The antiquarian robot sculptures of Christopher Conte, who also makes artificial limbs for amputees, are featured in this online gallery and interview at The Morning News. (thanks, Rosecrans)

Next time you fly Virgin America to (ahem) catch up on the latest episodes of Boing Boing tv, you may also want to check out video from TED Talks, which will debut in-flight throughout the fleet, starting this Friday.

The TED Talks channel will premier on Virgin America flights in March and will feature some of the most compelling and groundbreaking thinkers of our time – including former President Bill Clinton, designer Philippe Starck, rock star/activist Bono and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Oh, yeah, and there's some cool conference happening this week, too. (thanks, Charles!)

Emeka Okafor writes:

Hans Silvester captures in his book 'Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa' the delectable headdresses of the Omo Valley peoples.In the Telegraph he states:

'They can take any material from the plant world - leaf, stem, flower, grass, root - and instantly transform it into an accessory straight from a fairy tale, without the slightest tinge of absurdity.'

The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yet another court has rejected the RIAA's "making available" theory of copyright infringement. As a central part to most RIAA cases against individuals for file sharing, the record labels have insisted that merely making an unauthorized music file "available" for file sharing is the equivalent of copyright infringement. Others have pointed out that the law is pretty clear that there needs to be actual distribution (i.e., a copy is actually made) before you can show infringement. The RIAA doesn't like that theory because the evidence they have usually only shows that a file is available, not that it was actually shared. The specific case at hand involved the RIAA asking for a default judgment against an individual who did not respond to charges of infringement, but the judge rejected the default judgment, noting that by using the "making available" standard, the complaint was insufficient. The judge, among other things, points to William Patry's book on copyright, where he explains that "without actual distribution of copies.... there is no violation [of] the distribution right" and also to the infamous Perfect 10 ruling concerning copyright infringement of thumbnail images.

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morrison writes "The 2008 Google Summer of Code is on. We have discussed this four-year-old tradition before (2005, 2006, 2007). Google will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4,500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's really quite fascinating to watch infrastructure bubbles, where investors overspend on infrastructure, only to go bankrupt, and have that infrastructure picked up for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy and turned into a useful, profitable asset. We've seen it with all the dark fiber investment in the '90s, and perhaps we're now seeing it with satellite communications as well. Remember Iridium? The huge satellite phone operation spun out of Motorola that was valued at many billions of dollars? It was supposed to replace cellular phones with satellite phones that could work anywhere in the world. Of course, there were a few problems with that plan. First, it was insanely expensive to build out and launch the necessary satellites. Then, the satellite phones themselves were huge, ugly and bulky. Third, it cost a ridiculous amount to actually use the phones. Lastly, and probably most importantly, between the time it took for Motorola to come up with this plan and to actually have something to offer the market, cell towers were spread quite widely around the globe and cellular technology had improved greatly -- basically lessening the need (drastically) for Iridium in the first place.

That caused Iridium to go bankrupt, and for a while the entire project was almost abandoned completely with plans in place to destroy the satellites. At the very last minute, though, a group of investors picked up the entire thing for $25 million (yes, the entire system, which had cost the original company $3.4 billion to build). Not only that, but part of the $25 million buyout was a $72 million contract with the US government. The new Iridium was a lot more focused. Rather than going after the entire mobile phone market, it really narrowly focused on occupations where such phones would be necessary. However, even then, we've still been skeptical that the economics could work out. After all, it's still costly to manage those satellites (which have a limited lifespan and need to be replaced) and reports indicated that the new Iridium really had very few customers.

However, the company now claims it's in pretty good shape, with good revenue and EBITDA, and is even talking about trying to go public once again. I'm sure the roadshow pitch will be quite different than the original Iridium. And, considering the name is still synonymous with one of the biggest failures in business, it will be interesting to see how investors react. Still, it's yet another example of companies buying up expensive assets for pennies on the dollar after an investment bubble, and turning those assets into something useful. Sometimes it's good to be a scavenger, apparently.

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I spent an hour this afternoon talking with George Lakoff, professor at UC-Berkeley, about the 2008 campaign and language.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn025Feb08.mp3

I'll write more about the interview tomorrow, but wanted to get the MP3 out right away.

Last November Crave at CNet UK posted a list of their 10 favorite off switches.

I'd like to outfit all the lights in my house with "emergency off switches" as shown here. You can turn something off by pushing the candy colored button, but you need the key to turn it back on. That way, my kids couldn't leave every damn light in the house burning, as is their wont. Link

When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone a little over a year ago, he played up the fact that Apple had filed approximately 200 patents on some of the technologies included in the phone. This seemed a bit surprising because so many of the technologies found in the iPhone were already found elsewhere -- just not in as pretty a package. Also, despite all those patent claims, it hasn't stopped a whole bunch of companies from filing patent infringement lawsuits against Apple for technologies found in the iPhone. As we've pointed out, playing up the patents seemed rather pointless. Apple was going to sell a ton of iPhones no matter what, and even if others copied the basic technology, it's unlikely they would be able to get anywhere near the attention the iPhone would get (nor the sales). We've already seen that with the iPod. Despite competitors coming up with technology that some consider to be better, the marketing and positioning of the iPod keeps it on top of the market (by a large margin).

Wired is now pointing out another potential downside to Apple's patent claims. Despite there being a ton of work by others done on the concept of the "multi-touch interface," Apple's patents on the concept may force everyone else who uses multi-touch to come up with different multi-touch commands. In other words, rather than there being a common set of multi-touch commands, which would help widen the overall market, the patents may fragment the market, forcing everyone to learn a different set of multi-touch commands based on which device they're using. That's progress?

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We all know that false or misleading science headlines are all too common these days and that misleading media combined with an apathetic and undereducated public lead to widespread ignorance. But the real question is, how can this trend be reversed? At a session at the recent AAAS meeting, a studies was discussed indicating that what matters most is how the information is portrayed. While people are willing to defer to experts on matters of low concern, for things that affect them directly, such as breast cancer or childhood diseases, expertise only counts for as much as giving off a 'sense of honesty and openness,' and that it matters far less than creating a sense of empathy in deciding who people will listen to. In other words, it's not enough to merely report on it as an expert. You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The braking mechanism that limits the speed of the wind turbine broke during a storm in Denmark. This was the outcome." Article about the turbine failure

edremy writes "Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we mentioned recently, Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson has been working on a book called "Free" for a while now. To kick off discussion on the concept he's now written an article in Wired describing how "free" has been a part of economics for a while and then noting that it's becoming more common thanks to the digitization of so many industries. It's one more piece of the puzzle that you can point people to when they insist that "free" is a bad business model. While it's great that he's writing the book (and has written this article) as it will add to the wider understanding of how "free" needs to fit into so many business models, I have a couple of very minor quibbles about it.

The first, is that even though he positions "free" as something that's played a role in business models for a while, at the end he implies that this has "turned economics upside down." That probably helps sell books, but it's incorrect. By this point, we should be wary of books that claim economics has somehow "changed." As even Chris noted earlier in the piece, all it's really doing is applying economics correctly and realizing that "zero" doesn't break basic economic equations (as many had assumed it would). The second problem, is that by focusing on the most incendiary part ("free") it gets people focused too much on the controversial part, rather than the useful part. Again, that probably helps sell books, but as I've discovered here, focusing too much on "free" simply gets people yelling at you, rather than taking time to understand the arguments you're making. We're already seeing this, as News.com has a snip describing Anderson's theory as "more money can be made tricking consumers into thinking they are getting something for nothing." There's no "tricking" at all, but some people have trouble accepting that notion when it comes to "free." Perhaps it is for the best, though. Chris knows a lot more about selling books and influencing people than I do -- and if he can influence a lot more folks to recognize that "free" isn't a bad thing, then that's going to help push a lot of businesses forward.

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stinkymountain writes to tell us that NetworkWorld got their hands on Microsoft's latest addition to the server OS market and had a chance to poke around inside Windows Server 2008. It seems that the new release is a vast improvement over older versions in both security and performance but still lacking in several key areas. "There's even a minimalist installation called Windows Server Core that can run various server roles (such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory components) but not applications (like SQL Server or IIS dynamic pages). It's otherwise a scripted host system for headless operations. There's no GUI front end to a Windows Server Core box, but it is managed by a command line interface (CLI), scripts, remotely via System Manager or other management applications that support Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or by Remote Terminal Services. It's also a potential resource-slimmed substrate for Hyper-V and virtualization architectures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Local commercial for an Engineering Expo featuring the coolest high school rock band in Maine, The Yukon Initiative.

The bad news is that the clip is 30-seconds long. I want to see the whole song! (If there is one.)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove 'actual distribution of copies', and cannot rely — as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas — upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were 'available'. This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies' anticompetitive behavior."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Law professor and copyright critic Lawrence Lessig has decided against a run for Congress, citing polling showing "no possible way" of overtaking popular California State Senator Jackie Speier before the April 8 election to fill the seat left empty by the death of Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos. Lessig had been mulling a bid on the urging of a burgeoning netroots campaign to draft him for public office, but decided that the likelihood that he would "lose big" would do more to harm than help his broader nascent effort to "Change Congress."

That effort will now see a sudden cash influx, as almost $28,000 raised at the Lessig '08 page on the progressive Web site ActBlue flow into the newborn non-profit's coffers. Under an arrangement with ActBlue, some $8,600 raised on two other Lessig-related pages will be donated to Creative Commons, an organization founded by Lessig to provide simple legal licenses for creators who wish to enable the sharing and remixing of their works.

Julian Sanchez is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Julian Sanchez and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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