Cory Doctorow: I love themeparks, but I don't care for thrill rides -- I'm a Haunted Mansion guy, not an upside-down vomitcoaster 3000 guy. I don't have the stomach for it. Besides, people get hurt on those things.

A girl's feet were cut off Thursday when a free-fall thrill ride malfunctioned at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom Amusement Park in Louisville, Kentucky, police said.

A cord wrapped around the 16-year-old's feet and severed them at her ankles while she was on the "Superman Tower of Power," a police dispatcher said. The girl was taken to a local hospital.

Link

Cory Doctorow: My friend Sandra Kasturi is an award-winning science fiction poet, and she's just published her first major poetry collection. The book features an introduction by Neil Gaiman, and many of Sandra's major works. I'm not a huge poetry guy, but I make an exception for these poems. Be sure to check out the online samples.

The Unbinding of Spirits

What frail spectres can we begin to conceive
out of darkened bedrooms and glass-blown pride?
Conjuring tongues and gin-chilled fingers relieve
us of our private hauntings, turn them inside
out upon the carpet. Can we not inspire
peace—not this hag-ridden, ghost-hackled perturb
of an existence? Give one thought to what dire
sorrows may come forth, what we may disturb?
Yet here is grief. I have been waylaid.
I am gone to frantic clutching, a raving
of words, braiSitting, steadying the tilting world; smoking, obscuring the truthsding together things unsaid,
things imagined. Mourning’s bright weaving.
From my drowning bed, dragged by tides’ rebound,
my spectral words, pulled to depths where they unsound.

Link,

Mark Frauenfelder: Ron says: "Bruce Schneier ran a contest to come up with a plausible movie plot about bringing down a commercial jet in a manner that would force the TSA to ban something innocuous and/or ubiquitous. I have boingboing to thank for winning this contest: I found out about it on your site. When my script wins an Oscar, I'll be sure to mention you guys in the acceptance speech, if the orchestra hasn't played me off the stage yet :)"

On June 5, I posted three semi-finalists out of the 334 comments:

* Butterflies and beverages; water must be banned.
* Dimethylmercury; security checkpoints must be banned, but of course they can't be. Oh, what to do!
* Oxy-hydrogen bomb; wires -- earphones, power cables, etc. -- must be banned.

Well, we have a winner. I can't divulge the exact formula -- because you'll all hack the system next year -- but it was a combination of my opinion, popular acclaim in blog comments, and the opinion of Tom Grant (the previous year's winner).

I present to you: Butterflies and Beverages, posted by Ron.

Link

Mark Frauenfelder: John says: "Charming arrangement of toy cars etc depicting riots, murders etc." Link

prostoalex writes "If you're launching a new blog into the blogosphere, does the common netiquette allow you to have a separate wiki to go with a blog? If the previous sentence irritated you, you're not alone. Folksonomy, blogosphere, blog, netiquette and blook are among the most hated Internet words, Lulu Blooker Prize research found."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in April, a court found that Kaleidescape's high end DVD jukebox was perfectly legal, despite complaints from the entertainment industry. The DVD jukebox clearly was not for pirating materials. It would rip DVDs and store them on a hard drive, but it included all kinds of copy protection and cost $27,000. This wasn't for kids ripping DVDs in their bedrooms. When that lawsuit came out, the group in charge of the DVD spec, DVD-CCA whined that the lawsuit would delay the rollout of the latest DVD specs -- though it wasn't clear why. Now we know. PC Magazine has reported that the group has proposed a new amendment that would ban any product from making DVD copies or allowing DVD content to be watched without the actual DVD present. This is getting some attention on various tech sites, but it seemed pretty strange. How could an industry association, rather than the government, create the laws by which legally purchased DVDs could be used? However, as the EFF explains, it's the DMCA's fault. The DMCA effectively allows the industry to define what's acceptable innovation.

It's a little confusing how this works (and most of the initial reports aren't getting into the details). Obviously, the DVD-CCA can't change the laws and really "ban" DVD copying. DVD copying for personal use is protected fair use. However, in order to read a DVD you have to license the technology from DVD-CCA. So if you want to create a product that reads/copies/plays a DVD, you're supposed to agree to DVD-CCA's license terms first. The DMCA, with its anti-circumvention clause, means that anyone who ignores the license terms is guilty of violating the DMCA. Therefore, all the DVD-CCA needs to to in order to hinder innovation is change the terms of their license -- and ignoring it would breach the DMCA... even if all you're doing is providing tools for perfectly legal purposes (outside the DMCA). History is littered with examples of what happens when you put in incumbent industry to determine what kind of innovation is "allowed" and it never turns out positively. The incumbent industry is interested in protection, not innovation.

Mark Frauenfelder: The Magus says:

It's called the sitting cage, a cage made in the mold of the human body. Once inside the thing you can't move. Totally insane and not one for claustrophobics.

The site is semi-safe for work. No nudity or anything.

Link

steveb3210 writes "It seems that what was once a 5-acre glacial lake in the Andes has mysteriously disappeared. 'In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal,' Juan Jose Romero from Chile's National Forestry Corporation, Conaf, said. 'We went again in May and to our surprise we found that the lake had completely disappeared. All that was left were chunks of ice and an enormous fissure.'" The current theory is that an earthquake opened the ground and allowed the lake to drain. Looks like global warming is off the hook this time around.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've talked a great deal about why getting more educated immigrants into the US is a good idea. For some reason, way too many people assume that the job market is a zero-sum game, and that if a foreign person gets a job that somehow means one less job for an American. However, that doesn't appear to be the case. If that foreigner is helping to grow the market, it can often lead to a lot more demand. That's why it was good to see Congress at least appear willing to let in more skilled foreigners, especially in the area of high tech jobs. A recent Kauffman Foundation study supports this, by looking at foreign-born entrepreneurs, and noting that many of them came to the US as highly skilled, highly educated individuals in need of a job -- but later decided to start their own companies. In other words, they ended up creating many more jobs, rather than "taking jobs away." Yet, for some reason, many anti-immigration people would rather these individuals create those jobs in foreign countries and help those economies rather than our own.

The Supreme Court is on a roll. Earlier this week, it shot down an antitrust lawsuit against Wall St. banks for their role in dot-com IPOs. As with most lawsuits stemming from that period, this case seemed mostly about disgruntled investors wanting to blame someone for their losses. Now the Court has handed down another decision that should please the market. In an 8-1 ruling, the Court ruled that if you bring a class action securities lawsuit against a firm, you must supply evidence that corporate officers actually were engaged in or had knowledge of some sort of securities fraud. You can't just sue cause your stock went down and you want somebody's neck to wring. Unfortunately, it sounds like lawyers will find loopholes in the ruling, ensuring that these silly lawsuits will probably continue. But seeing as the only winners in these cases are the lawyers, anything that mitigates them should be good for companies, investors and customers, who end up paying the price of all this litigation in the goods they buy.

akkarin writes "Following Google's complaint to Microsoft regarding Vista's 'desktop search,' Google claims that Vista's search has not changed enough: 'Google said yesterday that the remedies don't go far enough. Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement, "We are pleased that as a result of Google's request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Todd Cochrane: AT&T's Secret $10 DSL.

Get my most recent trivia on Twitter.

Mark Frauenfelder: Cecilia Beaman, a 57-year-old grandma and school principal, was caught trying to sneak a bread knife on an plane. She said it was an accident (she claims she thought she put the sandwich-preparing knife in her checked luggage), but that's too bad -- no sympathy for granny or her lame excuses. She knows the USA is at Threat Level Orange, and she should have been extra diligent. Now she's been hit with a $500 fine and placement on a terrorist watch-list. I feel safer!

On the trip home, screeners with the Transportation Security Administration at Los Angeles International Airport found it deep in the outside pocket of a carry-on cooler. Beaman apologized and told them it was a mistake.

"You've committed a felony," Beaman says a security screener announced. "And you're considered a terrorist."

Beaman says she was told her name would go on a terrorist watch-list and that she would have to pay a $500 fine.

Link

Skapare writes "According to this ReclaimTheMedia article, the Local Community Radio Act of 2007 (PDF) would remove the artificial restrictions imposed on LPFM by a 2000 law passed at the urging of corporate radio giants and NPR, claiming that small community stations would interfere with the signals of larger stations. If passed, this bill will pave the way for educational groups, nonprofits, unions, schools and local governments to launch new local radio stations across the country."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in January, a district court turned down the request from the losing candidate in a Florida election trying to see the source code of the e-voting machine, since it appeared to lose a ton of votes. The judge in that case worried that exposing the code to experts for review (not to the whole world) would somehow violate the company's trade secrets. An appeals court has now agreed, and will not force ES&S to hand over the code even though a report between the two cases showed that ES&S knew its machines were buggy while experts like Ed Felten show that a bug in the software could explain the mistakes found in the system. But, of course, protecting the "trade secrets" of a company that can't program straight is apparently more important than, say, a functioning democracy.

Cory Doctorow:
Patrick Kovacich made this steampunky "Problem" light that you can switch on when your life is giving you problems; he lavishly documented the build in a Flickr set so you can make your own. Link (Thanks, Cn!)

I was thinking of getting an inexpensive Dell desktop for a home server, but after reading this review of their customer service, I was reminded why sticking with Apple is probably the best bet.

Cory Doctorow: The North American Broadcasters' Association has broken its own by-laws and trampled the position of NPR and PBS, endorsing a controversial policy at the United Nations.

This week, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization is holding a critical debate on the "Broadcast Treaty." This treaty would establish a new copyright-like right, but whereas copyright goes to people who make creative works, Broadcast Rights go to companies that broadcast other people's copyrighted works. The Broadcast Right isn't subject to the same fair use limits as copyright, which means that even if copyright lets you record a broadcast for criticism or parody, you will need to separately get an exemption under the Broadcast Right. More gravely, if means that if you license your work under Creative Commons, the people who distribute the files or air the program can overrule your generosity and insist that your fans not copy your work.

This treaty threatens the Internet as we know it. Novel services like YouTube and novel practice like podcasting would not exist today if this treaty was already implemented.

The General Assembly of WIPO has ordered Jukka Liedes, the chairman of the relevant committee to cut this out, instructing him to oversee a much narrower treaty that will block "theft of signals" (hacking free cable or satellite), while leaving all this other business off. The chairman has gone rogue, ignoring the direction of the Assembly and producing a draft that's even worse than the previous draft.

The Chairman isn't the only one who's gone rogue, though: the National Association of Broadcasters of America has been lobbying hard all week for the treaty. One problem: PBS and NPR -- members of NABA -- oppose the treaty and have not authorized the association to lobby for this measure.

"National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service do not support a Diplomatic Conference to adopt a treaty based on the April 20, 2007 non-paper because they do not believe the treaty provides adequate protection for the fair use of broadcast and cablecast matter for newsgathering and other purposes. Bell ExpressVu does not support a Diplomatic Conference because it believes the proposed exclusive retransmission right exceeds what is necessary to prevent signal piracy or protect investment and does not contain a reservation that would permit a signatory to limit or not apply the application of the retransmission right."

Link (Thanks, Alex!)