BoingBoing FTW

[jrtom]

Odd corners of IP law, or how magicians deal with those who steal their tricks:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/12/magicians-innovate-w.html

Ice cream dispenser sizes portions according to how sad you sound:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/11/voicestress-icecream.html

"Geostationary Banana over Texas"
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/11/artist-will-send-300.html
and, just because, http://www.geostationarybananaovertexas.com/ (how can one resist a URL like that?)

Madeleine L'Engle tribute involving tesseracts:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/11/a-fourdimensional-tr.html
(and for bonus points: http://www.tomorrowland.org/photos/uncategorized/hypercube.gif, which is one of the cooler hypercube animations I've seen)

Comments

News

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

Odd corners of IP law, or how magicians deal with those who steal their tricks:

Or, (to mangle an already mangled quote: "good men do not need laws to govern their behavior, and bad men break the laws anyway."

Who'd have thought? Personal accountability and public shame work better than incredibly dense legal-speak. Everyone except the lawyers wins.

Ice cream dispenser sizes portions according to how sad you sound:

Oh man ... I *so* do not want a machine that trains kids to sound whiny.

Re: News

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Personal accountability and public shame work better than incredibly dense legal-speak.

It's been suggested (in the comments on that page) that the reason why this works for magicians may be because their community is relatively small and tightly-knit. Public shame works less well for larger communities, I think.
(And bad men break the laws, sure, but the laws give us a framework in which to deal with this, which I think is useful. Granted, the existing legal landscape is incredibly tangled and dense, but I have a sense that we'd not be better off for chucking it entirely.)

Nevertheless, it's an interesting exploration.

I *so* do not want a machine that trains kids to sound whiny

Point. An amusing notion: swap polarity so that you _won't_ get ice cream unless you're _not_ whining. :)

Re: News

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

Point. An amusing notion: swap polarity so that you _won't_ get ice cream unless you're _not_ whining. :)

Ex-ACT-ly.

If we want to train kids to be annoying, we've got all those kids television shows already.