Here's a snip from the latest post on Kevin Kelly's Technium blog:

Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.

This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports -- that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Link to "Better Than Free." Can't wait for the book.

Photographer Dave Bullock visited the Navy's SPAWAR site in San Diego (man, I used to drive by the building every day when I lived and worked in that town!). Wired News has published a gallery of pics with a brief account:

The Navy's MDARS-E is an armed robot that can track anything that moves. Told that I was the target, the unmanned vehicle trained its guns on me and ordered, "Stay where you are," in an intimidating robot voice. And yes, it was frightening.

Link. (via Dave's twitter stream)

Lawgeek (who's just quit his job to become a university prof) posts a roundup of students' how-to-cheat YouTube videos. The best one is definitely the guy who scans the label off a Coke bottle, replaces the nutritional information with cheaty stuff, prints it, and glues it around a bottle (presumes that your teacher lets you bring Coke into class -- I suppose this works best in schools where Coke has struck a deal requiring their products to be available at all times and in all places.)

When I was a kid, we were obsessed with figuring out methods for cheating -- far more so than with actual cheating itself. We used binary encoding to sneak in long lists of numbers, stitching them up the outer seams of our jeans or cuffs -- a stitch for 1, no stitch for 0 -- that we could read by fingertip. After we learned the resistor color-coding scheme, we started to shave pencils and then decorate them with colored bands that actually contained the same lists of numbers. We tried -- and failed -- to produce a decent tapping code for interactive cheating, though this is certainly possible. One exciting failure was a light-based semaphore wherein the conspirators would flash reflected discs of light up on the wall over the teacher's head using our watch-faces.

The kids in these videos are awfully sanguine about their teachers' YouTube cluelessness. I'm relatively certain that the adorable little English moppet pictured here has never actually succeeded in using his cheat, as it relies on your teachers allowing you to keep playing cards on your desk during the exam. This is surely a purely theoretical cheat. Link

The Rogue Columnist blog has a thought-provoking entry on reasons that the newspaper industry is reeling and teetering -- it's not just "the Internet exists," but rather a set of things the industry did wrong, continues to do wrong, and should fix if the newspapers are to emerge from the net with still-beating hearts:

The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

Link (via Making Light)

The "What I Killed Today" blog keeps track of the sick and injured animals a veterinary worker euthanizes each day. The blogger says, "I work with a lot of injured wildlife. Also not wild animals that are just in a lot of pain. Sometimes I have to euthanize them. I decided to record each animal I euthanize here." This is depressing, of course, but moving, too, as with entries like:

a 13-year-old basset hound in kidney failure. she was so kind and licked my face as i carried her in from the car for the owner. he was a sweet old man with tears in his eyes. i fed her an entire bag of treats and she kept eating ferociously even after the injection. her chewing slowed down and then she was gone.

Link (via Warren Ellis)

A group of students at an "Interactive Art Director" course at Hyper Island in Sweden have produced a pitch-perfect "educational film" about their field; the short's a great little homage to the golden age of industrial films. Link (Thanks, Fabio!)

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years, this stroppy "no playing in the churchyard" sign from Seven Sisters in London. Link

Marilyn sez, "A father in Muncie, Indiana was tired of cars that didn't stop at the stop signs at the intersection outside his house, so he asked the city to make a crosswalk. The city refused, so he painted his own, and got arrested for criminal mischief."

"I used spray paint on the outline, and went to Wal-Mart, where they had a sale on ... white paint and rolled it out," he said.

Stump said he didn't hear about the second charge right away, causing him to miss a court appearance. Because he missed his court date, he spent 10 hours in jail.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Finnish scientists at the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tampere have successfully grown a human jawbone in a man's abdomen and the implanted it in his face. The procedure used the man's stem-cells, and took nine months.

A 65-year-old Finnish man received a new upper jaw that was grown in his abdomen using his own stem cells. Scientists had isolated stem cells from the patient's fat, and sorted out the type of cells that could grow into bone tissue. The cells were applied to a custom jaw-shaped scaffold and implanted in his abdomen for nine months. Tissues grew around the scaffolding, which was removed and attached to the man's skull to replace his upper jaw, which had been removed due to a tumor.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)