These crimes are on the rise because it is financially lucrative for the crooks. Even low level participants can make $10,000 or more for assisting a staged accident.

Some organized auto fraud rings are so complex they involve hundreds of willing participants, including unscrupulous lawyers, doctors, chiropractors, auto shops, tow truck operators, ambulance drivers, police officers and insurance company employees, according to NICB investigations.

"Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided materials that confirmed the user's information," the document said.

The document appeared to contradict early comments by Yahoo, which said evidence used to convict the journalist was provided by Yahoo's unit in China to comply with the mainland's laws.

Those standards are more restrictive than those in Hong Kong, a former British colony that has been governed under a "one country, two systems" formula since it returned to China in 1997. The territory prides itself on having an independent rule of law and international business and privacy standards.

Zhang Yu, representing the family of Shi Tao, said they were considering taking Yahoo Hong Kong Holdings to court either here or in the United States.

'We believe what (Yahoo) did was illegal so we are considering taking Yahoo to court,' Zhang told reporters, adding that Yahoo had refused to discuss the matter with him.

I will donate 100% of the winning bid, after I receive it, to two places, half of the amount going to each:

1) Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and

2) Sacred Choices, the women's reproductive health clinic planned by Oglala Sioux Tribe President Cecilia Fire Thunder, to be built on sovereign tribal land at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and which would not be subject to US law. Stephanie is also selling prints of the cartoon with most of the dough going to the clinics.

The activists went to FNAC, a giant record store, and at 7PM, a whistle was blown, whereupon the whole group unfolded anti-DRM signs saying things like "STOP DRM" "SAY NO TO RESTRICTED CDs" "YOU OWN THE MUSIC YOU BUY" and began to hand out leaflets explaining the dangers of DRM to other patrons. After they were all kicked out, they set up an anti-DRM information picket in front of the story. Link to video, Link to photos, Link to STOPDRM (Thanks, Jeremie!)

To better understand the distribution of shaking and damage that accompanied the great 1906 earthquake, seismologists have constructed new computer models to recreate the ground motions. The simulations show how ground moved on the two sides of the San Andreas fault and how seismic waves radiated away from the fault to produce the shaking. The earthquake, which began 2 miles offshore from the City of San Francisco, ultimately grew to cause shaking and damage along more than 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault.

Remember that crazy viral clip from 2004, where the female aerobics instructor is surrounded by dancing poodles? The woman who created and starred in that video (which was titled "ex-Fat Girl") is Japanese artist Nagi Noda. She has a new book out, and a new project: HANPANDA, a line of acid-pop, half-panda, half-other-creature hybrid furries. If you're in Paris, you may want to swing by the Colete boutique for her in-store appearance (mit Hanpandas) on Monday, April 3rd. Link.

Previously: Poodle-robics video.

Reader comment: John Morley says,

The Nagi Noda Hanpandas were also featured in the video for "Baby Blue" by the excellent Japanese girl pop/hip-hop band Halcali. Link.

This remarkable post details some of the impossible logistics of deploying the "NIR" and talks about the likely fallout of these failings. If you want to fight the NIR, join NO2ID, the national campaign to stop it.

So adding it all up, from NIR Day 1 for ten years you've got to keep processing people at the rate of 50 per hour at every centre, or one every 72 seconds, each of whom requires a scan of the whole central NIR to avoid multiple registrations, so the database has to be up and accessible every minute of the day to avoid delay.

In the early days it's a nailed on certainty that we'll get failures, resulting in potentially hundreds of people making pointless journeys (say it's down for an hour during a particular day - that's 50 people at each centre having their time wasted, a total of 3500 people). I have no idea of the MTBF for major government IT projects, and they almost certainly won't tell me on the usual 'commercial confidentiality' grounds. What I can do is provide some figures based on possible percentage reliability and estimate the number of people inconvenienced per year and the kind of reliability that would be required *from day one* to stop the scheme sliding into chaos.

It is widely believed that the expression "kekeke" comes from Korean players of StarCraft. It is an onomonopoetic Korean phrase similar to the English "hahaha", Spanish "jajaja" or Japanese "huhuhu", and is meant to express laughter. It is often used in-game as an expression of exhultation or as a form of mockery. Commonly, it is associated with a simple Starcraft tactic that involves massing a large number of units and using them to rush an enemy base before an opponent is sufficiently prepared to defend. This is often called a Zerg Rush, after the Starcraft faction for whom the tactic was created. The phrase "OMG Zerg Rush! kekeke!!" is sometimes used outside of the game to indicate any form of overwhelming or swarming force.

The levees that the Army Corps of Engineers is currently building in New Orleans do not meet FEMA standards, reports John Schwartz in today's NYT:

New Orleans's levees do not meet the standards that the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires for its flood protection program, federal officials said yesterday — and they added that the problem would take as much as $6 billion to fix.

FEMA has long based its flood planning on whether an area is protected against a flood that might have a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year, also known as a 100-year flood. Without that certification, the agency's flood maps have to treat the entire levee system as if it were not there at all, which means that people hoping to build in the affected areas might have to rebuild their homes at elevations of 15 or even 30 feet above sea level in order to meet new federal building standards.

But since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the agency has toughened its 100-year standard, based on new information about land subsidence and the increasing severity and frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. There is also new data about weak soils in the area and the failure of some of the city's floodwalls.

registration-free Link.

Here are some related, recent stories filed by John Schwartz from New Orleans, including:
- Engineers' Panel Urges Study of All Levees in New Orleans
- Museums Roll Again, but Where Are All the People?

Image: New Orleans in stereoscope. "The Levee," from a photoset of historic stereographs of New Orleans uploaded by Max Sparber.

Collaboration and the Marketplace
New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age
Keynote Address: Openness as an Ethos
The Wealth of Networks
The Economics of Knowledge as a Public Good
The Economics of Open Courseware
The Economics of Open Text
Convergence Culture: Consumer Participation and the Economics of Mass Media
The Economics of the Music Industry
If Only We Knew Yesterday What We Know Today
The Economics of Open Archives, Museums, and Libraries I
The Economics of Open Archives, Museums, and Libraries II
The Economics of the Public Domain
The Economics of Film and Television I
The Economics of Film and Television II
The New Economics of Gaming
Everything is Miscellaneous
Business Interests in Open Content
Next Steps: Cooperation Across Institutions and Industries

When you tire of wearing wadded-up aluminium foil on your head, check out lessemf.com's line of anti-electromagnetic steel clothing. T-shirts, aprons, fashionable scarves, and bedsheets (dramatized at left, image courtesy lessemf.com). 

Don't try sneaking any of it through airport screening lines, though. Via Bruce Sterling, who asks, "I wonder what happens when you drop that shirt in an acid bath. Are you left with NOTHING BUT the stainless steel fibers? What does that look like?"

Foresight is a particularly good way to stimulate insights. While prediction is impossible, provocation is easy. Insights arise from differences: different ideas, different angles, and different moods. If insights were obvious, everyone would be having them. What new development might be created—given the external future forces that are at play? This is a search for “Aha’s!” It is a search for insights, a search for coherence in the midst of confusion.

• "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad."--The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.

• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

• "Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous."--Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, 1939.

• "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."--A memo at Western Union, 1878 (or 1876).

I came across the BoingBoing 'drop shadows not bombs' post today, and it made me think of this shirt i printed a few months ago. It's nice to think of what would happen if we chose to drop kittens, not bombs. People would be too happy, too joyful to send their crazy young men at us with airplanes and exploding shoes.

Reader comment: Jerry Yeti says,

Your "Kittens Not Bombs" post and link reminds me of the "Cupcakes not Bombs" shirts that Urban Outfitters stole from Johnny Cupcakes: Link.

Nina Wu, the sister of detained filmmaker and Global Voices contributor Hao Wu, has now started a blog on MSN Spaces. It includes a photo gallery of “Haozi” as the family calls him. Even if you don’t know Chinese, leave her a comment in English and let her know your support for Hao.

Thanks to a volunteer who wishes to remain anonymous, we have a full translation of her first post. She includes an update on her latest visit to the police. It is a chilling account of what it’s like to be the family member of a Chinese person who has been detained without charge.

Previously: Blogger, documentarian Hao Wu held one month

Update: here's an English translation of Nina's latest post. Snip:

When I got up today my eyes were swollen into two big walnuts. I had to wear sunglasses out.

Luckily, it was bright outside, and the sun felt good on my body. I squinted and looked at the sky. The Beijing sky is much worse than Shanghai’s, but I remembered how I used to rise early and return late. When did I last have time to look up at the sky? I shouldn’t be too demanding.

There was a din along Dawang road where the old houses were being demolished. Remembering the innumerable times my little brother walked among the noisy mass of people, I felt close to him again. I greedily looked over every street peddler, every pile of rubble.

Brother, are you lucky enough to see this bright and beautiful day? Do you know that your sister is walking on the same street you walked on so many times before? When I thought that he may be locked in a dark room, without any view or news of the outside world, my mood darkened too.

"There is no such thing as an original play," writes the playwright Charles Mee, who has the text of his plays online at www.charlesmee.org. "Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work." He encourages others to "pillage his plays" as he has done to the work of other playwrights.

Last week, I saw "Hotel Cassiopeia" by Charles Mee, which was part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. The play was about the American collage artist, Joseph Cornell, a man who lived for most of his life in his parents' house in Queens, caring for a disabled sibling, and never having an an intimate relationship of his own. The play itself was more about the mind of the artist than the life of the artist, however. In this production, when you walk into the theatre, the actor playing Cornell is already on stage, sitting at a desk with his head in his hands. "Hotel Cassiopeia" is ornate and dream-like, without much of a plot. Real and imagined characters enter, old Hollywood movies are played on the wall and objects are retrieved and added to Cornell's collection in the drawers of his desk. He wonders whether anything he does has any meaning and is worth doing. He has a certain love of finding and keeping things, which seem as real to him as any relationship might be. Cornell is talking about these things in reverie:

the little store nearby where you can find
star fish
butterflies in little boxes
driftwood
and in the antiques store
the things from Asia
inlaid wood
a thousand little drawers

After the play, I found myself mulling it over, like a dream, strange and beautiful. I went to the Web to look up more information about Joseph Cornell and the play itself. I was delighted to find Mee's website, "The (re)making Project", with the full text of the play (and all of his plays.) Intentionally or not, Mee's thoughts about his own work seem to echo the ideas of Open Source and Creative Commons, viewing his own work as something to be remixed by others.

Jasmina Tesanovic, Belgrade
Scorpions Srebrenica Trial
Day Three: March 15, 2006
The Tin Soldier

I repeat, we should not mix anymore. This is not healthy, it is perverse, it is sickening: my gay friend, a Woman In Black, is looking at the Scorpion witness today and saying: he is so cute...

In his early thirties, dressed in a fancy suit, with an upright muscled body, he lies at full speed. His voice is scarcely audible, so that his contradictions cannot be followed. We, the audience, are huge today. Most of us are law students, led by their right wing professor from Belgrade law school, who thinks very well of the Scorpions, and very badly of all other ethnic communities on this territory. They are the clerico-fascist party in the government coalition; in the nineties, they used to be Milosevic's best allies, supporters of his troops such as Scorpions.

The "cute" witness was in his teens back then. Today he is obviously a professional criminal, blackmailed and pampered by his famous commander, who still makes them all tremble with his praises or scoldings.

Back then, the Tin Soldier was a war orphan, hired to drive a truck. A truck full of food-tins, he claims: food for the troop. Today he remembers nothing, or next to nothing, of names places deeds words. Not even one Name, not even one Place.

He has become a true geek, autistic and narrowly determined. He is a Tin Soldier, whose emptiness clanks like an empty tin, its contents eaten by Scorpions. He says he has no friends, no wife, just a boss whom he drives. The Tin Soldier needs no money for his expenses. He just wants to go. He says, many many times, as any answer to judge's questions; "everything is possible."

[image: Detail of interior house wall, Serbia, by Aleksandra Radonić]

I'm a videoblogger and an independent journalist, and I  frequently cover protests and other civil unrest in San Francisco.

On July 8th, I shot a protest in the Mission during which a cop was injured in the course of an altercation. Later that week I was visited by the FBI and asked to hand over the unedited footage from that night.

After speaking to my lawyer I denied their request. A few months later, in the beginning of February I was subponead to appear before a Federal Grand Jury with the tape. On behalf of my pro-bono attorney's at the San Francisco National Lawyer's Guild (NLG), we have filed numerous motions in an attempt to quash the subpoena and a hearing to decide to quash the subpoena occured this morning. We are still awaiting the results of that hearing.

I have made the Eno/Byrne track "Qu'ran", referred to earlier as the missing track from "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", available for download at my blog. Enjoy.

Mike points to another copy here.

And E.W. Brenner says,

here is a link of interest to people who are fond of the song "Qu'ran."

Carla got me a Gocco printer for Christmas, and while I'm not nearly as talented as the artists at The Wurst, I'm having fun with device. It uses flashbulbs (like the kind found in old cameras) to expose your image onto the screen.
Link

What happens to our bodies when we die? Inside a dusty room in a decaying outbuilding on the grounds of a state-run psychiatric hospital are simple pine shelves lined three-deep with thousands of copper canisters...The copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the seams of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118...

The project's title is "The Library of Dust". As I was setting up to photograph in a storage building that houses the cremated remains, prisoners from the local penitentiary were called in to clean up some of the mess in the adjacent hallway, crematorium, and autopsy room. A young male prisoner leaned into the room lined with the copper cans, scanned the room, and said in a low tone, "The library of dust.”

Enough is enough! I've had it with these Strakes.

Whaddya gonna do about it? Strakes on a plain, baby. Strakes on a plain.

Ain't nothing you can do when it's Strakes on a motherfucking plain.

(Thanks, Gaijin Biker) .

On a more serious note, see also this post today on DefenseTech blog about Operation Divine Strake: Link. (thanks, Noah Shachtman.)

Previously: Snakes on a Plane meets Cory's angry letter to AA

(Officials) said some 60,000 birds, mostly waterfowl, would begin their migration south from Alaska in mid-August, working their way down through Oregon, Washington and into California. Although both coasts have set up monitoring systems for any signs of the avian virus "we expect there will be access (to the United States) through Alaska rather than upstate New York," said Ryan Broddrick, director of the California Department of Fish and Game. He did not elaborate.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt warned against panic when avian flu hits U.S. shores for the first time, saying it would not inevitably mean the start of a human pandemic...

But he warned states to lay the groundwork for possible human to human transmission. "There is clearly a lot of buzz (but) I worry there is not enough busy-ness," he said.

Professor Daniel Robert is the research leader at Bristol: "We have found that different sound frequencies elicit very different mechanical responses in the locust hearing system. By studying these tiny nanoscale movements and understanding how sound waves are turned into mechanical responses we may be able to develop microphones based on the functions of natural hearing. These could detect very faint sounds and analyse their frequency, something that current microphones cannot pick up."

Walt Disney coined the term plussing as a way of making an idea even better. By telling his workers to plus it, even when they think they nailed it, gave Disney that extra edge when it came to quality animation back in the day. Pixar is a staunch believer in plussing their work. And it shows.

Photos from blogger / hacker / world traveler / shooter Jake Appelbaum are on display in Toronto tonight at his first-ever gallery show, together with photographer Kate Young. "Something Strange Bends Light Our Way" opens tonight at at the Now Lounge, goes for the next few weeks. Congrats, Jake! Link to show details. Image: a portrait shot by Jake on Kodak EIR infrared film.

The general pattern of maturation, they report in Nature today, is that the cortex grows thicker as the child ages and then thins out. The cause of the changes is unknown, because the imaging process cannot see down to the level of individual neurons.

But basically the brain seems to be rewiring itself as it matures, with the thinning of the cortex reflecting a pruning of redundant connections....

One interpretation, (National Institute of Mental Health scientist Judith) Rapoport said, is that the brains of highly intelligent children are more plastic or changeable, swinging through a higher trajectory of cortical thickening and thinning than occurs in average children. The scans show the "sculpturing or fine tuning of parts of the cortex which support higher level thought, and maybe this is happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children," (researcher Philip) Shaw said..

I.Q. scores and measuring intelligence have long been controversial. Brain-imaging studies by Dr. Thompson and the study group have advanced the field by identifying physical features of the brain that correlate with I.Q.

At about US$12, these LOVE / HATE baby mittens are exponentially cheaper than the wearable sculpture for adults blogged here a few days ago.

Perfect for your li'l bundle of Robert Mitchum.

Link to store, via needled.com. And here's an interesting MeFi thread of yore about the origins of the archetypal tat popularized in the movie Night of the Hunter (promo poster below). (Thanks, Susannah!)

Previously: LOVE / HATE knuckle tat gloves

Distancing itself from the more barbaric forms of hair removal, Priciderm, with help from its Quebec ad agency Carte Blance, has launched an S & M themed campaign to promote its seemingly less painful laser hair removal process.Two of the ads use the queasiness of S&M to illustrate hair removal doesn't have to be a painful ordeal. A third execution, gets right to the pint with blood in the sink.

The Pentagon plans to detonate 700 tons of conventional high explosives in Nevada in a June 2 test designed to gauge the effectiveness of weapons against deeply buried targets, officials said on March 30.

"I don’t want to sound glib here, but it’s the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," James Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, told a small group of reporters.

The test, dubbed "Divine Strake," is sponsored by Tegnelia’s agency and is set to be conducted at the Energy Department’s Nevada Test Site in Nye County, about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of Las Vegas.

A cursory Google search for "Divine Strake" yields some interesting docs. Link: cover from a 1950's atomic kitsch comic, via ep.tc.

As "colorized" is to black and white movies, "dimensionalized" will soon be for conventional footage which is later converted to stereo. Don't know about that "visual cue" part, though -- snip from press release:

IMAX Corporation will use its proprietary 2D to 3D conversion technology to convert approximately 20 minutes of the film into An IMAX 3D Experience (...) The film will be simultaneously released to IMAX® and conventional theatres on June 30, 2006.

During select sequences of the film, a visual cue designed by Singer will indicate when audiences should put on and remove their IMAX 3D glasses.

Reader comment: Stella says,

I was walking around CompUSA today and noticed a Nascar branded laptop: Link. First they take a step into the meat industry and now into computer technology... What's next?

Reader comment: Stacy says,

How about some hearty NASCAR russet potatoes to go with your NASCAR meat? Link.

Reader comment: "j" says,

Here's a NASCAR chainsaw. Just two weeks ago i toured the factory where some of the components of this puppy are made. The other people on the tour all agreed with me that it seemed a bit, um, odd. Or like someone was really stretching a brand name. Frighteningly enough, we were informed that the product sold as fast as they could make them. It's an odd kind of synergy, in a way, i mean, i can really picture NASCAR fans buying and using the hell out of a chainsaw. Call me a generalist, but it's true.

Reader comment: Paul says,

How about a NASCAR "slow cooker" for all of the NASCAR labeled meat and potatoes you find? Link.

Reader comment: Brandon says,

Don't foget the NASCAR romance novels! Link.

A single chapter of Warren Ellis' graphic novel Transmetropilitan #8: Another Cold Morning has been scanned and posted online by a fan. On his blog, Mr. Ellis responds:

Since it’s one chapter out of sixty, and no-one’s trying to earn money off it, and I am lazy benign, I choose not to release the throatfucking hounds of hell upon the criminal Internets pirate responsible.

Instead, I offer it to you to read, and tell you that the story can be found in the collection TRANSMETROPOLITAN: LUST FOR LIFE, available from Amazon and all better comics stores and bookstores.

Only three things are certain in life. MySpace, Taxes, and Death.

If you have a MySpace account and you die, this is where you will end up.

MyDeathSpace.com memorializes deceased MySpace users and picks up where a regular obituary leaves off.

Click the MySpace Deaths link at the top to view the latest MySpace Deaths!

This may be the first time in history that Sir Richard Branson has gazed unfavorably on a pair of supersized tits. According to that stalwart of truth and accuracy in reporting, the Sun, women who've had breast augmentation surgery may be banned from  Virgin Galactic flights over fears their implants may explode in microgravity.

Cabin pressures on parabolic flights and in space flights are lower than on regular airplane flights. Snip:

More than 157 people have paid $200,000 each to zoom 400,000 feet above Earth on the Virgin Galactic space "shuttle." Spokesman Will Whitehorn said yesterday that the trip would be safe for 80 percent of people.

(Ed note: Wait, does that mean Whitehorn believes 20% of Virgin Galactic clientele have fake tits?)

He told London's Sun newspaper: "We've discovered there may well be issues with breast augmentation. We're not sure whether they could stand the trip -- they could well explode."

Link to Sun story, and here's a related item on SCENTA blog. (via LAFuturists, thanks John Smart and John Spencer).

Image: at left, an artist's rendition of a Virgin Galactic craft (courtesy Virgin Galactic). At right, a snip from a COOP drawing. Her rack, however, is real.

Reader Comment: This report is bogus, serves me right for linking to the Sun. Dustin Miller says,

The almighty Mythbusters done busted that myth. And they subjected the poor silicone baggies to a near complete vacuum! Link

Reader Comment: Steve says, "Related to your richard branson reference:"

Richard Branson's Aussie sex romp video -- A new viral ad for Virgin's finance arm features boss Richard Branson splashing about in a spa tub sex romp. But will it make you sign up for a Virgin home loan?

The patients in the study at six U.S. hospitals included 604 who were actually prayed for after being told they might or might not be; another 597 patients who were not prayed for after being told they might or might not be; and a group of 601 who were prayed for and told they would be the subject of such prayer.

The praying was done by members of three Christian groups in monasteries and elsewhere -- two Catholic and one Protestant -- who were given written prayers and the first name and initial of the last name of the prayer subjects. The prayers started on the eve of or day of surgery and lasted for two weeks.

Among the first group -- who were prayed for but only told they might be -- 52 percent had post-surgical complications compared to 51 percent in the second group, the ones who were not prayed for though told they might be. In the third group, who knew they were being prayed for, 59 percent had complications.

After 30 days, however, the death rates and incidence of major complications was about the same across all three groups, said the study...

Radiohead fan and media designer Matt Smithson cooked up a fantastic little video for the song "Fitter Happier," off the album OK Computer. The tune features a sort of computer-drone voice, and Matt's video unfolds along a series of pages in an imaginary, vintage tech-product manual. It's perfect. Link to video on manvsmagnet.com. (via ateaseweb)

Seeing the post on the Radiohead video reminded me of one that a teacher I had in college did in 2000. A very different interpretation. It was and is still a beautiful piece. Link, go to the bottom of the page and choose either quicktime or wmv.

Court TV is currently casting for on-air talent for Takedown 2 (see below). We’re looking for con artists, magicians and experts in the area of street hustling, sleight of hand and other street cons. Must have some connection or expertise to one of these areas. Please no actors.

Takedown 2 SM: In this exciting new series, the con is on! A team of talented former con men and women led demonstrate some of the cleverest cons of all time, offering tips on how to avoid getting conned.

We just hit our 50th episode with Larry Lessig. We caught up with him at the first Creative Commons Salon in SF a few weeks ago. Other recent interviews include Jimmy Wales, Caterina Fake, Bram Cohen, Anil Dash and several pieces from SXSW. One of my recent favorites is the Adaptive Path 5th anniversay episode where we pose the question "What is Adaptive Path?". Many internet rockstars provide a range of answers that probably won't show up in any official Powerpoint presentation.

I think he should have started a video blog, instead. I'd subscribe to his RSS feed. I think he'd have no trouble attracting many times more visitors in that medium.

Eisner interviewed former Imagineering head and Applied Minds cofounder Bran Ferren during Tuesday's debut -- that's really interesting stuff, IMO. I might not stop my life to sit in front of a tv set at 6/9PM on a Tuesday night to watch the show every week, but I wouldn't miss a download. Link to Reuters article.

Also, CNBC effectively has no web presence. CNBC.com redirects to moneycentral.msn.com, which doesn't include any teaser content for network shows. I can't find any online promotion for Eisner's show (or others) anywhere, period. <shrugs>.. Okay, here's the recently-launched CNBC site -- it's pretty thin, though. With such vast resources of financial data through MSN at their disposal, I don't understand why this isn't a lot more content-rich. Image: screengrab from video at MSNBC.com.

Oh, this calls for a unicorn chaser. BoingBoing reader Yetter says,

I've been a reader for a few months now and I like how you follow-up disturbing stories with pictures of unicorns. I have a unicorn painting here in my office that I thought you might enjoy, two unicorns running through outer space.

Link to full-size snapshot of "Unicorns in Space Black Velvet Painting" on Yetter's office wall.

Reader comment: IvyMike says, "The picture of unicorns in space reminds me of this classic bit of Simpsons dialog:"

Marge: Well, I studied art, and this guy's got a real gift.
Warden: You kiddin'? Look -- [shows another painting] he painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm asking you: What's it breathin'?
Homer: Air?
Warden: Ain't no air in space.
Homer: There's an air-in-space museum.

Update: Krisjohn has provided a mirror of this page.

Oh for god's sake, this has gone on long enough.

Ear wax is there for a reason. It has antibacterial properties as well as preventing dirt and bugs from going further into your hearing system. Excess earwax is pushed naturally to the opening of the ear canal, where it is washed away, pushed out as the cerumen glands secrete more wax and also by epithelial migration as your skin goes through its replacement cycle.

From the Mayo Clinic: "Never attempt to dig out excessive or hardened earwax with items such as a paper clip, a cotton swab or a hairpin. You may push the wax farther into your ear and cause serious damage to the lining of your ear canal and even to your eardrum." Wanna go deaf? Stick a bobby pin in your ear. See herefor what it looks like when you've been packing that stuff in for a while.

Even if you don't do that, simply scratching or abrading the skin in the ear canal provides a protected growth site for fungus -- the dreaded swimmer's ear. I had this once when psoriasis broke up the skin in my ear. You don't want it. Also, removal of impacted ear wax, from pushing it further down in the ear, is inevitably very painful.

Now there are a VERY FEW people who have excessive wax secretions and need to have it cleaned out every now and again. The solution to that is a few drops of mineral oil to soften up the wax and, a day or two later, a bit of warm water or hydrogen peroxide squirted up the ear canal.

And for god's sake, don't stick a candle in your ding dang ear. Ear wax cannot be sucked out by a candle. There are easier ways to set your head on fire.

I use the word "instantiate" because the older word "manufacture" has the wrong etymology. Manufacturing literally means making something manually, with hands. Somehow the old term drifted into new use for a machine process that likely should have been radically renamed, like "mechafacturing." We lost that opportunity for clarity. In Shaping Things I'm trying to convince people that it's possible to approach physical possessions in an entirely different way than we do today. Tomorrow, they're no longer jealously guarded physical rarities that are hard to replace, they are hard copies whose histories and support processes are in continual flux.

This is the first time complete and total access to original tracks with remix and sampling possibilities have been officially offered on line. In keeping with the spirit of the original album, Brian and David are offering for download all the multitracks on two of the songs. Through signing up to the user license, and in line with Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like. Add them to your own song or create a new one. Visitors are welcome to post their mixes or songs that incorporate these audio files on the site for others to hear and rate.

Reader comment: Andrew Tonkin says,

Yes, that's very good news about the Byrne & Eno reissue & multitracks. One disappointing note - the haunting, original vinyl track "Qu'ran" is still nowhere to be seen. IIRC it was offensive to Muslims, was yanked from the vinyl and never made it to the original CD. Perhaps some vinyl-enabled BB'er might digitize and post this rarity, to the delight of the album's fans?

Reader comment: SoftwareDave says,

Qu'ran is on my copy of the CD (and of course the original vinyl...) - I'm listening to it right now. Maybe it's coz I'm in the UK.

Reader comment: E.W. Brenner says,

here is a link of interest to people who are fond of the song "Qu'uran."

Class. Pure class. That’s what the entire catalog oozes, and the cover does a brilliant job setting the mood. Because nothing says “alluring, tasteful lingerie” like something that resembles a grocery store circular from Red Owl, a series of arrows that point in the direction of detumescence, and a woman who looks like her head’s covered by a cross-dressing squid.

American journalist Jill Carroll, who was abducted in Iraq nearly 100 days ago, is free. Link.

David Cook, Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor: "She was released this morning, she's talked to her father and she's fine." Link.

Best wishes to Ms. Carroll, and to her friends and family, who must be ecstatic today.

Jeff Tynes, Jill's pal and former colleague, tells BoingBoing

Jill is safe and inside the protected Green Zone in Baghdad. She's spoken to her family, saying she was well and the she was treated well. She said she was not sure why she had been abducted. We are all just overwhelmed with joy. Was it Katie's appeal that led to this release? We aren't sure, but the timing seems to suggest that's the case. Whatever the reason, our Jill is released! We just can't wait to see her home again!

 Link to post on Natasha Tynes' blog. The direct link to all Natasha's posts on Jill is here. (Thanks, Jeff Tynes, Glyn Wintle, and the dozens hundreds of BoingBoing readers who wrote in with this great news)

"This is like Y2K except this one is really happening," said university IT spokesman Steve Tally.

Currently, most Indiana computer users set their PCs to a special "Indiana East" setting -- Eastern time that doesn't spring forward every April. Starting this April, however, they'll change their PCs to Eastern Daylight Time. The few who observe Central time set their computers to Central, and will also make the switch. Tally predicts the changeover will create havoc with the widely used Microsoft Outlook calendar application. When the time changes, he said, appointments will still be listed according to the old Indiana East time. The calendars of Central time Outlook users, in turn, will continue to list appointments according to Central time.

See also: Aussie timezone switch borks Exchange Server

Update: Mark sez, "I happen to be an IT manager for a philharmonic orchestra in Indiana and the changeover is going to cause massive problems for anyone who uses outlook as a calendar. By the time this is all said and done, it's going to end up costing businesses in this state a lot of time and money. Perhaps the greatest irony is the fact that our governor pushed the change under the premise that it was going to increase revenue in the state. I've been actively encouraging fellow IT professionals in my area to contact the governor and give him an idea just how much the change is costing their company in money and man hours."

Isn't the real problem that my local AMC charges $10.75 for a movie ticket?

Compare that to football games, baseball games, or the symphony - movie theaters are hands down the best value. The downturn you saw in 2005 was a quality issue. People read reviews, and there's a direct correlation with the box office numbers.

Yet in surveys people complain not about the movies but about megaplexes. Boutique theaters are booming.

Over 250 million consumers buy our product - that says something. Ultimately, if consumers don't like a product, they don't buy it. We offer entertainment for the masses.

To monitor, simply dial the number of the SIM card inserted in GSM transmitter from your phone and you are immediately and clearly listening to all of the audio activity in the area of our professional concealed GSM monitor AGS-01.

We head for the 'graveyard' itself. The first battered ship, the Lian Run 02 has holes near the waterline. They're so big, I could reach out and put my fist through. The two crewman are cheerful enough - or maybe just happy to see new faces. They'd been waiting there a month, in the hope of getting new crew - so far, there's no sign.

Next was the crumbling 'Happiness' ship already mentioned, the Zhang Yuan Yu 15. After we wave goodbye to the lone occupant, we head towards the next two ships. They appear roped to each other - the Zhang Yuan Yu 17 and the Lian Run 16. No one answers our calls on the first ship - but I see some movement behind the bridge, a cat... I'm not sure.

We move to the second ship, where again, a bunch of friendly young guys have been sitting at anchor for two months, waiting technical help and a new crew. Their engine doesn't work, and they no safety gear or radio. They can, however, run their watermaker, for desalinating seawater. Lines of drying fish hang over the deck, but they're running out of other food, and are often forced to signal other fishing boats for help. Like everyone else, their future is uncertain.

In less than a day, it was over. "Jem6X" at the popular DailyKos blog confirmed the street scene was in Bakirkoy, a suburb of Istanbul, not Baghdad.

Tipped off by someone who recognized the actual intersection in Turkey, Jem went through online photo galleries and in a matter of minutes today found a snap taken by a "Faruk" that lined up with the "Baghdad" photo in numerous conclusive ways. Game, set, and match to the blogosphere.

Later Wednesday, Kaloogian admitted the photo was from Turkey but denied he had anything personally to do with posting it on his site. He replaced that Turkey photo with a photo of what he said was Baghdad--taken from a distant hill.

Update: The Jesus' General site has a great parody of the fake Kaloogian photo -- thanks, Ian!

Update 2: David Roth sez,

Regarding the bogus photo which Mr. Kaloogian posted on his website, or rather its replacement:

The new photo which claims to show downtown Baghdad looks like was taken in July of last year. If you use the Unix/Linux command "strings" to strip out all of the text information contained in that photo, here are the first few lines:

Link to "Iraq War Coalition Fatalities," created by Tim Klimowicz. (via Digg user dirtyfratboy, thanks, John Parres)

Reader comment: Stuart Matthews says,

I liked the flash animation that you linked to. But it is missing one very important thing: Iraq (military and civilian) casualties.

1st century BC - Kama Sutra was created
1440 - Gutenberg Press Invented
1928 - Dr. Ruth was born.
1953 - Hugh Hefner starts Playboy
1965 - Bob Guccione starts Penthouse
1968 - Al Goldstein starts Screw
1969 - First mainstream movie to represent the swinger lifestyle - Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Directed by Paul Mazursky
1970 - Penthouse shows pubic hair for the first time.

Ethan Persoff collects and scans ultraweird vintage comics, and hosts them on his ep.tc archive site.

He's just uploaded four new gems, including an AIDS prevention infocomic starring Madonna. The booklet was distributed on one night only, during a 1987 Madison Square Gardens concert (holy crap, that was twenty years ago!). Link.

While you're on Ethan's site, check out new archive addition Johnny Gets the Word. Ethan describes it as a "Grim but wonderfully realized 1965 VD comic. Of particular note, this is by the same people who made the anti-heroin 1966 HOOKED comic. Dates suggest they made this VD one first. Who knew that to be able to win a government contract to draw a comic on drugs you have to earn it by drawing one on syphilis first."

He's also posted two freshly-unearthed 1950s bomb scare comics. Ethan describes If an A-Bomb Falls (1951) as, "a blast on every page. I love the faces. Some of the saddest sulking ever shown in a comic. Shelters, worry, etc."

And about the civil defense HOWTO, "H-Bomb and YOU" (1954). Ethan 'splains: "Includes instructions for children to spy on overhead planes - and do also note the armbands."

Reader comment: Darren Barefoot says,

Ma.gnolia.com, a social bookmarking site that my friends launched a couple months ago, has this nifty site snapshot functionality as well.

Xeni, you may be aware that Jill Carroll's twin sister Katie made an appeal today on Al Arabiya, one of the Middle East's major news networks. Natasha has put up the statement as well as two pictures of Katie (right) and Jill (left) that the Carroll's released to the Christian Science Monitor.

As the days move steadily towards 100, we are all just stunned that Jill has yet to walk free. God knows, they accomplish nothing by keeping her one moment longer. Things in Iraq are surely not getting any better. That chaos is such a worry.

With the support Jill has received from virtually everyone, it is so frustrating to imagine her there, alone amidst the madness.

One of the most notorious drunk drivers in [Ottawa, Canada] has been found not criminally responsible on his latest impaired driving charges because of a mental disorder that makes him believe female celebrities are controlling his actions.

Matt Brownlee was arrested last October after police spotted a pickup truck speeding along a busy street in downtown Ottawa. The 33-year-old man told psychiatrists that he knew the legal repercussions of his actions, but believed singer Shania Twain was helping him drive.

Reader comment: Jon Power says,

Nevermind dangerous driving, Shania Twain has shot a man!

A motley group of eccentrics, hell-raisers, and visionaries have found heaven in the ruins of California’s once-premier resort area––The Salton Sea.

After reading my recent posts about ear cleaning in Asia, Zee says:

It's not just an Eastern thing. I'm Black and my parents are from the South (Mom St. Louis; Dad, Alabama); they taught all of us kids how to clean our ears from the time we were toddlers. (Well, actually they cleaned them until we were old enough to do it ourselves). We use a plain black bobbypin and it's true what they say: once you go black, you'll never go back. ;)

Stay away from the gold and decorative bobbypins, they're too big to comfortably insert in your ears and the experience will not be pleasant. Sterilize your tool with some soap and hot water, rinse it, dry it off, and insert into your ear. Gingerly work your way from the outer ear to the inside scooping out small bits of wax as you go. Wipe the wax on a nearby kleenex or sibling and continue until you've reached as far as you can comfortably go. Some tips:

1. The first time you clean your ears, you may start to cough as you get deeper inside. This is common and nothing to worry about; just be prepared so you can either stop moving or quickly take out the hairpin so you don't inadvertently jab yourself.

2. Never clean your ears if there are sick people around you; the waxy buildup actually protects you from their cooties. No kidding! I can't tell you how many times I've been perfectly healthy only to get the flu from somebody at work shortly after cleaning my ears. This goes for allergies, too; wait for the pollen to die down before cleaning your ears or you will suffer more than usual.

3. Never clean your ears on a bed. Murphy's Law dictates that once you've gone in good and deep, some fool will take the opportunity to dive bomb the mattress and assist you in your quest to puncture your eardrum.

4. Don't clean your ears too often or you risk irritating the inner ear and causing an infection. As with all other pleasurable pursuits, moderation is key. Once every week or two is plenty.

5. Have a friend with a videocamera nearby the first time you clean your ears. It will undoubtly be a memorable event. The first time I cleaned my boyfriend's ears, I pulled out a massive inch and a half blob of dark black wax; it was the exact size and shape of his ear canal! I nearly fainted from shock. He said he actually felt suction when I removed those wax plugs and his hearing improved dramatically.

As an aside, my friend recently bought me a Japanese ear cleaning kit while she was on vacation and I didn't care for it. It's very pretty, but the scooping end has a rough, serrated edge to it. I found it too painful to use and have since gone back to my trusty black bobbypins.

This reminds me of a story about a non-existant mini anarchist Utopia called "Visit Port Watson!" that appeared in the SF issue of zine called Semiotext(e) in the late 1980s. The piece was probably written by Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey.
Link

Update: Nick sez, "I think some of these pics may come from a Vancouver BC competition which has been doing this for a few years."

Update 2: Tomo sez, "the canned sculptures were part of a charity event held annually in NYC called Canstruction. Several engineering and archiectural design firms in the city submit entries and awards are given out in various categories. All cans used are then donated to the regional food bank. A large portion of this past year's went to the victims of Hurricane Katrina."

Update: Scott Lawrence sez, "This isn't the first time Disney has done this. For their fairly recent Tron special edition DVD, the 'Tron' font they used for their menu text is a freeware font that myself and Paul Albers worked on in the mid 1990s."

Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you're in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can't do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this? Either they weren't thinking through the consequences or they don't care.

(Researcher Rana El Kaliouby's) program is based on a machine-learning algorithm that she trained by showing it more than 100 8-second video clips of actors expressing particular emotions. The software picks out movements of the eyebrows, lips and nose, and tracks head movements such as tilting, nodding and shaking, which it then associates with the emotion the actor was showing. When presented with fresh video clips, the software gets people's emotions right 90 per cent of the time when the clips are of actors, and 64 per cent of the time on footage of ordinary people...

Getting the software to work is only the first step, (researcher Rosalind) Picard warns. In its existing form it makes heavy demands on computing power, so it may need to be pared down to work on a standard hand-held computer. Other challenges include finding a high-resolution digital camera that can be worn comfortably, and training people with autism to look at the faces of those they are conversing with so that the camera picks up their expressions.

He checked out shoppers, read magazines, watched movies on the DVD display and played video games.

He bought meals at the in-store Subway sandwich shop, but was able to catch only brief naps in a restroom stall or on lawn chairs in the garden department...

Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Thornton said Bartels neither violated store policy nor broke the law.

"We were unaware of his presence and if we were aware of it we certainly wouldn't have condoned it," Thornton said. "We're a retailer, not a hotel."

Power quality is a well-known problem in the utility business, caused by the proliferation of computers, lighting dimmer switches, energy efficient bulbs, and other modern electronic gadgets. These new devices cause a more complicated use pattern for electricity than old-fashioned items such as incandescent bulbs, producing negative feedback involving high-frequency peaks, harmonics and other noise on electric wiring...

The change in power quality means more variable electromagnetic fields, and possibly more biologically active ones, are associated with electricity than there used to be. This is a possible explanation for the rise in electrosensitivity complaints in the view of Denis Henshaw, a professor at the University of Bristol in Britain, who is an international authority on the health effects of power transmission lines.

He says that if electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people's bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to. "We just don't get to adapt to these because they don't have any special pattern to them," he said. "There is no proof of this, it's just an opinion."

Scorpions Trial
Jasmina Tesanovic, Belgrade
The Liar, the Fall of Yugoslav Army
March 14, 2006

"I am going to pronounce something that I may regret for the rest of my life -- is there is any left after this -- but if I knew all this would have happened, I would have preferred to stay there in that meadow together with the victims.

"Mothers, you whose children were killed in cold blood, you should know that they never did anything to provoke or deserve their death: they had no uniforms and they were just kids. They were killed because we got that order, and because they were Muslims."

The only indicted Scorpion who shows some humanity. in his tremulous voice and red sweater, is the one called the Cunt, the coward who didn’t dare to shoot... He turns towards the audience behind the glass, heated and blurred with our wary breathing, while uttering this unexpected speech.

Then he turns to the witness who took the whole day to tell one big lie, which held no water by the end of the day, when even the guards started puffing with impatience.

His was the historical sentence, uttered in this miserable place called the 'special tribunal for war crimes,' in front of a crowd of war criminals, their criminal lawyers, their criminalized families, and us, a bunch of sobbing women. These brave mothers from Srebrenica are broadcast every single hour on CNN.

[image: Detail of interior house wall, Serbia, by Aleksandra Radonić]

Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe -- it's beyond tough in today's guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon's answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to "detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments." It's part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish "military omniscience" -- and "ubiquitous monitoring."

Reader comment: Josh Winters says,

In the realm of 'Sci-Fi is now,' check out Patrick Farley's 'Spiders' online comic about an alternate war in an alternate Afghanistan: Link. Mini-sensors that network in realtime to provide military omniscience? How . . . novel.

To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter internet content of any country in the world -- second only to China, Hopkins said.

It also is one of a growing number of Middle Eastern countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering, according to a 2004 study by a group called the OpenNet Initiative. The software that Iran uses blocks both internationally hosted sites in English and local sites in Farsi, the study found.

The filtering process is backed by laws that force individuals who subscribe to internet service providers to sign a promise not to access non-Islamic sites. The same laws also force the providers to install filtering mechanisms.

The filtering "is systematically getting worse," said [Hossein] Derakhshan, who was detained and questioned during a visit to Iran last spring, just before the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Previously:
- MySpace banned in UAE, like BoingBoing, presumably with SmartFilter
- Distributed BoingBoing, for those blocked by censorware
- SmartFilter, BoingBoing, and Adult Baby - Diaper Lovers.
- Xeni's NYT op-ed: Exporting Censorship
- More on SmartFilter blocking BoingBoing and other popular sites.

Update: Eric sez, "Kevin Dixon and I wrote the Mickey Death graphic novel, featuring a very similar-looking character, back in the early and mid-nineties. We recently republished the book, which you can get on amazon.com."

Update 2: Kate sez, "this death's-head Mickey Mouse is painted on an outer wall of the lovely and somewhat run-down Oakwood Cemetery in east Austin."

Update 3: Royal Stuart sez, 'The attached image is from a Saks Fifth Avenue ad I saw in the NY Times Magazine last Fall. I wanted one of these sweaters very badly, and contacted Saks to find out how to get one, because it couldn't be found on their website. Turns out their email and phone "help" couldn't help me at all, and said that "sometimes the models bring their own props to the photo shoot." Yeah right, it's a SWEATER, and it's a SAKS ad. If they weren't advertising the clothes, what were they advertising? Long story longer: I ended up finally finding the sweater, at Fred Segal in Santa Monica. It was made of cashmere, cost $400, and was a licensed Disney product.'

Update 4: Matt sez, "This site shows that Ian Astbury, lately singer of an updated version of The Doors and formerly singer/songwriter of The Cult, was using a death's head-Mickey as a graphic device back in 1983 in Death Cult (an earlier incarnation of The Cult). A large rendering of the Mickey Skull used to appear on the band's backdrop at the time, and was used on the front and back cover [TV design] of their 'Ghost Dance' EP."

Update 5: Matt sez, "Disney seamstresses in Bangladesh work 14 hour days for less than 20 cents an hour. This logoknit pattern is inspired by 2 designs from new book "Stitch N' Bitch" written by BUST magazine's editor Debbie Stoller."

Update 6: Cloroxenima sez, "This picture was actually taken at our shotgun-courthouse-steps-wedding in Chao Zhou, China (as you can see it was a very formal affair). We actually picked up the this T in Yantai China where my wife and I were living, and I had to buy this shirt as it, well for lack of a better adjective, rocked!

Update 7: Joshua sez, "I designed a Mickey Mouse skull t-shirt a while back, this one is a little more graphic than the ones you've got. Currently not in production, though if I get enough feedback I can certainly make it happen."

The toughest ticket in London's West End last week wasn't for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg ("Start the Week") with the following opening words:

"They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines."

The words are from The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary of the publication of his classic book. (...) Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis has noted:

"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."

Part of Dawkins' danger is his emphasis on models derived from cybernetics and information theory, and that such models, when applied to our ideas of life, and in particular, human life, strike some otherwise intelligent people numb and dumb with fear and terror. Some have called the cybernetic idea the most important in 2000 years...since the idea of Jesus Christ. And that would make it one of the most dangerous ideas.

Link to archived audio (1 hour 22 minutes,  and in two formats: streaming, or downloadable 75 MB mp3) and 12,000-word transcript. Speakers: Daniel C Dennett (Tufts), Sir John Krebs, FRS (Zoology, Oxford), Matt Ridley, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, FRS (Oxford), Chair: Melvyn Bragg; Organiser, Helena Cronin.

Here's an Amazon link for the original book: The Selfish Gene.

Reader comment: Andrew Platt says,

Melvyn Bragg presents ‘In our Time’ not ‘Start the week’ (that’s Andrew Marr) Podcasts of Radio 4s marvellous ‘In Our Time’ can be found here.

Ken Sitz of the online atomic kitsch history archive Conelrad says,

We just unearthed a relic from the 'Golden Age of Homeland Security' - Gene Hackman in the civil defense training film Community Shelter Planning. He appeared in this 22 minute Army Pictorial Center production just months before his role in Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Link to more about the "lost" film, and here are two video clips featuring Gene Hackman as the CD Regional Officer Donald Ross making a pitch to Bucks County PA commissioners for the government's "Community Shelter Planning" program. He's very convincing in a pre-Katrina Michael Brown sort of way. Google Video Link 1 (3:40 min) Google Video Link 2 (2:00 min). YouTube Link for both clips.

Television producer and BoingBoing buddy Ingrid Escajeda says,

I'm producing a series of short spots for the Food Network called "The Power of Food". They're basically little 60-second mini-documentaries that tell the story of real people whose lives were changed by food. They can be funny, touching, or both. For instance:

• How being part of cooperative garden in the middle of the inner city changed a kid's perspective on his future
• Someone trying to track down a certain ingredient met a future spouse in the one store they found the ingredient in.
• A woman quit her job to go home and take care of her cancer-stricken mother. She started researching nutritional treatments and ended up starting an organic farm business.

I'm pretty much looking for anything with a strong, tangible hook, where food has really affected someone's life. They need to be more than just "I love food, therefore I became a chef or opened a bakery" (even though that's a great thing). They can be located anywhere within the U.S. If the story is chosen by the network, we'd go out and film the person telling their story, as well as any relevant things and places, i.e that person in the garden or kitchen, old photographs, etc. People MUST submit their stories through the website, but if they have any questions, they can email me at foodshorts-power@yahoo.com.

Link to submission form at FoodTV website. Oh, hey, if you are a robot, you might want to submit a testimonial about eating Earth-children.

Image: a lovely macro shot of some peanuts, by photographer Di in Switzerland.

Previously on BoingBoing:
Food Hackers make high-tech geek eats

Reader comment: Jason Coyne says,

You probably don't want to tell people to look up at the eclipse (though I doubt you have many readers in the appropriate areas) as that would lead pretty straight to blindness. Pinhole viewers or special filters are the way to go...

Wow -- an online auction for what appears to be a legit Enigma machine. As the Wikipedia entry explains:

In the history of cryptography, the Enigma was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. More precisely, Enigma was a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines — comprising a variety of different models.The Enigma was used commercially from the early 1920s on, and was also adopted by the military and governmental services of a number of nations — most famously by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.

Link to auction for "Enigma 3 Walzen Chiffriermaschine Chiper Weltkrieg 1941." Which, in case you're wondering, is said to be "ORIGINAL!!! KEIN NACHBAU!!! VOLL FUNKTIONSTÜCHTIG!!!!" If my math's right, bidding is around US$12K right now. (Danke, Jake Appelbaum)

Reader comment: Tom says,

Here's the english version of the enigma machine on ebay...a little easier to understand!

Reader comment: anonymous says,

Thought you guys might find this link to an Enigma machine kit sold at Bletchley Park (where the machine was originally developed) interesting: Link.

Reader comment: Bill Schweikert says,

Here's a link to paper Enigma machines! Print the PDF files on card stock and you'll have (and understand) a working cypher box.

Reader comment: Roger Braun says,

Just wanted to tell you that the Enigma has not been developed in Bletchley Park, as is suggested in the seconde reader's comment. It's bin developed by Arthur Scherbius in Germany, not in the British Bletchley Park. It has been broken there, though (with a lot of help from Marian Rejewski and his colleagues in Poland).

Following up on recent BoingBoing posts about the threatened closure of South Central Farm (a big, communal urban farm plot which may soon be paved for a Wal-Mart), reader and photographer Kathryn Hill says: "I've been documenting the fight. Here are some updated photos." Link.

Previously:
Urban farm in LA gets eviction notice, Wal-Mart imminent

Waller's begenitaled aliens and space cowboy with a laser gun are also outtasight. And check out her crocheted computer games. The best part? Her entire online portfolio is 100% earwax-free. (Thanks, Jeff K!)

Reader comment: Anonymous says, "The last unicorn chaser reminded me of Perry Bible Fellowship's awesome unicorn revenge strip. 'Nice shirt, gay wad.' Link."

I think it's a little silly not to just post these books on a page. The point is to get them into the hands of Hugo voters; generally speaking, anyone who can afford to shlep to a WorldCon can afford to buy a couple books, so the thing that's keeping voters from reading these is more likely to be time-poverty than cash-poverty. Getting over a reader's transom is hard, and your best ally in the task is a friend of the reader you're trying to woo: if you can get someone to read and love your book and then make it easy for her/him to email it to a Hugo voter, you're further along than if you'd posted a physical copy of the book right to the door of the reader. Recommendations from trusted friends are the best sales-tool an author has.

So it follows that the more hands these books find their way into, the higher the likelihood that they'll get forwarded to a Hugo voter. What's more, they've got stiff competition from Charlie Stross's Acclerando, which is available to all comers as a CC-licensed ebook.

A Hugo win for any of these books will sell tons of physical objects -- when I worked in a science fiction bookstore, we could hardly keep the Hugo Winners' shelf stocked; those books would practically fly out the door. Even if you believe that giving away the ebooks to all comers might cost you a sale or two (which hasn't been my experience, not by a damned sight; CC licenses sell the hell out of my books), the upside of a possible Hugo win is gigantic and will overcome any potential losses from a widespread ebook release. Link

Bytheplanet.com sells neti pots, which you fill with warm salt water and pour into one nostril until it pours out the other nostril. I'm going to buy this. It looks like as much fun as the hot pepper nasal spray I bought a couple of years ago.
Link (Thanks, Posture!)

Sometimes it comes by email. Sometimes, by encrypted IM. Sometimes, they spell it out for us in Alpha-Bits cereal. Despite the great risk involved, roboticized earth-children and their parents are sending word to BoingBoing about the ongoing struggle against mecha-overlords. And today, the news is not good: robots are using stuffed animals to lure our young into their steely claws. Snip from Minneapolis Star-Tribune story:

Devin Haskin isn't the first little boy to find the inside of a toy machine too enticing to resist. When the 3-year-old Austin, Minn., boy crawled through the discharge chute of a Toy Chest claw machine at a Godfather's Pizza in his hometown, he ended up on the other side of the glass surrounded by stuffed animals.

Link. (Thanks, Scott Van Zile).  Meanwhile, main screen turn on. We get signal from the moms and dads of kids forcibly assimilated into machine consciousness. Here are some testimonials with photographic evidence.

Image above: Tech writer and editor Dylan Tweney says, "Here's my daughter Clara, fully assimilated into the guise of the dancing robot from the Junior Senior video, "Move Your Feet". Link to more snapshots.

BoingBoing reader Matt Vaughn points to his robot child from Cupertino, and says,

"What makes this Robot Child extra nerdy is that my daughter came up with this costume after finding the packing foam from her Mac Mini in my office." Link.

John Firehammer of "This is Pop!" blog says, "Here's a pic of my 8-year-old son Max from last Halloween [Ed. Note: why is it that so many of the robot child-abductions seem to occur on this day?]. Check out the smashed calculator bits, dryer vent arms and wired-on spigot."

Stacy Springman says, "A few days before you posted the first robot kid pic, I had started making my son a robot costume. The snapshot here shows the first stage of robot construction; the pics you post on boingboing are giving me some great ideas for a superior robot -- thank you. Time for a second generation robot, I suppose."

Without explaining why his daughter's name is "Mr. K," Gene Kaufman cries,

"Help!!!! The robots have enslaved my daughter, Mr. K!!!!!" Link.

And finally: garments with which to usher in the dark times. Claire says, "Can't Sleep, Robots Will Eat Me! A t-shirt designed in response to the horrific Child Eating Robots documented in recent BoingBoing posts."

Offered in "INFANT CREEPER." Oh, how cruelly apropos. Link
Previously on BoingBoing:
- Fresh children arrive from space
- Random jpeg of cuteness: robot kid
- More evidence robots devouring our kids
- Earth-children's robot resistance marches on
- "Roboticization of Earth-children": das ist geFarken

Reader comment: Brian Cubbison says, "The Associated Press photographs an Israeli robot child at Purim: Link."

Reader comment: Rim Toemer says,

I read your latest account of robots luring children into their jaws with stuffed animals, and I thought you might want to know this has been happening for almost a year now! Story: Toddler rescued from toy vending machine.

The movies are Good Night and Good Luck and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and together, they make a powerful, moving statement about how good people do evil and how flawed people can do good.

Good Night and Good Luck is the story of journalist Edward R Murrow's campaign to expose Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts for a sham aimed at grabbing power by instilling fear of shadowy bogeymen into America's hearts. Murrow and his fellow campaigners are portrayed in great warts-and-all style, flawed people with a heartfelt disgust for the deeds of a wicked opportunist who is destroying everything they love about their country. Most compelling about this is the way that it attacks the dumbing-down of discourse, something that's been in free-fall since before Murrow's time and shows no sign of hitting bottom. Cinematically, this is a beautiful film, shot in black and white and seamlessly intercut with scenes out of McCarthy's hearings, with spooky interstitial sequences of torchy jazz.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a straight-ahead documentary about the rise and fall of Enron. The Enron events took place over years, and it's hard to remember sometimes just how high-flying these bastards were, and how much harm they wrought to millions, and how much they got away with. The filmmakers got astonishing on-camera interviews with insiders from a Portland linesman who lost his pension when Enron bought the state utility he'd worked for all his life to a senior Enron exec who left just before things went horribly wrong and who is visibly moved in discussing the suicide of one of her peers, who she describes as a good person, despite his participation in a shell-game that bankrupted tens of thousands of workers who lost everything in his shell-game.

Smartest Guys in the Room also makes brilliant use of news-footage, with genius cuts from the Congressional Enron hearings to corporate Enron booster films to newscasts to grainy, secret whistle-blower clips. And Smartest Guys also has a fantastic soundtrack most notable for its use of spooky Tom Waits songs like "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" and "What's He Building Up There?" that have always struck me as soundtrack for a movie as yet unmade.

These two films tell you a lot about how good and evil are done. Smartest Guys shows you a parade of good and bad people who collectively did great wickedness (baby-faced traders bug-eyed with enthusiastic remembrance of the high-flying days of pump-and-dump) and Good Night and Good Luck shows you good people who refuse to do wicked, and who inspire others to follow their lead.

There are days when it's hard to believe that the world will ever improve, that greed will ever be set aside for decency, but these films put a lie to it. I recommend watching them both, back to back, the next time your hope runs low.

These Katamari are big enough to fit in the hand comfortably. The nubs are fully magnetic to facilitate the Katamari rolling power. Perfect for sitting on a desk or in a craft area holding metalic things for you. I can make them in any combination of 3 Bright acrylic yarns you want.

Marriott Flagship: Once again, the Marriott Flagship makes the worst list, partly because of inconsistency across the Marriott brands (Residence Inn, Courtyard and others offer free WiFi) and partly because you need a Ph.D to comprehend the Internet policies at some of their flagship hotels. First off, there's no free wifi. You can pay $9.99 for 24 hours in the lobby only. Or you choose to do a T-Mobile Hotspot option but $6.99 a minute roam charges apply. In the rooms, you can pay $9.95 for tethered ethernet access which will include any phone calls, local and long distance, that you make. Or you can head down to the business center and get free WiFi on the few computers offered there but will have to wait your turn and then have the next person in line breathe down your neck while you check your email. Marriott Flagship, you lost us at "No Free Wifi."

Granada [the scumbag film-house in question] has hardened their stance (even after -- or perhaps because of -- being shown evidence that the numbers they are standing on are fraudulent). Their current position is classic Hollywood: they claim with a straight face that a movie which only cost around $3 million to make back in 1982, and which has earned at least $20-25 million, is still $15 million in the red (!) because of "interest charges," and therefore they don't need to share a penny of their large windfall income from it.

Rumors of a possible sale involving the college/high school networking site and Viacom have been around for a while -- and they're growing louder: Link to Businessweek article.

In related news, police arrested a twenty-year-old Purdue university student after tracing his identity by way of his Facebook profile. Link. (Thanks, 7im)

“For women, it is not seen as appropriate for them to retaliate when they're angry, but it is OK for men. And that's reflected in their selection of media content,” said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

“This shows that even our news consumption is not motivated just by information concerns. We use news to regulate our moods...."

Overall, the findings suggest people may sometimes use their media choices to put them in the right frame of mind for upcoming events. “You want to make sure your mood fits whatever situation you're in,” Knobloch-Westerwick said. “Media choices can help you do that.”

For example, commuters facing a stressful drive home from work may choose calming, relaxing music on the radio.

“Our media use is not just for entertainment or information. It can also be functional, helping us to regulate our moods for what we're doing.”

Update: David emailed me a photo of an earwax picker with a built-in compass. (Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Scorpions Trial
Jasmina Tesanovic, Belgrade
First day of trial, March 13, 2006

Boca's Squad / Military Box 9189/19 Vukovar

That's how today's witness presented himself: a low-key thirty-nine-year old locksmith, grim and uncomfortable in his role. He executed his legal duty with obvious physical pain and loud moans and groans. as if barbecued slowly by the impatient woman judge, who looks every time more like a Hollywood star.

"Boca" is just a nickname here, commonly given to the nice kid round the corner, and Vukovar used to be a time-honored city in Croatia. However now, we are talking about Scorpions destroying that city, together with the Jugoslav National Army, the JNA. Recently a movie was made about that scene of the crime and bloodshed. Once again the reality show and the documentary material beat all the moralizing words of the accused war criminals.

He's one of the hottest Spanish-language radio personalities in the nation. So when Los Angeles deejay Eddie Sotelo joined hands with his radio rivals to urge listeners to turn out for a pro-immigrant rally in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, organizers hoped for a big turnout.

But many said Monday that they were stunned by how many responded to the call to march against federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants and penalize those who assist them.

(...) Rally supporters, including immigrant-rights activists, churches, and labor and community groups, agreed that the active advocacy of the region's top Spanish-language radio personalities was critical in drawing the enormous crowds, who marched more than 20 blocks along Spring and Main streets and Broadway to City Hall, wearing white "peace" shirts and waving American and Mexican flags.

Previously on BoingBoing: LA student protests organized on MySpace

Lenovo, which last year bought IBM's PC arm, said it had nothing to hide and would welcome the investigation. Concern has been rising in the US over foreign companies buying US firms.

Joel Rubin, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, just told the host of a news program on KCRW (the NPR affiliate station in LA), that the 15,000 high school students who walked out of school today organized today's march using MySpace.com over the weekend.

The students were, once again, protesting the House bill would make illegal immigration into a felony rather than a civil offense.

Reader comment: cathode ray says,

i am a student teacher at crenshaw high here in los angeles. let me begin by saying that as the daughter of mexican immigrants, this issue is of paramount importance to me. let me continue by saying, however, that the "walk-outs" can hardly be described as "organized." i strive to empower my students politically (even in my math class!) but staging a walk-out from school is a slap in the face of the many immigrants who have come to the united states seeking, among other things, a decent, if not quality, education.

when i asked my kids why they were walking out, only one knew about the bill in the house. the remainder were simply getting out of school early. schools like crenshaw lose *hundreds of thousands* of dollars per day due to absences. i think a more appropriate form of protest would be to stage a "school-in" much like the lunch counter demonstrations from the 1960s civil rights movement. coming to school and saying "i demand *everyone* have equal access to *a quality* education" is, in the end, more productive. and i can tell you, that the vast majority of the students who walked out of crenshaw high are the very ones who have constantly failed their classes, despite our best efforts to teach them, in english or in spanish.

in the end, education is the key. leaving is simply opting out of the educational process, which is another slap in the face to educators like me who are doing the best they can to provide these kids the futures our parents dreamt for us.

From one edition of NEXT to the other, do you see that technology is moving at a rapid pace? Or is it a slow continuum with, here and there, too many repetitions?
Technology will be moving even faster and among others will the convergence of established disciplines in the future contribute to this increased pace. Convergence in research fields will be more common because we are increasingly looking to apply the construction work of Mother Nature for creation of advanced technology. So the biologist will need more mathematics and vice versa. Also the merging of biotechnology and nanotechnology will create a demand for researchers which interdisciplinary skills. A forerunner of this trend is Stanford University’s Bio-X Lab of interdisciplinary research connected to engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, math and medicine.

A future ability to reverse engineer the human organs and other advances in technology will keep the pace of new discoveries at an exponential level of unheard dimensions if compared to past rates of discoveries. Some predicts that the next 50-100 years will yield advances in technology equivalent to 14.000 years of previous discoveries.

[I] learned all about mimikaki from an American friend who is addicted to his Japanese wife's ability to dig wax out of his ears without pulling brain matter out in the process. It's a Japan thing.

What better way to cap off a day or work and night of drinking than to have someone jam a camera-enabled pick in your ear so you can watch your very own "house of wax" on TV? A thousand yen gets you a 10-minute ear-cleaning and a quick massage.

having a fucked up back means drawing can be excruciating at times. one of the few positions that is actually GOOD for my back is laying on my stomach with my back arched (kinda like when you're watching tv on your stomach with your chin in your hands). trouble is, after about 30 minutes your shoulders and neck get exhausted, plus you can't slide huge pieces of paper under yourself like you would under a table, onto your lap. this thing addresses all those concerns. the adjustable chest angle thing supports your shoulders, the padded piping supports your head, and the whole thing is on a superwide frame that's lifted about 1 inch off the ground. BRILLIANT. and for added appeal, mom upholstered all the padding in the same world war II airplane fabric that she made my son's little duvet case out of.

Study results show that drinking alcohol and Red Bull together significantly reduces the perception of headache, weakness, dry mouth and impairment of motor coordination. Red Bull does not, however, significantly reduce alcohol-related deficits on objective measures of motor coordination and visual reaction time. People who combine alcohol with energy drinks may be at even greater risk for problems such as automobile accidents because they believe they are unimpaired.

I thought that if you liked the nontransitive dice, you might also like a nontransitive coin-tossing problem called "Penny-ante". Basically, your opponent chooses a series of three coin tosses (HTH, for example), and you choose another series (HHT). Then you flip a coin until one of these patterns shows up. So if we flipped HTTHHHT, you would win, because the pattern "HHT" appears at the end of the sequence. Seems fair, right? Well, it turns out that, no matter what your opponent chooses, you can always choose a sequence that's more likely to occur. In fact, your odds of winning *at worst* are 2-to-1. You choose the winner by choosing the opposite of the second position of your opponent's sequence, then tacking it in front of the sequence and ignoring the third position. So if your opponent chooses "THT", you choose "TTH".

Here's a good article about the game (PDF), And it's Puzzle 13 on this page.

According to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, a Boston family victimized by FBI-protected mobsters have no recourse to sue the government, because they waited until their lives were no longer in danger before filing the lawsuit.

The case involves a long-term collaboration between the FBI and the Winter Hill Gang, violent mobsters who helped the Bureau take down the competing Italian mafia in exchange for carte blanche to run South Boston's rackets without fear of prosecution. Gang leaders included Stephen "the Rifleman" Flemmi, who started working with the feds in 1965.

P. Kerim Friedman has more to add on the topic at his blog, Keywords.
Link (Previous coverage of betelnut girls on Boing Boing here, here, and here)

Senior Constable Brent Gray approached the driver's window, spotted a foot up on the dashboard and noticed the seat was reclined.

Mr Gray told colleagues he thought the man had an "attitude". But then he noticed his armless torso...

(Senior Sergeant Deidre Lack) had nothing against people with disabilities who drove motor vehicles, but had absolutely no sympathy for this speeding driver.

"Obviously driving at a speed like that, arms or not, you're just waiting for an accident. You're asking for an accident at 120km/h, whether you've got arms or not. Look at the risk he was posing."

On Metroblogging Mumbai, contributor Saakshi Juneja posts a fascinating first-person account (with photos) about a worker's strike in that city:

On Friday the 10th of February, the store all of a sudden decided to fasten its doors to the world. For over a month, 40-permanent workers have been squatting outside the estranged shop. Unable to get over the untimely death of their second home; where they have spent over 30 years of their lives. Struggling day in and day out, to obtain some kind of justice.

(...) Driving over in my A/C car I casually thought over a few questions to ask, but at that point didn't realize the gravity of the situation. I wasn't even sure, if I wanted to write a post on this.

As soon as I parked my car, workers assuming I have come to shop, yelled "dukhan bandh ho gaya hai, do mahena ho gaya." I got down and into the premises, as usual had to explain my self and my purpose. To which, for obvious reasons I had umpteen volunteers, ready to open their hearts out....and so here it goes.

The story's slant is a bit off.

We aren't complaining that "TSA security [is] lax", as in your headline. Nor are we saying that "TSA agents frequently fail to enforce the agency's rule that travelers must present government-issued ID". It's the opposite, actually.

Last Thursday, Communications Minister Helen Coonan reversed her opposition to a proposal to filter the internet of obscene and violent content. Liberal backbenchers, led by Tasmanian senator Guy Barnett, who find existing internet filters unsatisfactory, argue that a mandatory national filter is the only way to protect children. It's a noble idea, but there's a problem - it won't work.

Those ideas Philip references in his designs come from the real-life Imaginary Foundation, a clandestine, eccentric assembly of academicians and philosophers begun in 1973 and led by a septuagenarian with doctorates in physics and philosophy who holds 25 worldwide patents and whose father conceived the Dada movement. While Dadaists embraced nihilism, Surrealists, though inspired in part by Dadaism, valued the ordinary and embraced Freud's theories about the strength of the unconscious. It's the latter that drives Imaginary Foundation's function. "They believe everything around us in culture and what we see [is] essentially one idea... so the power of the idea and imagination is the power behind all of culture," explains Philip. "There's an incredible potential for creating beauty and harmony with our own minds."

My name is Gilles Tréhin, I was born in 1972, I live in Cagnes sur Mer, near Nice, in south-east of France.

I have been drawing since the age of 5. I have always been fascinated by big cities and aeroplanes.

Since 1984, I started to be interested by the conception of an imaginary city. I called it Urville, the name comes from "Dumont d'Urville", which is a scientific base, in a French territory of the Antarctic.

Since then, I am doing some drawings on this city and I am actually writing a book with an historical, geographic, cultural and economic description of Urville.

In the book I have writen, "Urville's Guided tour", it wasn't possible for the moment to put all the major quarters of Urville because the whole of Urville is still not completely drawn.

All the drawings, more than 250, come from the 5 main very large general views of the different sectors of the city. There is an example of a large view at the beginning of this text. Each of the smaller views show details of the streets, squares and various monuments of Urville. For each of them I have written a text giving more information about the history of the place.

I hope that the book will be published very soon.

Update: Benjamin sez, "The front page of Rzeczpospolita, Poland's paper of record, is reporting Lem's death on the front page. The article doesn't specify cause of death, only that he'd been in hospital for several weeks.

1703 Gulliver discovers Brobdingnag (Gulliver's Travels)
1704 October 10: Bouvet Island, Antarctica - Predators arrive for their feasting ritual on xenomorphs and humans (Alien vs Predator)
1711 Gulliver marooned with the Houyhnhnms (Gulliver's Travels)
1712 Kildare, Ireland - Connor MacLeod and Duncan rescue a stagecoach from bandits, and Duncan meets Kate (Highlander: Endgame)
1715 Rob Roy escapes the defeat of the clans (Rob Roy The Highland Rogue)
A Predator gains a pistol while hunting in the Raonoke colony (Predator 2)
Ireland - Duncan kills Kate MacLeod (Highlander: Endgame)
1720 Pirate Jack Sparrow frees a governor's daughter in the hope of regaining the Black Pearl (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl)

Click fraud is currently the subject of some high-profile lawsuits involving search engines. In an Arkansas class action suit involving multiple search biz defendants, Google recently offered to settle to the tune of 90 million dollars. Yahoo and others haven't said whether or how much they'll pay in that case. Another suit filed against Google in a federal court in California is up for class action consideration mid-May.

For today's story, I spoke with Google's Trust and Safety product manager Shuman Ghosemajunder; Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch; Tom McGovern of Snap.com; and Jessie Stricchiola, who's serving as an expert consultant in the Arkansas class action suit.

Link to archived audio for "Web Ad Buyers Fight Back Against Click Fraud." Here are the NPR "Xeni Tech" archives.

Charles Mann did a comprehensive piece on click fraud for a recent issue of Wired Magazine here: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet. And BusinessWeek's Burt Helm did a story last month that's well worth a read, too: Click Fraud Gets Smarter.

I’m sat in the Guardian Changing Media Summit, at the Victoria Park Plaza hotel in London, and the wifi is priced as above. Staying in the hotel, it’s £15 for 24 hours. But if you’re down here in the conference room, it’s £10 for 30 minutes. That’s £480 for 24 hours. I believe that’s the hotel equivalent of “Hi! Fuck you!”

Update: Looks like Ben's blog is temporarily down; I'm sure it'll come online again soon, though.

Update 2: It's back up!

Kimpton Hotels: Kimpton once again tops the list as the undisputed hotel WiFi kings. The brand improved their now legendary free WiFi service in the last couple of years, by extending their fast, reliable WiFi network to your upstairs room, at many hotels. Yup, at most Kimpton hotels you *can* actually sack out with your computer on the bed wireless and happy. This scenario is oft-advertised by other hotel chains, but hardly ever a reality. Kimpton doesn't count on their lobby WiFi network to reach the top floors of their buildings, instead, at the hotels we visited, Kimpton actually had two separate WiFi networks--one for the lobby and the other for the guest rooms. Both networks are easily accessible by clicking on a standard terms and conditions. Furthermore, during our Kimpton visits, friendly staffers went out of their way to ask us if we were getting a good reliable WiFi signal in both the lobby and our room, and guess what? We were. Kimpton Hotels tend to appeal to business travelers, hip leisure travelers, and globe-trotting bloggers.

The hitch is that the Microsoft Exchange server that we all use in Australia for my company is located in Kuala Lumpur, who I'm guessing didn't know about this deviation from standard DST. As a result, our Outlook calendars are showing that Adelaide are out of DST when they aren't.

The upshot of this is that some of the meetings in my calendar are actually an hour earlier than they appear to be. But only the ones that were booked by folks in Adelaide, and only for this week. As a result some people are putting the time of the meeting in the subject line (note the Tuesday 11am meeting below marked as "10am Perth time").

This program is a rudimentary teledildonics application built around the finger daemon - hence bringing generations of CS undergrad innuendo full circle.

It has two modes in addition to what you're seeing now - if you finger [any string]@[this host], a series of random pulses will be generated, proportional to the length of the string.

Alternatively, fingering 0x[hex digits]@[this host] will instead send a direct stream of motor speeds to the vibrator, one per second.

$54.33 mesothelioma lawyers
$47.79 what is mesothelioma
$47.72 peritoneal mesothelioma
$47.25 consolidate loans
$47.16 refinancing mortgage
$45.55 tax attorney
$41.22 mesothelioma
$38.86 car accident lawyer
$38.68 ameriquest mortgage

In comparison, the hardware type is more complicated, more expensive and more stable. They often look like portable USB storage with a flash memory chip and electronic circuits inside. It can grab video signals transmitted between the PC and the monitor, and analyze the signals to make a judgment.

For example, when a player gets beaten by a monster and loses his health, the game shows that he is in a critical condition by showing a bar gauge on the monitor. When the reading goes down by a certain point, the auto-mouse notices it, and moves the character out of the danger zone. Then it makes the character regain his strength by drinking a magic potion or using a magic spell, before sending it to another battle.

It is practically impossible for outsiders to tell whether a human or a computer program is playing a game character. Also, it is not against Korean law to use a macro of an auto-mouse, as they do no damage to the game’s main server.

In trademark law, the more unusual a term, the more it qualifies for protection. We would have no quarrel with Marvel and DC had they called their superheroes "actosapiens," then trademarked that. But purely generic terms aren't entitled to protection, at least in theory. The reason is simple: Trademarks restrict speech, and to put widely used terms under private control is an assault on our language.

Once a trademark is granted, it remains in effect until someone proves to the feds that the term has lost its association with a specific brand, as happened with "cellophane" and "linoleum." That's why Johnson & Johnson sells "Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages," not simply Band-Aids(TM).

This interview footage first aired live on KERA that year, and hasn't been seen by the public since. It was discovered on an old reel that had been saved by an engineer, and as you can see, it cuts off after about 14 minutes... the engineer taped over the rest. It's a look at the group being candidly questioned by fans at the peak of their fame and creative powers.

...[O]ne person at one point asks why there are ballots of candidate A stacked on top of the ballots of candidate B? Another person then yells at the others to get away from the tables. And that they should stop asking questions!

Update: Stewart sez, "Be aware that the eastern seaboard of Australia (Melbourne, Sydney, etc) NORMALLY end DST today, but this year it's delayed one week because of the Commonwealth games. Some folks may get caught out by that."