One might be tempted to ask: Can God make a signboard so big that even He can't illuminate it? Spotted in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, otherwise known as the Center of the Universe.

I am the photographer, and I approve this use of my image.

A jury in Minneapolis decided that Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who has been battling the RIAA for four years, must pay Capitol Records $1.5 million: that's $62,500 for each of 24 songs she downloaded and shared in 2006. Hollywood Reporter, CNET. — Read the rest

The Birth of Smurfette, based on Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by BB reader xomiele (blog) of Phoenix, Arizona.

I expect more than one cable news channel to devote mega time over the next 24 hours to "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure," a Kindle download which purports to be a HOWTO guidebook for "pedosexuals."

Oh, there you go, just as I'm composing this, Anderson Cooper tweets that Dr. — Read the rest

Imagine yourself in the driver's seat of this post-apocalyptic, semi-armored, customized hot dog vending vehicle.

im selling a hot dog car well u can do watever u want on it it has a grill so u can cook wat u want not only hot dog and well is good for business
it has the grill to cook nd storage it is place on a cushman car to transport it anywere u like really good car good on busines but need to sell cuz need money asap

hot dog and cook anything car 1979 – $2300 (Thanks, Katie!)

Craigslist ad: XBOX 360 WITH WIFI WITH 2 ANTENA 60GB 2 GAMES. One of these photos is not like the other. (thanks, Mikael Jorgensen!)

The New York Times' James Verini wrote up the misadventures of hacker Albert Gonzales, who was apparently giving up his black hat past to help the Secret Service snare other criminals.

He wasn't. Over the course of several years, during much of which he worked for the government, Gonzalez and his crew of hackers and other affiliates gained access to roughly 180 million payment-card accounts from the customer databases of some of the most well known corporations in America

His 20-year sentence is the longest handed to an American for computer crimes, according to the piece. — Read the rest

Aniomagic's Schemer is a small microcontroller that doesn't need a cable to program it. Instead, you write the simple code on a website, then hold the Schemer up to your computer's display. The code is converted to flashing lights on the display, which is read by the Schemer. — Read the rest

The MAKE Ultimate Workshop & Tool Guide 2011 has hit the stands. We are really proud of this special one-shot magazine. If you have a toolshop or would like to make one (even if you only have a kitchen table's worth of real estate) I think you'll find this guide very useful. — Read the rest

The swell hackers at Adafruit Industries have declared a winner in their cash-prize contest to reverse-engineer the Microsoft Kinekt controller and release a free/open library that would let hardware hackers incorporate it into their own projects. The winner is a fine gent named Hector, who says, "Here's my take on the Kinect driver. — Read the rest

See my review of Tonoharu Part One

Tonoharu is Lars Martinson's 3-volume graphic novel about a young American who gets a job as an English teaching assistant in a small Japanese town. It's a story of isolation, frustration, and mystery, with just the right amount of black humor to keep it from being depressing. — Read the rest

A high-school in Phoenix, Arizona is mounting a production of the theatrical adaptation of my novel Little Brother (this is the same script that was mounted for the 2008 performances in Chicago, written by Bill Massolia). They're doing a three-night run, starting tomorrow — tickets are still available.

Construction Begins on America's First Commercial Spaceship Factory — This is possibly the most amazing headline I have ever read. I don't even care about the nuance. I just want to throw up some devil hands and party with the Jetsons. — Read the rest

As requested by BB reader Arborman on the comment thread for "Math papers with complicated, humbling titles," here is a random baffling math paper title generator. Refresh the page for a new periodical.

Your browser does not support iframes. — Read the rest

Over a year ago, my friend Jerry Paffendorf showed up at a party with a picture of a ruler on his shirt and the words, "Iʼve got twelve inches in Detroit."

He explained his new project, Loveland, describing it as a series of micro-hoods
made of inches that he would sell for $1 each. — Read the rest

Here at Cool Tools we love things that really work. But what happens when a great tool ceases to function? Do you just throw it away and buy a new one? Given how expensive this can be it is often a better investment to find a company that stands behind their product for life. — Read the rest

I'm absolutely fascinated by Ransom Riggs' ongoing series at mental_floss called Talking Pictures—themed collections of found photographs that happen to have writing on them. They're sort of the multimedia equivalent of those 25-word or 100-word ultra-short fiction stories. Usually, there's just enough written here to make each image more powerful, and leave you wanting to know more. — Read the rest

Public Knowledge's Michael Weinberg has a new white paper: "It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology" — the title says it all, really.

Traditional patent infringement is not necessarily well suited to a world in which individuals are replicating patented items in their own homes for their own use.

Noah Shachtman of the Wired blog Danger Room tells Boing Boing,

The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in
Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate
rarely seen since the war's earliest days.

I first used this bottle scraper twenty years ago when boarding with a family in the Netherlands. At the time, Dutch pudding came in glass jars similar to traditional milk bottles and this spatula was the only way to get out the last drop. — Read the rest