Remember the BBC's daft plan to put DRM on high-definition broadcasts even though it's illegal for the BBC to put DRM on its broadcasts? Remember when people rose up and sent angry letters to Ofcom, the UK regulator that oversees the BBC's broadcasting activity?

It worked. Ofcom told the BBC to forget about it. Score one for the good guys. Give yourselves several pats on the back.

Meanwhile: the Beeb should be ashamed of itself. Especially for this disingenuous smear-job they published after I wrote about this ridiculous plan in the Guardian.

Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer 'fair use' and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation. In view of these responses we have decided not to approve a multiplex licence change without giving these issues further consideration. We remain keen to support the successful introduction of HD services on the DTT platform and are willing to consider a further round of consultation on the licence amendment if you could provide more information and evidence in the following three areas:

1. The anticipated benefits to citizens and consumers, and to the DTT platform, of the proposed approach;

2. How you propose to address the potential disadvantages to citizens and consumers associated with the impact on the receiver market under the proposed approach;

3. An explanation of potential alternative approaches that would impact less on the receiver market, and the extent to which those alternatives would be able to deliver similar outcomes and benefits for citizens and consumers.

We are keen to provide early clarity on the licence amendment to all stakeholders affected by the DVB-T2, MPEG 4, HDTV upgrade on the DTT platform and would welcome your early response on these three issues. Until we reach a final decision on the licence amendment the HD service information broadcast on Multiplex B should be provided in a free to air format. If Huffman compression is used then the related tables should be made available to receiver manufacturers without the need for a licence for Huffman look-up tables from the BBC.

HD on DTT content management proposals (PDF) (Thanks, Glyn!)

On his Big Questions blog, Steven Landsburg (author of a new book called The Big Questions) discusses a partially blind gamer's lawsuit against Sony. The gamer wants Sony to makes its games more accessible for partially blind people.

Here's the first part of Landsburg's thoughts on the issue:

This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?

A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won’t rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?

In The Big Questions, I make two separate (but closely related) arguments on Mary’s behalf. I was about to write a blog post offering the same arguments on behalf of Sony when I realized that only one of them applies. So I am forced to conclude that I should be a little less sympathetic to Sony than I am to Mary. My first argument is that Mary never had any moral obligation to rent to anyone in the first place—and if she has no general obligation to rent to anyone, then she can have no specific obligation to rent to Albanians. Likewise, Sony has no moral obligation to provide anyone with video games—and if there is no moral obligation to provide me with a video game then there is no obligation to provide one to Alexander Stern. Fine so far.

But my second argument is that Mary, appearances to the contrary, is actually doing some good for Albanian apartment seekers. By renting rooms to non-Albanians, she takes a little pressure off the housing market, driving down rents and making it easier for Albanians to find apartments elsewhere. Sure, she could be doing even more for them, but she’s already doing more for them than I am, since I don’t rent apartments to anyone at all. How can she be at fault for doing small amounts of good when I’m given a free pass to do no good at all?

Read the rest at his blog.

Earlier today, Xeni spotted an item by British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, encouraging black people to embrace the LGBT status of some of its heroes. It's typical Tatchell stuff--as commenter Birdseed pointed out, he's a controversial sort. I'd already started hammering out this post yesterday, in fact, about the second reason Tatchell's been in the news of late: yet another tussle with fellow progressive activists.

It concerns Tatchell's opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, assailed in "Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the War on Terror," published by Raw Nerve Books. As a result, authors Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem are under fire. Raw Nerve was even induced to confess a list of "untruths" aimed at Tatchell, turning the authors' hatchet job into a world-class backfire.

A Russian actor's group called "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница) remade The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin silent film. (Via Neatorama)

Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again.

Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

The radio dials shown here "represent only a small portion" of Michael Feldt's dial archive.

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (Via Draplin Design)

Artist Rosemarie Fiore paints with fireworks. Here's more about the process. (via Eric Wareheim, sort of)

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

Lucas Martell's new animated film, Pigeon Impossible: "A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase." (Thanks, Joaquin Baldwin)

Yesterday, my husband went hunting around the Internets for a new dining room lamp. This is one of the options he presented me with. Only $189. Cheap!

Sadly, no Battlestar model is available. Or a Death Star. I might have gone for a Death Star.

Star Ship Chandelier from eLights

You spend a lot of time online. Maybe it comes with the job. Maybe your idea of a perfect weekend is to be perched in front of your computer reading blogs, buying shit you don't need on Amazon, Tweeting and Facebooking, or surfing YouPorn. But at what point are you considered a bona fide Internet addict? To find out, I called up a psychologist and a fancy rehab center who specialize in this type of thing.

I must admit there was a part of me that went into reporting this story with a smirk. Internet addiction? Aren't we all Internet addicts to some extent? And then I talked to Coleen Moore of the Illinois Institute of Addiction Recovery, who told me that 20% of all addicts who check into the rehab center are there for Internet addiction. Some of them use drugs along with the Internet so they can stay awake and online longer, and others get urinary tract infections or wet themselves because they don't want to take bathroom breaks. Carpal tunnel and eye strain are only the tip of the iceberg. For some, Internet addiction is a very real psychological issue that calls for medical help.

The Fables comics are an infinitely entertaining and moving series of comics about a world in which every fable, legend and belief of humanity has been chased from the worlds of fantasy to exile on Earth, hiding in a secret side-street in Manhattan. The chaser is The Adversary, an evil emperor, and his numberless goblin shock-troops. This is such rich material, as it allows for tellings and retellings of every beloved story of humanity.

In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he's every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer. Peter and Max is the story of two brothers, Peter (Piper, also Pumpkin Eater) and Max (the Pied Piper), who grow estranged from one another on the eve of the Adversary's invasion of their homeworld, and lose themselves in a blood-soaked Black Forest, where they are both fired by the crucible of war and magic into men whose innocence will never be recovered.

Max is the villain here, jealous of Peter's inheritance of Frost, the magic flute of their father. Max acquires Fire, another powerful magic flute, from Frau Totenkinder, the evil witch of the Black Forest, and he and Fire warp each other into something monstrous.

Peter, meanwhile, is orphaned in Hamelin, where he becomes an accomplished thief, escaping from the worst circumstances with the help of Frost, and forever pining for his lost love, Bo Peep, disappeared into the evil woods.

The action moves from this mythic backstory to a contemporary tale in which Max has come at last to contemporary Fabletown, and Peter must hunt him, even though it means his certain doom.

As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing -- a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There's everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you've never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you've finished reading the book).

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel

This Shapeways tutorial on "Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing" is not only useful for 3D printers, it is a treasure-trove of 3D printing jargon.

If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight). You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M).

Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your modifier to delete them. Another possibility are vertices that are part of more than one overlapping faces...

Open the copy of the file, and select each object, one at a time. In object mode, apply all modifiers, then switch to Edit mode, hit A once or twice to select all vertices, then press ctrl-T to triangulate all faces. I don't know why, but Blender does a much better job with Boolean operations if the meshes are triangulated.

Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing (via Beyond the Beyond)

This early (1927) color film shows 10 minutes of remarkable vintage London -- especially the Petticoat Lane market scenes around 6:00, which are a rare glimpse into the life of everyday people (it's even cooler if you were actually down on Petticoat Lane yesterday, as I was!).

The Open Road London (1927) (via Making Light)