Reader comment: Simon says: "The compatibility problems are mainly with mac users not using acrobat. all macs running OS X come standard with apple's own 'acrobat' called 'preview'.

"preview reads .pdf files just like acrobat and i've never had a problem with it until i downloaded your boing boing zine! yeah for some reason (i don't know?) the boing boing zine in apple's preview just came up dead blank ...nuthin' ! it did show that the document was 32 pages - but every one of them 32 pages had zero content.

"so i then opened the .pdf in photoshop - and that actually worked! but photoshop had to rasterize the whole document first before i could view it.

"so yeah ...then i downloaded acrobat reader for mac OS X and it worked fine - i could see the zine! ...yay!

"so yeah ...i'd say 90% of boing boing readers would have acrobat reader already.

"but then you got those pesky mac users who have never downloaded acrobat cuz they've always just used apple's preview.

"anyhow, the zine was a great read - a blast from the past!"

Once upon a time, only boring, cookie-cutter horror magazines roamed the land. They terrorized fans with their press release-style stories and monotonous actor interviews. Occasionally they would throw in a photo of a mask or an action figure here or there, but they really only cared about making lots of money by covering the "latest and greatest" Hollywood film in the most generic, clichéd way possible.

But then, there came HORRORSHOW... And the collectors rejoiced.

From the publishers of ILLUSTRATION and ILLUSTRATION '05 comes HORRORSHOW, a stunning, full-color magazine for the monster fan and horror collecting community. Each quarterly issue of HORRORSHOW spotlights the best of the best from around the horror scene — including latex masks, vinyl and resin kits, PVC figures, props, and more — as well as in-depth, behind-the-scenes interviews with the artists and designers who bring these frightening creations to life.

Facing an upswell of protest, Warner Chappell Music on Friday formally apologized to Walter Ritter over a letter it sent to the software programmer earlier this month targeting a helper application for Apple's iTunes called pearLyrics.

"The goal of Warner/Chappell's prior letter to pearworks was to gain assurance that pearLyrics operated according to (copyright) principles. However, in both tone and substance, that letter was an inappropriate manner in which to convey that inquiry. Warner/Chappell apologizes to Walter Ritter and pearworks."

(...)Ritter says Warner Chappell is now talking with him about ways to create lyrics search tools with the blessing of music publishers, but the experience will cause him to think twice before committing his next big idea to code.

One of Ritter's recent brainstorms -- an application that queries lyrics data online to help music fans choose tracks based on themes, like "love" or "breakup" -- may now remain only an idea, he says.

"I'm concerned with how I should go on with software development, because this will be a potential issue -- every time I come up with something that people like, someone might say 'you can't do that, it's illegal and it infringes copyright," Ritter told Wired News. "It's getting really difficult to be innovative as a small developer."

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person's offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world's races.

Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of "the race gene." Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is -- and is not.

In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome -- the complete instructions for making a human being.

"It's a major finding in a very sensitive area," said Stephen Oppenheimer, an expert in anthropological genetics at Oxford University, who was not involved in the work. "Almost all the differences used to differentiate populations from around the world really are skin deep."

Fortunately, George Herriman's Krazy Kat original art was better represented in the show. The members of our party spent a lot of time poring over Herriman's originals, marvelling at the loose, gestural inking. Herriman achieved a lot of his inking effects by scraping ink away from the surface, either with a pen point or razor blade. This was particularly scary to the more anal members of our group. (myself included!)

"The government is proposing that devices (consumer electronics, computers, software) manufactured after a certain date respond to a copy-protection signal or watermark in a digital video stream, and pass along that signal when converting the video to analog. The same goes for analog video streams, to pass on the protection to the digital video outputs.

"The technology Congress is proposing (VEIL) is derived from one that originated with assorted interactive Batman toys that allowed the toys to respond to Batman television shows or videos. How cool—at least for toys.

"The government wants your future TV, TiVo, computer, cell phone, Final Cut Pro, (input your favorite analog signal viewing / converting device here) to respond to the Bat Signal." Link

This 36-page issue has an interview with my hero, Robert Anton Wilson, an article about the wonders of public-key crytography, a piece about lucid dreaming, an interview with the 1988 Libertarian candidate for the US Senate, reviews of zines, comics, books, and software, and lots of comics by me and my friends. The writing is clunky and the design is even more clunky, but I think it resonates nicely with the Boing Boing of 2005. Enjoy!
Link to 16MB PDF file

"The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47."

Reader comment: Danny says: "You can mail to say thanks to the senators standing up to PATRIOT from the EFF's Action Center. Rumor has it that Frist is going to keep trying to take the vote until Dec 31." Link

Happy holidays! See you in 2006!

Dec 5: Sony rootkit ripped off anti-DRM code to break into iTunes

Code from the Free/Open Source program DRMS was illegally included in the XCP rootkit -- and Princeton researchers Felten and Halderman reveal why: in order to sneak Sony music onto the iPod without giving Apple a cut of the sale through the iTunes Music Store.

Dec 6: Sony *finally* releases rookit uninstaller -- sort of

65 days after being put on notice about the XCP rootkit on 50+ of its CD Sony releases an "uninstaller," but the fine-print makes it clear that this doesn't really uninstall anything.

Dec 6: Musician: DRM screws my fans, so it screws me

Damien Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, has a great editorial in the NYTimes today, describing why DRM systems are bad for artists.

Dec 6: EFF forces Sony/Suncomm to fix its spyware -- UPDATED

After intense pressure from EFF, Sony releases an uninstaller for the Mediamax spyware that comes on music CDs from Sony and other music companies.

Dec 7: Sony's DRM security fix leaves your computer more vulnerable

Princeton DRM researchers Halderman and Felten publish their investigation into the uninstaller that Sony has provided for the Mediamax spyware -- turns out that the uninstaller creates even more vulnerabilities.

Dec 9: EFF to Sunncomm: release a list of all infected CDs!

EFF petititons Sunncomm, makers of the MediaMax spyware, to release a list of all infected CDs and to institute policies for future policies.

Dec 14: Sony Artists offering home-burned CDs to replace spyware-infected discs

Sony refuses to recall CDs infected with Sunncomm's MediaMax spyware, so some artists are running their own recall programs, offering home-burned CDs to fans who complain that the software prevents them from ripping their CDs.

Dec 15: HOWTO make a DRM CD

Alex Halderman, one of the Princeton researchers who's been doggedly revealing the tricks, nastiness, cheating and lies in the Sony DRM Debacle, has published a detailed HOWTO explaining how to make your own malicious "industrial strength" DRM CD, just like Sony's. The perfect project for your holiday break!

(Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank)

"It is designed to assist creators who release work under a Creative Commons license and want to engage with a publisher or gallery (for example) in a commercial relationship. They can use the Model Agency Agreement to structure the commercial relationship. The document provides a way to by-pass the legal costs of entering a commercial relationship. In this way it very much acts like a Creative Commons license, as it provides a free tool for creators to specify their rights and demands. In that sense one can call it a Commercial Commons License." Link (Thanks, Christian!)

Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?

Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I've got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.

Hume: Shuffle.

Bush: It looks like.

Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.

Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.

Hume: Called the Shuffle.

Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.

I've been walking around UC Davis today with my new "What Would A Unicorn Do?" deluxe spin folder. Inside, the Unicorn Code reminds me that Unicorns Don't Cheat on Tests, and Unicorns Don't Do Drugs, among other important things. I *heart* my "What Would A Unicorn Do?" folder! There's nothing like it to give your day a little boost, over and over again.

The deal has been described as bringing together two of India's well-known and established brands. The book might be called Deepak Chopra's Kama Sutra: Timeless Erotica for the Virgin Mind...

Originally the (Kama Sutra) served purely as erotic literature for kings and queens, said Chopra. But he believes that there is a great connection between sexuality and spirituality. He wants to explore that and take the carnal experience to new heights of spiritual ecstasy. Link

As much as we find Chopra a pabulum factory for Hollywood's seeker set, he's sidled right on up to the next hottness in spirituality: freedom from sexual guilt and Victorian-era moral repression.

While we're sure Chopra will palpify it in no time, it's still a signficant development in the alternative spiritual scene. But just because Chopra is Indian doesn't mean he's a master of doing it. It's too bad Virgin didn't have the vision to hire someone with more affinity for the subject matter. We imagine rock star Tommy Lee and a bevy of beautiful Sanskrit scholars locked in a hotel room for a week could take the centuries-old text to a whole new level of the erotic. Link

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

Reader comment: Mark says,

Here is an interview (RealAudio Link) with David Skillicorn, a professor of computing at Queen's University. Starting at about 4:40 into the interview (near the end), David notes that there is a confederation of five countries which look at Internet traffic (including email) whose destination is outside of those five countries. Originally linked from (Link); second RealAudio link on the right.

Reader comment hllc says,

This American Life did a great story almost 3 years ago on the Orwellian world of FISA courts (i.e. where the NSA would go if it were actually getting a warrant.) Link.

Today, W/C chairman Richard Blackstone and Jane Dyball, who handles the label's legal affairs in Europe, apologized to the Austrian programmer who created PearLyrics. Snip from Billboard analysis:

W/C’s apology was the right move, but may have come as a result of a publicly posted argument from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Not only was [Walter] Ritter’s application probably legal in the United States, reasoned the EFF, but such threats against U.S. developers could open Warner Music Group to federal liability.

The music industry might want to think these actions through more thoroughly, and not just to avoid legal strife. Dyball’s letter to PearLyrics was copied to Kevin Saul, an Apple Computer lawyer, and links to similar applications quickly disappeared from the Apple Web site.

This was two opportunities lost. For one, by taking the text from illegal lyrics sites, applications such as Ritter’s—which seek no revenue and are, at least arguably, legal—were taking eyeballs away from, and thus diminishing the ad revenue of the very illegal, very revenue-seeking sites that archive and distribute unlicensed lyrics.

Major rights holders confronted with these grass-roots software developments might also consider embracing them as possible new business models as aggressively as they have been in recent years about shutting them down. How many casual music fans currently pay for lyrics?

Previously:

Warner Music attacks specialized web-browser

PearLyrics shutown: EFF's open letter to Warner Music

Update: Walter Ritter has posted the joint announcement on his website, along with his thoughts on the debacle, and his thanks to the EFF. Link. And incidentally, Friday is Mr. Ritter's birthday.

A female Army officer has been charged with using money intended for reconstruction in the holy cities of Iraq to pimp out her New Jersey crib with a bangin' new deck and a hot tub. Oh yeah -- and then there was the ill-gotten Escalade...

Lt. Col. Debra Harrison is the fourth person to be arrested and charged in the scandal, and the second army officer. Snip from a report by James Glanz in Friday's New York Times:

An Army lieutenant colonel who received the bronze star for her wartime service in Iraq was arrested yesterday and charged with taking bribes in a growing corruption scandal involving the Iraq reconstruction program. An investigation has jolted the program, embarrassed the United States military and exposed a dark underside of the American occupation authority that ran the country after the invasion in April 2003. (...)

She is charged with receiving cash bribes of $80,000 to $100,000, a Cadillac Escalade, a trove of illegal weaponry and other items for steering construction jobs to an American contractor in Iraq.

Some of the cash, intended for projects like a library in the holy city of Karbala and an Iraqi police academy south of Baghdad, paid for a new hot tub and a deck for Colonel Harrison's home in Trenton, according to the federal affidavit. Conviction on the charges, including conspiracy to commit bribery and money laundering as well as a long list of weapons charges, could put her in prison for up to 30 years, the Justice Department said in a statement.

She says: "Penguin's Riverhead imprint just published my book, A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents, an anthology that I put together with fellow journalist Jill Smolowe. Unlike most books about adoption, ours is not about wanting a child or the process of adopting. Instead, it focuses on the special issues, challenges, and pleasures that can arise in actually raising the child.

"There really hasn't been a book like this before, despite the fact American families are raising some 2 million adopted kids."
Link

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

"It's not easy to start over from scratch, even when your skilled it's though getting a gallery so I'm looking for promotion anyway I can get it. Hope you will consider covering my site and blog. The site just has the paintings, the blog has little brief stories about the process of doing them. I hope you find it worthy."
I think his work is gorgeous. Link

Bamjan has spoken only a few times since he began the meditation, according to Prem Lama.

He said the first time Bamjan spoke was when a snake bit him around a month ago.

Bamjan took the incident as his second test, which he must overcome, Prem Lama said.

In the first test he was also bitten by a snake - three months after he began the meditation.

Cousteau calls the sub Troy, in reference to the mythical Trojan horse statue, in which Greek soldiers were spirited into the fortress kingdom of Troy.

The idea for the sub, though, came from a slightly more prosaic source.

Troy was inspired by Tintin, a Belgian comic book character. On the cover of the book Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (published in English as Red Rackham's Treasure), Tintin and his dog are pictured in a metal, shark-shaped submarine.

Functional, stretchable and bendable electronics could be used in applications such as sensors and drive electronics for integration into artificial muscles or biological tissues, structural monitors wrapped around aircraft wings, and conformable skins for integrated robotic sensors, said Rogers...

To create their stretchable silicon, the researchers begin by fabricating devices in the geometry of ultrathin ribbons on a silicon wafer using procedures similar to those used in conventional electronics. Then they use specialized etching techniques to undercut the devices. The resulting ribbons of silicon are about 100 nanometers thick – 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

In the next step, a flat rubber substrate is stretched and placed on top of the ribbons. Peeling the rubber away lifts the ribbons off the wafer and leaves them adhered to the rubber surface. Releasing the stress in the rubber causes the silicon ribbons and the rubber to buckle into a series of well-defined waves that resemble an accordion.

Josh says: "It is probably the only coverage of King Kong that is based on weird science, meandering from Enkidu, the hairy man-beast in the Gilgamesh epic, to the latest paleontological evidence about Gigantopithecus blacki, the 12-foot prehistoric ape that died out 100,000 years ago, to the re-classification of chimpanzees into the hominidae family, and of course the biological potential for a consummated love between man and ape."

Cooper and Schoedsack weren’t entirely off their rockers when they cast Kong and Fay Wray in a “great romance.” Humans share enough DNA and chromosomal similarity with both gorillas and chimpanzees — we’re 99 percent genotypically congruent with chimps — that offspring might be possible, were biologists unscrupulous enough to try it. There’s always suspicion they may have already; for some reason, Japan often gets fingered as the place that has secretly developed primate crossbreeds. And then there was the case of Oliver, a circus chimpanzee who seemed so human — he lived with a family in South Africa, where he liked to feed the dogs and sip whiskey while watching TV — that he was tested for human parentage. He came up negative, but in the end Oliver had to be sold because he developed an overpowering sexual interest in his female owner and woman visitors.

Reader comment: email_name: Jordan Running says: "Your post from today titled 'King Kong's Monkey Love' reminded me of an article I saw yesterday from Seed Magazine titled 'Girls Gone Wild...for Monkeys.' The article is about a study which shows that "while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex." Wild. Link

Reader comment: John says: "Apparently at least one person tried to crossbreed chimps and humans, in 1926. Clive Wynne has the story in a NYT op-ed. The scientist was Ilya Ivanov of the USSR, and the story involves Africa, Cuba, the New York Times and the Ku Klux Klan."

The young Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a humanzee: a human-chimpanzee hybrid.

Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.

Next Ivanov wrote a Cuban heiress, Rosalia Abreu. Abreu was the first person to breed chimps in captivity and had a large menagerie outside Havana. Ivanov asked if any of her male chimpanzees might be available to inseminate a Russian volunteer known to posterity only as 'G."

Reader comment: "Lovecraft wrote a story, now public domain, about a man who married an ape called 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family.'" Link

In her BODYWORK project, Liz Cohen is converting Färgfabriken's main hall into a car body shop and a gym. Every day, she will be working to transform an old East German Trabant into an American Chevrolet El Camino. East German functionalism goes American low-rider. In addition, the artist will be training her body so that she will also be able to present the finished car as a showroom bikini model.

On Dec 1, some cheats were published that allowed players of "Grand Theft Auto:LCS Trainer" to add new weather conditions and other play options.

This gave firmware hackers the crib they needed to unravel the game-format, and thence the whole firmware. Now a new hack allowed PSP owners to once again play homebrew games and add new functionality to their PSPs.

Now, how freaking bizarre is it that Sony continues to spend good money removing features that make the PSP more attractive to its customers? Someone needs to be beaten about the head and shoulders with the business-model stick.

First 2.01 Homebrew Game Ported By PSP 3D

That's right. From Hello World yesterday, to Tetris today. We at PSP 3D have successfully ported the first 2.01 game EVER. Thanks to Fanjita for the tips and for the wonderful GTA hack (props to all the people who helped him too). In the next few days, expect this and more games to be ported to 2.5 also (if and when we get SYSCALs working)...

If you are a homebrew developer and would like your game converted to 2.01 format (2.5 in the near future), please feel free to contact us with the SOURCE to your homebrew (aka, the C++ files, not an EBOOT or .bin).

Dave Pentecost tells Boing Boing,

I'm adding to the media frenzy surrounding the San Bartolo mural announcement today ("Sistine Chapel of the Maya") with a "you are there" video of the dig that discovered it.

I was in the tunnels, inside a pyramid, for five weeks as they discovered and cleaned the murals. In the press coverage they are using the phrase "blood sacrifice" to refer to the graphic penis perforation, with six-foot spears, that four figures are performing in the mural.

The video was shot and edited, and the music composed in Garageband, in the jungle east of Uaxactun, Guatemala. It's in iPod format - one of the oldest art objects in the hemisphere playable on one of the newest. My thanks to Bill Saturno and the whole San Bartolo team for allowing me to be part of the astonishing discovery.

Previously:

Earliest known Maya painting revealed

Suppose the mainstream media, fed up with the buzz bloggers keep getting and with bloggers criticizing their stories, decided to exact revenge. They initiate a vigorous copyright enforcement strategy, launching a barrage of lawsuits against bloggers as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has done to music file sharers. What would happen?

The blogosphere would be in for some tough times I bet. Bloggers frequently copy large chunks of mainstream media articles and some of us copy pictures we find on the Web. Bloggers don't have a team of photographers and artists, so they snag images from the Internet. As for mainstream media articles, bloggers often quote very liberally because the mainstream media is notorious for creating dead URLs -- articles often just disappear after a week or two. In other instances, articles get archived and can only be retrieved for a fee. The result is that a post discussing a mainstream media article with just a link or a small quote can become hard to understand when the article being referred to becomes unavailable. That's why bloggers often copy significant portions of articles -- so their posts can still be understood when the URLs to the articles go dead.

(...)[The] blogosphere has developed a set of copyright norms in an area where there is very little enforcement. These norms about the use of copyrighted material are probably at odds with existing copyright law. The mainstream media and other websites have not been going after bloggers for copyright violations all that much. Although the music and movie industries have been on the copyright offensive, beyond them, the enforcement of copyright on the Internet has been rather laid back. But this article from the WSJ strikes a bit of fear in my bones (...)

I'm really sad to say that Europe has failed itself. Today the EU accepted a terrible directive. If you read the PDF link here you can see what a disaster they've created.

For those that want a quick summary: Proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL on the retention of data processed in connection with the provision of public electronic communication services and amending Directive 2002/58/EC.

The directive argues that changes in business models and service offerings create new logging practices. Namely, pre-paid cell phone companies don't need to log as much information as a company that sends you a bill later. VoIP providers don't even have a location, they might have an IP address if the user isn't very savvy. All of this as well as other communication advances allow for criminals to speak freely.

They specifically discuss the value of "traffic data" and "location data" and how it's very useful for "prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime, such as terrorism and organized crime." So now they've created a way to solve that problem. They wish to log all of this data. Not the contents mind you, they're not recording every phone call. They're going to be logging who you dialed and when. They'll be logging names and addresses. They won't log the data in the body of your email, they'll log all of the communication headers.

This is a great deal of data.

Reader comment: Robert says,

It's worth noting that this link is the text of the *amended* proposal that the European Parliament passed and contains quite a number of changes by them in relation to maintaining privacy and trying to limit unnecessary intrusions. There are several added references to the European Convention of Human Rights and the EU data protection directive. Also, this amended text has to be approved by the Council of Ministers before going any further. If they make any changes, it has to come back to the Parliament. So it's not over yet!

I am a reader of Boingboing and I am in China right now. The protest in the city of Shanwei is being blocked by the authorities as known, yet at 10:20 p.m I saw it reported on TV with video clips by the so-called Dragontv,(or 东方卫视 as in Chinese) which I think is a station based in Shanghai and personally I think it a pioneer on some level.

I went to their website to check on it, but could not find a transcript. I could only navigate as far as the National News category, in which that particular piece of news didn't appear among a list of news on 2005-12-15. Here is the link.

Online news of protest deaths blocked by China authorities

Bloggers in China break silence on violent suppression of protest

You added the extra track (shown in yellow) when you edited the disc image in step 4. This simple change makes the audio tracks invisible to most music player applications. It’s not clear why this works, but the most likely explanation is that the behavior is a quirk in the way the Windows CD audio driver handles discs with multiple sessions.

For an added layer of protection, the extraneous track you added to the disc is only 31 frames long. (A frame is 1/75 of a second.) The CD standard requires that tracks be at least 150 frames long. This non-compliant track length will cause errors if you attempt to duplicate the disc with many CD drives and copying applications.

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

(Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank)

Update: Martin points out that the decision isn't final yet: "After acknowledging the jury's decision as to the result of the competition, the Governing Board of the National Bank will decide on the next steps."

When you visit the Windows Live Local and hit "Locate Me", Location Finder sends signal strengths and MAC addresses of nearby wireless access points and standard HTTP request information such as your IP address to the Microsoft online location service. The online service calculates the user's location from a database of known access point locations and returns an approximate longitude and latitude. If this method fails, other methods may be used such as IP address lookup.

Location Finder service was designed with concern for your personal information; secure methods such as SSL are used when transferring location information between your machine and the Microsoft location service. Since the Location Finder will only determine your location information when you visit the Windows Live website, we will not share your location information with other web sites. Also note that the Location Finder does not include an option for forwarding or sharing user location information with third parties. It is designed to work with the Windows Live web site only. Location finder can not track users. Your location is only determined when you explicitly click the “Locate Me” link at Windows Live Local and no user has the ability to determine another user’s location.

We believe that you deserve to have your personal data used only in ways you have agreed to that provides value to you. Our privacy policy prohibits the selling, renting, or leasing of your information to other companies.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three...

Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

The CodeCon 2006 submission deadline is tomorrow! If you're a developer with a cool project, come present it at the same venue that's showcased Off-the-Record Messaging, Audacity, Tor and a wide variety of other kick-ass open-source apps.

Well, I probably could have filled up this playlist with just the recordings of any one of these artists, but the RIAA has recently issued me a warning, so I’m not going to tempt a shutdown, lawsuit or a hefty fine. (Link to rant on this subject)

I’m defining classic country as pre-hippie-country, pre-alt-country, pre-outlaw-country — before Graham Parsons, Bob Dylan, Emmylou, Willie, the Flatlanders and scores of others made the genre accessible to folks who usually associated country music solely with rednecks, racists and reactionaries (hey, that would have made a good album title!) Those changes began in the late 60s and early 70s, so most of this stuff was done before that. I haven’t gone back to the real early rootsy stuff either, and there’s lots of incredible stuff left out, but it’s a pretty good sampling. (FYI, The best basic introductory sampler I’ve ever heard of this stuff is the Smithsonian’s box set. Our government cut through the red tape and inter-record-label squabbling and did something right for a change. Their jazz survey is pretty good, too.)

Previously:

David Byrne gets RIAA warning

More BB posts on David Byrne

Like many reclusive celebrities, Big Foot is misunderstood. In his touching memoir Me Write Book he wants to set the record straight, proving that although he's larger, hairier, and more foul-smelling than most of us, he's really not so different underneath.

Only the most cold-hearted among us could look on without compassion as this hirsute Everyman struggles bravely with parental abandonement, Pringles potato crisps, embarrassing moments with peach schnapps, the desperate loneliness of personal ads, and 'roid rage.

Previous Boing Boing posts about Roumieu's Bigfoot-related work: Link.

This is the first time it has been shown that a drug that increases endocannabinoids in the brain can improve your mood," says the lead investigator Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, an MUHC and Université de Montréal researcher.

Endocannabinoids are chemicals released by the brain under certain conditions, like exercise; they stimulate specific brain receptors that can trigger feelings of well-being. The researchers, which included scientists from the University of California at Irvine, were able to measure serotonin and noradrenaline activity as a result of the increased endocannabinoids, and also conducted standard experiments to gauge the 'mood' of their subjects and confirm their findings.

"The results were similar to the effect we might expect from the use of commonly prescribed antidepressants, which are effective on only around 30% of the population," explains Dr. Gobbi. "Our discovery strengthens the case for URB597 as a safer, non-addictive, non-psychotropic alternative to cannabis for the treatment of pain and depression and provides hope for the development of an alternate line of antidepressants, with a wider range of effectiveness."

I love the color palette with the light green and light yellows. This was quite counter to Bazooka Joe comics which always hit you with primary red, blue and yellow. Pud comics were much more subtle. They were also more visual and played with the tiny space they were allowed.

A young Iraqi journalist and blogger is taking a break from Iraq and hanging out at my brother-in-laws office (Committee to Protect Journalists, based in NYC) for a few days. He is staying in Brooklyn. His blog is very moving -- he drinks wine and gets his hair cut by a woman for the first time in NYC, goes to Ground Zero, etc. This entry is about walking to school with my two nieces, Ruby and Lola.

Joel and his two cute daughters arrived at the corner where I was waiting. Then we walked with his daughters to take them to their school as their mother who is a journalist is assigned for reporting in another state.

The school was so beautiful. It’s a church school that looks like the school where my mother used to teach. She used to teach in a Nun’s school, one of the best primary schools in Baghdad, called Dijlah [Tigris]. Because this school is located in the most dangerous street in Baghdad, Sadoun Street, my mother had to leave it and move to another school in my neighborhood. She decided to move after a massive car bomb took place at the main gate of the school where 22 Iraqi civilians were killed, most of them were pupils, school buses drivers and parents of pupils.

I remember how my mother was scared when I called her that day. She was crying and crying and saying things like the kids are killed, it’s like hell and something like that. My heart sank at that moment. What does it mean when someone is trying to kill westerners in front of a primary school? Two westerners and 22 Iraqis were killed.

Snip from National Geographic:

Archaeologists today revealed the final section of the earliest known Maya mural ever found, saying that the find upends everything they thought they knew about the origins of Maya art, writing, and rule.

The painting was the last wall of a room-size mural to be excavated. The site was discovered in 2001 at the ancient Maya city of San Bartolo in the lowlands of northeastern Guatemala.

(...) The painting dates to 100 B.C., proving that stories of creation and kings—and the use of elaborate art and writing to tell them—were well established more than 2,000 years ago, 700 years earlier than previously believed.

Reader comment: Mark says,

The National Geographic picture you published with your story of the newly discovered Mayan Mural seems to show the King making an offering of his own blood. As customary among the Mayan Kings he does it by stabbing his own penis with a white spear. To show the kings potency the blood is seen 'squirting out', as also noted in the NGS article (page 2), but they don't say it is also shown in the picture! Link.

Virgin Galactic also revealed that up to 38,000 people from 126 countries have paid a deposit for a seat on one of its manned commercial flights, including a core group of 100 "founders" who have paid the initial $200,000 cost of a flight upfront. Virgin Galactic is planning to begin flights in late 2008 or early 2009.

At a Virgin Galactic press conference today, the commercial spaceline firm unveiled a new logo design that will feature the iris of Branson. The logo concept comes from Philippe Starck, in conjunction with a design agency, GBH Design Ltd.

Starck is a founder astronaut for one of the first hundred commercial seats onboard Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceliner.

In displaying the logo concept, Branson said: “I believe it represents all those who will watch and be a part of the growth of this amazing new commercial aviation sector. Whether they are six or sixty, all will see and believe that a new chapter in the story of space flight has begun.”

I just saw the Virgin Galactic logo, and imho, it looks really similar the the cover of George Orwell's 1984: Link.

This month, they're back in Chicago, at the I-Space. Then, in the Spring, the Prisoners' Inventions head to San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center. The show has 13 new drawings from Angelo.

Previously on Boing Boing:

Prisoners' Inventions: MacGuyver meets the prison system

Prisoners' Inventions

I've had the use of an EVDO card that worked flawlessly and speedily (rates comparable to the Ethernet connection in my hotel room) in my Mac, and which also seamless interfaced with a WiFi access point that was literally plug-and-play: just connect it to the wall-power, stick in the card, and the EVDO wireless service was retransmitted to my whole hotel-floor.

The number of situations in which I find myself captive to overpriced Internet service provided by hotels is climbing (in Amsterdam, I stayed at a hotel where the Swisscom WiFi ran 30 Euros/day, with a cap of 250MB -- I spend 90 Euros in one particularly busy day) and gear like this points the way to freedom. I'd love to bring one to an airport ($10 bucks for a couple hours' broadband? Geez) with me and set the Internet free for my neighbors -- hell, with the right software, you could even set up a competing ISP that charged a buck instead of a sawbuck for access! Link (Thanks, Geo!)

Artist managers have been vocal in their opposition to the use of copy-protection software. "I just don't think that this is the answer to the problem that they think exists," says the manager of one veteran artist affected by the XCP software. Mike Martinovich, manager for My Morning Jacket, says that even before the revelation of MediaMax's security problems, his company had been mailing burned, unprotected copies of MMJ's new album Z to fans who complained that MediaMax prevented them from transferring songs to their iPods. "It should have been enough that fans are annoyed," he says. "But this should be the final reason."

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

(Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank)

The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One "incident" included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald's National Salute to America's Heroes -- a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: "US group exercising constitutional rights." Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense -- yet they all remained in the database.

Update: Chris sez, " my girls are making and selling iPod book cases along similar lines but with (1) compartments for all the bits & pieces, and (2) you can listen with the book closed (handy for cloaked listening). Got the idea from a ReadyMade magazine article, plus a few improvements."

Last week, I blogged about WaWa Digital, a fraud-house that calls up people who order its digital cameras and pressures them to buy overpriced accessories. If they decline, the store cancels the order.

A WaWaDigital representative left a disgruntled customer a voicemail threatening to "break his neck" if he tried to come to the store and collect his order.

Don Wiss (a photographer in Brooklyn who has posted galleries of the mailing addresses that are listed as the store locations of Brooklyn's fraud-stores) went and took some pictures of the storefront for PriceRitePhoto (another company that previously threatened to have a blogger who posted about his negative experiences with the company arrested), a graffiti-scrawled, semi-derilict building in Brooklyn with no evidence of any kind of legitimate retail operation.

Now Wiss's website has been knocked off the Internet, and anonymous callers have accused him of "running them out of business" and told him that he'd be dead if he didn't leave the country.

Brooklyn's DA is Charles Hyne -- I hope that he can be persuaded to take an interest in these crooked, violent dirtbags.

As you no doubt know, someone posted a link to your Brooklyn camera story on Slashdot on 12/1. One of the comments mentioned my donwiss.com/ pictures/ BrooklynStores web site. I had the most hits ever.

Yesterday donwiss.com had a DOS attack. 497 simultaneous connections. My host cut me off so not to bring down the other clients on that server. I then switched my dns to a backup host.

Today I received two phone calls at work. First one like blaming me for driving them out of business. Says they have already shut it down. But, of course, he didn't disclose what business, and they had caller id turned off.

I then got a second phone call. He told me to watch my back. He said if I don't leave the country I will be killed. Now nowhere at my site do I pass any judgment on the dealers here. So why blame me? My question is have you been threatened? Of course, living here in Brooklyn makes me a convenient target.

Update: Thomas sez,:

The outfit that threatened to break a customer's neck (that you blogged) was actually WaWa Digital. A different photographer named Daniel took photos of WaWa Digital's store after reading of this death threat.

Don Wiss (the guy now being given death threats) has had his photo series of Brooklyn storefronts up for a while now. It was through his photo series that I recently was able to link up the individual that may be the true owner or PriceRitePhoto, Chaim Pikarski.

By the way, PriceRitePhoto on Monday changed their identity on eBay from priceritephoto to barclaysphoto. They have also now registered the domain name barclaysphoto.com and I suspect plan to do business there now that there PriceRitePhoto name has been trashed all over the internet due to their bad behavior.

It's a tangled web they weave and it doesn't help that these Brooklyn photo shops keep changing their names and that there may be more than a few sleazy operators.

When I buy a CD, I look forward to having the lyrics printed in the liner notes. That's part of what I expect in exchange for my money.

If the record label omits the lyrics, I feel I'm entirely within my fair use rights to listen closely to the recording and copy down the lyrics. Similarly, I'm within my fair use rights when I use a search engine to find the lyrics of the music I've legitimately purchased. And thanks to Apple's iTunes software, I now can add those lyrics to the digital copies of the music I've purchased and have them appear when the song plays on my iPod.

Apparently, at least one music publisher thinks that makes me a music pirate. Yes, annotating music I've legitimately purchased with lyrics makes me a pirate, according to music publishing giant Warner/Chappell. Warner/Chappell sent a cease & desist letter last week to the developer of pearLyrics, a piece of software that automates the process of adding lyrics to iTunes tracks. (For more details, see the MacWorld review.) The developer is apparently located in Austria, and I cannot comment on how Austrian law might apply. But Warner/Chappell doesn't have a legal leg to stand on here in the U.S., and EFF is sending an open letter to them today to caution them from using their legal threats to chill American software developers and music fans.

Previously:

Warner Music attacks specialized web-browser

Reader Comment: Cecily Lynn Steele says,

I am a good friend to someone who is hard of hearing, she is also my tutor in American Sign Language. It's odd, it was just the other day we were chatting about how she listens to music. The ONLY way in which she can fully understand the lyrics to music is to have someone go through the lyrics with her. We sit down, with a lyrics sheet, and point through the words (word by word) as each is sung. After doing this a few times, she's memorized the lyrics and can understand them without the words in front of her.

However, without this assistance of the always-available lyric sheets printed on CD inserts, a tool like pearLyrics (in conjunction with iTunes), or someone laboriously writing them down for her, she has no access to this medium she enjoys so tremendously. Search-engines and particularly pearLyrics makes it easy for her to have access to the lyrics without the assistance of a second person, and come to understand the music that she listens to.

I'm sure that Warner Music certainly did not have any idea that they were shutting out hundreds of hearing impaired persons like my friend from enjoying the little music they can hear when they decided to begin this ridiculous battle.

They did him in, Tookie; it is my first capital punishment in California. They say, however, that Texas held the first place in executions while Bush was the governor.

Now Bush has the whole world to sample, to decree who deserves to live and who to die, who is a terrorist and who is a patriot, who can have scissors and who can have guns. Good and bad guys, it all looks like Hollywood and cowboy films. It not only looks like it, it is really is like it.

This Tookie, this black Californian, I don't care if he is guilty or not, I say when interviewed by a TV, as if my opinion mattered: the death penalty is barbarism and a crime against humanity, like torture.

How do you feel? the reporter asks me with tender feelings. What does that matter, I scream, it is not about feelings, it is about human rights.

Previous Boing Boing posts on Jasmina Tesanovic: Link.

Here's a related piece by Michael Krikorian in the LA Weekly: Link to "Tookie’s Mistaken Identity -- On the trail of the real founder of the Crips."

Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative. But controls like these have spurred a lively commentary among China's fast-growing blogging community.

"The domestic news blocking system is really interesting," wrote one blogger. "I heard something happened in Shanwei and wanted to find out whether it was true or just the invention of a few people. So I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn't do any searches." Baidu is one of the country's leading search engines.

"I don't dare to talk," another blogger wrote. "There are sensitive words everywhere - our motherland is so sensitive. China's body is covered with sensitive zones."

While numerous bloggers took the chance of discussing the incident on their Web sites, they found that their remarks were blocked or rapidly expunged, as the government knocked out comments it found offensive or above its low threshold. Some Internet users had trouble calling up major Western news sites, although those were not universally blocked.

The first taboo I think everyone should just plain get over is the taboo of writing in books. I write in most of my books. Notes about the content, things the content reminds me of, etc. When you just plain write in the margins, inside the cover, etc. there’s no way the notes for that content will get lost. They’ll forever be attached to the text they refer to.

The second is the folded over page corner (dogear). I know some of you just tuned me out as a heretic, but I dogear pages. Worse than that, I dogear for 2 different purposes. I use the top right corner of the right page as my bookmark. I also use the bottom corner of a page that contains something interesting as a marker as well. That lower dogear is often accompanied by notes written in the margin. By folding over the bottom corner of interesting pages, I can quickly look at a book of mine and see how useful I find it. It also lets me flip through a book I haven’t used in a while and easily find the bits I’m likely to want to find again. For a particularly interesting book, like The Big Moo(Seth Godin), you can see the density of interesting material easily.

In related clickage, here's a tattoo on an some guy's leg depicting a totally NSFW, sexually explicit montage. NSFW Link.

Bonus -- anchor cuttings, again not for the faint of gut: Link. (thanks, potty mouse, thanks Brian Short)

Mandatory unicorn chaser: Link.

Previously on Boing Boing: Rhinestone Brass Knuckles

Brass-knuckle purse lands wearer in airport security hell

It looks vaguely iPod-like. If Apple made it, I think they'd call it an iPooed.

Brondell Inc., developer of the Swash(TM), a revolutionary high-tech toilet seat, announced it has secured $1.3 million of Series A financing from a group of investors including technology visionary Mark Cuban. (...)

Brondell introduced the Swash(TM) in January 2005 to target the luxury bathroom products market and to help create a better bathroom experience for American consumers. The Swash is a high-tech toilet seat that provides all of the hygienic benefits of a traditional bidet, but it is installed on existing residential toilets. The Swash utilizes two retractable wands to provide a filtered posterior and feminine warm water wash and has a heated seat and all functions operate at the push of a button. The Swash 600 model even has a warm air dryer and wireless remote control.

Link to previous posts about Mark Cuban on Boing Boing.

Reader comment: Alex Waters says,

Those toilets you're talking about, with the multiple streams of warm water and the heated seats and the driers, are par for the course in Japan and have been for several years. The most popular brand is made by TOTO, under the name "Washlet". They aren't even particularly super-luxury items - according to Wikipedia, they're in half of Japanese homes, and I've seen them in many public bathrooms too.

You wouldn't think one would get addicted to a toilet, but these things are awesome - the one at my fiance's parents' house has adjustable stream angles, water pressures, and water temperatures, as well as adjustable strength and temperature on the blow dryer. The one at his grandmother's house has push-button seat raising and lowering as well.

Wiki link - scroll down to "Japanese Bidet." And here's TOTO's Washlet website (in English).

RSF reports the media blackout began with a physical block -- road checkpoints and a security perimeter -- then moved online, to news websites and message boards. Some international news reports state that 20 villagers died during the December 6 demonstration. Snip from RSF statement:

Chinese discussion forums were ordered to censor all messages posted about the events. When Reporters Without Borders tried posting the message (in Chinese) "People died in Dongzhou" it was automatically rejected by the main forums, including Xinhua and Sohu.

Some Internet-users try to get round the censorship by posting messages in which they simply allude to repression against villagers in Dongzhou. One of the messages, seen by Reporters Without Borders, condemned Japanese massacres in Nanking in 1937, making implicit references to the current political context, saying that it was unacceptable to "fire on compatriots". In another forum, a message read, "We cannot mention the place, the date or who was responsible. But we know".

Reporters Without Borders also tried researching the word "Dongzhou" on the Chinese version of the search engine Yahoo!. This produced no results, although it came up with 150,000 results on the Chinese version of Google.

Reader comment: a Boing Boing reader in Shangxi province writes:

I am out here in China at the moment. We get CNN and BBC in our hotel rooms. But when there is anything to do with the shooting in the south of China it is blanked. Takes some time to come back on. And when I told my Chinese fellow workers about it they knew nothing about it.

I thought I'd point out that English-language accounts of the incident aren't blocked. I live in Shanghai, and I first found out about it through a link on the front page of Yahoo. I also just searched--and found--stories on it with Google news and Yahoo news, and read (well, scanned) the New York Times story about it.

Naturally I can't speak for the policies of the Chinese government, but from what I can tell their point of view for most things seems to be that if you can read English well enough, you're going to find out about it anyway. (I always laugh when I go to the state-run foreign languages bookstore and see things like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 for sale.)

But the reader who wrote about CNN and BBC being blocked was right--that happens all the time with any vaguely "sensitive" story. I believe the satellite feeds are all delayed.

The link goes directly to an full recording (WMA audio file) of the Dec 8th hearing for John Gilmore vs Gonzales about the constitutionality of the ID requirement for flying domestically within the United States. Each attorney got approximately 20 minutes to argue his case in front of the court.

Interesting for a direct look at what each party is arguing and the issues that the court seems most concerned with. There are questions of jurisdiction, which the government is using as a basis to try and get the case thrown out, and they were touched upon in the hearing.

Listening to the whole thing provides a slightly deeper understanding of the legal subtleties which will determine whether or not the ID requirement will be found, in court, to raise constitutional issues.

To write Santa for goodies or with wish lists you should address your letter to Santa Claus as follows:

The USPS will see that the letter is received at the proper place. Please ensure to include the return address on the letter itself! Letters to God can be addressed in the same way replacing "Santa Claus" with "God".

Update: Lukethelibrarian sez, "the reason why the USPS wants a real return address, city and state on there (or tries to associate one) is so that the letter can become a part of Operation Santa Claus, in which many postmasters across the country participate. The program varies from one post office to another, but often includes responses to the kids (written by volunteers) and sometimes real gifts, through partnerships with United Way and Toys for Tots. "

Beware - you must think ahead when moving these magnets.

If carrying one into another room, carefully plan the route you will be taking. Computers & monitors will be affected in an entire room. Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances - and at great speed - to attach themselves to this magnet. If you get caught in between the two, you can get injured.

Two of these magnets close together can create an almost unbelievable magnetic field that can be very dangerous. Of all the unique items we offer for sale, we consider these two items the most dangerous of all. Our normal packing & shipping personnel refuse to package these magnets - our engineers have to do it. This is no joke and we cannot stress it strongly enough - that you must be extremely careful - and know what you're doing with these magnets. Take Note: Two of the 3" x 1" disc magnets can very easily break your arm if they get out of control.

The outline for the third book, The Big Meow, was completed in 1998. The series' then-editor at Warner read it and liked it, but after consulting with the sales staff -- as editors must -- she passed on it: what we both knew at that point was that the first two books weren't selling anything like strongly enough to justify taking the gamble of publishing the third one. So I sighed and put the outline away. (For those who're curious, it completes the trilogy, and -- like the second book -- has a strong time-travel component: but this one's set in just-post-WWII Los Angeles. Those who remember the film "Cast a Deadly Spell" will immediately catch something of the intended atmosphere.)...

The obvious solution to this problem is publication on demand (POD). I don't mind doing that. But you have to understand that it ain't cheap at the reader's end. Without dragging you all through the math -- which would take me a while, and I have enough trouble with math after the caffeine hits, let alone before it -- let's just say that a "trade paperback" perfect-bound copy of The Big Meow is going to cost you hardcover prices, not paperback. If I'm to make any money at all on the deal (by which I mean, at least recoup my publishing and labor expenses), you're going to be paying $20-25 for a copy of this book.

Last month, I blogged about how the Royal Society, a UK non-profit science organization and journal-publisher, had taken a stand against open-access publishing, an innovating approach to science publication that makes works available gratis under Creative Commons and comparable licenses.

The Royal Society's argument against open access were absurd: they argued that because open access publishing would undermine their ability to sell journals, that it would reduce researchers' access to scientific results. This was naked self-interest: the Royal Society equated access through their journals to access, period.

The open letter from the Society's members makes the eloquent case for Internet-based science publishing as a superior mechanism for distributing scientific research:

As working scientists who support open access to published research, we believe that the Society should support RCUK's proposal, rather than oppose it. The proposed RCUK policy will ensure that the results of research funded by the Research Councils are made freely and rapidly available, maximizing their utility not only to the scholarly community in the United Kingdom and around the world, but also to practitioners (including doctors and nurses) and to the British public whose taxes largely support the research. The RCUK policy has strong backing from librarians and academics, and has received official support3 from Universities UK, the organization that represents UK university vice-chancellors and principals.

In seeking to delay or even to block the proposed RCUK policy, the Royal Society appears to be putting the concerns of existing publishers (including the Society itself) ahead of the needs of science. The position statement ignores considerable evidence demonstrating the viability of open access, instead warning ominously of 'disastrous' consequences for science publishing. We believe that these concerns are mistaken.

Update:: A reader writes: "Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, responded to the members' letter last week. (Full text of his letter, Peter Suber's comments on what appears to be a delaying tactic by the RS.)

Shown here: a previously unpublished portrait shot Steve took in my back yard this summer.

Link to sugarbank interview, and here's a DVD retrospective of Steve's erotic photography, "Living Through": Link. (ships fast for holiday gifting!)

The Dutch electronics giant now plans to bring its TV-on-cellular chipset to the United States. Handsets with the chips should hit North American shelves sometime in 2006. To ensure that content and content services will be available, Philips has partnered with Crown Castle Mobile Media.

Crown Castle has acquired terrestrial rights to 5 megahertz of L band spectrum and will launch a mobile broadcast network in 2006.

Today, the BSA published a report about the so-called software piracy.

I say “so-called”, because of the interpretation of the data by the Bulgarian branch of BSA.

Here’s how the data should be read in historical order:

In 2004 BSA published another report. According to the data there, Bulgaria “had” $ 26 million of “pirated” software.

This year BSA Bulgaria uses new data by IDC to say that, “the Bulgarian IT-sector can double its volume from USD 300 M to USD 622 M till 2009, if the country can lower the software piracy with 10 %. ”

Now, how can decrease of $ 2.6 million per year lead to an increase of IT-sector with $ 322 M? That would have been funny, if it wasn’t sad.

It seems that either the data is fake - something of which there a number of articles published in the Bulgarian media, or it’s deliberately falsified.

From Boston.com today:

"AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors."

Translation: "We like everything about the internet, except the way it keeps us from locking out the competition, so we want something just like the net, except less useful to the user, but with more pricing power for us."

Implementation: The solution must enable the R15 DIRECTV DVR Plus to operate using a hard drive (or hard drives) with capacities greater than 160GB, and to recognize the full capacity of the drives.

Reliability: The solution should survive software updates to the R15 and should not cause other features of the R15 to malfunction or be disabled.

Features: We will pay more for solutions with special features, such as the ability to add a second drive, the ability to move programming from a 160GB drive to a larger drive (but NOT from one DVR to another), and the ability to move settings from a 160GB drive to a larger drive. We are specifically NOT looking for solutions that will bypass the security or digital rights management features in the R15, and we are not looking for any solution that would require modification of the R15’s motherboard. Further, we will not consider any solution that has the effect of enabling the user to avoid DVR service fees.

CBS and UPN will provide content to Amp'd Mobile broadband wireless phones, with programming that includes CSI: NY, Numb3rs, The King of Queens, and clips of David Letterman. From UPN, look for America's Next Top Model, Everybody Hates Chris and Girlfriends. Content from both networks will launch on Amp'd Mobile later on this month when the wireless company officially launches its service.

Most Americans carry cellphones, but many may not know that government agencies can track their movements through the signals emanating from the handset.

In recent years, law enforcement officials have turned to cellular technology as a tool for easily and secretly monitoring the movements of suspects as they occur. But this kind of surveillance - which investigators have been able to conduct with easily obtained court orders - has now come under tougher legal scrutiny.

In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants.

The rulings, issued by magistrate judges in New York, Texas and Maryland, underscore the growing debate over privacy rights and government surveillance in the digital age.

Once you get past the protections and down to the raw bits on the disc, its just the standard xboxdvdfs, however the offset and layer breakpoint are different.

Bunnie published a fantastic account of his Xbox cracking adventure, called Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, which is part manifesto, part HOWTO, and required reading for anyone who wants to start down the road of improving the technology all around us. Link

The state has a strong distance-education program for high-school students through the Michigan Virtual University, which despite its name now provides exclusively K-12 courses and resources. Many high-school students take advanced-placement courses through the virtual university, and Mr. Flanagan said those students have used online education to great success.

Under the proposal, students would be permitted to count noncredit online courses, such as ACT-preparation courses, toward the requirement. But Mr. Flanagan said he wanted to encourage students to take the online courses for credit.

For today, websites across the Internet are mirroring the American Edit album and/or turning their page-backgrounds grey. Mashup albums don't hurt the sales of the albums they sample -- at worst, they have no effect on sales, at best they can promote them. Artists who are signed to major labels can avail themselves of labels' legal departments when they want to remix others' work and get their samples cleared. Indie artists, hobbyists and fans don't get legal assistance from labels' high-priced fixers. This is pure patronage: in the old days you couldn't make art unless the King or some bishop granted you permission; today you need permission from a studio executive.

The labels admit this. Last year, EMI made headlines by censoring DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, which remixed the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. I raised this with an EMI representative at London's Creative Economy conference and she shrugged it off: "What's the problem? We later hired Danger Mouse to make a mashup album for us."

The problem is that copyright law is supposed to decentralize the process of making art, moving the power to authorize art from royalty to the marketplace. Labels have no business setting themselves up as arbiters of what art can and can't be made.

Happy Dean Grey Tuesday. Up yours, Warners.

Link

Update: Matt cooked up this sweet Dalek/Warner lawyer graphic in honor of the day.

Local officials said Thursday they were shocked to learn that Emerald Hills Golfland, a three-acre theme park with two miniature golf courses, had been placed on a Homeland Security watch list.

"The moment we realized it was on the list, it was taken off," said San Jose police officer Rubens Dalaison, who handles "critical infrastructure assessment" for the department. "I myself took it off."

But the list remains secret, and even San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who is the ranking minority member of a House subcommittee on terrorism risk assessment, said she did not know whether it is still listed.

Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ...well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er...Amazon's) platform, should they wish.

It's all done via web services. It's all integrated with Amazon's fabled web services platform. And there's no licensing fees. Just "consumption fees" which, at my first glance, seem pretty reasonable. ("Consumption" meaning consuming processor cycles, or storage, or bandwidth).

The fees? One dollar per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded (if you are putting your new service up on their platform).

To make the self-assembling containers, (researcher David) Gracias and his colleagues begin with some of the same techniques used to make microelectronic circuits: thin film deposition, photolithography and electrodeposition. These methods produce a flat pattern of six squares, in a shape resembling a cross. Each square, made of copper or nickel, has small openings etched into it, so that it eventually will allow medicine or therapeutic cells to pass through.

The researchers use metallic solder to form hinges along the edges between adjoining squares. When the flat shapes are heated briefly in a lab solution, the metallic hinges melt. High surface tension in the liquified solder pulls each pair of adjoining squares together like a swinging door. When the process is completed, they form a perforated cube. When the solution is cooled, the solder hardens again, and the containers remain in their box-like shape.

"To make sure it folds itself exactly into a cube, we have to engineer the hinges very precisely," Gracias said. "The self-assembly technique allows us to make a large number of these microcontainers at the same time and at a relatively low cost."

Several silicon valley billionaire gadget freaks turned me onto a hybrid camera they had discovered: the Lumix. Made by Panasonic (a name not usually associated with cameras) the Lumix seems to have a secret following. The mid-level model has the glass lens of a SLR, but at a smaller scale. Attached to a hand-sized 5-megapixel sensor is a very fast, extremely sharp zoom lens made by legendary optician Leica. The zoom is wonderfully telescopic, ranging 12X, all the way from the 35mm equivalent of 36 to an astounding 432 (!), yet clearly bright at 2.8 f/stop, which is perfect for low light without flash, and -- the key innovation here -- it employs image stabilization. The lens self corrects for vibrations. This means that I can shoot indoors and night with zoom extended (yes!) and get razor sharp shots. During daylight it is startling clear. Turns out that for real world use, sharpness is probably more important than megapixel size.

Reader comment: Greg Webster says: "I bought one of these back in May, for a bit more money than this (of course).

"The image stabilization is good, but not good enough to compensate for jitters at 12x. Pretty cool at closer levels though. Where it really excels is at medium range shots and at a wide range of light levels. The defaults in it's 'SCN' (scene) mode are really quite useful...using the 'snow' mode to take photos of high light levels like sunsets on water is wonderful. In a reasonably-lit party room I don't even need the flash, which is good because it's really a little overpowered and can wash out features. It also works great taking really close up photos with minimal zooming (bugs on flowers, etc.).

"All told, we've used it for almost 2000 photos in 7 months. Our previous digicam (Pentax Optio 230) took about 4000 before the shutter button began degrading. Digital cameras are wonderful things!"

"Mr. Hodgman gave up a generous 45 minutes of his time to chat with us about werewolves, palindromes, facial hair and of course the 700 Hoboes project, a collection of nicknames of famous hoboes throughout history, which are now being drawn by illustrators all over the world, thanks to Mark F's suggestion at Boing Boing." Link

For her eighth birthday, little Jenny receives a very strange gift from her toy-fanatic father – a little robot named Chibi-Robo. But Jenny’s mother isn’t happy, because Jenny’s father has just quit his job at a robotics plant for reasons he won’t explain. Chibi-Robo helps around the house, cleaning up and doing whatever he can to bring happiness to this troubled family. When the robotic Spydorz show up, it’s up to Chibi-Robo to protect his family from the evil plans of Macroware Robotics, Inc.

Robert Williams' booth was across from us, and he showed up in his recently finished '32 roadster. Lots of people were bummed out when Bob finally painted his roadster, as it was pretty much the first car back in the early eighties to deliberately go for the unfinished, primered (I won't use the "R-word") look. Folks were even more puzzled by the crazy paint job he created, which is a sort of a mish-mosh of styles between old dirt-track racers and sixties dragster graphics. I didn't dig it at first myself, but it has grown on me, and I really dig it now.

Reader comment: Jeffrey says: "Just the other day i came across a website that happens to sell these very items. They can be found at Fred Flare." $20.
Link

Reader comment:Fred says: ThinkGeek also offers cellphone handsets, and in my opinion they have more 'old school charm' than Fred's. Although, my name is Fred too, so I'm torn... And, of course, you can't forget the DIY cellphone handset either.

Reader comment: ReindeR says: "A friend of mine is busy building bluetooth headsets into old telephone handsets. His next project is to build an entire GSM into an old desktop phone from the seventies, much like the Portable Rotary project."

Reader comment: Nicolas Roope says: "I run Hulger (formely Pokia) that boingboing.net helped to get moving with a link last year that resulted in a half pager in the NYT (which in turn spurred me on to manufacture them).

"Things have moved on a lot since and we now have 5 models, two of which are bluetooth. all of them work both with cellphones OR for Voice over IP (the wired ones with the Y*CABLE accessory) "

The JYPHONE copies (the one you linked to) annoyed me no more than any of the other copies until i spotted some blatant rips of our special edition customizations."

Reader comment: Jake von Slatt says: "My version is wireless AND handsfree and is more closely related to the classic lineman's butt-set!"

"Maggie Bailey, known as "The Queen of the Mountain Bootleggers," died of complications from pneumonia Saturday at Harlan Appalachian Regional Hospital. The Kentucky legend, who began selling moonshine when she was 17 and was still selling alcohol from her modest home at Clovertown in Harlan County when she was 95, was 101.

Over and over again, often despite a preponderance of evidence against her, Mrs. Bailey beat charges of illegally selling alcoholic beverages. Juries just would not convict her.

"Everybody knew her and she had helped everybody. Why do you bite the hand that feeds you, as the old saying goes," said Helen Halcomb, who is married to Mrs. Bailey's nephew.

“Two bees tested two days after the initial training retained the information in long-term memory,” they wrote. One scored about 94 percent on the first day and 79 percent two days later; the second bee’s score dropped from about 87 to 76 percent during the same time frame.

The researchers also checked whether bees performed better for faces that humans judged as being more different. This seemed to be the case, they found, but the result didn’t reach statistical significance.

The bees probably don’t understand what a human face is, Dyer said in an email. “To the bees the faces were spatial patterns (or strange looking flowers),” he added...

Dyer said that if bees can learn to recognize humans in photos, then they reasonably might also be able to recognize real-life faces. On the other hand, he remarked, this probably isn’t the explanation for an adage popular in some parts of the world—that you shouldn’t kill a bee because its nestmates will remember and come after you.

Francis Ratnieks of Sheffield University in Sheffield, U.K., says that apparent bee revenge attacks of this sort actually occur because a torn-off stinger releases chemicals that signal alarm to nearby hivemates. Says Dyer, “bees don’t normally go around looking at faces.”

In January last year (Josep) Manchado saw a Boeing 737 on the airport tarmac (at Majorca's Son Sant Joan aiport). He pressed his camera shutter button while speculating idly that some US millionaire was in town. Then he put the picture of the Boeing (tail fin number N313P) on airliners.net, and forgot about it.

Within a few days Mr Manchado starting getting strange calls and emails. They came from the US and from Sweden. "People were asking me questions about the plane. They obviously weren't all planespotters because they were asking questions that people who know about planes don't ask," he said...

Months later, he got a call from Germany's ZDF television. A man called Khalid El-Masri had come to them claiming he had been kidnapped by the CIA from Macedonia, bundled onto a plane and taken off to a prison many hours away. Several months later, after allegedly being tortured, he was flown back and dropped in Albania.

One of the planes thought to be involved was one Mr Manchado had photographed. It was believed that it had flown on to Macedonia that very same day. With the photo in their hand, ZDF reporters were able to persuade Skopje flight control to give them a printout of the flight plan. The aircraft had gone from Palma to Skopje and from there to Baghdad and Kabul. Mr El-Masri's story, convincingly told but difficult to believe, fitted.

As my lectures bring me from industry to industry, I find myself amazed by just how little fun most people are having. Whether separated from one another by policy, competition, or cubicle, the last thing that seems to occur to people is to have fun together—when it should be the first priority. Instead, managers feel obligated to reign over employees; executives think they must hoodwink their shareholders; sales believe they must strong-arm their clients; and marketers assume they must manipulate the consumer. All for the life-or-death stakes of the next quarterly report...

Instead of relentlessly pursuing survival even after our survival needs are met, we must learn how to do things because they fulfill us— because they are, in a word, fun. Fun is not a distraction from work or a drain on our revenue; it is the very source of both our inspiration and our value. A genuine sense of play ignites our creativity, eases communication, promotes goodwill and engenders loyalty, yet we tend to shun it as detrimental to the seriousness with which we think we need to approach our businesses and careers.

If we can switch our orientation to fun, and see it not as an anarchic threat that needs to be quelled but rather as the core motivator and source of meaning for all human thought and behavior beyond basic survival, we will enable ourselves to reach levels of success that were previously unimaginable. Our very definition of success transcends survivalist notions such as cash reserves, time remaining, or personal safety, into the realms of self-worth, meaning, connection to others, and greater purpose. Plus, it’s better business.

Both political parties and the media are far to the right of the general population on a whole host of issues. And the population is just disorganized, atomized... And that's why the media and campaigns keep away from (political) issues. They know that on issues, they're going to lose people. So therefore you have... George Bush... this pampered kid who came from a rich family and went to prep school and an elite university. And you have to present him as an ordinary guy who makes grammatical errors, which I'm sure he's trained to make--he didn't talk that way at Yale--and a fake Texas twang, and he's off to his ranch to cut brush or something. It's like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.

Keltner hit upon this difference in national smiles by accident. He was studying teasing in American fraternity houses and found that low-status frat members, when they were teased, smiled using the risorius muscle - a facial muscle that pulls the lips sideways - as well as the zygomatic major, which lifts up the lips. It resulted in a sickly smile that said, in effect, I understand you must paddle me, brother, but not too hard, please. Several years later, Keltner went to England on sabbatical and noticed that the English had a peculiar deferential smile that reminded him of those he had seen among the junior American frat members. Like the frat brothers', the English smile telegraphed an acknowledgment of hierarchy rather than just expressing pleasure.

Update: A reader writes, "Amusingly, the Sunday Times (UK) has a completely different spin on the same research. While the New York Times remarks on the 'deferential' and 'sickly' aspects of the hierarchy-acknowledging British smile, the UK Times lauds the British smile as 'more sincere' and "hard to fake" as opposed to the American 'Pan-Am' smile. You have to read the two articles back to back to get the full sense of just how diametrically opposed they are. Hilarious!"

Update: Dan sez, "The guy in the Jelly Donut costume in the video is Andrew Bancroft, of the SF based sketch comedy group Killing My Lobster."

Update: More Jelly D video here (Thanks, Adrian!)

This auction is for the set of 5 Fashion Doll Arcade Game Patterns. I also sell them individually, starting at $3.00 each. 1) Pac-man (Upright) 2) Donkey Kong (Cocktail) 3) Claw Machine 4) Pinball Machine 5) Pool Table (Removable Top) Additional Table Tops (Ping Pong & Air Hockey, OPTIONAL $2.00)

There are individual differences in the costs of multi-tasking, Lien said. In her lab studies, a typical response to a single stimulus might take 300 milliseconds. Adding a second task increases the response to about 800 milliseconds. A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, so the delay may not seem like much – until you extend the difference to a car driving 60 miles an hour and realize the response rate more than doubles, Lien said.

In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others.

"I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests."