hard deadlines

Bicycle thieves have stumbled today into the top headlines in Britain.

Crowd estimates for big events on Central Park's Great Lawn have long been subject to error, and the recent rock concert was no exception.

A judge ruled for Max Mosley, the overseer of grand prix motor racing, in his privacy suit over a British tabloid’s story about a sadomasochistic “orgy” with a Nazi theme.

Barence writes "Britain's six leading internet providers have signed a Government-led agreement to stamp out illegal music file sharing. The six providers — BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse — will implement a series of measures against those found to be file sharing. Offenders may find their internet connection is throttled, or may even have their traffic "filtered" to prevent media files from being downloaded. The ISPs are reportedly reluctant to impose the BPI's preferred "three strikes and you're out" approach of cutting off users' broadband connections."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Democratic candidate enters the European leg of his overseas trip.

Credit Suisse posted a smaller-than-expected fall in second-quarter earnings on Thursday, sending its shares sharply higher in Zurich and giving some investors new hope that the turmoil in the financial sector was showing signs of easing. The Swiss bank’s earnings easily beat analysts’ forecasts, despite falling 62 percent to 1.2 billion Swiss francs ($1.16 billion), because [...].

Anonymous writes "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy. The study, 'Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,' examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The automaker, stunned by abysmal sales of its most profitable vehicles and a sudden shift in consumers’ tastes, suffered its worst quarter ever.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we found the best places to buy the worst gadgets, reviewed D-Link's DSM 330 Medialounge, and wondered how someone can retrospectively patent something and then shake down an entire industry.

Joel wants to know if miniature swamp coolers are any good; Brownlee spotted an Algebraic wall clock that implies its own answers; and Rob found a Tetris pain box.

There was an aluminum lego key chain; 365 free games; emo Qtips; a carbonite George Lucas; and a terrible, awe-inspiring no-console-required controller game knockoff of Guitar Hero..

There's the Ripple, a sort of poor man's Mac Mini; the ornithopter-cam; the spherical PC' and the bad battery life of handheld PCs.

Help Joel pick out a new gaming PC.

The motor racing boss Max Mosley won a landmark case when a judge ruled that The News of the World had violated his privacy with a story about his part in an orgy.

Pippin writes "Memphis Police Director, Larry Godwin, is suing AOL for the names of the authors of the Enforcer 2.0 blog. The blog is rumored to be authored by a Memphis police officer, and is critical of the department, Godwin, and some procedures. Godwin is actually using taxpayer dollars for this and is interestingly, the complaint is sealed".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Families in a village that produces some of Bordeaux’s finest wines have been set against one another by a court ruling challenging the way their wines were classified.

Continuing in the Blade Runner theme of our most recent Boing Boing tv episode, today BB Gadgets editor Joel Johnson speaks with artist and futurist Syd Mead about this rare treasure -- the only one in the world! -- spotted during a BBtv shoot in Mead's home and studio.

So what is that, Joel? A one-of-a-kind official LEGO version of Mead's "Spinner" flying car from Blade Runner, presented to Syd by LEGO when he attended a design summit in Billund. Syd let me pick it up and swoop it around my head like a child.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and how to subscribe to the BBtv video podcast.

LEGO and Blade Runner, two great tastes that taste great together. More iPhone snapshots from the shoot here.

If you like this BBtv episode, you might want to pick up:

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT [Amazon]

VISUAL FUTURIST: The Art & Life of Syd Mead DVD [sydmead.com]

And more Syd Mead books on Amazon.

Previous episodes in BBtv's Syd Mead series:

Syd Mead with Joel Johnson, part 3: BLADE RUNNER

Joel Johnson interviews Syd Mead: part 1.

Joel Johnson interviews Syd Mead: part 2.

(Footage from the movie Blade Runner courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment / Warner Home Video; Artwork courtesy of Syd Mead Inc.)

CNN reporter Drew Griffin reported on the TSA's 1,000,000+ name watchlist of "potential terrorists," and now his name seems to have been added to the list. The TSA denies it, but Griffin is held up every time he flies, and the airlines tell his that it's because he's on the list: "Coincidentally, this all began in May, shortly after I began a series of investigative reports critical of the TSA. Eleven flights now since May 19. On different airlines, my name pops up forcing me to go to the counter, show my identification, sometimes the agent has to make a call before I get my ticket," Griffin reported. "What does the TSA say? Nothing, at least nothing on camera. Over the phone a public affairs worker told me again I'm not on the watch list, and don't even think that someone in the TSA or anyone else is trying to get even."

The TSA, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, said Griffin's name wasn't even on the watch list, and the agency blamed the airlines for the delays the reporter experienced. The airlines, on the other hand, said they were simply following a list provided by TSA. Link

He followed the tradition of placing a prayer note at the site. Then, the Democratic candidate left for Germany.

Warren Ellis's fantastic net-perv novel Crooked Little Vein's just come out in paperback -- here's the review I posted of the hardcover last year: Warren Ellis's first novel, "Crooked Little Vein" is about what you'd expect from the Internet's most gonzo celebrant of the kinky, deviant, gross, hard-boiled and manic. Like Hunter S Thompson with an Internet connection, Ellis's hard-boiled detective story veers into hilarious gross-out turf from the first page, when a heroin-addicted presidential chief of staff charges the narrator of the book to retrieve a holy relic. The relic is a record of the "true" constitution of the United States, containing the mystical spell that Benjamin Franklin composed after killing an alien who had been sodomizing him in a hotel room in Paris. The book -- bound in the alien's skin -- has the power to restore America to colonial morality, banishing its Internet-era perversions. But first it must be retrieved from its current owner -- whomever has inherited title from the hooker to whom Nixon gifted it as a hush-up bribe.

This storyline - a hardboiled dick and his h4wt, tattooed, polyamorous sidekick -- is the perfect vehicle for a blazing, hilarious tour across America and its myriad daytime talk-show perversions (the narrator has his balls injected with saline in the first fifty pages). Ellis is a connoisseur of the weird and squicky, and he's saved his best material for us in this volume. This is a book that would make Goatse blush in places, and laugh in others, and do some discreet mail-order shopping in others.

But there's more to this book than just chuckles. Slyly hidden in this book's depths is an absolutely brilliant little message about the how and why of Internet perversity, the reason that America and the world have found themselves getting magnificently weirder in the last decade, and why that's a Good Thing. This is a celebration of following one's weird, one that is open-eyed to the pain and problems of that path, and one that embraces it anyway.

Ellis is a great storyteller, and this little sucker just rips along. I just finished it in 90 minutes on an airplane and it left me hungry for more. Go on and read this one, it's NSFW-ariffic.
Crooked Little Vein in paperback

Dan "We the Media" Gillmor has a fascinating editorial up today, "Helping the Almost-Journalists Do Journalism" about the "journalistic" work that organizations like the ACLU are doing in covering stories like the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and how they're filling a gap left by the traditional press, whose reportage has trailed ACLU's work. He proposes that these organizations can be turned into actual journalistic orgs with the addition of a little bit of journo practice. They’re falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they’ve been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides’ arguments, however weak. (That’s sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

Of course, transparency is essential in this process, and for the most part we get it from advocacy groups. The one we can’t trust are the ones who take positions that echo the views of financial patrons. The think-tank business is known for this kind of thing, and it’s an abysmal practice. Link

The Arctic may contain as much as a fifth of the world’s yet to-be-discovered oil and natural gas reserves, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey forecast.

Phillips has spun out a new company called Shapeways that does cheap remote 3D printing -- send them a design in 3D and they'll fabricate it out of a variety of materials and send it back to you. It's still in beta, but they've sent me 500 free signups for BB readers -- first come, first serve: Beta users can sign up via http://www.shapeways.com/beta
BetaCode: BoingBoing
Link