Extrapolation of what's happening "now" is one of the most dangerous things in trying to predict the future. If something is growing quickly today, it doesn't mean that will last. Take social networks for example. Historically, they have a pretty standard pattern. There's a huge rush of growth, as people think it's new and neat, and they sign up all their friends. Then there's a flat period where people are still using it, but some begin to question why. Then people start to realize that, beyond reconnecting with some old friends and acquaintances, there really isn't that much to do there -- and that realization may come even sooner if they're getting bombarded with advertisements. It happened way back in the '90s with Six Degrees. It happened with Friendster in the first half of the decade. Yet, some people and companies believed that MySpace and Facebook would be different. Certainly, both companies recognized this problem to some extent, and have worked to add more things that you can "do" on their sites. Both still get a ton of traffic and usage and aren't going anywhere soon. However, there are some worrying signs. Google recently noted that the ads it's put on MySpace don't perform very well (which is something of a problem, since Google has guaranteed at least $900 million in ad revenue to MySpace). And, now, reports are coming out that users are, on average, spending noticeably less time on both MySpace and Facebook, with some leaving it behind. And, what better way to amusingly drive that point home, than to point out that even Bill Gates has killed his Facebook page just a few months after Microsoft dumped $240 million into the company?

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New Scientist is reporting that, BP Piscium, an unusual star recently under scrutiny from astronomers may have swallowed a nearby companion and spewed out a planet-forming dust cloud as a result. The team has also identified a similar scenario with another star which they hope will offer more answers to the puzzling questions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When discussing patent related stories, people often claim that without patents, copycat companies would simply copy everything and put the original creators out of business. There are a number of reasons why this isn't true (and plenty of historical evidence that it's not true at all), but for a good example of this at work, just take a look at Google. Google is by far the dominant search engine out there, and it's only been growing. It was first to market with a quality search engine, but many studies have pointed out that Yahoo and Microsoft have both caught up (and possibly passed) Google in terms of search quality. And yet, Google keeps growing. There are plenty of reasons for this, from Google's "celebrity" (as the article implies) to Google's clean interface to people generally trusting Google more than those other providers (to date, Google has done much less to piss off most people). None of those things have anything to do with the technology alone. There's this view among patent system supporters that the technology is everything, when it's really just a component in terms of what makes a business. Copying the technology is one thing, but there are advantages to being first to market, executing well, treating customers right and building a reputation. Just copying someone's technology won't get you very far on most of those other points, and shows that focusing solely on patents as a competitive advantage is unlikely to get you very far.

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eldavojohn writes "It's a common string you see at the start of an HTML document, a URI declaring the type of document, but that is often processed causing undue traffic to W3C's site. There's a somewhat humorous post today from W3.org that seems to be a cry for sanity and asking developers and people to stop building systems that automatically query this information. From their post, 'In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.' Stop the insanity!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link to ad mashup, via hiltonjapan (thanks, DGHilton!)

After 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how there was going to be a new boom in the airport security technology sector. People expected that investment would go into that field and we'd be seeing a lot of new innovative technologies to keep us all safer. Yet, here we are, over six years later, and there's very little in the way of new technologies hitting the market. Jim Harper points out that part of the problem is that the TSA, as a big gov't operation, has little incentive to improve security. Instead, he suggests, if the airlines themselves were responsible for security and liable for security failures, we'd suddenly see a lot more innovation.

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You might have seen this shaded gray squares illusion before. Squares A and B are the same shade of gray. (It was created by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT.

Here's a similar illusion with colored squares. The "blue" tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the "yellow" tiles in the top of the right cube.

Don't take my word for it. Use an image editing program with a eyedropper to see for yourself. I used Photoshop's eyedropper tool to take 5x5 samples and found that both the "yellow" and the "blue" tiles are C:50 M:40 Y:40 K:5.

Take a look at the brown tile in the center of the top face and the yellow tile in the center of the side facing slightly to the left. They're the same color.

UPDATE: The color tile illusion is one of many excellent illusions created by R. Beau Lotto.

According to Barstool Sports, these photos of men with very dark spray tans were taken in New Jersey. Link (Via Why, That's Delightful!)

Real estate agents Mark Forytarz and Paul Castran of Castran Gilbert in Victoria Australia have filed a defamation lawsuit against Google. The two agents said that they asked Google to remove allegedly defaming links to articles about them, but that Google did not take any action.

The plaintiffs claim the articles suggest Mr Forytarz bullied an intellectually disabled man into selling his home in order to claim a commission of at least $200,000.

It is claimed the article paints Mr Forytarz as unscrupulous and unethical and he suffered distress embarrassment and humiliation as a result.

They also claim another article alleges Mr Castran used dummy bidders to inflate the prices of the properties he sold.

Link

Over the last couple of days on Boing Boing Gadgets, we looked at this trailer for a documentary about the Blip Festival, how to run cable like NASA, a litter box that doubles as a planter, my new studio monitors and my ignorance about them, giant LEGO chess pieces, the first issue of Wired, the continuing lack of Nazis in LEGO games, three new Picoo-Z helicopters (including 3-channel models!), antique hand-cranked coffee mills, a modular cell phone that is supposed to live inside all your other gear, Michael Ruhlman's affection for old GE percolators, and a crappy new Zippo lighter.

An anonymous reader writes "Local search engine company, Zvents, has released an open source distributed data storage system based on Google's released design specs. 'The new software, Hypertable, is designed to scale to 1000 nodes, all commodity PCs [...] The Google database design on which Hypertable is based, Bigtable, attracted a lot of developer buzz and a "Best Paper" award from the USENIX Association for "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" a 2006 publication from nine Google researchers including Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat. Google's Bigtable uses the company's in-house Google File System for storage.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Samson writes "The city council of the small town of Rawdon, Quebec (population: 9400) has managed to get a court order to shut down an online forum (French only) because its users were posting messages that were considered 'defamatory and detrimental to the reputation' of the elected board. Police raided the forum owner's house, copied his entire hard drive and asked him to delete the offending posts, and when he said he had over 8,000 messages to look through, they did not specify which ones were specifically targeted.

So he simply shut down the site.

Five other users, posting under their real name, were visited by police as well. The city's lawyer declared: "What we can't do in newspapers, on the radio, or on TV, we can't do on the Internet. This is the message we're trying to get across." The mayor had this to say: "Debate should be civilized and take place during Council meetings.""

Democracy may be messy, but it seems rather pointless to completely shut off an avenue for discussion just because some parties are a little rude. If any individual was being defamatory, charge them with defamation -- don't shut down the whole thing. And, to then claim that debate should only take place at council meetings shows a council that isn't just out of touch with technology, but with democracy as well.

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David Gray says: "Old commercial (1960's?) for a kids game where you get smacked in the face with a cream pie."

In January, I posted the news that a young man had been arrested in Dubai for carrying melatonin. This BBC article looks into the story, and serves up some other examples of the draconian drug laws in the United Arab Emirates.

Examples:

• A Swiss man "is serving a four-year jail term after three poppy seeds from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow airport were found on his clothes."

• A 43-year-old Englishman who had a cigarette stuck to his shoe was sentenced was sentenced to four years in prison for possession of 0.003g of cannabis, which I would imagine is a microscopic amount.

• Customs officers held a woman for eight weeks before she was able to convince authorities that her codeine pills were prescribed by her doctor for back pain.

According to BBC article:

"If they find any amount - no matter how minute - it will be enough to attract a mandatory four-year prison sentence.

"What many travellers may not realise is that they can be deemed to be in possession of such banned substances if they can be detected in their urine or bloodstream, or even in tiny, trace amounts on their person."

Link

The fellow who uploaded this to YouTube writes:

This is possibly the most disturbing thing I've seen on the Interweb. I'm sorry for inflicting this upon all of you. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: The mushroom in this video looks like Amanita muscaria, which are very poisonous! Don't ever try this at home, people. Picking and eating random wild mushrooms MIGHT KILL YOU. After a rigorous session of super-sleuthing, I was able to find out more about this guy. It seems that he is a performance artist from Japan that goes by the name of 'wotaken.' Here's his home page: http://katura.is.land.to/index.html.

YouTube Link (Thanks, Russ Gooberman!)

The Wall Street Journal and Information Week reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This latest action demonstrates that while the EU has settled the case against Microsoft that ran for almost a decade, it remains as suspicious as ever regarding the software vendor's conduct, notwithstanding Microsoft's less combative stance in recent years. The news can be found in a story reported by Charles Forelle bylined in Brussells this morning. According to the Journal, the investigation will focus on whether Microsoft 'violated antitrust laws during a struggle last year to ratify its Office software file format as an international standard.' The article also says that the regulators are 'stepping up scrutiny of the issue.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Asian Law Caucus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a joint lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over access to public records on the questioning and searches of travelers at U.S. borders.

Filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the suit responds to growing complaints by U.S. citizens and immigrants of excessive or repeated screenings by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

ALC, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization, received more than 20 complaints from Northern California residents last year who said they were grilled about their families, religious practices, volunteer activities, political beliefs, or associations when returning to the United States from travels abroad. In addition, customs agents examined travelers' books, business cards collected from friends and colleagues, handwritten notes, personal photos, laptop computer files, and cell phone directories, and sometimes made copies of this information. When individuals complained, they were told, "This is the border, and you have no rights."

"When the government searches your books, peers into your computer, and demands to know your political views, it sends the message that free expression and privacy disappear at our nation's doorstep," said Shirin Sinnar, staff attorney at ALC. "The fact that so many people face these searches and questioning every time they return to the United States, not knowing why and unable to clear their names, violates basic notions of fairness and due process."

ALC and EFF asked DHS to disclose its policies on questioning travelers on First Amendment-protected activities, photocopying individuals' personal papers, and searching laptop computers and other electronic devices. The agency failed to meet the 20-day time limit that Congress has set for responding to public information requests, prompting the lawsuit.

Link to EFF.org announcement, here's a copy of the complaint (PDF).

Previously on Boing Boing:
* US Customs TSA confiscating laptops
* TSA apologizes to "blogesphere" for arbitrary gadget screenings
* Arbitrary TSA requirement: all electronics out of your bag (cables, too)

My four-year-old daughter's pre-school visited a nursing home. When they got back to class, they teacher asked them to describe what old people look like. Here are their answers.

Q: What do old people look like?

A: Very old. Their stomach is very big. They have a wheelchair. They look like they can't walk.

Link

Here are two other Flickr galleries of