David Pescovitz: As part of the World Children's Festival this week in Washington DC, LEGO set up a build area outside of the Smithosnian National Air and Space Museum for kids to create individual mosaics that will fill out a basketball court-sized map of the US. This snapshot (click for larger size) was taken last week at LEGO headquarters where master builders were assembling the outline of the map for sizing. The final map will contain 9500 base plates and more than a million bricks. Link to World Children's Festival, Link to press release

frankShook writes "The Canadian news service CBC has up an article entitled 'Linux distributors scorn Microsoft partnership'. Primarily, it looks to describe the ongoing licensing saga between Microsoft and Linux distributors. It also includes a highly unique interpretation of the GPL: 'Open-source software such as Linux, on the other hand, encourages individuals to add to or modify software without fear of legal repercussions, so long as they abide by the conditions of the general public license, which stipulates that the program must remain open and sharable.'"

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I don't identify as a consumer. Why not get it over with and refer to me as a parasite.

Apparently Linked-in is considering its options as a platform with an API. The reason: Facebook, newly open to developers, is stealing its thunder. It would be cool if they just implemented an identity service that managed relationships between users, and allowed developers to define the relationships. Rather than incrementally one-upping each other by being slightly more open, why not go all the way, and operate an indentity service for your own application and for everyone else. This would put Linked-in (or whoever) at the center of Internet 3.0.

David Pescovitz:

Pressure Printing, creators of incredible fine art prints that are works-of-art in their own right, is having a summer sale! Through July 1, every one of their gorgeous limited-edition prints is 20% off. Pressure Printing's list of artists is just extraordinary, including the likes of Camille Rose Garcia, COOP, Jim Woodring, Tim Biskup, Attaboy, Mark Ryden, Glenn Barr, and many others. Seen here: at top, Tim Biskup's "Broken" and "Slayer" edition, $160 on sale; below, James Jean's "Taciturn," $400 on sale. Link

perturbed1 writes "The 142nd session of the CERN Council saw Organizational Director General Robert Aymar announcing a delay in the activation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The installation will start up in May 2008, taking 'the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier.' Such a delay was foreseen due to the quadrupole accident, which we've previously discussed. This gives extra time for Fermilab physicists to try to understand the latest interesting hints of the Higgs boson, as well as give much needed extra-time for the detectors at CERN to get ready for data taking. Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?"

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An anonymous reader writes "After recent success in using quantum computing for superconducting qubits, researchers from Delft have formed the first Controlled-NOT quantum gate. 'A team has demonstrated a key ingredient of such a computer by using one superconducting loop to control the information stored on a second. Combined with other recent advances, the result may pave the way for devices of double the size in the next year or two--closer to what other quantum computing candidates have achieved, says physicist Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Unlike today's computers, which process information in the form of 0s and 1s, a quantum computer would achieve new levels of power by turning bits into fuzzy quantum things called qubits (pronounced cue-bits) that are 0 and 1 simultaneously. In theory, quantum computers would allow hackers to crack today's toughest coded messages and researchers to better simulate molecules for designing new drugs and materials.'"

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amigoro writes with a link to the Press Escape blog, which is discussing new guidelines suggest by the FBI for university administrations. The Federal Bureau, worried about the possibility of international espionage via our centers of learning, now sees the need to restrict the freedoms of university students for national security. "FBI is offering to brief faculty, students and staff on what it calls 'espionage indicators' aimed at identifying foreign agents. Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators."

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Rafe Needleman: "Go to friend's wedding or blog Federated fracas?"

This is the neighborhood I take my walks in.

What you can't tell from the picture is how perfect the climate is for exercise.

I think it's the nicest weather in the whole United States.

peter deacon writes "Is the iPhone the next Segway, the next Zune, or the next iPod? The Perfect Storm offers some iPhone details that aren't secrets, but tend to be lost upon the analysts and journalists cranking out hit pieces on the iPhone. Why is everyone from Gartner to Gizmodo calling for a boycott of the iPhone? An interesting take on how Apple's new mobile phone will push to open up the web as a mobile platform for every mobile device on the market with a standards-based browser, and how Apple 'hacked the hackers' by releasing Safari for Windows in advance of its new phone."

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Continuing yesterday's thread.

I'm now working on a web service that takes four parameters:

1. username (a string)

2. password (a string)

3. MP3 bits (base64-encoded binary)

4. metadata (a struct)

The username and password are for the user's Twitter account. This data passes through the web service, it is not retained. You have my word of honor on that.

The bits are the "gram" -- the official limit is 200K, but there's a little bit of grace. (We'll accept slightly more than 200K.)

The metadata is a struct that can contain fields that have the same names as an RSS 2.0 item, such as title, link, description, category, source, etc. Very much like the Metaweblog API. Not all the elements are acceptable, but ones that aren't are ignored. (For example, enclosure.) All are optional, as is the struct itself. The title, if present, is used in forming the Twitter post. The remaining elements are retained, and used to form feed(s).

The twits are also posted to a global Twitter account -- twitogram. (They don't allow accounts whose name begin with "twitter.")

The username and password must be valid for the MP3 to be retained.

The service returns a string, if successful, the URL where the gram is stored. (I'm using Amazon S3 for the storage, so it should be fairly reliable.)

There's a limit to the number of grams you can post over time. Not sure exactly what the limit will be. Maybe no more than one every ten minutes? Interested in people's opinion.

The ideal client for this service, it seems, is Flash, because it can do the MP3 recording and has XML-RPC support. I will also implement a RESTful interface.

Disclaimer #1: Who does he think he is? Just some guy.

Disclaimer #2: My mother loves me. (I think.)

More dislcaimers will follow.

An anonymous reader writes "Almost ten years after the an internal report, and a year after a Baltimore sun story warned that the electrical system at the fort Meade NSA HQ couldn't keep up with the growing electricity demand ... the problem has got worse. The 'NSA has had to resort to partial, rolling brownouts at its computer farms and scheduled power outages and some offices are experiencing significant power disruptions'. NSA director Alexander testified to congress about this problem. It is suggested he wanted to add more than $800 million to the 07 budget. A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors. It also included a graph, without numbers, of this spending. It suggests that US intelligence spending is around $60 billion. An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other."

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Matt writes "Google is threatening to shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the German Bundestag passes it's new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, Google's German privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Google's practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any German citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal."

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Cory Doctorow:
Steampunk fireflies: a jar full of articulated mechanisms terminating in LEDs that flitter and flick when a small hand-crank is turned -- a huge brass knife-switch on the top of the jar switches them on. Hauntingly handsome. Link (Thanks, Jake!)

Steampunk on Boing Boing

theodp writes "Touted as a model of successful education by the likes of Bill Gates, Silicon Valley's High Tech High just held its first — and last — commencement ceremony, graduating only 21 students in its brief history. Despite the financial support of the world's richest man, the charter school cited money woes as it voted to shut its doors. Adding insult to the poor HTH kids' injury, the local public H.S. district plunked down $8.6M to snatch up their abandoned school and will turn it over to a brand new crop of kids in the fall."

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Deepa writes "We highly doubt LumiGram's Luminous Fiber Optic Tablecloth was designed with power outages in mind, but why hook up a boring string of lamps or fiddle with half melted candles when you can plug this bad boy into the generator? The cloth, which has fiber optics woven throughout, cotton borders, and a Europlug mains adapter, proves most useful when the lights are dimmed, and should prove quite the centerpiece at your next get-together. The illuminating device is available in a trio of sizes, comes in a variety of color schemes."

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The New York Times is reporting on preparations in the works by the US government to prep for a 'cyberwar'. Precautionary measures are being taken to guard against concerted attacks by politically-minded (or well-paid) hackers looking to cause havoc. Though they outline scenarios where mass damage is the desired outcome (such as remotely opening a dam's gates to flood cities), most expect such conflicts to be more subtle. Parts of the internet, for example, may be unreachable or unreliable for certain countries. Regardless, the article suggests we've already seen our first low-level cyberwar in Estonia: "The cyberattacks in Estonia were apparently sparked by tensions over the country's plan to remove Soviet-era war memorials. Estonian officials initially blamed Russia for the attacks, suggesting that its state-run computer networks blocked online access to banks and government offices. The Kremlin denied the accusations. And Estonian officials ultimately accepted the idea that perhaps this attack was the work of tech-savvy activists, or 'hactivists,' who have been mounting similar attacks against just about everyone for several years."

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MattHock writes "Wowhead (a WoW information database) has been sold to ZAM (Affinity Media) for the price of $1 million. ZAM is the owner of several other WoW databases, including Thottbot and Allakhazam. Until recently Affinity was also the owner of IGE, a highly controversial company that sold in-game wealth for real life money. Affinity recently sold IGE, which Wowhead claims as the reason they allowed the sale to go through. But did ZAM really sell IGE? The blogger who put this story online doubts that IGE and ZAM have actually distanced themselves. He believes that the supposed sale was just actually a means of restructuring to hide the relationship, similar to how IGE's relationship to Thottbot was hidden for a number of months through a convoluted set of parent companies."

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