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Mainstream press throws Wikileaks under a bus in journalist shield debate
A new proposed federal journalist shield law is under debate in the USA, which sounds like a great idea, except that the traditional press have agreed to amendments that would exempt Wikileaks from any protection for its confidential sources, on the grounds that Wikileaks isn’t journalism… ORLY?
More generally, Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee, criticized WikiLeaks as “not journalism.”"It’s data dissemination, and that worries me,” she told Time magazine. “Journalists will go through a period of consultation before publishing sensitive material. WikiLeaks says it does the same thing. But traditional publishers can be held accountable. Aside from Julian Assange, no one knows who these people are.”
Wait, what? You don’t want to give confidential source protection to Wikileaks because Wikileaks has confidential sources?
Tombstone stuffed with marijuana
This tombstone was shipped from Jamaica to Cincinnati, where US Customs and Border Protection at the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport discovered it was filled with 50 pounds of marijuana.
Officers questioned last week why someone would ship a tombstone from Kingston, Jamaica, to London.
An X-ray machine revealed packages of the drug in a metal box, wrapped in metal mesh and hidden inside the hollowed-out concrete marker.
The stone bears the name of 35-year-old Delroy Senior. Part of its inscription reads, “your place no one can fill.”
Authorities estimate the marijuana’s street value at about £34,000. They have no suspects.
Brian McCarty’s book of art toy photos
We’ve featured Brian McCarty’s terrific toy photography many times here. He’s a master at setting a perfect scene and using just the right perspective to trick me into thinking that the strange vinyl characters on my shelf come alive when I’m not looking. Brian’s photos are now collected in a wonderful hardcover book appropriately titled Art-Toys.
The book includes more than 100 photos, each on its own page, featuring toys designed by Mark Ryden, Gama-Go, Frank Kozik, FriendsWithYou, Tim Biskup, Amanda Visell, Attaboy, and dozens of other artists. Our pal Douglas Rushkoff wrote the intro. I really dig the back-of-the-book “behind-the-scenes” snapshots that reveal the time, detail, and love that goes into every one of Brian’s photos.
Gunman at Discovery Channel headquarters
A gunman has taken at least one hostage at Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
There’s no official police statements about who the gunman is or what he wants, but there’s a list of demands circulating on Twitter… said to be the gunman’s manifesto. I’m not sure what the original source of this list is, yet, but I’ll let you know if/when I find out. The demands are centered around a proposed new programming lineup for The Discovery Channel, pushing Malthusian ideas on population and Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212. Seriously. This would be almost funny if it weren’t for the whole hostage thing.
The Discovery Communications building is being evacuated. Here’s hoping everybody makes it out safely.
How A Good Samaritan Was Arrested For Driving Drunks Home
Some guy’s friend gets killed by a drunk driver and he decides to do something about it. He starts a service to keep drunks off the road by offering free rides home. 
It turns out that Quincy, Illinois, is well stocked with semi-responsible drunks, so “business” booms. He adds another car to the service, and eventually a bus. Local taxi companies are not amused.
The cab company complained loud enough that the Quincy City Council changed its taxi and limousine ordinance to remove the words “for hire” from its definitions and thus eliminate the loophole Schoenakase was operating under. Following the change, Jonathan applied for a license and the Chief of Police was supposedly about to approve it, but withdrew and said Schoenakase needed to clear up some legal issues.
StarChild’s DNA results show that it is definitely not human
Preliminary new DNA results from the 900 year old Starchild Skull, providing information that a percentage of the DNA in the bone may not be from Earth.
HOWTO: Add Facebook “Like” Buttons to Your Website
I want to offer a quick look inside the technology behind Facebook’s Open Graph initiative to show how easy it is to mark up your site and let Facebook users interact with it.
This is only a part of the broad Open Graph strategy the company announced at its 2010 F8 developer conference.
Basically, Facebook is offering up a set of widgets (they call them Social Plug-ins) that you can drop into any web page to make that page more “Facebooky.” There’s a Like button, a Recommendations widget that shows what other pages people’s friends are reading, an Activity Stream widget that shows a simplified version of the visitor’s personal Facebook news feed, and a Facebook Bar, a toolbar site owners can float at the bottom of the screen that serves all of these things at once.
Gmail launches “Priority Inbox”
Ugh, Google, it’s so hard to hate you when you’re being all… cute… and stuff.
AMD discontinues ATI brand
If you have any kind of sentimental attachment to the familiar, red-bordered ATI brand with its friendly curvy letters, then dig out your mourning gear. Yep, it turns out that all the rumors were 100% true. AMD is axing the ATI brand for good, and it’s now official.
AMD says the decision to drop the 25-year-old brand was made after polling a large collection of “graphics-processor-aware consumers” in seven different countries, to ensure it had “permission” to dismiss it.
“We asked them straightforward awareness preference questions,” AMD’s vice president of global corporate marketing, John Volkmann, explained to THINQ. “It’s literally the standard battery of questions: Are you aware of this brand? Would you consider it? And then we ask a very specific form of a preference question.”
Lynd Ward’s wordless, Depression-era woodcut novels
Library of America has announced a slipcased two-volume set collecting Lynd Ward’s gorgeous, Depression-era woodcut “novels” – wordless, book-length stories told in stark imagery. The set is edited by Art Spiegelman, and LoA has a short interview (.PDF) with Spiegelman on Ward’s work.
Smith & Wesson Tactical pens
I spotted the Embassy Pen (top image) over at Uncrate and really dig the minimalist Maglite-esque look of it. It’s $38.50 from County Comm. I showed it to Rob and he hipped me to the bad-assness of the Smith & Wesson Military and Police Tactical Pen that’s just $26 from Amazon. Now if only I could manage to hang on to a pen for more than two days.
Watching is a crime?
The resisting-arrest conviction last week of Felicia Gibson has left a lot of people wondering. Can a person be charged with resisting arrest while observing a traffic stop from his or her own front porch?
Salisbury Police Officer Mark Hunter thought so, and last week District Court Judge Beth Dixon agreed. Because Gibson did not at first comply when the officer told her and others to go inside, the judge found Gibson guilty of resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer.
Gibson was not the only bystander watching the action on the street. She was the only one holding up a cell-phone video camera. But court testimony never indicated that Hunter told her to stop the camera; he just told her to go inside.
Facebook to kill IE6 support for Chat on IE9 beta day
I am torn between my hate of IE6 as a web developer and my hate for Facebook as a human.
Facebook has announced that it will soon end Internet Explorer 6 support for Facebook Chat. The kill date is September 15—the same day Microsoft plans to release the first IE9 beta. Today’s announcement comes just a week after Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows Live Messenger that integrates with Facebook Chat.
Facebook explains its decision by saying that many users have complained about unstable chat sessions, or ones that stop completely. In order to improve the way connections are established and messages are sent, however, the social networking giant must make changes that aren’t supported by older browsers.
Microsoft plans to support IE6 along with Windows XP until April 2014; the software giant insists that “dropping support for IE6 is not an option.” Instead, the company has resorted to marketing and promoting IE8 while criticizing IE6.
Clever girl
Downloading a pirated anti-malware program is just like wearing a stabvest made of daggers.
Even if you can’t be stabbed, you’re gonna get blood all over your chest.
The Government can now put GPS on your car without warrant
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.
So do we have the judge’s address and home phone number? Ohh wait, he has a fence/gate around his house, so he can expect reasonable privacy.
Tonoharu: Excellent graphic novel about an English teacher in Japan
It took me a long time to get around to reading Tonoharu: Part One, Lars Martinson’s graphic novel about a young American who gets a job as an English teaching assistant in a small Japanese town. I’m so glad I did, though, because its incredibly good. It reads like an autobiography. Martinson actually did work in Japan as an English teacher, so I’m sure parts of the story are based on his experiences.
Published in 2008, and a winner of the prestigious Xeric Award, Tonoharu is a story of isolation, frustration, and mystery, with just the right amount of black humor to keep it from being depressing. Dan Wells, the main character, is a recent college graduate who gets a job at a junior high school in the town of Tonoharu. The teachers and staff at the school are mostly standoffish, and because his contract requires him to stay on campus all day even when he has nothing to do, the resulting boredom combined with the language and cultural barrier are at times almost unbearable. The few foreigners that Dan gets to know are too weird to connect with in a meaningful way. And an American girl he meets and becomes smitten with seems to want to have as little to do with him as possible.
Blockbuster Plans Bankruptcy Filing Next Month
Blockbuster, the movie rental chain, is said to be readying a bankruptcy filing for mid-September, The Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter.
Blockbuster’s bottom line has suffered over the last several years as the rental movie marketplace has seen the rise of such competitors as Netflix and Redbox.
The firm’s C.E.O., Jim Keyes, and the company’s senior debt holders and a restructuring team reportedly informed executives at the major film studios in Hollywood last week of Blockbuster’s intention to enter a pre-planned bankruptcy near the middle of next month.
TomTom XXL 540S 5-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator for $90 shipped
Amazon.com is selling TomTom XXL 540S 5-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator for $89.95 (normally $199) + free shipping as part of their Gold Box deal which is good for another 5hrs!
Next lowest on Google Products is $140.
Amazing deal on a GPS unit!
Zombies victorious over City of Minneapolis
It’s a good week to be a zombie.
Back in 2006, a horde (What’s the word for a group of zombies?) of seven Minneapolitans were arrested when they donned not-particularly-convincing zombie garb (I mean, look at those photos.) and staged a protest of brainless consumerism at an outdoor mall in downtown Minneapolis. Given that the protest took place during Aquatennial—an annual celebration of the fact that Minnesotans are rather fond of their various bodies of water—I can almost guarantee that they were not the most ridiculous-looking people hanging around downtown.
Nevertheless, somebody called 911, and the zombies ended up spending two days in jail, told they were being held for carrying equipment (an iPod hooked up to portable speakers) that resembled “weapons of mass destruction”. They were eventually released without charge. Then came the lawsuit, a loss in District Court and a resurrection in a Court of Appeals.
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