Bad corporate blood led to the collapse of the NBC/Apple business relationship in the fall of last year. Now, via the Engadget news feed, comes word that things may be thawing out between the two. A for-pay article in the Financial Times had words from NBC Universal's COE Jeff Zucker, saying: "'We've said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple.' He then unexpectedly adds, 'We're great fans of Steve Jobs.' No telling what has caused the turnabout. Perhaps the writers strike gave both parties time to reflect on their mounting lost revenue." The site also notes that NBC signed a deal as part of the recent movie rental announcement, possibly contributing to the thaw. They link to a BusinessWeek article pointing out positive statements from Jobs reciprocating these 'feelings'.
In this video, the UC Berkeley marching band performs a video-game-themed halftime show, playing the beloved themes from such old friends as Tetris, Zelda, Mario Brothers and others, all the while marching in animated formation and reenacting scenes from the game. Bravo!
Link
The March, 1936 ish of Science and Mechanics featured this dubious DIY project to keep street urchins from riding on your horseless carriage's bumpers: electrocute 'em! Didn't I see this in a Little Rascals short?
IF your auto is pestered by hitchers-on, here is a good cure. Fit a Ford coil with a piece of chain which will drag along the ground (but must not touch the car), and ground the other end of the coil to the car. Complete circuit as shown, and close switch for results—Rocco Conte.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien writes,
On Tuesday, the
CULT committee (the part of the European Parliament responsible for culture
and education) is voting on what needs to be done to support the "Cultural
Industries" in Europe.
The report, headed by Member of European Parliament Guy Bono, started off well
- but the music industry have
stuck in several hand-grenade amendments that could mess up European
culture and the Internet for decades: They're pushing for ISPs spying on
traffic, "dangerous" sites being blocked online AND copyright extension, all in
one document!
Here's the back-story. The International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI) has been lobbying Euro-parliamentarians to introduce ISP
filtering and blocking across Europe, and pushed to get language supporting
these ideas into this report. EFF
briefed the committee members on why this would be a terrible idea for privacy,
Europe ue process, free expression - and wouldn't work to stop infringement.
So now IFPI has changed tactics. A new amendment, number
82, has popped up, proposing EU-wide law that would extend EU copyright
terms "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".
(The UK's Gowers
report already put pay to both of these canards: artists hardly benefit
from extensions 95 years after they recorded the song. And there's no
"competitive advantage" when extending EU copyright terms means you're paying
foreign rightsholders more by charging your own citizens extra.)
Europeans who would like their Internet free from constant monitoring for
suspected infringement, and their cultural works not trapped in amber for
nearly a century, write to your CULT committee members now. Phone numbers and
email addresses are available
on the Europarl site. Tell them to keep ISP filtering, site-blocking, AND
copyright extension out of the Guy Bono Report, and out of Europe!
An anonymous reader writes "The first evidence of a volcanic eruption from beneath Antarctica's ice sheet has been discovered by members of the British Antarctic Survey. The volcano on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet began erupting some 2,000 years ago and remains active to this day. Using airborne ice-sounding radar, scientists discovered a layer of ash produced by a 'subglacial' volcano. It extends across an area larger than Wales."
Here's a freaky Parasite Rex moment for you: an Amazonian nematode makes infected ants swell up to resemble bright red berries, which entices birds to eat them and then spread the nematodes around the jungle:
This bizarre lifecycle of a parasitic nematode, or roundworm, plays out in the high canopy of tropical forests ranging from Central America to the lowland Amazon, according to Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It's just crazy that something as dumb as a nematode can manipulate its host's exterior morphology and behavior in ways sufficient to convince a clever bird to facilitate transmission of the nematode," Dudley said.
"It's phenomenal that these nematodes actually turn the ants bright red, and that they look so much like the fruits in the forest canopy," said co-author Stephen P. Yanoviak, an insect ecologist and assistant professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who noted that numerous tropical plants produce small red, orange and pink berries. "When you see them in the sunlight, it's remarkable."
Weather Storm writes "DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects at a governmental level. They recently awarded 265 million processor-hours to 55 scientific projects, the largest amount of supercomputing resource awards donated in the DOE's history and three times that of last year's award. The winners were chosen based on their potential breakthroughs in the areas of science and engineering research, and the suitability of the project for using supercomputers. This year's INCITE applications ranged from developing nanomaterials to advancing the nation's basic understanding of physics and chemistry, and from designing quieter cars to improving commercial aircraft design. The next round of the INCITE competition will be announced this summer. Expansion of the DOE Office of Science's computational capabilities should approximately quadruple the 2009 INCITE award allocations to close to a billion processor hours."
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years: this shot of one of the kids at the children's photoshoot at Bat's Day at Disneyland 2007, when thousands of goths converged on the Gloomiest Place on Earth for a day's eyeliner frolic. I've had some pretty memorable days at Disney parks, but Bat's Day is in a league all its own.
Link
The Technology Review has a great feature on Metaplace, a virtual world startup that aims to allow users to create tiny, individual multiplayer worlds that they can link together like homepages. I'm a huge fan of the founder, Raph Koster, who previously created Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and I love the idea of letting players shape their worlds in simple, easy-to-understand ways.
With Metaplace, designers can build worlds using a markup language, style sheets, modules, and a scripting language. Every world acts like a Web server, Koster says, and every object in a world has a URL. What this means for users of these worlds is that they can move seamlessly from the rest of the Web into the virtual world and back again, he says. A user can browse to any object in a Metaplace world from outside, and every object can be linked to the rest of the Web and exchange information with Web services. With this architecture, Koster says, he plans for users to be able to build worlds with games as simple as a two-dimensional Tetris game, or as complex as the World of Warcraft, a massive, multiplayer, online role-playing game. Users might also build widgets, such as a virtual weatherman who could deliver the latest news from weather.com, or a Coke machine that gives them a real-world coupon whenever they drink a virtual Coke. Koster says that users should be able to stage up a basic world with chat functionality and a map within about five minutes.
Koster envisions users coming to a Metaplace world by clicking on a link in a Web page. That link launches a page where the user finds herself inside a world, perhaps using a default avatar, but no log-in or registration is immediately required. "They don't make you log in to play a YouTube video," Koster points out.
The Metaplace client is basically a Flash application, he says, and, consequently, is available to nearly everyone who uses the Internet. Currently, Metaplace does not allow users to build 3-D worlds, but Koster says that he expects Flash to add 3-D capabilities in the near future. The client will work anywhere on the Web, and Koster adds that he hopes to see user-generated clients built for mobile devices such as iPhones.
Becky Schaffer reworks needlepoint kits to add in subversive videogame elements, like Lara Croft standing astride a pretty meadow. The Game Girl Advance article is from 2003, but these landscapes still entertain and enlighten.
Do you know where Becky's current site resides? Post in the comments and I'll add it to the main post.
Schaefer feels there are strong parallels in the 'boxing-in' of experience that craft kits and mass-release games like Tomb Raider offer. In both cases, a smoothed and prefabricated reality provides entertainment to fill and define idle time. Recombining the bucolic/domestic and the erotic/violent helps Schaefer to expose these similarities and to remind us that we've checked out of everyday messy existence, whether threading our needle, or booting up our pc.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns us that H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, is still steaming ahead with its "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention" that ties college funding to universities' purchase of DRM-based industry-sanctioned download services and deployment of network snoopware that spies on and disconnects college kids if they appear to be violating copyright (without any hard evidence or a chance for the student to present her side of the story).
These congressional requirements will turn out to be expensive dead-ends -- the industry-sanctioned online music services are laden with DRM, and network detection/filtering programs present privacy risks and are inevitably rendered obsolete by technological countermeasures.
Advocates of the bill stress that the language stops short of demanding implementation -- that it only requires universities to "plan" -- but this argument misses the point entirely. The passage of this bill will unambiguously lead universities down the wrong path. For the sake of artists, administrators, students, and consumers better approaches exist.
The bill also would hang an unspoken threat over the heads of university administrators. In response to concerns that potential penalties for universities could include a loss of federal student aid funding, the MPAA's top lawyer in Washington said that federal funds should be at risk when copyright infringement happens on campus networks. Moreover, earlier versions of "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention" proposals nakedly sought to make schools that received numerous copyright infringement notices subject to review by the US Secretary of Education.
mAriuZ writes "Bob Rogers just released Parrot 0.5.2. This monthly release includes a couple of interesting new features. First, we've bundled Patrick Michaud's Rakudo (thats the implementation of Perl 6 on Parrot) such that you can type make perl6 on Unixy platforms and make perl6.exe on Windows and get a working standalone Perl 6 binary. This is experimental and we hope to iron out some installation and deployment issues by next months release, but it was important to demonstrate our progress. The second new feature is a toolkit for starting your own compiler. Max Mohun built a prototype several months ago, and we've added a stripped-down version for now that builds the skeleton of a compiler for you using the Parrot Compiler Tools. I mentioned the LOLCODE compiler in What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on Their Christmas Vacation; this is how Simon and Company were able to get LOLCODE up and running so quickly."
Increasing use of e-mail, web apps and online networking might minimize the need for living physically close to our workplaces and social circles. However, studies suggests that far from removing distance barriers, technology actually reinforces the value of proximity and face time.
kylemonger writes "A blogger at the Seattle PI has interviewed a Microsoft insider about the Xbox 360 project. The insider purports to have the background story on the 'red ring of death' (RROD) failures and why they are so common. 'RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this. And many of the failures were obviously infant mortality, where they work when they leave the factory and fail early in use. The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life. There are also other significantly high failure rates in other areas, like the DVD.'"
A stunning new concert film captures the Irish rockers in all their stadium-filling glory. The film might be even better than the real thing. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.
Most of the time, Pluto is the planet (or dwarf planet) farthest from the sun. But every 248 years its eccentric orbit carries it inside the orbit of Neptune and they switch positions for a while.
plasmacutter writes "The EFF is raising the alarm regarding provisions injected into a bill to renew federal funding for universities. These new provision call for institutions of higher learn to filter their internet connections and twist student's arms over 'approved' digital media distribution services. 'Under said provision: Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable — (2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity. Similar provisions in last year's bill did not survive committee, it appears however that this bill is headed toward the full house for vote.' Responding to recriminations over this threat to university funding, an MPAA representative claims federal funds should be at risk when copyright infringement happens on campus networks." We've previous discussed this topic, as well as similar issues.
arbitraryaardvark writes "NASA's Messenger probe flew past Mercury at a distance of 125 miles. The spacecraft took hundreds of pictures during the pass, updating photos from the now 30-year-old Mariner mission. According to an article at the International Business Times, the probe will eventually settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011. 'The images obtained by the $446 million MESSENGER mission (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) this week contain some of those unexplored areas. One image released Saturday was taken after Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury last week. In the photos released this week, scientists have observed unexplored cratered areas of the planet. On Monday, Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury yet, aiming for new discoveries. Among its goals is to discover if Mercury has ice water in its polar craters and to complete the mapping of the whole planet.' Meanwhile here on Earth, a joint EU/Japan probe with an ion drive is set to head towards Mercury sometime in 2013."
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This bizarre lifecycle of a parasitic nematode, or roundworm, plays out in the high canopy of tropical forests ranging from Central America to the lowland Amazon, according to Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
