(Guest-essay by Jasmina Tešanović, photos by protest participants.) Italian people are at their best in a piazza. Yesterday, the international "No B day" was held all over the world, in public squares. The largest event happened in Rome in Piazza San Giovanni. For those few who don't understand...

This iPhone-slamming Droid ad prominently features a banana....

Greg Borenstein sez, "This is a video version of a paper I delivered with Jem Axelrod at the 2009 PAMLA Conference about Project Cybersyn, an early 70s socialist pseudo-internet built by British cyberneticist Stafford Beer in Chile. The video explores how Beer's writing, infographics, and industrial design worked together to create a science fictional narrative of omniscience and ominpotence for Salvador Allende's socialist government." Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions (Thanks, Greg!) Previously:Futurism, fictional and science fictional - rambling and inspiring ......

Bob's Gone Wild by Bob Ricci

Just look at it. Dazzling Banana an electronic Banana peeler Previously: Just look at this awesome banana slicer. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana saver clip. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana bunker. Boing Boing HOWTO disassemble a banana - Boing Boing Robber uses banana as...

Is Britain's war on photography coming to an end? After the Independent newspaper got senior officials to admit that anti-terror legislation was being "widely abused...to question and search innocent photographers," the Association of Chief Police Officers has sent out a strongly worded memo to all officers ordering them to cease the practice. The harrassment of photographers by police officers is said to have senior officers "exasperated, depressed and embarrassed," and they characterize officers' belief that anti-terror laws prohibit photography as an "internal urban myth." Chief Constable Andy Trotter, chairman of Acpo's media advisory group, took the decision to send the warning after...

A group of students at the University of Michigan has formed a smartphone orchestra. Attached to the musicians' wrists, each iPhone runs an app recreating a selected instrument: "Now everybody has a smartphone, the question of how you get an instrument into people's hands has disappeared." [BBC]...

The British government has reached new heights of absurdity in stonewalling the release of a report on the efficacy of drug prohibition. The report was commissioned from independent academic researchers, and various activist and citizen groups have spent years filing four separate Freedom of Information requests for it. The government has manufactured excuse after excuse, going out on such bizarre limbs that even the Economist has taken notice. The reason is that next March the National Audit Office (NAO), a public-spending watchdog, is due to publish a report of its own on local efforts to combat drugs. The Home Office says that to have two reports about drugs out at the same time might...

Read this account of James Love's conversation with Ambassador Ron Kirk, the head US Trade Representative, on the question of why the Draconian Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is taking place in secret. Love cornered Kirk on a United Airlines flight from Geneva to DC following a WTO Ministerial meeting. Love asks Kirk why the treaty isn't public, and Kirk's answers are -- at best -- total weaselling and at worst fabrications. I had a chance to talk to Kirk about the secrecy of the ACTA agreement. He said the ACTA text would be made public, "when it is finished." I told him it that was too late, and the public wanted the text out now, before it is too late to influence anything. Kirk...