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Yea, some plants grow more with more CO2 in the air, like poison ivy which becomes even more poinsonous, but other plants grow slower. Here's an article from "New Scientist" on it, Climate myths: Higher CO2 levels will boost plant growth and food production.

Falcon

Sesame Street might have thought of the gay marriage thing 40 years ago:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/10/sweet-inadvertent-se.htm

mainly because iran employs a diabolical tactic that no american interceptor can defeat: if a missile of their's is shot down, they merely photoshop some more:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/10/iran-you-suck-at-pho.html

however, i would encourage american military planners to adopt iran's own dark tactics against it, and photoshop lots of missile interceptors. that should do the trick

and if the combined powers of fark photoshop and 4chan were militarized, we could bury iranian internet warriors in sheer volume of photoshopped missiles. throw in some lolcats, general ackbar, gold paint sniffer dude, and that guy riding a missile from "dr. strangelove", and iranian missiles will be decisively defeated

Like most things, while there's no pressing need to solve the problem (small number of reactors, countries willing to take the waste at low cost) and the cost of solving it is non-zero, we tend to find workarounds. With more investment in nuclear and more reactors appearing, more investment will be made into solving the problem (be it improved means to clean and store waste, more efficient reactors that can burn more of the waste, a giant space cannon or whatever else we can dream up).

Isn't that kind of what piratebay did? They wanted people to pay in small increments of less than a dollar, some quirk of law in Sweden says you have to accept them. However, it would cost the Swedish RIAA something like a 1.50 to process the payment, so the payment would be taken care of to satisfy the court case, but the payment itself would cost the RIAA way more than the settlement itself.

found it

I know Scrabble is one where I certainly want to be able to take in the whole board at once. And I want to be looking at different parts than the other players, without them knowing what I'm focused on.

The desire to keep what I'm looking at to myself is true of a lot of games.

I'd like to see one of these table sized interfaces we've seen used this way. I know it's been done with d&d. That would be cool for board games.

My GF's great-grandmother passed away in November. She was very close.

Weepy GF gets onto the web site of a regional Canadian carrier that prides itself on its customer service, selects her flight, and begins to fill out the VISA information. After filling out most of the information she clicks "continue" and *bam* up comes VISA's activation during shopping page (ADS) with a giant "I agree" button under inscrutable masses of legal fine print. She is in a fine state of mind for clicking her life away.

This happens right in the middle of the transaction, with no advance warning. Not on the page before she began filling out the details: to complete this transaction with your VISA card, you will be obligated to click "I agree" to the ADS terms of service, which shifts VISA's liability onto your shoulders and plays havoc with established web security practices and altogether makes the world a shittier place.

All of this under the commercial maxim that instant gratification == learned helplessness. Your average user will blindly click anything during gratification interruptus.

As it happens, my red-eyed GF muttered out loud "WTF is this?". It took me about 30s to get past "HF those sleezy MFs". Then I told her to slam down the virtual circuit on her half-completed web page transaction and start the transaction over again using an aging circuit-switched technology far less suited to rights erosion, and also more expensive for the airline to provide. Real human at the other end. What a PITA.

Brilliant lose-lose for everyone involved.

Two of the links I recorded checked this out:
Links More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa
Verified by Visa: British banks phish their own customers - Boing Boing

Redacted portions of an online TOS from a large Canadian bank which has since gone 404.

You agree not to: modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Verified by Visa Website or service or the software used in connection with Verified by Visa.

You agree to immediately notify us by contacting us, as we require in our cardholder agreement with you for a lost or stolen card of any unauthorized use of your password or other verification information, or any other breach of security. You will be liable for any unauthorized activity involving use of your password or Activation Data, until we receive such notice.

Answer me this, Batman:

How is one supposed to notify the bank that you've lost control over the password, when you lose control to a phishing widget embedded in a concealed iFrame?

I wrote that riddle back in November, and I'm no closer now to coming up with the solution. FWIW, this agreement is probably less egregious than the one that came up under ADS, from a different major Canadian bank. Bonus marks for completing this task without first discovering how the service works which violates your TOS.

This whole thing makes me seriously limbic.

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong.

For the good of society, the law ought not to be an ass, and the VISA company ought to not be pushing the matter like a used car salesman at the helm of an invincible glass castle.

LeGuin wrote some very interesting books. Unfortunately her stance on copyright is a bit too 20th centure to my taste.

Doctorow: "I did this with the understanding that reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute. Ms Le Guin disagrees, and though I haven't heard from her personally, my understanding is that she disagrees on the basis that taking the whole story can't be fair use. I have taken the piece down. The last thing I wanted to do was quote Ms Le Guin against her wishes, and had I known sooner that she objected to being quoted, I would have removed it sooner. " http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/14/an-apology-to-ursula.html

with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor) UPDATE: Ferl

with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor) UPDATE: Ferl

with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor) UPDATE: Ferl

with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor) UPDATE: Ferl

with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor) UPDATE: Ferl

andy zebrowitz

Boing Oct 31, 2004 ... First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a ... Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor) ...

fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he

Heh.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/18/cbs-uncovers-rare-ja.html#comment-691290

I love it when I'm right.

I think the big issue here is that some government(s) will no doubt be using this to break up protests or at any time when other less-than-lethal weapons would have been used in the past.

Well I'm absolutely positively sure that nothing like that would ever happen in the Land of the Free.

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

Sorry, this does sound to me like one of those despicable and horribly misguided "if you have nothing to hide, why would you want privacy?" line.
I like Bruce Schneier's answer.

I donated to Mercy Corps the old fashioned way, by entering a credit card number into a website.

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin has posted some interesting stuff on Boing Boing. It seems that enough of the high-techie infrastructure survived to allow people to keep in touch and look for lost relatives:

The internet is a vital form of communication, as are cellphones—when they work—and she is seeing people in Haiti using social networking services as a means to try and locate missing loved ones within Haiti. The environment is so chaotic and roads so badly damaged that even in-country, mobile technology and web-based social networking services like Facebook are playing a vital role in the reconnection process. Don't assume that because Haiti is so poor, nobody's using the internet. She says cell service has been spotty, with certain carriers performing better than others. She connected to us using WIMAX, and the degree to which that service has performed during the disaster makes her a real believer in the promise of that particular wireless technology.

AIDG's Catherine Lainé, live from Haiti (BB Video)

Update from Doctors Without Borders team in Port-au-Prince (Cool inflatable MASH-like field hospital!)

I donated to Mercy Corps the old fashioned way, by entering a credit card number into a website.

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin has posted some interesting stuff on Boing Boing. It seems that enough of the high-techie infrastructure survived to allow people to keep in touch and look for lost relatives:

The internet is a vital form of communication, as are cellphones—when they work—and she is seeing people in Haiti using social networking services as a means to try and locate missing loved ones within Haiti. The environment is so chaotic and roads so badly damaged that even in-country, mobile technology and web-based social networking services like Facebook are playing a vital role in the reconnection process. Don't assume that because Haiti is so poor, nobody's using the internet. She says cell service has been spotty, with certain carriers performing better than others. She connected to us using WIMAX, and the degree to which that service has performed during the disaster makes her a real believer in the promise of that particular wireless technology.

AIDG's Catherine Lainé, live from Haiti (BB Video)

Update from Doctors Without Borders team in Port-au-Prince (Cool inflatable MASH-like field hospital!)

Oct 31, 2004 ... First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a ... Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor)

I'm no Monsanto fan, but a lot of commenters on Boing Boing were questioning the methodology and validity of the study.

http://boingboing.net/2009/07/16/autism-as-an-academi.html
Gives some examples. Not sure it outweighs the negatives but it's still food for thought.

Actually, Sosumi is just one of the alert sounds, not the startup chime. Here's the true story behind the sound's funny name: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/24/early_apple_sound_de.html

Bloggers should learn to be less playful. Someone might get sued.
I'll probably hold out for a Nexus-6, myself.

Back with this story first came out I remember reading that DNA introduced by virus is thought to have given us the genes that allow the formation of placenta, which gave rise to mammals.

All the articles from around that time seem to be locked away behind paywalls now.

Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he posts this masterpiece online. Now, you can download it, and spew Red Bull through your nose laughing. Next, w

First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he posts this masterpiece online. Now, you can download it, and spew Red Bull through your nose laughing.

Here are the odds of being killed by a airborne terrorist in a handy infographic - It's about 1 in 10 million. Wow, you're orders of magnitude more likely to die by the plain falling out of the sky by itself... which they do.

Ten million to one:

http://www.boingboing.net/200912301009.jpg

Original post:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/30/odds-of-being-a-terr.html

Food for thought no? Bare it all in mind next time your at the airport being harassed by security - it's all for show.

Here are the odds of being killed by a airborne terrorist in a handy infographic - It's about 1 in 10 million. Wow, you're orders of magnitude more likely to die by the plain falling out of the sky by itself... which they do.

Ten million to one:

http://www.boingboing.net/200912301009.jpg

Original post:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/30/odds-of-being-a-terr.html

Food for thought no? Bare it all in mind next time your at the airport being harassed by security - it's all for show.

Next time I travel I'm bringing my gieger counter.

Safety equipment in Carry-On??? You will get stopped searched, strip searched, arrested, interrogated, re-arrested, re-interrogated, and charged with mentioning something you shouldn't at an airport.

Parachutes are banned from flights, and I think life preservers are too. Tools are also banned, stuff like screw drivers, allen keys and multi-meters. This is what happened when an MIT student showed up at the airport terminal with a circuit on her shirt. This is what happened when a traveller dropped an iPod into an airplane toilet.

Good luck with a Gieger Counter. It will start a minor terrorist incident.

First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he posts this masterpiece online. Now, you can download it, and spew Red Bull through your nose laughing.

I don't know why I bother reading the comments.

Maybe it's the favorable ranking Slashdot has in my Firefox awesome bar. Maybe it's the arbitrary and Skinnereque reinforcement that comes from being modded up. Perhaps it's just a bad habit. Regardless, arguing here is like wrestling a fifth grader. Between the ultra-individual libertarian ideologues and the clueless teenagers (never mind the considerable overlap), it's hard to find anything challenging.

As another poster mentioned a few weeks ago, Slashdot has become a site for "computer janitors" --- i.e, the bored and easily amused who have no real ideas, power, or authority. The comments section has become a showcase for naivety. Oh, there's sound and funny and fury, but there's no creativity, even among the trolls: does anyone remember OOG_THE_CAVEMAN? Now we're left with copypasta that aims to offend in the most superficial way.

Frankly, reading Slashdot has become an embarrassment. I mention it with the same tone and trepidation I might use to admit I'd purchased a Big and Rich album. Remember when we used to talk about technology? Now we mainly argue about people talking about technology.

If I want interesting stories, fair and timely news, or probing analysis, I know where to find it. Still, there's nothing that can replace the Slashdot of yore.

andy zebrowitz
andy zebrowitz

andy zebrowitz
andy zebrowitz

andy zebrowitz

Right. Taking away privacy is not necessary, in fact it's damn dehumanizing.

It's like being in a zoo, where you know everybody is pointing and laughing at you while you shit behind a wall of glass.

Imagine this: you're a soldier serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. You may be a colonel with 20 years of service or a lowly grunt with 2. You're a married man who obviously can't have sex, so you and your wife arrange to have a little private "pillow talk" over the phone. NSA agents pull up your private conversation for the "lulz", laughing their asses off at you even though you might die tomorrow for the very same government who is paying for them to watch you like a zoo exhibit and e-mail each other details of your sex life just as office workers do the latest jokes.

Fuck that, man.

That law in France was declared unconstitutional by there "Conseil constitutionnel" (constitutional council) http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/10/frances-three-strike.html

Wait, it's called Beautiful Cervix, not Daily.

And here, the octopus thing so you don't need that on your google record: http://boingboing.net/2009/01/02/cephalerotica.html :P

"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site."

For a while, Target appeared to be selling marijuana, MDMA, crack, blowjobs, etc. Those have since been removed from Target.com, but Google is apparently still indexing those product searches.

At one point, Target had mirrored Amazon's product pages, which resulted in Target appearing to sell marijuana and an anus constricting book. However, that was FIVE YEARS ago. You'd think that Google would eventually figure out that these products are long-dead, and purge them from their index.

Or does Google keep things around forever? Psychologists have discovered that forgetting old memories is actually useful. Maybe Google should follow suit.

At one point, Target had mirrored Amazon's product pages, which resulted in Target appearing to sell marijuana and an anus constricting book. However, that was FIVE YEARS ago. You'd think that Google would eventually figure out that these products are long-dead, and purge them from their index.

Or does Google keep things around forever? Psychologists have discovered that forgetting old memories is actually useful. Maybe Google should follow suit.

At one point, Target had mirrored Amazon's product pages, which resulted in Target appearing to sell marijuana and an anus constricting book. However, that was FIVE YEARS ago. You'd think that Google would eventually figure out that these products are long-dead, and purge them from their index.

Or does Google keep things around forever? Psychologists have discovered that forgetting old memories is actually useful. Maybe Google should follow suit.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/16/teaching-refugees-ho.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

People becoming wealthier means in the long run they can buy stuff from you (not necessarily directly mind you, but is no use to have people starving to death when they could be earning a living and trading with people around the world).

The difference is "Fair Use".

The Doctrine of Fair Use states that very small excerpts of a copyrighted work may be used for academic teaching, political commentary, and indexing.

Competition with the actual author of the work with a verbatim copy, as in the Psystar case, is clearly not fair use.

This ruling, upholding the French version of the DMCA (except far more draconian), essentially says that you can sue a Phone Book company for putting the copyrighted name of your business in their phone book. It also makes programming open/free software into a "suicide mission". France is going to suffer decreased competition from these laws, and likely stunt their intellectual services economy as a result.

Maybe it's not the same degree of mistake as Vietnam and Iraq that the French warned Americans against, but it will hurt them economically in the long run quite badly.

Someone who would do something like that has probably suffered a life of abuse them selves

Perhaps. Or perhaps not. You have to wonder if some people weren't just born that way.

I don't know, never been to Israel and don't plan on doing until it becomes less suicidal to do so. But on the bright side, they are refunding her laptop. Ever tried to get that from the US border agents?

So some of the comments on the boingboing post, e.g., this one, have had their vowels removed and a "Moderator note" added, with a link to an article about "disemvoweling". The article says, "comments on blogs and in other online forums can be incredibly annoying, not to mention hate-filled and obscene. How can moderators walk the line between unregulated anarchy and oppressive censorship? Some have begun discouraging problem commenters by simply removing the vowels from their posts, a process known as disemvoweling. The offending message is rendered less obnoxious, but it's still possible for other readers to decipher it — f thy rlly wnt t."

So let's try to decipher one of the disemvoweled comments:

It's my observation that most of these cases begin with a person who becomes belligerent when asked to do something he doesn't want to do (get out of the car, step away from the car, etc.) These officers may very well have overstepped their bounds, but I doubt very seriously that Watts is completely innocent.

I suspect the crux of the matter lies (no pun intended) in this sentence: "When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating..."

So he innocently said, "Why are you searching my car?" Then they commenced to beating him. Sure.

So that is what the moderators consider "offensive" enough that they think it should be censored? I looked a few more of the censored comments, and they were of a similar vein--suggesting that we don't know the whole story, but doing so politely. Sure is nice to see dissenting viewpoints being suppressed!

He questions just how much effort agencies take to reduce false positives when it comes to DMCA notices.

I think the answer is absolutely no effort at all. Here is a notorious example where a busybody associated with a professional writes' association sent out a slew of automated DMCA notices, including some totally erroneous ones that caused authors' work to be taken down after they had intentionally put it up. Actually, they appeared to the service providers to be DMCA notices, but the guy who sent them out now claims that they weren't; this is because a real DMCA notice is supposed to be sent under penalty of perjury.

I experienced one of these myself recently. I've written some books that are under CC licenses, and various people have (totally legally) posted copies of them on Scribd. I got an email from Scribd saying that they got a DMCA takedown notice from a publisher for one of my books. Turns out that some contracted in SF hired by the publisher issued the notice without checking carefully. Apparently the title was similar to one of their books. They didn't bother checking the name of the author. So they're going after me for violating the copyright on my own book. Great. I called the contractor in SF, and they said, "Oops, never mind." So theoretically they've exposed themselves to prosecution for perjury. If I called the DA in San Francisco or in my own jurisdiction and asked them to prosecute, what do you think the chances are that they'd do it? Zero, I'd guess.

I wonder if anything the EFF can do about this in the courts. It really sucks.