Cory Doctorow: John sez, "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is giving away copies of their Sept. 2007 issue to bloggers willing to write about the issue on their blogs. This issue features stories by Alexander Jablokov, John Langan, Albert E. Cowdrey, Heather Lindsley, Kevin N. Haw, Robert Reed, and a brand new story by Ted Chiang."

I've got a box of copies (about 40) of the Sept. issue I'd like to give away to bloggers. Here's the deal:

1) Go to our "Contact Us" page: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/contact.htm

2) Tell us where to mail your copy of the issue.

3) Receive the issue and blog about it. Naturally, we prefer if you read the issue before blogging about it, but I'm just insisting that you blog about it. (Last time we tried this promotion, people mistakenly thought they should blog about the magazine in order to receive the new issue. No. The idea is to blog about this issue, even if the whole blog entry is short. So instead of blogging "The cover sucks," you're supposed to write "The cover OF THE SEPTEMBER 2007 ISSUE sucks.")

4) Send us a link to your blog.

That's all there is to it. I'll post here when we run out of copies.

Link (Thanks, John!)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Capitol v. Foster, in Oklahoma, the RIAA has been directed to pay the defendant $68,685.23 in attorneys fees. This is the first instance of which I am aware of the RIAA being ordered to pay the defendant attorneys fees. The judge in this case has criticized the RIAA's lawyers' motives as 'questionable,' and their legal theories as 'marginal' (PDF). Although the judge had previously ordered the RIAA to turn over its own attorneys billing records, today's decision (PDF) made no mention of the amount that the RIAA had spent on its own lawyers."

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David Pescovitz: This beautiful sign, erected in 1957 at Felix Chevrolet in Los Angeles, was declared a historic-cultural monument on Thursday. (Photo from Tejana's Flickr stream.) Antonio Villaraigosa and downtown-area City Councilwoman Jan Perry were against the monument status for the Felix sign and the car showroom, at the corner of Figueroa and Jefferson Boulevard, because they fear the designation will cause problems for area development efforts. From the Los Angeles Times:

"It is literally a modern totem pole," said sign preservation advocate Jim Childs. "It really explains the evolution of the automobile and Los Angeles..."

The Felix character was borrowed from the popular 1920s cartoon "Felix the Cat" by pioneering L.A. automobile dealer Winslow Felix, who opened Felix Chevrolet in 1922 at 12th Street and Grand Avenue. Felix was a friend of filmmaker Pat Sullivan, whose animation studio created the mischievous feline character...

Felix's fans urged that the sign and showroom be left intact. They noted that landmark status does not permanently block removal of a historic structure but does force property owners, developers and city officials to carefully study the effects of demolition.

"We're looking at an icon in California history, a true definition of L.A.'s love affair with the automobile," added Charles Fisher, who teamed up with Childs to nominate the sign and showroom as a landmark.

Link (Thanks, Gale Banks!)

Considering all of the tumult surrounding the release of Vista, not to mention the lukewarm reaction to it, there's been a lot of discussion over whether or not Vista represents the last Windows operating system of its nature. On top of everything else, the emergence of web-based software is rapidly reducing the significance of the client-side operating system. But Microsoft insists that Windows as we know it here to stay and that the successor to Vista will be another "heavyweight" system. It's not surprising that Microsoft would have this attitude, as it has little choice but to continue feeding the Windows cash cow. The question for Microsoft, then, is whether it can do a better job of pushing out the next operating system than it did with Vista. Has the company identified why the product development cycle went so far awry, or can customers expect multi-year delays, once again? And can it address other complaints, such as the prodigious amount of computing power that it takes to run? It seems pretty safe to say that unless it addresses these issues, it's unlikely that the next version of the operating system will see any more success.

H_Fisher writes "Research into mitochondria — small structures within a cell that have their own DNA — suggests that they may be a cause of cellular death, according to Newsweek. The article The Science of Death: Reviving the Dead reports on people who have recovered from sudden death due to cardiac arrest through the use of medically induced hypothermia. The cooling process may help stop the death of brain and heart cells initiated by the mitochondria once they are deprived of oxygen. The article goes on to probe delicately at the question of where a person's personality 'is' between death and later revival, and describes several ongoing scientific studies of near-death experiences."

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Cory Doctorow: Rich Prelinger sez,

The Internet Archive has launched a demo of the Open Library, a project that seeks to gather all the information about all the world's books and make it publicly available as a giant books wiki.

While many books are making their way online for free access, most still are restricted or cost money to touch. The Open Library combines links to open resources with information on in-copyright works and enables you and me to review, annotate, correct and convene.

I think this project (which right now seems to point to almost half a million books) is very cool -- it's going to be a major addition to the world's open cultural infrastructure. I have a hunch that it's going to be the primary way many if not most people access books, and I see it becoming an always-open window on the desk of every librarian.

Aaron Swartz led this project, which was conceived by Brewster Kahle -- please send them support, critiques and book databases!

Link (Thanks, Rick!)

Earlier in the month, Russian authorities shut down the well-known Allofmp3.com site, following complaints from the US government -- and the implication that if they didn't do so, the US would make it hard for Russia to join the World Trade Organization. Of course, the people behind Allofmp3 quickly set up shop at another URL, and went about their business selling dirt-cheap digital music. It's today been reported that Alltunes, another site owned by Allofmp3's parent company, has won a court case against Visa's Russian agent, after Visa refused to process its payments. As the company points out, it's never been convicted of illegal activity, and Visa cut it off after complaints from the IFPI, the international equivalent of the RIAA. It's not clear to what extent Visa and its agents can be forced to =offer their services to a business, however the Allofmp3 folks are correct when they assert that it's not Visa's -- nor the IFPI's -- right to decide when copyright's been violated, particularly when they don't hold any of the copyrights in question.

coondoggie sends us to a Network World story, as is his wont, about network problems at Duke University in Durham, N.C. that seem to be related to the iPhone. "The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke. The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the school's wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help-desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown. 'Because of the time of year for us, it's not a severe problem,' says Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke's Office of Information Technology. 'But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It's a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20-30 access points signaling they're down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating.'" So far, the communication with Apple has been "one-way."

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Mark Frauenfelder:

Allan Janus says: "In regard to the 1950's comic that predicts the administration's Iran policy, I discovered a villain - the evil Yew Bee - in one of the Fletcher Hanks Stardust thrillers (contained in "I shall destroy all civilized Planets) who bears an uncanny resemblance to our dear vice president. And guess what - he's plotting to take over the country!"

Cheney - sorry, I mean Yew Bee - wreaks terrible destruction on the country - normal weaponry and constitutional restraints are useless! Cheney - sorry, Yew Bee - is poised to triumph and plunge the U.S. into a hideous dictatorship... and then Super Wizard Stardust appears and turns Chen... I mean Yew Bee, sorry - into a giant rat! By the way, Super Wizard Stardust is the only superhero I know of who's so secure in his masculinity that he can wear polka dots. And they look good on him!

Link

Reader comment:

Howard says:

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) And, of course, we hope that the title "most prophetic comic" is not awarded to T-Man # 20 (which, alas, little Dickie Cheney probably devoured at some point in the course of his undisclosed childhood).

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the experience of commercial flying -- like poor service from airlines, and delays from technical glitches and systemic failures. But a Computerworld columnist is all hot and bothered because people can't get online or use cell phones while they're on planes. Frankly, the piece is so bizarre that it would make more sense as a badly written parody. It claims "Providing low-cost WiFi access in-flight is perfectly doable. In fact, an extremely good service was painstakingly rolled out, then later killed because of a lack of interest and support from the airlines and the government." This isn't strictly true: Boeing shut down its Connexion service because it didn't attract very many users. People were reluctant to pay $30 per flight for WiFi; this made airlines hesitant to spend the $500,000 per plane to equip them with the system. Still, the writer claims that US airlines "failed everyone" -- despite evidence that the real demand for in-flight internet access is nowhere near as great as many people assume.

But things take an even more bizarre turn when the writer turns his rant towards the government ban on cell phones on planes. He focuses on the FAA's ban, which is in place for safety reasons, ignoring the FCC's ban, which is based on the contention that devices on planes could interfere with ground networks. He says that the FAA ban, purportedly on safety grounds, merely exists so that planes' avionics and other equipment don't have to be shielded from interference. His demand is that the ban be lifted, and airlines forced to install shielding -- then that cell phones be banned again, but this time because they'd be annoying to many passengers. That seems rather pointless, but his claim that the current ban is helping terrorists makes it really hard to take the guy seriously: "And terrorists love the ban, because it's another potential way to crash airplanes. The cell phone ban as a substitute for shielding is clearly unacceptable. It's a trivial task for terrorists to look up public information about which phones cause the most interference, then bring dozens of them onboard and turn them on during crucial phases of flight, such as takeoff." Um, yeah. The fact remains that the real demand for in-flight internet service hasn't lived up to the expectations. Regardless of how many people say they'd use such services, there hasn't been enough actual use to sustain their operations. It remains expensive to equip planes with the necessary equipment to offer in-flight net access; given the way things are going at many US airlines, the majority of customers would probably rather see that money spent on things that would help get them and their luggage to their destination on time.

Xenographic writes "INCITS V1, the US group responsible for the US vote over whether or not ANSI will grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's OOXML format, failed to reach the 2/3 consensus required to recommend OOXML to ANSI. What makes this vote interesting is the graph in the article, showing all the new Microsoft business partners who joined INCITS just this year to vote for OOXML. The INCITS Executive Board will now deliberate further, until they can come to some agreement on what to recommend to ANSI, but it's pretty clear that Microsoft is pushing OOXML as hard as it can."

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I've started to work on the final pass of the OPML 2.0 spec, in preparation for freezing it. The last changes were made on 3/1/06, well over a year ago. There haven't been comments in months. People have been quietly deploying OPML 2.0, even though there's a clear Do Not Deploy caveat at the top of the document.

http://www.opml.org/spec2

Today I made a change to the explanation of the new-in-2 <ownerId> element. In the previous version it said the address had to point to a page with a form that allowed the reader to communicate with the author. It no longer says it must be a form. Further, in the previous version it didn't say that it must be unique to the author. Now it does.

Please use the comment section on the annex site for feedback.

Although it may not get that much hype, Zappos has built up an impressive and successful online shoe retailer. While shipping costs are often the bane of online retailers, Zappos has thrived, not only by offering free shipping, but by offering free return shipping as welll (via Knowledge Problem). Obviously, shipping is expensive, but by subsidizing product returns, the company has removed the risk of buying shoes online. Customers don't have to worry about a pair of shoes not fitting right, because they can always send them back at no cost. In fact, the company approves of customers that buy multiple pairs, just to see which pair fits, while sending the others back. Of course this cuts into its margins to some extent, but the alternative is for customers to buy shoes at traditional stores. The basic lesson is one that plenty of retailers recognize: making it easier to return items will make customers more comfortable with purchasing them. But it's the application of this lesson online, to such an extreme degree, that has separated Zappos from the pack.

Aaron Swartz today announced the launch of the new Open Library project. The goal of the project is to produce the world's greatest library on the Internet free for anyone to use. Starting with the Internet Archive's book scanning project and organizing the insertion of new content via a wiki-type model the project seems to be off to a great start. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up today in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Frauenfelder: Alterati has a link to a torrent file to an out-of-print Timothy Leary comic called Neurocomics published in 1979 by Last Gasp. I have an original copy, and it's a fun introduction to his 8-circuit model of the brain, popularized by Robert Anton Wilson in Prometheus Rising.

This work, while in black and white, was years ahead of the modern pop art comic of the time. The black and white line drawings and illustrations are easy to digest and allowed the amazing depth of information Dr. Leary had synthesized to be delivered in 33 pages of psychedelic imagery and concise language. Other than Timothy, the creative talent involved included Pete Von Sholly, Tim Kummero, S. Riley, L. Ochi, B. Clark, and George DiCaprio. (George DiCaprio is, of course, the father of film star Leonardo, who just happens to be scheduled to play Dr. Leary in an upcoming pic. It all fits together in an acid sort of way.)

Link (Via Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing)

Mark Frauenfelder: English Russia says:

During the press conference of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, that took place on G8 summit, some young man started to throw out propaganda leaflets. This incident became very popular in the Russian part of the Internet. The reason of such popularity is neither the actions of the young activist, nor the smart reaction of the Mr. President. The reason was the man sitting in the conference hall (you can see him on the picture above). They called him Glazastik (Big-Eyed Guy). Below you can see the short video of this incident - see the guy with strange eyes behind the guy with leaflets, clear at 00.58 of the video. After the video was spread around Russian Internet many photoshopped versions of him appeared, we also include them here.

Link

iamdrscience writes "MIT aeronautics professor Dava Newman has designed a new spacesuit along with her colleague, Jeff Hoffman and a group of students. This is far sleeker and lighter weight than the suits used by astronauts today, promising greater mobility than the traditional bulky suits of today which can weigh 300lbs or more. Instead of gas pressurization, the new prototype BioSuit employs "mechanical counter-pressure" in the form of skin-tight layers wrapped around the body." http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html

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