What happens if you take a couple hundred programmers and hackers and fuel them with caffeine, pizza, beer and Wifi for an entire weekend? The Music Hack Day series, which stopped off in New York City this past weekend, attempts to find out. The answer is clear: As they did last time , these music technologists self-organized into groups to build a truly remarkable range of functioning digital music technologies — everything from Valentine’s Day music players that build playlists based on your beloved’s name and interests to an app that plays the ideal music for any group gathered at a venue using FourSquare check-ins.

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Music Hack Day NYC Winners: Invisible Instruments, Crowdsourced DJs and More

My First Computer, by Dulcie Recently we had a death in the family. My wife’s 2007 MacBook locked up completely: no on-screen movement, no keyboard access, no mouse control, no ‘three finger salute’ to kill the nastiness (which incidentally was a Flash game)

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How Young Is Too Young To Get An Online Life?

The news from Disney is that Playhouse Disney is being shelved for good. Its new preschool incarnation is called Disney Junior. The focus will be less on teaching the three Rs à la PBS and more on social values.

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Kinder, Gentler Pirates with Social Values? Today is the Launch of Disney Junior

> Building your own electric bike has many advantages over buying one. It’s cheaper: you can pick up parts from scrapyards or buy cheap off-the-shelf motors, and even a purpose-made conversion kit can be had for $400, a lot less than buying a new electric bike. A home-made bike is also easier to maintain.

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Awesome DIY Electric Bikes Defy Laws, Good Sense

“Don't worry ma'am, we've got it under control: we're scientists.” Tagging horseshoe crabs for Project Limulus. Photo by Andrea Schwalm It’s a dark and blurry but if you look closely you can see that this is a picture of my younger son holding a flashlight while my older son tags a horseshoe crab. The boys were participants two years ago in Sacred Heart University’s Project Limulus, an annual horseshoe-crab census that has used volunteer-generated numbers to try and solve an emerging environmental mystery: “ Where are all the horseshoe crabs going ?” It turns out that horseshoe crabs are pretty amazing creatures

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Citizen Science Projects

The Flaming Lips ‘ new single is a YouTube symphony that requires 12 smartphones to be properly heard. More

The House voted Monday to extend to December three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act spy legislation.

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House Extends Key Patriot Act Provisions

The latest rumors say that Activision is trying to hogtie Take-Two Interactive, but that doesn’t seem likely. (The picture is a metaphor.) Image courtesy Rockstar Rumors that Activision will buy out rival Take-Two don’t add up, says a top industry analyst.

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Analyst: Activision Unlikely to Acquire Take-Two

When Aaron Barr was finalizing a recent computer security presentation for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, a colleague had a bit of good-natured advice for him: “Scare the shit out of them!” In retrospect, this may not have been the advice Barr needed. As CEO of the government-focused infosec company HBGary Federal, Barr had to bring in big clients — and quickly — as the startup business hemorrhaged cash.

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Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks

The U.S. government seized 18 more internet domains Monday, bringing to at least 119 the number of seizures following the June commencement of the so-called “Operation in Our Sites” anti-piracy program. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement seizure, in honor of Valentine’s Day, targeted sites hawking big-named brands like Prada and Tiffany & Co

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Feds Seize 18 More Domains in Piracy Crackdown