- dice wars
- cow commander
- missle 3d
- turbo tanks
- gravitypods
- cruel 2 b kind

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

The Cabaret Mechanical Theatre Online Shop sells all manner of automata, pre-assembled, papercraft, and even a kit for DIYers. I've assembeld one of the papercraft models before and it ran superbly -- and was an awful lot of fun to put together. Link (via Paperforest)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez, ""Word from the EFF on the Hill: The House just passed their FISA reform bill without clauses that would give telecoms like AT&T immunity from prosecution for assisting in illegal wiretapping programs. No vote yet in the Senate, but a version of the bill without immunity passed Judiciary, and rumors say that's the version that Dem. Senate leadership is going to put forward for Senate vote." Link (Thanks, Danny!

See also:
AT&T wiretapping: Your two-minute guide
StopTheSpying: Tell the Dems to keep AT&T on the hook for NSA wiretapping
EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
AT&T logo improvement
AT&T's guilt-by-association algorithm for finding "terrorists"
AT&T retrofits privacy policy: your data is not yours.

Fox News Porn is a collection of raunchy outtakes from the Fox "News" Network, where hypocritical prigs like Bill O'Reilly revel in prurience while condemning it. This condemnation is largely indistinguishable from a celebration -- as when Sean Hannity visits a brothel and asks snotty, explicit questions of the workers there while his camera lovingly pans across their bare flesh.

The site is the creation of filmmaker Robert Greenwald, whose documentary Outfoxed is a masterful takedown of the Murdoch empire. Fox News Porn created a brief but spectacular net-storm when an overzealous moderator for Digg took the site off the Digg front page and threatened to suspend Greenwald's account for violating Digg's Terms of Service. However, a day later, Digg management reversed the decision. In founder Kevin Rose's words, "Our fault. Digg on." Link (Thanks, Kevin and Pete!)

See also:
Iraq For Sale: documentary about profiteering contractors
Movie -- WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price
Critical Wal-Mart documentary to be shown in houses of worship
Uncovered: War in Iraq torrents under CC license
Outfoxed interviews .torrent for remixing
"Happy Talk From Hell" -- Salon reviews Outfoxed

Cameron sez,

I thought BB-readers would be interested to know of this year's Creative Commons Flickr photo contest. It entails creatively photographing some CC swag and uploading said photos to Flickr group CCswagphotocontest2007. All photos must be CC-BY licensed.

A weekly winner will be announced every Monday starting on November 19, 2007 - December 17, 2007. The two overall winners will be announced on Jan 2, 2008.

The weekly winner will be blogged on CC's main page and posted on CC's website for that entire week. The two main winners will be awarded 100 postcards of their winning photo. These postcards, properly attributed of course, will be distributed internationally to promote CC.

Link (Thanks, Cameron!)

The Book Design Review Blog has picked its top book covers for 2007 -- there are some superb covers here -- I'm especially fond of these two, for Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, and The Worst Years of Your Life. Got favorites of your own? Link 'em in the comments. Link (via Kottke)

James Patrick Kelly recently concluded the 49-part podcast of his wonderful classic novel Look Into the Sun, a superb novel of first contact and faith. The whole podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, so you're free to share it with your friends. Link (via Futurismic)

See also:
James Patrick Kelly's new podcasts: "Look into the Sun" and a story every week
James Patrick Kelly's wonderful sf stories online as free audiobooks
Hugo nominee James Patrick Kelly video podcast
Three James Patrick Kelly audio stories free and CC-licensed
James Patrick Kelly's podcast
James P Kelly's "Burn" short sf novel podcast concludes
Asimov's magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons

John Tehranian's paper, "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap," from a forthcoming symposium issue of the Utah Law Review on "Fixing Copyright," is a great, tight little essay on the way that the growing gap between what technology allows us to do and what copyright tells us not to do is turning us all into mega-crooks. Just by doing the normal, everyday stuff -- chatting with friends, sharing the moments of our lives -- we commit billions of dollars' worth of infringements:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

PDF Link (Thanks, John!)

I recently became acquainted with the work of NYC-based funnyman Dave Hill, by way of John Hodgman and Jesse Thorn's respective blogs. Dave has a metric dungload of videos up on Superdeluxe.com: here is a Link to his archive. I think my favorite is "Dave Hill Gets Schooled In Actor's Movement." I love it so much that I have recently begun muttering a certain phrase he uses in that video again and again. My friends and cow-orkers are sick of me saying that Dave Hill line now. I, however, AM NOT.

Dave's "NYC fashion week" videos (one, two) are also pretty fcking sweet. OMG, no wait, this dental services commercial is my favorite: Link.

Remember the Black Metal Dialogues? Witchtaint? The email exchange? Classic internet excellence. Dude, that was Dave Hill, too!

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at this juice-infusing "Turkey Cannon," the first in-game footage from the new Ghostbusters game, a device to discover hidden cameras in your home, old news footage from the Japan Tech Expo '95, a Chewbacca backpack (add your own wookie smell), an expensive ratcheting corkscrew, a company that makes motion-based microgenerators gets some funding, a strong, simple fridge magnet, a device that plays music when you're on the can, a water filter that adds flavor, new fire-resistant hard drives and safes, a very nice yet overpriced dock radio, a lamp shaped like a mushroom (sadly just a concept, I think), a must-watch video that lays bare the utter failure of modern telco customer service, a man creating 300 game concepts, hearty all-beef calculators showing the Russians still like their gear Russiany, a folding keyboard, a surprisingly witty Ford Sync commercial, the latest in no-muss turkey roasting, a heart-stopping recreation of the battleship Yamato in LEGO, and an easy way to return your poison toys.

And some deals, including your chance to get in on that Amazon "Customers Vote" promotion. (Worth doing even if you don't follow through.)

michael sweere
denise burge
rosemarie fiore
brian dettmer (shown above)
kris kuksi
silvia b

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

The Flying Spaghetti Monster will be discussed at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting

The title: "Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody."

"For a lot of people they're just sort of fun responses to religion, or fun responses to organized religion. But I think it raises real questions about how people approach religion in their lives," said Samuel Snyder, one of the three Florida graduate students who will give talks at the meeting next Monday along with Alyssa Beall of Syracuse University.

The presenters' titles seem almost a parody themselves of academic jargon. Snyder will speak about "Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce: The Flying Spaghetti Monster's Messy Implications for Theorizing Religion," while Gavin Van Horn's presentation is titled "Noodling around with Religion: Carnival Play, Monstrous Humor, and the Noodly Master."

Using a framework developed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Van Horn promises in his abstract to explore how, "in a carnivalesque fashion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster elevates the low (the bodily, the material, the inorganic) to bring down the high (the sacred, the religiously dogmatic, the culturally authoritative)."

Link (Thanks, Rick!)

A series of wonderful Reuters photos show Chinese children studying and playing in a school campus built in a cave.

A general view shows the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.

Link (Thanks, Rick!)

For those who missed the killer deals at GAMA-GO's Holiday Sale in San Francisco last weekend, they're spreading the shopping hysteria down to Los Angeles tomorrow. This Saturday, come one, come all, to the Bigfoot Lodge on Los Feliz Blvd for bargains galore! (Sorry, GAMA-GO's new Boing Boing hoodie is not part of the sale.) Follow the link to see the flier with the details.
Link

The fine artisans at Pressure Printing created a beautiful relief print of one of my absolute favorite COOP artworks, his "1949 Mercury" with Satan at the wheel. This hand-printed relief on Arches Cover printmaking paper is HUGE, more than two feet tall and almost four feet wide. Follow the link for close-up shots as the devil is in the details with this one. The 1949 Mercury was printed in an edition of 25 and is now available for $600. Shouldn't that be $666 though? Link

Here's the future of mixed reality technology. A German designer created der Desktop für die Wand, a "desktop for the wall." Practical or not, it's a fun idea.
Link (via MAKE:)

David Theiss, 21, of Kansas City, Missouri, was arrested for keeping a pet toad with the intent of licking it to get high. The skin and venom glands of Colorado River toads produce powerful hallucinogens called tryptamines. Theiss was released on bond, but the toad remains in police custody. From KBMC.com:

Most pet stores don't sell the Colorado River toad because the venom can sicken humans and kill household animals.

"People used to do it all the time, but it got faded out awhile, but came back as a fad. Not a smart one," animal expert Danny Snyder told KMBC's Dion Lim. "The toxins in it can kill a lot of stuff."

Link

I've just switched to a monospace font called Droid Sans Mono, a free, Apache-licensed (see below) face. I do all my work -- novel writing, blogging, article- and short-story writing, email composition -- in a text editor (currently using Gedit, a free and open editor) using a monospace face. Droid shows up very nicely indeed, at a large variety of sizes. I've been using it all morning and I've already switched my monospace preferences to it system-wide. Link (via Joshua's Delicious)

Update: From the comments, Javier fact-checks my ass: "Sadly, it looks that Droid Sans is not Free after all, and anyone wanting to use a free-as-in-speech font of these characteristics has to pick between DejaVu (Bitstream Vera license, has italics, bold and almost every character under the Unicode sun) and Inconsolata (definitive version will be under SIL's Open Font License, prints pretty but is not so screen-pretty at small sizes, so far has no cursive or bold)."

This annual report (for a Croatian food company) ships wrapped in foil, and needs to be baked in an oven in order to make the thermal-reactive ink illustrations show up.

Croatian creative agency Bruketa & Zinić have designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be baked in an oven before it can be read.

Called Well Done, the report features blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that, after being wrapped in foil and cooked for 25 minutes, reveal text and images.

Link (via Kottke)

Con Edison is shutting down the last direct current power in Manhattan, currently serving 10 East 40th Street, near midtown. Thomas Edison was a DC maniac and a fanatical opponent of Tesla's alternating current (he used to shock livestock to death with AC power, just to prove how bad it was -- he eventually worked his way up to an elephant!).

Despite the clear advantage of alternating current — it can be transmitted long distances far more economically than direct current — direct current has taken decades to faze out of Manhattan because the early backbone of New York’s electricity grid was built by Mr. Edison’s company, which had a running head start in the first decade before Mr. Tesla and Mr. Westinghouse demonstrated the potential of alternating current with the Niagara Falls power project. (Among the customers of Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street power plant on that first day was The New York Times, which observed that to turn on its lights in the building, “no matches were needed.”)

But direct current clearly became uneconomical, as the short distances that it could be transmitted would have required a power station every mile or less, according to Joe Cunningham, an engineering historian. Thus alternating current in New York began in the outskirts — Queens, Bronx, Upper Manhattan and the suburbs.

Link (via Kottke)

(Image credit: IMG_5766 (Edison from the National Portrait Gallery), a CC-BY photo from dbking's Flickr stream)

Dartmouth's Hany Farid ("working with federal law enforcement agencies on digital forensics, to the digital reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian tombs") has a great pictorial history of photo-tampering, beginning with this shot of Lincoln's head superimposed on Calhoun's body, going all the way up to the insertion of British Culture Secretary James Purnell into a group photo (he missed the shooting because he was late) in a newspaper in September, 2007.

circa 1860: This nearly iconic portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln's head and the Southern politician John Calhoun's body. Putting the date of this image into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1881.

Link (via Kottke)

Eric D. Wilkinson, producer of the independent film "Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth," has written a letter to the editor of Releaselog, a site that reviews leaked movies available on P2P networks. He hasn't written to complain, mind -- he wrote in to say how much promotional value the piracy of his movie on P2P has generated, and how that's turning into real sales for him.

I am sending you this email after realizing that our website has had nearly 23,000 hits in the last 12 days, much of it coming from your website. In addition, our trailer, both on the www.manfromearth.com site and other sites like YouTube, MySpace and AOL has been watched nearly 20,000 times AND what’s most impressive is our ranking on IMDb went from being the 11,235th most popular movie, to the 5th most popular movie in 2 weeks (we are also the #1 independent film on IMDb & the #1 science fiction film on IMDb). How did this all happen? Two words: Torrent / File Sharing sites (well, four words and a slash).

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Xeni barges in to a hotel room where the great John Hodgman is writing his next book (not on a PC, oddly). The book comes out in 2008, and will include never before known knowledge about mysterious MOLE MEN (among many other things). Then, we enjoy a cavalcade of hobos drawn by Ape Lad -- these are but a few of the 700 hobos named in Hodgman's last book, Areas of My Expertise.

Link to blog post with video and comment forum.

A few minutes' work with a pair of scissors and some sandpaper can turn a tin-can into a stove-top (or candle-lantern- top) popcorn maker. Link (Thanks, Sylvio!)

This short video illustrates a simple procedure for forcing open standard padlocks with a shim snipped out of a tin can. The technique is old, but this is a good, lucid explanation of it. Kids have been doing this for years, but schools and gyms still recommend these broken locks -- and the manufacturers keep making them, which is practically criminal negligence. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

See also: HOWTO pop a combination lock with a beer can

XKCD is my favorite geeky webcomic, and today there's a great profile of the comic and its creator, Randall Munroe, in Wired. Coincidentally, I make an appearance (in my persona as a hot-air- balloon- borne be-goggled, caped blogger) in today's strip (a fact that approximately 200 Boing Boing readers have written in to mention -- a partial list of the first several appears below!).

On that day, nearly a thousand xkcd fans from as far away as England and Canada converged on the park, bearing tape measures and Rubik's cubes. At the assigned minute, Munroe emerged and spoke.

"Maybe wanting something does make it real," he said as his fans cheered and fought duels with foam swords. The comic that spurred the gathering was enlarged and hung from a fence, and fans took turns contributing to a new last panel, where dreams can come true.

"I had someone write in and say that he'd been hanging out with this girl for a while, and then one day she just kissed him out of the blue," Munroe said. "Since then, they've been together. She told him later that she'd done it because she'd read a comic that suggested you take more chances. I think everyone needs to just relax a little bit. People do meet people."

Link to Wired profile of Randall Munroe, Link to today's strip, Link to photo of me in blog-goggs (Thanks, Zan, Brent, Macca, JK, Paul and Michael!)

See also:
Scary MBR-nuking program inspired by XKCD geeky webcomic
Ninjas attack Richard Stallman, reenacting xkcd comic
Cory Doctorow cosplayers at the XKCD picnic
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters
Where LOLCats come from
Ironic Internet malapropism grid
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Bloggin' 'bout my generation

The University of Kentucky's Periodic Table of Comic Books provides a cross-reference to mentions of various elements in a wide variety of funnybooks. Show here, the entry for Calcium (on the site, each thumbnail is clickable and expands to a scan of the entire page). Link (Thanks, Shake Day!)

Remember those sonic blasters I blogged about here on BoingBoing (and reported on NPR) a while back? Noah Shachtman at Wired reports that the Saakashvili regime in Georgia is using them to crush protestors.

This English-language footage from Russia Today shows riot police rolling through the streets of Tblisi in pickup trucks, small dishes in hand.  A high frequency pulse follows.  "Georgian police used an acoustic gun -- it's a non-lethal weapon that disorients people for a period of time," says one "special weapons expert."

Link 1, Link 2.

Here are more stunning high-definition images from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's lunar explorer Kaguya. From the description of this beautiful shot:

This still image was cut out from a moving image (tele shot) taken by the HDTV onboard the KAGUYA at 12:07 p.m. on November 7, 2007 (Japan Standard Time, JST,) then sent to the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center. In the image, the Moon's surface is near the South Pole, and we can see the Australian Continent (center left) and the Asian Continent (lower right) on the Earth. (In this image, the upper side of the Earth is the Southern Hemisphere, thus the Australian Continent looks upside-down.)

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Previously on BB:
• High-definition video of the moon Link

Gerald A. Rocchi, 32, was arrested on Tuesday for robbing an Ashland, Kentucky ice cream shop at stapler-point. He ran off with $175 but witnesses pointed police in his direction. A search of Rocchi's home turned up cash, a ski mask, and the chrome-plated stapler. From the Associated Press:

Ashland Police Capt. Don Petrella said he didn't know if Rocchi planned to shoot staples at the shop's employees or use it as a blunt instrument if he didn't get the cash...

Petrella said the chrome finish on the stapler could have made it look like a gun "if someone didn't get a good look at it."

Link

Previously on BB:
• Ashland, KY robber disguised face with duct tape Link

RADAR magazine has an article about Marc Collins-Rector (mugshot below from the Florida sex-offender registry) and Brock Pierce, founders of the dot-bomb online TV network DEN.

The co-author of the piece, John Gorenfeld says:

Mention DEN, the Digital Entertainment Network, and dot-com historians will know you're talking about the ugliest of the bubble implosions. A forerunner to YouTube, it was brought down by the pedophile appetites of founder Marc Collins-Rector, who had promised to build "the last network," burying TV forever. Its three founders lived in a VC-funded mansion in L.A. where boys -- promised stardom in Web clips -- [filed lawsuits claiming to have been] raped after decadent parties.

What happened after the three founders -- including Disney child star Brock Pierce -- fled the FBI by heading for Spain? An investigative report by Radar Magazine catches up with Marc Collins-Rector, who is walking rakishly free in London...and his protege Brock Pierce, whose giant company IGE -- which buys and sells cash in "World Of Warcraft" and other games -- is winning rave write-ups in Fortune and other magazines. In our long investigation, we discovered strong evidence that Collins-Rector -- who is hiding his money from child abuse victims -- may have helped fund IGE.

Plus you can now watch their hilarious/twisted flagship Web show, "Chad's World," a pedophile fantasy based on the founders' own lives.

Excerpt:

As the lawsuits against the company mounted in early 2000, DEN—in which Pierce held nearly one million shares and Collins-Rector still owned a majority stake—began to hemorrhage money. The planned IPO, which was postponed after the first abuse allegations surfaced, was permanently shelved. A crumbling Nasdaq didn't help the situation. By May 2000, the start-up was bankrupt. Before long, its headquarters were gutted, the expensive computer equipment and office chairs sold off for a fraction of their original cost. Around Hollywood, rumors flew that Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce were about to be arrested on embezzlement and sexual offenses. Before any charges were filed, though, the three men disappeared.

They didn't turn up again until May 2002, when a tip to Interpol led authorities to raid their luxury villa in Marbella, on the Spanish Riviera—an area British tabloids have dubbed the Costa del Crime due to its high population of English-speaking fugitives. Among the items recovered from the residence were guns, machetes, a trove of jewels, and child pornography. Pierce and Shackley were held for about a month by Spanish police and then released.

The prosecution of Collins-Rector also proved difficult. He remained in a Spanish jail for almost two years, fighting extradition, before finally being brought to the United States, where he pled guilty to eight charges of child enticement, a comparably minor offense. He was soon out of prison—receiving credit for the time he'd served in Spain. Since most of his alleged crimes took place at the mansion in Encino, it was up to L.A. County prosecutors to make any further charges stick, but the DA never took steps to do so. (The L.A. County district attorney's office refused to comment about the status of any DEN investigation.) The victims sought justice in the civil courts, however, winning a total of $4.5 million in summary judgments. Except for a small side agreement with Pierce, the award has yet to be paid, lawyers say.

(Here's a totally not safe for work parody video about the three founders of DEN on Fucked Company)

Link

The cover story of this month's National Geographic is a curious, provocative, and thoughtful feature about the weirdness of human memory. I was delighted to see that it was written by Joshua Foer, who is well known for his work if not his name, as the secretary/blogger of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Foer, a winner of the World US Memory Championship himself, is currently writing a book about the art and science of memory, due out in 2009. I can't wait! From his National Geographic article, titled "Remember This":

There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

"My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped...

EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.

AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.

Link

Ludology has a photo and description of an LCD game from 1982 called Airport Panic.

The player had two missions: boarding the plane while avoiding the bombs of the hijacker. And then, according to the English manual, "shoot at the hijacker and rescue the stewardess and the passengers."

Link

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in England is investigating an incident involving police who tasered a man in a coma because he was unresponsive.

Mr Gaubert said he was on his way to meet friends when he suffered a hypoglycaemic fit on the bus which left him slumped on his seat clutching his rucksack.

Armed police were called to the bus depot in Headingley and when he failed to respond to their challenges he was shot with the Taser.

He said as this was happening, another officer was pointing a real gun at his head.

He was restrained and eventually came round in the police van.

He said it was only then that the officers realised it was a medical emergency, despite him wearing a medical tag round his neck to warn of his condition, and took him to hospital.

Link

Here's a video of the distraught non-English speaking man from Poland who died from being tasered at the Vancouver Airport. He can be seen throwing a chair and trying to break other things. When security arrives, he calms down and doesn't appear to be acting in a threatening manner. It's hard to tell though, because the video was taken through a pane of glass with glare.

Be warned, the man writhes on the ground and screams for a long time before he dies. It's disturbing.

From an October 26 post on Boing Boing:

Akezys says: "Recently police at the Vancouver airport were attempting to question a recent immigrant that could not speak English. They tasered him after 24 seconds of speaking with him. The man had spent 10 hours stuck in the airport with no-one helping him."

Link (Thanks, James!)

Update:

In the comments section, Kyle Armbruster has an excellent explanation about why it's important to make this video available:

Okay, folks:

A "snuff film" is a kind of pornographic film where you are watching someone die because you get off on it. No one here is getting off on it. In fact, the "not getting off on it"-ness is actually what the whole thread is about. This is a primary news source. If you don't want to watch it, fine. But...

As for people's feelings that they got nothing new out of watching the beheading videos (I've seen several) or the Hussein video (saw it) or this (haven't seen it yet--at work), although I cannot, of course, speak for them personally, I kind of doubt it.

I'll go further. I think it's extremely important to view things like this. We're so used to TV violence, movie violence, and video game violence--so used to the abstract concept of death, even violent death--that we have a tendency to become nonchalant, cavalier about it. Looking these things in the face demystifies them. It's not dramatic. It's not moving. It just is.

It reminds us that we are fragile. It reminds us that if someone wants, it is quick and easy to end our lives. It reminds us that there are people who do this, for whatever reason. Maybe they're just crazy assholes (beheading videos). Maybe they are paid and/or required to do it (Hussein, any videos from wartime). Maybe they do it because they are incompetent, dangerous assholes (this video). It reminds us how far we can go, and how far we mustn't go, and how far we must do our best to not allow our public servants to go unless actually necessary.

I encourage you all to watch these things. It's hard. You will wince. You might cry. You might feel sick to your stomach. But you will know, to the very fiber of your being, what the fuss is all about.

In this youtube, Daily Show writer Jason Rothman delivers an hilarious monologue about the Writers' Guild strike against the studios, who claim that they can't compensate writers for digital media because no one knows how much this stuff is worth. The clip delivers a Daily Show-style montage of coverage from the $1 billion+ Viacom lawsuit against YouTube, including clips of Viacom's CEO talking about how digital content is worth tons of money and getting paid is the name of the game. The clip includes a nice guest appearance from Daily Show correspondents, too. Link (Thanks, Mariana!)

If you pay your restaurant bills with with a credit card, there's a small chance a crooked waiter will jack up the tip by scribbling the amount you added. If you don't go over your receipts and compare them to your credit card statement each month, you'll never know if you've been a victim of this form of fraud.

I know for a fact this has happened to me at least once. I had a meal at Mexicali Concina Cantina in Studio City, CA. I paid with a credit card and left a cash tip. When I got my credit card statement, I happened to have the receipt handy, and I discovered that I had been overcharged by exactly ten dollars. I called my credit card company, and they reversed the charge.

Punny Money has a way to help you catch tip fraud without having to compare your receipts to your statements (you do need to save your receipts, though). You use a checksum method. Adjust the pennies in your tip so the last digit to the right of the decimal point equals the sum of the digits to the left of the decimal point of the total bill.

When you get your statement, the fraudulent tips are easy to spot:

Link (Via Crypto-Gram)

The LA Times has an article about undercover federal agents smuggling bomb materials past TSA airport screeners to test security.

My favorite part is how the TSA warns its screeners to focus on identifying and stopping undercover federal investigators whose job it is to test the TSA's effectiveness:

Release of the GAO report follows a hearing Wednesday in which Hawley vehemently denied that screeners had been tipped off about covert security tests, even as lawmakers brandished an e-mail from TSA headquarters that not only warned employees of testing, but described the methods and appearance of those conducting the probes.

"There was no intent to tip off, there was no cheating," Hawley insisted. He said that the e-mail was sent not to tip off screeners, but because a TSA official thought the tests might really be an Al Qaeda operation.

Democratic lawmakers were openly incredulous. "If you want me to believe that, I find that's a stretch," said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.).

Link

Tony Sale and a group of British vintage computer enthusiasts is rebuilding Colossus, the gigantic proto-computer that Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park scientists built to crack German codes during WWII. The original Colossus machines were all broken up (into pieces "no bigger than a man's hand"!) after the war for security reasons, but Sale has tracked down the surviving Colossus engineers and is making great strides in completing the machine.

The finished Colossus is to be pitted against a contemporary general-purpose PC in a code-breaking race. The raw fodder for the race is a set of messages encrypted using Nazi ciphers and transmitted by amateur radio enthusiasts in Germany.

It's all in support of a new National Museum of Computing, based at Bletchley. What a cool idea -- I'm now officially planning a day-trip to Bletchley to see the museum.

He had no working machines to look at because, on Churchill's orders, the Colossus machines were dismantled once the war was over. Many parts, mostly the 1500 valves, went back to telephone exchanges and the rest were broken into pieces "no bigger than a man's hand".

Mr Sale has tracked down the few living engineers who worked on the project and plumbed their expertise to guide the rebuilding effort...

The German participants in the code-cracking challenge will transmit three enciphered messages - one hard, one very hard and one ultra hard.

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones said there was a "busy and business-like" atmosphere at Bletchley as the code cracking attempts got underway.

"We've seen webcam video of the Germans preparing to send the first signals," he said.

Link to BBC Colossus reborn story, Link to BBC crypto race story (via Futurismic)

LocateTV looks like a pretty good US/UK TV listings search engine -- Lottie sez, "LocateTV is a film and TV search engine that tells you when any show is next on air, on TV, online and on DVD, specific to your region and channels (US and UK). It's slick and simple, with lovely widgets, which you can embed on your blog or post to share the scheduling info with your readers - which remains always dynamically updated and relevant to them." Link (Thanks, Lottie!)

I've just finished "Jack of Hearts," the second collection in the "Jack of Fables" comic series, spun out of the larger (and most excellent) Fables books. These are the life stories of "Jack" who was Jack Horner, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack be Nimble, and all the other Jacks from storybooks. These comprise a kind of picaresque tale of Jack's philandering, selfish, funny life, accompanied by such supporting fables as the Pathetic Fallacy (now going by the name "Gary") and the Queen of Fortune.

In book two, we follow Jack through a series of adventures as a casino baron (the previous volume starred him as a Hollywood exec), as he copes with the mob, heiresses, and ancient mystical cabals (not to mention large, violent pit-bosses).

These are great, lightweight stories, a nice counterpoint to the darker, more brooding main Fables stories. More to the point, a second Fables series means that there's twice as much of this great comic to read. I can't get enough of it. Link, Link to all Fables collections

See also:
Jack of Fables: great new Fables collection
Scherezade meets every fable of every land - comic

In today's Boing Boing tv episode: Mad professor Mark shows us how to make a Curie Effect Magnetic Heat Engine from common household items. Then, Austrian art-pranksters Monochrom sing a song of love for Lawrence Lessig.

Link to video and full text of BBtv post.

Kyle Supley's Flickr stream contains a drool-inducing set of classic mid-century gadgets and furnishings, including this 1950s teal lamp with an alarm clock set into the phone-dial and a cigarette lighter hidden in the handset. Link (via Watchismo)

The Kremlin is using Russia's new anti-software-piracy laws to target dissident media outlets and shut them down. This is an eerie echo of the Soviet era, when black marketeering and other universal activities were used as the excuse for arresting dissidents and other inconvenient people.

The difference is that this time, the anti-piracy laws were enacted at the behest of the US trade representative, who made stringent patent and copyright enforcement a condition of the recent US-Russia free trade agreement, forcing Russia to take on board stricter laws than those in place in the US. This includes laws that would never pass Constitutional muster stateside, like a scheme for police licensing and inspection of CD and DVD presses. Imagine that: Russia reinstates state control over the press at the behest of the US government! The Framers of the Constitution would be very proud, I'm sure.

The thing is that everyone in Russia is an infringer, which means that everyone is guilty of breaking these strict new anti-piracy laws. That means that anyone can be arrested for being a pirate, so there's no need to gin up a law against dissent, political organizing, homosexuality, or looking cross-eyed at a cop.

It's true in the US, too. Everyone's an infringer. At every talk I give, I say, "Is there anyone in this room who isn't a copyright criminal?" No one ever puts up a hand -- not at universities, law schools, technology conferences, or at motion picture studios.

Once everyone is a criminal, no one is free.

In the past 10 months, police in at least five Russian cities have raided the offices of media outlets, political parties and private advocacy groups and seized computers allegedly containing illegal software, paralyzing the work of the organizations. Often, authorities demand that employees submit to questioning and order them not to leave town until legal action is completed...

"This is not a campaign against piracy, it's a campaign against dissent," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, who is in charge of the newspaper's regional editions. "The authorities want to destroy an opposition newspaper. It doesn't matter if we send more computers to Samara. It doesn't matter if we show we bought computers legally. It will change nothing." The paper says it believes its software is legal.

Link (via /.)

See also:
US Trade Representative bends Russia over on copyright
USA: Russia can't enter WTO unless it shuts down music website

"oimorrigan," an avid gamer, has built this incredible "Apocalyptic Manhattan" terrain for Warhammer 40,000 -- a tabletop strategy game. The construction is "UltraCal (construction plaster) + foamboard," and comprises some 50 buildings. Link (via JWZ)

Chris Reccardi has a fantastic new show of psi-fi paintings and prints opening this Saturday, November 17, at the M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs, California. Chris is a veteran of the animation world, having worked on classics like The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Powerpuff Girls, and Samurai Jack as a designer, writer, director, and even musician. This upcoming exhibition, titled Cosmopollus, runs until December 14. Follow the link for an exclusive sneak preview of the mind-blowing art. Link (Thanks, Andrew Brandou!)

Funny old ad from Retro Thing. I'll bet hot Dr Pepper is tasty! Link

Update:

Here's a photo of a sign Coop took last year that proclaims hot Dr Pepper to be "devilishly different." Link

The Japanese Ministry of Defense showed off its new high-tech battle suit in a presentation titled "Towards the realization of Gundam," a reference to the popular Mobile Suit Gundam anime. According to the ministry's Technical Research and Development Institute, the new Advanced Personal Armament System, which includes GPS, wireless networking, and thermal vision, was inspired by the cartoon mecha robots. Whether that's true or not, I think it's interesting that they went for otaku-appeal in the PR campaign.
Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

There's a battle raging in Missoula, Montana over "urban chickens." One one side are people who want to raise their own food and bring a little bit of farm life into the city. On the other are those who say the birds are noisy, unhealthy, and stink. New West Network's Anne Medley and Jonathan Stumpf created a wonderful video documenting the controversy. The piece has the feel of spoof, but it's no joke.
Link (Thanks, Jonathan Weber!)

Carl sez, "You hear a lot of rhetoric in Washington about public-private partnerships. Sometimes rhetoric meets reality ... Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase have reached an agreement for the release of a totally unencumbered repository of 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including Courts of Appeals decisions back to 1950. We had help from EFF to broker this deal and the repository will sport a brand-new Creative Commons mark—CC-Ø—which will allow us to affirmatively certify that this information is public domain. The legal information market has been the last bastion of what Yochai Benkler calls the industrial-style information economy. Today's announcement is poking a big hole in the walls of that garden." Link (Thanks, Carl!)