A gaggle of tech companies, led by Google and Microsoft, have been pushing the FCC to open up the "white space" spectrum -- open airwaves in between those used by TV broadcasts -- for use by electronic devices and broadband services. This has been talked about for quite some time, and represents one way to more efficiently use spectrum, which is a finite and very valuable resource. The group delivered a prototype to the FCC earlier this year, as a way to show that the technology to allow devices to automatically detect what spectrum's in use and what's available, and route communications accordingly, is viable. The FCC's been testing it for several months, and it's all good, except for one little problem: it doesn't actually work. The Commission says the prototype couldn't detect TV broadcasts, and it also sometimes interfered with them. While this current iteration of the technology sounds like a failure, the FCC is still open to the idea of allowing use of the white spaces; now Google, Microsoft and their friends just need to get the technology right before things can move forward.

David Pescovitz: The Droste effect is the modern name of a recursive visual effect most famously used by the artist MC Escher. There are hundreds of fantastic Droste effect photos in the Flickr pool "Escher's Droste Print Gallery." You can create your own by following Flickr user Pisco Bandito's tutorial. (Seen here, Bandito's "I've Opened Myself To You.") From the Wikipedia entry on the Droste effect:

The 'Droste effect' is a Dutch term for a specific kind of recursive picture, one that in heraldry is termed mise en abyme. An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever, but practically it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration exponentially reduces the picture's size.

The term was coined by the poet and columnist Nico Scheepmaker at the end of the 1970s. It is named after Droste, a Dutch brand of cocoa, whose box has a picture of a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a box of the same brand of cocoa.

Link to Escher's Droste Print Gallery on Flickr, Link to Droste Effect Tutorial

selain03 sends us to Forbes for a surprisingly tolerant article on the recent Defcon. The reporter spoke to several of the event organizers and faithfully conveyed their characterization of the community as motivated by curiosity about technology. The article quotes a Department of Defense cybercrime guy: "Run-of-the-mill individual hackers are just noise as we try to focus on the real problem. We have to investigate every threat, but we're often dealing with ankle biters." A refreshing perspective to read in the mainstream media.

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While many people are aware of how dangerous software patents are to innovation in the software space, not nearly as many feel the same way about pharmaceutical patents. However, there is increasing evidence that pharmaceutical patents are harming healthcare in a variety of ways, often by slowing the pace of innovation by locking up important concepts and making them too expensive. Recently, India was pressured to update its patent system to cover pharmaceuticals (in many countries, pharma patents are a relatively recent addition), though the rules state that drugs created before 1995 cannot receive patent protection. However, drug makers have long learned that a great way to artificially extend patent protection on a drug is to make a tiny modification and then get a new patent. That's why you now see Clarinex on the market from the maker of Claritin. Claritin went off patent, so the maker came out with Clarinex, advertising that it was much better, even though that doesn't actually seem to be the case.

It seems that pharma firm Novartis tried to use this little trick to sneak in patent protection in India for a leukemia drug that came out before 1995. It tried to get a patent on a slightly modified version of the drug, which would then let it ban the sale of generic versions of the non-patented version of the drug. Luckily, as pointed out at Against Monopoly, an Indian court has denied the request, since Indian law says patents should only be granted for new products, or ones where there's a significant improvement -- which is not at all true in this case. That means generic makers can continue to market their drug in India and many, many more leukemia patients will be able to afford the medicine. Novartis, of course, whines that this will slow down drug development, but the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. Having a truly competitive market increases the incentive for real innovation. What Novartis wants is to focus on marginal, useless innovation for the sake of keeping monopoly profits.

mrcgran writes "Dell announced the availability of Ubuntu in Europe and future plans for China. 'I hinted at this before, but today, it's official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed... In his LinuxWorld keynote, Kevin Kettler announced that Dell and Novell intend to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 factory-installed on select consumer notebooks and desktops in China.'"

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Xeni Jardin:

Charles Ferguson made the Iraq documentary No End in Sight with money he earned when he sold his startup company to Microsoft. Snip from Joe Garofoli's feature in the San Francisco Chronicle about Ferguson's film (distributed by Magnolia Pictures), his message about Iraq, and the start of his new career:

In 1996, Charles Ferguson sold the startup company he founded to Microsoft for $133 million. He was 41, had $14 million worth of growing Microsoft stock in his pocket after paying off investors - and was thoroughly exhausted after barely sleeping the previous year. Then for the next eight years, he wrestled with the question that relatively young entrepreneurs rarely consider until they hit it big:

Now what do I do?

"For quite a while I didn't know," said Ferguson, as he looked out a window of the book-filled two-bedroom Berkeley home near Strawberry Canyon where he has lived since before he struck gold. While he was hardly idle during that time - he wrote two books, including the scathing "High Stakes, No Prisoners" (1999) about his startup experience, traveled and served at the Brookings Institution think tank - he felt unfulfilled. He couldn't sleep, and felt himself growing too dependent on sleeping pills that left him feeling dopey. And for a man who thinks at warp speed, that wouldn't do.

A little more than two years ago, Ferguson said he started to "get my energy back." What germinated during his hibernation was "No End in Sight," a documentary about how the United States has botched the occupation of Iraq. It opens Friday in the Bay Area after winning the special jury prize for a documentary at the Sundance Film Festival this year and garnering largely rave reviews in New York, where it opened last month.

Link to SFGate article. Link to No End in Sight website. The movie is playing in some cities now, and opening in more around the US throughout this month. (Thanks, Wayne Correia)

Xeni Jardin:

The president of Students for a Free Tibet is in Beijing right now, exactly one year ahead of the 2008 Olympics, vlogging and blogging about Tibetan sovereignty and being a general pain in the ass to the Chinese government.

Lhadon Tethong's liveblogging experiment is incredibly ballsy or incredibly foolhardy, depending on how you look at it -- hard to imagine this lasting long before authorities arrest, extradite, or take some other action to stop the activity.

Apparently, she's already attracted a group of official government "escorts".

Incidentally, Ms. Tethong's uncle is the most senior advisor to H.H. the Dalai Lama.

Link to "Beijing Wide Open" blog. Today's posts from her include an item about activists placing a giant "Free Tibet" banner on the Great Wall of China. (thanks, Oxblood and Nathan Freitas!)

Last month we noted a new entrant, Korea-based CDNetworks, in the red hot CDN space, where it competes with the likes of Akamai and LimeLight Networks. Since then, shares of Akamai and LimeLight have taken an utter shellacking, as investors wake up to the realization that all of this competition won't be very good for profits. Indeed, it seems that a bitter price war has already broken out, as the core CDN product rapidly becomes a commodity. This trend wasn't particularly hard to see, but the speed at which it's engulfed the industry does come as a bit of a surprise.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A group of Oklahoma University students has made a motion to vacate the ex parte order the RIAA had obtained compelling the university to turn over their names and addresses. In support of their motion was the expert witness declaration (PDF) of a computer security and forensics expert who essentially attacked the entire premise of the RIAA's lawsuit, characterizing the declaration upon which the RIAA based its motion as 'factually erroneous' and 'misleading.' Among other things he pointed out that 'An individual cannot be uniquely identified by an IP address,' and that 'Many computers can be connected to the Internet with identical IP addresses as long as they remain behind control points.' The students are represented by the same Oklahoma lawyer who recently obtained a award for $68,000-plus in attorneys fees against the RIAA in Capitol v. Foster."

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Xeni Jardin:

9/11-themed machinima terror-rotica: Link, another Link. Flesh, by Edouard Salier. (mildly NSFW, some stylized CGI nudity) I don't know that I'm a fan of it, or not, just fascinated that it exists and evidently floats some people's boats.

Foot and mouth disease outbreak in the UK probably originated with viruses "that escaped somehow from a pair of veterinary laboratories where vaccines are made." Link (NYT)

Monsoon rains this year in India, Bangladesh and Nepal are causing some of the worst floods in decades. 19 million people have been displaced, roughly the entire population of NY state, or nearly the entire population of Sri Lanka. By comparison: Hurricane Katrina scattered about a million Americans, and that was the largest US population displacement in 150 years. Ennis Singh Mutinywale at Sepia Mutiny has more: Link.

On August 28, a colorful eclipse of the full moon will occur. Link.

After a teen was arrested for recording a 20-second clip of Transformers (to share with a family member, for personal use), many are now calling for a boycott of Regal Cinemas: Link.

8-foot-tall man made out of Legos washes up on a beach in Africa: Link.

Hurry, hide your cats. Google Street View vehicles are now surveilling and snapping in four new cities: San Diego (high-res), Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando: Link.

Geeksugar takes a peek inside the newly renovated video-game-themed hotel in San Francisco's Japantown district -- Hotel Tomo. Link.

(thanks, Siege, Dave Markland, Callum!)

Mark Frauenfelder: The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has a post with a bunch of interesting WWII propaganda posters. Link

Xeni Jardin:

Steve Jurvetson's Flickr stream is always full of awe-inspiring images. Above, a photo he uploaded yesterday:

I head out to Cape Canaveral this evening for the STS-118 launch. Will bring cameras. Barbara Morgan has waited 22 years for this launch as part of the Teacher-in-Space program. Mission specialist Tracy Caldwell is also making her first spaceflight on STS-118 (Space.com) This photo shows one of our payload mascots getting some fresh air in the Black Rock Desert before her flight.

Link.

The NASA Shuttle Endeavor launch is scheduled to take place tomorrow, Wednesday August 8, 2007, at 6:36:36 p.m. EDT. Here's coverage on Space.com. Here's the NASA mission website.

Pcol writes "The New York Times is running a story on Dr. Gregory Clark's book 'A Farewell to Alms,' which offers a new explanation for the Industrial Revolution and the affluence it created. Dr. Clark, an economic historian at the University of California Davis, postulates that the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 came about because of the strange new behaviors of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours, and a willingness to save. Clark's research shows that between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor and that he postulates that this caused constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. 'The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,' Clark concludes. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped. Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency caused a significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England's escape from the Malthusian trap."

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Back during the 2000 election you may recall there was a third party campaign from Ralph Nader. There was some concern from Democrats that Nader would siphon votes away from Gore. Not to get into a political debate about this (and while I know it won't happen, I'll ask that the commenters avoid getting political too), but some websites were set up to facilitate "vote swaps" where (mostly) people in swing states would agree to vote for Gore in exchange for someone in another state voting for Nader. The idea was that this way Nader would still collect enough votes to make a "statement" while Gore wouldn't lose crucial votes in the swing states. Except that a bunch of politicians started jumping up and down that these sites were illegal. Now, it would be one thing to claim that vote swapping itself was illegal, but to say that the sites were illegal seems like a stretch. It only took seven years, but an appeals court has finally agreed that the sites are perfectly legal. Of course, it's a bit too late for the sites in question, who shut down when it was first announced that they might be illegal. This is actually the second time the appeals court has ruled on this case, as it had sent it back to the lower court back in 2003, but apparently it took this long for the case to bounce back down and then back up again. So, uh, if anyone feels like setting up a vote swapping website for 2008, it appears that you're not breaking any laws.

Mark Frauenfelder: Representative Bob Allen, a Republican in the Florida House of Representatives, blamed the weather and his fear of black men for offering $20 to perform oral sex on a man in a public park. The man turned out to be an undercover police officer, who promptly arrested Allen.

365gay has more on what happened:

Titusville Officer Danny Kavanaugh who was on plainclothes duty says he observed Allen entering the washroom twice. Kavanaugh said he was drying his hands in a stall when Allen peered over the stall door.

The officer's report said that after peering over the stall a second time, Allen pushed open the door and joined Kavanaugh inside. Allen muttered "'hi,'v" and then said, "'this is kind of a public place, isn't it,'" the report said.

Kavanaugh wrote that he asked Allen about going somewhere else and Allen suggested going "across the bridge, it's quieter over there."

"Well look, man, I'm trying to make some money; you think you can hook me up with 20 bucks?" Kavanaugh wrote in the report that he had asked Allen.

The Republican lawmaker, the report said, replied, "Sure, I can do that, but this place is too public."

According to Kavanaugh's statement, the officer said, "do you want just (oral sex)?" and Allen replied, "I was thinking you would want one."

It was at that point Allen was arrested.

Towleroad.com reports:

When Allen was loaded into the patrol car, the statement said, he asked if "it would help" that he was a state legislator.

"No," the officer said.

Soon after taking office in 2001, Allen was one of 21 Florida legislators to sign Gov. Jeb Bush's friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state's ban on gays adopting children.

In March, he co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill that would have enhanced penalties for "offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts" such as indecent exposure.

The Florida Times Union reports: "In his seven years in the Legislature Rep. Bob Allen of Merritt Island has built up a 92 percent approval rating with the Christian Coalition of Florida on issues like abortion, marriage and pornography." Link

Samrobb writes "According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. Schwartz writes, 'We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL.'" Sun is still working on getting these released; early materials are up on OpenSPARC.net.

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