(TrendHunter.com) Will Smith's new movie, Hancock, will be available for download before it hits iTunes or DVD. Since Sony owns the studio that made the movie, they decided that people who download movies... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 5:00 pm
It has already been a long day! I got up at 3 to get ready and get to the San Francisco Airport in time to catch my early morning US Airways flight to Charlotte and then connect to Frankfurt and then to... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 12:53 pm
palegray.net writes "Bruce Schneier brings us his perspective on a future filled with kill switches; from OnStar-equipped automobiles and city buses that can be remotely disabled by police to Microsoft's patent-pending ideas regarding so-called Digital Manners Policies. In Schneier's view, these capabilities aren't exactly high points of our potential future. From the article: 'Once we go down this path — giving one device authority over other devices — the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?' We recently discussed the Pentagon's interest in kill switches for airplanes. At what point does centralizing and/or delegating operational authority over so much of our lives become a dangerous practice of its own?"
An anonymous reader writes "A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn't just any GoDaddy employee; he's head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions. Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn't win. The conflict of interest is unethical, but could this practice also be illegal? Said a representative for a competitor, 'Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it.' This comes hot on the heels of news that despite earlier promises to ICANN to end their 60-Day ban on transfers, GoDaddy quietly circumvented it by forcing customers to agree to the ban anyway. ICANN doesn't appear to be investigating or asking follow-up questions about this. What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible?"
By Hurley, Graham Stem injection of knotweed could have damaging effects The sincerely held and enthusiastic views of various correspondents in HW on the subject of Japanese knotweed stem injection need to be the starting point of widespread debate on this technique - before injection becomes the accepted treatment method of choice and unforeseen environmental damage results. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Anonymous Horticultural representatives are battling with potentially devastating changes to pesticide use as the European Commission (EC) and European Parliament try to come to a final decision on new proposals. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Anonymous Chemical manufacturers, importers and users need to check new EU rules regarding chemical control and pre-register their use or face being forced to halt their activities. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Luntz, Stephen Increasing ocean acidity as a result of carbon emissions may be making it hard for fish to form symmetrical otoliths (ear bones), creating a further threat to the health of coral reef ecosystems as fish with asymmetrical ear bones struggle to find their way to the safety of coral reefs. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Luntz, Stephen Dr Michael Bode of the University of Queensland's Ecology Centre has called for conservationists to take the cost of conserving locations, rather than just the number of endangered species, into account when prioritising areas for protection. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Mike Snyder, Houston Chronicle Jun. 29--DALLAS -- Late-night gunshots no longer awaken tenants at Ashley Creek Apartments in northeast Dallas. Off-duty police officers patrol grounds once controlled by drug dealers. Workers have repaired exterior walls that were close to collapse. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Ibrahim, Magda Balancing the value of trees with potential risks they might pose to public safety was examined by experts aiming to kickstart the creation of an industry standard on tree management. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Anonymous For House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the message is simple: The mortgage lending industry can do it the easy way or the hard way when it comes to curbing home foreclosures. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Richards, Zoe Half a century after nuclear tests shook Bikini Atoll, some corals are flourishing again while others are locally extinct. Understanding the capacity for biodiversity to persist after disturbances is crucial to mitigating biodiversity loss. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Winston-Salem Journal, N.C. Jun. 29--The town of Boone ought not to rush into its proposal to put a raw-water intake on the South Fork of the New River in Todd. The New is an American Heritage River and one of the oldest in the world. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Ackerman, Robert K The crystal ball is cloudy when it comes to the nature of future chips. Scientists are racing against the clock to develop a means of defeating an enemy that threatens to stop computer technology progress dead in its tracks. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Stanley B. Chambers Jr., The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. Jun. 29--DURHAM -- Investigators think Joy Suzanne Johnson, third vice-chairwoman of the Durham County Democratic Party, not only knew about her husband's alleged misdeeds, but was there when they happened. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Josephine Marcotty, Star Tribune, Minneapolis Jun. 29--At first glance, Sexpulse looks like a sexually explicit gaming website, with provocative pictures of nude men, cartoons and cheeky icons. But it's not a game. Far from it. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Lynn, Matthew In Amsterdam, on the afternoon of 26 June, the pound is finally being sold off. No, Gordon Brown hasn't decided to repeat his famous trick of dumping a chunk of the nation's gold reserves at the nadir of the bullion market. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Nancy Hull, St. Joseph News-Press, Mo. Jun. 29--They were all the rage decades ago, with their slick pages, leather binding and wealth of knowledge. Today, they're collecting dust. The Internet claims another victim: encyclopedias. St. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Boland, Rita Move over, fortune tellers and psychics-scientist seers hear the future loud and clear The minds of the world who are creating the future's communications technology already know what to expect in the next generation -tools that are smaller, more powerful and more flexible yet less expensive. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Carroll, Jim A few years back, I posted an entry to my weblog titled, "What do you do after the world gets flat? Put a ripple in it!" My post came in response to the buzz surrounding the bestselling book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Lawlor, Maryann Raise the firewalls and batten down the gateways: security risks are rising. Web 2.0 users beware: Social networking technologies may be fun and useful, but the one thing they are not is secure. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Messmer, Max Q+A ARE PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING SITES USEFUL WHEN LOOKING FOR WORK? Maintaining and developing professional contacts has always been a vital job-search strategy, and networking websites are another vehicle for doing so. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
By Jennifer Atkins Brown, News & Record, Greensboro, N.C. Jun. 29--About three years ago, the pastors of several Greensboro churches started getting together for fellowship and prayer, and found a common desire to unite to help the community. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Jun 2008 | 11:02 am
An anonymous reader writes "Two days ago Blizzard announced that they will be selling keychain tokens to add one-time password support (FAQ) to World of Warcraft. Have compromised World of Warcraft accounts become such a serious problem, that OTPs are already neccesary for games?"
Reuters - U.S. congressional leaders agreed late
last year to President George W. Bush's funding request for a
major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at
destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New
Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged Japan Sunday to take a greater lead in the fight against climate change, as the nation prepares to host next month's Group of Eight summit. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 8:41 am
Navizon's Mobfindr lets you find the location of an iPhone just by sending an SMS to it. In their own words:To set it up, just install the latest version of Navizon and enter the passphrase that will... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 8:08 am
A new television spot for U.S. Cellular opens by depicting the world as a bleak and toxic place. All is black and white, and everyone is miserable. Then a man answers his cellphone and the city streets... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 7:33 am
A hundred years ago this week, a gigantic explosion ripped open the dawn sky above the swampy taiga forest of western Siberia, leaving a scientific riddle that endures to this day. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 7:20 am
(TrendHunter.com) Karl Lagerfeld, the head of design at Chanel, is the new model for a road safety campaign. It's a very peculiar choice for Herr Lagerfeld, but an excellent idea to merge fashion and... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 7:00 am
wooferhound writes "In a move to make the heavy-lift vehicle more robust (predicting an increased launch thrust requirement) to send four astronauts, a lunar lander plus supplies, NASA has announced the Ares V rocket will be beefed up to cater for our future needs to get man back to the Moon. This huge vehicle is now designed to carry payloads of over 156,600 lb (71,000 kg), some 15,600 lb (or 10%) more than the original concept. Ares V was originally designed to be approximately the same length as the original Saturn V lunar rocket (361 feet or 110 metres long), but to accommodate an extra booster engine and extra payload volume, Ares V will be 381 feet (116 metres) long. This upgrade will be capable of sending far more instrumentation into space, an extra 15,600 lb (7,000 kg, or the equivalent mass of a male African elephant)."
(TrendHunter.com) In the hit film Wanted, Angelina Jolie added fake tattoos to her existing tattoos, instead of covering them up. Angelina Jolie is well known for her love of tattoos. Over the years... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 6:23 am
(TrendHunter.com) Instead of auctioning memorabilia post movie-launch, Angelina Jolie's leather jacket from 'Wanted' is being auctioned now. The obvious goal of this charity auction is to promote the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 6:14 am
Hydropower is held up as the beacon of hope for millions of electricity-starved Cambodians, with ten planned hydro-dams set to power up their homes for the first time. But... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 5:49 am
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has sacked a number of government officials and arrested a man in connection with a set of fake photographs that local authorities had said was proof of the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 4:55 am
Chinese officials involved in a set of fake photos supposedly showing an endangered South China tiger have been sacked, state press said on Sunday. The photographer behind... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 4:44 am
Human judgment by referees is increasingly being supplemented (and sometimes overridden by) computerized observation systems. nuke-alwin writes "It is obvious that any model is only as accurate as the data in it, and technologies such as Hawkeye can never remove all doubt about the position of a ball. Wimbledon appears to accept the Hawkeye prediction as absolute, but researchers at Cardiff University will soon publish a paper disputing the accuracy of the system."
Yesterday, while I was returning from San Francisco to Austin, AT&T was letting folks know that it plans to move its headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas. A big part of the blame was laid on the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 1:58 am
I got this great tip from marketing innovator Seth Godin. I think its a good one for anyone putting on a conference or large meeting. Like Seth, I attend many conferences and the time and manner in which... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 1:39 am
ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.
Earth is filled with incredibly strange creatures, from thermophiles like the one seen here that can survive in temperatures up to 121 degress Celsius to the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans that thrives in 2000 times more ionising radiation than would fry a human. New Scientist features a survey of ten "extremophiles." The headline is a bit off though, reading: "The most extreme-life forms in the universe." Of course, studying these unusual organisms could give scientists insight into what life might exist on other planets, but all of the creatures in this article are found right here at home. From New Scientist:
There's hardly a niche on Earth that hasn't been colonised. Life can be found in scalding, acidic hot pools, in the driest deserts, and in the dark, crushing depths of the ocean. It has even found a toehold in the frigid polar regions and in toxic dumps.
"Life on Earth has radiated into every conceivable – and in some cases almost inconceivable – ecological niche," says Chris Impey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US.
The very existence of these hardy organisms hints that life might be able to eke out an existence in the cold, dry climate of Mars, the icy, acidic conditions of Jupiter's moon Europa, or in countless other spots beyond our solar system.
CNET - Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 29 Jun 2008 | 12:49 am
RSS feeds are the all the latest craze. It's one of the best and most popular way of staying up to date quickly. However, with services web feed readers like Google Reader and even desktop readers such... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Jun 2008 | 12:41 am
An anonymous reader submits news of Netgear's release of the "open source Wireless-G Router (model WGR614L), enabling Linux developers and enthusiasts to create firmware for specialized applications, and supported by a dedicated open source community. The router supports the most popular open source firmware; Tomato and DD-WRT are available on WGR614L, making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. The router is targeted at people who want custom firmware on their router without worrying about issues, and enjoy the benefits of having an open source wireless router."
Thanks to hundreds of lightning-sparked wildfires in Northern California, air pollution readings in the region are two to 10 times the federal standard for clean air. Some areas are experiencing the worst air quality on record.
The EU is close to finalising an agreement with the US that would allow the FBI to see the internet browsing habits and credit card histories of UK citizens. However, the prospect of an agreement between... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 11:11 pm
BMW M5 Touring £67,830 Miles per gallon: 19.1 Seats: 5 Good for: Overtakers Bad for: Undertakers With its phenomenal 5-litre V-10 engine, which blasts you from 0-62mph in four seconds and can... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 11:11 pm
The only surprise for fans of cult Eighties television is that it has taken so long. A satnav system featuring the voice of KITT, the robotic car in Knight Rider, will give drivers the dubious privilege... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 11:11 pm
For anyone unable to remember their password for logging in to a particular website, a new industry group is calling for passwords to be replaced by an electronic ID card, with which users would only have... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 11:10 pm
The scene: a tasteful, wooded corporate retreat north of Seattle. The time: one day last March. A large group - mainly chaps in their mid-forties - stands around. They seem to be in quite a state. Here's... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 11:08 pm
Constantine writes "The Linux kernel is one of most complex open source projects. Even though there are a lot of books on the Linux kernel, it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The interactive Linux kernel map gives you a top-down view of the kernel. You can see the most important layers, functionalities, modules, functions, and calls. Each function on the map is a link to its source code. The map is interactive. You can zoom in and drag around to see details."
WASHINGTON, June 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following the debate on immigration reform that John McCain had with himself at today's meeting of the National... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 9:35 pm
justechn writes "Many of us have seen robots in the movies and wondered how long it would take for them to become a reality. Some of my favorites when I was a kid were Short Circut and Runaway. iRobot is a company that is striving to bring some of that technology home today. Their most popular and well known product is the Roomba vacuuming robot. The Roomba is great, after I finished my review of it and sent it back I went out and bought one. It does its best work picking up pet hair. They just came out with another robot called the Looj. The Looj is used to clean the rain gutters that go around your roof. If you have ever had to do this by hand you know how much of a pain it is. This robot uses a 3 stage auger to break up clogs and sweep all the debris out of your gutter. It is also water proof so you don't have to worry if you have water in your gutter, just don't stand below it when it is cleaning or you will get sprayed." Read on for the rest of justechn's review.
SecureThroughObscure writes "ZDNet Zero-Day blogger Nate McFeters has asked the question, 'Should vulnerabilities be treated as defects?' McFeters claims that if vulnerabilities were treated as product defects, companies would have an effective way of forcing developers and business units to focus on security issue. McFeters suggests providing bonuses for good developers, and taking away from bonuses for those that can't keep up. It's an interesting approach that if used, might force companies to take a stronger stance on security related issues."
Strange Horizons's fund-raising drive started June 1st, and we'd hoped to end it by the end of the month, but it looks as though we will need to extend it, as we've only met our goal halfway. Our goal this year is $6,000 and we're doing things a little bit differently than we have in previous years. This year we are giving away prizes mid-drive. Prizes are being awarded to random bloggers--if someone posts a blog about our fund drive during a given week, they are entered into our drawing for that week's prize. This week, the winner of the blogger incentive prize will win a piece of fiction written by Tim Pratt exclusively for this prize. The winner will receive a hand written copy and also two of Tim's books. We are also giving away prize packages when we reach different amounts: $2,000, $4,000, and $6,000 dollars, respectively. The winners of those drawings will receive Escape Pod: Collections 1-5, a five-disc set containing the complete archives of the first thirty months of episodes from Escape Pod.
We're a nonprofit online speculative fiction magazine that pays professional rates for fiction; we're run by a staff of volunteers; we've published new material every week, freely available online, for nearly 8 years (and almost all of it is still available in our archives), including fiction, poetry, articles, reviews, art, and columns; we're funded entirely by donations, in a sort of public-radio-like model; in the US, donations to us are tax-deductible. Stuff we publish gets picked up regularly for Year's Best reprint volumes. Last year a story we published was on the Nebula ballot and another was on the Hugo ballot. Also, our Editor-in-chief, Susan Marie Groppie, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award.
Rockers from Aerosmith's Stephen Tyler to Hawthorne Heights' Casey Calvert are snubbing heroin and coke. Their new favorite vice is prescription meds. And they're not alone: U.S. teens are currently abusing painkillers more than coke, heroin and meth combined.
The International Whaling Commission ended its annual meeting Friday leaving unchanged both its long-standing row over commercial whaling and Japan's "scientific" hunting quota of 1,000... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 7:30 pm
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda Saturday urged all major greenhouse gas emitters to tackle climate change as he sought to galvanise efforts ahead of July's G8 summit. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 7:19 pm
Chinese President Hu Jintao urged renewed efforts to curb global warming on Saturday, stressing "time is limited" in finding efficient solutions to the problem, state media reported. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 7:05 pm
James Lavelle's electronic supergroup has got an ear on cinema of the sci-fi variety. UNKLE's latest effort is called End Titles...Stories for Film, plus its remix of 'The X-Files' theme song touches down with the film on July 25, and on the official soundtrack on July 21.
My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.
NBC is making more than 2,200 hours of live competition from Beijing available online, giving Olympic junkies more action than they could ever devour in a day. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 5:54 pm
AP - NBC is making more than 2,200 hours of live competition from Beijing available online, giving Olympic junkies more action than they could ever devour in a day. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Jun 2008 | 5:52 pm
NBC is making more than 2,200 hours of live competition from Beijing available online, giving Olympic junkies more action than they could ever devour in a day. After barely tipping its... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Jun 2008 | 5:52 pm
The most powerful atom-smasher ever will make its debut in August, and experts say doomsday fears that the Large Hadron Collider could create black holes or killer particles are unfounded.
An anti-radiation blanket that supposedly protects against Gamma emissions hits the market. What's its secret? The blanket's 30 inches by 36, and weighs 60 pounds, equal to one-seventh of an inch of lead.
An anti-radiation blanket that supposedly protects against Gamma emissions hits the market. What's its secret? The blanket's 30 inches by 36, and weighs 60 pounds, equal to one-seventh of an inch of lead.
Today on Boing Boing Gadgets — a site which we suspect you'll enjoy reading even if you often find gadgets tire- and irksome (so do we!) — we spotted these top-notch crank-powered greeting cards from Hallmark, of all people; hacked sunglasses that block CCTV cameras; a book about making LEGO weapons; a human-powered party bike, complete with lights and sound system; and the Venture Bros. era-appropriate love of fancy chairs.
A team of Israeli art students made a wooden coffee grinder shaped like a cuddly tumor; a crappy newspaper made a crime spree by stupid kids the fault of Grand Theft Auto; ICANN unveiled a new plan for top level domains, putting me only $100k away from owning http://cluster.fuck.
Rob documented BBG's first word coinage; John exposed a traumatic misunderstanding of the nature of lumberjack hibernation; I got off my ass and started rounding up deals again.
One of Pixar's own made a cute Wall•E in LEGO. (And I'm going to see it tonight. I'm pumped!) AT&T may actually be adding MMS to iPhone, which for the first time allowed people on the internet to express their opinion about Apple. Nokia released some new phones, which for the second time allowed people on the internet to express their opinion about Apple.
Then there were the sexy stormtrooper boots, our enthusiasm over which only slighted muted by the acknowledgement that every stormtrooper was a clone, then brought back into vibrant excitement when reader Rob Cockerham invented the term "Fett footish."
There was a Steampunk sonic rifle. Despite indications to the contrary, use of the term did not cause the internet to implode. Yet.
Helio, a company that thought it could build a business by buying expensive phones and selling them to poor teens has — surprisingly — been sold for scrap. Perhaps they'd have been better selling buckets for making dogsicles.
Once again, someone made a dot-matrix toaster, but only in their mind. (Hey, MAKE:RS! You can do this!) World of Warcraft added a real-world security dongle to protect you from gold farmers stealing your account. Yahoo hiked domain prices in a fairly scummy manner.
And someone made a lamp from dishes which looks an awful like the stuff I used to make on the lathe when I was sequestered in wood shop for seventh-grade homeroom.
Harpo Marx -- my second-favorite Marx brother -- explains the origin of the Gookie, his magnificent, world-beating funny-face (there was a fantastic Animaniacs version of this -- post links to it in the comments below if you know where it lives online!)
Gookie was funny enough to look at when he wasn’t working, but when he got up to full speed rolling cigars he was something to see. It was a marvel how fast his stubby fingers could move. And when he got going good he was completely lost in his work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out, and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves.
I used to stand there and practice imitating Gookie’s look for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, using the window glass as a mirror. He was too hypnotized by his own work to notice me. Then one day I decided I had him down perfect--tongue, cheeks, eyes, the whole bit.
Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I’ve “thrown a Gookie” at least once. It wasn’t always planned, especially in our early vaudeville days. If we felt the audience slipping away, fidgeting and scraping their feet through our jokes, Groucho or Chico would whisper in panic, “Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!” The fact that it seldom failed to get a laugh is quite a tribute to the original possessor of the face.
The Guardian's Marina Hyde discusses the rampant abuse of CCTV spy-cameras placed by local governments -- the junior G-Men who use cameras to follow women with cute butts around town.
. A couple of months ago it was discovered that Poole borough council, in Dorset, had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - designed to track serious criminals and terrorists - to determine whether a school applicant and her parents lived where they said they did. They did, and were appalled to discover they had been spied on for three weeks, the subject of surveillance notes such as "female and three children enter target vehicle and drive off". Target vehicle, if you please! The thought of some deep-cover council drone jotting this stuff down as though it were an elite Delta Force operation is not as funny as it is horrifying.
Just who are these people, these swelling legions of unelected, ill-qualified monitors who wield such extraordinary power in our surveillance society? Clarification in one case came last year, when the civilian in charge of a Worcester police station's surveillance team was suspended after detectives found, among one day's footage, a 20-minute sequence of close-ups of a woman's cleavage and backside as she walked oblivious through the streets. Whether the woman ever discovered she was the star of a kind of pervert Truman Show is not recorded. But the offending monitor escaped with a warning and was - unbelievably - back in post within weeks.
Reuters - U.S. congressional leaders agreed late
last year to President George W. Bush's funding request for a
major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at
destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New
Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.
There's hardly a niche on Earth that hasn't been colonised. Life can be found in scalding, acidic hot pools, in the driest deserts, and in the dark, crushing depths of the ocean. It has even found a toehold in the frigid polar regions and in toxic dumps.
AFP - Bill Gates spent his last day at Microsoft Friday, bidding a teary goodbye to the company he built into a global software colossus.
My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.
Today on Boing Boing Gadgets — a site which we suspect you'll enjoy reading even if you often find gadgets tire- and irksome (so do we!) — we spotted these top-notch crank-powered greeting cards from Hallmark, of all people; hacked sunglasses that block CCTV cameras; a book about making LEGO weapons; a human-powered party bike, complete with lights and sound system; and the Venture Bros. era-appropriate love of fancy chairs.
A team of Israeli art students made a wooden coffee grinder shaped like a cuddly tumor; a crappy newspaper made a crime spree by stupid kids the fault of Grand Theft Auto; ICANN unveiled a new plan for top level domains, putting me only $100k away from owning http://cluster.fuck.
Rob documented BBG's first word coinage; John exposed a traumatic misunderstanding of the nature of lumberjack hibernation; I got off my ass and started rounding up deals again.
One of Pixar's own made a cute Wall•E in LEGO. (And I'm going to see it tonight. I'm pumped!) AT&T may actually be adding MMS to iPhone, which for the first time allowed people on the internet to express their opinion about Apple. Nokia released some new phones, which for the second time allowed people on the internet to express their opinion about Apple.
Then there were the sexy stormtrooper boots, our enthusiasm over which only slighted muted by the acknowledgement that every stormtrooper was a clone, then brought back into vibrant excitement when reader Rob Cockerham invented the term "Fett footish."
There was a Steampunk sonic rifle. Despite indications to the contrary, use of the term did not cause the internet to implode. Yet.
Helio, a company that thought it could build a business by buying expensive phones and selling them to poor teens has — surprisingly — been sold for scrap. Perhaps they'd have been better selling buckets for making dogsicles.
Once again, someone made a dot-matrix toaster, but only in their mind. (Hey, MAKE:RS! You can do this!) World of Warcraft added a real-world security dongle to protect you from gold farmers stealing your account. Yahoo hiked domain prices in a fairly scummy manner.
And someone made a lamp from dishes which looks an awful like the stuff I used to make on the lathe when I was sequestered in wood shop for seventh-grade homeroom.Gookie was funny enough to look at when he wasn’t working, but when he got up to full speed rolling cigars he was something to see. It was a marvel how fast his stubby fingers could move. And when he got going good he was completely lost in his work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out, and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves.
