Yeah right. Magic dildo, my ass.

Yes, but what about the 69th Imperial Legion cloned from Janga Fett.

So what would the special controller for adult interactive software look like?

I'm a fan of bread picks, those little plastic things that keep loaf bags closed

Those are called occlupanids:
http://www.horg.com/horg/intro.html

It's a nice design, but calling it "true tensegrity" is a bit of a misnomer.

(cable actuated) != (tensegrity)

In post-9/11 America, the camera take picture of you!

@1 TOMSERVOJR, It would probably be pretty easy to hack one of these shake-rechargeable flashlights into a foot bouncing batter recharger.

http://www.amazon.com/Flashlight-Magnetic-Induction-Bright-Rechargeable/dp/B000637LTY

I'd love to see the forensic detectives going over the crime scene where the Vibram Fivefingers Gang has struck again. "Hmmm, this seems to be the work of a gang of barefoot aliens."

Since ugly bags of mostly water are known to attract bugs, perhaps attractive bags of 100% water are enough of a contrast to repel them.

In Russia, smuggled iPhone uses YOU!

Here is an interesting article on the future suburban slums.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

@22 Kingzilch, I know what you mean.

I do my best to be compassionate and to create peace, but if I got mugged, my instinct would be to kick the person's ass and if not that then I'd still be really pissed off. Intellectually, I know peace is the best path, but it's much harder to change habitual, emotional behaviors especially when you're being threatened or victimized. That makes what this guy did all the more remarkable. We all have to make compassion our habitual behavior in small and large things, if the world is going to improve. I'm the first to admit that I personally have a long way to go.

Just don't pack this in your luggage for your next airplane trip...

Don't forget about pooping. Be sure to know what the human waste rules are for the area where you will be. Hopefully, you can get by with just TP and a plastic trowel.

Agree with #8 about the tarp. Also, if it does rain, tarp+cord can make a covered area around your tent so you don't have to stay inside the tent all day, and if you are clever about it, you can use it to collect rainwater. Happy camping!

Porn, especially elf-porn, is indeed a "wonderful thing".

I'm always amused by the snarky faux disclaimers in "This American Life" along the lines of "there is no actual sex in this story but it does acknowledge the existence of sex."

It's sort of like "note to dumb people: you are dumb"

I want to use that thing to shoot Spock's body into space.

I met this guy a few years back when he was did a presentation about his balloonhat calendar. Talented, down to earth, and awful nice.

evilgenius@#33 I sincerely hope you are kidding.

Yoko Ono once again shows that she is a class act and a cool lady, through and through.

Oh man, this is disgusting.

Even worse, I've heard that the young of certain creatures latch on to the thorax of the mother animal and suck liquid right out of their mother like a parasite.

Isn't that horrible?

Or every time you travel just shove an arbitrarily large random chunk of archive.org's 18 billion sites into your browser history.

How about a little script that starts autogenerating browser history with semi-randomly generated urls. "So you've visited 10 websites today... no wait, 100... um 1,000? What? 10,000 websites?"

On one of the threads posted by micah@23, one traveller mentioned that the customs agent did a *.jpg search on his harddrive and browsed them as thumbnails. I think everyone should have a folder packed with 10,000 1kb jpegs. I would gladly sacrifice a measly 10 megs to give the fools something to wade through.

Always have the phone number of your local ACLU chapter programmed into your phone.
http://www.aclu.org/affiliates/

I suspect that just off screen, he has successfully bagged a giant barrel of high fructose corn syrup which, when properly dried and cured, should provide this rugged frontiersman adequate provisions for the brutal winter to come.

@25 Well, that is all well and good but let's face it, an endorsement from Shatner would equal a vote from me.

Video aside, what about the lyrics to the song? "She's the beast inside your paradise...
A fallen angel..." Perhaps this is proof that she is the anti-Christ and her rise to power foretells the coming Rapture. Or not. In any case, a very questionable musical choice.

"Shadow unit" sounds like the punchline for a dirty joke about ninjas.

And before all of those people, Leibniz realized we are brains in jars, and before him Plato wasn't satisfied with just staring at shadows of the real world, and before him Siddhārtha Gautama cut right through all this samsara BS. Just goes to show that the eternal epistemological and metaphysical questions will remain questions no matter the modern context in which they are framed.

And enjoy our new arithmoquinification salad bar!

@#4, tubman: I think "Vibration White Finger" will be the name of my next band.

Re:#1 >I also like the deathly pallor of his fingers

Zombies need lovin', too.

Noen@24 I think he used the term "our" to differentiate between the indigenous people in her/his region (South America) as opposed to "our" region (North America).

Sort of like saying our self-righteous people versus their self righteous people ;P

I wonder what is going to happen when "intelligent design" tattos start getting added to the set.

bizket@#2 it's not Christmas music

porn@#4 interesting idea but that doesn't appear to be Kline's intended experience. The designed-in "errors" are part of the interesting happenstances that occur. But if flash mobs are your thing, then unsilent night probably is not.

Sadly, I'll have to miss the SF event this year, but if you haven't been you don't really know what you are missing.

It references an Improv Everywhere prank conducted at Best Buy. I don't know if that counts as parody per se but there is definitely a connection between Best Buy and Imrov Everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtBU0fNk3qE

#2 Will Shetterly--I respectfully suggest that we not hijack this tribute by starting a political/policy discussion.

Though I did not know Anita, she sounds like a wonderful person who touched many lives.

That's nothing new. My dad bought a contraption like this about 30 years ago that rolled the newspapers into a log shape. It didn't work well at all and we never used it again.

I guess not so much with the teaching kids not to play with plastic bags.

Whether Cank was kidding or not, s/he's wrong! Of course people saw dinosaurs. Cavemen lived side by side dinosaurs after the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. Duh!

Reminds me of a lot of beautifully engraved arms & armor especially from the Renaissance.

Thank you, Garrett for making me a better person. Your comment has redoubled my efforts to monkeywrench the new world order. Give yourself a pat on the back. And you are free to assume or challenge whatever you want about me, I am going to assume that you are not as self-righteous in person as you come across on this forum. But if you really intend to conduct yourself online by judging not merely the words but the personal and moral worth, context, and intent of every single person you encounter, then good luck to you with that. Let us know how it works out for you.

And I don't know how long you have been reading boingboing, but in addition to lolcats BB consistently deals with civil liberties issues in a serious and principled manner, especially where it crosses over with technology issues. Maybe that is your cup of tea. Perhaps you can convince Mark, Cory, et al to change their personal and intellectual interests to match yours. Again, good luck with that.

Ceronomus: you say people should already be outraged enough that they don't need to see the video? Now that is just dumb. Okay, that is a bit harsh. But it is lazy.

Every single article I have read on the incident has been extremely vague about the specific details and chain of events. Perhaps once you reach your "outrage threshold" your intellectual curiosity magically evaporates. Mine does not. Seeing the video really helped me to understand the level of the guy's behavior and to adjust or verify my previous knowledge and conclusions.

I am certainly not making any judgments for everyone, but you seem to be. I am stating that there may be a legitimate desire/purpose to view this distribute/view the video outside of the prurient. You seem to be the one that wishes to enforce their judgment on every single other reader of boingboing.

One of the "wonderful" things about the internet is the wide availability of primary source material so that everyone can make informed judgments on their own without filtering from official sources.

Don't take that away from me, bro.

Regarding the appropriateness of boinboing posting this video--I certainly realize boingboing is not a democracy so this is not meant as a statement in that direction, but let's pose a simple, hypothetical poll: if you were tasered and died as a result or had a relative who suffered the same fate, would you want this video distributed as widely as possible?

I would. I think most people would, especially if they felt it was undeserved or inappropriate. (and I don't think it's a stretch that the guy or his family feel that he didn't deserve to die).

And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViiB_dE3Lhs

I clicked to the naughtyjames site and my virus software alerted me that it had blocked a trogan script. WFT. I reloaded the page and lo and behold it happened again. Not only a douchebag, but a spreader of badware.

They are not saying the chimp is a "person" in an every day sense, but a "person" in a legal sense.

I am not necessarily agreeing with them, but there is some legal precedent for this since corporations, countries, etc. are considered "persons" in the eyes of the law--they are treated as individual entities with their own rights and privileges separate from those of their employees, owners, investors.

In the meantime, they should simply form a corporation that has only one asset which is the chimp.

Seriously, what is next, a combo kitchen knife-mascara brush? Chainsaw-electric shaver? Handgun-toothbrush?

Japanese ninja peepers have REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!

He looks like Henry Rollins' much dumber brother.

>They must not teach Shakespeare at that school.

Or the Bible (which I guess they really wouldn't if it's a public school).

On my soapbox and then I'll stop spamming this article...

The underlying problem is not that cops/guards are ignorant of electronics. Granted, their job is to look for bombs/weapons, so they should be trained on what bombs reasonably look like. But they are not. They are given dumb rules (e.g. no liquids) and expected to enforce them. That DHS are TSA incompetent is clear. But it is unavoidable that some technology will be unfamiliar to many people. Isn't that the point of innovation?

The problem arises from the basic axioms of our country's security policies:
1) fear is the best strategy
2) distrust your own citizens
2a) state/corporate = safe
2b) independent/uncontrolled/unmonitored = dangerous
3) security concerns trump *all* legitimate civilian activity

A host of undesirable endpoints logically follow from those axioms, from illegal wiretapping to suspension of habeas corpus. In this case, they result in corollaries unwisely adopted by our government as technology policy:
1) *any* unfamiliar technology is to be viewed as potentially dangerous.
2) unfamiliar is defined as anything that is not a manufactured consumer product

The implications of this are far reaching. The stated objective of many online communities, e.g. boing boing, is to foster and celebrate innovation and intellectual freedom. Assumption of distrust of home-made technology directly opposes individual innovation. Note the demonization of the word "improvised". Anything from the workshop of amateur inventors/coders/geeks/nerds/artists is now viewed as a potential security threat (unless it is part of a DARPA sponsored contest).

Before Microsoft and Google were huge state-sanctioned corporations, they were a few individuals with good ideas hunched over their PCs.

Of the millions of home-brew electronics projects, what tiny percentage turn out to be bombs? And how many of those millions of student and amateur innovators need to be deterred by ignorant officials/parents/teachers before we lose something valuable without even knowing it?

The problem is nothing less than our country's basic attitude toward science and innovation, which seeks to eliminate individual/amateur innovation in favor of government/corporate control of technology.

Also, for now I guess not so much with the wearable computing.

Maybe our government's technophobia is a logical extension of the fact that the only uses they can imagine for wearable computers (and technology in general) is better ways to kill people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Force_Warrior

We've clearly passed the point where the prevailing fear of technology has surpassed the prevailing knowledge of technology.

Any electronic device not bearing a Dell/Apple/Sony/Motorola/etc logo is now immediately viewed as a potential weapon.

I bet if you walked into an airport holding any current model graphics card in your hand, you'd be promptly gunned down.

Even "knowledgable" security apparatchiks have an unreasoning suspicion of any non-corporate, non-official tech. I wonder how many DHS/FBI agents attend the Maker Faire...

I'll bet it is nothing more than an alkaline fuel cell--"aqueous alkaline solution, such as potassium hydroxide (KOH)"

KOH aka caustic potash

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_fuel_cell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_potash

Wow, this is silly. It doesn't require any extravagent explanations of secret ingredients--it's just some sort of battery or chemical fuel cell.

"This creates a reaction that releases an incredible amount of energy compared to that put in." If you don't count the energy required to make the device or the ingredients, then plenty of things satisfy that equation from a nuclear reactor to a log of wood.

match + paper + kindling + log = "incredible amount of energy"

OMGZ! teh invenshunz!

THECYNIC is absolutely right--this thing was totally staged. I bet Yearwood's leg was already pre-broken before he instigated the whole thing!

I used to do old-school design engineering for folded steel (our parent company specialized in metal enclosures). Designing for flat pattern steel is quite fun, like metal origami. Our factory in this small Swedish town had these masterful tool-die guys who were amazing at translating our design prints into real patterns, tools/dies, and processes for the multiple steps of stamping, folding, spot welding, in the fastest and least wasteful manner possible. A lot of the specific layout tasks are done with CAD now and most of the tool cutting is CNC, but it would be worthless without the decades of hands-on experience/knowledge that these craftspeople have.