An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has confirmed the story that Paramount and DreamWorks Animation were paid $150 million for an exclusive HD-DVD deal that will last 18 months. 'Paramount and DreamWorks Animation declined to comment. Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment but said it wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group.'" We discussed Paramount's defection on Monday.

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Back in 2005, we had quite a story about how DSL lines in New Mexico were apparently knocked offline due to "random gunfire." That story got even more bizarre when a guy who was playing online poker at the time, blamed the outage on him going "all in" on the wrong hand (he claims he went all in just as the DSL turned off, but when it came back, it went in on a different hand). However, it still struck us as interesting that random gunfire could impact your internet service. Apparently, it wasn't an isolated case. The latest is that random gunfire is being blamed for a general slowdown in the internet, after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were "sabotaged by gunfire." Who knew that gunfire and internet wiring were such a dangerous combination?

Sony has today announced a couple of updates to its T-Series of slim digital cameras, replacing the DSC-T100 and DSC-T20. First off we have the DSC-T200 with 8.0 Megapixels and 5x optical zoom. Taking up pretty much the whole of the camera's rear we find a 3.5" touch screen which may be used to choose between focus targets identified by the Face-Detection system. Sony also has an interesting twist on this now-common feature - smile detection! The DSC-T70 carries mostly the same specification but downsizes the zoom and monitor to 3x and 3.0" respectively.

Sony has today announced its competitor in the 'pocket superzoom' sector. Featuring an 8.0 megapixel 1/2.5" sensor and 10x optical zoom, the Cyber-Shot DSC-H3 brings plenty of technology to the table with Super-Steadyshot optical stabilization, Face-Detection and Sony's Dynamic Range Optimizer. In a bid to speed up response whilst photographing fast-moving subjects, Advanced Sports Shooting mode with predictive AF is here too. Finally, If the camera's 2.5" monitor isn't quite big enough for your tastes, there is also HDTV output at full 1080 line resolution so expect the imminent return of post-vacation slide shows.

Is there a connection between the recent meltdown at quant funds and last week's outage at Skype? Nick Carr makes the provocative argument that both events are the result of what happens when algorithms fail to anticipate behavior that is somehow out of the ordinary. In the case of quant funds, their models failed to anticipate the market's wild volatility, whereas with Skype (if you believe the company's official explanation), the glitch was the result of mass reboots taxing network capacity. Interestingly, both Skype engineers and hedge fund managers were heard using the phrase "perfect storm" to describe the sequence of events that lead to their respective collapses. Of course, as hedge funds learn every few years, these perfect storms that are mathematically supposed to occur just once in a thousand years, seem to happen quite a bit more often. The same goes for any network that suffers an outage despite the best laid contingency plans. The problem is that it's difficult to craft an algorithm or a model that's robust during 'normal' times and abnormal times. In finance, one hopes that the profits are big enough during the good so that you can survive the occasional mess. The one problem, of course, with the comparison between hedge funds and Skype is that Skype's explanation doesn't ring particularly true. The connection between Microsoft patches, mass reboots and the network collapse seems tenuous at best. Thus, it's entirely possible that this particularly outage had nothing to do with abnormal crowd behavior. Still, as the surprise outage at 365 Main demonstrates, it's difficult, if not fully impossible, to completely inoculate oneself against adverse events.

Gibbs-Duhem writes "Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus wants free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years. From the article: 'The goal, he said in an interview last week, is to better prepare children for school and get more of them into college to make the United States more globally competitive, particularly with countries like China and India. "I think the challenge is fierce, and I think we have a real obligation to go the extra mile and redo things a bit differently, so we leave this place in better shape than we found it," Baucus said.' Do you think this would help with the US's lackluster performance in these fields?"

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Xeni Jardin:

BoingBoing reader Drew says,

In his book "Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe," James Brundage creates a truly fantastic flow chart explaining when one can and (mostly) cannot engage in the physical act of love.

At the time, a lot of Christian theology basically took the form of lists of things one wasn't allowed to do, so this flow chart probably isn't far off from the real decision making process prescribed by the church.

Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Flowchart: Is it f*cked up? What to do, if so.

Infographic: Criteria for proper tactical usage of phrase "Oh, Snap!"

Xeni Jardin: BoingBoing reader Herkko says,

In Helsinki, cops have arrested Pirate cinema organizers who were showing Hollywood blockbusters in a squatted house. Antipiracy lawyer Kotilainen is cheering for major police operation and piracy crack down: "They say that they are anarchists, fighting against big movie moguls. Then the only recreation that they have is to show movies produced by the companies that they despise so much." The house squatters are getting ready for next show tomorrow.

Link

Xeni Jardin: One week ago, we pointed to news that an early hacker named Joybubbles had passed on (previous BB post). Reader Adam Aviv writes in with word of obituaries that offer more insight into the life of this man:

The New York Times recently ran an obituary of Joybubbles, AKA Joe Engressia. He was a pioneer of telephone touch-tone hacking, or Phone-Phreaking and is dead at the age of 58. The article is a fascinating read of a fascinating man. Blind, Engressia had perfect pitch and learned how to recreate the touch-tons necessary to move the switches at AT&T in the 70's. Using this technique, him and a community of others, were able to get the switches to do their bidding. Thus began the revolution and inspiration for many computer scientist and network freaks.

Later in life, he also hosted a weekly telephone story time from Mineapolis, similar to Mr. Rogers. Clips of which can be found in an NPR interview with Ron Rosenbaum of Slate, who first published an interview with him in Esquire in 1971.

RIP JoyBubbles.

Image: Associated Press, 2005.

Xeni Jardin:

Over at Worldchanging, Micki Krimmel has written a comprehensive roundup of what individuals, camps and the Burning Man organization are doing to make this year's festival more ecologically responsible: Link. See also the Burning Man environmental blog: Link.

Image: Burning Man playa tableau, with lots of bikes and a tripped out mannequin. Xeni Jardin, 2003.

Back when the federal "do not call" list law passed in 2003 there was some fear that there were enough loopholes in the law that telemarketers would quickly sneak their way through. Surprisingly, it appears that many didn't immediately do so. However, in the last few years, it seems that a new crop of companies are filling in that space, exploiting loopholes to start calling people again, even if they're on the DNC list. The big loophole, of course, is the "previous business relationship" loophole. Apparently, it's now big business for companies to set up various contests and sweepstakes whose sole purpose is to get you to sign away your DNC protection from the company and its "dozen or so marketing affiliates." These companies set up shops in malls and shopping center and try to entice people to sign up for their contests. The fact that it's all a scam to get you on their "call away!" lists is hidden way down in the fine print that most people never bother to read. Another scammy move is to pretend that the calls are really surveys, when they're really designed to sell you something. Of course, now that these firms are starting to get away with it, expect bigger, more well known companies to start doing similar things as well. The depressing thing about all of this is that these companies should recognize that the people who are on the Do Not Call list are more likely than not to be pissed off, rather than prospective customers. You would think that telemarketers would be happy to know who doesn't want to hear from them, so they can focus on those who are more receptive to calls.

willdavid writes "Via CNet, a link to a blog post with the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. As the CNet blogger notes, 'Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.'"

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Roland Piquepaille writes "Physicists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) say they have improved the performance of solar cells by 60 percent. And they obtained this spectacular result by using a very simple trick. They've coated the solar cells with a film of 1-nanometer thick silicon fluorescing nanoparticles. The researchers also said that this process could be easily incorporated into the manufacturing process of solar cells with very little additional cost. Read more for additional references and a photo of a researcher holding a silicon solar cell coated with a film of silicon nanoparticles."

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David Pescovitz: MIT researchers have designed a software tool that measures "visual clutter." According to the scientists, the system could someday help designers create better displays, maps, and data visualizations and steer our attention in various ways. The prototype tool, written in MATLAB, is freely available here. From the MIT News Office:

"We lack a clear understanding of what clutter is, what features, attributes and factors are relevant, why it presents a problem and how to identify it," said Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and the paper's lead author.

The fact that one person's clutter is the next person's organized workspace makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and colleagues modeled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on color, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter.

To be useful, such a tool has to capture the effect of clutter on performance. In their paper, Rosenholtz and her colleagues-- MIT BCS graduate student Yuanzhen Li and BCS undergraduate Lisa Nakano--tested the influence of clutter on searching for a symbol in a map, like an arrow indicating "you are here." They found good correlation between the time it takes to find a symbol in a map and the amount of clutter according to their measure.

Link

David Pescovitz: Today's New York Times has a fascinating article about a recent scientific symposium on the "Magic of Consciousness." Organized by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and staged in Las Vegas, the conference featured scientists, philosophesr, and, of course, magicians discussing the nature of reality, attention, and cognition. From the article:

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

“In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,” he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. “If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.”

Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

Link

Despite the market's convulsions, the VMWare IPO went off without a hitch, suggesting that investors aren't yet throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. They may be in a state of panic over credit markets, but they won't let a quality company be ignored. However, they may be pulling back from certain riskier ventures. Canadian solar cell maker Photowatt has announced that it will suspend its IPO plans, citing unfavorable market conditions. This is a pretty common excuse for companies, particularly at times like these when the market does look inhospitable. What seems most likely is that investors simply have their fill of solar power, as there's been a rush of IPOs in the space this year. With every one that comes out of the gate, it gets that much harder for the next company to go public, particularly if it's not on solid financial ground.

holymodal writes "In a new post to the Google blog Bindu Reddy, the Google Video product manager, admits that only offering refunds via Google Checkout was a bad idea: 'We should have anticipated that some users would see a Checkout credit as nothing more than an extra step of a different (and annoyingly self-serving) kind. Our bad.' Google now plans to issue customers a full credit card refund, while allowing them to keep the Checkout credit and extending the life of purchased videos another six months."

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