Speaking of creepy and disturbing ads, seen the new Trojan "Evolve" TV commercial?

A pig trying unsuccessfully to date a human woman is magically transformed into a handsome man through the act of working a Trojan condom vending machine.

Sounds neat. I can't help wondering, though, what happens when you use up all of one chamber but there's still plenty of juice left in the other.

Might they sell individual sauce refills?

And just think, when they outlaw incandescent bulbs in favor of fluorescents, it'll have to go.

According to Ars Technica's take on the law:

So can the county seize your house and computers just for downloading a couple of unauthorized tracks? Not exactly. In this case, "piracy" actually means "piracy," and it refers to the "manufacturing, distributing, selling, or possessing for sale of counterfeit goods, or recordings or audiovisual works which are improperly labeled under California Penal Code section 653w."

There's no call for FUD here. If you want to find something to get angry about in this legislation, consider that this debacle just goes to show that the RIAA and MPAA's lumping of peer-to-peerers in with knock-off vendors causes a great deal of unnecessary confusion.

I think this is enough of a difference from what your posted article says that it really does warrant a correction update.

I expect it's possible to bypass the middleman and go entirely digital. The question is, does Cory really want to. Even writers who do start out works entirely digitally (books in series that publishers don't want but fans do) will happily jump at the chance to get those works published by a print publisher if it is offered.

Ebooks are great, and its terrific of Cory to give them away free, but it's still a printbook world and will probably be for some decades to come.

I can't believe I'm the first one to say this, but…

We finally have incontrovertible proof that the patent office…just doesn't know beans.

This puts me in mind of an editorial I read in one of my hometown (Cassville, Missouri)'s local papers, where at the graduation ceremony a couple of kids doing a musical performance as part of the ceremony launched into a totally unannounced encore rendition of "Come Sail Away" at the end of their planned performance.

They were suspended and not allowed to graduate with the rest of the class.

So, basically, he traded in his ashtray for some "Ash play." :)

I am inescapably reminded of what the old unintelligible farmer had in his barn in Hot Fuzz.

No Team Fortress, Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, or Portal that I could see, either. Though for the last three, I suppose there's a limit to how far they want to drill down into Half-Life derivatives.

I was a little startled to see that my hometown of Springfield, Missouri was one of the six cities mentioned. It did make a lot of sense, as I had noticed that the yellow lights around here were annoyingly short lately. When I discussed it with my Dad, however, he was not surprised at all—he's of the opinion that Springfield city government is made up of a bunch of crooks and scoundrels. (Given all the irregularities that a recent state audit of the city government turned up, he's probably right.)

If you go to the website that originally broke the story, http://www.motorists.org, and browse around, you'll find some very interesting reading.

From those chubby cheeks, it looks like she eats too much candy already.

I really wish you'd can it with the "humorous" exchange rates. Once or twice was amusing, but this is starting to get really old. Some people really would like to know the real value, you know.

It's not quite correct to say "nobody really knows."

According to the British Medical Journal, it is believed the advice may come from a misreading of a recommendation to have 64 oz of fluids per day including those fluids that are found in food.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1288

I don't think there's really any way to know whether it is "Anonymous" or not. I would be inclined to be naturally and immediately suspicious of the Co$ because of what I've heard about them—especially given the apparent lack of organizing/bragging posts on Anon's usual hangouts. On the other hand, I gather that there isn't an actual cohesive organization of "Anonymous," so it's possible that even if the majority of them didn't have anything to do with it, a few bad apples in their bunch could have pulled it.

Very awesome book.

If you enjoy it, you might also enjoy the roleplaying game Nobilis, a diceless game that draws upon Gaiman and Zelazny and others in the same general neighborhood as Butcher Bird. It'll be coming out in a new edition soon.

#11 - "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" is a slogan seen on a cutesy sign hanging behind many a bar. It's a play on the slogan "In God We Trust" which adorns United States currency, and means that they don't extend credit to (i.e. "trust" that they will be paid back by) anyone except God.

NPR had an interesting story on fortune cookies recently, in connection with Jennifer 8 Lee's book about them.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19200355

My personal favorite fortune is pinned to my cubicle wall at work: "If it feels like the fates are against you today, they probably are." Such a nice, cheerful message to get from one's pseudo-Oriental food.

I have to admit, I do have Andrew Burt to thank for something. He gave me my first "hit" of full Internet freedom. Back in '91, my college didn't have access to USENET, but I was able to get an account on Burt's free public-access UNIX box, nyx.cs.du.edu (later nyx.net), and whole new vistas of Internet discussion were opened up to me. (According to the Nyx trading card I have in front of me, Nyx was "a SPARC2, a SPARC10, 5Gb disk space, 224Mb RAM, an Annex x1 and 16 14.4K modems." My, how times have changed.)

Just think, if that was the only contribution he ever attempted to make to geek culture, we would still think of him kindly. Just goes to show you should stick with what you're good at.

Re Takuan: Huh? Wouldn't it "catching on" mean that the remaining cork trees get used up even faster?

The idea of not accepting big bills isn't really anything new; there are places in the US that won't take $100s (the largest circulating US banknote anymore) for that reason.

Of course, the USA used to have bigger denominations back in the day, mainly used for transferring funds between banks, but they were taken out of circulation in 1969 because EFT made them redundant and there were concerns about their use by organized crime.

Kind of ironic, really, that they killed off those big bills and now the smaller bills have considerably less buying power than they did back then.

Business? Did you read the article? They were on holiday.

Just wanted to mention that some of the other shows on The Biblio File might be of interest to Boing Boing readers. An interview with Peter S. Beagle going into detail about some of the skullduggery of which he has been a victim mentioned here, for instance.

If you have the chance, go and see Peter. He's a marvelous writer, and a fascinating man to talk to.

Also, there's a Peter S. Beagle Q&A session that goes on for almost four hours (along with publisher and long-time friend Connor Cochran, and special guest caller Diane Duane) on my podcast The Biblio File.

http://terrania.us/biblio/

Peter talks about his writing career, his experience scripting the Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings movie (for a pittance and a promise for more work that wasn't kept), how the company that owns his movie The Last Unicorn has systematically ripped him off through Hollywood accounting, the Star Trek Next Generation episode he wrote (and Diane Duane chimes in with her own Trek writing experiences), and many more fascinating things. I'm really proud of that show, and delighted to have had the chance to discuss all those things with him.

Well, sure. Early Christianity went around like a medieval mashup artist, latching onto pagan symbolism and holidays and incorporating them into itself, so as to be able to say to the pagans, "Hey, look! We're not so different from what you worship after all. So why not worship what we do instead? You'll hardly even have to change anything." Probably one of the major reasons it was successful enough to become the powerhouse it is today.

But the reason the unicorn has become a Christian symbol is that was mentioned a dozen times in the King James Bible. For instance:

"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide in thy crib?

"Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?

"Wilt thou trust him because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him?

"Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"

—Job 39:9-12.

It was actually a mistranslation of re'em, referring to an ancient Hebrew wild ox. Given that the KJV was more or less the Bible for hundreds of years, the unicorn would probably have faded into the same heraldic obscurity as the gryphon or the chimera if it hadn't been for those prominent mentions.

By the way, everything you could possibly want to know about unicorn myth and legend, from ancient days up to the 1930s when the book was written, can be found in Odell Shepard's The Lore of the Unicorn, which you can find as an e-book right here:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/lou/index.htm

I don't suppose, he said lazily, someone could compile all those mp3s into a zip file so I don't have to right click and save so many times? :)

Poor Kit Bond. He should have thought before he used that analogy. What he meant to say is apparently that waterboarding and swimming are both things that you can do in a lot of different ways.

But the way he said it, people's eyeballs turn off after "it's like swimming."

FYI, this exact same cane is available for $13 through American Science & Surplus.

http://www.sciplus.com/singleItem.cfm/terms/12180

http://www.amazon.com/American-Science-Surplus-WALKING-STICK/dp/B0007RUORU

Well, at least they're right twice a day.

The thing about insurance companies is that everyone assumes they exist to pay your medical expenses. But that's flat wrong.

They exist not to pay your medical expenses. The fewer medical expenses they pay in return for premiums received, the higher their profit margin.

Sad but true.

Having had square dance experience myself, what amazes me is not so much that they're doing it but how well they're doing it.

If you're ever in St. Louis, stop by Fitz's, a restaurant and soda pop bottling plant that uses only sugar, not corn syrup, in its non-diet drinks. Some of the best root beer and creme soda I've ever had.

I only wish I didn't live too far away to get cases of it regularly.

And here I had always assumed they were named after an old Doobie Brothers song.

I bet after they found out what it was, the London police were fit to be Thai'd.

Isn't there some kind of law against the sale or possession of human remains?

I would tend to recommend reading them in published order the first time through, because although there's not necessarily direct crossover among them, there are in-jokes and references introduced in some series of the books that are repeated or referred back to in others. Not exactly world-shattering, but I think it lets you fully appreciate the cleverness of some of the touches.

<anal>It's not "Dr. Who," it's "Doctor Who."</anal>

FYI, the book is also available free over on Baen's website; they post the first few chapters of each book as samples, and this comprises the first part of their Tom Godwin collection.

Personally, I rather enjoy some Taco Bell products, in moderation. Certainly their Grilled Stuft (sic) Burrito is very filling for the money. I'm sure if I knew more about what goes into their food, I might not enjoy it so much—so I guess I'm glad I don't.

I like to call it "FauxMex," as a sort of play on "TexMex."

To Anonymous #88:

Firstly, as is mentioned elsewhere, the "it wasn't really a takedown notice" is from an early draft response that was since retracted, and never meant to be posted publicly (but you can't unring a bell). In the email, it certainly claimed to be a takedown notice, even though as others have pointed out it didn't meet all the technical requirements of one.

The whole point of the DMCA takedown provision is to say, more or less, "If you act promptly to take down infringing content immediately when you get a notification, they can't sue you for it. That way, you don't have to worry about vetting every single thing anyone puts on your site, because if you had to do that you'd never get anything done."

That being the case, it's understandable that they'd act right away to comply, and also understandable that they might not be quite up on the protocols enough to understand the notice fell short in a couple of key respects. In short, they panicked and pulled right away to make sure they couldn't get sued.

How ironic that Andrew Burt should do this.

Andrew Burt was responsible for the first real unfettered access I had to USENET, back in the days when my telnet access was through a CP/CMS machine, and so telnet into Nyx was all cluttered with ANSI codes and improper scrolling yet still readable. aburt's Nyx site was where I went to read the anime newsgroup rec.arts.anime that a friend had told me about, and where I was inducted into online writing circles where we wrote our tales and shared our stories freely on the Internet. Though defunct now, alt.pub.dragons-inn and alt.pub.havens-rest were really jumping back in the day.

And Burt was also a more direct champion of writing circles, too, in his work with Critters. According to the article, he believed that espousing some of the principles of the Open Source movement in writing would lead to more and better writers.

And now look what he's doing. What a shame that it should come to this.