At left: what the museum's proprieters promote as "Japan's only live horse sex show," which visitors soon discover is no more than a faux herd of weird livestock mannequins knocking bovine boot in front of some equally weird human mannequins. Photoblogger Juergen says, "This was Japan's first (or second, depends on how you count) Erotic Museum and is pretty much unchanged since 1971."

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Sharman Networks threw down the legal challenge Tuesday in Australia's Federal Court in Sydney. Sharman was raided by Music Industry Piracy Investigations, a private investigations unit established by the Australian Recording Industry Association to crack down on copyright infringement, including illegal Internet file sharing. MIPI successfully applied to the federal court for a number of private search warrants, known as Anton Piller orders, which were executed at 12 locations, including Sharman's offices in Sydney. The order allowed MIPI to seize data and documents from all 12 sites, including the private residence of Sharman chief executive Nikki Hemming. The raids are a prelude to a copyright infringement suit, which will argue that Sharman has the ability to block the transfer of copyrighted works through its software but refuses to do so. Sharman vehemently denies the claim.

1) Orkut claims irrevocable unlimited license rights to everything you post. Most people don't understand what that means. One example of this is that many of my friends have posted pictures that I've taken. This is probably not a problem, generally, but they've granted Orkut a license to use them without consulting me, and created a legal tangle should I have a problem with that, forcing me to have to perform a legal struggle with Orkut, because of their unwitting actions. I think this is rude behavior on the part of Orkut, but their prerogative to demand.
2) Orkut may share personal information with Google in an unrestricted way. Google is unwilling (so far) to discuss what use they may make of that information.
3) Google's privacy policy possibly has some holes in it with regards to data collected by way of means other than use of the google.com website.

I suspect that Orkut is a way for Google to gather personal information about their clientele for marketing purposes, and to try to form a more solid relationship beyond "I just use Google for search because it's convenient". This is not terribly nefarious, but the kind of data that could be collected to do so has wide potential for abuse, and people should be aware that that's what's going on. Some may not care, but many people I know are signing up without reading or understanding the implications of the above three points.

having seen a few of tim o'reilly's keynotes i get the feeling that he throws conferences to get thousands of people working on the technologies he really wants. if tim really wanted a jet car, he'd throw a conference, invite some jet car enthusiasts and talk about how great it would be to have a jet car and then sit back and wait for someone to build him a jet car. it's like the peter lynch investing philosophy in reverse: instead of investing in the things you use everyday, get other people to invest in the things you wish you had everyday.

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Econ is the study of choice under scarcity. The dismal science says, when essential stuff is scarce, you've got to trade something for something else.

MMORPGs sometimes try letting everyone have everyone for free are ghost towns. MMORPGs create artificial scarcity.

The surprise to econismists is that scarcity is fun -- people hunger for that which is dismal, scarce.

Because wealth accrues due to temporal investment, the rich and powerful in MMORPGs are people who can devote a lot of time to games, which means that they tend to be poor in real life.

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Flikr is a social image-sharing application: it's a mechanism for creating ad-hoc chats, using a drag-and-drop GUI interface that lives inside your browser, and share images from peer-to-peer and within conversational groups.

I've beta-tested this at various points and at each time I've been struck by Ludicorp's amazing combination of utilitarian, usable interface aesthetic and genuinely witty whimsy. As Ben Ceivgny, a developer on the project, said:

We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here's a mechanism for batching them into a locked-and-loaded tool for firing them into the world.

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Manifesto: Don't build applications. Build contexts for interactions.

The architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of immersion.

We try to design places for people to play, but play is about people, not places.

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Military logistics are unstructured. We're trying to build a neural-network like fluid resposne systems that is complex and adaptive to get stuff to the right place.

Everyone under 30 gets this, everyone else is too old.

We are moral, legal and unconstrained.

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A vulnerability has been reported to exist in the software that may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code ...

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Modern computers can handle large files, video, media, etc.

Want to provide experiences above the effective bitrate of our users, and bits are expensive to ship.

Example: Added a high-quality video clip to the front page of ESPN.com.

Came to think about the enclosure tag in RSS -- the idea of asynchronously d/ling content behind the scenes. You can download the experience prior to hitting the page.

Built a client-side technology -- espn.com, disney.com, etc -- an RSS aggregator that d/ls and pre-caches video on the machine, and communicates with the mothership to tell them who's got what in the cache.

We wanted 500k users in 1 year -- in three weeks we hit a million. Over 2 million now. Sustainign 2GB of bandwidth, TBs/day.

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A vulnerability has been reported in the software tha...

RIT is struggling with enrolment, but the enrolment is overwhelmingly male. Why not bring in more women? It's an untapped field and it makes men happier.

People say that women don't want want to be there, why are your forcing them to go? But this is what people said about math 30 years ago.

Today there's gender parity in math classes, but subtle pressures steered them away.

We design products for men -- women get killed by airbags. If you include women in the devleopment of product, you diversify the view. Women aren't the only viewpoint you need to include, but it's half the potential market.

Anil Dash: It's no coincidence that the two popular blogging packages (Blogger and MT) were co-developmed by women (Meg Hourihan and Mena Trott).

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Bad guys co-evolve with your defenses -- tax code, software and NBA rules all need to constantly evolve, as does Google

Evolutionary computation: represent individuals as genetic strings, i.e. 110100101

Test individuals for fitness -- how good they are at finding and exploiting loopholes

Mutate and crossover to get individuals who are better and better at solving your problem -- at finding loopholes.

In 2002, Sussex researchers tried to design an osscilator using evolutionary computation, but found it ended up weird because of unintentional RFI emission from a nearby PC

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SCI FI Channel has greenlit production on the Battlestar Galactica franchise as a new original weekly series. Based on the top-rated December miniseries event of the same name, the one-hour drama is slated to begin production on 13 episodes in Vancouver next month. All principal cast from the mini will reprise their roles for the series, including Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), and Tricia Helfer (Number Six), among others. Ronald D. Moore (Carnivale, Mission Impossible 2) returns as executive producer as well as writer. The project will be produced exclusively forSCI FI, in association with Sky One. The series will be distributed by USACE, where David Eick, an executive producer of the miniseries, serves as Executive Vice President.

What's on the radar now?

* Amazon Hacks, Google Hacks, eBay Hacks, Spidering Hacks, etc

* You might think you're not a Linux user, but if you use Google, you use Linux. What you use isn't (just) what's on your desk

* The Internet is the platform

* Killer apps are built on OSS, but aren't themselves OSS -- like Google and Amazon

* User contributions are critical to market dominance: Listmania in AMZN search-results (BN.com doesn't have this -- and it shows, and they have 1/10 the market of AMZN)

* MSN maps are really cool and useful, but there's no collab element, just blinking banners that appear to be saying "Go away user, go away"

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In real life, though, at least 10 of the photo's buildings are abandoned hulks. Some are burned-out, roofless and scarred with soot.

Artists touched up the photo by splashing light onto darkened windows and streets and adding roofs where there were none.

The final product made Detroit's lonely blocks look as Super Bowl-worthy as busy Houston.

"We want to do the same thing, put our best foot forward and turn on all the lights we can," said Michelle Fusco, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau, which helped staff the Detroit booth.

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(Thanks, tracymilburn!)

Frames that are smaller than the minimum frame ...

Here are scanned instructions for every Transformer ever made.

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(Thanks, Josh!)

Dream FTP Server has been reported to be prone to a remote format stri...

Not one but two online stores specializing in pirate-themed bathroom accoutrements.

Link One, Link Two

(via Making Light)

In this era of renewed interest in social networks, finally comes the results of perhaps the biggest social network connection study. Snip: "We report on a global social-search experiment in which more than 60,000 e-mail users attempted to reach one of 18 target persons in 13 countries by forwarding messages to acquaintances. We find that successful social search is conducted primarily through intermediate to weak strength ties, does not require highly connected 'hubs' to succeed, and, in contrast to unsuccessful social search, disproportionately relies on professional relationships."

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Derek "Fray" Powazek just posted some lovely snaps from Saturday's Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco. Link

Running on HBO from the summer of 1997 through early 2003, Oz is everyone’s favorite don't-drop-the-soap opera. Reflecting on the same years in my web design career, I see considerable parallels. Many of the lessons I learned watching Oz and designing websites are too similar to be coincidental.

BoingBoing reader Heidi says,

"Rob Walker writes about the North Claiborne area of New Orleans, where a community still uses an area as public space -- even though it's now under a freeway. Some of the highway support columns are painted with murals, but the most interesting column is plastered with newspaper obituaries of neighborhood residents. Photos are included in the essay."

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