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Google has won a long-running lawsuit over its Google Books program, as a federal judge today ruled that the project falls under fair use protections. The plaintiffs, led by the Authors Guild, alleged the program had infringed on the books copyright protections by scanning them and rendering the full text available for search. The court took as a given that Google had scanned copyright-protected books without permission. "The sole issue now before the Court is whether Google's use of the copyrighted works is 'fair use' under the copyright laws," the decision reads. "For the reasons set forth below, I conclude that it is."

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A special mini prequel to Doctor Who's 50th anniversary episode

The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is just a few days away now, and the BBC is of course pulling out all the stops (and turning several handles, bashing a bit of the console with a hammer and consulting a screen) to make sure we A) all know it and B) get excited. With special episode The Day Of The Doctor set to air on the anniversary itself, November 23, the now-standard mini-episode prequel is online and it’s a doozy. 

The Day Of The Doctor will see Matt Smith’s Eleventh incarnation meeting David Tennant’s popular Tenth and the mysterious version of our favourite Time Lord, played by John Hurt as was introduced in The Name Of The Doctor. We’ll finally get to explore what really happened with the Time War, the clash between Gallifrey’s people and the Daleks that caused the darkest period in the Doctor’s history, and one he’s not eager to revisit.

As for what happens in this short, The Night Of The Doctor? You’ll have to watch to find out - and then re-assess elements of the previous paragraph in that light. Meanwhile, you can watch one of the trailers for The Day Of The Doctor below and another right here. And don't forget there's a look at the drama about the creation of Doctor Who, An Adventure In Space And Time, in the latest Empire. Find it in shops and in digital versions now...

 

And the rain came tumbling up?

The first trailer for Darren Aronofsky's Noah is online, following yesterday's poster, and it looks like all those promises of a weird twist on the Biblical story will be kept. It also looks like the film will deliver on the promise of epic action, however, with Noah preparing to defend his escape ship against those who would steal it. Take a look.

Russell Crowe, of course, plays the ark builder who is inspired by a dream of the Almighty (it looks like) to build a mighty big boat. Jennifer Connelly is his apparently supportive wife, Douglas Booth and Logan Lerman his sons and Anthony Hopkins his grandfather Methuselah. Emma Watson crops up as a friend / love interest of Booth's Shem.

This trailer gives us our first look at Ray Winstone's barbaric opponent to Noah, as well as some idea of the scale of the movie. The water bursts up, out of the ground, in this version? We're not sure the strict constructivist Biblical scholars will approve.

In any case, Noah hits screens on March 28, 2014. Better lay in the sandbags fast.

UPDATE: The US version of the trailer, which has some different footage and dialogue, is available to watch over at Apple. 

The fuse will be lit on Christmas Day

Given today’s news, the most dangerous mission that Ethan Hunt and his team will have to accept in Mission: Impossible 5 won’t be facing down dangerous terrorists or clambering across high buildings: it will be surviving the crowded, box office-shredding environment that is the 2015 release schedule. The film, at least in the US, is now scheduled for December 25 of that busy year.

The implications are clear. Director Chris McQuarrie, star / producer Tom Cruise and writer Drew Pearce have a fight on their hands, particularly given that there’s a slightly anticipated sequel set to open just one week before. Yes, Hunt and his crew will be arriving shortly after Star Wars: Episode VII jumps from light speed into cinemas.

Much of what MI:5 will have to offer remains classified beyond knowing the core creative team. Given that McQuarrie has been scouting UK locations and Pearce is writing it, could we see some cheeky team-ups with British security services to make the title work on another level? There has been no indication as to whether Cruise’s colleagues from Ghost Protocol – Simon Pegg, Paula Patton and Jeremy Renner – will be back, or whether M:I veteran Luther Stickell (aka Ving Rhames) will show up again.

So far, aside from that teeny tiny bit of competition, the new Mission will open in the States opposite Ben Affleck’s next planned directorial effort Live By Night. Will someone blink? Will the new film act as a festive version of the M:I concept and see Cruise scaling a giant chimney to help Santa deliver toys? All these questions (well, probably not that last one) and more will be answered soon enough…

Mike sez, "In Mother Jones, Will Potter profiles Ryan Shapiro, a punk rocker-turned-PhD student who wanted to study how the FBI monitors animal-rights activists. Through trial and error, and a lot of digging, he devised a perfectly legal, highly effective strategy to unearth sensitive documents from the bureau's 'byzantine' filing system.

In short, he got too smart for the feds, so they've cut him off. Now Shapiro has sued the FBI to release some 350,000 documents he's requested under FOIA. If the court buys the FBI's argument here, open-government groups say it could make it harder for scholars and journalists to keep tabs on federal agencies. Potter explains:"

Evoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro's multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a "mosaic" of information whose release could "significantly and irreparably damage national security" and would have "significant deleterious effects" on the bureau's "ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism."

So-called mosaic theory has been used in the past to stop the release of specific documents, but it has never been applied so broadly. "It's designed to be retrospective," explains Kel McClanahan, a DC-based lawyer who specializes in national security and FOIAlaw. "You can't say, 'What information, if combined with future information, could paint a mosaic?' because that would include all information!"

Meet the Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File (Thanks, Mike!)

(Photo: Stephanie Crumley)

10 years and $900M later, the TSA's behavioral analysis program is a debacle. Here's the US General Accountability Office on the program: "Ten years after the development of the SPOT program, TSA cannot demonstrate the effectiveness of its behavior detection activities. Until TSA can provide scientifically validated evidence demonstrating that behavioral indicators can be used to identify passengers who may pose threat to aviation security, the agency risks funding activities [that] have not been determined to be effective."

Basically, the TSA has spent a decade and nearly a billion dollars reinventing phrenology. I feel safer already.

For the report, GAO auditors looked at the outside scientific literature, speaking to behavioral researchers and examining meta-analyses of 400 separate academic studies on unmasking liars. That literature suggests that "the ability of human observers to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral cues or indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance (54 percent)." That result holds whether or not the observer is a member of law enforcement.

It turns out that all of those signs you instinctively "know" to indicate deception usually don't. Lack of eye contact for instance simply does not correlate with deception when examined in empirical studies. Nor do increases in body movements such as tapping fingers or toes; the literature shows that people's movements actually decrease when lying. A 2008 study for the Department of Defense found that "no compelling evidence exists to support remote observation of physiological signals that may indicate fear or nervousness in an operational scenario by human observers."

TSA’s got 94 signs to ID terrorists, but they’re unproven by science [Nate Anderson/Ars Technica]

The UK Conservative Party's ten-year archive of campaign and policy speeches has been erased from the Internet. Sometime since October, they posted a robots.txt file to block the Internet Archive and other sites from caching copies of the deleted archives. Ironically, Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne ran on a platform of "open source politics." The Internet Archive has started to restore its archive of deleted Tory speeches. Conservative Party HQ won't comment on it, because the "website guy" is out of the office.

Meantime, we've lost such speeches as Cameron's 2006 talk at Google Zeitgeist where he lauded "democratising the world's information" and said the Internet gave us "the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power - whether it's government, big business, or the traditional media."

Transparency would make public officials accountable to the people, said Cameron then. He was riding at the front of the wave that would wash us into a new world, and a new age.

Likewise the chancellor, who on delivering his landmark "Open Source Politics" speech at the Royal Society of Arts on 8 March 2007, declared his ambition was "to recast the political settlement for the digital age".

"We need to harness the Internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible - and so bridge the gap between government and governed," said Osborne.

"The democratization of access to information... is eroding traditional power and informational imbalances.

"No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the state, or between the layperson and the expert," said the Chancellor when he was campaigning for election.

Conservatives erase Internet history [Mark Ballard/Computer Weekly]

(via /.)

If you're interested in learning a new language, there are plenty of great ways to do it, but Mango Premiere is a new method that teaches you through foriegn-language movies you'd love to watch anyway. Mango teaches you to understand both written text and speech with full subtitles in both languages as the movie plays.

Mango Premiere has two modes: "Movie Mode" and "Engage Mode." The video above describes the differences pretty well, but movie mode essentially plays the film with subtitles in your native language and the language you want to learn, so you can begin to match up the words you see and hear. It's just like watching a foriegn film, except in addition to reading your own subtitles, you see the language you're studying too. Engage mode actually takes you through the movie scene by scene, teaching and quizzing you along the way. If you pause the movie, you'll see more detail, and you can hover over words to see their phonetic spelling and hear audio. The tool also gives you cultural notes, so you can understand puns and in-jokes that may not be apparent to an outsider.

Mango Premiere is available now, starting with films in English, Spanish, Mnadarin, and Japanese. Here's the catch though: The tool is designed for groups, so it's not something you can just download. You'll have to get access to it through your local library. Mango has this useful ZIP-code lookup tool you can use to see if a library in your area has licensed Mango. If they have, you should be able to access it through your library's website. To read more about the program, hit the link below.

Mango Premiere

Venice was once described as “undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man,” and from these pictures it’s hard to disagree. You can now explore panoramic imagery of one of the most romantic spots in the world, captured with our Street View Trekker technology.

It was impossible for us to collect images of Venice with a Street View car or trike—blame the picturesque canals and narrow cobbled walkways—but our team of backpackers took to the streets to give Google Maps a truly Shakespearean backdrop. And not just the streets—we also loaded the Trekker onto a boat and floated by the famous gondolas to give you the best experience of Venice short of being there.

We covered a lot of ground—about 265 miles on foot and 114 miles by boat—capturing not only iconic landmarks but several hidden gems, such as the Synagogue of the first Jewish Ghetto, the Devil’s Bridge in Torcello island, a mask to scare the same Devil off the church of Santa Maria Formosa and the place where the typographer Manutius created the Italics font. Unfortunately, Street View can’t serve you a cicchetto (local appetizer) in a classic bacaro (a typical Venetian bar), though we can show you how to get there.

Once you’ve explored the city streets of today, you can immerse yourself in the beauty of Venice’s past by diving deep in to the artworks of the Museo Correr, which has joined the Google Cultural Institute along with Museo del Vetro and Ca’ Pesaro - International Gallery of Modern Art.

Finally, take a look behind the scenes showing how we captured our Street View imagery in Venice.

The Floating City is steeped in culture; it’s easy to see why it’s retained a unique fascination and romance for artists, filmmakers, musicians, playwrights and pilgrims through the centuries—and now, we hope, for Street View tourists too.

Posted by Daniele Rizzetto, Street View Operations Manager (and proud Venetian!)

In a year in which government surveillance has dominated the headlines, today we’re updating our Transparency Report for the eighth time. Since we began sharing these figures with you in 2010, requests from governments for user information have increased by more than 100 percent. This comes as usage of our services continues to grow, but also as more governments have made requests than ever before. And these numbers only include the requests we’re allowed to publish.
Over the past three years, we’ve continued to add more details to the report, and we’re doing so again today. We’re including additional information about legal process for U.S. criminal requests: breaking out emergency disclosures, wiretap orders, pen register orders and other court orders.

We want to go even further. We believe it’s your right to know what kinds of requests and how many each government is making of us and other companies. However, the U.S. Department of Justice contends that U.S. law does not allow us to share information about some national security requests that we might receive. Specifically, the U.S. government argues that we cannot share information about the requests we receive (if any) under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But you deserve to know.

Earlier this year, we brought a federal case to assert that we do indeed have the right to shine more light on the FISA process. In addition, we recently wrote a letter of support (PDF) for two pieces of legislation currently proposed in the U.S. Congress. And we’re asking governments around the world to uphold international legal agreements that respect the laws of different countries and guarantee standards for due process are met.

Our promise to you is to continue to make this report robust, to defend your information from overly broad government requests, and to push for greater transparency around the world.

Posted by Richard Salgado, Legal Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security

http://the-toast.net/2013/11/13/branagh-vs-whedon-much-ado-about-nothing/

The-Toast compares how differently Branagh and Whedon filmed Much Ado, looking at some of the major scenes as well as the overall approach.

There is good use of pictures from the films to illustrate the difference.

Use your own pictures or ones borrowed from the Internet as a fancy blurred background on your Android

Want a really cool effect for your home screen wallpaper, but aren't a PhotoShop guru? If so, you need to check out a new app called Blur in Google Play. Blur allows you to take any picture and apply an adjustable blur effect and set it full resolution as your home screen wallpaper.

It's really simple to do, and the whole routine involves only choosing a picture and adjusting a slider. The paid version (just 99-cents) also allows you a bit of control over the colors, while the free version will randomly do a bit of adjustment if you like by tapping on the image. the free version also has some ads in a banner at the top.

Blur registers as an Android intent, so you can share pictures into it right from the gallery, and the entire process is live and with a real-time view. I tend to keep things pretty simple when it comes to the home screen on my devices, but I'm digging this one, and gladly sprung for the paid version. Check out the short video of just how it works and the end result after the break.

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Pulse is now fully integrated with LinkedIn, providing a personalized newsfeed based on your LinkedIn network. It will replace LinkedIn Today on iOS, Android and LinkedIn.com as the company's social news experience.

With LinkedIn Pulse, the company begins its transition from a job-hunting platform to a technology-powered media company. 

The company updated the Pulse application, a news reader it acquired back in April, and now commenting and liking on the Pulse app are possible. Additionally, signing into Pulse with a LinkedIn account automatically syncs the channels, influencers and content you already follow on the social network, as well as customizes news recommendations based on your contacts. A "What's New" section in the app lets users find and follow breaking news, and with "My Lists," users can create their own lists around a variety of topics. 

Amazon wants to see apps, games, and entire desktops run out of the cloud, and it's launching two new Web Services products today to see that happen. One tool, called AppStream, will allow developers to completely run and render an application in Amazon's cloud, which can then be beamed down to users on a variety of different platforms. Someone running the app theoretically wouldn't know the difference between something running over AppStream or their local hardware, though that would depend on how quickly the hardware was able to receive the stream.

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Jessica Sadeq from the Smithsonian shares big news--the Institution has launched the Smithsonian X 3D Collection and 3-D explorer [Twitter]. They've gathered data on some of the most treasured items in the archives, and they're encouraging people who work with 3D printers to help them explore new ways of using the data.

Our team scanned 20 of our collection items (The Wright Flyer, a fossil whale and even an exploded star!) in 3D and have made the data available for download (and print for those with 3D printers). You can also take tours and explore the models through a custom built viewer that is embeddable and shareable. Take a look: http://3d.si.edu/.

The announcement kicks off the Smithsonian X 3D Conference, a two-day event focused on the current state of the Institution’s 3-D program and where 3D digitization of objects in its collection is headed. A webcast of the conference is available.

@smithsonian secretary getting 3d scanned at http://t.co/0uFX36icqf tech gallery! http://t.co/0uFX36icqf pic.twitter.com/qhkVVYZ49i

— Smithsonian 3D (@3D_Digi_SI) November 13, 2013

An opium poppy harvested in Afghanistan. Opium cultivation reached a record high in 2013, according to a new report from the UN. (United Nations / Flickr)

The US has spent billions of dollars trying to rein in Afghanistan's opium trade, seen as a central driver behind the Taliban insurgency, but a new report suggests that the drug is more pervasive than ever before. The UN's drug agency today announced that opium cultivation in Afghanistan reached a record high in 2013, raising concerns over the country's security and stability ahead of next year’s withdrawal of American troops.

According to the latest Afghanistan Opium Survey, released Wednesday by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 516,000 acres of Afghan land were used to...

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Google is launching its educational app store today and is encouraging developers to build new apps aimed at the K-12 audience. All apps that want to be featured in the Google Play for Education store will have to receive approval from a reviewer and educator, who will also judge the app's subject and grade level. The store will allow educators to easily purchase and install apps in bulk, making it easy to distribute them across an entire classroom or school's stock of tablets. Google says that the store will include videos and educational content aside from apps as well, though it'll all revolve around tablet use for now.

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Marissa Mayer's repainting of Yahoo's ‘front door' has expanded its international reach, with the “more modern” looking homepage now being rolled out to seven global markets, six of them in Europe. The new-look homepage debuted in the U.S., back in February.

The spruced up portal is now available in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and South Africa, Yahoo said today in a blog post.

That still leaves a large swathe of Yahoo's international markets sticking with the old look homepage, with only the recently redesigned Yahoo logo to hint at Mayer's ongoing internal makeover of the long-toothed Internet company.

Here's the current Yahoo India homepage, for instance:

And here's the new, cleaner-looking Yahoo Spain:

As with the U.S. overhaul, the new-look Yahoo homepage packs in more content than before but does so in a way that feels a bit less hectic - with a focus on keeping the overall look uncluttered, despite increasing the amount of data on tap.

The new homepage also includes a real-time news feed with a ‘save for later' function; a stack of new utilities; and spotlights that act as widget-sized windows onto other Yahoo services, such as Yahoo Weather, Finance and Flickr. The displayed widgets can be customized by individual users.

Despite this new lick of paint there's no disguising that Yahoo's homepage is still a portal - and web portals were cutting edge circa 15+ years ago. Making this ‘front door' to the Internet relevant now, in a digital environment dominated by mobile devices where users don't need so much hand-holding and simply cherry pick their favourite apps, is of course Mayer's big challenge. Or one of them. ‘Making Yahoo relevant again' sums up her chief challenge.

Although the new Yahoo homepage is designed to work across desktop and mobile devices, with smartphone and tablet optimised versions, getting users to actually visit it on their mobile devices is another matter.

Yahoo said today that it will be continuing to tweak its new international homepages “over the coming months” - to “make changes and improvements”, presumably as it seeks to find the stickiest combination of widgets.

Yahoo is also continuing to spruce up other portions of its existing estate, giving its finance service a new lick of paint last week, for instance, and overhauling Yahoo Mail in October.

Under Mayer, it's also been on a hiring spree - buying up a swathe of startups, including Summly and bread, and most recently signing up former New York Times technology journalist David Pogue to work on a forthcoming Yahoo consumer tech website.

It's still not entirely clear whether the Yahoo that emerges from all this updating will mostly just have a fresh lick of paint, or whether Mayer has more radical plans for reinventing the business that involve significant shifts of focus.

Almost 30 years after Bill Watterson introduced the world to Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most beloved daily comic strips is finally available as a collection of ebooks. It's not quite the full series, which is available as a giant multi-volume book, but the ebooks on offer cover a fairly large range of strips. There are three in total: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, each of which was previously released as a regular book.

Why the ebooks couldn't be released in numbered volumes is anyone's guess, but even with the obtuse naming, the trio still offer up a wider range of content than was previously available on mobile devices. Until now, the only way to...

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Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 with mobile data to receive update 'soon'

Nexus 7 (2012 and 2013 Wifi models) and Nexus 10 users may want to start checking for the big update right about now, as the OTA to KitKat has been released into the wild according to the official Android Google+ account. To accept the OTA as-is, you'll need to be running the latest stock build from Google, though an unlocked boot loader should pose no problem.

If you didn't go back to stock so you were ready, you've a couple options. The easiest, and recommended, is to sit tight and wait for someone to convert things into a zip file that can be flashed with any recovery, which will follow shortly after the OTA gets into plenty of hands. You could also quickly flash the last factory image, or you could just wait and see if Google releases a new 4.4 factory image.

Source: +Android; @Android

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App still needs to be paired with a Windows component to install firmware

In its push to make installing its custom firmware easier for the average user, CyanogenMod has just launched its installer app in the Play Store. You'll need more than just the app to get through the process, however. After installing and going through a few basic instructions related to turning on USB debugging and the like, you'll be pointed to its get.cm website to download the desktop software to initiate the install.

You'll still need a Windows PC (running Vista or later) and a good USB cable to get your phone flashed with CyanogenMod, which adds another wrinkle of complication to the process. The combination of apps on your phone and computer should make it pretty simple though, provided your phone is on the list of compatible devices.

Although the app doesn't do a whole lot on its own, you can grab it from the Play Store if you're willing to also download the software on your PC and move through the process to bring CM to your device.

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Birds provide a wonderful opportunity for photographers to practice their skills. So today we thought we’d put together a bit of an image collection that feature them in the hope of inspiring some of you to get out and photograph some of our feathered friends (if you do take some great bird photos please share them in comments below).

Looking for a little instruction in bird photography? Check out these tutorials in our archives:

• 8 Tips for Photographing Birds
• Backyard Bird Photography Tips
• An Introduction to Bird Photography
• How to Photograph Birds
• Bird Photography Near Feeders
• Introduction to Bird Photography

 

 

Inspired? Check out these tutorials on photographing birds:

• 8 Tips for Photographing Birds
• Backyard Bird Photography Tips
• An Introduction to Bird Photography
• How to Photograph Birds
• Bird Photography Near Feeders
• Introduction to Bird Photography

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

57 Fabulous Bird Images

The post 57 Fabulous Bird Images by Darren Rowse appeared first on Digital Photography School.

When Photobucket redesigned its site and user experience with better uploading and new social features last fall, it did so in the hope of reestablishing itself as the go-to site for photo sharing and storage after falling in popularity relative to its competitors.

The ten-year-old company, which filed $5.67 million in equity funding in May, is now launching a mobile app that extends the full capabilities of its service to smartphone users. Recognizing that photo taking and sharing is fractured between people's devices and services, Photobucket's plan is to create one cohesive ecosystem to incentivize users to convert (or reconvert) to the system.

“Photobucket has a history of being an open, highly scalable [platform], and we wanted to build on that. We looked at two real market problems: photos are everywhere on multiple devices and services and platforms, and people are losing photos because it's too hard to back them up,” said David Toner, Photobucket's head of marketing.

Photobucket relaunched its mobile web app last month. It now serves as an onramp to the native app, which allows users to back up, edit, organize, and share their photos. While the app can serve as a quick organizational tool, users are still going to want to do major organization on the website.

In a few weeks time, Photobucket will be rolling out the next phase of their development: use as a social hub for event-specific photo uploads, for which people may be using various services like Instagram, Facebook, and Google+. They remained fairly quiet about the specifics, but the aim is to allow people to discover each other's photos in a way that doesn't require people to change their uploading behavior.

Photobucket's U.S. monthly uniques stood at 20.85 million in October, up from 20.2 in September and 16.5 in April. But it still has a long way to go relative to other leading photo sites like Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Shutterfly. Of those sites, it showed the highest bounce rates during April through September of this year, according to numbers from SimilarWeb - likely the result of bad traffic from search.

It's also behind Shutterfly and Flickr in page views per visit (Instagram is too, probably because its scrolling feed doesn't require much clicking). On average time spent per visit Shutterfly and Instagram also came out on top of Photobucket.

[Image: Flickr / Pedro Ribeiro Simões]

Here's how you know the Steve Ballmer era is truly ending at Microsoft: The company has finally killed off stack ranking. ZDNet reports that Microsoft will no longer evaluate its employees' performances on a curve because it wants to foster more cooperation between different workers and departments within the company. Microsoft's stack ranking system, which has come under withering criticism from former employees, essentially mandated that all managers create tiers that ranked the best and worst workers within their departments. The top workers in each department were put on the fast track for advancement while the bottom performers saw their careers stumble into dead ends.

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In the midst of the Machine Age, Rube Goldberg poked fun at America's seeming obsession with "building a better mousetrap" through intricate diagrams of chain reactions employing gears, pulleys, shirt-eating moths, burning candles, canaries, and even opossums. A beautiful new hardcover collection of his strips, The Art of Rube Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon (C) Genius, hits shelves today. Along with a visual history of his career, the book also includes selections and commentary by Goldberg's granddaughter Jennifer George, an intro by Adam Gopinick, essays, rare photos and ephemera, and a paper-engineered cover:

But who was Goldberg?

Born in San Francisco in 1883, the art-obsessed Goldberg pursued engineering at UC Berkeley only at the insistence of his conservative parents. Ironically though, it was in a UC Berkeley School of Mining Engineering class that the artist found what would eventually be recognized as his biggest inspiration.

"In analytic mechanics you were introduced to the funniest-looking contrivances ever conceived by the human mind," Goldberg once said.

Case in point: Slate's Barodik, a surreal system of tubes and retorts in a basement laboratory designed to enable students to calculate the weight of the earth. Professor Slate, along with then-dean of the College of Mining, was also the inspiration for Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, one of Goldberg's most loved cartoon characters.

After a summer job digging mining tunnels and a post-graduation gig diagramming San Francisco sewers, Goldberg resolved to pursue his first love of cartooning. Successful sports cartoonist stints at the San Francisco Chronicle and the News-Call Bulletin led to a skyrocketing career with the New York Evening Mail, New York Journal and numerous popular magazines of the day. His comic commentary on the zeitgeist culminated in a 1948 Pulitzer Prize for his "Peace Today" editorial cartoon, seen here, that in a single panel summarized the nation's fear of the atom bomb. But the artist remains best known for his Inventions series, immortalized in 1995 on a US postage stamp twenty-five years after his death, celebrating the centennial of his Collier's newspaper comic. The stamp was based on this strip that appeared in Collier's on September 26, 1931:

Perhaps the legacy that would have most delighted Goldberg though are the multitude of high school and college courses and contests around the world bearing his name and his sense of engineering for the fun of it. The following selection of strips from the book give a taste of Rube Goldberg's happy mutant approach to engineering.

Original art for “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K.” from Collier’s (c. 1930–31).

From “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K.,” created exclusively for Collier’s from 1929 to 1931. The first strip in the series, January 26, 1929.

From “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K.,” created exclusively for Collier’s from 1929 to 1931. October 12, 1929.

All images above from The Art of Rube Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon (C) Genius, Selected and with commentary by Jennifer George; Introduction by Adam Gopnik, Published by Abrams ComicArts.

Ireland leads the EU in Freedom of Information fees, and they're the only EU nation that charges anything for an introductory query. Now they're raising those fees, potentially to infinity, through a law that charges you €15 per "unit" of government work necessary to answer your query. "Unit" isn't defined (government agencies get to make it up as they go along) and you have no way of predicting in advance how many units of work will go into your query.

This is actually a worsening of the already terrible FOI bill, which allowed Irish bureaucrats to determine reasonableness of queries based on how hard they'd be to answer if concerned records kept on paper -- even if those records were, actually, in a database that could be queried with a few keypresses.

Irish politicians have taken extraordinary measures to protect the state from the people finding out what it's up to. This is alarming on its face, and would be bad news even if Ireland was a paragon of good governance, and not a nation in economic meltdown that is subjecting its people to brutal austerity after being one of the centres of a corrupt investment bubble.

A new provision, an amendment to Section 12, is now proposed. If this amendment goes through, a single FOI request will cost you multiples of the outrageous current €15 fee. How many multiples will depend on how many administrative units, in a Department or office, are required to take action to answer your question. For every internal unit bestirring itself, you have to pay another €15.

As you can’t know in advance how many units any question will require to act in order to be answered, you can only guess how much any FOI request will cost. We can’t know the definition of “unit”, referred to as “different functional areas” [of the FOI body] each body will adopt.

Ireland is already the only European country that charges any fee at all for initial FOI inquiries. Before any changes, it is already the most expensive in the world.

Creating an arbitrary fee structure, limited only by a requirement that all costs charged be in multiples of €15 is, as Gavin Sheridan notes, a regression. It is a response contrary to an essential modern democratic right; to know what is done in the name of the public.

Freedom of Information: Fees to be multiplied in new amendment [Simon McGarr/McGarr Solicitors]

You're probably used to downloading email attachments, but each of those files takes time to download, eats up space on your device, and can get buried deep inside your "Downloads" folder. With today's update to Gmail, you can skip that whole process. Instead, you can view attachments and save files directly to Google Drive without ever leaving Gmail, making it easy to access them later from whatever device you’re on—computer, phone or tablet.

The next time you open an email with attachments, you’ll see new previews of the files at the bottom of the email, from photos and videos to spreadsheets and PDFs.
When you click on one of those previews, a full-screen view of the image or document will appear. You can read, search for a particular phrase, and even browse through multiple attachments right in Gmail.
You can now also save your attachments directly to Drive simply by clicking the Drive button that appears when you hover over the preview. Of course, if you prefer to download the attachment to your computer, you can—just click the arrow button.
This new attachment experience is available on desktop and will be rolling out over the next week. If you’re one of the more than 120 million active Drive users, you know that saving your files to Drive lets you get to them from any computer, phone or tablet. And if you aren’t taking advantage of Drive just yet, give it a try with your next Gmail attachment.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog and Google Drive Blog)

Google is releasing yet another update to Gmail today, which sees deeper Google Drive integration coming to the company's email platform. Now users will be able to skip the whole process involved with downloading email attachments, and instead view and save their files directly to Google Drive – without leaving their inbox.

This change comes only a day after Google rolled out new “Quick Actions” buttons, which allow for easier interactions with email messages, with just a click. Similarly, the Google Drive integrations are also designed to speed up users' interactions with email content, in this case, attached files.

As the feature rolls out, Gmail users will begin to see new thumbnail previews for files at the bottom of their email messages, including both photos and videos, as well as office documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Clicking on one of the file previews will then display the item in a full-screen image format. From here, you can basically interact with the file itself right from your Gmail inbox, with no need to first download then launch the file using desktop software.

However, if you do need to save the item for later viewing, you just click on the Google Drive button that appears when you hover over the preview. From the window that appears, you can click to save the file to your Drive, even choosing the folder where the item should be stored. If you still need to go the old-school “download” route, don't fear – an arrow button will allow you to continue to do things in the traditional way.

This move not only supports interactivity between Google's various online services, which could push more users to adopt Drive over competing services like Dropbox or Box, for example, but it also helps with Google's larger “cloud” agenda. With Chrome OS, the company's web browser-based operating system, Google forgoes the idea of “desktop software” altogether.

It's also another effort to make the online software feel more like mobile, and vice versa. When you're viewing email attachments on mobile, there are already fewer steps involved.

It's worth also pointing out that the addition comes shortly after an email startup for salespeople, Yesware, bought a San Francisco-based company called Attachments.me, which was also working to better connect email attachments with the cloud. Even if the latter company had not hit a roadblock in its path to growth, this new feature in Gmail could have presented a serious challenge for such a service to overcome.

Google says the update is available initially to desktop Gmail users, and will be rolling out over the next the week. The company notes it now has 120 million active users for Google Drive – a number Google had not yet released until now. This puts the service close to – and maybe above – others also operating in the same space.  Dropbox has 175 million registered (not active) user accounts, Apple's iCloud has 325 million, SkyDrive has over 250 million, and Box trails with over 20 million accounts.

For Third-Party Developers

In addition to support for standard attachments, the Google Drive SDK will also now allow third-party developers to better integrate their apps with Google Drive, and let users interact with apps and files in Gmail.

Gmail users will be able to choose which app to open their file attachments with from the new file preview feature in Gmail, which will show both suggested and connected apps. And if users don't see the app they want, a “connect more apps” option will let them pick a new, compatible app – again, right from the inbox.

More details on this feature are here on the Google Developers blog.

 

Under international human rights conventions, nations are not allowed to withdraw their passports from citizens if doing so would leave them stateless. Theresa May, the UK home secretary, has asked her staff to find a way around this, so that British citizens who are accused of terrorism can have their passports withdrawn while they are travelling abroad, rendering them stateless, with no way to return home to Britain.

She has repeatedly said that a UK passport is a "privilege, not a right". Whitehall sources have reportedly said May believes it cannot be right that a person who has enjoyed the benefits of becoming a UK citizen should keep their passport if they act in a way that is "totally at odds" with British values.

The Financial Times reported that May had asked officials to find a way of overturning international human rights conventions that prevent individuals with only one citizenship from being made stateless. The necessary change to the law could be enshrined in an amendment to the immigration bill now going through parliament.

Human rights campaigners criticised the move, saying it legitimised the tactic of states such as Zimbabwe of using statelessness to clamp down on political dissent.

Theresa May plans new powers to make British terror suspects stateless [Alan Travis/The Guardian]

The BBC: "Blackadder star Sir Tony Robinson has received his knighthood from Prince William in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace."