Boing Boing reader HallieDeCatherine says,

Ronald Jenkees is a video blogger who started a YouTube channel over a year ago.

He is a musical genius, coming correct with some bad-ass keyboarding skills on his Korg Triton and producing sick hip-hop beats on FL Studio. He has almost 6000 YouTube subscribers.

Funny thing is..... you can't really figure this guy out! He's a super geek who squints constantly and wears coke bottle glasses. He has a really soft voice and chuckles at himself as he spouts off self-defeating, lame-o, uber-geek comments.

Apparently he just released a new CD, but I have not listened.

Photographer and Boing Boing pal Bart Nagel shot this portrait of Steve Fossett last year at the millionaire adventurer's home in Carmel. The renowned aviator has gone missing after taking off in a small plane from a Nevada airstrip on Monday.

Nagel tells us:

He is such a nice man, not at all what you'd think of as an adventurer. Unpretentious and authentic.

He told us that his wife Peggy hated his explorations and never wanted to know when they were happening.

She must have been getting ready for a day like this for some time.

But Fossett has been in even tighter spots than this before -- and I will continue hoping for the best.

Our best wishes to Fossett's family, and we hope for the best, too.

Previously: Aviation adventurer Steve Fossett is missing

In May of 2006, a VC-backed startup called M2Z petitioned the FCC to hand over some spectrum for free in exchange for a cut of future potential revenues. As you're probably quite aware, the FCC has been focused lately on auctioning off slices of spectrum to private companies for use in various wireless projects. The spectrum seems to only be getting more and more valuable as demands for potential wireless applications and services increase. Of course, as we've seen in the past, these spectrum auctions don't always work out so well, with companies overbidding and being unable to actually do much with the spectrum. Part of the problem is that the FCC wants to put all sorts of rules on the spectrum usage, rather than letting it be used for whatever makes the most sense, like some other countries.

However, the M2Z proposal seemed pretty questionable in its own way, promising nothing up front, and then making plenty of promises on the backend. The company claimed it would cover 95% of the country in broadband in 10 years, would have a "free" tier that was relatively slow and filtered, a more expensive upper tier, as well as offering priority for public safety uses. It may have been intriguing simply for the fact that it was different, but the FCC wasn't convinced. As has been expected for quite some time, the FCC has rejected the proposal, though some believe that the debate over this topic may eventually lead to good things from the FCC with the spectrum it's going to release in the near future. Of course, in the end all this really highlights is that the FCC still is focused on dribbling out bits and pieces of spectrum using different rules and regulations each time -- rather than coming up with a truly comprehensive spectrum allocation plan. Of course, some of us have been pointing this out for years, and the FCC never seems to get any closer to a comprehensive spectrum allocation policy -- and the country continues to suffer for it.

My latest column in Locus Magazine has just gone live. Called "Free(konomic) E-books," it's an attempt to enumerate the evidence that Creative Commons and other scheme for giving away free ebooks works to sell printed books. In my next column, I'l expain how Creative Commons works, and how science fiction writers can use it.

Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.

More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices).

Link

NewsCloud writes "Does Facebook believe that no publicity is bad publicity? Why else would they leave a group called, "F**k Islam" open since July 21, 2007 despite more than 53,482 members joining an opposing group called petition: if "f**k Islam" is not shut down..we r quitting facebook group? Furthermore, advertisers such as Sprint, Verizon, T Mobile, Target, and Qwest wouldn't be too happy to learn that they are paying for ads on the 'F**k Islam' group pages. Shouldn't a startup like Facebook, reportedly worth more than a billion dollars and with over a hundred employees, be expected to enforce its own Terms of Use in less than six weeks?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Retro Selectro: Card Callmaker Ad (1973)

• Fun Level: Orange – Valve's Orange Box is coming October 12th

• If These Don't Emit, You Must Acquit – Epson's new PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB front-projector is have an MSRP of $2,700, making it the cheapest 1080p projector yet. (And retail will probably be cheaper.)

• Wii Runs – New Nintendo trademarks in Japan: "Wii Body Controller; Mii Contest Channel; Nintendo Magic; Wii Handle; Soma Bringer."

• Dial M for Metamucil – "Verizon Wireless offers new $30 senior citizen plan"

• Suck It Up, Out –Man breaks stylus in smartphone sheath. AT&T tells him his warranty is voided.

• Keeping the Ashes Stoked – "Microsoft says a Zune phone 'not unreasonable'"

• BioPro 190: At-Home Biodiesel Production

• The Future of Television: Two Girls Shooting Each Other with Tasers

• In the Year 2000: Bell Spaceplane Models

• Bukkake Simulator 3D: Love Death 2 Gameplay Video

• Quad Shelves by Nauris Kalinauskas

• Video: Overdrift: Stage 2 Teaser

• 1946 Mathis 333 3-Wheeled Car Prototype

• Doubles as Wings – I'm not sure how to embed this particular flash video of a disappearing door concept car, in which the door slides into the undercarriage, but it's cool, so here's a link.

• When Taste and Money Collide – Water "butts," or drainspout caps, shaped like bottoms and rectums. Horrible.

• Rolly Polyphonic – Sony's "Rolly" (roll-e) may be a music-playing "Wii on wheels," claims [Digital-Lifestyles.info]

• Two > Four – Jeff Atwood compares dual- and quad-core processing times. Dual is just about as good as quad for most desktop users.

• Flamebait – "According to research group iSuppli, the iPhone outsold all smartphones in the U.S. in July"

Raver32 sends us to space.com for first light on the design of New Mexico's Spaceport America. Quoting: "The winning design is the work of URS Corporation — a large design and engineering enterprise — teamed with Foster + Partners of the United Kingdom, a group with extensive experience in crafting airport buildings. When the 100,000 square-foot facility is completed — the centerpiece of the world's first, purpose-built, commercial spaceport — the structures will serve as the primary operating base for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceliner, and also as the headquarters for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The NY Times appears to have just come across the now ancient claims that Mark Zuckerberg got the idea for Facebook from another Harvard classmate who started a system called houseSYSTEM that had a Facebook-like featureset. The guy behind houseSYSTEM, Aaron Greenspan, has been pushing that story for years. Then, of course, there's the more high profile claims (and silly lawsuit) from the founders of a company called ConnectU, which claims that Zuckerberg stole the idea from Facebook from them. All of these stories (and lawsuits) miss the point. It doesn't matter whose idea it was originally. The concept of an online facebook or a social network wasn't new at the time anyway. Friendster had launched long before any of these guys were thinking up the idea (and there were social networks like Ryze and SixDegrees before that anyway). The point isn't who came up with the idea -- but who could take that idea and actually build it into something successful that people wanted to use. And, for whatever reason, it was Mark Zuckerberg who was able to do that (with the help of plenty of other folks). The idea, itself, is somewhat meaningless if there's no execution behind it. There's no reason to worry about who came up with this idea or that idea when all we need to do is look at who made the idea work.

M Saunders writes "Not long after we enjoyed playing with the device at LinuxWorld 2007, Palm has announced that it is shelving the Foleo handheld PC, before it was due to ship, so that the company can focus on a 'next-generation platform.' Palm hasn't ruled out a 'Foleo II' at some point, but for those of us looking forward to dinky Linux-powered laptops it's a bit of a disappointment. Still, with the Asus Eee PC nearby — and at a very low price point — perhaps it was a sensible move by Palm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carl Sagan in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, explains why human beings find road trips so satifsying.

The earth's climate is always changing, even before global warming, a rain forest would turn into a desert because the weather pattern changed. Or some animal or plant that you're depending on for food or shelter or trade, might suffer or go extinct. Or a volcano might turn up right in the middle of your civilization.

Leaving one place for another is a big part of being human. And the reason we like travelling so much is that evolution culled out those of us who didn't.

And maybe this also answers the question why, when I travel, I'm always thinking about what it would be like to live there. It's not my mind that's wondering, it's evolution's mind.

Palm tried its best to whip up a ton of hype around the Foleo, the "smartphone companion" it announced at the end of May. Unfortunately for the company, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. The device itself seemed fairly pointless, and its main function seemed to be to highlight the poor user experience of the aging Palm OS platform on its Treo smartphones. Well, Palm's gone and saved itself from having to deal with the terrible reaction the Foleo was pretty certain to get when it hit the market -- by canceling the device completely (via Engadget). The blog post from Palm's CEO says the decision was made so that the company would only have one internal software platform, in addition to Windows Mobile, and that it plans a "Foleo II" when that internal platform is ready (if ever, since the platform in question's been talked about since 2004 or so). Killing the device is a pretty extreme course of action, particularly if the Foleo was, as the Palm announcement claims, "nearly at the point for shipping." If that were true, the company had almost certainly begun manufacturing them already, but given Palm's track record for moving very slowly on the product front, it seems more likely that the Foleo was fatally flawed. There were rumors several days ago that the Foleo had been delayed because of software bugs, including a pretty significant one that kept the device from syncing with Treo smartphones -- giving further credence to the theory that this decision was taken because the device was screwy and destined for failure, rather than as a matter of platform strategy. If that is indeed the case, it merely raises further questions about Palm and its viability.

shafty023 writes "The Xbox Live online service disallows screen names like LINUXRULES, L I N U X, and other variations of these kinds. Other bloggers are reporting that variants of 'Unix' also result in the message: 'Your motto contains inappropriate language. Please try again.'" If this is an extension of Microsoft's anti-Linux campaign, perhaps it's time they gave it up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Studio Laurens van Wieringen, a Dutch interior design studio, made this beautiful landscape carpet that employs soft foam blocks of varying height and color to create a beautiful, walkable relief map. Link (via Cribcandy)

Stephen Hawking has written a kids' science fiction trilogy called George's Secret Key to the Universe, the first volume of which is to be published in 29 countries this year, with subsequent volumes coming once a year. His goal is to create a rigorously scientific work of sf that turns kids onto sf -- that's my kind of book! Hawking's co-writers are his daughter (who came up with the idea) and the French physicist Christophe Galfard, whose thesis was based on Hawking's work.

The trio wanted to "provide a modern vision of cosmology from the Big Bang to the present day," without presenting it as magic, Galfard said. "All of what we see (in the universe) corresponds exactly to what has happened already," he added.

The sole element of fiction in the book involves supercomputer that opens a door allowing George and his friends to travel into space aboard an asteroid.

"I don't know of any other book quite like George's Secret Key to the Universe," Hawking, 65, said. "I think we may be unique."

Link to George's Secret Key to the Universe, Link to Cosmos article (via Futurismic)

You may recall that last year there was a lot of news about a direct email firm, e360insight, suing anti-spam organization SpamHaus for listing the email firm as a spammer -- and winning over $11 million. Part of the reason for the decision was that SpamHaus, after originally preparing to fight the charges, simply ignored the case and said that it didn't apply since SpamHaus is based in the UK and the lawsuit was in Illinois. Because of that, the district court judge gave a default judgment to the e360insight and awarded the company $11 million from SpamHaus (which SpamHaus neither had nor intended to deliver). The court also issued an injunction against SpamHaus, saying it could no longer list e360 as a spammer -- which SpamHaus has ignored. However, now, an Appeals Court has tossed out the injunction and the monetary award, saying that the district court judge didn't look closely enough in determining the punishment -- and simply accepted the word of the guy behind e360insight in saying how much SpamHaus's listing had cost him.

While this is initially a victory for SpamHaus, it doesn't change the initial default judgment against SpamHaus -- it just sends the ruling back to the lower court to rethink what the punishment should be. So, SpamHaus may still be on the hook for certain damages and may again be told not to list e360insight (though, again, it'll probably ignore any such ruling). Of course, with the recent ruling that found section 230 of the CDA means that anti-spyware vendors are allowed to call any software they want spyware, as long as they have a good faith belief that it is spyware, you have to wonder if SpamHaus could use the same law to defend its ability to call any particular organization a spammer. It may be too late for that in this case, with SpamHaus already having decided not to take part -- but for future reference, it will be interesting to see if others start using this same argument.

Nonillion writes "New Jersey attorney Evan M. Levow was finally able to get an order from the Supreme Court of New Jersey forcing the manufacturer of the popular Draeger AlcoTest 7110 to reveal the source code. Levow turned the code over to experts, Base One Technologies, to analyze. Initially, Base One found that, contrary to Draeger's protestations that the code was proprietary, the code consisted mostly of general algorithms: 'That is, the code is not really unique or proprietary.' In other words, the 'trade secrets' claim which manufacturers were hiding behind was completely without merit." Following up an earlier discussion here, the state of Minnesota has (without explanation) missed a deadline to turn over the code for a different breathalyzer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "It's been widely reported by now that Comcast is throttling BitTorrent traffic. What has escaped attention is the fact that Comcast, like the Great Firewall of China uses forged TCP Reset (RST) packets to do the job. While the Chinese government can do what they want, it turns out that Comcast may actually be violating criminal impersonation statues in states around the country. Simply put, while it's legal to block traffic on your network, forging data to and from customers is a big no-no."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Right now, there are more than 70,000 people on the waiting list for a kidney transplant in the US alone. Sometimes, a family member will offer to donate a kidney to a relative. That's a really amazing thing to do. The problem is that one-third of the time, the match isn't right. But what if the donor, say, from one family, is a good match for the recipient in another family, and vice versa? According to Science News, researchers at the United States Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University hope to address this with a mathematical method to "match up the maximum number of donors with recipients while simultaneously guaranteeing high compatibility in each case." The technique is based on graph theory, a way to model the relationship between pairs of objects. From Science News:

(US Naval Academy mathematician Sommer) Gentry expects that if there were a national registry in place for kidney matching, and if it used her team's method, then each month, about half the pairs in the registry would find a compatible match. Each year, 1,000–2,000 patients would get kidneys who currently would not.

By contrast, as of 2005, only 51 patients had ever received kidneys through a swap in which two incompatible pairs exchange donors to create compatible pairs. Gentry calculates that developing a national registry could save $750 million per year, because dialysis, the only alternative to transplantation, is very expensive.

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