Ikea has begun selling prefab houses in Sweden and is rolling them out in the UK.

Quoted: BoKlok homes don't exactly come in flatpacks, but they're not far off. The timber-framed buildings are almost entirely prefabricated. They are usually brought to the site on the back of trucks as pre-assembled units, like Portakabins, with the interiors already fitted out. Each apartment is made up of two of these units, which are simply moved into position by crane. Put on the roof and exterior wall cladding, plumb and wire it in, and it's ready to live in. The typical BoKlok arrangement is an L-shaped, two-storey block with three apartments on each floor. One such block can be put up in a day...

DMCA author says it's a failure.

My friend Sung and I went to check out the new Fantagraphics store last week. It was great! I definitely want to try and make their grand opening.

December 2nd, on a Saturday. Should be fun. If anyone wants to check it out, let me know and we'll hook it up.

Quoted: A weblog about pop culture

Flickr has filed a patent on "interestingness" as it relates to images. Quick! We need to get out patent for "intriguing" filed!

Quoted: A weblog about pop culture

This is funny. A group of anti-DRMers are using Amazon.com's tagging feature to tag items as "defectivebydesign."

Quoted: A weblog about pop culture

Some of these are excellent. 6 word long scifi stories:

Quoted: Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth. - Vernor Vinge

This looks like an excellent zombie comic series. Has anyone read this? Does anybody have the first volume to loan me?

Quoted: A weblog about pop culture

Quoted: Last night, security legend Bruce Schneier gave a tremendous lecture as part of the Technology and Public Diplomacy series I'm organizing at USC. He talked about privacy in the era of Moore's Law, and the fact that advanced technology makes it easier to spy than to resist spying. One remark that stuck with me is that "personal data is like pollution" -- like the CO2 we offgas and the waste we produce. Our data-trail is toxic crud, and we haven't developed any good technology to help us dispose of it -- all our technology is devoted to saving and manipulating that data.

Cory Doctorow is awesome. Here he takes Amazon to task for their horrid new Unbox service. He goes through the user agreement in pretty good detail, translating it into common language. It's pretty funny and pretty damning.

And to think, I was so excited about this service before it was released. It seems they're trying to piss people off at every possibility.