Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Beautiful Alice in Wonderland rings

Posted: 01 Apr 2010 02:16 AM PDT

San Francisco Chronicle comics section goes indy

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 11:58 PM PDT

The San Francisco Chronicle has revamped the comics section in 96 Hours, its weekend supplement (published on Thursdays!?). The new comics page features all indy comics, instead of the usual dreary syndicate stuff. A maze is threaded through the comic. The new section features Jon Adams, Keith Knight, Sacha Eckes and Michael Capozzola.

Welcome to Friendship Town (Thanks, Jon!)

Previously:


Cthulhoid snack-food

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 11:56 PM PDT


I've stopped eating (delicious, rubbery) octopuses -- they're just too durned clever to cram down my gaping maw. But that said, octopus tempura on a stick takes the cake (cone?) for most cthuloid convenience food.

Octopus Tempura on a stick (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (Image: Octopus Tempura on a stick, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mdid's photostream)

Previously:


Eat white bread, win the war

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 10:54 PM PDT


This stern, solemn woman is determined to keep on eating bread, no matter what happens Over There.

BREAD -- 1942

Pyongyang: North Korea's chain of restaurants

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 10:52 PM PDT

The North Korean government operates a chain of hard-currency restaurants throughout Asia, as a means of bringing cash into the country. The Pyongyang restaurants feature abundant food (unlike Pyongyang itself), as well as a floor-show.
Aside from small North Korean flags pinned to the waitresses' blouses, the restaurant is surprisingly free from overt propagandizing. Instead of paeans to the Great Leader and his revolutionary juche ideology, the walls are adorned with a series of monumental landscape paintings. One crashing seascape, rendered in an apocalyptic palette of blues, greens, and reds, recalls the painting used as a backdrop to the official photo of Kim Jong-il and Bill Clinton that was taken during Clinton's visit to Pyongyang in August. The cold flood-lighting and no-camera policy (often violated on the sly by curious Western expats) also lend an Orwellian tinge to an evening at Pyongyang, though the authoritarian mood is often broken by the sound of drunken South Korean businessmen warbling their way through the restaurant's thick karaoke catalog...

In 2006 and 2007, Daily NK reported several incidents in which waitresses from North Korean restaurants in China's Shandong and Jilin provinces tried to defect, forcing the closure of the operations. Kim Myung Ho added that two or three DPRK security agents live onsite at each restaurant to "regulate" the workers and that any attempts at flight result in the immediate repatriation of the entire staff.

Kingdom Kim's Culinary Outposts (via Kottke)

(Image: Slate)

Previously:


What will the net do to institutions in the next 10 years?

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 10:45 PM PDT

The latest Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project report is out: "The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future" surveys 895 tech experts on the way that technology will change institutions (government, business, nonprofits, schools) in the next ten years. The responses -- presented as a series of free-form survey answers -- range from the incandescent to the outraged, but every one is thought-provoking. Unsurprising, given that respondents included Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Doc Searls, Nicholas Carr, Susan Crawford, David Clark, Jamais Cascio, Peter Norvig, Craig Newmark, Hal Varian, Howard Rheingold, Andreas Kluth, Jeff Jarvis, Andy Oram, Kevin Werbach, David Sifry, Dan Gillmor, Marc Rotenberg, Stowe Boyd, John Pike, Andrew Nachison, Anthony Townsend, Ethan Zuckerman, Tom Wolzien, Stephen Downes, Rebecca MacKinnon, Jim Warren, Sandra Brahman, Barry Wellman, Seth Finkelstein, Jerry Berman, Tiffany Shlain, and Stewart Baker.
"Having been a senior executive at some of America's largest corporations I am convinced that model is ultimately doomed. An entity that lasts forever and grows forever is just not possible and is silly anyway. It is a waste of resources. Society deserves a better model for the organization and deployment of resources to provide products and services. Scale is still important. Companies like Cisco have shown how to continue to innovate by acquisition, but the big question is how do corporations gracefully end? How can we break the cycle of Wall Street, a strong financial services industry is simply not good for society. Wall Street does not improve productivity, the model is parasitic, transferring huge resources out of the system. I am looking forward to the next phase of the industrial revolution." - Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett Packard
The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Apple's iPad is a touch of genius

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:37 PM PDT

It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It's sensual. It's tactile. And that moment is a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is a pause, a few breaths before hitting the "on" switch, just letting it rest against the skin. Flick the switch and the novelty hits. Just as the iPhone, Palm Pré and Android phones scratched an itch we didn't know we had—somewhere between cellphone and notebook—the iPad hits a completely new pleasure spot. The display is large enough to make the experience of apps and games on smaller screens stale. Typography is crisp, images gem-like, and the speed brisk thanks to Apple's A4 chip and solid state storage. As I browse early release iPad apps, web pages, and flip through the iBook store and books, the thought hits that this is a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests.

Remember The Periodic Table of Elements series of books we featured here at Boing Boing? There's an iPad version ($13.99 in the app store, screenshots here), and it's dazzling — it makes science feel like magic in your hands. I called the guy behind The Elements, Theo Gray, and asked him to put into words the UI magic that iPad makes possible for creators of books, games, news, and productivity tools.

"The Elements on iPad is not a game, not an app, not a TV show. It's a book. But it's Harry Potter's book. This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library. Everything in it is alive in some way."

Indeed, the elements in this periodic table seem very much alive. The obvious way to examine static objects — say, a lump of gold (number 79) or an ingot of cast antimony (number 51) is to rotate them, to spin the specimen with your fingertips. And that's exactly what you do here. You can view them in 3D if you wish, with 3D glasses you buy separately online. Tap here, and live data from Wolfram Alpha pops up (the thermodynamic properties of molybednum, perhaps, or the current price of platinum). Some elements are presented with little video clips you can play, too.

When you get a chance, compare it to the tiny screen of an iPhone or Droid, or the less responsive touchscreens of an all-in-one desktop PC such as HP's TouchSmart: it's a completely different experience.

"A stereo 3D video of a static object that you can rotate in real time," Theo says over the phone. "Honestly, I'm not sure where you go from there. Smellovision? Not a whole lot more you can do."

The Elements presentation for iPad (those spinning samples of elements you twirl with your fingertip) makes use of openGL textures, compressing visual data in a way that can be compressed in the graphics chip, so the data can be read without hogging CPU resources. By making use of hardware native to iPad, you can can "play" a spin forwards and backwards with no hiccups or performance lags -- even spin 3, 4, 5, 10 views of an element at a time. This ain't Flash video over WiFi, folks. You'll feel sad going back to chokey http embeds.

Each app for iPad can't be more than 2 gigs in compressed archive form (a limitation imposed by the zip compression standard at work here, not something of Apple's own design). Data-dense applications like The Elements buck right up against that limit, but future iterations (this and others that go live Saturday were developed with great haste) will likely take advantage of the ability to do background downloading to supplement data.

Tapping and swirling my way through iBooks (the store includes free, public domain titles in addition to the $9.99-$12.99 bestsellers), and iPad native apps provided at launch such as the spectacular, game-changing Marvel Comics app (crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete), the Epicurious recipe browser, and the news browsing app by Reuters (free app in which video is, again, a seamless delight), the idea hits. This is what we wanted e-books to be all along. Rich, nimble, and dense with image and sound and navigability, right there inside the flow of the story. And this is what we wanted the web to feel like all along. We just want it to work, and we don't want to be aware of the delivery method while we're enjoying what's delivered.

Theo's been thinking about all of this, too. "The Kindle is a great device, and I own several," Theo says. "But the concept of an e-book has always been that it's like PDF. Imagine if the web standard was PDF instead of html, if everyone's web pages consisted of what you can do in PDF? That would be a really boring world. I hate to see ebooks as being pigeonholed as these static, PDFlike things, in which the biggest 'a-ha' you can have is an exciting pageturning animation, or search. What could an ebook be? Let's draw a line in the sand out in the future and say, this is the greatest aspiration, if the limitations of code and hardware were no object."

Draw that imaginary line in the sand, and you've sketched out iPad.

Manic, nonstop use revealed a number of things: battery life is better than I anticipated. I got a full day of constant internet-connected use (it did not leave my hands) on one charge. More than 12 hours, with heavy video and gaming, and screen cranked up to full brightness.

Orientation lock is great for when I'm sharing YouTube clips on the couch with family, or web browsing in bed. It fits well in my lap for tweeting when eating during lunch break, and it's easy to wipe off a stray mayo glop and get right back to updating the world on the details of my sandwich (using Twitterific for iPad, a free app which does what it promises on the tin). When we began developing the Boing Boing iPad presentation, we used a simulator and tapped into a lot of jQuery, thinking that snazzy transitional animations would delight. They didn't: it worked great on the Mac simulator, but were sluggish on iPad, so we aborted and went simple. When you're redesigning a site for iPad, you start to think in terms of a visually rich 'zine, not a website. Given Boing Boing's 'zine roots (25 years and counting since the first Xeroxed copy), the close of that evolutionary circle is something that makes me smile.


Familiar Mac fundamentals like Calendar, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are presented thoughtfully with the kinetic and tactile specifics of iPad in mind. Pinch-zoom the preview image for a photo album you've saved, and watch the contents scatter out accross the screen, so you can be reminded of the shots you've stored inside.

Gaming possibilities are profound. Accelerometer-driven games like the Real Racing HD iPad app ($9.99) available at first release thrill in a new way, like when I first held a Wii. There's something about tilting and steering and braking with a device you hold in your hands, just like a steering wheel, that's so much more viscerally pleasing than a big old shelf-bound console.

The on-screen QWERTY keyboard is more finger-sized than iPhone (obviously, the screen's larger when either in portrait or landscape) but I didn't find myself using the device for lots of text input (email, blog post composing) without the aid of the keyboard dock— pretty much exactly like the standard Mac keyboard. No, there's no camera, but it doesn't seem like as much of a big deal as when I heard that news back at the January unveiling. iPad is more about experiencing media, and light sharing, than heavy-duty media production.

That said, I can imagine traveling with iPad instead of a netbook, with that keyboard dock in tow if I really need to do heavy text input.

Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren't here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.

I like it a lot. But it's the things I never knew it made possible — to be revealed or not in the coming months — that will determine whether I love it.

Pictish art may have actually been written language

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 04:50 PM PDT

How do you tell the difference between art and written language?

Oh, yeah. It's math.

[Rob Lee] and colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings, found on the few hundred known Pictish Stones. The researchers used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.

There is, sadly, not a lot of detail about what specific characteristics make language stand out from decoration. I'm guessing it has something to do finding patterns in the choice of symbols, or the way symbols are oriented, or how the patterns repeat. Wish there was more though. For the record, even if this is language, nobody is even close to deciphering what it means.

On a side note: Shannon entropy is a measure of the amount of information that we get from knowing one English letter. It's kind of the Entropy of Wheel of Fortune—how many guesses does it take to figure out all the letters of a sentence using only the information provided by the letters previously guessed. Besides identifying ancient scripts, it makes for a fun, time-wasting applet game.

1916 electric utility propaganda

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 04:14 PM PDT

jackbuilt1916.jpg

In 1916, a time when electricity was still something of a luxury toy, the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company put out a pamphlet of House That Jack Built-themed doggerel illustrating all the wonderful ways you can use electricity around your home (and for such a low cost!).

There's a couple of things I find fascinating about this sales pitch.

First, you're looking at a world that still had a fairly limited number of uses for home electricity. Things were certainly on the upswing from a couple decades previous, when an electric hook-up was as much of a single-use tech toy as anything you can buy in Sky Mall. But this is an 18-page booklet, put out by a very biased source, which repeats several "benefits of electricity" as though it's running out of ideas. Hey, did we mention that you can use it to... um ...turn on a light?!

Second, the booklet really gives you a sense of the honest, fuck-all amazement and wonder people felt at being able to control their environment. In the new world of electricity, the toast never burns (at least, not like it used to when we were trying to grill it over an open fire), you need no longer schedule your week around laundry and everyone is healthier and happier. It's advertising hyperbole, sure. But only kinda. When you read old letters, you find that this was advertising capturing the way people really thought, rather than just pushing happiness that wasn't there. Think Dawn of the iPod, not Late-Night Wall-to-Wall Carpeting Commercial.

Finally, I love the last couple pages that allude to the real conflict between man and nature. Forget about simplifying housework. Centralized electricity changed energy production from a difficult, in-home process that kept the messy by-products of progress literally in your face, into something magical that happened when you threw a switch. The choking smoke was still there, but not at your house. There was still heavy labor involved, but it wasn't done by you or your children. For the first time, people were able to pretend that their standard of living was provided, free of downsides, by little elves that lived in the wall. All benefit, no detriment. Action without consequences. In other words, this is the point where everybody went a little bit bonkers.

NSA's domestic spying was illegal, federal judge rules

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 03:55 PM PDT

A federal judge today ruled that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program was illegal. In doing so, the judge rejects the Obama administration's attempts to maintain the secrecy around the widely criticized program introduced by Bush after the 9/11 attacks:
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers who were representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance," the judge said that the government was liable to pay them damages. The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration's claims that its warrantless surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans' e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.
Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretapping Program Illegal (NYT)

Previously:


Random moment from history

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 01:17 PM PDT

Actual sentence just read, by me, in a history tome documenting the early days of Outagamie County, Wis. — "A fair sized audience attended the lecture on 'The Rise and Fall of the Moustache'." This is listed as one of the highlights of 1880, people. And don't front like you wouldn't have totally gone to that lecture. We all know better. UPDATE: Intrepid reader ncbeets was able to supply some missing context on the moustache lecture. Turns out, it's the work of a sort of proto-David Sedaris, who traveled the country reading his comic stories to packed houses for 30 years. And you can listen to the whole thing online!

Last Gasp 40th Anniversary Art Show, Thursday in San Francisco

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 11:58 AM PDT

Images Blog Wp-Content Themes Cutline-1.3 Images Lgbanner1
Blog Wp-Content Uploads 2010 03 40Years Smaller-1 For 40 years, our friends at Last Gasp have kept the counterculture busy with books, publishing wild, weird, wonderful, and subversive works by R. Crumb, Robert Wilson, Diane di Prima, Mark Ryden, Timothy Leary, and a slew of other greats. This Thursday, April 1 in San Francisco, Last Gasp will celebrate with the opening of a major art show and party at the 111 Minna Gallery. The line-up is mindblowing with works by: Tim Biskup, Glenn Barr, R. Crumb, Frank Kozik, Camille Rose Garcia, Mark Ryden, Winston Smith, Stanislav Szukalski, Basil Wolverton, Ed Hardy, Charles Gatewood, Liz McGrath, Laurenn McCubbin, Jay Kinney, and dozens of others. Our pals at Gama-Go even created a special t-shirt for the anniversary. The 21+ over event is free, public, and starts at 6pm. di Prima is reading at 6:30pm. Congratulations, Last Gasp! Thanks for keeping the dream alive, and the underground literate.
Last Gasp 40th Anniversary Art Show

The Last Gasp story

Teabonics

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 03:06 PM PDT

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Teabonics is a Flickr set of "signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests (that) feature 'creative' spelling or grammar." (Thanks, Jody Radzik!)

The Beat of the Future

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 02:53 PM PDT

Super Bowl XX. 1986. Bears vs. Patriots. New Orleans Superdome. One of the great joys of growing up in Chicago was watching Walter Payton turn a corner on nasty winter day.  The Chicago Bears were a wondrous team in '85/'86: full of great personalities, before any  originality in sports was reduced to the common rubble of brand, and a defensive line that rushed the quarterback like marauding beasts. They were Mongols.  

upw2.jpg The Jumbotron was still relatively new technology at that time—at least it still felt new.  I remember the slack-jawed horror when Reagan's mammoth speaking head filled the giant screen, draped in the pulsing stars and stripes. We were celebrating the apex of liberty and the human spirit and lots of other shit, apparently. His comforting tone was deep with menace.  I was with Tim Robbins and we got a bad case of The Fear, even though we had prepared for just this situation.

I remember witnessing the UP WITH PEOPLE halftime pageant terrified, with dilated pupils. It was a time when kids were ordered or bullied into attending high school pep rallies—with all that hateful homecoming gibberish.  

As you can see in this video now, watching the performance was like diving into an ocean of bad fashion and forced smiles. Dr. Pepper dancing and Mom Jeans from shore to shore... pre-Prozac in motion.... military ballet... Mandatory cheers and quasi-religious cult patriotics... the glory of the empire. A choreographed tribute to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. A celebration of diversity, unity, and fluorescent leggings.

Meanwhile, Reagan was dumping all the mentally ill and vets out on the streets to die,  as a direct result of his policies.  

upw3.jpg

Reagan was a bona fide motherfucker (politically speaking) who—among many other horrible things (see Central America's massacres and bloodbaths)—launched the deregulation craze that began America's descent. But the triple-nuclear motherfuckers who shared his ideology and followed would make us nostalgic for his comparatively lesser evil.

The idea that America would one day feel homesick for the '80s was as alien to me then as that vast, choreographed grid of grinning dancers, goose-stepping to synthesizer blasts.



In the middle of the extravaganza, Dick Enberg's syrupy and wholesome voice echoed through the Superdome:

The beat of the future is all around us!

It's the players on the field

The kid in the stands,
dreaming of being out there himself some day

It's a feeling that's hard to describe!

And when you can't say it with words,

you can always say it with your feet.


"The beat of the future!," Up With People sang. "The sound of tomorrow, ringing in my ears!"

There was ringing in my ears, too. We were seated on the 50-yard line ten rows up. The three grams of psilocybin I gobbled before the game was the only thing that kept me sane.

Later that night in New Orleans, I met a zombie, but I got away without being bitten.

RELATED:

* "Smile Until it Hurts," a documentary on the "clean-cut, smile-drenched singing phenomenon" of Up with People.

* "Forever War: It's What's For Dinner," Michael Vlahos


* Another YouTube find: A montage of the preparation and performance of the SuperBowl XX Halftime show by Up with People, in the Superdome of New Orleans LA / January 86 by the UWP casts of 85-86.



8 Wonders of the Solar System, art by Ron Miller

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 11:38 AM PDT

Marsvallllll
When it comes to science fiction, fantasty, and space art, Ron Miller is an artist's artist. Before becoming a freelance illustrator (and Hugo-nominated book author), Miller was art director for the National Air & Space Museum's Albert Einstein Planetarium. Along with doing book and magazine illustrations, he's also created production art for films like Dune and Total Recall, and designed stamps for the US Postal Service. Recently, Scientific American commissioned art from Miller to illustrate their new online feature, "8 Wonders of the Solar System, Made Interactive." The multimedia feature explores the likes of Jupiter's Red Spot, the Geysers of Enceladus, the sunrise on Mercury, and, of course, Saturn's rings. Here's the caption for the image above, depicting Valles Marineris on Mars:
People have been known to fall to their knees and weep at the sight of Arizona's Grand Canyon. One wonders what the first traveler to the Mariner Valley will do when gazing into this canyon. At almost four miles deep and so wide that in some places you would have to strain to see the other side, this gigantic tectonic crack would span the U.S. from New York to California--a quarter of the way around the planet--so that sunrise at one end happens six or so hours before sunrise at the other. Water once ran through large segments of this expanse. In this image the traveler views an icy mist filling the valley as the suns sets over the north rim.
"8 Wonders of the Solar System, Made Interactive"

Pedobear on a child's birthday cake?

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 10:05 AM PDT

HiSmH.jpg This is so inappropriate I don't even know what to say. I doubt, however, that this really is a child's birthday cake, or even a real cake at all.

Man creates SF out of toothpicks

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:59 AM PDT

Scott Weaver of Rohnert Park, California started making the Golden Gate Bridge with toothpicks at the age of 17. Now, thirty-some years later, he's completed an entire replica of San Francisco, with details like the Palace of Fine Arts and surfers at Ocean Beach. Here's a video:

Dude totally recreates San Francisco with toothpicks [Wired]

Man fleeing police runs into prison yard

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:47 AM PDT

Ricky Flowers, 20, was fleeing on foot from Cleveland police when he climbed a 30-foot barbed-wire fence. Problem was, it was a fence surrounding a state prison. Apparently, police attempted to pull over Flowers's car. He and his passengers eventually stopped the car and ran. From AOL News:
Police say that they found seven bags of marijuana in the vehicle, and that Flowers told them he fled because he was driving with a suspended license.

Flowers, who cut his right arm on the barbed wire as he scaled the fence at the Northeast Pre-Release Center for Women, was taken to a local hospital, where he received 36 staples and stitches, police said.

Fleeing Police, Man Hops Fence Into Women's Prison

Erykah Badu LA release party, and a Sun Ra moment: NUCLEAR WAR

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 10:35 AM PDT

badu.jpgLast night's release party for Erykah Badu's new album at at the El Rey Theater in LA was amazing. The El Rey is a relatively small venue, the place was packed, the sound was rich, and Badu was in spectacular form with an incredible supporting ensemble. Opening turntablists J Rocc, DJ Nobody, and Kutmah spun fine sets, too. At left, one of a number of great shots from the evening by Jewell at Frolab (Flickr slideshow after the jump). The poster Badu is holding was designed by Emek, more of his art for this release here.

One of my favorite moments in the set last night was when Badu turned to her laptop on stage (yep), opened up a Sun Ra track, let it hang in the air for a while, bobbing her head, then led her band and the audience in a live call-and-response cover of that same song. The track was Nuclear War. I've embedded the original above.

"Nuclear War.... Nuclear War... They're talkin' about... Nuclear War... It's a motherfucker, don't you know... If they push that button, yo' ass gotta go...."

Go get the new Badu album, it's full of sweet funky beauty: New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh. More Frolab photos from the release party after the jump.

Previously:

(Special thanks to Metzger, Morpheus, McGinley, and Victor!)

Strange ad for Friskies cat food

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:32 AM PDT

Slate points us to a strange ad for Friskies, the cat food, that features dancing turkeys, a golden fish-shaped boat, and a rainbow-colored wonderland with a red carpet leading to a bowl of cat food. The pet food brand claims it's trying to reach owners who want to "get inside and experience the magical world their cats experience." There's even a psychedelic remix version on YouTube, set to The Byrds' Eight Miles High.

Psychedelic cat food [Slate]

Bikini protest of France's Burqa Ban

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 02:48 PM PDT

DSC03377.jpg

Boing Boing reader Georgia McElveen sends this photograph, and says she shot it after "coming accross a group of three girls protesting the burqa ban in France on Monday March 29, 2010." And that is all we know.

20,000 US BitTorrent users sued; 30,000 more lawsuits pending

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 06:56 AM PDT

The number of Americans targetted by entertainment industry lawsuits nearly doubled this month, as the the US Copyright Group ("an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance") brought suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users. 30,000 more lawsuits are pending, bringing the total number of US entertainment industry lawsuit defendants up to 80,000 (when you include the 30,000 victims of the RIAA).

This beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves gambit is puzzling to me. It seems likely to me that most of these defendants will settle for several thousand dollars (regardless of their guilt) rather than risk everything by hiring a lawyer to defend themselves. But does the "US Copyright Group" really think that Americans will go back to the mall with their credit-cards in hand once their friends' lives have been ruined by litigation?

How about making peace, instead? Offer blanket licenses, DRM-free downloads, ad-supported streams, and products whose EULA consists of "By buying this product you agree to abide by copyright" (a far cry from the current status quo, which goes more like "By buying this product, you agree... [15,000 words omitted] ...that we can spy on you, take it away again, stop you from exercising your consumer rights to lend or give away this product, etc etc etc).

New litigation campaign quietly targets tens of thousands of movie downloaders (via Michael Geist)

Previously:


Labour MP's motion to subject Digital Economy Bill to full debate

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 06:44 AM PDT

UK Labour MP Austin Mitchell has had a change of heart on the dread Digital Economy Bill and has produced anearly day motion asking to have all 24,000+ words of it subjected to scrutiny and debate, rather than being hidden away in the undemocratic, secretive "wash-up" process: "That this House believes that the Digital Economy Bill [Lords] is too important to be taken further in the last days of a dying Parliament; and considers that a bill with so many repercussions for consumers, civil liberties, freedom of information and access to the internet should be debated and properly scrutinised at length and in detail, with a full opportunity for public discussion and representation in a new Parliament after the general election and not rushed through in the few days that remain in this Parliament." Write to your MP and support the motion!

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