A lot of those 1920s Popular Mechanics (etc.) writers were still around to be laughed at when their predictions of flying city-cubes by 1950 didn't come true. This guy has the right idea--predict things about a future that will have forgotten you millennia ago.

Humans will telepathically control the very fabric of space-time and colonize the 9th dimension... by the year 1,000,000,000,002,008. I'll stake my reputation on it.

Psst, kids: there's a word that's part of a trademarked Disney character name that rhymes nicely with "fuck."

But this is great news! I can use the bribe money from my slanderous Amazon comment to pay him a bribe to take me off the "bad chargeback" list from a few posts down!

Another Aaron: When one is a lefty, and frequents lefty-oriented sites like BB (at least I think it is; your mileage may vary), and one wants to say something that gets in the way of a good Bush burning, one is well-advised to start with a snarky disclaimer. Or so I thought.

I really am a liberal; I really do think the Bush administration is an abomination for all sorts of excellent reasons I'd be happy to list; I really don't think this whole patent shenaningans has Thing One to do with him. (From what I've seen.) But what I hate much more than being disagreed with is being disagreed with because someone equates "I think that GWB isn't personally responsible for the death of your kitty" with "I love GWB."

Sorry if I threw you or anyone else off (really). It doesn't even seem to have worked for its intended purpose.

And, of course, it was actually #10 that was calling me a fascist, not #8 (me). I sometimes do think I'm a bit of a fascist, but even then I usually refrain from screaming it on the internet apropos of nothing, because of how that tends to reflect on the credibility of the person doing it.

@8: The rules matter enough that the Supreme Court will have to hash it out, and Congress will have to patch the hole. Is that rule-bound enough for you? Were there other rules you'd prefer to apply?

My point was that governments can make honest mistakes as well as corrupt ones, and that they call for different levels of outrage. Your point was to call me a fascist on the internet, I guess.

By the by, I made a mistake above. It wasn't Dubya and a Democratic Congress that let this happen, it was Clinton and a Republican Congress (the law passed in 1999). Those who want to adjust their outrage accordingly should do so. To me it still looks like an oversight that took eight years for anyone anywhere to catch.

Um... I'm a commie librul America-hatin' American like nobody's business, but I'm not sure this warrants all the chic pessimism.

This all seems to hinge on (a) whether a director is a "head of department" and (b) whether a patent judge is an "inferior officer" or an employee. Maybe that's a no-brainer to Appointments Clause experts, but I could see how it's the sort of thing you could have an opinion about, especially if you're one of a hundred lawyers drafting procedural legislation in cubicles.

As for the conspiracy angle, if it hadn't been Dubya's "Director of the Patent and Trade Office" making these nefarious appointments, it would have been his Secretary of Commerce (under the old law). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it doesn't really matter which one handled it, assuming there was some particular menace intended. But the one thing the article doesn't suggest is that anyone in particular had something to gain that could only have happened via this evil scheme.

Just because Dubya malevolently turns everything he touches to crap doesn't mean that this wasn't an honest oversight by a nonpartisan line attorney somewhere. Does anyone know of anything that even hints at something less innocent than that? Beyond "oh, well, patents are big money so the fix must automatically therefore be in."

Sure, it'll destroy the data (even after the feds cut the power before storming your compound), but then you're left with a hard-drive-destroying machine and the smoking remnants of a bunch of hard drives. That's going to look worse in court than the evidence you were trying to destroy!

What we need is a machine that will, at the push of a button, completely overwrite illegal or secret data with merely embarrassing or sensitive data. That way your flop sweat looks like a natural reaction to someone finding your .torrent files of Welcome Back Kotter and Big Breasted Amateurs Vol. XXX.

"STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER! We know it's got the stolen nuclear technology on it! I'll just take a look at your directory and... 180GB of Harry Potter slashfic?! Aw, man, somebody's playing a joke on you. Sorry about busting down your door, ya pervert."

What the--?! This is a travesty! My auto-generated ASCII robots were steampunk, for crying out loud!

The danger here is that spiders will follow the cat model with respect to kindnesses shown them.

First, they snub it. Then they accept it. Then all of a sudden you've got spiders jumping on your face in the middle of the night because it's YOUR job to fix the web, like RIGHT NOW.

You just know that when Grand Theft Auto V comes out, there's going to be a mission where you hijack a delivery truck full of brand new video games.

Those wooden gouges, at the bacterium-scale, are bristling with organic-molecular detritus that bacteria find extremely inhospitable. Distressed, treated wood is not a growth medium for germs.

Gouges in a plastic cutting board, by comparison, simply create little reservoirs that fill up with traces of chicken blood, buffalo offal, or whatever animal/bodily fluid combination is appropriate to your kitchen environment.

(The writer is a spokesman for the American Wood Cutting Board Advisory Council.)

@7: Fair enough. What confused me was the matter of market share, which would seem to be important to this kind of application--i.e., one that will need some attention and support going forward, not just something that you can wash your hands of once you've sold the software. But I can see how it would be offset by other considerations.

Leopard only? Yowch. Am I the only one who thinks that's an odd choice?

Takeshi,

Fair enough. I don't think anyone else would have gotten a $540 fine for the violation(s) described in the article; that's why I had a problem with this approach in the first place. If Portland really is handing down $540 in tickets or threatening arrest every time someone parks in a no-parking zone, then I think he should get the same treatment. But I doubt it.

@30,

I think you missed my point. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of parking tickets, and of cities issuing them, and of this citizen issuing one to this cop. A minor ticket for what sounds like a minor infraction, just like the kind you'd get in a big city. If this cop was parked halfway up the curb in a handicapped spot facing the wrong way, then yeah, I could see more tickets.

But no, I don't think it's a great idea for this guy to cite the officer for $540 worth of tickets given what he did, any more than I'd think it was a great idea for a police officer to arrest me every time I did 62 in a 55 zone, which they could legally do (at least in my present jurisdiction).

As a piece of civic activism this is all well and good, but I have to say that the punishment doesn't fit the crime here. Even in the most park-o-fascist places I've lived in, what the officer did would have gotten a $50 "stopped in a no stop zone" ticket, which is where this guy should have drawn the line.

I like the idea of policing the police, but there's more justice in showing some discretion than in trying to violate him for every conceivable law on the books. It's bad mojo when prosecutors lard on charges just to make a point, whether they're ordinary citizens or not.

I can't wait for the inevitable BB story about how an elephant taking photographs for distribution under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license gets hassled by a mall security guard.

Well, sure, but I've got eight people coming over for a soft-boiled egg luncheon in nine minutes. THANKS FOR NOTHING, SCIENCE.

#2: Whaddaya, some kinda wiseguy commie?

What I really want to know is how much time he had to spend filling out insurance paperwork when he got back.

Um, guys? There was no actual sorcerer Prospero or Prince Hamlet of Denmark, either. This is a parody! It's pretty funny, actually!

Them sixteenth notes is flagged th' wrong way!

Is it an especially good idea to have unpaid volunteer part-time police?

It seems like having your pictures deleted is about the smallest possible abuse of such a system, IF (and I have no idea how things like this work in the UK) they really are shielded from the consequences of their actions. To say nothing of the fact that it's hard to imagine that they're trained anywhere nearly as rigorously as proper police.

Every little bit of power needs to come with its own little bit of accountability.

@#14: Indeed, it's illegal NOT to buy them (srsly). If you're going to sell drugs, that is. You wouldn't want to be a tax cheat, would you?

If you're not going to sell drugs, it's still not illegal (since when does a government have a problem with you overpaying your taxes?) although yeah, your name will probably go on A List Somewhere. At least in Kansas, though, they're not allowed to ask your name or share that information with non-tax police. I dimly recall there might be some Fifth Amendment problem with them using your stamp-buying to bust you down the road, in which case the same rule applies nationwide, but it's the Gitmo Age, so exercise caution.

From what I recall of other articles on the subject, the Revenue Dept. or whoever sells them in your jurisdiction, only ever hears from stamp collectors and giggling kitsch fans, so they're pretty blase about it.

Semiotix says, “The block quote (and hence the HTML tag)
“ are the descendants of the old-timey newspaper practice of
“ running a line of open-quote marks down the left-hand column
“ of a long quote, so that people wouldn't forget that they were
“ reading a quote and not the narrator. That always struck me as a
“ snazzy-looking device, much more so than just empty space at
“ the margins, and I never miss a chance to advocate for its return."

What a scam! Not only is this not transferable, it's expired! Nice try, Morley S. Preppernau, but I'll purchase my illegal-drug tax stamps directly from the appropriate government agencies.

It doesn't pay to cheat, kids. What would happen if everyone tried to use black-market tax stamps to cheat the government? Why, the whole system would fall apart.

Okay okay okay. Obviously this book is two parts hilarious, nineteen parts sick and wrong.

But just for the record, cosmetic surgery isn't inherently evil, selfish, etc. I'll skip my "it happened to a friend of mine..." story because it's long and involved, but suffice it to say there are plenty of people out there getting "elective" cosmetic surgery whose lives are made unambiguously better by it. Not the cheesy made-for-basic-cable-reality show stuff, either, but stuff that's about as morally controversial as taking antibiotics for strep throat.

From what doctor friends tell me (although none of them are surgeons, so grain of salt) I get the feeling there's a lot more of that than drive-through liposuctions or booth-tanned trophy wives swapping out their C-cup implants for DDs.

I love how, at the end, they put up a little wooden sign on a stand in front of the doors. I imagine it says, in a nice italic script,

~ Please use caution ~
~ Elevator may hold you captive for days ~
~ The Management ~

@#17: no, it wasn't what I was trying to say.

The unquestioning belief that [GROUP] is the root of all evil is what makes [OTHER GROUP] a [WORD MEANING "BAD THING"].

Pat Robertson and Chris Hitchens both demonize the Other, one perverting what he calls "faith" and the other abusing what he calls "reason" to do so. In reality, they're doing what they damn well please in spite of, or perhaps because, it hurts other people. It's ugly tribalism and it has fuck all to do with what Jesus or Plato said about this or that.

Allison the Average Atheist and Thomas the Typical Theist, the middle 99%, get along fine in the culture I live in. In cultures where they don't, it's because someone told them that Other Group was bad/evil/stupid/crazy/irrational/sinful/morons/etc.

@#14: I'm an atheist, in the literal sense. I do not believe in god(s). I'll swear it on a Bible, if you like. (Kidding!) I think Christians, to name just one religion, can easily comprehend such a thing. Obviously they don't share my stance on it, by definition.

When you say, "Atheism isn't a religion or a cause. It's a simple stance..." I agree. Wholeheartedly.

The reason I get all het up about these "New Atheists" is that I tend to think that Dawkins et al are trying to make it a cause, and not a particularly attractive one. I really, emphatically, desperately don't want to have my simple non-belief co-opted into (or confused with) a movement that so closely mirrors the objective and tactics of religious dominionists.

Starcadia,

Fair enough, but bear in mind that there are those of us who are proud to call ourselves atheists in the literal sense of the word--that is, not adhering to a theistic understanding of things--without going to Dawkins' book-signings.

That's what really pisses me off about them--not just the intolerance and hypocrisy, but the fact that they're muddying up what ought to be a totally innocuous (non)belief. They're turning it into capital-A "Atheism," a Big Issue about which you have to Take Sides in the Coming War for Truth.

Wouldn't you know it, it's exactly the thing that pissed off my Christian friends about the televangelists of the 1980s (and beyond).

Huh. I guess I'm a sophist, because I do tend to think that most of the "New Atheists" and their acolytes are fundamentalists by another name, complete with holy books, a smugness and condescension born of the knowledge of their personal salvation, and a screeching intolerance of heresy. BUT, I guess it's something of an oversimplification, and like any analogy you can pick it to death if you try hard enough.

Still, it's an interesting read. It's amazing that so many of "religion's" self-appointed Inquisitors can't distinguish between an individual's belief and its larger social manifestation, or can't grasp that there might be more than one social or political movement arising from something as big and diffuse as, say, Christianity. Or can't understand that there might be a Catholic (or a few hundred million of them) who are just fine with birth control. Etc.

Good for this guy for getting that, and for saying so. Of course, he's got to prove he's still one of the cool kids, so you get the obligatory taunts at "religion's preposterous epistemology and its hypocritical morality"--ha, take that, um, Religion! (The unintended irony of that kind of bluster mixed in with Chick tracts is great.) But of all the self-important ranters about religion (pro and con) I've seen recently, this is easily the most nuanced.

Anything that helps get the vast majority of us who coexist nicely out of the line of fire between Dawkins/Hitchens and Falwell/Robertson is fine with me.

(PS: I'm an atheist. That means atheists who disagree with me should call me a traitor and theists who disagree with me should call me a useful idiot, NOT the other way around, please.)

John Brownlee,

I've spent a good portion of the last two years paging through forty years worth of pre-WWII SF pulps for a doctoral dissertation on... well, actually, pretty much what this picture is about. Radioactive bric-a-brac and cultural attitudes encoded therein yadda yadda yadda. (That's a working title.)

I can't give you chapter and verse just now, but yes, the "worlds within the atom" trope predates "The Incredible Shrinking Man" by a few decades at least, so this ad might have been echoing that.

Incidentally, I know a lot of BBers are vintage SF fans, and if you want to stay that way, I heartily recommend that you stick to SMALL DOSES ONLY. Like radiation damage, the harm done to your brain by the cheap boilerplate crud in Awesome Space Wonder Stories Quarterly Digest is cumulative and eventually debilitating.

Are those keyword tags at the bottom? If so, that's what makes it genius and not just amusing.

I'm very disappointed to hear that the "Text entered was wrong" message is simply an indication of some sort of login error.

I've gotten the message several times, and, assuming that it was autogenerated in response to wrong ideas, have modified my beliefs (and comments) accordingly until I reached--so I thought--right text, and therefore right thinking.

Now you tell me that I haven't been engaged in a Socratic struggle for truth all this past week? That I changed my beliefs for no reason?! Well, thanks for nothing.

You say you want to help in the war effort? Very well. We'll need you to do arithmetic for 16 hours a day in your underwear. Come now, stiff upper lip and all that. There's a good girl.

@24: I mistakenly self-censored because I mistakenly thought I'd gotten the "wrong text" message for calling Rep. Davis an asshole. (Looks like it was an HTML thing instead.) Sorry to be the cause of further self-censorship on the part of others.

As for the rest of you--well, hey, no one expects to be able to reason bigots out of their bigotry, because bigotry is deeply rationalized. Every time a black man is in the news for having committed a crime, Rush Limbaugh is beside himself with joy because it proves what he knew about them all along. Could you point out the flaw in that thinking? Sure, but you wouldn't expect to make much headway. So it goes with every form of bigotry. Even the "good ones" are suspect, crazy, weird, different, other.

Dominionist assholes like Rep. Davis aren't representative of theists any more than heterosexual rapists are representative of heterosexuals. If it's an article of faith for you to believe otherwise, don't let me get in the way of your dogma. But don't expect me to be thrilled that someone on my "team" thinks just like she does.

Also, I'd just like to toss this out there: "invisible sky wizard" is roughly in the same connotative space as n****r.

It's something you say when you want to get a little rush out of dehumanizing someone who's not part of your clan. It's a little like saying, "You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying."

Bigotry is as bigotry does.

What an [unprintable word referring to the end stage of the digestive system.] What a perfect little [unprintable word] Rep. Davis is. She should be ashamed of herself.

However.

As an atheist concerned about how atheism is represented to a society in which we are neither the majority nor terribly well-understood, I am BEGGING any people who share that non-belief in divinity to avoid making the same [unprintable word] mistake that Rep. Davis did. Please, please, PLEASE do not externalize evil onto Christians or believers of whatever stripe.

Bigotry is bigotry, and I'd like to keep the moral high ground, thanks very much.

[My "text entered was wrong," too. Hope this is the right text!]

Taking a picture in the hall outside the building are prohibited?! An outrage it are! Many boingboing.net are posts to be about carry list of rights of photographers in publics places. Cory Doctorow: it shall hear about this.

Adding, since #19 posted his/her comment while I was writing mine:

These sorts of things don't exist for calculus classes (etc.) because the only thing stopping a Calc student from buying a calculus text on his own and "unethically" learning the material that way is the fact that it's ALWAYS easier to let the professor teach it to you directly. Ditto with basic physics, intro chem., etc.--anything where the evaluation is based on learning an immutable process or fixed series of elements, rather than synthesizing a complex bunch of differentially-related facts, theories, interpretations, etc.

That's not to say it's easy to learn the immutable rules of calculus, which is why we award credit for those classes. If you could pass a calculus exam by rote memorization of someone's notes, then yeah, the professor involved would be a hack, because the questions would have to be something like "What definition of derivative did I put up on the board?" or "What answer did I get when we did this problem in class?"

#13 stole my thunder (or at least violated my intellectual property rights to that thunder) so I'll just say this: professors who administer their courses in such a way that purchasing such a summary is of any use whatsoever aren't worth employing in the first place.

He could solve this problem by publishing his own annotated lecture notes online, and saying on the first day of class, "I triple-dog dare you to try to pass this course by memorizing the raw content of these notes." If he's got a course worth teaching, and if he's willing to put five minutes into revising his exams or assignments so that they measure the understanding of someone who comes to class and listens to what he says, then that's that. And as a bonus, it weeds out the profoundly lazy student who thinks that these expensive doodles are worth anything in the first place.

But there's a wrinkle here--the suit isn't being filed by him, but by a publisher of some sort to whom he's assigned his "copyright." So it may be that he's mad that they're not buying HIS warmed-over notes.

It's crap like this that made Anthrax (the band) change their name to Basket Full of Puppies.

I've never once parsed it correctly. Whenever the subject of CERN comes up (and in my line of work it's fairly often) I titter like a schoolgirl.

If you hold down the "t" key during the start screen you get unlimited ammo, which makes beating the crypt level a lot easier.

I don't begrudge this fellow his day in court, but I think it's inappropriate to issue a prior injunction absent much stronger proof.

If the experiment goes wrong and the earth is sucked into a black hole or parallel universe and destroyed, then let him claim actual damages. That's why we have civil courts, after all.

I'm not sure this wouldn't cause more problems than it solves.

I would imagine surgeons are lecture-d, seminar-ed, memorandum-ed, and otherwise COMPLETELY forewarned about the dangers of sponge-leaving and the massive slam-dunk lawsuits that follow from it. It happens anyway because you can always have a careless moment.

If you can remember to record a sponge going in infallibly (which is the assumption all this rests on), you can remember to take it out infallibly--and if that were true, we wouldn't need the device in the first place.

Worse, I'd worry that an EXTRA sponge got recorded (inadvertent double-click or something) and that I was left open while a panicky surgeon poked around my organs looking for a non-existent sponge.

Amirite? Any surgical types out there?

Oh, come on. Cooper's done all the damage he can ever do (at least with respect to this particular caper, and probably in any sense ever again). At this point, pure conspiracy-theory/urban legend fun is all we have left, and the discovery of this parachute means there's a LOT MORE of it to be had!

I insist that Mark change the headline to "CIA: suspicious radiation readings, French-Russian dictionaries discovered in vicinity of D.B. Cooper's parachute."

A wise man once said, "There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it." I suppose keeping hospitals solvent is a fairly "right" cause.

I'd like to nominate "...somehow, the matrix..." as the least confidence-inspiring phrase ever to appear in a scientific explanation of anything.

Dammit, I thought it said "gaily colored monocle." I've been waiting years for those to come back into style!

This point has been made many times already, but I always think it's worth repeating: let's say you're not just innocent, you're super-duper beyond-the-moon innocent, and you can and will prove it a hundred different ways. Let's say you can get affidavits from three ex-presidents and Jesus. Let's say you're a two-year-old. Imagine the most innocent conceivable person.

You can never be taken off such a list--not because it implies someone made a mistake in putting you on, but because it implies they MIGHT make a mistake in letting the next person off. If you can get a letter from your Congressman, so can Osama bin Whatsisname, the terrorist sleeper agent.

And by a similar token, the list itself can never be discarded, because it REALLY DOES include the names of actual terrorists (including some who died in the 9/11 planes, but hey). Now that we have the technology to detect if Mohammed Atta is renting a car, we're never going to give it up, even though we know we should.

Uh... we're ABSOLUTELY SURE this is a joke... right?

I have no intention of ever criminally trespassing or vandalizing anything, but if I ever decide to do it, I'm going to start with this guy's property first. Seriously, there's antisocial and then there's this.

Just wait until the local high-schoolers find out about the awesome fun they can have setting off this guy's chicken-shit cannons. Assuming it even works at all, I bet a homebuilt automatic mechanical defense system is about as dangerous as attacking that guy who's had one martial arts class and can throw you as long as you stand perfectly still and let him get into position first.

These guys are fantastic. I sent them an envelope stuffed full of small-denomination, nonsequential bills, and my arsenic ring was delivered to my mail drop, no questions asked.

It's all fun and games until the "random" keystrokes are "sudo rm -rf *"...

Actually, you could probably charge triple for that device.

Saw it on House.
Saw it on Grey's Anatomy.
Saw it on E.R.

Come on, real life. You're going to need to be a lot more creative if you want me to stop watching 14 hours of television a day.

@14: Aww, you took my clever movie quote. Shucks. (Although without a hundred dollars American and a prophylactic, you'd have to be creative.)

"and it'll never trick the dog by making it think you threw the ball, even though you didn't."

That's a bug. Version 2.0 will correct this.

They did it on The Tonight Show too, which is a personal least-favorite, because the new Johnny Carson doesn't look ANYTHING like the original.

That just grabbed some part of my brain like a vise. I don't know what it is, and I can't say it's a pleasant feeling, but holy crap was that riveting.

All I can guess is that at some point in our monkey ancestry squeezing zits must have been absolutely vital to our survival.

My LOL. Let me show u it.

I say we make it fight the Canadarm.

Since when has the rule of law meant squat to this administration?

Never, but there's absolutely no reason to believe there are any Bush administration politics involved here, or that boneheaded contract lawyers looking to run up billable hours would be acting any differently under any other president.

I believe him when he says he didn't mean to kill it, although he was obviously caught up enough in being a violent sadistic asshole to not think through the consequences of trying really hard to hit a small animal with a golf ball.

Still... hitting a hawk from 75 yards?! Shit, his punishment is that he just used up a lifetime's worth of luck on one swing. If he were that good, someone would have heard of him by now.

It's too bad he survived. I don't say that to be cruel, but because "I didn't realise crocs were so aggressive" would have been some truly stellar last words, well worth a horrible and early death.

""Experience the visco-elastic properties of simulated tissue," said Hollis at one point."

Sold.

This is a tech-update site that might include nudity?! I always thought it was just a really easily distracted porn site!

Can I get my membership fee refunded?

It's not the odd-seeming photographers you need to be worried about. It's that odd-seeming police call box that keeps materializing everywhere.

The delicate part is how to do this without making the government look soft on witchcraft.

Jesus, remind me never to take a class from Professor Dan. By my calculations, even with 100% perfect conversion, it should take a mass on the order of an aircraft carrier raised ten kilometers against the Earth's gravity to generate the surplus assholery in that post. I suspect he's surreptitiously using an external power source.

I don't know if it works, but from seeing that commercial I'm now disturbed by the possibility that we (as a society) are not using epoxy putty to its full potential.

Billy Mays doesn't just glue a coffee cup handle back on--he makes a whole NEW handle out of putty. Maybe we could make the whole CUP out of putty. Maybe we could make the whole KITCHEN out of putty. Maybe we could make SEATTLE out of putty.

Am I crazy? Or are alien explorers going to be digging through our ruins a few hundred years hence, saying "The fools! They had mastered epoxy putty technology. Yet they stubbornly clung to their pre-putty ways, and in the end, destroyed themselves!"

Dirty bomb survival would go something like this.

1. Are you dead from the force of the explosion itself? If no, then
2. You have survived a dirty bomb, unless
3. You own property in the area, in which case you're probably looking at severe emotional distress.

But seriously, my dissertation is all about radioactive whatnot and how people react to it, and so I've been steeped in crazy bomb-lore for years, and I can't figure out why keeping your mouth open is important. So strontium-90 doesn't lodge in your nasal passages?

"...so you have my permission to steal my body and bury it in an unmarked grave."

Way ahead of you. But good to know you're on board with the plan. Do we have an ETA yet on, you know, the starting point? I've put the lilac seeds in the fridge, but the package says they'll either germinate or go bad in six months anyway.

Oh, sure, the temes are gonna get us, but we'll be avenged when the temes fall to the remes, who in turn will be superseded by the lemes, who of course will form the building blocks of the zemes.

Buy my futurist book on the subject for $39.95 hardcover! I've got a Ph.D. and everything.

I'm in complete agreement with David Carroll, although his username is infringing on the trademark rights of a guy I went to college with. (His lawyers will be in touch.)

Off the top of my head, this place is violating your trademark, service mark, implied patents, and several of your notoriously wide-reaching EULAs. They're also looking at legal nastygrams over deceptive trade practices, incursion on your airspace, and emotional distress. Come to think of it, I'm emotionally distressed by this. Anyone for a class action suit?

Anyway, here's my advice: get a court order forcing them to set up a website publicly disavowing any connection, and then serve their provider with a DCMA takedown notice. After all, you have to protect your good name!

@#10: They do the keycard-light thing in UK hotels, too, which I found out several years ago. After fifteen minutes of flipping every switch and pressing every button in all combinations and permutations, I finally admitted defeat and went down to the front desk. I said, "As you know, I'm an American tourist and very stupid. Can you explain to me how to operate the lights in my room?"

I thought that addressing the matter that way would save me from having a hotel clerk purr condescension at me in an accent so upper-crust it would make the Queen weep, but I was wrong. "Are you quite sure you'll be able to manage it, sir? Shall I send someone up to look after you?" This was at a £30-a-night Travelodge, mind you.

What the--?! Safer than nuclear, my ass!

This sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. I assume they're prepared to follow all the relevant regulations for public performances--permitting, different fire inspection and safety laws, different and probably higher taxation, and so forth. I also assume they're in compliance with zoning laws (most municipalities have a special code for retail food) and that this won't jeopardize their food or liquor license. And, of course, no doubt they've checked to make sure that their waitstaff can still accept tips, can still be paid at the foodservice employee sub-minimum, and aren't subject to (or are in compliance with) local collective bargaining agreements for performing artists. That's the obvious stuff. Their tax lawyer is going to charge them triple overtime figuring out which taxes to collect, if any, but maybe they've got that base covered too.

Actually, I don't mind them dabbling some, ahem, theatrics, especially if they think a little short-term profit is worth the inevitable crackdown. But it is a little sickening to see them play-act as a helpless, oppressed minority heroically engaging in civil disobedience. They're just hoping people won't hold it against them that they're profiting at the expense of bars that wouldn't break the law. Hey, they're probably right.

There had been some questions about how a kid-friendly game would protect itself from the inevitable legion of outsized LEGO phalluses

I'm still wondering how to protect myself, in the real world, from legions of giant LEGO phalluses. It's kind of a long story.

As an extremely poor collector, I volunteer. I can offer $20 and a student pass good through September on Madison, WI city buses (don't worry, they never check IDs).

Holy shit.

Not that it should matter in a humanitarian situation, but was this baby American Samoan (i.e., a US national) or a citizen of the state of Samoa? Either way I'm glad our all-powerful Delegate is involved, but if the baby was American Samoan this just might actually get some attention in the media.

Well, there's still the House yet, and the Senate again after it comes out of conference. I'm not saying it looks good, but it's not a done deal yet.

MKULTRA: you're projecting emotional baggage, yes, and that's all well and good. But it doesn't follow that "this is nothing more than a physical act."

One reason to have anonymous and/or for-pay sex is because, even though you believe EVERY other option to be better, this is the ONLY one available to you. That probably does happen, and it probably does make the people in that situation a little sad.

However--not everyone's sexual schema is set up that way. Not every sex worker is miserable (or miserable because of her or his job), and not every client or Craigslister is acting out of desperation or the rutting instinct.

I can feel my brain tying itself in knots as it tries to unravel the fractal-like layers of innuendo on that cover.

I'm not sure what the people funding this project were thinking.

"Welcome to Travelodge! We hope you have a restful night's stay with us. You'll want to put on these special anti-itch pajamas, though."

Gandalf23 quoted someone who said: Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force.

Okay, I'll buy that for now. Hypothetically, let's say the jurisdiction you live in banned personal guns, by a majority vote of duly elected legislators yadda yadda yadda. If you don't yield to their reasoning about gun control, in short order they're going to come, armed with guns, to take away your gun by force.

Just as a baseline for understanding your stance on guns and people, what do you do in that situation? I'm making some common-sense assumptions in this hypothetical, for instance that "if you don't like it, leave" isn't any more viable an option for you than for most people. Basically, the choice you face in this hypothetical is between keeping your guns and keeping a tenable place in society.

The reason I ask is that certain abstract or idealized projections about things like force, power, politics, etc. play better together than others. There's the Nietzschean übermensch, and then there's a guy with a mortgage. You like guns, and you've got a philosophy going where they're not only unproblematic but practically a moral imperative--fair enough. I'm just curious which you'd throw overboard first, if we changed the parameters slightly--the guns or the rationale for having guns.

No wrong answers, no gotcha! response from me. I can have an internet-style "debate" about guns on any website. Really just curious.

That's terrible news about the Museum of Useful Things. Now where am I going to go when I need a can of the special oil for my authentic reproduction three-point-mount manual pencil sharpener, or pre-cut high-traction felt nubbins for the bottom of my 1938 Remington manual typewriter?

Seriously, that store was great--it really was part museum. They should make a real museum with not-for-sale exhibits of the sort of things they sold.

The following activation-termination pairs would be (and possibly were) perfectly acceptable 1973-era porn movie titles:

CHINAMAN ORGY
SCARCELY FECUND
FOUNDRY CREEPER
BACKDOOR GABARDINE
DAISY ISLAND
SITUATE LAYMAN
LOVESICK BREECHES
SOFA PADDLER
RUBY TAGTAIL
ZIGZAG CLARINET
LOVELORN ANVIL
OINTMENT FOLLOWER
JOHNSON TRANSFORM
HALFCOCKED VANCOUVER
DELUXE KENNEL
UNMELTED LASHING
and, lastly, UNETHICAL SCOTTY (which I believe starred VENETIA SERRULATE)

That is all.

As a left-hander, I'm fascinated by this. I'd die of transdermal smudge-ink poisoning before I got halfway through something like this.

Katydid whatnow?!

Seriously, though, this needs to be reported to the NSA.

Well, great--now we have to go hat in hand to Uncle Pierre every time we get the sniffles. Curse our shortsightedness in letting the French corner the lucrative seawater market!

RyanH--you write,

"Any time I say something nice about the laptop or Apple's service people roll their eyes and assume I'm some kind of fanboy."

But then you go on for a whole other paragraph about how great a job Apple did replacing your fan. You're literally an Apple fan-boy! Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Don't worry. The animals won't stand for this kind of oppressive, unfair treatment, and they'll stage a successful revolt, led by the pigs.

Of course, after that, things will get pretty bleak for them.

REMUNERATE! REMUNERATE! REMUNERATE! The appropriate subway fare for entry, that is.

I haven't read this book (which must surely be interesting if only for its subject matter) but I was expecting a comment like Smithereens' above.

The archetypal magician was (and is) a sensitive, withdrawn, highly intelligent boy who used tricks and a stage persona to compensate for shyness. From there it's a short step to manipulating people on a grander and grander scale--anecdotally, at least, you can't find a "con man" or other social-engineering type who doesn't know a dozen great card tricks. Of course, there are plenty of people who end up using their insights into how humans work for "good" as with Randi, Jilette, and apparently this guy.

But if you look at that class, it's pretty clear that familiarity with how the brain works has bred a great deal of contempt. If you've ever seen your local IT guy simmering with rage over having to work with inadequate equipment, you get some idea of how Randi et al approach people with harmless but irrational beliefs. Actually, I should say you get the idea if you've ever seen an Inquisitor sitting in judgment over an apostate, but they're curiously resistant to the idea that there are elements of religion to what they do--all empirical evidence notwithstanding.

Eeek. I was actually okay (in practice, if not in principle) with retroactive immunity, because I couldn't be sure that the telecoms weren't simply yielding to the threat of a jackboot upside the head if they didn't go along. I guess this pretty much blows that out of the water.

On the other hand, maybe now the government will finally do something about the ridiculous fees that phone monopolies charge for illegal services. I can just see Dubya trying to decipher the bill. "$8.42 for an 'expedited miscellaneous service charge overage fee'? What the hell does that even mean?!"

This is indeed a troubling account, and one that casts serious doubt on the wisdom and legality of the CPD's actions. If she was, indeed, not in any way knowingly acting on behalf of the police, it's somewhat less disturbing--but we're still left with what looks like an awfully wasteful use of police resources in a city that can barely keep order in the streets as it is. Columbus is at a tipping point where some intensive, community-based policing on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis could keep them away from a major meltdown, and these guys are staking out topless women.

That said, it is also easily the most interesting thing to happen to Columbus in decades.

" The object retains the heat memory of a previous user and displays it as a visual marker for the next user to assess.”

I'm pretty sure that's some sort of subtle visual pun.

I have to say, the full version of that memo would make a pretty great chapter in a pretty great drama textbook. It was clear, cogent, and authoritative. If Reed just dashed that off, he missed his calling (and I've seen what he did with the calling he chose).

Argle bargle blegh. All other races are inferior to the Turkmen. Cory Doctorow's unicorn fetish is an open secret among the patrons of the opium dens he frequents.

I am grateful to be among the most highly compensated non-employee commenters in Boing Boing history, and although my comments are nonsensical, offensive, and libelous, I am making literally infinitely less money for commenting here than I did last year as a teaching assistant.

I write a blog, and then draw notes and doodles about what's on the screen, and then put those in a portfolio that I keep on my coffee table. But does my art get any attention from the techno-elite? Nooooooo.

Just kidding, this is great. Thanks. And I'm not just saying that because I'm afraid of retribution, although I am.

I can't wait until I can get my copy of an Officially Pirated Document, preferably with leather covers and an embossed, hand-numbered certificate signed by an Antiguan government official, certifying that this copy of Bridget Jones' Diary was ripped off under the auspices of international law.

I'm serious--how awesome would it be to have a bona fide legal Antiguan knockoff? I'd gladly pay ten times face value of a book, and I bet I'm not alone. Of course, that would probably create a demand for imitation Antiguan piracies. I wonder if Antigua is entitled to trademark protection on that?

The supplemental article says that "[p]hone calls flooded the Tribune from readers, hoping to be the first to connect the dots and nab the Christmas Grinch."

Truly amazing. Who knew that anyone, let alone a "flood" of people, was actually reading local newspapers that carefully?

Step 11: make her open the box... and that's the way you do it!

Heyyyyy... isn't it your job to convince us we need that $2,000 DSLR?

;)

As a former UPJ faculty brat, let me assure you that there is not much better to do with your time there than cultivate amusing eccentricities.

I think I've been spending too much time on the internet, because the first thing I thought of when I saw this incredible picture was OM NOM NOM NOM.

And what happened then? Well, in Who-ville they say /
That his anus distended three sizes that day!

Arto--there's no need to panic. You can always read a cursed scroll of genocide. Besides, hunting floating eyes teaches kids the value of ranged weapons, and how dangerous passive paralysis attacks can be. And of course there's no better way to get the telepathy intrinsic.

So, what's this "Warcraft" people are talking about?

Futzing around with kerning and justification is the hallmark of the worst kind of preening amateur poet. This so-called artist brings nothing to his or her art, visually or rhetorically. (The writer, I mean, not the photographer.) Even the carefully posed line of esses, which I assume was the point of the right-justifying, leaves me as cold as the winter snow on which it sits.

Now, Edna St. Vincent Millay could write a sign-poem:

Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
59 cents for Wonder™ Bread.

This is going to completely change the way we do things at my Gentlemen's Society for the Re-Enactment of 19th-Century Fisticuffs, Rough-Housing, and Belligerent Disportment.

Note to self: when sharing a public restroom with Mark Frauenfelder, take notice of whether or not he's got his camera out.

Just kidding. Actually, I'm having fun imagining the wacky sitcom antics that would have ensued if someone had walked in on you taking that picture. "Oh, no, I just-- there was a cockroach, and-- you see, I write for this offbeat webzine thing, so--"

The fine print is troubling:

"The tastiness of this item is disputed. Please see the waiter for a discussion. It has been suggested that this item be merged with 'an order of spring rolls.'"

Personalized Sharpies? Meh.

Personalized Shar-Peis? NOW you're talking.

Given the rising popularity of name-cognate Sierra Mist, Mountain Dew would be better off protecting its flanks rather than grabbing predicate nouns at random.

Otherwise, as someone pointed out a while ago, it's merely a matter of time before they're competing with "Hillock Moisture," too.

Dog, cat, kitten, puppy, leash, collar, food, shop, and especially "name pet"--this wasn't designed by a 7-year-old, it was designed by a NetHack player.

Boing Boing noticed me! This is without question the high point of my year. Yeah, I know.

To clarify:

* I am a "snooty college professor." Well, as of next August, anyway. At the moment it'd be more accurate to call me an "insufferable teaching assistant." (But audiophile... man, that's low!)
* I'm not in food sciences or any other science.
* I'm absolutely full of BS.
* I stand by my definition.

@Logicaldash:

Do novelists type for hours without pausing for any reason, even to think about spelling or word choice? Does anyone? I still can't get past the idea that "you can type faster this way" doesn't really have a practical manifestation. I could drive my clunker of a car 2,400 miles in a day if it weren't for speed limits, traffic, and having to stop for gas and bathroom breaks and sleep. But since I do have to deal with those things, a car that could go 200 mph wouldn't get me where I'm going any faster.

It may be that my brain-buffer is just unusually small, and that other people are seeing what they're writing pages in advance and just waiting for their fingers to catch up. But I'm a little skeptical.

Crispy things are compressible and striated. Air or some other interstitial medium is essential for crispiness.

Crunchy things are solid and may cleave in any number of planes. In a rigid food, crunchiness is the absence of crispiness.

These elements give rise to the epiphenomena other food-ontologists have already noted (higher pitch from the sound of something crispy being chewed, as a function of its lower mass per unit volume; greater resistance in crunchy foods, as a consequence of the covalent bonds that characterize them, versus the van der Waals forces at work between layers of crisped foods).

How often have you found yourself in a situation where the only thing standing between you and some kind of accomplishment was 20 or 30 extra wpm of typing speed? How many more blog posts, novels, prefaces to the Esperanto edition of Scroogled would that have netted you? None, unless your writing practice is to sit down at a keyboard and type in unbroken strings for hours at a time.

Don't do it, man. At this point it would probably require rewiring so many neurons that you'd forget how to breathe.

To me, it sounds like the Latin name for an organism. I recommend that the next newly evolved strain of bacterium we find be designated c. design proponensis regardless of its actual place in the taxonomy.

This scenario is premised on the following conversation NOT happening on a regular basis:

ELOI #1: Ew, check out that Morlock guy over there.
ELOI #2: Yeah, he's all big and hairy and uncultured.
ELOI #1: And he's all sweaty and gross.
ELOI #2: So gross. So gross he's... kind of hot.
ELOI #1: Back off, I saw him first.

So no, I don't think we're going to be splitting off into two subspecies any time soon.

Yeah, but the dry erase cheese is really expensive. That's how they get you.

It's not hard to see where this is going. Maybe not with StormWorm, but eventually we're going to see Secretaries of State flying to Iceland or Malta or wherever to conduct high-level treaty negotiations with l33t haxx0rs.

I bet Neal Stephenson is pumped!

Oops, I screwed up my pronouns in the post above. When I say "I'm sure he's in favor of *it* in principle" I mean the concept of fair use, not necessarily reforming it.

Permission is granted without restriction and in perpetuity to sneer at people who write so sloppily.

My problem with this isn't that an orangutan has the hots for human women... it's that his tastes are so banal. Honestly, Sibu... tattooed blondes? That's the most outré fetish you could come up with? Don't they have the internet at your zoo?

I guess having an opposable thumb and a rudimentary grasp of tool use doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run your freak flag more than halfway up the mast.