The end game is now in sight. The Digital Economy Bill is now expected to become law within the next 6 weeks. It introduces orphan works usage rights, which - unless amended, which HMG says it will not - will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

UK Gov nationalises orphans and bans non-consensual photography in public | Copyright Action

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain - life - 29 June 2009 - New Scientist

The good news is, we can now control a pinball machine's flippers with our brains, as this demo at Germany's ceBIT Technology Fair proves. The bad news is, it's not going to make aspiring pinball hustlers look cool in bars.nullnull

Looks like fun.

Is There Some Way To Be A Telekinetic Pinball Wizard Without Looking Demented? - Brain-computer interfaces - io9

Researcher Matthias L. Jugel with Thinkberg sent us these pictures of the "next gen" helmet, which he says was sitting right next to the pinball machine we featured yesterday. It doesn't need electrodes going to the brain, because it uses "capacitative measuring" instead. Researchers at the the University of Braunschweig are working on the project along with the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface research consortium.nullnull

The Next Generation Of Brainwave-Control Helmets Looks Much Cooler - Brains - io9

Alain de Botton:

Being good has come to feel dishonest. The nun, the parish priest, the self-sacrificing politician; we have been trained to sense fouler impulses behind their gentle deeds.

An exchange:

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Alain de Botton:

In flight from dogmatism, we stand transfixed by the dangers of moral convictions. In the political arena, there is no faster way to insult opponents than to accuse them of trying to undertake the impossible task of improving the ethical basis of society.

One wonders whether the idea of freedom still always deserves the deference we are prepared to grant it; whether the word might not in truth be a historical anomaly which we should learn to nuance and adapt to our own circumstances. We might ask whether for developed societies, a lack of freedom remains the principal problem of communal life. In the chaos of the liberal free-market, we tend to lack not so much freedom, as the chance to use it well.

Freedom worthy of its illustrious associations should not mean being left alone to destroy ourselves. It should be compatible with being admonished, guided and even on rare occasions restricted -- and so helped to become who we hope to be.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

The Limits of Freedom

Louis Menand:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.

As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good.

Gary Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it's all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains -- that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.

Slim Charles:

It's what war is, you know? Once you in it ... you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight!

Menand:

The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.

Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?

Ian Malcolm:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Menand:

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things.

People like to be able to say, I'm just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the "I" that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

Menand:

Do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn't short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don't want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies?

Drew Gilpin Faust:

In the 21st century, we shy away from death, and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one. Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

Head Case

This article claims that a lawsuit was filed over a Philly high school allegedly activating student's webcams to spy on students at home. Scary.

School Issued Laptops Used to Spy on Students at Home

The Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Feds push for tracking cell phones | Politics and Law - CNET News

Words fail me every day because a picture is so much more telling.
I’m afraid that I can’t see beauty anymore.
I paint the world black.
No word will I take back.
It belongs in the trash;
The picture just got smashed.
So show me something better;
Words that feast my eyes.
Closure softly erasing all the numb pain.
Hardly a pretty picture all the same.
I’ve thought of some words for you,
because of the thousands only several matter.
They constantly burn my mind.
In the quest to find letters to deliver
they but always escape into the dream
and wash into a picture,
Whenever I think of you.

As many of you know, about two months ago TI sent me an email referencing the DMCA and demanding that I take down one of my blog posts. I complied at the time, but I also sent TI a response, requesting that they reconsider their position. They did not respond.

Two weeks ago Jennifer Granick at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent TI an email on behalf of myself, and several other bloggers who received similar notices from TI. In that email Jennifer told TI that we would repost our censored blog posts today if TI did not respond and clarify their position. TI has not responded.

Therefore, the original blog post has been restored, and if you didn't read it before, you can read it now. Its hardly the best post I've ever written. It was jotted down at 9:30 in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I tend to shoot first on this blog and ask questions later, and that certainly leads to posts which are poorly articulated and easily misinterpreted. In a later post I did a much better job explaining the technical concept which drew my interest to this calculator key cracking effort in the first place.

I'd like to thank the EFF and particularly Jennifer Granick for working with me as well as the other bloggers in this case. My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong. Its important that people stand up for that right, and we're fortunate that there are people out there who are willing to do it. Thank you EFF.

The post TI censored has been reposted.