was logging in to retrieve a message, and loved what I saw.
Link

Update: BB reader Chad says:

The baby in the photo (Josie Robson) just happens to be the first baby born on Flickr: Link. Now she is the first baby seen reaching for a faux rabbit on Flickr... the distinctions keep piling up. (she and her mommies are my roommates)

BB reader David says,

Check out the comic I made out of those incredible baby pictures: Link

Geez, talk about sucking all the fun out of life. Cookie Monster will be cutting back on sweets as part of a new healthy eating program on Sesame Street. The googly-eyed, blue fuzzball will learn that "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food." What next, a song called "C is for Celery?"
Link (Thanks, jodyh)

Here's a gem I picked up from WFMU's excellent Beware of the Blog -- a 17 MB video clip of a robot woman head that is as creepy as it gets. Precisely what you'd expect to find at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley.
Link

I sure hope this photograph is a real McDonald's ad. It's too perfect! Link

UPDATE: Carrie says: "Mark asks on his post about the McDonald's ad whether it's real or fake. It's real. The ad campaign was for McDonald's in Austria and was conducted by the agency CCP Heye." See this and here.

UPDATE: Mark says: "Check out this painting by Casey Weldon [nsfw -- Mark] for more mcdonald's baby-suckling action!!

I just finished reading Jon Ronson's latest non-fiction book The Men Who Stare At Goats and it was brilliant, absurd, scary, deeply freaky, and lol funny. The cover of the book says it's a story "about what happened when a small group of men--highly placed within the United State military, the government, and the intelligence services--began believing in very strange things." Some of those odd beliefs include: psychic spying (aka "remote viewing"), Jedi powers, subliminal sound weapons, and the ability to kill an animal just by looking at it (hence the title). As demonstrated in his previous book, "Them: Adventures with Extremists," Ronson has an amazing talent for seeking out individuals on the fringes of reason and enchanting the reader with their (truthful?) tales of high weirdness. Forget any questionable conspiracy theories about the US military--the truth is far stranger. From the dust jacket:

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. 'The men who stare at goats' reveals extraordinary - and very nutty - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's War on Terror.

Link

Lorna says: "A plastinated fetus was stolen last week from the Bodyworlds exhibit in Los Angeles.

"There's a pair of Goth-looking ladies caught on security camera who are believed to be the theives. Could you guys help spread the word to your readers to help ID these people?"
Link

Noah Schachtman's defensetech blog reports on a '90s Pentagon initiative to give G.I.s flying saucers:

The Multipurpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platform (MSSMP), flown from 1992 to 1998, used a ducted fan and a 50 hp engine to "cruise at speeds of up to 80 knots, for up to three hours, with a ceiling of 8,000 feet," according to Helicopters.com. Weighing at 250 pounds with a diameter of six feet, the MSSMP was meant to "provide a rapidly deployable, extended-range surveillance capability for a variety of operations and missions, including: fire control, force protection, tactical security, support to counterdrug and border patrol operations, signal/communications relays, detection and assessment of barriers (i.e., mine fields, tank traps), remote assessment of suspected contaminated areas (i.e., chemical, biological, and nuclear), and even resupply of small quantities of critical items," its makers at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center say. (These are the same wizards of robotics that put together the ultra-intimidating Robart III guard drone.)

Link

This website offers animal sound ringtones for your mobile phone. Respond to the "true tone" of the turkey gooble, interrupted by a rifle blast. Other earthycrunchy options: Barred Owl, Canada Geese, Common Loon, Cougar, Mallard, Elk, Pintail, and Goose. Kinda pricey, though: $2.50 a shot. At that rate, I might just wander out to the woods, grab an unsuspecting duck, and strap it to my Treo instead. Link (Thanks, bonnie)

Nokia's new 8801 (for the US) and 8800 (Europe, Asia) are set for launch later this year, and feature sexxay sillhouette and hip, prefab ringtones composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The phone's thin, stainless steel profile slides open to reveal an elegantly designed control interface. Me want.
Link to product specs and a QuickTime promo video, and here's the press release. More on Infosync: Link (Thanks, Marko).

A new scientific study suggests that older people who have sleep difficulties snooze much better after listening to 45 minutes of quiet music before bed. Researchers studied the sleep patterns of sixty individuals aged 60-83 in Taiwan who had problems sleeping. Compared to the control group, "the 30 who had listened to carefully selected music experienced physical changes that aided restful sleep. These included lower heart and respiratory rates." From the press release:

The music group was able to choose from six tapes that featured soft, slow music. These included one tape of Chinese folk music and five that had been found effective for reducing postoperative pain in research conducted by (Case Western Resever University nursing professor Marion) Good.

Good, one of the country's leading researchers of drug-free methods to reduce postoperative pain, has found in previous studies that the combination of relaxation and music relieved postoperative abdominal pain significantly more than painkillers.

Link

CityRag says: "Glenn Feron is a master photo retoucher. On his site The Art of Retouching, he makes the subjects pop, removes background items, and reshapes body parts. Scrolling through his gallery is a nice lesson in photo editing. But what we really like are the booty lifts, artist makeovers, and tattoo removals. An eye opening reminder that much of what we see in celebrity publicity photos is highly enhanced and improved through the magic of retouching."
Link (via CityRag)

Apparently, Sony has received a patent on a purely theoretical method for transmitting sensory experiences directly into the brain. Their approach would non-invasively fire ultrasound pulses at various parts of the brain. Details are sparse as the inventor declined interview requests from New Scientist.

Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."

Link to article and Link to patent