An anonymous reader writes "A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers 'expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year.' This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, famed inventor (among other things) Ray Kurzweil announced that he was getting set to launch a new investment company that would employ advanced mathematical techniques to discern patterns in the stock market. Of course, just because Kurzweil is widely considered to be a genius, it doesn't mean he'd have any midas touch when it comes to the stock market. Furthermore, quant funds, as they're known, aren't novel. Lately, in fact, they've been getting slaughtered as the market swings about in unpredictable ways. Top tier investment bank Goldman Sachs has announced that its closing one of its premier quant funds in light of recent losses. Obviously computers have become an indispensable tools in modern day investing, but no algorithm or mathematical genius can guarantee good performance in all markets.

apokryphos writes "AMD has helped sponsor the progress of openSUSE with leading-edge hardware and development expertise. "AMD is helping to ensure that the openSUSE Build Service continues to be an important collaboration and development platform for developers of all distributions," said Terri Hall, AMD vice president of Commercial Systems Marketing. Are these continued announcements of huge support from large OEMs an indication of a new era?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warner Music Group's chairman Edgar Bronfman is no stranger to failing to see the big picture when it comes to online music. After all, back in the summer of 2000 (when he owned Universal Music), Bronfman was the first music exec to rant and rave about Napster and say he was preparing an army of lawyers to start suing people for downloading music. In retrospect, many now admit that Bronfman's declaration of war on Napster kicked off the recording industry's problems. It was clear then that Bronfman simply did not understand the economics of digital goods, and in the eight intervening years, it appears he hasn't learned very much. While he's dabbled in digital music, the strategies always come back to him trying to control how the music is used, providing less value for music fans. Amusingly, he then complains that downloadable music isn't easy enough. Of course, the only reason that's true is because of the restrictions he insists must be included. In discussing Warner Music's latest earnings, Bronfman complains about the ubiquitous nature of music, and insists that the strategic response is to create additional artificial scarcity. This is exactly the opposite of what he should be doing. All that does is shrink the market, piss off potential customers and create wide open opportunities for competitors to better serve the market. Ubiquity isn't a problem -- it's an opportunity. There are plenty of ways that Bronfman and Warner Music could embrace that ubiquity, expand the market, increase the value and profit handsomely from it. But, instead, Bronfman seems stuck on his failed plan from the summer of 2000, and yet another opportunity will be squandered. Update: Then again, news is coming out that Universal Music will at least experiment with DRM-free music "for a limited time." That's a step in the right direction, just 8 years too late.

Cory Doctorow: Universal Music -- who are usually the most extreme piracyphobes in the music industry -- have announced that they're going to try selling much of their catalog without DRM from now until January. What caused them to change positions? Fear of an iPod Planet.

The iPod plays two kinds of music: music crippled with Apple's DRM and MP3s. If you want to cripple your music with Apple's DRM, you have to give Apple total control over your track-pricing. No other store can carry Apple-crippled music. Every time we buy an Apple-crippled track, it gets that much harder and more expensive to switch away from the iPod and iTunes.

For record companies, there are only two choices: sell Apple-crippled music and increase Apple's control over the online music business, or sell uncrippled music. Uncrippled music -- MP3s and other open files -- are superior to the crippled versions. You can play them on more devices and do more with them. No customer seeks out music because it's crippled -- DRM doesn't sell music. None of the iTunes customers bought music because they wanted music that was locked to the iPod and wouldn't play on competing devices.

People who don't want to pay for music just download it from P2P, where all the music is already available for free, without DRM. If you want to convince people to buy your music, you can't start by making it worse than the free stuff.

So it's inevitable that Universal would come around to this position. They're not selling DRM-free tracks through iTunes (where Apple charges a 30 percent premium) -- they're selling them through Apple's competitors. But since they're MP3s, they'll work in iTunes and on iPods, so Apple customers can get $0.99, DRM-free, iPod-compatible Universal music.

The offer of Universal’s music under the new terms is being framed as a test, to run into January, allowing executives to study consumer demand and any effect on online piracy. If Universal decides to adopt the practice permanently, it will probably pressure other record companies to follow suit. That could stoke a wider debate about how to treat intellectual property in the digital era. Universal’s artists include the Black Eyed Peas and 50 Cent.

The effort is likely to be seen as part of the industry’s wider push to increase competition to iTunes and shift leverage away from Apple, which wields enormous clout in determining prices and other terms in digital music. A month ago, Universal notified Apple that it would not agree to a new long-term contract to sell music through iTunes.

Link (Thanks, Dion!)

See also:
Universal threatens to drop iTunes Store contract
Apple said to be in talks to buy Universal Music
Barenaked Ladies guy on Universal's DRM SpiralFrog service
Why Zune shouldn't pay blood money to Universal
Universal and Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s
RIAA and Universal accused of extortion
Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves

Cory Doctorow: Brian Talbot's Alice in Sunderland is probably the single weirdest graphic novel I've ever enjoyed (there's weirder stuff out there, but it overshoots enjoyability). Talbot is a "Mackem" from the Sunderland region of England, and he is thoroughly steeped in the rich lore and history of the region, stretching all the way back to prehistory. He is also a giant, galluphing Alice in Wonderland nut (as am I), as well as an accomplished (near-legendary) comics creator. Alice in Sunderland is a skillful weaving-together of these disparate threads into a sprawling, meandering non-narrative about, well, Sunderland. And Alice. And Brian Talbot.

Imagine sitting in a park in Sunderland, looking out at the ocean, and being approached by a guy who knows, basically, everything, and whose prodigious imagination enables him to draw connections between any two subjects, transitioning from Alice to the Crusades to JFK in just a few sprightly (if somewhat drunken) steps. That's the structure of Alice in Sunderland -- a cobbeldy-wobbledy folk-tale/docent tour of several subjects that Talbot is absolutely obsessed with.

Like Alice in Wonderland, the structure of Talbot's book is dreamlike, with a "and this happened, then that happened" feeling, that nevertheless all seems to be part of a terribly urgent thesis that the author is trying earnestly to impart. Talbot half-seriously hints at a shadowy conspiracy to suppress the role of Sunderland and the Mackems in history -- especially in the history of Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll. He repeatedly punctures the romantic story of Carroll composing Alice extemporaneously on a golden afternoon in a rowboat -- and gets good licks in on several other Alice myths, including Carroll's purported pedophilia, Alice's mother's suspicion of him, and his shy, retiring nature.

The visuals in Alice in Sunderland are something else altogether. Talbot's book is a scrapbook of thousands of images sourced from every imaginable site -- photos, tapestries, cartoons, posters, books, maps, brochures -- strung together around a loose story about Talbot himself, addressing an impatient Mackem from the stage of a grand Victorian Vaudeville house. The look-and-feel of this book is somewhere between a madman's collage and a genius's towering remix.

This is not only the weirdest graphic novel I've ever enjoyed -- it's also the most ambitious. Talbot's doing things here that I've never seen done before, and he's doing all of it, all at once. Link

See also: Alice in Sunderland review mashes up comic

Cory Doctorow: Jasmina Tešanovi?, the noted Serbian feminist writer and activist, has just released her latest novella, "Nefertiti," as a free, Creative Commons-licensed download. Nefertiti was initially published as a short-run book in an edition of 300 copies from the Women's Studies and Gender Research Center in Belgrade, but now it's available to a much wider audience. Both the print and the electronic editions feature gorgeous stencil art from Aleksandra Petkovi?, a young Belgrade street-artist.

I'm pleased to be hosting the HTML version here on Boing Boing, and to have helped Jasmina put the PDF up on the Internet Archive.

Jasmina writes,

Nefertiti was a heretic queen about whom we know almost nothing. Nefertiti disappeared during her reign, her tomb was never discovered, and her regime's images were erased from the royal walls. Yet her bust still casts her spell on the onlookers in the Berlin museum, and the fame of her beauty overshadows our need for facts.

Jasmina Tesanovic, a feminist writer, gave Nefertiti a voice, while Aleksandra Petkovic, an artist, stencilled images for her across all these missing centuries.

Nefertiti is here, Nefertiti is there, Nefertiti is everywhere.

Link to HTML version, Link to PDF

See also:
Jasmina Tešanovi?: Where Did Our History Go?
Katrina: Jasmina Tesanovic's account, Austin Convention center
Jasmina Tesanovic: Slobodan Milosevic Died
Belgrade native Jasmina Tesanovic on 10 years since Srebenica massacre
Jasmina Tesanovic, Belgrade: Scorpions Trial, April 13
Jasmina Tesanovic, Belgrade: To Hague, to Hague
"A Human Package", by Jasmina Tesanovic
Jasmina Tesanovic on Mladic arrest: Less Than Human
Report from a concert by a Serbian war-criminal
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya murdered
Mladic Arrest: When Bad Guys become Good Guys

One of the aspects of Second Life that has gotten a lot of hype is the fact that it's not just a virtual world, but a virtual economy as well, complete with trade, currency fluctuations and banking. That being said, people that have actually tried to engage in sophisticated financial activity (e.g. forms of arbitrage) have found in-game institutions to be unsatisfactory for their purposes. These problems seem to be spreading, as in-game banks that offered depositors sky-high interest rates on their Linden Dollars are experiencing what could be described as a 'run on the bank'. It can't be a surprise to the depositors that these institutions are having trouble remaining solvent, seeing as offered interest rates were in some cases near 100%. Those are the kinds of interest rates tend to be indicative of Ponzi schemes and other fly-by-night operations rather than stable banks. If anything, this raises more of a psychological question more than an economic one: why would people trust their money to a bank offering these kinds of rates when they almost certainly wouldn't do so in the real world? Then again, these issues aren't really unique to Second Life. France's biggest bank, BNP Paribas, has just announced that it will freeze the assets of three major funds, as it struggles with issues related to the US mortgage market.

talkinsecurity writes "In a public, side-by-side test conducted last night at LinuxWorld, ten antivirus products were confronted with 25 known viruses. The results were surprisingly disparate. Only three of the products caught all of the viruses; three only caught 61 percent, and one caught an abysmal 6 percent. The test, which wasn't particularly complicated, proves that there still are wide differences in the effectiveness of AV tools. A lot of people think all AV tools are the same — they're not!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

Vance DeGeneres: Daily Show correspondent, brother of Ellen DeGeneres, and artist whose work includes recurring motifs of robots and naked girls. Link 1, Link 2. Above, "ROBOTS ARE STEALING OUR STRIPPERS," 16" x 12", oil and oil stick on canvas. (via RileyDog)

Survival Research Laboratories just shipped off a bunch of lethal robots by sea to Amsterdam where they'll cause mayhem from September 19-22, 2007. "The sideloader weighed the the container in at a gross weight of 54,300 pounds, give or take 800 pounds." Link.

Man charged with DUI wins right to obtain source code for breathalyzer that led to his arrest. Link.

An AP reporter visited that prison in the Philippines where all those inmates performed "Thriller." Link, and here's that previous BB post.

Do antiperspirants that contain aluminum increase the risk of breast cancer and other health problems? Scientific American takes a SNOPESy look at the question. Link.

Did AT&T censor Pearl Jam's concert broadcast? Looks like they blocked portions of the band's Lollapalooza performance which included references to President George W. Bush. AT&T says it was a goof, caused by an aggressive content monitor. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.

Google News team says they'll soon "be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story." Link.

(Thanks, Brian K. Wharton, Scott Rosenblum, Om Malik, Farhad Manjoo, Karen Marcelo)

An anonymous reader writes "DARPA has selected thirty-six teams as Urban Challenge semifinalists to participate in the National Qualification Event. Both the webcast and press release can be found on the official site. Dr. Tony Tether reports that only 1 of the top 5 previous teams was rated in the top 5 of teams this year and 3 of the top 5 were not in the challenge finals last year. 'The semifinalists will compete in a final qualifying round at the site on October 26th and be whittled down to 20 teams. Those teams' vehicles will have to perform like cars with drivers to safely conduct a simulated battlefield supply mission on a 60-mile urban course, obeying California traffic laws while merging into traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding obstacles -- all in fewer than six hours. The team to successfully complete the mission with the fastest time wins.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

Iraq war veterans talk about they saw and experienced during the war in an extensive feature published in the July 30 issue of The Nation.

Link, edited by Laila Al-Arian and Chris Hedges.

Article is related to a forthcoming title from Nation Books: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians .

Image: 31-year-old staff sergeant Camilo Mejía recalls arriving at the scene after an Iraqi man was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun, while his young son watched.

Snip:

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

(thanks, Susannah Breslin, via Radosh)

Three years ago, porn magazine publisher Perfect 10 sued Google for copyright infringement. The case was a strange one. Google's image search was showing thumbnails of Perfect 10's images, but courts have ruled that thumbnails are fair use in search engines. The real complaint from Perfect 10 was that other sites were taking the images from their magazines and putting them online -- and that Google was helping people find them. In other words, the real copyright infringement was being done by others, but Perfect 10 was suing Google because Google has a lot more money and was an easier target. After some back and forth in the courts, an appeals court finally ruled in favor of Google. Oddly, despite this loss, Perfect 10 has gone out and sued Microsoft for the exact same thing. Once again, it's suing the wrong party -- and even admits it, saying that "it's absolutely hopeless" to find those actually responsible for the infringement, so it's suing Microsoft instead. That's like saying it's absolutely hopeless to find the bank robbers, so we're going to sue Ford for making their getaway car. Perfect 10 also complains that its business is being destroyed -- which is probably true. However, that's the result of a bad business model and not being able to adjust to the changing market. It may suck for Perfect 10 that it doesn't know how to run a modern business, but it's not against the law.

Mark Frauenfelder: Amy Crehore says:

The "Literartistry" Group Show which will open at Corey Helford Gallery, Culver City, CA on August 11, 2007 from 7-10 pm. Each artist is interpreting a favorite book. Don't miss this show - artists include: Jason Shawn Alexander, Erik Alos, Chris Anthony, Chris Conn Askew, Attaboy, Anthony Ausgang, Lauren Bergman, Andrew Brandou, Dave Burke, Paul Chatem, Greg Clarke, Amy Crehore, Camilla d’Ericco, Jason Dugan, Korin Faught, Sarah Folkman, Melissa Forman, Andrew Foster, Lauren Gardiner, Andrew Hem, Michael Hussar, Stella Im Hultberg, Mari Inukai, Wednesday Kirwan, Kukula, Joe Ledbetter, Tiffany Liu, Kevin Llewellyn, Lola, Jeff McMillan, Lisa Moneypenny Murray, Tom Neely, Joe O’Neill, Alex Pardee, Kevin Peterson, Joshua Petker, Carlos Ramos, Sergio Rebia, Joey Remmers, Lesley Reppeteaux, Isabel Samaras, Mijn Schatje, Nathan Spoor, Bob Staake, Gin Stevens, David Stoupakis, Cassandra Szekely, Heidi Taillefer, The Pizz, Sage Vaughn, Amanda Visell, David VonDerLinn, and Jasmine Worth.

Link

vboulytchev writes "The folks at MySQL has quietly announced that it will no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball. It's been about a year since the split between the paid and free versions of the database project. The Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and as a result MySQL appears to be making it harder for non-customers to access the source code. 'One of the things that many users worry about is whether they're getting an inferior version of MySQL by using the Community version. Urlocker says that MySQL "wants to make sure the Community version is rock solid," but admitted that the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities." Because of that, the company is revising its policies about when features go into the Community releases.'" Update: 08/10 04:56 GMT by CN :While it is slightly harder to get, the source isn't closed by any means, so I updated the title to reflect that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

vboulytchev writes "The folks at MySQL has quietly announced that it will no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball. It's been about a year since the split between the paid and free versions of the database project. The Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and as a result MySQL appears to be making it harder for non-customers to access the source code. 'One of the things that many users worry about is whether they're getting an inferior version of MySQL by using the Community version. Urlocker says that MySQL "wants to make sure the Community version is rock solid," but admitted that the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities." Because of that, the company is revising its policies about when features go into the Community releases.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.