#11 Yeah, Dave Firth and his crew are pure, warped genius.

#12: Indeed. Also, war is peace, and love is hate.

Hehe. Which reminds me: Live action tentacle rape punk porn. Equally (if not more) B-grade, way more x-rated (NSFW!!!)

And it's a really cool t-shirt. Maybe when I get to Canada, and no longer have to worry about the ridiculous cost of trans-Atlantic shipping, I'll get one.

Erm, I mean, I'm not educated in the arcane ways of feminism, but what could be more feminist than a slightly and subtly sexualised woman in working clothes with a jackhammer?

It's like the WWII "We can do it" propaganda.

Meh. Nearly fed the troll. (slaps hand)

#47, #50: Teresa, Poptart, thank-you both.

#49: Tak-kun, you may also appreciate Harold Strachan, a humble art teacher and columnist who has the perhaps dubious honour of having created the first bombs for the ANC military wing. He is a master of wit, and of what he calls "the concentration camp laugh". His account to the TRC of his experiences in an Apartheid-era prison is at once chilling and riotously funny. His columns are carried by the Witness (findable with a little searching) and Noseweek (pay site except for last month's issue).

Here's some commentary on the Iraq war and Dubya:

"So then, you will say, we should all as one nip it in the bud. Yes, but when and how does the disgusting thing start? Well you can start by stealing an election and feeding your purposefully dumbed-down electorate a lot of sanctimonious jingo blather about liberty and decency, and deceive them and lie and trick them into a merciless unlawful war against a sovereign state posing no threat to them, and take them beyond the point of no return. I’m talking about Hitler, of course."
-Harold Strachan, from "Pale Mothers", last month's Noseweek.

w00t! The last month or so, I've been looking for a way to repay you for the eBooks. This is a fantastic idea!

I just have to:

On the moon,ep 1,ep 2

"If you don't get yourself dubbed, Moon Hitler, I shall simply ignore you."

Well, from what I understand, the protests in Tibet haven't been entirely peaceful. Maybe when they turn more violent, they'll put the Dalai Lama on the terrorist list too.

The point is that declaring war on "terror" was a ridiculously ill-considered idea, at least in terms of making the world better/safer for U.S. citizens and the rest of us. The only purpose it serves is to give the neocons an excuse to "project American power" (= declare war on small nations as an exercise in global intimidation).

#32 And who would be "the usual filth"? Here at BB we do try not to sling bigotry like that around at each other.

Please read about necklacing and the ANC's position on it, rather than believing the sensationalist newspapers/blogs you obviously use as "reliable" sources of information.

#25 Necklacing was officially condemned by the ANC leadership. There's a Human Rights Watch report with some information here.

It really frustrates me how people reason as follows:

1. Mandela founded MK.
2. MK eventually bombed civilians.
3. People, some of whom may have been low-level members of MK, engaged in the horrific practice of necklacing.

Therefore, Mandela officially ordered necklacing. (From prison, presumably.)

Sorry, forgot to post the coppers blog link in #22.
http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/

#18 As I understand it, the bombings under Mandela were strictly non-harmful. They certainly included sabotage of infrastructure, but great care was taken to ensure that people were not affected. It was only after Mandela went to jail that MK shifted towards targeting police and military and later civilians.

Also, "One settler, one bullet" was a Pan African Congress slogan, while Zuma was in the ANC. I find it strange that you assert that it was a famous Zuma slogan.

Don't get me wrong, he certainly was a guerilla, back in the day, and his singing of "Awuleth' umshini Wam'" ("hand me my machine gun") at his rape exoneration does little to inspire confidence in the man who will most likely be our next president, but please try to be correct in your criticism.

#17 Yeah, I guess that's not an uncommon story. To be fair, there are plenty of similar stories in other countries. (There's a blog on which frustrated UK police complain about their inability to respond to crime as a result of the bureaucracy they're hampered with).

As to what you do:

1. Lodge a complaint with the SAPS. The SAPS service number is 0860 13 0860. There is also a web system which lets you send a complaint directly to the station commander, which I have had success with (for a far smaller complaint than yours). Personally, I would use the web form first, then phone the 0860 number if that fails.

2. Write to/ email/ phone politicians. South Africa is a democracy, and government is, to some extent, contactable. Even if you can influence one or two, that can make a difference up the chain.

3. Protest about and raise awareness of the issue, but keep the issue clear: The issue is that there is excessive violent and other crime, and that the government is not doing enough to prevent it. (Admittedly, the rate is falling, so maybe they are having an effect?)

As soon as you conflate crime with tinfoil hat conspiracy theories of condoned genocide, the government (and many other people) will stop taking you seriously. Also, if crime is what you truly care about (and it sounds like it is), keep it separate from the issues of corruption and crumbling infrastructure. (At least, outside of the context of the justice system.)

The people you need to convince are the South African electorate and the South African government. Calling the entire government corrupt isn't going to get them to listen to you.

As for your personal situation, you may also want to look into sector policing as a way of getting more involved with your local police force - it may help you (and others in your area) to get a better response in future.

#14: I don't really think the ANC is significantly more (or less) corrupt than most political parties and/or governments. We're just fortunate that our political and judicial systems are such that more gets detected and made public than in most countries.

That's probably a good thing.

(Which is not to say that it won't go away - take the recent dissolution of the Scorpions as an example.) :(

And really, calling the current government "a bunch of murderous morons", and saying the old was better.

Please, please read some of the TRC report some time. Please assure yourself that the NP government knowingly and deliberately tortured and murdered people.

Blame the current government for not doing enough about violent (and other) crime, but don't propose ridiculous conspiracy theories suggesting that they're actively perpetuating it.

#10 Hobnob.

People like you make me deeply and thoroughly embarrassed to be a white South African.

If you bother to look at crime statistics, you may notice that murder has steadily fallen since the ANC cam to power, and that violent crimes in general have been falling over the last few years.

Accept the fact that the police no longer provide your middle class white neighbourhood with the same, unfairly disproportionate level of protection which they did under Apartheid.

Accept the fact that this is fair.

Please.

Hmmm...

I've started to run into the term "hoodies", being used to describe criminal kids using hoodies (the item of clothing) to conceal their faces from CCTV.

Yet another example of "crime-fighting" technology that only invaded the privacy of the innocent, without helping much in prosecuting the guilty.

Just as a point of information, CIAT is actually based in Colombia. It's mission is to use science in the field of agriculture to benefit the poor. They get reasonably decent funding for this research (my MSc supervisor post-doced there before supervising me), which tends to give me a small ray of hope for the world at large.

It's a nice example of Central/Latin American solidarity.

Of course, yes, if some Mexican/Colombian/Central American in general came and said "those beans look like the ones in my village", they would (sadly) be ignore. This is where big organisations like this come into play, collecting data from many farmers and trying to do right by them.

If I recall, they have a bunch of these in the Science and Technology museum in London, just around the corner from Stephenson's Rocket. They drive them off an electric motor, but you can press a button and watch the whole workshop come to life.

I use FBReader, which comes installed by default on the EEE, and seems to be as good as it gets for Linux. Does most of what Voluminous seems to, apart from integrating with Gutenberg, and supports plenty of formats.

(Oh yeah, and it's free.)

I eagerly await the first real-life implementation of this...

The OLPC tech is all developed as a charity effort (no royalties expected) and the laptop is intended for underprivileged kids in developing nations. In other words, not the average blogosphere denizen.

The EEE, and its derivatives were developed as a commercial response to the XO - comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.

That said, I wonder if you could use an EEE as a semi-realistic test-bed for sugar and other OLPC software?

I bought an EEE this month, having had to give my old laptop back due to a change in study/work.

I got it because it was cheap and portable. I plan on taking it backpacking around Europe later this year. (It's light enough not to be a burden, and cheap enough not to make me so much of a target / hurt me if it gets stolen/damaged.)

It runs a lot of nifty full-functionality software that is useful for my productivity and entertainment (Open Office, FF, Amarok, Mplayer, etc). It functions as an ebook reader, and costs half as much (and it *feels* like a book to hold). It functions as a small, portable movie player. (Mplayer plays anything at DVD/TV quality. HDTV not so much, but that exceeds the screen res anyway.) It functions as a videophone (I gave my parents a walking tour of my flat via Skype the other day - try doing that comfortably with a 3kg laptop.) It acts as a hub between my 500GB portable HD and my webcam/mp3 player.

One thing I do not do on it is development - while it *could* run a webserver and MySQL, I don't think I'd be up for the pain. (And having to use the function key to get "|" and "\" on a Linux box is really irritating.) For most of the other things I use a computer for (largely listed above), it does a pretty good job.

But really, the price was the major factor. It does about 90% of what I need a home PC for, and cost half as much. I'm almost not afraid to use it in public...

OK, you most definitely do not escape it by writing "&<", you escape it by writing &<;.

(But of course I'm having to escape both the & and the < there, which is not helping.

@20: You can escape "<" by writing it "&<".

All XML reserved characters have to be scaped in this way (by being enclosed between "&" and ";").

Of course, the BB software tries to intelligently escape these for you, so you shouldn't have to worry, but it's struggling with <, most likely because they need to allow some through when they form parts of %lt;a> tags.

Another test case for the broken functionality:

1. Enter some text with an escaped < into the comment box.
2. Click preview - the text in the comment box appears with the < unescaped (just "<", not "&lt;").
3. Click preview again - the < and everything after gets truncated.

OK, so your system kills anything after a "<", probably while trying to treat it as an XHTML tag, but only on the same line...

Perhaps, if there's a < and no valid (or permitted) tag, you should just escape it, and put in whatever follows verbatim?

Anyway, what I meant to say earlier was:
"700 |V|u<|-| 1|\|73r|\|37$"

(And that will teach me to escape my l33t when pasting it into an XHTML-based system.)

lol.

One more test, a less than followed by some garbage without any whitespace, then some garbage seperated by a space, then some carriage returns and a Hmmm...:

Hmmm...

Bit of a quick test: If there's no text after the unescaped less than, you guys probably need to be taking a look at how you handle form input in this system. (I say this because my previous post got truncated...)

Less than sign, XML-escaped: <
Less than sign, unescaped:

Some stuff which will probably get truncated.

I'm a little shocked I can make it out too.

700 |V|u

"R3\/34£ t0 u$ |\|07 Ζ3R0 |)@ÿ \/u£|\|$, βu7 $A\/3 u$ fR0|\/| t3h RIAA"

I really love this line. Very topical.

I have a feeling I saw something similar (including the "All your base" reference) quite a few years ago. Like, when people still made "all your base" cracks...

My last day of my final year of high school, we didn't do all that much, though one thing was to write on each others' shirts.

A few days later, just at the start of finals, the headmaster addressed us all, and gave us a half-hour grilling about defacing the school uniform, and threatening not to provide letters of reference for any of us (not that *that* mattered to me - I was going to university, and all they cared about was our marks). This was about the last thing he *could* do to us, since barring us from writing the final exams would probably have been illegal. I'm pretty sure he would have if he could've.

(This is a school which subsequently was actively investigating ways to circumvent legislation banning corporal punishment in schools.)

Of course, this doesn't beat the year a bunch of people came to school on the last day with undercuts, and were dragged into a room and shaved almost bald. (Well, a few ducked out and ran home. My hair was a little long at the time - slightly over my ears - and I was ready to bolt. Fortunately they didn't come for me.)

Then there was the year when the final year pupils really ran rampant on their last day. I hid out on the sports fields and watched from a distance, but my younger brother recounted how his class locked themselves in the classroom and defended themselves with wooden planks.

And these are fairly mild stories as far as middle class, South African all-boys schools go.

Probably the most important skill that I acquired from the high school experience was the art of surviving under a totalitarian regime while remaining subversive and anti-authoritarian. "Yes sir, no sir, I'm completely committed to the school/nation/company/insert social entity here sir." (with complete sincerity)

I suspect they mistook MP3tunes for a file-uploading-and-sharing service. To a large extent, those seem to be the new p2p for file sharers.

Wait - what am I saying? Of course people use this for file sharing. (It's not too hard to create a temp account, put some stuff there, then distribute the username/password to your friends/whoever).

That doesn't lessen the fact that EMI are indiscriminately attacking a service which can be used both for legit (music backup) and illegal (music sharing) activities.

It's sorta like a Hollywood studio suing a manufacturer of VHS recorders, because they *could* be used to illegally copy and distribute their films.

Looks like the An Yue Jiang could be heading home. Way to go, the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union!

The funniest part is that KfW Ipex-Bank is looking to repossess the cargo to offset the debts of the Zimbabwean government. (Details in article linked.)

Nelson Mandela (non-lethally) bombed buildings and laid the foundations for a guerilla struggle, too.

Not to criticise him for that - the man is a saint, and his later actions produced a borderline miraculous outcome for South Africa, but just to point out that, contrary to popular rhetoric in the US, "terrorism" is not automatically evil.

And as for "the terrorists" hating Bush: Down in the rank-and-file of those organisations, I'm sure they do, and that the same (in reverse) is true of the rank-and-file of the US government/military/nation.

But the Bush Administration and the upper echelons of Al Quaeda are each others' best friends, and I'm pretty sure they realise this. They give each other fantastic excuses to pursue and further their own political agendas.

Terrorist actions give excuses for invasions and vice versa, with the side benefit to the Neocons of asserting "America's global preeminence", and the side benefit to the Islamists of radicalising Middle Eastern politics and society.

OK, let's put aside the headmaster metaphor completely. (Illustrative as the choice of the dominant position for the US therein may be.)

The "real" reason the attacks on "9/11" were organised was to manipulate the US into a knee-jerk reaction in the Middle East, so as to shift public opinion in Islamic Middle Eastern countries (which is, for the most part, extremely moderate) towards radical Islamism.

The Islamists succeeded admirably, in that you have invaded not one but two Middle Eastern nations, and are rattling sabres at a third, all of which has had the desired effect on public opinion in the Middle East.

Anyway, to the point of how you share some blame for "9/11": During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, you chose to support and train radical Islamist fundamentalists as a means of furthering your own political agenda. (And please don't come with "we were just helping the poor Afghanis out against an evil invader" - if that invader had been anyone but a major Communist power, you wouldn't have lifted a finger.)

You manipulated them, but in the process gave them the tools and set the example for them to manipulate you back.

I must say, I had wondered at the rooms I occasionally glimpsed through windows, walls completely lined with books (reminded me of my grandparents' study).

Unfortunately, most of the places I've stayed in have tended to be student / middle-class migrant worker accommodation, where even pretty intelligent, well-read people are just too mobile to be able to accumulate books.

It's a pretty cool idea nevertheless. I guess, though, that the increasing dominance of TV/games consoles/PCs over books in British culture will, indeed result in lessened insulation and increased heating bills...
(That's OK - the climate's getting milder, so that'll probably keep pace...)

Hmmm ... to echo one of the comments on YouTube, I can see a possible future for discounts on retail coffee if you opt to have advertising printed in the foam...

I reckon there are marketing think-tanks debating this right now.

lol - awesome. I had to turn off the nav bar in FF to get it to fit on the screen (of my EEE), though.

Is there a version which lets you pass in the text (say via the URL)?

OK, Tak-kun, which "proud cultural heritage" would that be?

This beats any unicorn chaser.

Takuan, perhaps the cat was playing with the thing *because* it was hard of hearing, and the theremin produced a noise it could actually hear?

(Interesting factoid, though.)

Now, a la Takuan's response to the photographers==terrorists police propaganda, we need a photo of someone in front of the artwork pretending to photograph the CCTV camera.

And of course the last (or maybe first?) resort: Write to your government representatives about the issue of net neutrality, since the UK government seems to need a bit of a wake-up call on this:

http://www.writetothem.com/
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

(bleh - that should probably all have gone in one post.)

I wonder if a workflow management tool would be handy for this process...

There's also a dispute resolution process at OfCom (the Office of Communications), which should have some power over Virgin Media.

"Telecommunications

Landline telecoms, mobile telecoms and broadband are becoming increasingly competitive, with new products and lower prices for businesses and consumers.

Ofcom seeks to ensure that companies are able to compete fairly and that businesses and consumers benefit from the choice of a broad range of services. We take action to protect consumers from unfair practices;"

Regrettably, and interestingly, Virgin Media is not a member of Otelo (Office of the Telecommunications Ombudsman) which seems to have slightly more power and be more effective. Virgin Mobile, however, *is* a member...

May also be useful (though it may just get lost in the corporate apparatus):

How to contact VM
VM complaints form

Vm feedback form

There's a good guide to switching providers (including details of your rights under current UK law), here.

*sigh* The Virgin broadband at the place I just moved into is in my technologically semi-literate housemate's name. I wonder if I can manage to convince him of the problem.

I would try phoning Virgin, but they charge some ridiculous fee just to talk to a human on the other side...

Hmmm ... the label on the London Museum one needs a bit more info - I don't recall them mentioning it being a reconstruction. (It's in an appropriate place, though, right next to Stephenson's Rocket.

Oooh! I have the urge to bake now. I love Sierpinski fractals.

(I wonder how tricky it would be to get a triangle to extrude right...)

w00t on the response, and applause to those who followed this up with the JH authorities.

Maybe the internet will become a medium for true democracy. We can but hope...

#1 and #2:

Well, there's a reason the U.S. has worked to systematically undermine the International Criminal Court.

It would be fun to see these guys arrested. I think most countries are more sensible than that, though. (Pat the giant and try not to make it angry in case it does something incredibly stupid.)

It's also a lot like The Goon Show - 1950s BBC Radio Humour at its finest.

(Spike Milligan + Peter Sellers = full of win)

Tak-kun, you are remarkably full of it with the image links tonight. ;)

That said, I understand teen pregnancy is a huge problem in the UK.

This was driven home to me when I was working at a charity in Hackney a few years back. I captured a request for funding for baby clothes, reading something like "You helped me with my last one, and now I'm pregnant again, won't you pretty please help me again?"

This all passed through my head like most of the other cases until I was typing it in and did a quick mental sum on the girl's age. She was 14.

I mentioned this to my supervisor. Her response?
"Oh that's nothing. You want to know what's the youngest we've had? 11."

In a country with a falling birth rate as a whole, it's disturbing to note what a large proportion of births are unplanned, and to mothers who are financially, emotionally and psychologically poorly equipped to be raising kids. This is a problem which can only self-perpetuate, and result (has already resulted in?) in a very scary society.

Well, so yes, pinch of salt. There are very few reliable news sources in the UK. Besides, if you read between the lines, this was just a village hall party at which a few kids had unprotected sex, and probably even fewer did it in the village square. It most certainly was not an orgy.

#44 Well, I'm sure the UK has a strong gender bias in its definition of rape, but if they were all drunk, who was raping whom? (South Africa has very recently removed gender from its definition of rape. IANAL, but I'm curious as to how that has affected things like the sex-under-the-influence-is-automatically-rape argument. Does the sober partner automatically become the rapist? Has rape occurred if both are off their faces? Does anyone know any precedents for these?)

@ Mindysan: Yeah, I'm still a bit confused as to the distinction between "emo" and "goth".

One clue might come from a guy a I know from South London who was into the scene in the 80's: "Where I grew up, the goffs used to sit outside the school gates and frow bricks at people."

I see emo (and late 90's/21st century goth) as being the watered down version of the 80s stuff. Hence the death rock resurgence in the last few years, and the late nineties "cybergoth" branching into the hard house/dance scene.

It amazes me that the subculture has survived this long, far better than most - I guess it represents something fairly primal/archetypal, and is intrinsically anachronistic, where most other subcultures are tied to circumstances, be they temporal, social, political or some combination of these.

Emo is just what happened when the marketing/song writing departments from the big record companies got hold of it.

That all said, I still tend to enjoy hanging out in "trad" goth clubs, myself...

Meh. I'm a little tipsy, and have spent way too much time in dark clubs thinking about this when I should have been having fun. Don't mind me.

#8: I've just started reading "Wasting Police Time", an account of policing in the UK by a police constable. He frequently expresses rather a similar opinion - quite a lot of his (and other members of the criminal justice system's) time seems to be taken up by trivial cases like this, while far more serious crimes slip through.

I can't imagine it's especially different in the US.

I just don't think law enforcement scales the way crime does with population and affluence.

That's a really cool idea. It's also fire resistant. (In summer, when it's really hot, dry and windy in Cape Town, fires in the townships are a huge problem with tragic consequences.)

Hahahaha! Salivanomics.

No google hits, although "urinomics" brings up a few...

and you're welcome :)

I did a bit of research (ie: reading through reagent catalogues) on the Trypanosome test mentioned earlier (the last link in my previous post), and it really can be manufactured for something like $1 per test.

Of course, that's just testing for a specific trait, not making more detailed comparisons between individuals, but I'm sure the tech isn't far off.

#17: http://xkcd.com/236/ (Be sure to check out the alt text on the image to get the reference.)

#1: Alvin Toffler said something in Future Shock along the lines of science/technology being a runaway train which we had lost control of, vastly outpacing our ability to deal with the social and ethical consequences.

Bad idea or not, the tech is coming. (This is not really a home paternity test kit, but one cannot be far in the future.)

I quite enjoy Transmetropolitan as a portrayal of the near future. It's going to be weird, and the ethics we end up living with (assuming we survive) will be intensely alien to our modern sensibilities.

#4, Trust me, you will struggle to carry out the PCR and Southern blot at home using the contents of a small cardboard box you bought for $30.

Of course, LAMP, featured recently on the boing is quite promising as a cheap, home-performable substitute. I give it a few more years before we have a commercialised, fully home-performable paternity testing kit.

Sigh. I nearly got a PhD position doing some very cutting edge Mass Spec analysis of blood, but it turned out I wasn't British enough for the funding.

(As a point of reference, "overseas student" is a quaint British euphemism for "filthy foreign scum trying to steal our education funding who shall have none of it".)

What's really interesting about this is that only now are we developing the computational power to be able to identify most of the proteins in a sample using mass spectroscopy. Forget genomics - all of the interesting stuff happens in the proteome (and I guess what you could call the "metabolome" - including all the small molecules floating around), and they're orders of magnitude more complex.

Also, I'm not entirely sure they're discounting blood tests - from the sounds of it, they're saying they could diagnose some things from saliva, but blood is likely to be more reliable, being more tied into the core systems, and less prone to external interference. All of these (blood, urine, saliva ... faeces ... ) can help to provide useful diagnostic information, and our ability to obtain and process this information is getting better at an exponential rate.

(All hail bioinformatics!)

Awesome!

I've been really keen on the idea of wiki-tourism - going to strange and exotic places primarily to take photos of stuff for Wikipedia.

#109: Kyle, I find the trick in those situations (which I get a lot of, too) is, as you said, to just shut up most of the time.

Every now and then, though, you can turn it to your advantage. (Beggars and salespeople come immediately to mind.) Nothing beats interrupting someone's carefully prepared patter with the assertion that they've just insulted you, their potential mark.

#16 I rather suspect that is exactly what happened. How rare are these things, anyway? The headline could just as easily read "Spotted Eagle Ray killed by boat".

From the website of "Lamperd Less Lethal" (at least their name carries some element of honesty):

"These letters from the Department of Homeland Security show that the interest in the Safety (Security) Bracelet includes and goes beyond the Airline Industry."

(Cory posted the link to this. It's the second article under "New Products")

Excerpts from one letter from the DHS:

"Dear Mr.

Our meeting on 18th July was of great interest and the concepts you proposed, would I believe, contribute significantly to a more secure US border."

"... we find your ideas have merit and believe it would be of great help on the borders and indeed for anywhere else, for which the temporarily restraint of large numbers of individuals in open area environments by a small number of agents or Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs)."

#34 They propose 6 possible means of activating the thing (and combining two or more into a single remote). The aluminium could stop the RF, IR, mag field and microwave, and clothing could stop the laser, but how does one block ultrasound?

I'd go with the conductive gel option. 100ml stored in a hand cleanser bottle should be more than enough.

It's OK, it's only intended to be used on "predetermined passengers". If you're not one of the million on the list, a non-US citizen between the ages of 18 and 44, or otherwise a "risk", you probably have nothing to worry about.

*rictus*

Morally, somehow this makes it worse than wanting to put them on everyone.

"But Alice, how will I know who to shock?"

"Don't worry Martha, you just need to look for the brown men with beards in white dresses."

Damn, damn, damn.

I would have liked to have gone to this.

Hmmm ... need to see if this is up as a torrent somewhere.

Yep, yep. A whole lot of US citizens are in for a very, very big shock sometime soon.

The question is: how far will the world's greatest military power be willing to go to maintain its economic dominance?

Yeah, I thought that was Vangelis. Heavy, dramatic stuff.

"I find that another English writer -- who, coincidentally, also spent most of his life in the East -- has expressed it very well. So let me end with these words of Rudyard Kipling:

If I have given you delight
by aught that I have done.
Let me lie quiet in that night
which shall be yours anon;

And for the little, little span
the dead are borne in mind,
seek not to question other than,
the books I leave behind."

-Clarke, on his 90th birthday last year. ( link

RIP

:'(

#4: They might run into some issues with Bridgeman vs Corel there.

(In summary: In the US, photographic two-dimensional copies of a document do not generate a new copyright.)

Sugoi!

If I actually had some free time available right now, I would want to play with the data a bit. (It would be a fun way to learn a little R.)

#6 Or banzai charging a machine gun nest. Or starving and abandoned when things turned bad and the supplies stopped coming. Or shot trying to surrender.

It was an ugly war on all sides. :(

#3 Nonsense. The repetition in this case clearly illustrates the logical connection between the two.

But yeah, lol, I'm pretty sure it's been cracked for some time now already.

The question is how long it will take the Russian mafia to start mass-producing fake ones...

#13: Sure, that would be great.

Unfortunately, the US economy depends on military spending.

The good news is that it's going down the tubes despite the enormous spending right now, so that's a self-limiting process. Hopefully the countries who take their share of the global economy will have more responsible spending goals.

Hmmm ... Well he makes quite a quick jump from

"While researchers don't yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain's pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids."

to

"When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.'"

I'll wait until they can actually confirm the rise in opioid levels before I take this too seriously.

That said, as an insatiable informavore, I can completely relate!

#10: The impression I get is that there is still substantial funding within the US coming from the government for the purposes of research which can have direct health benefits to its citizenry. Similarly, in Europe, Japan and quite a few other places there is substantial funding. (I think this is especially so for countries with nationalised health care systems.)

Granted, big pharma probably spend a hell of a lot more on commercially viable research, but I'm not sure there was ever a time when science was purely nationally funded. (Well, at least not in a capitalist country...) Short of a communist revolution, I don't see that changing, either.

As for universities==patent farms, I think this depends on the university. Certainly there are universities which decree that all patentable research must be patented. On the other hand, there are universities which produce and encourage the use of FOSS licenses.

Science depending on charity and advertising campaigns? Could you cite some examples? I am certainly aware of certain large chunks of money donated by the mega-rich to fund research, but I'm not sure that falls under the kind of charity you're describing. I can't really recall seeing an appeal to the general public for donations to conduct research.

As for open access to research, there are big strides in that direction already. (eg: Public Library of Science and Biomed Central)

As a scientist-in-training, I certainly would love for science to be a communally funded, communally beneficial thing. I just don't think our current global political system can handle that. The solution lies elsewhere, but I'm not sure where.

(I also haven't even gotten started on "neglected tropical diseases.")

I tend to rely on Gwynne Dyer as a general source of deep, long-term political analysis. (I trust a historian far more than I trust sensationalist/partisan journalists.) His books are worth a read, too.

Just in case Takuan comes back and read this.

#13: The UK? (Here's why.)

Canada, Germany, Russia and Japan don't seem like such bad options, either. (This assumes the Americans don't try to take Canada's resources by force as arability moves in a polar direction.) It also assumes we don't end up with a three-way nuclear war between the emerging power blocs of the 21st century.

#11.

Yep. :(

And all that we computer-owning middle class types will feel (apart from the political machinations) will be increased food prices. The poorest of the already starving poor will starve in numbers never before seen.

"But that's OK, the poorest of the poor are always starving, right?"

I'm personally all for a calculus of death as a tool for publicising the problem. Something along the lines of "The emissions from your vehicle this year will cause 3.72 developing nation children to starve to death. Keep on trucking."

@ #22: He made the assumption that we are entirely made up of water (ie: 1g/cm^3 density). It's probably not too far out. (What is the average human density, anyway?)

But, as Takuan pointed out, to make the sphere would require that we all be liquefied...

Hmmm ... The test itself carries no license. The paper describing the test has been released CC (as are most articles under the Public Library of Science, as well as Biomed Central).

In theory I think they could have patented the test, but now that it's published I think they've invalidated that option (probably deliberately).

It's really cool, though that Plos do a "Journal of Neglected Tropical Diseases". Having seen a few graphs showing how much research goes into cancer and heart disease (the main killers of developed nation citizens) versus research into diseases that are pandemic in developing nations, my faith in the overall morality of our species isn't very high.

Incidentally, what is even cooler about this is the simplicity of the reagents and equipment required. I strongly suspect they could mass produce these for under US$1 per test.

@ #10 Hmmm ... like "gaijin" or "nanban"?

But seriously, you're quite right, and I'm sorry if I offended anyone. I blame extreme sleep dep/stress.

I *do* think it's really cool that both the Chinese and the Japanese have orbiters up there right now.

W00t. I wonder if we could ask the Chinese or the Japs to verify this for us?

I really like the idea that a large amount of our (snow? hail?) could simply be a phase in a bacterial life cycle. I haven't yet got hold of the Science article, but I do hope that they have plans to test this hypothesis.

To quote Berk from The Trapdoor
"Ain't nature wonderful?"

Oooh - early information visualisations. Edward Tufte has written a few books on IV that incorporate a lot of the history, including early cartography, Japanese art and various other fascinating pre-computer era visualisations. Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte (Amazon).

A particularly awesome one is this 19th century French representation of Napoleon's Russian campaign losses.

Next up: "We're sorry, ma'm, we're going to have to confiscate your wedding ring before we allow you on the flight. New safety regulations..."

Gorey is wonderful, too. I hadn't known about him before this post.

Last I checked, though, you couldn't sue somebody for copying your style. (I mean, what if the Dali estate sued every modern surrealist painter?) Unless they actually copied, verbatim, one of his works, they've done nothing but flatter him by imitation.

Oooh I've played this. It's fantastic! Best played over a bit of alcohol, though -- it's rather silly.

(It really is fun when the most evil thing you can do to your opponents is to make them happy...)

Hmmm ... it seems the Windsor-Detroit heart attack incident was due to a random computer selection, and very likely resulted in permanent damage to the guy's heart.

It is interesting how that incident got mainstream coverage in the Canadian press, while this one, where someone actually died, has had very little.

Perhaps this says something about the press in the USA?

@ #65

Sorry - I meant to convey awe at the speed with which you found a related story from several months back, not derision. (I think it came out wrong.)

Awesome. And it's free. And it's published as a webcomic.

Did anyone else pick up on the supernatural angle? I mean, she was talking remotely to that Connor guy via a dirty, scratched pane of glass...

So, not just rehashed steam/cyberpunk. Maybe a bit of dark fantasy, too?

Takuan, where on earth do you dig these obscure news stories up?

What is scary is how little news coverage this is getting. Most of the stories within the US are in Hawaii, with the only other state showing coverage being Arizona. Neither AP nor Reuters seem to have picked up on it.

Lol - I swear I hadn't seen WHOKNEW's post when I posted mine. Eerie - we even punctuated it the same.

Hear, hear, Joel.

And if it offends anyone, download Firefox and install Adblocker Plus.

Or leave.

This truly made my day. Leave it to the French, hey?

Aww. I was looking forward to the prospect of the world at large looking to sources other than Hollywood for their daily drivel. At least there' be variety...

at #3: Weirdly enough, I was just chatting to someone about Isareli flight security measures. She reckoned that after the profiling, the two hour compulsory (and harsh) interview with Isreali security forces and the other measures that would have Americans (and people from other "developed" nations) crying "invasion of privacy and personal rights", she felt "really safe".

No, I wouldn't voluntarily go to Israel. That's something you've really gotta want to do, either out of Jewish nationalism or the desire to see the "holy land".

#14 Hmmm. Why is it that weasel words get you flamed on Wikipedia and weasel words prevent you from getting flamed here?

Here we express opinions and try to persuade people of our arguments. Weasel words are allowed, but so are the rebuttals to their use that can bite you back worse than being randomly flamed. (Of course, the rebuttals require the argumentative sharpness to pick out the weasel words in the first place - they can very successfully placate the ignorant.)

On Wikipedia, we aim towards objective truth (whether or not that actually exists), and weasel words are obviously not a step in that direction. Also, the people who flame you for using weasel words on Wikipedia are hardened informavores, usually with an academic degree or three under their belts.

#73 - I think you're mistaking fatalism for fear.

Yeah - I saw it and couldn't help thinking of this

The comments here are a veritable treasure trove of humour.

#31 - I nearly fell out my chair imagining them rooting around someone's arse looking for their public key.

(Given my aunt's experience on going to the USA, to a proton radiotherapy conference - the customs? border patrol? official asked her "So, did you bring any of these 'protons' with you?")

#46 - I'd download an mpeg of that.

#48 - Awesome. I wonder if they'd actually bother to click through it all (or confiscate our laptop to take it to a lab for "further study".) The image is hilarious, though.

#64 - Ponderous post, but there's the gem of the English-to-Klingon translation of all your test files hidden in the middle.

Someone needs to compile these, per Takuan's suggestion on the TSA thread the other day, and create a humorous guide to getting through US (or other) customs with a laptop.

Some real architectural symbols of political power might include Westminster Palace, the Moscow Kremlin, the Forbidden City in China and the Palace of the Parliament in Romania.

Of course, these were all built by oppressive, totalitarian (or imperialistic) governments, but that's what they're going for in this competition, right?

Of course, the half-a-billion-dollar Baghdad superfortress (ahem) embassy probably counts, too...

"the ultimate architectural symbol of political power", eh?

So:

1. The USA is the "ultimate political power" (unlike, say, France or Great Britain in 1800, when the White House was built.)

2. This power rests "ultimately" with the president (not with the senate, congress or the media).

3. A piffly little Georgian country house is an "architectural symbol of power" at all?

The rhetoric coming out of the USA these days is often amusing (and/or frightening).

(and what's more frightening is that, the first time I tried to submit this post, Boing Boing gave me an error message and logged me out ... /removes tin foil hat)

At #7: Yes, that's the problem - it plays on the intrinsic gender bias of the US political system (and the reader).

Some actual details on that jet powered birdman flight.

Most likely it's algal. Ecologically it's much more sound - you literally just need water, sunlight and some trace nutrients. In theory, you can place the reactors in the middle of a desert, so there's no competition with food supplies. (Yes "agrofuel" as you put it is catastrophic, but it's not the only possible biofuel option.)

Not that it's commercially viable just yet, as some South African investors discovered last year, but prototype plants have been set up, and have probably managed to produce enough for one plane flight, at least.

Congratulations!
Veels geluk!
Asengamhlophe!

I don't know - by the time I reached the end of high school it would have been impossible to store all the subject matter in a small enough space for exams. (I'm thinking, eg, of history here - you just can't condense pages and pages of complex, interwoven facts into any medium that can be smuggled into an exam venue). By university level, the content had multiplied several fold, and there was even less point (and the penalties were much more substantial). One set of courses I took, in philosophy, even provided the exam questions beforehand -- you could either argue convincingly, or you couldn't.

Anyway, the point is that any good educational programme should be testing reasoning ability, not memory. We have computers to do the remembering for us now. At least until they can out-reason us, that's the ability we should be focusing on.

As long as they continue to allow people to post images with CC licenses, and enable searching by license, I don't really care.

Yeah - single, bulky robots don't scare me so much - the vulnerabilities are substantial, and you just have to take out one to inflict huge financial losses on your opponent.

When the US (or other major power's) military starts implementing armed robot swarms, as is the latest hot topic in AI research, then I'll start getting scared.

Yep, that's Wikipe-tan all right, and she's GFDL / CC-BY-SA dual licensed, so they're allowed to use her in the poster shown (though they *should* put a credit there, somewhere).

MirrorMonkey wrote:

K*r does seem to be an odd one out there, the name not having any geographical connection and is derived from arabic for unfaithful/unbeliever.

I reply:

K*r used to be a blanket term for Southern African black people. Occasionally, it was also used as an alias for Xhosa people. Towards the beginning of the 20th century, it was considered acceptable usage (by Europeans), even to the extent of it having an entry in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

A proposed origin I have heard (but haven't seen a solid reference for) is that European explorers traders sailing the coast of Africa encountered Arabic traders on the East African coast and asked them who the people living inland were, to which the Arabs replied, dismissively, "heathens".

Some time during the 20th century, it became recognised as an ethnic slur, and popular used as such in South Africa (and reportedly, in Rhodesia). However, even in the 1970s, using the term to someone's face while talking about them was legally actionable. (Of course, if you were a poor, second-class black South African in those days, enforcing your legal rights, little as they were, wasn't always an option.)

Sadly, it's still a term I hear being used by racist white South Africans, although most are sly enough to prefer euphemisms (a la "Canadians").

Lol - The "Squirrels on Crack" story has an interesting background. Apparently it was first posted on a slightly subversive Brixton community website, and found by the chief reporter at South London Press, who afterwards was "happy to admit it's an exaggeration of the truth".

*sigh* I guess it does say something about the quality of the journalism in the UK.

Hmmm ... I'm wondering about the copyright status. He's licensed it with a CC-NC 3.0 license, but if it was published in 1935 it must surely still be under the copyright of the original author (whoever that may be).

It's also a little frustrating that he chose the Non-Commercial version. That makes it incompatible with Wikipedia.

Wait, what am I saying - the book has no copyright. That means that the images are faithful two-dimensional reproductions of public domain images, and therefore in the public domain themselves (at least in the US and some European countries - excluding the UK).

*sigh*

Of course, it remains to be seen whether photos can be found that do not convey the intrinsic racial bias of the book.

HymieTheRobot wrote:
"The latter is an audiovisual form of story-telling that requires it's own set of rules to succeed dramatically, which is why space ships make noise, laser beams are visible, and characters can become invisible without going blind."
===

Firefly didn't seem to require such "rules" (ie fabrications) to be a huge cult success.

Well, Tom Wise responded with a commitment to vote against it and to collaborate with whomsoever wants to join him to defeat it.

*sigh* While their position in the political spectrum scares me, and I'm definitely not anti-EU, at least this guy has taken the right position on IP issues.

A bit of web searching turned up an old Vcard containing Kilroy's email address:

robertandjan@thamesinternet.com

from: http://www2.erewash.gov.uk/moderngov/mgVCardSingleExplain.asp?UID=315&Caller=&J=1)
confirmed: http://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/mepDetails.asp?mepcode=575&type=MEP

Also, Christopher Heaton-Harris can be reached at:

christopher.heaton-harris@europarl.europa.eu

(This is not listed on his MEP page, but is listed on his personal website)

Well, I've emailed the representatives who had email addresses. (Kilroy seems to lack that, but I have tried robert.kilroy@europarl.europa.eu anyway.)

Here's my letter. It's nowhere near as eloquent or comprehensive as Cory's, but I guess if we're going to email them, it can't hurt to exchange ideas. (I release this into the public domain, copy/paste/alter at will.)

Dear Mr Wise

I am writing to express my strong opposition to he pending amendment 82 of paragraph 9a of the Guy Bono Report, reading:

"9a. Calls on the Commission to propose a irective designed to protect artists who risk seeing their work fall within the public domain in their lifetime, and to consider the competitive disadvantage posed by less generous protection terms in Europe than in the United States;"

As has been pointed out in last year's Gowers eport, such an extension of copyright conveys negligible benefits to individual artists. The extension of copyright also stifles creativity by restricting the creation of derivative works, and restricts public access to archival materials with
cultural and educational value.

Finally, the tone of the amendment suggests that the EU has a moral obligation to follow the lead of the United States in creating legislation. This carries a dangerous, implicit assumption that all laws passed by the United States are automatically morally just and appropriate to a European context.

Allowing this amendment to enter the report would set a dangerous precedent for future European legislation, as it could promote the creation of laws that will benefit only record companies, and not the creators and consumers of culture.

Please vote to have amendment 82 deleted from the report, for the good of European culture.

Sincerely,
Kieran O'Neill

In Flickr's defence, you *can* tag images using any of a range of Creative Commons licenses. http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

As such it gets used as an image source for Wikipedia quite extensively (since it's easy to search for images with a compatible free license).

Unfortunately, these do not include options for tagging as strictly public domain.

Update (from the BMC forum):

http://www.bmcforums.com/showthread.php?t=42681

They're going to fight it.

I definitely do not think this is "Rwanda redux" - there's been some upheaval, and people have died, but it certainly isn't genocide, and doesn't look like it will end up that way.

For that matter, far worse has happened in Zimbabwe over the last decade or more - I guess we just notice Kenya because we're used to it being so stable.

As for helping out, I'm not too sure. There are various delegations in country trying to resolve things, but they're being manipulated by governmental spin doctors (see link below).

http://allafrica.com/stories/200801090371.html

Ultimately, it's international delegations like these that will help resolve things. If you want to help people in the short term, maybe you could donate to organisations like the Red Cross who are working to help victims of the election violence?

Erm. Why are there no comments on this? Have they been disabled, or do people just not care?

Cool project, though, especially if they get a TRC up and running after the madness is over. Of course, it could end up being used as a tool for retribution. Such is the power of information, I guess.

Hmmm ... Looking at the previews, there even seems to be an obscure reference to the conflict in the DRC - something which the US more or less ignores while the rest of the world sends in peacekeeping forces. That at least is beyond being a "cliche" (sic).

What exactly are you attacking, Hirudo?

1. That like-minded people cooperate on an art project?

2. That people create anti-war protest art?

3. That people aren't doing (2) effectively enough?

4. That the anti-war arguments are becoming clichéd?

Or, are you just trolling?

These artists have given up their time, effort and creative energy. So far all you've offered has been vitriol. Until you can contribute something constructive, perhaps you should shut up?

This is really pretty. It's just annoying that they chose to encode this (and all the other posters posted here) as jpg. With all the solid colour and crisp lines typical of the time, png would have been a much better option.

(Try printing one of these - you will see the really awful jpg artefacts, especially in the background.)

This is ingenious. I like to think of myself as someone who confronts and works against his prejudices, but this pushes buttons (that really need to be pushed). What's fantastic is that it doesn't attack anyone - it's a completely positive way of forcing people to think about important issues.

This is something which I think could be learned from in US political discourse. Right now, debates tend to get very polarised and accusatory (and the debaters consequently lose sight of the issues themselves). Subtle, positive and ideology-neutral is definitely the way to go.

Just a thought...

According to this 1994 Wall Street Journal article,

"Bufotenine, as a hallucinogen, has been on federal and state dangerous-drug lists for years, and its possession is illegal."

Of course, according to some of the discussion at this frog-keeping site, it's an endangered/protected species in several states, but you may possess up to 20 wild-caught in Arizona with a fishing license. How that interacts with the federal illegality of the compound the frog secretes, I don't know.

"But from the perspective of someone who happens to think that xkcd is shit, reading the post conjures up an image of Mr. Doctorow sucking his own little Cory."

Arg!

Begone, and never darken our comment threads again!

Hey! Pre-empted. I've been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for some time now.

Interestingly, the font review site posted above (the lowing.org one) rates it the highest, too.

Crash said:
"There are all these steampunk objects, but so few steampunk costumes, nor indeed a steampunk style of dress. We all know what punks dress like and the Wachowskis have given us a vision of how cyberpunks dress, but what does a Steam-Punk look like?"

I say:
Lol! "Cyberpunk fashion" (or cybergoth, it seems, these days) has existed a lot longer than the Wachowskis have been making Matrix episodes, and is even well commercialised.

That said, I did run into a clothes maker in a London goth/industiral/dark alternative club recently who said he was working on a complete steampunk outfit, so we'll have to see where that ends up...

I was yelled at by a US Border Patrol officer. I should put that on a t-shirt. :P

The level of rudeness I got from her was pretty exceptional, and included debasing Canadian currency. (I'm not Canadian, but I'm fairly sure that if I was, then at the point when she threw the $20 note back at me, yelling "That's play money!", I would have been offended, to put it mildly.)

At the time there were signs everywhere stating that their staff are required to be polite and respectful at all times. Whether or not it really is their policy (Who would know? Aren't US Border Patrol operating procedures a national secret?), they definitely do not enforce it.

I have to say that the incident left me deeply disinclined to return to the US any time soon. It would actually make sense in some ways for me to apply to do my PhD there, but I simply refuse to be subjected to the treatment foreigners get in your country.

I have mine hanging over my workstation...

It is a fantastic project. I follow it religiously.

... because inciting people to use "munitions" on the CIA website would not quite be in the spirit of an anti-terrorism campaign?