I'm reminded of some of my favorite episodes from the classic 1970s BBC adaptation of I, Claudius.

"Yes, I've become a god! Isn't that wonderful!"

"Why, yes, Jove!"

Ok, now this is kind of depressing. Realizing that the future actually could have looked like Syd Mead, but the future didn't sell and people just made fun of it.

Maybe the Aptera can still save us.

Good modernism = formalist process to achieve explicit goals

Bad modernism = explicit goals to achieve formalist process

If you're on a Mac, there's a fairly straightforward tutorial on how to set up an invisible account that can't be seen when logged in as your fake one.

http://www.macgeekery.com/gspot/2006-02/how_to_hide_a_user_account_in_mac_os_x

Pfft, I bet he even got his name off the bottom of a teacup.

Saying "radiation around Chernobyl and other nuclear plants" is kind of like saying "volcanic activity around Mt. St. Helens and other mountains."

I have somewhere between zero and two "true fans" and am perfectly content with that.

But I also have a full-time job.

@61 Scottfree:

Don't forget the part where the cows only reproduce at the replacement rate while the cow certificates are printed up at a rate suggesting a bovine population boom.

Takuan

While the US president's Lord-of-the-Flies approach to market oversight certainly put very few obstacles before greedy debt traders, you seem to be blaming the mayor for the crime wave. Or rather, blaming the voters who allowed the mayor to ascend to office only to preside over the crime wave.

Don't let the mayor off the hook, but let's not let him distract us from the actual robbers, eh?

A few times a month, I check the Pirate Bay hoping to find a torrent of my ultra-indie electronica album.

I'd start one myself, but it wouldn't be the same...

Look closely to the right and bottom of the monitor... There is some sort of thin metal shield there. A half-Faraday cage to protect picture quality from the leaky peripheral cables perhaps?

Whatever may exist beyond the limits of space we've explored... It can't be weirder than what is already beneath our oceans.

That little guy looks like he's ready to report your mumblings about Dust to the Magisterium.

On the subject of paying: Why can't the BBC just offer an international license subscription?

I know it's not exactly cheap but there may just be a market for it. Better than "either you don't watch it or you're a pirate," right?

Whether you're a writer, an engineer, a circus trapezist, or a TSA employee, the advice to try and save so you have a financial "buffer" is golden.

Also, a handy rule that has served me well: Necessary exceptions aside (things you really do need right now), don't buy anything for which you don't already have cash in the bank. Know exactly how much your credit card tab is when you use it, and don't tell yourself you'll have the money when the bill comes, even if you know you will. Want that new TV or Prada bag? Don't buy now and pay later. Save now and buy later.

Treat your credit card like a debit card, and you shall know what personal fiscal responsibility tastes like.

Wow, Phun reminds me of this addictive, awesome old Mac-based 2d physics sim that I used back in high school. I recall being disappointed that I couldn't get a copy for my own computer.

It's going to be a late night tonight!

Ok, this is way too much fun... I made one with an excerpt from the DMCA!

http://www.ns-ae.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/boingboingcss.html

While you could hand code something like this, the example is obviously using a script of some sort to generate the final HTML+CSS.

But, I checked the guy's blog, and he also has the script on his site to make your own, instantly!

http://metaatem.net/highlite/

"Finally, our awesome C6000 is assembled, installed, and online! Press print!"

"PC LOAD LETTER"

Pushing aside the whole "inconvenience big corporations and lose your livelyhood" mentality that seems to be pervading current content industry lobbying, here's another disconnect:

These legislators, for whom the internet is "oh, that thing that I use occasionally when I don't read the paper" don't seem to realize that for a lot of Brits, "cutting off" their internet connection is essentially putting them under house arrest. Everything they do is online, so cutting off their internet is a massive loss of liberty.

Indefinite house arrest on suspicion of depriving a rightsholder of £10.00. Welcome to the new serfdom, peon!

Guys, let's all just chill out and remember that for better or worse, Honda commissioned one of the most awesome ads of the decade:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB_1gPRCLCo

He should have just ordered a few annoyed-telephone-rep fetish DVDs.

If those don't exist yet, I'm sure some "A/V industry" studio in the outskirts of Tokyo started on a few screenplays after this story broke...

The coolest gadgets invariably use the internet. Their use could easily be greatly disrupted by AT&T doing strange things with the network.

Ergo, I don't think Joel's direction of conversation was off topic by so much as a degree even for an explicit "gadget" segment!

I'm with Coaxial on this: Most of the design on display is amateur in that it's either too vague, assumes too much background, or dilutes itself with other unrelated symbols, all without much regard for reproducibility or iconic simplicity.

At least Cory did what the competition holders should have done before any voting took place, paring down the competition. The first one Cory shows is the best of all of them (ok, of the first five pages I looked at) as it's the least visually noisy, though it's still somewhat vague.

All things considered, though, the best option here would have been to court student or professional designers, or even just hire a firm with a portfolio consisting of this sort of thing.

This ain't got nothin' on my Escalade with quad window-mounted plasma screens. Normally I run hip-hop videos on them for the passers-by, but when I drive by hotties in convertibles, I cue my specially-recorded greeting with digitally-added tooth sparkles.

Once I've got their attention, I throw together some special hip-hop video mixes in iMovie using the dash-mounted Quad Xeon Mac Pro. It takes some concentration to do that; usually I have to slow down to about 70 before I can devote much attention to the dash-mounted Cinema Display.

It works, though; I've gotten lucky 43 times so far with this method, though I've also gone through 8 Escalades.

I'm still trying to figure out where this international meme of "cameras are tools of terrorists" actually came from.

I mean, think about it... How will photos of anything help a terrorist? Do we have any stories of suicide bombers in Palestine descending with cameras and light meters upon the market they plan to attack; do Iraqi insurgents take an album of photos of the spot on the road where they have planned to place an IED?

Or do they just, you know, decide on a location they scouted out before and blow things up?

Will that photo of the Cinnabon really help a terrorist plot his deed any more than simply going there, looking around, and ordering a PecanBon?

I wonder if the note's author used a capitalist garbage computer to print the note?

Somehow, I will remember Netscape as my most opaque browsing experience. Internet Explorer, then Safari, then Firefox have all been, more or less, windows of different tints, while Netscape Navigator was not simply a mode of viewing the web; it was using Netscape Navigator to access the web

I think it was due to the presence of a splash screen.

http://farm.tucows.com/2004/11/netscape_navigator_2.0.png

Actually, it's amazing how small it looks on a modern LCD.

I really like Neuros' spirit here (I always like Neuros' spirit!), but I have to agree the logo could read and look better (speaking as one with a formal typographic education, in fact). That upside-down lock doesn't quite read well enough as a lock, and I agree with Jordan that the typeface looks kind of dated (1980s sci-fi movies).

I think "unlocked," while not ideal, is probably the best word in practicality, as "free" connotes an absence of compensation, and I can't really think of anything else that comes close in concept.

Hmm... in the spirit of open source community, I'd gladly volunteer a bit of time to try to improve this logo.

The first time I encountered the term, on a gaming message board circa 2001, it was described as "the sound the whistle on a tugboat makes." I've never thought of it as anything else.

With Netflix, you actively decide to connect with people for purposes of sharing movie recommendations within the Netflix environment.

Blockbuster + Facebook, on the other hand, involved no decision on the part of the user, no user intent or consent to share, and was far outside the Blockbuster environment.

If this happened in the US, we'd have a big debate over whether or not he did this due to his exposure to coffee-spitting fetish DVDs and whether or not coffee-spitting fetish DVDs should be more heavily regulated to prevent this from happening again.

That is, of course, if we had coffee-spitting fetish DVDs in the US.

Wow. So often, content dealing with African slums becomes mired in the usual "it sure does suck to live in a slum" saw, but I haven't seen such a vibrant, progressive, and downright interesting look at the culture and economy of these places as this video.

Time to watch more Current.

XOPL:

You raise an interesting question with the cat-in-a-blender-in-a game question. I laughed when I imagined it happening as a sort of "physics engine experiment" in a game, and yet, I would be just as disturbed by a feline version of the Pleo meeting a similar fate.

I suppose it's the reversibility of the action that makes it either wickedly humorous or disturbing even though both are controlled by AI. A game in which you could immediately reload before your cat and blender experiment has no consequence, and thus is funny, whereas killing the Pleo, even if it never was alive, certainly feels "dead" afterward.

I keep intending to read this (and now have even fewer excuses than before) but I keep hearing that I should read earlier Vinge first. Is the consensus A Fire Uopn the Deep?

If I could deliver an ultimatum to all purveyors of DRM-ed goods, it would be this:

If you want to use DRM to pretend that the data you are selling me is a physical product, then fine. As long as you let me re-sell this supposedly physical product.

I'm fine with the no-reselling clause on the DRM-free Amazon MP3 store, because they aren't pretending those bits are physical entities of which only one copy can exist. I can even deal with DRM on Netflix streaming, since no one was trying to convince me I was paying to "own" a copy of that content.

But when you try to sell me DRM-ed products at a "keeper" price and then tell me that your system of pretend physical property enforcement isn't even advanced enough to allow me to transfer the product to someone else -- I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways. I'll be sticking with analog.

I don't like the implications of this distinction the news outlets (and the rest of us) are making between Tasers and "real guns." Tasers *are* "real guns" that are less deadly and less bloody in use.

I really wish people would quit thinking of them as an electric version of a half-nelsonn

I've wondered what Takahashi has actually been up to lately -- the only interview with him I ever read made it sound like the original KD was the one and only time he agreed his creative vision would work in a video game. He's on record as not even being a fan of the Wii.

I hope he comes back to gaming some time!

It's just the Disney principle at work.

Build your work off the works of others, profit greatly, then restrict others' building off your own.

Is Ron Paul incorruptible?

Can a ship be unsinkable?

Certainly, to idealize any public figure is to set oneself up for disillusionment. But to accept that they do have faults, and despite that, decide that they still have a better voting record and a clearer and more consistent platform than their opponents: That may be a good idea.

If he was threatening to throw chairs at the cops,

maybe the cops should have picked up chairs to throw at him.

I think the watchlist is a brilliant idea.

I'm going to start making lists of my own on things that I've decided are vaguely dangerous enough to take random precautions with, yet not dangerous enough to actually learn why I've decided they're dangerous.

1. Refrigerator door. I've read of kids getting killed by these before somehow. I'm going to start opening mine carefully, with tongs just to be safe.

2. Bathtub. I read some statistic about these! I'm only going in with gloves and wrist guards from now on.

3. Toaster. Heard some horror story about a kid, not sure what he did but it was deadly! To keep safe here, I'm going to wear steel-toed boots and a helmet.

The assertion that we cower/cry/are aroused by fictional situations due to a deep-seated inability to discern fantasy from reality seems to be a shallow plumbing of what the mind actually does when exposed to these media.

Not that I claim any expertise in this area, but I can at least say from my own experience that the most moving things in film are such to me because I make the connection between them and their real-world counterparts. Isn't plausibility what
we crave in entertainment anyway?

I know, I know, Japan isn't actually full of robots, cute mascots, and cyborg hentai ninjas, and has plenty of normal people going to normal stores, schools, and post offices just like we do...

But I still maintain that when someone in Japan does something weird... It's still weirder than when someone in the US does something weird.

Somehow, I really don't think those flanges are intended as a stand. They're too tall and too thin; they look too unwieldy to hold the device steady given their length versus height.

The two axes involved with the "stand" part are what intrigue me most; there's obviously something of a large diameter that would run perpendicular to the flanges through the hole when they're folded flat, and yet they unfold along a parallel axis.

Very strange.

Honestly, I hate to see Defective By Design squandering its credibility like this.

The method of delivering the message is broken, it only encourages material waste and political noise, and the priorities exhibited by the choice of issue don't make sense.

We need to focus on DRM that's used on content we supposedly "buy to own," such as iTunes movies or XBox Live download-to-own movies. This is much more harmful to the consumer than DRM on rented media -- one could say there's really no such thing as renting in a DRMless world anyway.

DBD needs to take a break from all the breathless finger pointing of late and prioritize its campaigns.

Michael has it. I don't have the Atlas Shrugged passage handy (although my guess is a lot of us have seen it posted again and again in Slashdot comment sections) but it encapsulates the real problem with selectively-enforced laws: They give enforcers carte-blanche to enforce their own agendas.

Who cares if your participation in an anti-war rally was completely legal if you broke an obscure state law about hand-carried signs near state buildings? You're fined or in jail either way.

Dead laws need to be buried. Their corpses simply invite abuse.

I hate to say it, but I don't think we can have it both ways.

Let's back up a bit:

The problem with DRM is that it tries to enforce a physical-world ruleset of scarcity on infinitely replicable data. One purchase, one copy, pretending to be physical goods. Which sucks, because data should be much more flexible than physical goods.

So then we get rid of DRM, and we rid ourselves of artificial scarcity. But then we've lost the parallel to physical goods -- our personal copy can easily propagate among our own domestic hardware, and there's really no incentive to "rid" ourselves of the file's presence in our personal ecosystems if we sell it to someone else.

And so Amazon's lawyers put this dorky bit in restricting the doctrine of first sale. I don't like it either, but we've come so far recently from what was looking like it would be a future of hands-off filesystems and inaccessible encryption modules, I think this legal annoyance still easily beats what might have been.

"Sir, you'll need to step aside for a minute."

"What... Was there something wrong with my carry-on?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that right now, sir."

"What's the problem then?"

"You'll need to look over there until the eye-twitch analysis algorithms get about 10 seconds more footage of your face."

(another guard at a computer makes a signal)

"Sir, I'll need you to step into this room over here..."

I hate to further the off-topic problem myself, but one of the things that has greatly impressed me so far about the re-institution of BB comments has been the excellent signal-to-noise ratio compared to just about every other comment-able blog I visit.

While part of that is a smart community, part of it is also a solid moderatorship that trims the excess.

I think what is in order here is a solid, high-profile test of AT&T's new policy.

If some enterprising advocate out there can manage to actually apprise AT&T of her own criticism, and subsequently receive a termination of service notice from AT&T citing this offense, then we'll have a big story on our hands.

Maybe it could be a group effort. Boston AT&T party, anyone?

Of all the business ventures that have stepped up in a hope to compete with iTunes, I think this may be the one that actually gives Steve Jobs cause for concern.

The only reasons iTunes' closest competitor, eMusic, is such a distant second (as far as my market knowledge goes) is:

1. Barrier to entry in the form of committing to a subscription.

2. Subscription uses monthly credits that don't roll over.

3. Lackluster label support (and for some reason, even the indie catalog is never up to date).

It looks like Amazon's offering addresses each of these. Add the fact that almost no one who buys anything at all online even needs to sign up, and their position starts to look pretty good.

I'm excited. Very excited.

My guess is that we'll see this cracked within 7 days.

It's a quandary that has troubled me a lot as of late, though: It often seems as if Apple has the only digital consumer ecosystem on the market that "just works," and yet its ecosystem requires hacking to make it "just work" for anything other than precisely that for which it was intended.

To make matters worse, though, even in open alternatives, deliberate obfuscation is merely replaced with matter-of-fact density.

And so one way or another, everything ends up needing to be hacked. I guess hacking is just a fact of life.

Isn't that the legendary Gun of Baseball?

(More on BB about the GoB: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/13/weird-toy-gun-of-bas.html )

You know, if I were a baron of industry with the means to engage in these dark, labyrinthine conspiracies that weird folks suggest, I'd probably be tempted to give it a try.

After building the first underground base, though, I'd probably get kind of bored with it all and inevitably go back to my island retreat while the hoipolloi guessed about the lizard men inside.