Gammu writes "The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don Park, who I know to be a reasonable and fair person to do business with (I have experience), had a terrible experience with Magnussen's Toyota of Palo Alto.

Part of the power of blogs is that we get to share our experiences, so we can avoid businesses that take their customers for granted. There are lots of Toyota dealers, and many of them are a pleasure to work with; again I speak from experience.

I drive a Toyota myself, purchased at Lighthouse Toyota in St Augustine, FL (turn down the volume before clicking that link). I'm sure I paid more than I had to, and there were problems with the deal, but they took care of them, and in the end I felt good about the purchase.

There's a big Toyota dealer in Berkeley, I've had to bring my car in for service there, and likewise, they've done a good job, and treated me with professional care. I managed to blow out all four of my tires (they're run-flat tires, a terrible design, imho), and they replaced them at no charge. I wasn't even their customer. How about that!

amigoro writes "A court in Germany today banned Google from using the name 'Gmail' for its popular webmail service following a trademark suit filed by the founder of G-Mail. Daniel Giersch, started using the name G-Mail in 2000, four years before Google released 'Gmail'. "Google infringed the young businessman's trademark that had been previously been registered," said the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in its judgement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nik Cubrilovic: Twitter v Pownce: It's The API, Stupid.

The API is why Twitter is a coral reef, and Pownce is just a shipwreck.

Twitter, to me, is a very thin app, on top of a bare-bones identity system with a clean and simple API, very lightweight (and therefore not very secure, not suitable for banking applications, for example). And for not very much more complexity it's also a pub-sub system (not IM, though many people confuse it with IM).

It's one of the 25 most interesting pieces of software I've ever seen, not because of its technical prowess, rather because it is not technically impressive. You can master it as a platform in a matter of days. With good sample code (which I didn't have) probably in hours.

Xeni Jardin:

Here's an interview with artist Kent Rogowski, about his "Bears" photographs. Furry, huggable teddybears, gutted and inverted.

Q: I love these bears so much. They remind me of my early sewing experiments. What happens when you take such a beloved and iconic toy and transform it by literally turning it inside out?

A: (...) Teddy bears are designed to be innocuous and non-threatening creatures. Inside-out the bears are still sometimes recognizable but are now much more complicated and contradictory. The seams of the bear now look like scars, and some bears loose their limbs and other appendages depending on how they were constructed. When you look at the inside-out bears they appear to have a history or a past. They no longer offer comfort but instead seem to want our empathy.

These are phenomenal. I think this one's my favorite -- the poor li'l guy looks like he's all tubed in to a catheter or an oxygen tank.

Link to interview by Nicole Pasukla at The Morning News, here's the gallery show in NYC through August 10, and here's an Amazon Link to buy the book (thanks Rosecrans!).

Xeni Jardin:

Metropolis magazine has a beautiful photo-feature about the design story behind a memorial for victims of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid: Link (Thanks, Susannah / via La Petite Claudine!)

thefickler writes "Media Defender, a company which does the dirty work for the MPAA, has been caught setting up 'dummy' websites in an attempt to catch those who download copyrighted videos. The site, MiiVi.com, complete with a user registration, forum, and "family filter", offered complete downloads of movies and "fast and easy video downloading all in one great site." But that's not all; MiiVi also offered client software to speed up the downloading process. The only catch is, after it was installed, it searched your computer for other copyrighted files and reported back."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

Scott Beale says,

Here are some photos of The Long Now Foundation members event for "77 Million Paintings" by Brian Eno, an exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The installation consisted of a 45 long projection by Obscura Digital of Brian Eno’s “visual music”.

Link

Previously on BoingBoing:

Brian Eno's 77 million paintings

Xeni Jardin: This one's dedicated to all the lovers and the dreamers out there. Don't stop believin'. Stock will replenish soon. Link, shared by Dubi Kaufman of Chicago, IL.

Xeni Jardin:

Here are photos of funny signs in a Greek deli which is closed for the July 4th holiday. That date, as you see here, commemorates the Great Greek Battle of Tabouli. Shared by BoingBoing reader Paul of Minneapolis.

You know, when I think of tabouli, I think, "nom nom nom," and that's precisely the kind of talk you might see emanating in speech-clouds from the mouths of Laugh Out Loud Cats. They, too, would like you to has a happy Independence Day: Link, here is moar. (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

BB reader Austin says,

Here is a fabulous (and lengthy) nearly line-by-line dissection of the Declaration of Independence. This essay really highlights the elegance in this one document. The crappy part is I can't imagine any group of politicians today coming up with anything nearly as well thought out.

And finally, dear reader: please do not blow yourself up today. Leave explosives in the hands of pros. Here's a gruesome wire story about a lady in Michigan who blew her head off Monday night with a 3-inch mortar bomb.

They would have made a wifi-only cell phone.

I wrote about this earlier this year. As I talk with people from home on my iPhone it seems so silly. The place is saturated with wifi bandwidth, and the device uses it, for everything but telephone calls.

6/15/07: "You gotta wonder why Apple went with such old, expensive, customer-hostile and likely obsolete technology."

And then I read this article by David Pogue in today's Times saying that T-Mobile introduced a phone last week, in the middle of all the iPhone euphoria, that routes phone calls over wifi if a signal is present.

Seems the iPhone should be doing that.

ScienceDaily is reporting that physicists at the University of New Hampshire have discovered the existence of a new type of electron wave on metal surfaces. "The acoustic surface plasmon, which will have implications for developments in nano-optics, high-temperature superconductors, and the fundamental understanding of chemical reactions on surfaces. [...] 'The existence of this wave means that the electrons on the surfaces of copper, iron, beryllium and other metals behave like water on a lake's surface,' says Diaconescu, a postdoctoral research associate in the Condensed Matter Group of the physics department at UNH. 'When a stone is thrown into a lake, waves spread radially in all directions. A similar wave can be created by the electrons on a metal surface when they are disturbed, for instance, by light.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: Security forces in Islamabad, Pakistan arrested the leader of a radical mosque after a bloody standoff -- the man was trying to escape the siege disguised in a burqa, according to authorities, but his pot belly is said to have given him away. Link to Reuters account. The Islamabad metblog had the most thorough online coverage I could find as the event was unfolding -- kind of wild to watch a story like this documented in real time, by folks who live there. Link to one of several much-updated posts on that site. (thanks, Sean Bonner)

Xeni Jardin:

In this photo shot by EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, EFF legal intern Ruben models the "AT&T Deathstar banner" on a handsome new Apple iPhone "to remind people that AT&T is still evil... Turns out it's a perfect fit for the screen!" (Thanks, Cory!)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting that pheromones could enable the growth of new brain cells. "Pheromone signals from dominant males spark new brain cells in their female partners and could help repair injured brains, suggests a new study by a University of Calgary neuroscientist. Sam Weiss's findings, in the July issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, provide evidence that pheromones -- subtle chemical signatures that influence mating behavior -- can control stem cells in the brain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

Developer "gj" and others behind the iPhone Development Project (http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki) claim to have released a "proof of concept activation program for the iPhone" that makes it possible to activate the device without an AT&T account, or re-activate after an AT&T account has been terminated.

Project participants explain that their work is intended to discover "additional uses for the iPhone by (legitimately) enabling its potential capabilities," and that the project is "for informational purposes only." Snip from the "goals and milestones" page:

The current goals of the iPhone Development Project are as follows:

* Break DMG Password *COMPLETE*

* Break Activation *COMPLETE*

* Unlock Phone

* Run Third Party Applications

* Allow DUN/Tethering

* Remove IMEI Transmitting

* Enable Disk Mode

(...)Also, as we enable certain features of iPhone, other features previously thought impossible may become reality.

And from the "Activation process" details page:

* Phone activation - Using a "known" token (one used to activate an iPhone legitimately), we can activate an iPhone even after deactivation. We can use this "known" token to activate multiple phones, but the token is believed to contain identifying information so we have not provided a token. I want to emphasize that a known token will work on any phone, and once you have a known token you can use wifi, iPod, etc.

The group claims to be having a "popularity problem" -- their servers can't take all the attention they're getting right now -- and they've asked folks to point to this IRC channel ('#iphone on irc.osx86.hu), instead of linking from high-traffic sites directly to the wiki page ((http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki).

In related news, yesterday "DVD Jon" Lech Johansen announced the results of a code project with similar goals:

Link to previous BoingBoing post. (Thanks, Jake!)

Reader comment: Eli says,

Might be nice to point out that thanks to a fairly recent Copyright Office ruling, it's perfectly legal to unlock your iPhone (or any other phone) to run on competitor's networks: Link. Heck, if I were in charge of Alltel or T-Mobile, I'd put a team of engineers on it and then offer free iPhone unlocking if you come in the store...

Conlaw writes "A former plumbing contractor who has made a new career selling virtual cyber sex toys in the virtual world of Second Life, has now brought suit against another player who is allegedly copying and selling a device called the Sex Gen. The plaintiff, whose avatar is known as 'Stroker Serpentine,' is seeking the real name of the copycat entrepreneur. The reporter describing the lawsuit included commentary from a cyber law professor whose university maintains a virtual Supreme Court in the Second Life world."