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Nice reference, Sir! That is one of the classics in 419 eater.

http://www.419eater.com/html/m...

My personal favorite was The Incredible Shrinking Artwork (http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm). But you can waste far too much time on that site.

Don't forget PPP-PowerBook
  http://joi.ito.com/images2/thepowerbook.pdf

Lazer!!!

It was Joel first. I, too, remember reading about it many years ago. (Jeff's post is just a year old.) Here's a mention of it from 2004:

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2004/12/20/happy-trolls.html

(See comment #2)

[later]

Aha! I knew I had it. Way back when, he was revamping his community, and he, briefly, made it so you had to sign up to get an email to hear when it would be launched. I still have that email. It is entitled "Building Communities with Software" but it differs slightly from this. According to Google there is exactly one copy of the original email on the WWW and here it is.

If you post something and it gets deleted, we'll use a cookie to actually continue to show you your own post. We just don't show it to anyone else in the world. 9 times out of 10, you won't even know your post has been deleted. If you delete cookies or go to another computer, you may catch us, but most of the time people don't even notice that their post was removed.

That's all? So TEPCO did not falsify safety inspection records, cover-up a defective reactor, use the yakuza to get expendable workers, continue on with a foreign journalist QA session even without the foreign journalists, or make numerous blunders immediately after the tsunami to put us into the current situation ?

What a relief . . . here I was thinking TEPCO would become the poster child of the part of Japanese society that remains corrupt, arrogant, and incompetent. Good thing they have apologists like yourself . . .

You could ask the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, when he said the following:

In due course, the perpetrators were captured, and, just as had been suspected, the crime was one of revenge among Chinese criminals. There is fear–and not without cause–that it will not be long before the entire nature of Japanese society itself will be altered by the spread of this type of crime that is indicative of the ethnic DNA [of the Chinese].

And this guy has been re-elected twice.

A bar owner in Japan was ordered to pay royalties for playing the harmonica for his customers. As far as I know, the decision has stuck.

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2006/11/10/elderly-harmoni.html

"Hi Blaxthos, On slashdot: "Proper sourcing always depends on context; common sense and editorial judgment are an indispensable part of the process." In any case, there is plenty of material concerning IBM's dubious patents: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/06/ibm_paper_or_plastic_patent/ http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/03/30/ibm-applies-patent-offshoring-math http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/12/ibm_patents_sys.html;jsessionid=4BEPM0NZUXQDAQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/ibm-patent-policy-apparent.html http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2002/10/13/ibm-eliminates.html http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/03/ibm-makes-more-money-by-destorying-value.html I've assembled them all here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1227341&cid=27885503 But I don't think that a larger number of dubious patents is needed to make the case. I think one is enough. I am not biased against IBM, but I am biased against claims to have record number of patents and no wishes to see the highly dubious exposed in a NPOV. (My opinion: Society is not being improved by these patents, neither IBM.)"

In my little david vs goliath here, that's what I'm getting, and the page keeps being reverted. And here I'm thinking CowboyNeal is a reliable source...

In any case, if I lose, there are reliable sources for the "paper or plastic" patent, the "but I only had soup" patent, the offshoring patent, the "who is going to poo next" patent, the "terry is a boy, jeena is a girl" patent, etc. And here's a comment on IBM's patent schizophrenia. And here's another comment on how IBM makes money by destroying value.

I have nothing against IBM or other patent trolls, I just want them to look in the wikipedia mirror to see if they are happy with who they are. This will only stop with a big streisand.

[...] that sounds like something I would tell someone to get out of doing any actual work.

It's actually incredibly productive. As one pal of mine put it, "You get third-draft code in first-draft time." Pairing is really just a special case of "two heads are better than one."

Although I've done a lot of pair programming, right now I'm working solo, and I really miss having a pair. I know there are problems with my code right now, but I won't be able to spot them myself until I come back a month later with a fresh perspective. Having a pair also saves me a lot of time in avoiding ratholes and yak shaving. And a pair is great at finding things to test that I miss because I'm too close to the code I'm writing.

Maybe it's not for everybody, but I love it like candy.

Relative seriousness?

I dunno man...

How many billboards do you see discouraging youths from shooting each other?

And there have been plenty of laws in the US against having sex before marriage, after marriage with someone else, or involving organs other than the vagina. Many of those laws have only very recently been repealed. Oh yeah, and then just today I read this little tidbit, which covers having sex with *yourself*.

I swear, if it didn't mean the end of humanity, sex *would* be illegal in at least 23 states. Since basically all non-procreative sex has indeed been illegal in those states.

My brother built something like this LEGO panoramic camera mount using Mindstorms. His digital camera screw-mounts to it, and it turns a precise number of degrees and pushes the camera's shutter button, then turns again... A lot of other people have done similar things. I'm in the midst of building a LEGO-based robotic arm to grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder. LEGO is a great prototyping tool and with the addition of mindstorms you can build amazing things: the LEGO rubik's cube solver is pretty old, but the LEGO car assembly line is pretty spectacular. That's like $5000 of LEGO right there.

sms.ac did exactly the same thing; but didn't ask permission to email people. Whilst you'd think people would know better even Joi Ito got caught by this, what's worse is they spammed before the signup process was complete. Joi immediately quit using the service and blogged a public apology, referring to sms.ac as spammers. Next thing you know they sent him a cease and desist demanding Joi stopped calling them spammers.

sms.ac did exactly the same thing; but didn't ask permission to email people. Whilst you'd think people would know better even Joi Ito got caught by this, what's worse is they spammed before the signup process was complete. Joi immediately quit using the service and blogged a public apology, referring to sms.ac as spammers. Next thing you know they sent him a cease and desist demanding Joi stopped calling them spammers.

JASRAC has gone after bars and clubs where musicians perform cover tunes previously, so this is not an isolated incident.

Authors must also obtain a license from JASRAC in order to quote song lyrics in their publications. I've seen manga where the JASRAC license number appears in the footnotes next to the panel where the song lyrics are quoted.

Though in fairness, their ATMs have had just as many problems, but luckily ATMs dont completely undermine democracy. worm infections media player hack. Great idea to use windows XP (embedded) on an ATM...

It is kind of different in East Asia, though. There is more of an expectation that you will not seek attention to yourself.

The Japanese hostages in Iraq were treated much more harshly by public opinion than American or European hostages were in those countries. Keep in mind that they were aid workers who had gone to help the Iraqi people but the Japanese public were quite hostile to them after their rescue, and they had to apologise to the public for the trouble and embarrasment they'd caused the government. (News story here) (blog post here)

This despite the fact that the deployment to Iraq was itself unpopular, and most people opposed it. I think the hostages were seen as embarrasing the country with the attention they were getting, and seeking fame for themselves.

What you describe is just people leaping to judgement of who commited a murder, which happens in every society.

The TSA supervisor returned from her phone call and asked Harper why he didn't have identification and to where he was traveling. But she was satisfied enough with his answer -- that he had mailed his driver's license home to Washington D.C. -- that she allowed him to pass.

He is a myth. Again, look up the stats. Very few individuals have the money to first of all, hire a patent bureau to draft a patent application. Unfortunately, the USPTO accepts almost any crap applications these days so they won't be properly screened for prior art. Thus, what this inventor gets is not a patent but a time bomb. As soon as he tries to use his patent in any way, he will be slapped with so many infringing law suits his head will spin fast enough to create its own magnetic field, giving him cancer.

You eliminate any incentive for independent inventors to invest capital in their projects

Several large VCs claim to value patents very low compared to many other factors when deciding to invest in start-ups. Factors they value much higher include time-to-market and their ability to execute and ship product before the competition. Patents tend to slow that process down.

For companies who are working in a patent riddled space, I definitely do a mental calculation of the added risk of litigation and subtract that value from the valuation of the company or decide to not invest at all.
Joe Ito, VC

No, this is what PATENTS do, today. Since it's become impossible for lone inventors to create proper patent applications, they need the resources of very large patent bureaus to at least make the attempt to create non-infringing new patents. Again, this is a crap shoot, at best.

We have this really smart guy in Sweden named Håkan Lans. Maybe you heard of him? Look him up. He got a patent for a small invention that turned out to be really useful for color graphics. He got hold of a reputable patent bureau and started raking in the licensing fees until one day some large corps basically told him to fuck off and die. He tried to fight back, but the sneaky bastards bought off his patent lawyers so they made a rookie mistake in filing (yeah right), he lost on the technicality and he now owes the law firm somewhere around 10 million dollars (estimates vary upwards from that, I've seen speculation about a hundred mil). They say they'll back off if he gives them another one of his patents. He hasn't been able to work and invent since 1999 because he's been tied up in this crap that you claim would PROTECT him? Excuse me while I go out the back and laugh myself silly. The patent system is rigged against the small inventors. The big patent bureaus and corporations are selling pre-scratched lottery tickets through the USPTO. It's all a big myth.

Here's one where Henry Ford claims he did no such thing as invent the assembly line and the whole "lone inventor" notion is a myth:
Bridging Small Worlds to Accelerate Innovation (PDF)

Exactly. Speed is much more important than patents. We see that all the time in the telecom and software industries too. No one even has the time to seek patents on the good stuff anymore, because by the time the application goes through, there's something new on the market anyway. Then again, we have a functioning patent office that doesn't just rubberstamp anything that comes their way. Prior art searches take a while.

But, what if you infringe on someone else's patent? Since you're in such a hurry to patent everything, how can you take the time to do proper prior art searches? In fact, that's what we hear from VCs; they are wary to enter new fields exactly because they don't know the patent risks involved.

Steve Andriole, a venture capitalist who was most recently CTO of Safeguard Scientifics, offered the perspective of a VC investing in software and information technology. "In a way, intellectual property and patents are in the eye of the beholder," he said, noting that while entrepreneurs looking to raise capital often ascribe great value to their patents and patents pending, venture capitalists are not that impressed. "In the thousands of pitches I experienced personally, patents were considered one of the least important factors. Entrepreneurs would talk about the need to seize the marketplace within six months, but they didn't realize that this makes the patent process pretty much irrelevant," said Andriole, referring to the fact that patents take years to receive.
Why High-Tech Firms Can't Afford to Ignore Patents

Has BSOD been upgraded to RSOD in all the versions or only in specific ones?

They aren't dogmatic about it and there are many more languages in heavy use at Google. Orkut is written in C#. Google also uses Javascript/Ajax extensively for many of their client-side sites. If you want a good illustration of how ridiculous it would be to insist on single language such as Java everywhere, imagine if all their sites (e.g. maps.google.com) had to be provided using Java applets.

grave of the fireflies did come to my mind. Perhaps anecdotes are unbalanced but then again perhaps not. It's suppose to be a personal account, not a reasoned story. I think any account from people who survived the war, not just the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki is worth reading simply because the generation who lived through that time won't be around for ever, so the more we hear of their personal accounts of what they lived through the better.
To emphasize the point I read a piece via boingboing about joi ito being asked to do a op-ed for the new york times for tomorrows edition. Ito said that at first the piece was hard to write as:
"I was supposed to write about impressions from my generation and from a Japanese perspective. I first went on IM and interviewed a bunch of my Japanese friends to confirm my suspicion. No one was really thinking about the bombing of Hiroshima and didn't really have much of an impression."
it's something we are forgetting and that's a terrible shame.

... but I hope they didnt forgot the most important screenshot (the red screen of death)... too much eye candy always must be seen with a grain of salt.

This is just a recommendation. I have full faith that Joi Ito and the rest of the board will make the best decision when the time comes.

• Weblogging Software Leader Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal
• Six Apart bought LiveJournal!
• LiveJournal and Six Aart

LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He started Wikipedia.com, a Web site functioning as both a free encyclopedia and a wiki community, which allows users to add information to posted articles. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five.

Fiorella Terenzi released music based on telescope readings as far back as 1991.

And she's "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna"!!

Hecklebot

See MeatBall:ElectronicDemocracy for relevant links.

I particularly draw your attention to NetConference Plus, and to Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy wiki section.

Also, there is a wiki effort to become a virtual nation state, called AnewGo, although it's quiescent right now.

Finally, I've just begun work on a software inference engine, Parliament, that would assist in the application of parlimentary procedure to an online legislative body. The core engine could also be used as an assistant to humans during a live meeting (which is in fact the way that I'm developing it first).

Remember, every time you hear that default Nokia ring tone, that's the sound of market share. ;-)

20 Hydrogen Myths paper covers a lot of the issues wrt. hydrogen pipelines.

There are upsides, and there are downsides.

There's also an interesting blog entry about the relationship between information and energy by Joi Ito. Puts the whole thing in a certain kind of perspective.

You need to be able to handle pretty heavy multi-tasking / parallel thinking though.

Heckle Bot is an IRC bot that transmits feedback to the speaker of a conference for example. Heckling the person that is speaking. This can sometimes backfire and work in both ways.

David Beckemeyer built a LCD output display called UcHeckle (easy to read while speaking) for the heckle bot, that retransmits the comments of the audience.

You need to be able to handle pretty heavy multi-tasking / parallel thinking though.

Heckle Bot is an IRC bot that transmits feedback to the speaker of a conference for example. Heckling the person that is speaking. This can sometimes backfire and work in both ways.

David Beckemeyer built a LCD output display called UcHeckle (easy to read while speaking) for the heckle bot, that retransmits the comments of the audience.

You need to be able to handle pretty heavy multi-tasking / parallel thinking though.

Heckle Bot is an IRC bot that transmits feedback to the speaker of a conference for example. Heckling the person that is speaking. This can sometimes backfire and work in both ways.

David Beckemeyer built a LCD output display called UcHeckle (easy to read while speaking) for the heckle bot, that retransmits the comments of the audience.

Dav, I agree. Can you post the link to your friend's blog? The technology was available to do this for awhile, but I found that my new P504iS with the 144kbps link and 2 cameras on it is fast enough and high resolution enough to make it much more fun than with the older camera/phones like the J-Phone. I find myself sending pictures all day long. ;-p

A friend of mine in Tokyo recently bought one of those cell phones that can take movies and snapshots and email them to someone (over the G2(?) 144kbps link). So I had the idea to set her up with a blog and use procmail and xmlrpc to autopost her cell phone media captures to her blog.

Next thing I know, this concept is a big deal and I find similar systems popping up all over the place.

It seems to be an up and coming meme, and I imagine that this nascent meme combined with 3G speeds could really turn into something exciting.