After 8th-grader Sasha Matthews posted here about the copyright-swiping terms and conditions imposed in Scholastic's annual Art & Writing Awards, the group says it will no longer demand legal ownership of youngsters' submissions.

Scholastic's competition is a marquee annual event celebrating the creative work of schoolchildren, but its rules assign the company copyright ownership of entries forever. This would allow Scholastic to reuse and profit from the work without the creators' permission--and prevent the creator from stopping them or doing likewise.

Now the company is planning a revision to its rules so that it can use the work, but the kids still own it. Though Scholastic hasn't said exactly what form the new terms and conditions will take, similar events require only a license to use the work.

Update! @Scholastic @ArtAndWriting read my story on @BoingBoing and emailed to tell me they plan on revising their terms before next year’s contest in September. They haven’t said yet what they’re going to change. Hope they keep us involved!https://t.co/jkPgMr7Wky

— Rumble Comics (@RumbleComics) February 16, 2018

Nicole Brown writes:

Matthews wrote about the copyright issue for a school assignment and got it published in February on the blog Boing Boing.

Shortly after, the alliance reached out to her dad, letting him know they would review its terms and conditions before next year’s contest.

“The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that administers the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, is currently exploring a revision to the program’s terms & conditions for participants,” McEnerney confirmed.

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"Only slighty exaggerated," it's titled. "Based on actual events. More or less. " Read the rest

Nailed It is a forthcoming Netflix show that's apparently entirely dedicated to cake fails. Having watched this trailer I'm very eager to binge the season.

Hosted by Nicole Byer and master pastry chef Jacques Torres, Netflix's Nailed It is a baking competition show for anyone who has tried to copy a Pinterest recipe and epically failed.

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I think all modern computers should look like these vintage ones photographed by James Ball a couple of years ago. [via Wired] Read the rest

ZNRenew enhances your old Sinclair personal computer with beautiful colored cases and, soon, a striking backlit version of its infamous rubber chicklet keyboard.

LED Membrane click keyboard kit should be available in the next couple of weeks circa £34.99 depending on import duty. DM me for more info. We're also looking for a name. Suggestions very welcome! pic.twitter.com/idAtkhyxWm

— ZX Renew (@ZXRenew) March 10, 2018

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Mapping Student Debt illustrates the grim strings attached to higher education in the USA—strings disproportionately attached to latino and black kids.

More than 42 million Americans owe a total of $1.3 trillion in student debt, making it the second-largest liability on the national balance sheet. A generation ago, student debt was a relative rarity, but for today’s students and recent graduates, it’s a central fact of economic life that we don’t know much about. Mapping Student Debt is changing that. The maps below show how borrowing for college affects the nation, your city, and even your neighborhood, giving a new perspective on the way in which student debt relates to economic inequality.

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Meet Will. The music is from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Read the rest

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose life's work is to take funds out of public education and give it to private religious charter schools, struggled to explain her philosophy on 60 Minutes last night. It was a funny journey into the exciting new mode of conservative thinking that everyone's talking about. When the desire to do something isn't backed by a coherent ideology (or one you dare to explain), describing it becomes a deer-in-headlights nightmare of fixed smiles and random thoughts springing into life and evaporating almost before an interviewer can pop them with simple, unchallenging questions. Read the rest

If you need context, and you don't, here it is! [via r/videos] Read the rest

A museum's worth of prototype Apple devices--computers, ipods and more--is being auctioned on eBay.

Plain, who spends his days working at a Lexus dealership in Monterey, California, is part of the vintage Apple collector community. But where most collectors are trying to accrue a wishlist of machines sold to the public, Plain prefers the prototypes. ...Now Plain has more 48 different devices in his collection, including two different Mac clones, the Outbound 125 and the Dynamac. And that Cinema Display that was probably used by one of the founders of Apple. But Plain doesn’t plan on keeping all of it. When he gets extras, or stuff that doesn’t really jibe with his personal preference for G4 Cubes, 20th Anniversary Macs and Macintosh Portables, they go up on eBay

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Martin Shkreli, the entrepreneur famous for hiking the price of a life-saving medicine and defrauding hedge fund investors, was sentenced Friday to serve 7 years in prison.

Convicted in August on securities fraud charges, Shkreli was a sneering, smirking presence in interviews, Capitol Hill hearings and on the internet—at least until the judge tired of his antics and threw him in jail to await sentencing.

At Friday's hearing, the Wall Street Journal's Rebecca D. O'Brien wrote that Shkreli's own defense lawyer said "There are times I want to hug him...There are times when I want to punch him in the face."

Added Ben Brafman, the lawyer: "Quite frankly, I've got my begging voice on."

It was all to no avail, even after Shkreli wept and promised that he was a changed man. Judge Kiyo Matsumoto said the lengthy sentence had nothing to do with Shkreli's reputation or price-gouging. He faced up to 20 years in prison.

Now 34, Shkreli became well-known after raising the price of Daraprim, a pill used by HIV patients, from from $13.50 to $750. He was arrested on securities fraud charges over an unrelated hedge fund swizz: the prosecution contended he pilfered funds to start another company, while his defense noted he made good on the investments in the long run.

He was banned from Twitter after harassing a woman journalist there; he also fell into the habit of buying internet domains that include the names of journalists who wrote about him, including me. Read the rest

Leaked footage of a police officer repeatedly punching a pedestrian led to charges for Christopher Hickman, the Asheville, NC cop who also lost his job after the attack on August 24 last year. Hickman claimed that Johnnie Jermaine Rush was jaywalking and had assaulted him when challenged, but bodycam video showed a more sinister incident in which Hickman, who is white, told his black victim "you are going to get fucked up hard core", chokes him, repeatedly strikes his head with his fist, then tases him.

"I beat the shit out of his head," Hickman says on the recording. "Not gonna lie about that."

The police chief, Tammy Hooper, has also offered to resign.

Police said they plan to present an investigation into whether Hickman’s actions against Rush were criminal to the district attorney next week.

“This is a human rights issue, and Hickman should’ve been charged from day one,” local Black Lives Matter leader DeLores Venable said during Wednesday’s meeting, per the Citizen-Times report. “If no one would’ve leaked it or said something, we would be in the dark.”

Hooper issued a public apology March 1, saying, “The acts demonstrated in this video are unacceptable and contrary to the department’s vision and the progress we have made in the last several years in improving community trust.”

Jaywalking is a ridiculous crime to begin with, but "jaywalking" in the dead of night on an empty road in Asheville? No wonder people were curious about the circumstances of the arrest, and no wonder the footage had to be leaked before the public saw it. Read the rest

It'll buff right out. Read the rest

"Wanna try it?"

"No." Read the rest

Isaac Bonsu, 30, faces charges of DWI and weed possession after "a police pursuit in which he ended up running over himself."

Fairfax County Police released dashboard video from Tuesday’s incident showing 30-year-old Isaac Bonsu getting out of his car on a residential street in the Alexandria section, a Washington suburb. But Bonsu apparently forgot to put the car in park and the video shows him running in front of the car and being struck.

Bonsu is fine. Guys, remember to engage the parking brake when leaping out of a stolen vehicle in motion. Here is the video.

[Thanks, Akimbo_NOT!] Read the rest

This machine solves Rubik's cube in no more than 0.38 seconds. This is much faster than the previous world record of 0.637 seconds and its creators, Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo, think there's plenty of optimization space left.

That was a Rubik's cube being solved in 0.38 seconds. The time is from the moment the keypress is registered on the computer, to when the last face is flipped. It includes image capture and computation time, as well as actually moving the cube. The motion time is ~335 ms, and the remaining time image acquisition and computation. For reference, the current world record is/was 0.637 seconds.

The machine can definitely go faster, but the tuning process is really time consuming since debugging needs to be done with the high speed camera, and mistakes often break the cube or blow up FETs. Looking at the high-speed video, each 90 degree move takes ~10 ms, but the machine is actually only doing a move every ~15 ms. For the time being, Jared and I have both lost interest in playing the tuning game, but we might come back to it eventually and shave off another 100 ms or so.

This makes me think of movies which depict mankind fighting the machines. A careful fantasy is often constructed, where the machines are superior in speed, durability and capability to humans, but not so much so that ingenuity and cunning cannot overcome them.

The truth is that the gun turret will detect you, turn on you, shoot you and kill you as fast as this robot knocks out the cube. Read the rest

Aviator Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean, and almost made it around the world: her plane vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Many hypotheses cropped up over the years to explain her mysterious disappearance. Perhaps she simply ran out of fuel far from land. Perhaps she was forced down and captured by the Japanese military. Or, maybe, she was stranded on a desert island.

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