Joe Paterno, not getting it. —

"The kids that were victims or whatever they want to say, I think we all ought to say a prayer for them."—Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno, on the child sex abuse scandal in which he is looking more and more like a knowing enabler for a child rapist. His former colleague Jerry Sandusky is charged with 40 sex crimes against boys, from 1994 to 2005. Paterno has not been charged with any crime. But he's out. (via Joel Johnson) — Xeni •

Scott Lynch was kind enough to place this photo of Ben "Ben and Jerry's" Cohen scooping up free ice-cream for the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the Boing Boing Flickr pool.

Occupy Wall Street: Day 52, Zuccotti Park, Ben and Jerry's, scooped by the real, actual Ben

From the annals of history, this ad for Western Electric's picture phone, which wouldn't catch on for decades more -- probably needed more Chatroulette.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea: The Picture Phone

[Video Link] Todd Bieber (the fellow who made that video about the snapping turtle that tries to bite a guy that looks like Will Ferrel) says, "I planted this illegal vegetable garden in Brooklyn and documented the experience."

[Video Link] Grand Theft Auto V is likely to come out in late 2012.

Several years ago, I wrote a MAKE: article about Greg Leyh, a brilliant, understated high-voltage engineer/artist in San Francisco who builds the world's largest Tesla coils. For as long as I've known Greg, his dream has been to create a massive lightning laboratory with two 10-story Tesla Coil towers to study high-power scientific phenomena. Indeed, Greg's operation is called Lightning On Demand. With the only barrier being money, Greg has now come up with a "highly cost-optimized version" of the Lightning Laboratory. With this new design, Greg only needs $348,000 to make it happen. And he's launched a Kickstarter project to seek funding to build this magnificent DIY scientific instrument. Greg says:

Rather than being a purpose-built, conservatively designed machine, the new approach is literally designed around used materials, scrap and salvaged equipment. There’s a lot of great obtainium out there these days!

This new design should still be able to produce the conditions needed to trigger a relativistic avalanche as per Gurevich and Zybin’s calculations [200kV/m, 50m characteristic avalanche length.] Ultimately I hope to trigger a super-long discharge event and discover if there’s any connection with Gurevich’s relativistic runaway breakdown theory, or at least get some gamma-ray precursors.

"The Lightning Foundry" (Kickstarter)

"Power Tripping" (MAKE: Volume 11)

Wired.com has a new photo policy: "Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) license and making them available in high-res format on a newly launched public Flickr stream." They've commemorated the event by releasing 50 of their archival images under the same terms, including this fab Jim Merithew shot from The Toy and Action Figure Museum. Bravo!

Wired.com Goes Creative Commons: 50 Great Images That Are Now Yours

Black Sabbath [discography at Amazon] is expected to announce a reunion tour on November 11, 2011.

The announcement will be made at the Whisky A Go Go in LA where they performed for the first time in LA, 41 years ago. The video above is from a Sabbath show in Paris that same year.

You know how old rock-n-roll reunion tours tend to go. But if they bring back 1971-era Ozzy and 1971-era LSD, I'm totally there.

(thanks, Souris!)

"We The People" is a White House initiative where the US government will respond to any petition that can land 25,000 signatures (a recently increased threshold) in a month. Today, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy's Phil Larson responded to petitions for the President to "Immediately disclose the government's knowledge of and communications with extraterrestrial beings" and "formally acknowledge and extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race - Disclosure." Guess what -- the White House says there's nothing to disclose. Sure there isn't. Phil must not read the Weekly World News or he'd know The Truth. From the White House:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye.

However, that doesn't mean the subject of life outside our planet isn't being discussed or explored. In fact, there are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth.

"Searching for ET, But No Evidence Yet"

This week, San Francisco municipal election posters have sprouted Occupy-chic "corrections."

Political Posters Defiled Day Before Election Day (via JWZ)

(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail from a photo by John Johnson)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more on the deadly Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the most extreme, anti-Internet, anti-privacy, anti-free speech copyright proposal in US legislative history. Today, EFF responds to claims from the Chamber of Commerce that SOPA isn't a blacklist because the law doesn't actually contain the word "blacklist":

First, the new law would allow the Attorney General to cut off sites from the Internet, essentially “blacklisting” companies from doing business on the web. Under section 102, the Attorney General can seek a court order that would force search engines, DNS providers, servers, payment processors, and advertisers to stop doing business with allegedly infringing websites.

Second, the bill encourages private corporations to create a literal target list—a process that is ripe for abuse. Under Section 103 (cleverly entitled the “market based” approach), IP rightsholders can take action by themselves, by sending notices directly to payment processors—like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal—demanding that they cut off all payments to the website. Once notice is delivered to the payment processor, that processor has only five days to act.1 The payment processor, and not the rightsholder, is then responsible for notifying the targeted website. So by the time Visa or Mastercard—who will no doubt be receiving many of these notices—processes the notice, informs the website, and the website decides whether to file a counter notice, the five days will almost certainly have elapsed. The website will then be left without a revenue source even if it did nothing wrong.

Third, section 104 of SOPA also allows payment processors to cut websites off voluntarily—even if they haven’t received a notice. Visa and Mastercard cannot be held accountable if they cease processing payments to any site, as long as they have a “reasonable belief” that the website is engaged in copyright violations of any kind. Hmm, wonder how long it will take big media to publicly post a list of allegedly infringing sites, and start pressuring payment processors to cut them off? As long the payment processors are willing to comply, the rightsholders can essentially censor anyone they see fit. Even well-meaning payment processors might do this to avoid liability down the road.

The Stop Online Piracy Act: A Blacklist by Any Other Name Is Still a Blacklist