Some people go to the gym, others work out with light sabers. Xeni visits LA Jedi, a group of Star Wars trufans who gather regularly in a Los Angeles area park to refine their sabering skills. And this isn't just for adult guys, either -- we meet Padawan moms, 10-year-old Jedis in training, and female Sith warriors. Link to video, full post, and comments on Boing Boing TV.

jschauma writes "Yahoo published a press release announcing that it has become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. In their company blog, Yahoo points out their particular interest in the Apache projects Lucene and Hadoop, and that they have hired Doug Cutting, creator of both projects and VP at Apache. (Lucene powers the search on Wikipedia; Yahoo also provides hosting capacity to Wikimedia.)"

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Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Server Coat - Link.
• CRAFT Podcast: Quick Holiday Gifts to Make from Britex Fabrics - Link.
• HOW TO - Make Cereal Gift Boxes - Link.
• HOW TO - Recycle and Make Your Own Papers - Link.
• The Golden Girls...in Felt! - Link.

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An anonymous reader writes to let us know that users of Trixbox, a PBX based on Asterisk, recently discovered that the software has been phoning home with statistics about their installations. It's easy enough to disable, and not particularly steathy (beyond encrypting the data sent back), but customers in the forum are annoyed at not having been informed of the reporting. Trixbox is owned by Fonality, which makes customized PBXs (again based on Asterisk) for paying customers.

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Click the pic to play.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Texas grandmother Rhonda Crain got the RIAA to drop its monetary claims against her after she filed counterclaims against the record companies for using an investigator, MediaSentry, which is not licensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas. The RIAA elected to drop its claims rather than wait for the Judge to decide the validity of Ms. Crain's charges (PDF) that the plaintiff record companies were 'aware that the... private investigations company was unlicensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas specifically, and in other states as well... and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign.' Similar questions about MediaSentry's unlicensed investigations were raised recently by the State Attorney General of Oregon in Arista v. Does 1-17"

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It's the end of the weekend, have you made a sympathy doll yet? If you made one, leave a link to a picture of it in the comments!

Video - Link
PDF - Link
Subscribe in iTunes - Link

If you saw the secret message in the video, make sure to send verification and email me with an address!

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Hugh Pickens writes "There is a long article in the NYTimes, well worth reading, about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the Web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based 'cloud.' Microsoft faces a business quandary as it tries to link the Web to its existing desktop business — 'software plus Internet services,' in its formulation. 'Microsoft will embrace the Web while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable,' according to the article. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by startups, and it is 'unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating.' David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, 'a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.' Microsoft used to call this 'cutting off their air supply."

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The amazing steampunk and macabre assemblage artist Alex CF has struck again, this time building a "Chrono-Displacement" device as a prop for the cover of a forthcoming steampunk fiction anthology, to be published by Solaris, an imprint of BL Publishing. The book, entitled Extraordinary Engines, will be out in the Fall of '08.

The Chrono Displacement device - Link

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Artist Frank Kozik, best known for leading the concert poster revival, created this strange plastic bust of Stalin smoking a cigarette and wearing a baseball jersey. The bust is 15-inches tall and sells for $199.95 from KidRobot. The Web shop seems to be sold out but I just spotted one at my local Kidrobot retail store.
Link

theodp writes "FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras has refused to recuse herself from the agency's review of Google's $3.1B DoubleClick acquisition, despite her current and past ties to DoubleClick law firm Jones Day. EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy, which had requested her recusal, are keeping up the pressure as DoubleClick-related pages and references have been disappearing from Jones Day's website. Although the statement issued by the Chairwoman suggests Jones Day's DoubleClick representation is limited to the European Commission, the Google cache of one MIA document boasts: 'Jones Day is advising DoubleClick Inc., the digital marketing technology provider, on the international and US antitrust and competition law aspects of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition by Google Inc.'"

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As inevitable as the Mitchell Report response was, how long will it be before we get the headline: "Popeye denies he knew spinach was a performance enhancing drug". "I had no idea. I was just eating my vegetables. It was supposed to make me stronger. It was what, 30 or more years ago ? How much did we really know about the properties of spinach back then ? Why is the media making such a big deal out of this ? I didn't know then and I am paying the price today. Divorce. Family loss. Boomerang dropped the show because of all the fuss you guys are making. My last source of real income, gone." Leading into the inevitable interviews with Brutus saying that he knew something was up but pressure from the Network kept him from speaking up. So he took his beatings. All of which eventually led to weekly, then daily therapy sessions and his current addiction to anti-depressents. Olive Oil will refuse all informal interviews, but we will be able to dissect some of her problems she attributed to Popeye's mood swings and spinach habit from TMZ.Com interviews as she shops for her Depends at Greenbergs Pharmacy near her apartment in Burbank. And Sweat Pea ? He has disappeared. Not seen since his stint on a VH1 reality show a couple years ago. Our society loves gossip and the media loves to report it. What the sports media has to understand is the difference between reporting gossip and reporting news. I'm not saying that the Mitchell Report shouldnt be reported and commented on. It should. For a couple days. Then it should be relegated to industry trade press and gossip pages. Sports fans want sports. Its ok to mention and report about popeye being in the spinach report, but don't beat it to death. Tell us about baseball

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An anonymous reader writes "Time Warner Cable has received a state-wide franchise agreement in Ohio. Time Warner's agreement covers 260 communities in 60 of Ohio's 88 counties, for 10 years. AT&T was the first to earn a state-wide franchise contract, after a law was passed in September that allowed operators to negotiate a single state-wide agreement. In the past operators negotiated franchise agreements at the local level."

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Forbes on the Tranistor's birthday! -

Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry. They were so instantly certain they'd found their answer that they didn't speak a word of it to anyone for six months, until they could experiment further and apply for patents.

Then on June 30, 1948, they held a press conference in New York City. They showed the world not only a big model of a transistor but also a TV and a radio with transistors in place of the tubes. Nobody was talking about anything like computers yet, but it was a first look at the future we all live in. The world's response? The New York Times ran an item at the bottom of its "News of Radio" column on page 46.

The Transistor's Birthday - [via] Link.

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James Hardine writes "Wikileaks reports that US armed forces personnel at Guantanamo have conducted propaganda attacks over the Internet. (The story has been picked up by the NYTimes, The Inquirer, the New York Daily News, and the AP.) The activities documented by Wikileaks include deleting Guantanamo detainees' ID numbers from Wikipedia, posting of self-praising comments on news websites in response to negative articles, promoting pro-Guantanamo stories on the Internet news focus website Digg, and even altering Wikipedia's entry on Cuban President Fidel Castro to describe him as 'an admitted transsexual' (misspelling the word 'transsexual'). Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one 'mass communications officer' by name, who has since received death threats for 'simply doing his job — posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.'"

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An anonymous reader writes "While the intention of both HTML V5 and XHTML V2 is to improve on the existing versions, the approaches chosen by the developers to make those improvements are very different. With differing philosophies come distinct results. For the first time in many years, the direction of upcoming browser versions is uncertain. This article uncovers the bigger picture behind the details of these two standards."

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prostoalex writes "Researchers at Duke are trying to solve the problem of speeding up fiber-optic connections by converting light into sound, then converting it back into light. From the Nature News article: 'To get the information from the acoustic wave out again, a third light pulse, the 'read' pulse, is sent in. When it reaches the part of the fibre being affected by the acoustic wave, the light scatters in such a way as to regain the information that was left behind by the initial pulse. The newly-formed data pulse leaves the fibre, resuming the journey in the same direction as the original pulse, taking the same information with it.'"

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Doofus writes "The NYTimes is running an article about the end of the corporate lab and the growing partnerships between businesses and universities around the country. A number of researchers are concerned about the potential influence of business goals on universities' strategic research priorities, and the possible censoring of research antithetical to a corporate sponsor's business interests. Others claim that the universities' intellectual freedom is more liberated by corporate involvement. As the article states, 'The alternative to corporate funds is for universities to rely even more on government funds. And that raises parallel issues in the minds of some academics.'"

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The Solitaire brings us a link to Datamancer, where Richard R. Nagy shows off his Steampunk Laptop. The attention to detail and the creative style, which includes a copper-plated keyboard and speakers shaped like violin f-holes, make this an impressive case mod. From Datamancer: "This may look like a Victorian music box, but inside this intricately hand-crafted wooden case lives a Hewlett-Packard ZT1000 laptop that runs both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. It features an elaborate display of clockworks under glass, engraved brass accents, claw feet, an antiqued copper keyboard and mouse, leather wrist pads, and customized wireless network card. The machine turns on with an antique clock-winding key by way of a custom-built ratcheting switch made from old clock parts."

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Beetle B. writes "An argument has arisen over whether Wikipedia should allow pages that provide proofs for mathematical theorems (such as this one). On the one hand, Wikipedia is a useful source of information and people can benefit from these proofs. On the other hand, how does one choose which proofs to include and which not to? Should Wikipedia just become a textbook that teaches mathematics? Should it just state the bare results of theorems and not provide proofs (except as external links)? Or should they take an intermediate approach and formulate a criterion for which proofs to include and which to exclude?"

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