An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist is reporting that one unlucky individual had to send his Xbox 360 in for repairs. The catch is he had spent a great deal of time getting signatures and artwork on the outside of the console from notable members of the gaming industry. He specifically asked and even sent a letter along with his console requesting that the outside of the case be returned intact. When he got it back it was once again, plain white. Assuming that this is a genuine claim, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the missing/cleaned case Microsoft should at least apologize to the guy."

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Jeremy Jaynes, considered one of the biggest spammers in the US was sentenced to nine years in prison for violating a Virginia anti-spam law. As part of his appeal, Jaynes claimed that the anti-spam law itself was unconstitutional, as it violated his right to free speech. It would appear that argument hasn't worked out, as a somewhat divided Virginia Supreme Court has ruled against him, upholding the conviction. It does raise some interesting first amendment questions -- but most spamming activity involves so many other things that could be considered illegal (such as computer trespass, identity fraud, false advertising, etc., etc., etc.) that you would think spammers could be convicted on charges that have little to do with free speech issues.

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Lisa Congdon turned her scissor collection into a gorgeous mobile -- think of the incredible mental scars you could leave on your child by hanging this over her crib! Link (via Craft)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The judge in the Wikileaks case has dissolved the injunction against Wikileaks, which means that it can get its .org domain back. He defended his prior ruling because it was based on the pittance of information the bank and registrar had provided him, saying 'This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit... Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order.'"

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While a bunch of consumer groups have come out in favor of keeping the internet neutral, a bunch of civil rights groups are taking the opposing view. However, the reasoning is hard to follow, as it doesn't make very much sense: "The effective prioritization of P2P traffic would represent an altogether new type of 'back of the bus' second-class status for our speech on broadband networks -- and ought to be resoundingly rejected." Actually, it's the use of traffic management that would create a second-class status for some traffic. Preserving network neutrality does exactly the opposite -- making sure all packets are treated equally. What the groups seem to be saying -- incorrectly -- is that by not using traffic management, P2P traffic is prioritized. That's not true. It's treated equally with any other traffic.

It's completely fair to argue that treating all packets equally doesn't make sense -- as many have. However, to claim that treating all packets equally somehow makes some traffic "second-class" is an outright misrepresentation. No one denies (perhaps other than these civil rights groups) that traffic management is all about officially making certain kinds of traffic second-class. They just argue that this is necessary and reasonable. The filing by these civil rights groups is simply backwards.

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The Streisand Effect is getting a bit more coverage these days. After the Associated Press mentioned it the other day, I got to sit down and talk with Robert Siegel for today's "All Things Considered" where we discussed The Streisand Effect starting with the Wikileaks case and moving on to some other cases where the Effect clearly made an appearance. If this keeps up, maybe we can look forward to a day when lawyers think twice about trying to force perfectly legitimate content offline.

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ScienceDaily is reporting that researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Southampton in cooperation with partners from Japan and the US have shed some light on the Standard Model of physics using a new computer model. "The project's enormously complex calculations relate to the behavior of tiny particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to complete. Their result shows that the Standard Model's claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists' efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect."

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We've been posting a ton of examples lately of authors giving away ebooks for free and seeing that it noticeably increases sales of their actual books. By this point, I'd think that such stories are old hat and don't need to be repeated. But if you look through the comments on some of our posts, you'll find people who insist that this doesn't work or that we haven't shown any examples. One commenter recently said that there's no proof that this works unless "50% of publishers adopt such a model." So, for the time being, here's yet another example, as pointed out by my colleague, Chris. SciFi author John Scalzi just participated in publisher Tor's recent effort to offer up free ebooks, and discovered an almost immediate boost in sales. He admits that there could be other factors involved, but tries to account for all of them, and concludes that it's almost definitely the free ebooks that are driving the noticeable increase. So, here we are. Yet another example of it working. How long until someone points out in the comments that this, too, is a special case? Just how many special cases do we need to show before people recognize that this model does work?

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My uncle Kevin Scanlon has snapping photos of Appalachian life for as long as I could form sentences -- actually, no, longer. When I was young, his photos taught me to appreciate the modest, mostly overlooked beauty that surrounds old railroads that snake through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and neighboring states. His photographs document what is now a dying culture.

His first-ever solo exhibit opens tomorrow in Grafton, West Virginia. It's probably safe to guess that most of the people who read this blog post aren't in easy driving distance of Grafton, West Virginia, but you can see some of the images online, and buy prints if you're so inclined. Shown here: Morning Coal Train, Coopers, WV, 2005. (high five, uncle Kev!)

Previously on BB: Kevin Scanlon's heavy industry photography

The rather infamous Jack Thompson gained his fame by picking up various lawsuits that involved kids shooting people and trying to get them off by blaming the video game. Rather than admit guilt, he was attempting to keep murderers from getting convicted by saying that it was the video game that made them do it. It appears that others are now picking up on this tactic. Adam Thierer points us to a recent case where a lawyer isn't arguing that his client, a 24-year-old, didn't commit a murder. He's arguing that the guy thought he was playing a video game. This is a really weak way to try to get someone acquitted of murder -- and says quite a bit about the lawyers who would use this sort of defense. As the article notes, the actual evidence suggests that video games had nothing to do with the murder, and that it was an old-fashioned robbery attempt.

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E Online is reporting that a new spinoff is currently in the works to feature Cleveland, the soft-spoken neighbor in popular animated sitcom Family Guy. "Not much is known about Cleveland other than the fact it will revolve around the Brown clan. It's unclear whether the series will remain set in the town of Quahog or whether Cleveland, along with his wife and son, will continue to appear on Family Guy, though as both series are animated, the double-billing won't so much be a logistical problem as a creative decision."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A couple weeks after trying to shut down Wikileaks a federal judge in California, after hearing the various first amendment concerns realized that perhaps he was a bit hasty. He has now reversed the order, allowing the site to have its domain name back. So, after all of this, the site still remains up and millions more people now know that the Swiss bank Julius Baer tried to shut it down to hide various documents. The end result: not only is the disputed content still available, many more people have seen it. I assume that this was not quite how the bank's lawyers expected this situation to turn out.

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SpaceAdmiral writes to mention that NASA has some new high-resolution radar maps of the Moon obtained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The new images have also been used to create a simulation of the Moon's day and a movie of a Moon landing from the point of view of the astronaut. "NASA is eying the Moon's south polar region as a possible site for future outposts. The location has many advantages; for one thing, there is evidence of water frozen in deep dark south polar craters. Water can be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn as rocket fuel--or astronauts could simply drink it. Planners are also looking for 'peaks of eternal light.' Tall polar mountains where the sun never sets might be a good place for a solar power station."

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We've been discussing how patents can have a serious economic downside (as was recognized by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as they designed the patent system). It appears that some researchers are trying to quantify just how much damage bad patents are doing to the economy. Against Monopoly points us to a blog post at Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property that discusses the results of a preliminary study (pdf file) that estimates a loss of $22.5 billion due to bad patents. The researchers admit that the findings are preliminary, but it does create an initial framework by which to look at the negative impact of bad patents on the economy. Among other things, the paper lists out the following ways that bad patents harm the economy:

• Cause consumers to absorb monopoly prices over "inventions" that were already effectively common knowledge
• Direct resources away from productive research and instead towards strategic accumulation of patents already filed over innovations already deployed
• Divert resources to "defensive patenting" or securing offensive "blocking patents
• Direct research away from areas of existing patents that should not have been granted
• Direct resources toward acquiring and enforcing substandard patents and collecting royalties rather than other more-productive fields of economic activity.

We've seen all of these in action lately. And, of course, this doesn't even get into how much is thrown away in legal resources to litigate patents and defend infringement claims on patents that should not have been granted. Also, it's worth noting that the TIIP blog post reminds us that the author's own book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk comes out next month.

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yorugua writes "Furniture trembled as Steve Ballmer was to be interviewed by InformationWeek. He then went on to talk about Linux: 'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value, which in this case means good total cost of ownership," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says.', Embrace-Extend-Extinguish: 'We say when we embrace standards, we'll be transparent about how we're embracing standards. [...] If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

netbuzz writes "Lawyers for the Swiss bank that got the plug pulled on Wikileaks.org have dragged a Stanford grad student/human rights activist into the case because he moderated a discussion group about Wikileaks on Facebook. He has no relation to Wikileaks or the case, other than that he helped authenticate documents — completely unrelated to the bank matter — that were posted on Wikileaks. The guy and his lawyer have done a nice job of making lemonade out of this lemon, though."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we recently posted, FeedBurner's integration into Google is moving along. We've got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner's integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, "new" as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn't strictly tied to FeedBurner charts 'n graphs 'n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like "What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?", and "Is there a feed file size limit?" in just one place. (We've still got nothing for you on "How can I avoid jury duty selection?") The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We've provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way, going well beyond the options we currently offer.

And, finally: Leap Year post!