An anonymous reader writes "This may be an interesting take on creating long-term storage technologies. A team of researchers at UCSC claims to have come up with a power-efficient, scalable way to reliably store data for a theoretical 1,400 years with regular hard drives. TG Daily has an article describing this technology and it sounds intriguing as it uses self-contained but networked storage units. It looks like a complicated solution, but the approach is manageable and may be an effective solution to preserve your data for decades and possibly centuries." Nice to see research on this using the kinds of real-world figures for disk lifetimes that recent studies have been turning up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the best songs ever combined with one of the most whimsical roadside advertising gimmicks equals a video of pure joy. Created by Lex10, who says:

I drive a 12 year old Pontiac convertible to my place of work, so I get quite the panoramic view. I was waiting for the light to change across from a storage complex, when I noticed how the end of Cream's "Glad" matched so beautifully with the tube man on top of the storage complex's roof as he waved his pneumatic arms and whipped his pneumatic head back in an unbridled expression of glee and air-filled pride.

Link

A little over a year ago, we wrote about the plans by the popular indie record shop in NYC, Other Music, and how it planned to adapt to the changing marketplace for music buying. The store recognized that it couldn't sit still and wait to be consumed like its former neighbor down the street, Tower Records. So it set up its own online download store, with DRM-free tracks for sale from indie acts. However, the real key to its business was in recognizing what the real benefit of a good indie record store has always been: the knowledge and recommendations from the staff (and having been to the Other Music physical store years back, I can attest to their knowledge and recommendations). Business Week has now checked in with the store's owners, who note that the new venture is still very much in its nascent stages, but that they're quite optimistic about where things are headed. "I feel like there's a lot of opportunity if you're willing to shake up your way of thinking, and approach things in different ways and experiment and take chances." Contrast this to what you heard from execs at Tower Records as it failed or from the record label bosses who refuses to change.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A Danish company called Agroplast has figured out how to turn pig-piss into plastic and into a cigarette "flavor enhancer":

Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch.

Tøttrup claims that the process could, conceivably, result in plastics that cost a third less than conventional plastics made from fossil fuels. That's a big conceivably. Traditionally, bioplastics made of vegetable matter have cost more than fossil fuel plastics. Evaluation of the pricing will have to wait until large volumes of this stuff are made. Agroplast is going into a pilot study now, Tøttrup said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

(Image: URINE: a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Salvez's Flickr stream)

Oscar sez, "Amnesty International waterboarding ad, where they actually filmed someone really getting waterboarded. The ad will play in movie theaters starting on May 12th. This is part of their 'Unsubscribe Me' campaign. They had released another video a couple of months ago of a guy getting put into a stress position."

Amnesty's 90-second film, called Stuff of Life, opens in slow motion with stylish shots of crystal-clear water and an upbeat soundtrack in the style of a typical mineral-water TV ad.

However, after lulling viewers the ad transforms into an interrogation room where a man is strapped to a table being subjected to waterboarding. Waterboarding involves first tying detainees to a board face-up and tilted backwards, then pouring water over the face and into breathing passages to simulate drowning.

"For a few seconds our film-makers did this for real, they poured water up the nose and into the mouth of someone who was pinned down with his head tilted back," said Sara McNeice, campaign manager at Amnesty International UK.

"Even for those few seconds it is horrifying to watch. The reality, in a secret prison with no one to stop it, is much, much worse."

Link (Thanks, Oscar!)

See also: Amnesty's Unsubscribe Me video reenacts CIA stress-position torture

People who bought music from the MSN music store have been royally hosed by Microsoft: as of today, if you buy a new computer, or refresh your hard-drive, you have to kiss all your music goodbye. Microsoft has shut down its DRM "license server" and left people who bought music -- instead of downloading it from a P2P site -- out in the cold. All those years the music industry spent insisting that the only way they'd sell music is with crippling DRM attached managed to totally discredit the idea of buying music at all:

MSN Entertainment and Video Services general manager Rob Bennett sent out an e-mail this afternoon to customers, advising them to make any and all authorizations or deauthorizations before August 31. "As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers," reads the e-mail seen by Ars. "You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play."

This doesn't just apply to the five different computers that PlaysForSure allows users to authorize, it also applies to operating systems on the same machine (users need to reauthorize a machine after they upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, for example). Once September rolls around, users are committed to whatever five machines they may have authorized—along with whatever OS they are running.

Link

Here's a neat trick: drip food coloring into a pan of milk, then add some dish-soap to set off a psychedelic, animated chemical reaction that'll have 'em agog with delight! Link (via Neatorama)

Stephen sez, "From its first story published free to the web August 1st, 2005, the flash fiction website 365tomorrows.com has posted a new piece of short science fiction to the web every day since and will post its 1000th story Apr 26th, 2008. The site continues to publish daily from a combination of staff writing and select submissions from amateur writers from around the world. A reader commented, 'An idea while stuck at a traffic light has spawned 500,000 words... of course that only counts the stories you've accepted. It's also interesting to think that you've gotten a thousand unique futures from a bunch of amateur writers. Pretty neat.'" Link (Thanks, Stephen!)

Jennifer Niederst Robbins (author of Web Design in a Nutshell) interviews super-cool music people (Apples in Stereo, Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, Jack Black, etc.) about cooking and food. #

David Gerard writes "Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. It will cost 20 Euros, and 1 Euro from each copy will go to Wikimedia. They're editing down the most popular 50,000 articles for the 1,000-page book, to be released in September. Because of the open-source origin of the material, the publisher cannot claim copyright in the book." The German-language Wikipedia is second in size only to the English version, which has 2.3 million articles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sarah Milstein, Boing Boing's Operations Manager/Chief Loop-Closer, and CrowdVine's Tony Stubblebine are orchestrating a free unconference in San Francisco this week. Called Web2Open, it's part of the program for the Web 2.0 Expo that started today. (Thanks Sarah for the free pass code below for the Web 2.0 Expo!) If you're in the area, check it out! It's sure to be full of smart people, big ideas, and good converations. In fact, Web2Open will also feature a rare Bay Area appearance from BB's amazing community manager, Teresa Nielsen Hayden! She's on a panel on the topic of "Troll Whispering" and community dynamics. Sarah writes:

Web2Open -— a free, highly participatory unconference hosted by the Web 2.0 Expo in SF -- is going off this week on Weds and Thurs. In addition to offering the traditional open grid (where participants sign up on site to lead discussions) and tons of chances to connect with other participants, we’ve also pre-scheduled a handful of very cool sessions:

* Four round-table discussions, each with a panel of people passionate about their topics: Small Business Hacks; UI for Data Portability; Troll Whispering; and Social Responsibility for Web 2.0 Businesses: Geeks Doing Good.

* Three hybrids: We’ve picked three sessions in the main conference track that will be open to all Web2Open attendees. Then we’re following those presentations with discussions in the Open: Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business, Taking Web 2.0 Offline and On the Desktop and Influence Is Overrated.

* Speed Q&A with Clay Shirky, Kara Swisher, Matt Cutts, Saar Gur and Tim O’Reilly. This going to rock: we’ll have fifty minutes and five tables, one each for programmers, designers /UI specialists, marketing /community gurus, businesspeople and undeclared. Each of our five prominent people will hold an informal Q&A at each table, switching every nine minutes.

The Web2Open, open to anyone who would like to participate, is a part of the Web 2.0 Expo. You need a badge to attend, but you can register for free on site using the code websf08opw (this free badge will admit you to the Web2Open sessions, Expo Keynotes, Show Floor and Launch Pad).

Link

Dusty Miller is "grown primarily for its attractive silver-gray foliage..."

Rob Cockerham and his brother Mike use a super-powerful magnifying toy (Eyeclops) to count the individual threads in some $40 Martha Stewart Collection 360 thread count pillowcases. They wanted to answer the questions, "Are there really 360 threads per square inch?" Link (See other How Much is Inside" experiments here.)

A well known prison inmate who has a long history of filing totally ridiculous lawsuits has struck again. Reader William writes in to let us know that the Jonathan Lee Riches has filed for a restraining order against the game "Grand Theft Auto" and its maker Take Two Interactive. No, it's not clear how one gets a restraining order against a video game, but the filing incoherently claims that Take Two and the game put him in prison and later complains that the content in the game "offends me." If only that were a crime. Anyway, while this is an amusing story from an inmate who files way too many such lawsuits, it does show how our courts often have to waste time on these types of bogus claims.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. edited an episode of Charlie Rose to make it look like he's interviewing himself.

Something has happened to PBS favorite "Charlie Rose." The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that, somewhere, a man named "Steve" is "not happy." Though this seemingly random statement might confuse us, Charlie understands it for what it is -- a threat. But who is "Steve" and why is he angry? And why does the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold? Using appropriated footage from a single episode of "Charlie Rose," filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical in "'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett."

Link

J. T. Glover says: "This is an article from the Seattle Times about how the U.S. Border Patrol is questioning U.S. citizens traveling within the U.S. (from island to mainland) on the grounds that some of them might be terrorists. When pressed, a deputy chief patrol agent for the area admitted that anyone stopped who refuses to answer questions--as is their legal right--is let go. Clever terrorists escape, citizens are inconvenienced, and an unknown amount of drug smuggling or illegal immigration is halted."

[I]n February, when federal agents started corralling everyone off domestic ferries into a fenced-off area in Anacortes and questioning them about their citizenship. It now happens once, maybe twice a week; no one has any way to know if they will be stopped.

When islanders talk about taking a ferry to the mainland, the joke around town these days is, "I'm going back to America," said David Jones, the mayor of Friday Harbor.

"There's a great surge of indignation underneath the surface here," he said.

So much so that local attorney Carolyn de Roos recently asked three Seattle lawyers to come speak at two meetings about residents' rights and legal options.

Their advice: Don't answer any questions.

Because island residents who board domestic ferries don't cross an international border, they "have a right not to reveal anything about their legal status," said Matt Adams, an attorney with the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and a member of the ACLU.

"Once they're inside the country, Immigration doesn't have the right to detain someone without reasonable suspicion," Adams said. And ethnic background, skin color or language don't meet that threshold.

But if someone admits to being in the country illegally, Border Patrol can arrest the person.

Link