Just amongst the traffic lights on my bike-to-work route I have observed all of the following:

A) a couple lights completely ignore the button (on one of these, the button is observably not connected)
B) one light only turns if you hit the button (or stop over the sensor with more metal than my bike)
C) one turns green at the same time, but does a shorter green with no walk light if you don't push
D) one light changes between behavior A & B based on time of day

So it's really up to whoever programs the lights for that intersection. But in a big city, or anywhere that the light is going to change in it's regular cycle for long enough for you to cross: it's a placebo.

Mr Phonebook:

I don't speak for "you people", but I would like to see government activities, conducted effectively and rationally. The amount of time and effort (i.e. my tax money) spent investigating ought to be appropriate to the actual suspiciousness of the activity in question. Taking pictures of something someone else doesn't find interesting is not suspicious enough to warrant the spending of any money at all. Not even if the photographer is brown.
If a terrorist attack happens, will I be mad that the authorities didn't do something? No. I'll be mad they wasted their time doing the obviously wrong thing.

What the mooninite guys did wasn't all that amazing in any case, it was the stupid reaction that was notable; but does anyone have an actual source that GRL in any way inspired the Mooninite guys?
Or is this just a further example of their claim to have invented the LED?

If it doesn't hurt someone else, what a sane person wishes to do with their own body is their own business, and ought to be legal.

Can anyone really disagree with that?!?

Science is neither good nor bad.

Science works, and I say that's good.
But this guy isn't against science. This guy is in favor of having sensible, general ideas about food that lead you to eat reasonably. Whether you boil it down the one sentence, or to 12 rules, these are principles you can realistically follow without being obsessive about it, and wind up eating fairly well. You'll even end up eating about how you would if you figured out how you ought to based on all the science. But if you obsess about the science, it's easy to focus on the last 100 details you heard about how to eat, and ignore the big picture.

Serve is full of people just colluding to give each other achievements. Not sure why that's fun for them, but it isn't for me.

I'm playing 4th edition under an NDA that prevents me saying anything specific about the rules, but I can and will say it's the most fun I've ever had playing D&D. As far as the game goes, it's great and I expect it will quickly take over the D&D world assuming they don't completely bork the licensing.

As far as the licensing: WotCs position is very difficult; in this age when traditional copyright models are becoming increasingly misfit to out technological state, they produce a tricky product copyright-wise (game rules and source material) that obviously benefits if it's easy for others to expand and build upon it, but they obviously want to keep control of the base so as to make money off it. Essentially a wildly inflated version of the same IP issues faced by other industries.
In the past, their attempts to navigate these tricky waters have involved a great deal of lurching madly about before settling on a more or less reasonable course. So I'm inclined to cut them a bit of slack, and not get too excited until we wait and see where things wind up.

#3: I take it you are reporting actual experience, from Japan? I wondered when I saw this, are bikes more standardized there, or does the robot handle more varied bikes than it looked like? Or are there just enough "standard" bikes to make it worthwhile?

My bike would probably fit dimension-wise, but alas: I have hacked up an obscure pre-deraileur gearing scheme which prevents it rolling backward.

@#2 - You could do this with any city, but it works particularly well with D.C. Most street plans follow a regular grid there growth was well planned, or a haphazard jumble otherwise. DC was entirely planned, but not with utility in mind. L'Enfant laid out all those avenues circles and squares specifically to make cool looking patterns, so it's unsurprising there are some.
It also means all the streets follow a regular grid with a consistent naming scheme, except for the big roads you use to get anywhere, so navigation is perversely still a PITA.

"'Sunspots don't cause global warming, people do'.
Really?
Is the preponderance of evidence in, and that's what it says?"

Yes, you have it exactly: The preponderance of the evidence is in, and that's what it says.

Hey! I had a Coleco Telstar!
If you want to understand why the 2600 was such a big deal, you need look no further than the Telstar, where you slid a 4 position switch to select which variety of Pong you wanted. Imagine the envy as my friend down the street demonstrated the dozens of (near identical, to be sure) game modes in his Atari fighter-plane game... And then he changed cartridges.

The moderation at BoingBoing has always struck me as excellent. Lively, sometimes contentious discussion happens without devolving into constant flame-fests. But long detailed policies seem pointless to me. Who's going to refer back to this in the heat of composing a flame? This reads as mostly Teresa giving in to an understandable need to vent a bit. I'd go with:

1. Don't be a jerk. It's the moderators job to decide if you are being a jerk. If you think she or the editors are being jerks, tell them about it somewhere else.
2. Nothing is as boring as being told how boring something is.

And yes, I realize I'm saying this post was too boring except for the part about not saying posts are too boring.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

I get most everywhere by typing stuff (even domain names) into a search box. And it's not because I'm a noob; I've been on the interweb since ever.
Certainly my memories of an ad are more likely to produce good search terms than an exact URL, and even with a url, I can drop the "http://www." and less typing, and I'm protected from most typos.
I don't see why this is regarded as something unsavvy or crazy users do. It's just better. Typing in the address bar is for people stuck in their old, inefficient ways.

Around the fork and disc rotor? Sounds like you could get it off with a hex wrench. Maybe I don't understand what they mean, since all the pictures on their site show it locked (more sensibly) to the frame.
As far as I can tell, any half-decent lock properly used is about equivalent. They'll all stop casual thieves, but can't stop dedicated ones who bring the right tools have time to work. A "better" lock doesn't impede the pro's much more, and if it's heavier probably isn't worth it.
Better improvements come from picking a better place to leave the bike, and a bike that's less attractive to thieves (which can still be a nice bike to ride, just not as valuable to sell)

My stereotyped impression of Rand fans was that they aggressively attack anyone who disagrees in the slightest and declare them a communist; also that they have unlimited free time to dedicate to droning on endlessly about the obvious superiority of their views.

Thanks all for dispelling that one!

Antinous: But what makes for a legitimate country anyway?

If you ask me (and you did), broad un-coerced consensus that the government is legitimate amongst those who live there. The various historical accidents that created the borders are irrelevant. And, yes, I realize by this standard an awful lot of countries in the world are illegitimate.

I certainly don't advocate carpet-bombing; but there's a big gulf between that and not criticizing the emirs because "It's their country".

There are some states with as little legitimacy as the UAE, but not many. The being able to be born, live your life, and die there entirely as a non-citizen "guest worker" really puts them over the top compared to your other, run-of-the-mill oppressive dictatorships.

@33 : It's their country? Whose? and says who? The majority of the UAEs residents are not considered citizens by their laws. Not even if you're born there, and live there your whole life. Of the small percentage even considered citizens, only a small percentage of them are royals, and have all the political power.
Hey, the sultan is throwing people in jail for long times for little reason, but who are we to care, it's his country. After all, he said so!

@#14 - I don't have an abandoned monorail track handy, so my own art bikes have different targets. Also, I'm more interested in building and riding them than documenting them, so it may be a while before they're ready for posting anywhere, sorry. You'll have to take my word for it that while they are of various unusual dimensions and drive-train configurations, they are also functional transportation. All of which is irrelevant to my ability to opine upon the art of others.

By my sense of vehicular aesthetics, the judgment is clear: Anything with pedals should travel faster when you use them than when you walk behind it and push. This will not.

I figure this product is intended entirely as a way to force the TSA to either admit the liquids ban is pointless, or require removal of bras at the checkpoint. So as long as we're offending everyone, I'll note it sounds like win either way.

@John Weeks: 19th century, but they would have had a 60 inch wheel. That looks to be about 12 inches.

By my calculations, a good cyclist adept at high-cadence spinning should be able to achieve a cruising speed of not quite 4 miles per hour! Though with all those big balloon tires, probably only half that.

Yes, I know it's art, because the guy goes on about the the duality of the vehicle as object and conception, blah, blah, blah. I know I'm unfairly judging him by criteria he probably never aspired to, but as a cycle geek, riding that thing sounds unutterably tedious.

"ZERO emission solutions like hydrogen or solar."

"Solar" is never going to power a significant fraction of our energy needs. "Hydrogen" is not a power source at all.
Hybrids only make a little difference, but they make a real difference today, as opposed to a theoretical one in the future, so they get the thumbs up from me.
Of course, it makes a much bigger difference to go entirely car-free, and just ride a bike. But not everyone has the imagination for that :)

#19 : "We, the end users, are Google's customers."

Give me a break. Customers pay. I don't know about you, but I don't pay Google. Google isn't a new different business model than newspapers. It's exactly the same business model, done better. Just like newspapers, they make money selling ads that are displayed next to the content we actually want. They've brilliantly offloaded the risky content-creation side of the business. Individual content sources can die, and Google keeps making money selling ads on the ones that live.
It's great for them, and arguably for good for content producers (e.g. reporters) and consumers (us) as producers can take what risks they like without the business side of a newspaper caring so much if they, as individuals entities, live or die.
I mean, feel free to love the fine works of Google (I do). They've got a nice big-picture view whereby they don't sacrifice their longterm asset (our eyeballs) for short term gains. But their revenue comes from advertisers; and it is advertisers they must keep happy. Keeping us happy is merely a necessary prerequisite, not the goal.

Based on my (peripheral) involvement with the newspaper business, this guy is dead on. Newspapers make money by selling ads, not papers. Any discussion of how much to charge for the paper is about convincing advertisers that people actually read it. It's an unsustainable business model because newspaper ads were never very effective compared to TV ads, bilboards, etc. They're just too easily ignorable.
Now people have the analysis tools to figure out newspaper ads aren't worth it, and the web gives readers and low-end advertisers other options.

Frankly, looking at the state of technology today, why would anyone imagine daily newspapers could be a viable medium? When was the last time you decided to buy something based on a newspaper ad? Heck, it's got to have been years since I even saw a newspaper ad.

It may not be "just" that the internet exists, but that's plenty sufficient. Print is dying as a medium for daily news. This strikes me as unsurprising, and not even necessarily sad.

@#4: "You won't blind oncoming traffic if it's aimed correctly. Do cars and motorcycles blind you?"

Yes, but being blinded by fellow cyclists is more common; they are more likely to be more directly oncoming. So I do worry about my own light blinding other cyclists, whose eyes, like mine, have adjusted to bike-light level illumination. Blinding motorists whose eyes are adapted to headlight illumination is not a concern, though being seen by them at all is, particularly from the side, where the headlight isn't much use.

This glow-in-the-dark paint strikes me as a gimick, and probably not bright enough to matter, but I've often wondered why reflective paint on bike frames isn't typical.

Fluxx is insanely fun. There is definitely strategy, in that there are a variety of tactics that will significantly increase your chances of winning. But no, they won't guarantee it. Someone might just get lucky and draw a winning hand.
If you're looking for hard-core, competitive gaming requiring intense concentration, play something else.
Fluxx is great because you can have a game between a focussed adult, an 8 year old, and an adult who isn't really paying full attention, and they can all have fun.

@half this thread:
It is the wiretapping that is unconstitutional. Nobody (in this boing boing post) is claiming the Bill is unconstitutional.

The problem with the Bill is not that it is unconstitutional, but rather that it is a stupid, short-sighted affront to the rule of law and the rights of the individual pursued for crass political ends.

Please desist telling people why the Congress is allowed to pass this law, and get on the phone to tell your senator why they shouldn't.

There are several variables at play (composition & shape of ball, type of flammable liquid and how much) Get them right and you don't get burned; Get them wrong, get burned.
Fire-eating circus performers extinguish flames in their mouth without serious damage. That random surfers doing something they saw on the interweb got burned does not surprise me.

The only thing my laptop does is run remote desktop to act as a portable screen and keyboard for a more capable box somewhere across the network. At the frequency I use it, it's not worth spending big $ for a nice laptop whose performance I'd never use, so I've always had something ancient and heavy. And that means I've only got it with me when I really know for sure I'll want it.

I'm loving my Eee. A bigger screen would be nice, as would a less dopey name, but the always-in-my-backpack form factor rocks.

I imagine sub-notebooks becoming ever more dominant as my usage pattern becomes more common, which depends largely on network connectivity becoming more pervasive. Though currently, I can usually find a wifi connection about as easily as a place to sit down.

@#3: Rowlings change in feelings about this now that it's being sold are perfectly understandable. But her legal rights to this work are unchanged: she doesn't appear to have any.
Copyright protects her words from being copied, not her ideas. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books, and thus created the Harry Potter universe. The law gives her limited ownership of only the former. To whatever extent the Lexicon copies her words, she may (or may not) have a case.
They can describe her world with their words all they want, and all she can do is cry about it. (Of course, all she ought to do is cheer about it)

"plus, '2.75 lbs'? Wouldn't that MORE than make up for any aerodynamic dysfunction?"

For a road bike: No. Aerodynamics are a much bigger deal than weight, and the lightest frames are under that anyway.

For a mountain bike, weight is a big deal, but the frame isn't responsible for all that much of it, so the savings is marginal. Also, how much will it weigh with all those holes full of mud?

Finally, bump one rock a little hard and your frame is garbage. There's a reason they don't make mountain bikes out of Carbon Fiber, even the regular complete-tube way. The failure mode is utterly inappropriate; it fractures where metal dents.

The No-Fly list consists of people who can't be allowed to fly, can't be arrested, and can be allowed to know they're under suspicion. Under what circumstances would it ever make sense to someone on such a list?

I quit smoking a while ago, but the only lasting good thing I got out of it is an ability to tolerate cold. I lived in various no-smoking-indoors environments and I was always too lazy to put on a jacket (or frequently shoes). To this day I don't mind being very cold as long as I know I'll be warm again in a few minutes.

@ALEX: Chargers generally draw power even when they are not charging anything. Not as much as when they are, but a non-trivial amount. Touch one of your chargers that has been plugged in, but doing nothing for a while in a cool room; It will be slightly warm.
This is of course really stupid and easily avoidable. If the manufacturer would spend an extra penny or two they could save you dollars a year, and/or the hassle of unplugging wall warts all the time.

I work on demographic analysis software for a living, and while the names of their clusters are a bit over the top, that stuff is otherwise spot-on. So much so, it kind of freaked me out reading it: If the only part I know a lot about is completely true...

I'm happy to call this "Rube Goldbergian".

Look at the part count there for a job that ought to be pure software; a dirt simple script if the phones software were remotely open.

@WWEBOING:
- Your rush to defend yourself is revealing, as nobody generalized anything.
- I hear Christian groups condemn a lot of people and things. It does not particularly endear them to me.
- If you haven't heard Muslim groups condemn 9-11, it's because you weren't listening.

@#4 Nick D :
Just to pick on my own pedantic pet peeve, lay off the Puritans. They abstained from many things, but this notably included passing laws about how others should behave. Laws about alchohol, sodomy and gambling arrived much more recently.

Tim @34:
My coding is in C++, and I do strongly prefer a monospace font. Sometimes successive lines of code can be made clearer by making them line up vertically in nice ways. But I'll be the first to admit that's an only-occasionally edge case. Monospace for code is mostly just habit. What mystifies me is the people saying they need bold & italics for code; I've never seen that. For me, code is monospace, albeit in a rainbow of colors.

It is the museum that presents an exhibit whose rules ironically contradict its very content and thus the museum that looks idiotic, and the museum that we criticize.

Perhaps the museum could not present this show except by agreeing to the terms of rights holders who insist that the museum impose idiotic rules. That does seem probable, but it doesn't mean the rules aren't idiotic, or that the museum shouldn't be criticized. Regardless of the reason, the museum is doing something idiotic, so they're going to get called on it. Particularly when it is so amusingly idiotic.

"It's not my fault, I have to be an idiot to work with idiots" is a recurrent theme in copyright foolishness, and it's really annoying.

I've got to think this is being skewed by a lot of people who become skinny shortly before they die.

I know it's anecdotal, but I've known perhaps a dozen people over 90; every single one was skinny, and of those whose old photo albums I've perused, every one they always had been skinny.

Michael: Despite getting all the press, the Puritans were not "a lot" of even very early America. Furthermore, while we call them all "the Puritans", they weren't remotely one group, and were united chiefly by their desire that the state stay out of religion.
They certainly can't be blamed for current insane drug laws. Marijuana was made first made illegal in this country (in 1915) in Utah. So if you want to find pleasure-hating people using the law to push their religious agenda, it won't be hard. But it ain't the Puritans.

Natural selection could certainly select for altruism, because natural selection is non-intelligent.

Let us say there is some gene that makes an individual pre-disposed to act altruistically. When this comes into play, it will cause you to help someone near you, not someone far away from you, so there will be a bias towards helping those you are related to, who are more likely to carry the gene. Even though the gene just makes you help anyone, simple geography makes it favor your kin, so it gets selected for.

Even a gene that makes me want to help any living thing is going to favor my kin disproportionately.

I just spit coffee all over my keyboard.
I hope you're happy.

@BUTTERMAKER: Not doing business with Amazon is what Mayfair is proposing to do assuming Amazon won't change their pricing. Whether the tactic is legal is unclear.

It's worth noting that if Amazon sells a copy of Settlers for a deep discount, or a little guy sells it for full price, Mayfair gets the same money either way. Whatever their motivation here, it is not short-term greed.

Mayfair thinks their business would be in very bad shape without the local game stores, which do basically all the marketing and promotion in their industry. So they want to make sure it is possible to run a successful local game store selling their games.

Frankly, it strikes me as a somewhat bizarre idea that Mayfair can't decide who to do business with based on what price their games will sell for...

@MUPPET:
Of course they learn about fractional reserve lending, that's what a bank is. If you keep 100% of your deposits in reserve, you can't very well lend anything.

I am intrigued by the socio-linguistic implications of the phrase "filthy rich". Do you suppose street kids in India associate wealth with a lack of cleanliness?

That's not a band-saw. A band-saw is a power tool; the blade makes a continuous circular band that goes around and around really fast.

That is one of those big two-man saws used by lumberjacks of old; I don't know a specific name for it.

@PORK MUSKET:

1) Some of us don't rely on our transportation for that
2) Of course chain drive. Chain drive is dominant on every small vehicle there is: motorcycle, bicycle, electric scooters and skateboards; all use chain drive. What would you expect and/or why isn't chain drive great? (OK, I'd enclose it in this case, but then it wouldn't look as cool)

If you want to criticize these, they're not lacking in reasons to call them silly. Chiefly, as transportation, they compare unfavorably to unpowered inline speed skates. But really I think it misses the point to evaluate tham on any practical grounds, rather than their sheer geektacular awesomeness, which is considerable.

Dear Mister Krinkle -
I am not "TooShort" the rap musician
(note the different spelling), and your post is the first I've heard of him, so you'll just have to judge my opinions by what I say rather than your preconceived notions. Based on the lyrics you provide, and a bit of the clip on his myspace page, I think he sucks. But for gangsta rap, that was hardly surprising.
I am, like you, a card carrying atheist, which might explain my certainty regarding Gods lack of involvement in drawing the US border.
You are correct that I pay taxes in Colorado. I propose to let anyone else who can get a job here pay taxes here too. Well, actually, a lot of illegal immigrants do pay taxes here, they just can't get refunds or earned-income tax credits, so they pay more taxes than the rest of us.
In contrast to Sky, I don't feel much personal guilt for the less fortunate circumstances of other nations. I was lucky to be born in the US, and I'm OK with that. I'm also smart and hard working; I just don't need stupid protectionist BS trying to keep out the competition. I can handle it.
Our restrictive immigration policy is out of alignment with economic reality; as long as that's the case, people will violate it, and problems will ensue.
I find it depressing: Yet again people react with horror at the idea we might want to change a societal system that is causing all sorts of problematic side effects while failing spectacularly at its actual goals. Call me a liberal hippy all you want (I am, after all), but what's your suggestion? More restrictions and enforcement, since that's working so well so far?

I find interesting that (presumably) conservative comenters don't think Eyebeam should be allowed to spend their own money how they like, nor that private landowners should be able to erect what structures they like. Whatever you think of illegal immigrants, insisting other must not help them avoid dying of dehydration is pretty low.

My own opinions on imigration begin from the premise that God did not draw the US border. Whatever right I (born in Virginia) have to live in Colorado that someone born in Chihuahua does not, there is nothing fundamental or moral about it. Further, were our positions reversed, and I perceived a choice between feeding my family or crossing a line someone else said I shouldn't? I wouldn't hesitate.

Economics, politics, and the desert are conspiring to kill people. It would be nice if economics or politics would change. In the meantime, kudos to Ransick for suggesting we change the desert.

@Tubman: I do not have sources handy as I too have not looked the stuff up in several years. I'll further confess I've somewhat misstated the case. The take-away conclusion I derived the last time I looked into it was that gun ownership was a net safety negative.

Attempted burglaries while the house is occupied would presumably include burglars who fled upon simply learning the house was occupied. My interest would be in attempted home-invasion-murders only; which are not so common. On the other side of the equation I would include crimes of passion that would not have been lethal without a gun available, thought that is hard to estimate.

I have owned guns. There are good reasons to own guns that may well be worth the small, containable, safety risk owning guns present. But as far as I can tell, safety is not itself a reason to own a gun. The chance that you will ever be in a situation where a gun makes you safer is just incredibly remote. This assumes you live in the US, and aren't employed in the military, law enforcement, or some violent criminal enterprise.

"... most of these people have not inadvertently killed their children/spouses, and maybe, just *maybe*, have successfully defended their homes with them."

Most people do neither. However, if you look up the statistics, inadvertently killing the children/spouse is vastly more common than ever having an opportunity to defend your home.

I support the right to bear arms, but as way to make yourself safer, gun ownership is a very bad idea.

The "zero bike" cannot be built with current technology. Further, it retains the riding position of current racing bikes while violating the very regulations that are the only reason current racing bikes retain that racing position. It's a nice drawing; but not a gadget at all.

The other bike on their list is sweet minimalist glory (minus some reservations about breakless fixes with platform pedals; that's easily correctable), but it's not exactly their design; everybody and their brother is riding bikes like that now. I hesitate to ask the price for their "hand built" version of the same thing I converted a dumpster bike to for 50 bucks.

#15: "There is nothing, NOTHING like waking up to find a dead bat lying face down, wings spread, in between you and the loo."

I have woken up to find a live bat treading water *in* the loo!

At the rustic summer place where this occurred, bats flying around bedrooms is a not infrequent occurrence, and they are generally dealt with with tennis rackets. Surprisingly, this does not appear to do permanent damage; the bat falls to the ground, but is apparently just stunned. You want to scoop it out the door quickly, as it will be up and flying again shortly.

The reel on such a mower is driven by its wheels; as long as you propel it forward, that's no problem.

However, given a bicycle with two front wheels and a non-vertical head-tube, turning will be impossible.

@Abdiel:
Be wary of the items labeled "For Novelty Use Only". They are not specifically so labeled to get around this law for sale in Alabama. They are labeled that way to get around federal regulations that would otherwise require that they not be toxic, or not be otherwise unsafe. Consult the the blog of the esteemed Violet Blue for a thorough discussion of this issue and recommendations of reputable online dealers.

@Chris Tucker:

Actually, it's the Harvard/MIT Coop.

But as to your larger point, I believe reading lists for MIT courses are all available online in the first place, and have been for a decade.

@CordableTuna: "If you buy an MP3, how do you prove you've bought it?"

Why would I want to?

@33 - "It's unreasonable to expect everyone else to see homebrew electronics on someone's shirt and deduce immediately at a glance that it's a novelty device or 'art'."

Having now seen the "device", any security person who cannot tell that is not a bomb at a glance, should be fired immediately.

There is absolutely no reason a bomb needs exposed wires and lights. Identifying bombs by looking for wires and lights is insane. A bomb needs space to carry the explosives: any piece of luggage should be more suspicious than anything stitched to your chest.

If the police should not ignore this, anyone carrying a briefcase should be shot on site.

It's entirely relevant that she spent $800. This makes it kind of unlikely she is trying to rip them off for $8 on a pair of flip flops. Accidents happen, as does shoplifting. Someone has to apply a little common sense to figure out which one is going on. This was obviously just a mistake.
It's really bizarre to see people defending detaining someone for an hour over a pair of flip-flops put back in the wrong box. If the store is going to react to something that harshly, they need a better system to prevent it's happening inadvertently (e.g. a price tag on the shoes).
Fixing your system by using fear of humiliation to train customers into paying more careful attention to what shoes go in what box, does not sound like the most effective method; and it may have some negative side effects for your business.