CopyFraud

Barbie is big business

Link: Playing Around with Barbie.

Barbie is a $ 1.2-billion-per-yearbusiness.  Every second, somewhere in the world, twoBarbies are sold."(67)  Inthe United States, girls from 3 to 11 years old own an average of10 Barbie dolls, compared to seven in Italy and five in Franceand Germany.

I foud an excellent article by Aluson lewis about use of copyright and trademarks to control the expression aroung everyday cultural icons like Barbie.

Homeless Rather Get Handouts Than Work

Homeless people are a big problem in US. They are everywhere, begging for money. In Berkeley the main street Telegraph avenue is full of street people. Drug addicts, hippies, skateboarders and winos. My local friend told that most of the people who pose as homeless and hang out at telegraph are from rich families. These kids are rebelling against their parents. Street life is considered cool with high schoolers. I have never given any money to homeless. US has chose to support a global army and not social wellfare. Why should I support american hobos?  This story only confirms my oppinnion. Link: Homeless Rather Get Handouts Than Work.

A Phoenix news crew with hidden cameras went around the city to see if the homeless people would actually accept work as their cardboard signs claimed. They offered $20 to each homeless person in exchange for one hour of landscaping work.

Only one guy accepted the work. Other homeless made all sort of excuses.

Axe + Saw combo

One of the first things I bought when I moved to Berkeley was an Fiskars axe [hatchet]. Fiskars bought couple of years ago a knive company Gerber. Now Gerber has an Gerber Gator Combo Axe II that has the Fiskars design handle and a bonus saw hidden inside of it. Sweet!

Interesing stuff stuff at Berkeley

Today Michael Eisen was at our open source class talking about the Public Library of Science. It was started when bunch of scientists noticed that it is really stupid that journals get the rights to their works when they are published. Most of the work is done by scientists and funded by public. The journals are charging silly amounts of money from the same people who produce and funds their content. Still it hard to convince scientists who want to publish in the most famous journals. The academic reviews that have limited time to review candidates favor papers that are published in known journals. The way to change that would be to create the same snobby on-line journals that signal quality.

Last Thursday at law schools IP strategy class we had two lawyers who have litigated for Qualcomm. Qualcomm is notorious of being a patent troll. They don't produce their own products and their main income comes from patent licensing. This is controversial in many sectors like in mobile phones where players usually have cross licensing contracts that reduce the need to pay huge royalties. Because Qualcomm doesn't play with the same rules it tend to get challenged in courts for its patents.

No wonder the patent litigation costs. These guys were artists. They knew a lot about psychology and how to deal with difficult technical subjects and how to explain them to judges. The beauty was that they shared most of their tricks. Keep it simple, use a lot of pictures, take care of court intelligence use technology for your advantage be a alpha lawyer in the room and don't lie!

Naked statue on Shop Window at Flickr

This is window shopping I dig! Don't ask how I found it : )
Link: Shop Window - Sablon Brussels on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

"I always believed in the real thing," sculptor John DeAndrea says of his ultra-life like work, "lf I could make it breathe I'd say. 'l've done a good days work now! " For more than twenty years, John DeAndrea's sculpture has extended realism, his inheritance from ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, to its extreme. His figures remain the last word in illusionism, enduring chilly gallery settings with serenity.

TILT: Illusion of pink spots

Disaperaing pink spots that might be green? This site has a x worth staring. Don't believe your eyes.Link: Damn cool illusion.

f your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink. If you stare at the black in the center, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating if you're lucky! It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.

Entrez PubMed has interesting articles

National Library of medicine has a article database of biomed journals. Now dont miss this one... Entrez PubMed.

Department of Surgery, Medway Maritime Hospital, Windmill Road, Gillingham, United Kingdom.

We describe a unique case of a patient presenting with rectal impaction following self-administration of a liquid used as masonry adhesive for anal sexual gratification. The solidified matter required laparotomy for its removal. Strategies for removing rectal foreign bodies are discussed as well as other consequences of inserting foreign material per rectum.

I dont know what laparotomy is but I sure would want lear it the hard way. "self-administration of a liquid used as masonry adhesive" oh come on...

Berkeley FD at our house

We were having a pleasent Sunday evening with my wife watching film when we heard some one weird noice like some one was shooting with automatic weapon.... Turned out there was some one at our land ladys door banging it. I opened window and ask if I could help him. He said that the roof is on fire! He had noticed smoke and saw an empty house with lights off and tried to knock on the door. Our landlady was not home and we were busy watching war movie in the dark and burning our 19th century fire place. When Joe didnt get any response he had  called fire department. If you read this Joe Thank you again. I didn't open a door for you because there are lots of crazy people out there.

Fire department came and checked out our fire place. My wife gave them some Korvapuusti-pastries she had made (they were still warm). That was some action for tonight. What did I lear? The reason why there was so much smoke coming from our chimney... because we had just thrown woods over coals that were barely burning -> so the woods didn't caught fire but rather emitted a lot of smoke.

Another thing I took out of this episode? The neigbourhood watch is working. I guess it is either because people care or because people care for their own property. About ten years ago there was a big fire in Oakland/Berkeley hills. Hundrets of houses were destroyed.

TILT3:Robotic-vacuum maker, BU team up on antisniper device

I have been following the technical development of sniper / anti sniper technology. Horus systems, laser protectection technoly and ghillie suits are part of everyday sniper technology. Now robotic vacuum maker (the same one that created Roomba) has created a small and very portable sniper radar system.

When REDOWL's microphones detect a gunshot, the device calculates the source of the sound, swivels the camera, illuminates the target with either visible or infrared light, and uses a laser to calculate the range.

Link: Robotic-vacuum maker, BU team up on antisniper device - The Boston Globe.

Dyer said that in tests, the REDOWL detected gunfire sources with 94 percent accuracy, and can distinguish between guns. ''It can tell the difference between a 9 millimeter pistol and an AK-47 or an M-16," he said.

The machine also works in urban settings, where snipers are hard to spot because gunshot sounds echo off buildings. Dyer said REDOWL's software can detect the original sound source and ignore the echoes

This doesn't sound too scary for a sniper. At least in urban settings a good sniper can hide inside a building and shift positions constantly. In addition the normal infantry usually doesn't have the range / skill to reach snipers positioins. I guess they could call for airstrike or mortar fire. Having a system that illuminates the target makes the system SOooo easy target for a sniper. Dragunov rifles have a scope that easily detects infrared light sources. Taking such target would be easy after the radar system activation.

TILT: Pharming

Pharming is a second post for my Thing I learned today category. From Wikipedia:

Pharming is the exploitation of a vulnerability in the DNS server software that allows a hacker to acquire the Domain Name for a site, and to redirect that website's traffic to another web site. DNS servers are the machines responsible for resolving internet names into their real addresses - the "signposts" of the internet.

The term pharming is derived from the term phishing.