How Hackers collaborate
Wow, MAKE pal David Weekly will be on this panel – “How do hackers collaborate? How have these patterns changed over time, with shifting cultures and new technologies? What can other disciplines learn from hacker culture? Hacker culture has always been a highly collaborative meritocracy that has extended well beyond organizational and geographic boundaries. This manifests itself in a variety of ways — from face-to-face gatherings, such as the legendary Homebrew Computer Club meetings 30 years ago, to open source projects today. The collaborative tools and processes that have always been pervasive in hacker culture are now beginning to penetrate other fields as well, from grassroots political activism to the arts.” [via] Link.
Here comes an interesting trend – buying real world goods with virtual money – “The first real product, an XFX GeForce graphics card, is selling for L$20,000 or about US$80 (approx. $L250 = US$1). Makes sense, upgrade your system from work within the virtual world you’re running. What next?…How about something simple that generates from the SL itself, like user-created t-shirts a la something like Threadless? What do you think would work? Gosh, virtual currency for virtual things is going to be sooooo passe soon.” 
Monopole writes in about an open source 3D camera – “Stereoscopic Camera and Camcorder Synchronizer using the commonly available LANC camera control ports. Based on the Atmel ATMega8 microcontroller. Both the software and the hardware is open source, with board layouts on the website.” 
We’ve had a few emails and posts about folks who wanted to build their own lie detector, here’s one (and how it works) – “The circuit diagram of the Lie Detector is shown above. It consists of three transistors (TR1 to TR3), a capacitor (C1), two lights or LEDs (L1 & L2), five resistors (R1 to R5), and a variable resistor (VR1). Suitable transistors to use are BC547, BC548 or BC549, or any other small NPN transistor. The Lie Detector circuit works based on the fact that a person’s skin resistance changes when they sweat (sweating because they’re lying). Dry skin has a resistance of about 1 million ohms, whereas the resistance of moist skin is reduced by a factor of ten or more.”