Wired's Threat Level blog has been doing some excellent work covering the first RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial, in my home state of Minnesota. In the latest post, reporter David Kravets quotes a couple of whoppers in the testimony of Sony BMG exec Jennifer Pariser. First, Pariser claims that "Selling music is the only way a record company makes money." That's just silly. While record sales are certainly a major source of revenue for record labels, there are lots of other revenue streams out there: concert tickets, merchandise, online subscriptions, endorsement deals, advertising revenue, and so forth. Just yesterday we had an excellent example of a band experimenting with offering name-your-own-price downloads coupled with a premium "discbox." And even some of Pariser's fellow record label execs have begun acknowledging that relying so heavily on music sales is a bad business strategy. At least I can see why Pariser might have thought it was a good legal strategy to pretend that record sales are the only conceivable revenue source for the music industry. Her other claim is even more puzzling: when asked if it's legal to make just one copy of a song you've legally purchased, she apparently said that was "a nice way of saying, 'steals just one copy.'" Not only is that flatly untrue as a matter of law, but saying it also seems like a lousy legal strategy, because (as Kravets points out) some of the jurors probably own MP3 players and won't like being accused of stealing. It's also worth mentioning that this is something the industry keeps flip-flopping on. Sometimes (like when they're arguing before the Supreme Court) they say that of course iPods are legal. Other times they call anyone who rips their CD collections for personal use thieves.

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.

jcgam69 writes "October 1 marked the first day of the Great Worldwide Star Count, a half-month citizen science project that will harness thousands of observers across the globe to help map light pollution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're excited to share something new with you today -- Boing Boing tv. The idea is simple. Explore the same kind of stuff we've been obsessing about since Boing Boing began nearly 20 years ago, only explore it now in daily video. Five days a week, and short: under 5 minutes each.

Here is episode 1: Video Link.

For the first few weeks, much of what you'll see will be produced in-studio, but we also plan to do stuff out in the world, and all over the world.

Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder and I are co-hosting the first few weeks of Boing Boing tv, but expect to see the other Boing Boing and Boing Boing Gadgets editors, too -- Pesco, Cory, Joel -- along with familiar characters whose work and eccentricities have been chronicled here before.

And: you. We also welcome video produced by you, our community, our audience, our internet-friends, and we're working out exactly that might fit in the mix (we'd love to hear your thoughts on that).

We're exploring different ways of producing this, and plan to publish a mix of faster-moving "internet zeitgeist" stories with material that remains of interest for a long time. Some lighthearted, other stories less so. In other words, a variety of material pretty much like you find on the blog.

This is not the result of a business plan, or a corporate focus group. We promise no huffy manifestos about Taking Down The Networks with A New Television Paradigm, no breathless hyperbole about Reinventing Citizen Journalism With the Disintermediation of Long Tail Postmodernist Blogonomics -- gah!

We just want to have fun and explore interesting things with you. But, y'know, now with video, because video allows you to explore stuff that text, photos, and audio -- all the things we've experimented with so far -- do not.

We don't intend to take ourselves too seriously. And we're not trying to be TV. Same old Boing Boing, but with talkies.

We hope you like it and find it worth your time to watch and participate, as you, our community, do with Boing Boing the blog. We hope you'll talk with us in the comments (or through your own video, if you wish) about what you'd like us to explore, though Boing Boing tv, next.

Link Discuss FTW!

TECH NOTE: RSS feed and the ability to subscribe via iTunes will be live ASAP.

THANKS: heartfelt gratitude to colleagues and friends without whom this would have remained vapor: Michel Wayne, Chris Kimbell, Jacob Riskin, and all of our production partners at the newly-launched Santa Monica-based studio DECA; all of our sponsorship, marketing, and tech partners at Federated Media (John Battelle, Jason Weisberger, Neil Chase, Ken Snider, Jonathan Schreiber, Ivan Kanevski, Chas Edwards, Bernie Albers, and Samantha Kahn, among others); George Ruiz and Nick Khan at International Creative Management (ICM reps BBtv); Brian Walsh at Castfire; the unfairly talented writer and producer Nihar Patel (he was once Xeni's producer at NPR, before that he worked at ABC Nightline, now he's part of the BBtv team), Scott Crawford of Scenic Route Pictures (shoot and post production), Tom Kendall and team at oftheworld.tv (BBtv title animation), and Kai Vermehr and all the folks at eboy who created the BBtv cowboy monster critter.

And thank you, dear viewer, for stopping by.

NEWS: Link to story in the LA Times. Link to Valleywag item. Link to Wired News blog post. Link to Laughing Squid. Link to Warren Ellis' blog. Link to Digg.

As the federal government continues its quixotic quest to stamp out online gambling for no clear reason (other than, you know, to protect our ports), it's now putting the responsibility on banks to block online gambling. Why banks? That's not entirely clear, but banks may now be responsible for making sure that individuals can't transfer money to various online gambling operations. All this for an activity that doesn't appear to create any additional problem gamblers. There are those who say it's all because the federal government wants to tax online casinos, but that doesn't ring true either -- since they're shutting them down rather than taxing them. Many online casinos would love to be taxed if they could legally do business in the US. Instead, it seems to just be that some politicians claim not to like online gambling for moral reasons -- though they were careful to carve out exceptions for wholesome online gambling like horse races and state lotteries.

I love podcasts, I take a walk every day, and listen to whoever Terry Gross is interviewing, or Tim Russert. I love it all, but sometimes there's no substitute for a great schmaltzy song and some of them never seem to get old, they just get better.

One of those songs is You and Me Babe, from the Ringo album. I've said it before, this album is really the last Beatles album, all four of the Beatles write, produce and perform. To me, a Beatles fan since I was a Mets fan, it's a beautiful album, there are reprises from some of the great post-Beatles music of McCartney, Harrison and Lennon. And I love it even more because it's all got the Little Help From My Friends spirit that RIngo embodied.

I dare you to listen to that song without smiling.

scott3778 writes to recommend a post by Timothy Mattson over at Intel's Research Blog. He argues, convincingly, that the most important paper for programming language designers to read today is one written by two social psychology professors in 2000. This is the well-known academic study, "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire too Much of a Good Thing?" "And then we show them the parallel programming environments they can work with: MPI, OpenMP, Ct, HPF, TBB, Erlang, Shmemm, Portals, ZPL, BSP, CHARM++, Cilk, Co-array Fortran, PVM, Pthreads, windows threads, Tstreams, GA, Java, UPC, Titanium, Parlog, NESL,Split-C... and the list goes on and on. If we aren't careful, the result could very well be a 'choice overload' experience with software vendors running away in frustration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This baguette-shaped hunk of foam-rubber is actually an "ergonomic" wrist-rest. Low-carb, too. Link (via Popgadget)

We've tried to point out how government granted monopolies can distort a market, whether it's in the intellectual property space or within wireless spectrum. For example, take a look at what's happening in the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum space. A bunch of 2.5 gigahertz spectrum was handed over to schools and non-profits, supposedly for use in education. The rules on those licenses were that it couldn't be owned by for-profit businesses... but could be licensed to them. Of course, for many schools, the idea that they owned any spectrum rights at all was a complete mystery. Many valued the spectrum at absolutely nothing (which was its real value to them) and let the licenses expire. However, with Sprint's latest focus on WiMax, it could make use of more 2.5 GHz spectrum. It already owns a bunch, but not enough. So, of course, now that this spectrum is suddenly valuable to Sprint, schools are scrambling to renew expired licenses to the spectrum they valued at absolutely nothing, in order to turn around and license it to Sprint for quite a bit of money. In other words, you have a natural resource given to schools absolutely free. They didn't value it and didn't have any use for it at all. Then, a company comes along that actually can do something useful with that spectrum, and the schools are suddenly setting roadblocks in their way. That doesn't seem like a particularly useful thing -- but thanks to another set of gov't granted monopolies, combined with a complete lack of a comprehensive spectrum allocation policy from the FCC, it's what we're left with.

Hugh Pickens writes "Climate researchers Ray Pierrehumbert and Jonathan Mitchell at the University of Chicago say that Titan, the only moon in the solar system large enough to support an atmosphere, has many of the same weather features as Earth, but with completely different substances that work at temperatures that plunge down to minus 170 degrees Celsius. Pierrehumbert and Mitchell call Titan's climate 'tropical,' a climate that is warm to hot and wet year-round, because on Titan methane assumes the role of water and exists in enough abundance to condense into rain and form puddles on the surface. Titan's tropical nature means that scientists can observe the behavior of its clouds using theories they've developed to understand Earth's tropics. For example, Titan's atmosphere produces an updraft where surface winds converge to lift evaporated methane up to cooler temperatures and lower pressures, where much of it condenses and forms clouds, 'a well-known feature on Earth called an ITCZ, the inter-tropical convergence zone,' Mitchell says."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IPOs, for the most part, have not been the preferred exit strategy of the latest round of entrepreneurs -- most companies debuting on the market this year have been greeted with lackluster response. The tide may be beginning to change; this next quarter may see the largest crop of IPOs since 2000. With VC backed 46 companies registered to go public during the third quarter, it is obvious that the IPO market is warming up. Time to break out the Aeron chairs in celebration of yet another era of Internet hype and excess? Not quite yet. Out of the 46 companies that filed, none were Internet companies. However, if the latest crop of IPOs do well, you can bet that Internet startups will start looking towards Wall Street... and plenty of investment bankers will be waiting with open arms.

An anonymous reader writes "A new public opinion survey conducted in Canada finds overwhelming public support in that country for net neutrality legislation. Three-quarters of Canadians believe the government should pass a law to confirm the right of Internet consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice — even though most of those surveyed did not know the term 'net neutrality.' The survey was commissioned by eBay." Of course the devil is in the wording. Given the survey's sponsorship, it's unlikely that respondents were presented with examples of the value that ISPs say packet shaping can bring, or asked to weigh such against net neutrality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wendy, a crafty blogger at Wisdom of the Moon, has a great post on making your own monstrous cupcakes through clever application of candy decorations. These are scary calories! Link (via Craft)

Update: From the comments: Matt sez, "I like to top mine off with a marshmallows for extra high 3D monster sculpturing."

It's no secret that we think Viacom has made some really bad strategic moves recently (while sister company, CBS seems to be making the right moves). However, it's still impressive to see Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman lay out so many wrongheaded strategic positions in a single speech. Clearly, Viacom's strategic sickness comes from the top -- and it's going to strangle the company as others, who actually pay attention to basic economics and trends, run rings around Viacom over time. Let's take a look at all the issues that Dauman is wrong on.

• DRM and watermarking: Dauman says the way to defeat piracy is for companies to "unite against piracy by installing more safeguards." How's that been working so far? Right, it's only made the problem worse and pissed off a bunch of folks by treating them as criminals. Limiting what people can do and treating them like criminals diminishes value, rather than increases it. As more and more companies are learning this, it's simply going to push people away from stragglers like Viacom.
• Spurring creative output: Dauman insists that copy protection and watermarking are necessary to "usher in an unprecedented period of creative output across the globe." Apparently he hasn't been paying attention. We're already in an unprecedented period of creative output across the globe -- and it isn't because of copy protection and watermarking, but because of increasingly simple tools for content creation, promotion and distribution -- all of which are held back by things like DRM and watermarking.
• Easy copying and distribution seen as a problem: Dauman apparently complained about how awful it is that "all manner of intellectual property" can now be reproduced more easily than ever "at the click of the mouse." Only in the world of someone who doesn't understand basic economics would that person lament the fact that the tools of creation and distribution are getting cheaper. For most people who recognize that they're selling benefits, not products, having the cost of production and distribution drop to virtually zero would be seen as an opportunity, not a problem. Unfortunately for Viacom, there are plenty of companies that do view the easy reproduction of content as an opportunity rather than a threat, and that's going to hurt Viacom if it continues its current policies.
• Supporting ISP plans to filter traffic: Dauman apparently applauded AT&T's efforts to filter copyrighted content. It's not hard to see why he would support this, but it seems like a model designed to simply waste AT&T's money. There's no clear way for AT&T to profit from this -- and, if anything, it will just annoy users of AT&T who will look to go elsewhere. At the same time, given the high number of false positives in takedown notices (including those from Viacom), it's only a matter of time until this filtering effort starts blocking perfectly legitimate content. It's also not clear how AT&T determines what is and what is not infringing content. Especially as media companies start to recognize the promotional qualities of otherwise infringing content, this will only get messier.
• Against net neutrality: While there's a good argument against net neutrality regulations, Dauman's reason for being anti-net neutrality is the false belief that if net neutrality was mandatory it would hamper anti-piracy efforts. This one is just wrong, as it appears Dauman doesn't understand net neutrality at all. And, of course, that doesn't even start to get into all the reasons why the entirety of Viacom's anti-piracy campaign is misguided (parts of which we've discussed above).
• US pressuring foreign countries to fight copyright battles for Viacom: Funny how Dauman is against gov't intervention when it comes to net neutrality, but when it comes to having the US gov't act as Viacom's personal police in international disputes over copyright law, he's all for it. Copyright is about incentives, not protection, and different countries have learned that there are many ways to create good incentives for content creation, that don't require excessive protection. Dauman's push to have US diplomats force other countries to follow the US model threatens all kinds of interesting new business models over what is, essentially, a private commercial dispute concerning an obsolete business model.
• The Pirate Bay: Dauman slams The Pirate Bay for making movies available, suggesting again that he's confused about how technology works. The Pirate Bay isn't making the content available, but acting as a search engine for content. It's like blaming Google for all the content on the web.
• Speaking of Google... Dauman then goes on to defend Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google for infringing content on YouTube. He may be right here that it will be a defining landmark case, but he's still on the wrong side of it for a bunch of reasons we've discussed here repeatedly. Given how many (non-Viacom) companies are recognizing the benefits of having people share their content on YouTube, asking Google to automatically block all shared content is ridiculous. It would harm all of those who are happy to have their content shared, just to protect an obsolete business model.
• Google's reliance on intellectual property: Finally, Dauman notes that he can't understand Google's position in the YouTube suit, "given Google's own reliance on its software intellectual property." Again, this suggests Dauman doesn't actually understand either technology or intellectual property economics. Google doesn't rely on its intellectual property. Yes, it has many patents -- but that's not the basis of Google's success. The company relies on its ongoing ability to produce useful services that people want to use -- and then has built a business model that supports that (and supports it fantastically well, I might add). Studies have suggested that other sites have better technology than Google, but it's no longer the technology that keeps people coming back to Google -- but the overall experience. The clean interface, the better usability and the simple fact that many people feel that Google is trying to provide them with a useful service, rather than trying to figure out how to limit what they can do. That's not relying on intellectual property -- it's about creating a business model that supports what people want.

And there we go. All that in one speech. Almost all of it very, very wrong. It's hard to craft a forward looking strategy for a rapidly changing market when your boss seems to have nearly all of his assumptions wrong.

christian.einfeldt writes "James Burgett of the Alameda County Computer Resource Center calls himself a 'tattooed freak' and a recovering drug addict, but CNN is calling him a hero (video) for diverting tons of computers from landfills, installing Ubuntu Linux on them, and giving them out to schools, non-profits, and poor people. Burgett's filmed interview is currently leading a CNN contest among videos of 'ordinary people' whom CNN considers everyday heroes, narrowly edging out the video of a man who is saving gorillas from extinction. In his interview, Burgett points out that the people working for him are also recovering drug addicts or recovering mental illness patients." Update: 10/02 23:46 GMT by KD : Reader stefanlasiewski posted a journal article describing how, bewilderingly, the state of California is threatening to shut down Burgett's ACCRC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The journal Science and the National Science Foundation have announced the winners of their fifth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Seen here is one of the tied first place winners in the photography category. Created by Kai-hung Fung of Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, the image is a computed tomography (CT) view up someone's nose. From Science:

A computed tomography (CT) scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease provided the raw data for Fung's rendering. He stacked together 182 thin CT "slices" to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head.

Fung chose to use the patient's CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because "[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful," he says.

Link to see all the winners (Thanks, Mike Liebhold!)

Previously on BB:
• Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2006 Link
• Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2005 Link

An unknown gent has deposited at least 13 carved stone heads on the doorsteps of frightened villagers in the UK. He was caught on a security camera Braithwell, near Rotherham, but police have yet to arrest him. (On what charges? Littering?)

Police are on the trail of a shadowy figure who has been dumping giant carved stone heads on village doorsteps at dead of night. "Some people think it's a curse - but we have no idea who we might have offended. One woman claims there's a link to werewolves."

Link (Thanks, Giovanni!)