A brilliant action-figure modder has created a set of custom steampunk Justice League figs based on the Gotham by Gaslight comics. They're absolutely perfect:

Inspired by the comic book, Gotham by Gaslight by Mike Mignola and Brian Augustyn. Set in 1880's , Batman attempts to stop Jack the Ripper, who has come to Gotham.

I attempted to re-design the famous members of the Justice League in the Victorian Era. I went for a darker look & tried to give them the right period feel, but also keep the feel of the original character.

Link (Thanks, Jim!)

The European Commission apparently thinks that the big thing holding back the rise of a European online content industry is the lack of a single centralized marketplace for digital content that also includes DRM and other anti-piracy safeguards. It's not surprising why they might think this, but they're wrong. It's a politician's solution, rather than a business person's. It's based on the false belief that copyright is a tug-o-war between content creators and consumers that needs balance on either side. That's simply not true. Saying that it is sets up the economics of a zero-sum game where every winner has a loser. However, that's not true with digital content, with its infinite availability, every winner doesn't need to be a loser. You can set up business models that expand a market, rather than limit it. And, of course, the worst way to try to set up such market is to centralize it and make it the government's job. It has all the hallmarks of a totally boondoggle of wasted government money and effort. Instead, why not let various other business models get tested in the marketplace to see what works?

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Today on Boing Boing tv -- more subversive animated genius from David O'Reilly, a 22-year-old experimental filmmaker from Ireland whose style lies somewhere between Kubrick and Kaufman and Ketamine. We've featured his work before here, and were instantly smitten with his vectorpunk vibe -- so we asked him to cook up something exclusive for BBtv. This is the result.

Part two of today's episode: more animated awesomeness from O'Reilly, featuring music composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood.

Link to BBtv post with video and comments.

theodp writes "US corporations and shoppers spent more than $54M last year on credits toward tree planting, wind farms, solar plants and other projects, prompting the FTC to question whether carbon-offset money is well spent. 'There's a heightened potential for deception,' said FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras of the green-sounding offers that seem to be confronting consumers at every turn."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This post may be a little "inside baseball-ish" when it comes to copyright issues, but it's worth noting what's happening in some important lawsuits. While the Supreme Court has been gleefully taking on more and more cases concerning patent law, it seems that it's not yet ready to revisit some important discussions around copyright law, since the Eldred case back in 2003. Late last year, we updated you on a few cases that have used the specific wording of the Eldred decision to argue that recent copyright law changes were violations of the First Amendment. In Eldred, the Supreme Court had ruled that it was only a First Amendment issue if changes in the law changed the "traditional contours of copyright protection." It's that clause that some other cases have been challenging lately. As we noted in that last post, there appeared to be a split among the different circuit courts concerning whether recent copyright changes did, in fact, change the traditional contours of copyright protection. That, it seemed, was actually a good thing, because different circuits with different readings is the sort of thing that attracts the Supreme Court's interest.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Supreme Court just isn't all that interested yet. Larry Lessig has the update, where he notes that the Supreme Court has refused to take the case so far, though part of its reasoning was that the government's filing insisted that the one ruling that said the traditional contours had been changed was an obvious mistake that would be overturned when the 10th Circuit agreed to rehear the case. Except... the same day that the Supreme Court turned down the case, the lower court turned down the request to rehear the case. As Lessig notes, this is far from over, but it appears that the Supreme Court won't be settling this matter any time soon, which is a bit unfortunate.

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An anonymous reader writes "According to James Bullen of NXT, 'The UK ministry of defense was experimenting with a way to dampen the sound in helicopters and developed a honeycombed material that did the opposite — conducted sound.' Cambridge-based NXT christened it "SurfaceSound" and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more. NXT is working on ways to put the technology to use in touch screens that promise to be part of a new rage in 'natural interfaces' for computers, mobile telephones, televisions and other electronic devices. Toyota has SurfaceSound in the head liners of four of its car models. NXT recently made a deal with greeting card giant Hallmark to use the technology in 'big cards with big sound' when opened, Bullen said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There certainly have been a lot of questions concerning favoritism on FCC chair Kevin Martin's part. He has consistently been for regulating cable while deregulating telcos. He clearly has a very close relationship with the telcos, and never seems to question their motives. That came to a head last month when Martin pushed forward plans to cap cable growth despite serious questions about the FCC's authority in the matter (as well as questions about cherry picking statistics to support his case). It seems that all of that has now caught the attention of Congress, who is going to launch an investigation of the FCC's rulemaking process, and examine accusations of favoritism. Seeing as this is a Congressional investigation, it's likely to be a lot more grandstanding than anything substantial. However, at the very least, it looks like Congress is making it clear to Martin that he may have pushed his luck one too many times.

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A while back I posted a story about a lawyer couple who were able to take away part of their neighbor's property under the doctrine of "adverse possession."

Many people in Boulder believe the court's decision was wrong. Others believe that while the court may have been technically correct, Richard McLean (a former judge in Boulder) and Edith Stevens used their connections to take the land in an underhanded manner.

Don Wrege, a Boulder songwriter, made three hilarious parody songs about the case. One is based on Mister Rogers' "Won't You Be My Neighbor," another parodies Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," and the third is a delightful take-off of "You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch."

1. Stealing Land From Our Neighbor

2. This Land Belongs to Don and Susie

3. Edie and Dick (The Grinch Theme)

Link

coondoggie writes "Looking to save $1 million, 20 tons of paper, or close to 500 trees, the White House said today President Bush's 2009 Federal Budget will for the first time be posted online. The E-Budget will be available for downloading at the Office of Management and Budget Web site on Feb. 4. Typically the White House has paper-bombed congress and anyone else who wanted to read the budget with a tome which can reach 3,000 pages and weighed multiple pounds each."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I ordered ten red pens but they sent ten dozen. Oy.

The Washington Post is running an article covering a bunch of cases where big companies have been using content from user-generated content sites, like Flickr, without permission -- upsetting the amateur content creators. Some of the cases we've talked about in the past, and a few others are pretty well known as well. Basically, they usually involve someone at a big company making use of an image he or she found on Flickr without getting permission and then using that on TV, in a magazine, in an advertisement or on the web. Quite often, the companies that are doing this are also known for their own overly-aggressive attempts to combat copyright infringement of their own works. What's unfortunate about these cases is that, rather than recognizing how silly copyright is no matter which direction it's going in, many of the people are reacting just like the big content companies themselves. This isn't surprising, but it is a little depressing. The Big Content companies only have themselves to blame, of course. Their "education" campaign has only alerted people to become more attuned to thinking of content as property, and more ready to sue over its use. This situation is only going to get worse, as more and more amateur content is out there, unless we start realizing that it's time to peel back copyright law, stop thinking of ideas as property that can be owned, and start recognizing there are ways to embrace the sharing of information and content that makes everyone better off. The Washington Post asks if that would be "total anarchy," which suggests little recognition of the history of content creation or free markets.

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mattnyc99 writes "With top geeks saying photovoltaic cells are still four years away from costing as much as the grid, and the first U.S. thermal power plant just getting into production, there's plenty of solar hype without any practical solution that's efficient enough. Until Lonnie Johnson came along. The man who invented the Super Soaker water gun turns out to be a nuclear engineer who's developed a solid-state heat engine that converts the sun's heat to electricity at 60-percent efficiency—double the rate of the next most successful solar process. And his innovation, called the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion (JTEC) system, is getting funding from the National Science Foundation, so this is no toy. From the article: 'If it proves feasible, drastically reducing the cost of solar power would only be a start. JTEC could potentially harvest waste heat from internal combustion engines and combustion turbines, perhaps even the human body. And no moving parts means no friction and fewer mechanical failures.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register has a brief look posted (with photos and diagrams) of "USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)." The posting explains that USB 3.0 "wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like." How does it handle backward compatibility? The extra pins needed for USB 3.0 "are placed behind the USB 1.1/2.0 ones. USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current ones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was tremendous hype and a number of big names behind the wireless startup Frontline, who was talked up as a possible upstart bidder (and potential winner) for a segment of the spectrum that the FCC is auctioning off later this month. However, if one thing has become clear over the years, spectrum auctions are not a game for startups to play -- as unfortunate as that may be. On Tuesday, the news came out that Frontline had shut down after it was unable to find financial backers to pony up all the money it needed. There are some questions about this, as some of the company's early supporters represent a ton of money, but some are noting that this could actually cause something of a domino effect impacting all of the spectrum being auctioned off. There are a variety of rules and hurdles that various bidders need to meet, and if those hurdles aren't cleared, then the FCC can cancel the auction and try again -- with different rules that could toss out the open access requirements the FCC put in place. It's not clear if that will actually happen, but it appears to increase the likelihood significantly.

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slim-t writes "The Star Tribune is reporting that students have been disciplined for photos of them on Facebook. 'Eden Prairie High School administrators have reprimanded more than 100 students and suspended some from sports and other extracurricular activities after obtaining Facebook photos of students partying, several students said Tuesday.' Is the school right to do this? My opinion is that the students should know not to post pictures of yourself breaking the law." I'd just like to know what all those administrators are doing cruising Facebook pages looking at the students in their school.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whoever designed this flyer for a Swiss McDonalds must be a Rolling Stones fan. Link

Flickr: My election return desktop.

Brian Bailey: Bloomberg wins New Hampshire.

Newsgator's RSS products are free now.

Chelsie Gosk says: The New Yorker invites artists, designers, and readers of all ages to enter the Eustace Tilley Contest and create their own version of Tilley, the iconic dandy who appeared on the magazine’s first cover in 1925 and has returned for nearly every anniversary issue since.

Up to 20 winning entries will be published on newyorker.com to commemorate the magazine’s 83rd anniversary.

Show here, R. Crumb's 1994 interpretation of Eustace Tilley. Link

nerdyH writes "Google's Android stack for Linux phones has been successfully hacked onto several actual hardware devices, including Linux-based Sharp Zaurus PDAs and a high-end development board. Google's preview release of Android las