@AGENT_86: It starts on the mark of minute 13.

I liked this one today:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gammablablog/516149765/

It's a note outside a public school asking the "politically-inspired" graffiti writer to contribute to the repainting of the wall.

I hate it when that happens to me...

@47: and one drawn by Kyle Baker at that.

Yay, congratulations to proud dad and mum, and welcome to peacefullyy sleeping baby girl!

Awesome as the promise of such a piece of equipment may be, I can't help but be reminded of Idiocracy.

I am surprised that nobody so far has mentioned the similarity between UX/Unthergunther and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom's adhocracies.

Now, where is my local chapter, and how do I join in?

Cory,

Droid Sans is not under an Apache license.

At first I thought so too, and I was so happy about this new free font that I emailed a couple of mailing lists about it before checking. People answered they could not find the license anywhere. So I have had to do some digging.

I have downloaded Android, and while the license says that in the future "Google intends to release most of the components under the Apache v2.0 open source license", it's not clear which components that will cover, and whether the fonts are covered.

The downloaded .zip with the droid font has no license file either, but rummaging inside the font itself with Fontforge (thank you, George Williams!) I have unearthed the following:

> License URL: http://ascendercorp.com/eula10.html
>
> License: This font software is the valuable property of Ascender Corporation and/or its suppliers and its use by you is covered under the terms of a license agreement. This font software is licensed to you by Ascender Corporation for your personal or business use on up to five personal computers. You may not use this font software on more than five personal computers unless you have obtained a license from Ascender to do so. Except as specifically permitted by the license, you may not copy this font software.
>
> If you have any questions, please review the license agreement you received with this font software, and/or contact Ascender Corporation.
>
> Contact Information:
> Ascender Corporation
> Web http://www.ascendercorp.com/

Sadly, it looks that Droid Sans is not Free after all, and anyone wanting to use a free-as-in-speech font of these characteristics has to pick between DejaVu (Bitstream Vera license, has italics, bold and almost every character under the Unicode sun) and Inconsolata (definitive version will be under SIL's Open Font License, prints pretty but is not so screen-pretty at small sizes, so far has no cursive or bold).

Unless, of course, Google decides to buy the copyright from Ascender Corp., and publish the font under a free license. That might still happen, but so far it hasn't.

Javier

I saw the ad on TV with my girlfriend, who is a researcher and also teaches Quantum Physics at university, and we looked at each other in complete incredulity. The ad just doesn't work, and not because models can't be smart, or read Physics textbooks for fun, but because the writing is incompetent. That exchange is completely stilted in any setting, be it a fashion show, a Physics faculty or our bathroom (I have been known to accost her with asinine questions about QM).

Now, have the models be at the makeup station, sipping a diet drink, in their dressing gowns, with their hair up, and have one of them lift her head from a book and make the question... and the other one retort with a "duh" look (barely taking her eyes from her Nintendo DS)... and it may work, if you rewrite the lines a bit and change the ending. The first one wouldn't say "that's interesting" but rather sheepishly repeats the "duh" to herself, or say "of course it is" before plunging back into the book. How to reveal that they are models is up to the director (maybe the makeup guy coming to interrupt them and a wide shot making clear that this is the backstage to a fashion show).

Scott Aaronson is usually great, but I think he is overreacting a bit. The only reason to raise a stink is not that the two lines were plagiarised (fair use, man), but that the execution is so shoddy as to make the lines (which are great) trite and soulless, and his work is associated to mediocrity.

The tooltip is priceless.

Oops. My ISP's proxy did me in. Sucks to be me.

I am the author of this pinball. I am sure I commented here yesterday, and I would like to know what I did wrong that prompted the deletion of my comments. You can communicate with me via the email in my registration. Thank you.

ASX: Cool, I didn't know those existed. I am sure they are spiffier than ours: Visual Pinball is a very good pinball simulator. Emilia, which is the one we used, is GPL (thus modifiable by all and sundry), but rather more limited.

Thanks about the writeup, and for getting right the 'social commentary' angle. Gizmodo just picked up the link, and they wrote it is a game to "teach kids stuff": not so, it is a game to talk to grown-ups about their response to children's interaction with videogames and the Internet.

More at this one-question interview with friend and indefatible Debian contributor Miriam Ruiz: http://www.miriamruiz.es/weblog/?p=92

The pinball is a homebrew in the sense that it's a custom one-off, but it has been produced industrially: the CNC machine the wooden panels for the cabinet were cut on is bigger than some of the apartments I have lived in.

In fact I am now looking to borrow time on a CNC machine so I can learn about how they work while building myself a smaller version of the cabinet. I want to design a couple more pinball tables to play on it.

So if you know anyone who can give a starving artist/student free access to a CNC machine in Melbourne (Australia), please give me a shout!