Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library identifies a theory implicit in much of the copyright wars called, "If value, then right." It holds that if something has some value, then the person who made it has a right to be compensated for using that value.

For example, your DVDs have value as discs you put in a player, which you pay for when you buy them at a store. But when you rip the disc and put it on a portable player, then you realize some new value. According to "if value, then right," the studio that made the DVD has the right to be compensated for that new value. Otherwise, you're stealing.

Exploring this idea, David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger has compiled a list of "20 things I’ve stolen" according to the "If value, then right" theory. 1. I took an extra napkin from a Taco Bell for unspecified use “later.”
2. I sat on a bench on a hot day, enjoying the breeze as the man next to me fanned himself.
3. I read the headlines of a newspaper that was for sale in a kiosk box.
4. I divided a single-serving DingDong in two, and had it for dessert on two consecutive days.
5. I listened all the way through to a Metallica song emanating from my neighbor’s radio, but closed my window when the commercial came on.
6. I remembered the movie times in my newspaper from the day before so I wouldn’t have to buy a copy of the paper today.
7. When a friend’s cat chose my lap to sit in, I petted it, precisely to discourage it from moving to the lap of its rightful owner.
8. I said “What a long, strange trip it’s been” without air quotes.
9. On the Amtrak “quiet car,” I listened to a man in the seat ahead of me explaining to the bored woman next to him how he gets such a great shine on his shoes. I have since used his technique, successfully.
10. I have stared carefully at reproductions of great paintings. 20 things I’ve stolen

Instructables user Gmjhowe created this "Steampunk Dystopian Sniper Rifle " prop, which "fires a compressed sliver of frozen mercury at ultrahigh velocity" (this last part is imaginary). The process of building it is well-documented, and the result is fab.
I decided to make it recognizably steampunk, while staying true to my own style.

Ive used a lot of metal, and a lot of card. and a lot of other stuff, so much inf act that there is no point me creating a list of items. The main barrel is made from metal, and the handle and stock is mostly card, dense card with a layer of corrugated.

Ok, this is about 5 weeks of work, off and on, i will try my best to explain, but its pretty length, so im gonna try and keep it short and sweet. Steampunk Dystopian Sniper Rifle (Mercury Bow)

The headline says it all, doesn't it? A Chicago Police officer has been suspended and ordered into counseling after she was found guilty of demanding free Starbucks coffee from five different stores on the North Side from 2001 to 2004, sometimes flashing her badge, displaying her gun and screaming at employees.

Officer Barbara Nevers of the Belmont police district was suspended for more than 15 months, according to records the Chicago Police Board released today. Cop demands free coffee, but not at this Starbucks (via Starbucks Gossip)

Worldchanging's Morgan Greenseth has a nice piece up on the future of malls in America -- as many malls and mall-chains fail, they open up lots of possibilities for urban renewal, a fact that has been noticed by the New Urbanist movement, who are busily cooking up plans for turning dead malls into town squares.
As malls across the country start to fade into obsolescence, what is to become of these massive structures? After spending some time searching out the most creative alternatives to abandonment and massive landfilling of these former monuments to chain-store consumerism, I've found that the future of shopping malls is hopeful and creative:

The Factoria Mall in Bellevue is currently losing many stores, but redevelopment will begin soon in the hopes of creating a more useful, long-term multipurpose community space. The new Marketplace @ Factoria will still house retailers, but the redesign will add pedestrian walkways, outdoor dining, and even residential units. The Future of Shopping Malls: An Image Essay

(Image: Brian Lutz)

Our pals at Pressure Printing and Hi-Fructose Magazine teamed up to produce this incredible Travis Louie fine art print, titled "Bride of Stan." It's an intaglio print encased in a hand-cast resin frame with dome glass. As always with Pressure Printing, the attention to detail in the production process is incredible. The edition is limited to 50. Each one is signed, numbered, and sells for $350.
Travis Louie: Bride of Stan (Pressure Printing), How to order Bride of Stan (Hi-Fructose)

UPDATE: Pressure Printing proprietor Brad Keech just informed me that the amazing frame was cast from an early 1900s original frame. Wow. They sure don't make frames like that anymore. Well, not usually anyway.

Now for sale on eBay, lifelike (deathlike?) latex replicas of the Montauk Monster, the mysterious beast that has captured the hearts of millions. Loren Coleman has the details over at Cryptomundo. Montauk Monster replica (Cryptomundo)

• Gakwer reports on "monster" washed ashore
• More on the Montauk Monster

BBtv guest correspondent and blog pal Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics takes us inside a steam-powered World War II "Liberty Ship," the SS Jeremiah O'Brien.

We marvel (!) at the cool old retro-technology that kept this behemoth boat running to and from the beaches of Normandy, and we meet the volunteer caretakers -- obsessive nerds just like us, only with white hair! -- who keep her ship-shape today. Did you know that shipyards in the San Francisco Bay Area once churned out Liberty Ships like this in 4 days or less, during the heat of the war? Watch and learn, li'l skippers.

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion, downloadable video, and podcast subscribe instructions.

Todd has a rockin' photoset of images from the ship, too.

Shot for BBtv by Eddie Codel, during the Long Now Foundation's Mechanicrawl.

Danny sez, Cheye Calvo, mayor of DC suburb Berwyn Heights, was raided by a SWAT team after 30lbs of marijuana was delivered to his home. They broke down his door, shot his two black labradors, and interrogated him and his wife as their dogs bled to death.

Turns out Calvo says he had no idea about the package, which was still outside, unopened and perhaps waiting for its real recipient to pick it up. Police say they still had sufficient cause to break in (even though they did not have a "no-knock warrant").
Another Police Raid; More Dead Dogs (Thanks, Danny!)

Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!). There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner's inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, "We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games." Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.

We have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We've really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before. Link

David from Wondermark sez, "I thought you guys would appreciate this retro-futuristic poster I designed! It was painted by Carly Monardo, whom you might know from her work on the webcomic Dr. McNinja -- she dug into old Popular Science covers to really get the proper retro feel. " Futurism Print [preorder] (Thanks, David!)

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society has an amazing and extensive collection of Lovecraft-inspired fonts for use in your Cthulhoid cosplay, larp and role-playing adventures. HPLHS Prop Fonts (via Beyond the Beyond)

A tinsy little virus called "Sputnik" with only 21 genes preys on larger, more developed viruses, infecting them and hijacking their resources to reproduce and spread: With just 21 genes, Sputnik is tiny compared with its mama — but insidious. When the giant mamavirus infects an amoeba, it uses its large array of genes to build a ‘viral factory’, a hub where new viral particles are made. Sputnik infects this viral factory and seems to hijack its machinery in order to replicate. The team found that cells co-infected with Sputnik produce fewer and often deformed mamavirus particles, making the virus less infective. This suggests that Sputnik is effectively a viral parasite that sickens its host — seemingly the first such example.

The team suggests that Sputnik is a ‘virophage’, much like the bacteriophage viruses that infect and sicken bacteria. “It infects this factory like a phage infects a bacterium,” Koonin says. “It’s doing what every parasite can — exploiting its host for its own replication.”
'Virophage' suggests viruses are alive (via /.)

Jwilly's "Rich People Rooftops NYC" Flickr set collects images of posh, elaborate rooftop gardens over the penthouses of New York. Rich People Rooftops NYC (via Kottke)

The Mario Scarf Blog document's Cassie's "extreme-geek knitting" project: to knit a long strip of cloth that depicts the entire first level of Super Mario Brothers. This is the utter apotheosis of geek crossover passtimes. The Mario Scarf (via Craft)

Marilyn sez, "Relive the good old days of East German secret police at Zur Firma, a new bar in Berlin equipped with an interrogation table, fake security cameras, and prison cells. You can buy a beer and apply for an ID card at the theme bar."
Make a day of Cold War anti-nostalgia with a visit to the Stasi Museum around the corner, which shows off the offices of the last minister of the secret police who flourished before the Wall came down. There are even prison cells to reenact the fates of those who were brought to the grim, blocky building.

When that display becomes too much, buy a beer and apply for an ID card at the theme bar, called "The Company" or "At the Firm." The cards will mark you as a Stasi informant, but also get you a ten percent discount--not at all offensive to the victims of the reign of terror perpetrated by the secret police. Paranoia Travel: Get Spied on at This Scary German Bar (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Artist Steve Powers has created a Guantanamo Bay waterboarding exhibition at Coney Island -- for a buck, you can watch an animatronic torture reenactment. This is the most intriguing use of animatronics I've heard of since I got to see the animatronic reenactment of the castration of the eunuch admiral Zhèng Hé at the 1421 exhibit in Singapore.
If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

In interrupting a day at the beach with scenes of the United States government’s rougher practices, Mr. Powers is being deliberately provocative. “What’s more obscene,” he asks, “the official position that waterboarding is not torture, or our official position that it’s a thrill ride?” Link (Thanks to Mark and everyone else who suggested this!)

(Image: Michael Nagle for The New York Times)

Over in Scalzi's blog, the commenters are having fun making up zombie rhymes: What are zombie rhymes? Well, they’re like this:

Q: What do zombies like to eat?
A: BRAAAAAAAAAAINS.

Q: What do vegetarian zombies like to eat?
A: GRAAAAAAAAAAINS.

Q: What do vegetarian zombies eat when they’re on vacation in Jamaica?
A: PLANTAAAAAAAINS.

Q: What is the favorite city of Illinois zombies?
A: DES PLAAAAAAINES.

Q: What are zombies’ favorite scale model entertainment?
A: MODEL TRAAAAAINS.
Toward a Canonical List of Zombie Rhymes (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: San Francisco Zombie Flash Mob, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Ioerror's Flickr stream)

If you want to die of meat, you should hie yourself to HillBilly Hotdogs in West Virginia and try the 3.5lb "Homewrecker" dog. If you can eat it in four minutes or less, it is free (minus the health-related expenses arising from the act of consuming it).
The Homewrecker is a 3.5-lb. weapon of cardiovascular mass destruction. They start with a deep-fried 15", 1-pound dog and top it with peppers, onions, nacho cheese, chili sauce, jalapenos, mustard, ketchup, coleslaw, tomatoes, lettuce, and shredded cheese. Assured intestinal wreckage will run you $14.99. Finish it in under 12 minutes and you get a free burial t-shirt. Do it in under 4 minutes and your family will have an extra $14.99 for the funeral. The Mother of All Hot Dogs--HillBilly's Homewrecker (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Aaron says: "This amazing, elevated goat pen seems to be up your alley. They walk along planks above the visitors. It is at Underwood Family Farms [in Moorpark, California] ,which also has a lot of other animals."

Martin says: A research program designed to enhance spiritual awareness for persons with a cancer diagnosis is accepting volunteer participants at the Bayview Campus of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. The program consists of a brief counseling intervention, including medical screening, rapport-building appointments, two all-day sessions that include psilocybin administration, and appointments to facilitate initial integration and application of insights gained. More detailed information is available at cancer-insight.org

Conducted by Drs. Roland Griffiths, William Richards and colleagues, this program is designed to help cancer patients who are suffering with some degree of psychological distress to become less anxious and depressed, and to become more fully engaged with life again. Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in the "sacred mushrooms" that have been used in religious ceremonies by indigenous people in Mesoamerica for approximately two thousand years, is employed to facilitate the resolution of personal conflicts and to occasion states of consciousness that for some may be indistinguishable from visions and mystical experiences recorded in the history of religions. Psilocybin has not been found to be toxic or addictive, and is considered reasonably safe for persons without a history of serious mental illness, when administered in accordance with the safety guidelines published by the Hopkins researchers. Additional information on safety and the unique contributions this intervention may make to human personal and spiritual well-being, may be found here.

The research is FDA approved and is open to persons between 21 and 70. Confidentiality is maintained for all applicants and participants.