serutan writes "Using lasers to drive spaceships has been a subject of interest for many years, but making a photonic engine powerful enough for practical use has been elusive. Dr. Young Bae, a California physicist, has built a demonstration photonic laser thruster that produces enough thrust to micro-maneuver a satellite. This would be useful in high-precision formation flying, such as using a fleet of satellites to form a space telescope with a large virtual aperture. Scaled up, a similar engine could speed a spacecraft to Mars in less than a week."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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For many years it had seemed like Prince was one of the major music industry stars who actually understood the new business models made possible by the internet, and how those could be leveraged without wasting time on worrying about those who were making unauthorized copies. Unfortunately, for all his innovation in the space, it looks like he, too, has fallen victim to trying to sue those who are out there promoting his works. Prince had experimented widely with a variety of innovations in making, distributing and promoting music -- including his recent offer giving away his latest CD for free with newspapers. He'd also done a number of other promotions, all designed to push more people to his concerts and events where he could make even more money. That's why it's both surprising and disappointing to find out that Prince is now going to the other extreme and is suing YouTube, eBay and the Pirate Bay for making his works available.

There are quite a few things that are problematic about this lawsuit -- with the first one still being that he's suing the wrong parties. The sites he's suing are all the platforms which others are using for distribution. They're not involved in the content at all, and if he wants to sue, he should be suing those who are uploading his content. However, the much more important issue is how backwards this is and how it goes against nearly every other part of his strategy. Nearly every other part of Prince's strategy had seemed to be focused on the simple idea that the more his music got out there, the more ways there were for him to make money -- whether it be from more people wanting to see him in concert or getting others (sponsors, partners, even fans) to pay him upfront to create his next group of songs so that he doesn't need to worry about monetizing the music after it's been produced. These are strategies that make sense, and actually become even more valuable when his music is being heavily promoted online for free by his biggest fans. This kind of strategy backfires when you try to also maintain strict copyright control. For someone who had been so creative in figuring out new business models that don't require limiting fans via copyright, it's disappointing to see Prince go in the opposite direction -- potentially harming much of the good will he's built up.

In the meantime, it's looking like Trent Reznor may quickly be taking away the baton as a well-known musician who is experimenting with cool new models designed to get more music out there and then providing incentives to make money elsewhere. Reznor is now being quoted as telling fans that they should be downloading his music for free from his own site, rather than wasting money on buying counterfeit CDs.

Ant writes "Macworld reports that people in the U.S. have steadily increased the amount of time they spend watching videos online, as Google's YouTube remains by far their preferred video site, according to a study. In July, almost 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched videos online, up from 71.4 percent in March, according to comScore Networks. The monthly time spent watching videos went up to an average of 181 minutes per viewer in July from 145 minutes per viewer in March, according to comScore. In July, the average user watched 68 clips, up from 55 clips in March. Overall, almost 134 million U.S. Internet users watched a little over 9 billion video clips in July, up from 126.6 million people and a little over 7 billion clips in March."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I had a number of interesting conversations today, first at our weekly blogger's breakfast in Berkeley, then with Rex Hammock at T-Rex, and then with Nick Denton at Barney's in Berkeley. I watched the President's speech and the followup with Republicans and Democrats. Then I got a direct message from Fred Wilson saying he was going to write about Iraq, to which I responded, glad to hear it!

Through all my discussions today I've been telling a story about Fred Wilson.

I've only met Fred once, we had a dim sum lunch in July in San Francisco. We've also had several back-channel discussions, some pretty intense. And of course I've been reading his weblog for a couple of years. How well do I know Fred? Not that well, but then consider the possibility that Fred is one of the leaders of his generation of tech investors. Compare how well I am getting to know Fred as compared to say John Doerr, the VC of the previous generation who I knew best.

In the past, the most I would have heard was a quote or two in a business publication maybe three or four times a year. The quotes would pass through N levels of filters, reporters, editors, copy editors, etc. How different that is from the way things work today, when I not only hear from Fred on a daily basis, but I also see pictures of people he meets through Twitter and Flickr, bits of music he likes, and random thoughts on the non-tech issues of our day, such as the war in Iraq.

In talking with Denton, who runs Valleywag, which gets a lot of flow, but doesn't run ads (something I had never noticed before), we agreed that some things don't change. There are still hierarchies of people, stars and gossip about stars, but something important has changed. Now we have the means to go direct, and that truly is an important difference.

And more and more I believe that the plan I outlined in 2000 and 2001 for making money on the Internet is the way it will shake out. It will be important to feel our way through it, and realize that the power we have to learn about each others' lives and minds and feelings and foibles, is just the beginning of the changes the new environment is bringing about.

Postscript: Fred Wilson's post about Iraq.

Miasik.Net writes "A lawsuit has been filed in Federal Court (US District Court for the Western Washington District C07-1189 JLR) that alleges Autodesk, Inc maker of the industry standard AutoCAD software and their attorney Andrew S. Mackay have devised an illegal scheme to have used copies of their software removed from the eBay site using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Finally someone decided that non-transferable licenses must be stopped." While proving $10 million in damages might prove difficult, the reasoning behind the case is pretty sound.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The paper we linked to on Tuesday about innovation in the magic industry has generated a lot of attention around the blogosphere. Magician Andrew Mayne thinks we've got it all wrong. He tells us that "creative people are constantly pulled from magic to places where intellectual property is better recognized," and that the magic industry would be more innovative if it were more like the music industry. Interestingly, after faulting the paper for lacking any economic research or input from magic creators, Mayne himself failed to offer any examples of individuals who have left the magic industry because of an inability to make a living. Nor does he cite any other magicians who share his view. Magic legend Jim Steinmeyer apparently thinks the current system would break down if the magic industry were as large as the music industry, but he doesn't dispute that it works pretty well at its present size.

Meanwhile, my friend Jacob Grier, who has worked as a freelance magician for several years, hails the paper for its thorough research and disagrees with Mayne's critique. As an example, he quotes a high profile dispute between prop makers over charges that one has been copying the other's designs. While the more established craftsman was annoyed that his designs were being copied without credit, he didn't feel the dispute was hurting his business much: "I think that the feud/competition has actually increased my business by a rather large margin. And the competition has certainly been a catalyst for me to improve my products." That echoes a point we've made repeatedly here on Techdirt: that a competitive marketplace leads to more innovation because it forces producers to constantly improve their products and stay ahead of the competition. That's true in the software industry, and it's just as true when you're talking about magic. Perhaps that's why, as Jacob puts it, "If anything, it's much more common to hear magicians complain about the tremendous glut of new products on the market rather than of a dearth of innovation."

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Miro needs your donations -- the project is trying to raise $50,000 to pay programmers and designers to make its player even better.

Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is the best and most promising video player I've ever used. It's free and open -- licensed under the GPL -- and it incorporates three different technologies that make watching videos easier and better than any of the proprietary players like Windows Media Player or iTunes. These technologies are VLC, a free and open video playback engine that plays all video formats, no matter where they come from; RSS, so that you can subscribe to "feeds" of your favorite videos (including subscribing to feeds of YouTube videos matching your keywords); and BitTorrent, so that you can download files without costing the people who host them -- so the more popular a file is, the cheaper it is to host.

Miro is a bet on a future for "Internet TV" that is as open as the Web, controlled by no one. Otherwise, the way things are headed, we could end up with one or two giant companies owning the future of video. No one -- not community activists, not video startups, no one -- benefits when just a few companies control the platform.

The Miro fundraiser will raise money to pay the talented hackers who have been producing regular updates to the Miro platform, ensuring that there's always an up-to-date version for the Mac, Windows and Linux. I believe in Miro enough to have volunteered for their Board of Directors since they started -- I hope you'll help us keep on producing the future of Internet video. Link

(Disclosure: I am a board member for the Participatory Culture Foundation, the 501(c)3 charitable nonprofit that oversees production of Miro)

A Welsh priest/Dr Who fan is planning Who-themed services to attract the young 'uns:

St Paul's Church, in Grangetown, Cardiff, was used as a location for an episode of the first series of Doctor Who starring the ninth Doctor played by Christopher Eccleston.

And parish priest, Father Ben Andrews, 32, says he loves the cult TV show so much he thought a themed evening would go down well with the youngsters.

He said: "I love the series and it has such a great following that we couldn't resist doing something for young people on a Dr Who theme.

"We will be looking at the idea of Jesus as a Lord of time and showing who Jesus was and the different images of him throughout time.

"We will try and get some Dr Who props in to try and make it as lively as possible."

Link (Thanks, Jennifer!)

doubleacr writes "Ran across a story on CNN that says the "118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Polish paper has reported that a googlebomber ("23 years old Marek W. from Cieszyn") has been arrested for creating a googlebomb that turned President Lech Kaczy?ski's homepage into the top search result for Google searches on the word "kutas" ("penis"). Marek W faces up to three years in prison.

The man used the official website of Polish president Lech Kaczy?ski for testing the software. When internet users typed "kutas" ["penis"] they got the official president's site. Furthermore - it was the first result. They played with this for couple of months - right up to March this year. That's when the 23 years old was traced by investigator from the Katowice police office.

Finding him wasn't difficult - the man used his home computer, which police easily traced by its IP address. The computer amateur confirmed that he wrote the program. "I just wanted to verify my skills and check if the software works" was his his explanation during the hearings.

Link (via Ars Technica)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel has spotted this sweet (and I do mean sweet) collection of edible, Nokia-handset-shaped mooncakes for Chinese mid-autumn festival. A couple nights back, I mentioned mooncakes at a dinner in Beijing and the table erupted in hilarity and derision -- my hosts advised me that mooncakes are the Chinese equivalent of Christmas cakes -- no one likes them, everyone gives them (I like Christmas cake!). They are haloed with weird possible urban legends, like the scandal of a mooncake manufacturer that was recycling last year's filling because no one can taste the difference between year-old and fresh mooncake stuffin'. The consensus was that the best mooncakes come from western chains, like Starbucks (the Starbucks in China and Singapore carry green tea and coffee flavored mooncakes in plastic wrappers with little silica packets to keep them "fresh") (they also don't charge extra for soy-milk, a smart move in the land of widespread lactose intolerance). Starbucks's cakes are apparently less incredibly sweet than the real deal. Practically every food shop, restaurant, duty-free and department store I've visited here has had some kind of mooncake boxed assortment on offer, in elaborate packaging. At the Carrefour grocery superstore in Beijing, they had a double aisle running the whole length of the store devoted to 'em. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The whole "blame Facebook for killing the economy" line seems guaranteed to get press these days as we've already had two totally different stories of "studies" coming out from biased parties, supposedly "blaming" Facebook for killing productivity. The stories all follow a pretty similar arc to all of the "personal surfing is killing productivity" reports that come out every few months from some company trying to sell internet filters. However, by adding the Facebook element, you've got a definite press hook that most can't resist. Con von Hoffman writes in to let us know about the third example in the series, as some employment lawyer in the UK is claiming bogus "productivity" losses from Facebook. It's the same old story, counting every minute spent on Facebook as "lost productivity" despite studies showing that taking personal surfing breaks tend to be good for employees, and they more than make it up in the work that they do. No matter, though, the story hook is too good for the press to ignore. As Con notes, none of the press reports on the topic bothered to check with anyone than the guy who's trying to get publicity for his employment law practice, and none seemed to question his methodology.

A man built his own guillotine and used it to kill himself.

Groundskeeper from the Fairlane Green shopping center at Outer and Fairlane drive discovered the body shortly before 11 a.m. Monday.

Allen Park Deputy Police Chief Dale Covert said the roughly six-foot tall guillotine was bolted to a tree and included a swing arm. Covert said police also found several store receipts detailing the materials used to assemble the device.

"I can't even tell you how long it must have taken him to construct," he said. "This man obviously was very determined to end his life."

According to investigators, the man had to make several trips to carry the wooden and metal parts to the area in the woods.

Link

Toronto's Seneca College is throwing its sixth annual Free Software/Open Source convention -- admission is as cheap at $20, and this year's speaker lineup includes Bob Young, Co-founder, RedHat and CEO and Founder, Lulu.com; Ross Turk, Community Manager, Sourceforge.net; Chris Blizzard, One Laptop Per Child Project; and Marc Kwiatkowski, Senior Software Engineer, Facebook.

Welcome to Seneca's 6th Annual
Free Software and Open Source Symposium
October 25-26th, 2007 - 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Seneca@York Campus, Toronto

The Symposium is a two-day event aimed at bringing together educators, developers and other interested parties to discuss common free software and open source issues, learn new technologies and to promote the use of free and open source software. At Seneca College, we think free and open source software are real alternatives.

Want to present? The deadline for presentation proposals for this year's symposium is September 1.

Link