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Raising kids is an adventure filled with all sorts of imperfect decisions. A butterfly flapping its wings on your kid's iPad could initiate a cascade of events, leading to his/her eventual life of crime or triumph. Or maybe that butterfly has no effect whatsoever -- how did that unusual insect get into the house, anyway? Common core standards might be crushing young spirits with "new math" -- or just frustrating parents who don't remember how to do long division. Is there an optimal way to parent that leads to a society where every child is above average and no one graduates in the bottom half of the class? Maybe the best path is just to let kids figure it all out themselves. (But probably not.)

You likely already know the story of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you don't, go read up on it, because it's a delightful example of how a cause can be fought with humor and derision without taking itself too seriously. The admittedly silly non-organization is actually quite an important story for secular government and how it must treat free speech in the context of religious exemptions offered to citizens. Not all governments do this well, as you may recall the story of Australian authorities briefly confiscating a man's legally-owned firearms after he insisted on wearing a pasta strainer on his head for his government ID photo.

Hey, remember that time I was thoroughly fooled by two hoax sites into reporting that Survivor band members had filed a copyright suit against Mike Huckabee for using Eye of the Tiger at that gross rally for Kim Davis? And remember my simpering excuse, suggesting that copyright as it stands today makes it difficult to separate the absurd from the fake? Well, suck it, universe, because now that Survivor's Frank Sullivan really hasfiled a copyright lawsuit against Huckabee for using the song at the rally, I am now claiming that instead of being the victim of a hoax, I'm actually some kind of prophetic modern-day Nostradamus.

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

Okay, let's review. On Friday, a horrific and tragic series of attacks took place in Paris. And then:

Famous TV news talking head Ted Koppel recently came out with a new book called Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath. The premise, as you may have guessed, is that we're facing a huge risk that "cyberattackers" are going to take down the electric grid, and will be able to take it down for many weeks or months, and the US government isn't remotely prepared for it. Here's how Amazon describes the book:

The $59.99 Ultimate CompTIA Advanced Training Bundle will help you master some of the most in-demand IT skills and prepare you for passing the CompTIA exams (exams must be scheduled at outside testing centers and are not included in the bundle). The four courses cover network security and risk management training, how to manage Linux-based clients and server systems, project leadership and management, and how to implement and maintain cloud technologies. You have access to the courses for 2 years so you can pace yourself anyway you'd like while learning some very important IT skills.

Over the past few days, we've been highlighting the fever pitch with which the surveillance state apologists and their friends have been trampling over themselves to blame Ed Snowden, blame encryption and demand (and probably get) new legislation to try to mandate backdoors to encryption.

Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of "hand-wringing" that has made "our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging." Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, "In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn't seem to be the scariest thing in the room." Ultimately, it's impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here's a roundup of what we know. An internal review of the Bush administration's warrantless program – called Stellarwind – found it resulted in few useful leads from 2001–2004, and none after that. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage obtained the findings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and published them in his new book, Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post–9/11 Presidency:

By now you probably know the drill: Comcast will do something incredibly stupid, and a customer that has been struggling to get the company to fix it for a year (or longer) will have absolutely no luck getting the issue resolved. They'll subsequently contact the media out of frustration and (especially if the screw up goes viral) Comcast will finally resolve the problem -- usually within a day. The company then trots out claims that this is simply an "anecdotal" experience and not representative of the great care and skill with which it manages its beloved customers. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Historically, the cable and broadcast industry has responded to Internet video competition in the only way a mammoth legacy industry knows how: denial, dirty tricks, price hikes, more dirty tricks, and more denial. And instead of giving customers what they want (lower prices, ad skipping technology, more flexibility in programming packages) they've arguably often made things worse -- like stuffing more ads into every viewing hour.

It's a commonplace that software permeates modern society. But it's less appreciated that increasingly it permeates many fields of science too. The move from traditional, analog instruments, to digital ones that run software, brings with it a new kind of issue. Although analog instruments can be -- and usually are – inaccurate to some degree, they don't have bugs in the same way as digital ones do. Bugs are much more complex and variable in their effects, and can be much harder to spot. A study in the F1000 Research journal by David A. W. Soergel, published as open access using open peer review, tries to estimate just how much of an issue that might be. He points out that software bugs are really quite common, especially for hand-crafted scientific software:

Physical cash seems to be a bit less popular than it once was. Some European countries are even contemplating completely digital currencies to combat the potential side effects of negative interest rates (i.e. people taking out all of their savings as cash). At the same time, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could provide other means of payments without dealing with physical cash. So are we ready for a cashless society? (No, probably not for some time.) However, digital currencies could take away the importance of centralized banking, bit by bit. Perhaps some older forms of savings will make a comeback.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has actually used its powers for good, stopping an Indonesian citizen from spreading malware while taking the name of the EFF in vain.

Is there an expectation of privacy in public spaces? Generally speaking, there isn't. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all. Private conversations in public places are still afforded a limited expectation of privacy by the "Wiretap Act" -- a law prompted by the widespread warrantless use of recording devices, along with the Supreme Court's Katzdecision, which found attaching a recording device to the outsideof a public phone booth required the use of a warrant.

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance may not know what the fuck he's talking about when he discusses encryption, the internet and other tech-related issues. But that's certainly not going to keep him from talking about them.

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week encryption has continued to be a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports were quickly circulated suggesting that the terrorists used incredibly sophisticated encryption techniques, despite no evidence by investigators that this was the case. These reports varied in the amount of hallucination involved, the New York Times even having to pull one such report offline. Other claims the attackers had used encrypted Playstation 4 communications also wound up being bunk.

Even though the NY Times helped kick off the stupidity by publishing a nearly fact-free article (since deleted, and then replaced with an entirely different article) claiming that the Paris attackers used encryption to communicate, it appears the editorial board of the NY Times gets things exactly right with the editorial they pushed out last night: Mass Surveillance Isn't the Answer to Fighting Terrorism. Not only does it point out why expanding mass surveillance won't help much, it also points out that the people calling for it, like CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, are not exactly trustworthy -- in fact, they're known liars:

Stories develop almost daily that remind us about the importance of protecting our privacy on the internet. For $69 you can buy a little more peace of mind with a subscription to PureVPN. The subscription gives you access to over 550 servers in 141 countries and includes updates to the system. Use it to ensure a safer connection over public WiFi. You can use it on up to 5 devices (including routers, gaming consoles and more) at once and take advantage of the unlimited bandwidth. PureVPN does not log your data according to their privacy policy.

I happen to be in Washington DC this week for some events and meetings -- and it's a... ridiculous week to be here, apparently (of course, that could be true of just about any week here). Earlier this week, we noted the pathological ridiculousness of surveillance state apologists like former NSA top lawyer Stewart Baker arguing that the Paris attacks are evidence for why the NSA should not roll back its Section 215 collection. The 215 collection is, of course, the completely unconstitutional (as declared by both an appeals court and the White House's own civil liberties board) program by which the NSA slurped up basically all phone records, claiming that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act allowed this.

Two months ago, the Obama administration came to the conclusion that mandating backdoors to encryption through legislation was a non-starter. They seemed to recognize that it was mostly a bad idea and (more importantly) that Congress would not approve such legislation. Almost immediately, we noted that intelligence officials (almost gleefully) noted that they really just needed to wait for the next terrorist attack to restart the campaign. Here was Robert Litt, the top lawyer in the intelligence community:

There's been a universe of responses to the recent tragedy in Paris, and unfortunately the lion's share of them are incomprehensibly stupid, adding a compounded feeling of inevitable dread to the already heart-breaking ordeal. From punishing all Syrian refugees for the attacks to blaming Edward Snowden and encryption, there's once again far more knee-jerk inanity being generated than reasoned commentary. Joining the fray this week was Rep. Joe Barton, who simply can't seem to understand why we can't start filtering this whole "terrorism" part of the Internet.

Elsevier has pretty much established itself as the most hated company in the world of academic publishing, a fact demonstrated most recently when all the editors and editorial board resigned from one of its top journals to set up their own, open access rival. A blog post by the statistician Chris H.J. Hartgerink shows that Elsevier is still an innovator when it comes to making life hard for academics. Hartgerink's work at Tilburg University in the Netherlands concerns detecting potentially problematic research that might involve data fabrication -- obviously an important issue for the academic world. A key technique he is employing is content mining -- essentially bringing together large bodies of text and data in order to extract interesting facts from them:

Citizens don't care much for red light/traffic cameras. These revenue generators do little more than turn moving (or parked) vehicles into ATMs for the governments that deploy them. Obviously, local governments lovethem. They love them so much they're willing to overlook badly-broken systems, crooked manufacturers and increases in vehicle collisions.

Biotechnology doesn't have quite the same milestones of progress as Moore's Law, but as we unravel how biology works, we're going to have incredibly powerful tools to change the world. Sure, we're going to need to figure out the ethical ramifications of a GATTACA-esque future where designer babies are possible and replicants/clones can be grown for replacement parts. But it might take a while still before we're engineering lifespans and curing the disease of aging.

It looks like a few law enforcement agencies might be doing some judge-shopping in the future. Magistrate judge Iain D. Johnston has announced -- via an order in a (mostly) sealed drug investigation case -- that agencies will no longer be able to come to him to get their Stingray-related orders rubber stamped.

Fallout 4 was recently released to a world full of ready gamers eager to get their paws on the latest installment in the franchise. And, because the game was released on the PC, modders immediately got to work on the title, coming up with fun little customizations for it. Those mods ranged from altering the companions players can recruit within the game to more cosmetic changes. One of those cosmetic changes included a custom outfit which allowed for players to don a David Ortiz Boston Red Sox jersey while cracking skulls with a baseball bat for a weapon. And, of course, Major League Baseball got its knickers in a twist over it.

Ever since the bubble and bust of the 90s, Silicon Valley observers have been wondering if and when history will repeat. Lately, some have been pointing to the trend of "unicorn" companies as evidence that we might be heading down that road again, while others have made the case that the fear is overhyped. This week, we discuss the elusive unicorn and what it means for the future of the tech industry. Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

We've already discussed how the usual surveillance state defenders quickly rushed into action following the Paris attacks to demand more surveillance -- and also noted that the two attacks in Paris in the past year happened despite that country expanding its own surveillance laws twice in the past year (once right before the Charlie Hebdo attack and once soon after). And all of that raises a simple question in my mind:

Over the years, we've had a whole bunch of posts demonstrating various industries where there is no direct intellectual property protection -- and yet where we still find tremendous innovation and competition. These include things like the fashion industry (where you can't copyright fashion designs), the restaurant industry and some others. In fact, a few years ago, a couple of law professors wrote an entire book highlighting competitive and innovative industries where there was a lack of intellectual property protection. And, yet, time and time again, we see people who show up in the areas where there's lots of competition and lots of innovation, and insist that those industries need more intellectual property protection.

The holidays are coming! So is the chaos of finding a great deal on the perfect gift for everyone on your list. Stay far from the maddening crowds and take a look at our early "Black Friday" deals. Use the coupon code EARLY10 to receive an extra 10% off of your purchase. We're highlighting a few of the early deals below.

I've been having this discussion on Twitter and a few other places over the past few days, so it seemed only right to put it into a blog post. For all the ridiculous talk with politicians grandstanding and using the attacks in Paris last week as an excuse to expand surveillance powers, it seems worth noting that France actually expanded its surveillance state powers twice in the last year -- and the first time it didn't stop the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the second time obviously failed to stop the attacks last week. Already, before all of this, French intelligence had powers that were so similar to the NSA's that it was obvious that there had been some coordination. Then, late last year (actually on Christmas Eve), France quietly enacted a new surveillance law relating to data retention and requiring internet companies to cough up info on users.

Yesterday we noted that the surveillance state supporters were quick to rush in and blame Ed Snowden and call for undermining encryption in response to the attacks in Paris last week -- and they did so based on no factual information whatsoever. There was, briefly, a NY Times article quoting anonymous "officials" claiming that the attackers had communicated via encrypted channels. That article eventually disappeared entirely (with no explanation from the NY Times). If that's true, it would not be surprising, because terrorist groups have long used encryption -- as have tons and tons and tons of law abiding folks. Blaming encryption seems particularly dumb.

A few years ago, we first wrote about the supposed missing black hole of culture due to copyright, based on some excellent research by Paul Heald, looking at the availability of new books on Amazon based on the years they were published. It produced this chart: As you can see, there are a bunch of recent books, then a huge drop off... until a sudden spike at 1922 -- also known as the year before which nearly all books are in the public domain. That giant gaping hole on the right side of the graph should be pretty distressing. It counters the totally false narrative by certain legacy copyright system supporters that copyright is necessary to get books published and also that without copyright, no one would bother to sell the works, because they could just be copied by others. But, more importantly, it shows how much important culture is totally locked up because of copyright law -- unable to be published by those who'd like to offer them, and not worth it for the copyright holders to actually publish.

The good news is that we finally have the complete text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The bad news is that it runs to 6,194 pages, not including dozens of "related instruments" and "side chapters." There is no way that anybody could read through and fully understand the implications of all of that -- certainly not before it comes to a vote next year. But luckily, that's not necessary. Gone are the days when a single commentator would be expected to offer profound insights of a treaty's entire text. Instead, in our Internet-based world, it's very easy to do things in a highly-distributed fashion, parcelling out pieces of the task to many topic experts who carry out deep analysis in parallel. One such source of expertise is the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which has recently produced an analysis of TPP's "Sanitary and Phytosanitary" (SPS) chapter dealing with key issues such as food safety, and animal and plant health in agricultural trade. It's well-worth reading for its detailed comments on this section, but there are two main points that it makes. First, it notes a trick that has been used in the SPS chapter:

Texas A&M has a long history of defending its registered trademark of "12th Fan" to ridiculous lengths. Between threats to breweries, threats to double-amputee cancer-survivors, and generally serving as the template for the Seattle Seahawks' own idiotic over-enforcement of a rival 12th fan trademark, the university has managed to foster a climate of permission-culture over a phrase that has become commonly used in American football circles. See, the 12th man refers, in most cases, to fans of football teams that show up and make so much noise as to influence the opposing team on the field. Lots of teams have used the phrase over the years, including the Indianapolis Colts. Well, the Texas A&M lawyers have finally had enough and have brought suit against the Colts, hilariously claiming that football fans might see the Colts' use of the phrase and think there's a connection between the school and the professional football team.

Renewable energy sources like solar and hydroelectric are great, but they generally can't provide enough baseload power. Sure, maybe we need to upgrade our electrical grid to handle more distributed power plants and circumvent traditional baseload power requirements, but in the short term, the only carbon-free power source comes from nuclear reactors. However, after the Fukushima accident, there seems to be growing distaste for nuclear energy -- with Germany closing about half of its nuclear power plants and pledging to close all of them by 2022, and more plants around the world have been closing rather than opening since 2011.

Well, well. In August, we saw that the Illinois Attorney Discipline Board finally decided to file a complaint against Team Prenda front man, John Steele. The complaint made it quite clear that the board had been spending a lot of time going through the fairly long list of questionable activities by Team Prenda in a variety of lawsuits across the country. If you somehow missed the Prenda saga, it was a group of copyright trolls who were shaking down lots and lots of individuals, to the point that they apparently decided to cut out the middleman, set up their own fake company, seed porn films themselves and then hide behind various "trusts" and offshore corporations. It was also pretty clear from the Illinois complaint that the board was planning to file a similar thing against the only "official" partner in Prenda, Paul Duffy... but Duffy had passed away just about a week before the complaint came out.

CNN has one of those useless filler stories concerning the Paris attacks where it notes that the FBI will be ramping up wiretapping of suspected ISIS "sympathizers" in the wake of the attacks. That's sort of a dog bites man story if you think about it. What else are they going to do? However, as Adam Johnson notes, the article has a bizarre statement by an "anonymous" law enforcement official at the end. The story mostly talks about how the FBI similarly ramped up its wiretapping following the shootings in Garland, Texas, and then admits that law enforcement will then use that information to arrest people based on non-terrorism charges just to "get them off the street."

This could be fun.

We already wrote a bit about the absolutely ridiculous attempts to connect the Paris attacks of last week with Ed Snowden and encryption. But, of course, the surveillance state sees successful terrorist attacks -- which often demonstrate their own failings -- as a way to double down on getting more power. Take, for example, our old friend and former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker.

If you've followed the saga of "Do Not Track," you know it began with good intentions, labored under squabbling and marketing industry sabotage, and is now seen by some as too little too late in the face of far more sophisticated new snoopvertising technologies. Knowing that many companies will never honor Do Not Track requests voluntarily, Consumer Watchdog had filed a petition (pdf) with the FCC to "initiate a rulemaking proceeding requiring 'edge providers' (like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Pandora, Netflix, and LinkedIn) to honor 'Do Not Track' Requests from consumers."

If you long for the days spent playing Super Mario World, Super Metroid, and other iconic SNES games, grab the $29.95 SNES30 Bluetooth Game Controller and take a step back into the past. This little controller is a 1:1 replica of the original SNES controller but is updated to support gaming via Bluetooth or USB connections. It is compatible across multiple devices/computers and one charge lasts up to 20 hours. You can even use it with a Wii via the Wiimote emulation support and with touchscreen-only games with touchscreen simulation.

We've talked a lot in the past few years about the desperate need to reform the CFAA -- an absolutely horrible "anti-hacking" law that has been stretched and broadened and twisted by people over the years, such that it's frequently used to "pile on" charges when nothing else will stick. If you want to go into a lot more detail, you can listen to the podcast we recently did about the CFAA, or listen to this wonderful podcast that Reply All did about the CFAA (where I also make a brief appearance). But one of the biggest problems with it is that it considers you to be a dangerous hacker if you access a computer/network "without authorization" or if you merely have "exceeded authorized access." It's that latter phrase that often causes trouble. What does it even mean? Historically, cases have been brought against employees who use their employer's computers for non-work related things, against someone for supposedly failing to abide by MySpace's terms of service and for downloading too many academic journals that were freely available for downloading on MIT's campus network.

Retractions of scientific papers are by their nature quite dramatic -- the decision to withdraw recognition in this very public way is never taken lightly, especially given all the work that goes into writing a paper. But the specialist site Retraction Watch, which we wrote about back in August, has a new retraction story that is rather out of the ordinary. It concerns a much-cited 2004 paper about a piece of scientific software called Treefinder. The program is used to create phylogenetic trees, which show the probable evolutionary relationships between species based on comparing their respective DNA sequences. Retraction Watch explains what happened:

Quick: who is the author of the famous Diary of Anne Frank? If you said "Anne Frank" you'd be correct -- but thanks to copyright law, the Foundation that holds the copyright on the book is now trying to add her father's name as a co-author, all because of copyright law.

It really was less than two months ago that we noted that, having lost the immediate battle for US legislation to backdoor encryption, those in the intelligence community knew they just needed to bide their time until the next big terrorist attack. Here was the quote from Robert Litt -- the top lawyer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from September:

It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone that this week's top comments were dominated by responses to the Patrick Zarrelli situation. Three out of the four winners by vote were on that post, with the first being GMacGuffin taking most insightful comment of the week with an observation about word choice:

Five Years Ago Let's start out on the patent front. This week in 2010, the USPTO issued new guidelines that made it harder to reject patents for obviousness, while MIT's tech review disappointingly came out in favor of patent trolls. Microsoft and Motorola got entangled in a full-scale patent war, while patents intersected with actual war when South Korea tried to use them to stop North Korea from copying its uniforms. Facebook also filed its first patent lawsuit — a countersuit against a patent aggressor. Meanwhile, in the game of piracy whac-a-mole, we saw a bunch of LimeWire replacements start popping up after the shutdown, including new unofficial versions of LimeWire itself — leading to the supremely ironic situation of LimeWire complaining about unauthorized copies. Cooler heads, however, were discussing the bigger picture: the EU Commissioner was telling copyright middlemen to get with the times, musician Phil Elverum (who I've seen live twice — once in a church, and once quite literally in a tree) was urging musicians to let music be free and sell valuable scarcities, and one law professor was using hip-hop as a case study in why copyright laws badly need to be updated. Ten Years Ago This week in 2005, the world was still in the wake of the Sony rootkit scandal. Despite the PR disaster, the company was still pursuing new copy protection schemes, while we looked towards the class action lawsuit that was in the works. The company's response was feeble and insulting, claiming that rootkits weren't a big deal because most people don't know what they are, and the EFF took a look at Sony's EULA only to discover a clause saying that if you declare bankruptcy, you must delete the music. Unsurprisingly, virus writers started using the widespread rootkit to their advantage and to cover up their work, and by the end of the week Sony had finally agreed to stop making and distributing rootkits... temporarily. Fifteen Years Ago Groups like Anonymous have become well known in recent years, but "hacktivism" has roots going all the way back to this week in 2000, when website defacement and DOS attacks were in their infancy and not always very effective. Of course, the best "DDOS" of the time was a natural one: the presidential election generated enough traffic to knock out a bunch of political websites. We also saw one of the silliest events in the Napster war this week in 2000: the RIAA sent a letter to Napster requesting that they issue a personal apology to Lars Ulrich, as if (as we put it at the time) he was "5 years old and crying in the corner because some other kid took his toys". But perhaps it was foolish to expect anything more mature. Also in 2000: a lot of things sucked, like mobile phone service and search engines and online banking and voice recognition and many aspects of shopping online. You can decide for yourself how far each of those things has come... Ninety-Three Years Ago The BBC is one of the most respected public broadcasters in the world, but what not everyone knows is that before it become the Crown-controlled "British Broadcasting Corporation" it had a brief four-year stint of life as the privately-owned "British Broadcasting Company". It was on November 14th, 1922 that it began mediumwave broadcasts from the Marconi House in London and aired the first BBC newscast, and on November 15th that it launched two additional channels in Manchester and Birmingham.

Last year, a pair of creators crowdfunded OpenBCI — an open source software suite and interface board that made biosensing — taking readings of electricity in the human body, especially the brain — far more affordable and accessible. Now, the same people are back with the pushes this even further with new, even more affordable gear. The Good Electroencephalography has been evolving for nearly 150 years, but up until very recently it was exclusively the domain of researchers and doctors with access to the expensive, high-tech equipment and software required. Lately there have been fledgling steps to bring direct brain sensing into consumer technology for various applications, but in today's world of makers and tinkerers, there's exciting potential if the basic technology is made available to all. OpenBCI is all about making that happen: the first iteration focused on open-source software and a more affordable interface, but still required lots of equipment and know-how to set up and make use of a full biosensing rig. Now, they're busting through those remaining barriers. The new OpenBCI offerings are an even more affordable interface board — "The Ganglion" — and a kit for building customizable 3D-printed headsets. The goal is to make the technology feasible for anyone who's interested — high schools, makers, independent researchers, and anyone operating with a shoestring budget. The Ganglion interface clocks in at a mere $100, and the parts for the headset (including new dry electrodes, eliminating the need for a lengthy and messy application of gel to a subject's head) only $350. The software, as well as the plans for 3D printing a headset, are all fully open source and available for free on Github. All told, for less than five-hundred bucks, anyone can start experimenting with technology that not long ago was almost completely inaccessible. The Bad What could be bad about giving people easier access to important tools for cutting edge science and engineering? Not much, really. As with most such things, there's a question as to what people will actually do with it, and how many really have a need for it — but that's thinking backwards. Apart from the obvious learning value if this is brought into schools, there's the fact that much of the untapped or unseen potential of brain-sensing technology stands to be unlocked by getting it into the hands of more people. Direct brain interfaces for computing have been possible for some time now, and many experiments in that area continue to happen, but these cheaper OpenBCI tools could be a major step towards making this exciting technology mainstream and finding new and useful applications for it. The Open High-tech Kickstarter projects can be divided into two camps: those focused on establishing a consumer brand, with closed technology and pages riddled with trademark signs and proprietary language, and those that are committed to expanding the world of open source, open hardware, hackable technology and interoperability. It's extremely gratifying that OpenBCI is so firmly in the latter camp. For the time being, a brain-computer interface isn't something average consumers are going to go pick up in a sleek box like a new iPhone — but it is something that developers and engineers are going to want to experiment and play with. If the technology were made affordable in the form of a locked-down consumer product, we'd still see lots of experimentation, but it would rely on a lot of hacking and reverse-engineering. Thanks to OpenBCI's commitment to open source and hardware, people with exciting ideas don't have to jump those hurdles. Thanks, OpenBCI!