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walktalker · 20-11-02, 09:47 PM

Big Retailers Squeeze FatWallet

Can the unpublished discount price of a DVD player for next week's big sale at Wal-Mart be copyrighted? That's the question at the heart of a legal dispute involving several big retailers and FatWallet, a popular website that caters to bargain shoppers. After receiving legal threats from Best Buy, Staples, Target and Wal-Mart, FatWallet removed several user postings in its Hot Deals section. Scooping sales circulars by several days, the postings, apparently from site users who had access to proprietary sales information, included lists of products, along with reduced prices, that will go on sale Nov. 29 -- the day known as "Black Friday" for U.S. retailers because it kicks off the holiday buying season. According to FatWallet owner Tim Storm, the retailers all cited the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act as the legal basis for serving FatWallet with "takedown" notices.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56504,00.html

A Few Ways to Win Mortality War
People who want to live forever are often pegged as narcissists, heretics or just plain crazy. But about 200 people bent on immortality who did not appear to be crazy, narcissistic or sacrilegious (well, maybe a little) gathered in Newport Beach, California, over the weekend for Alcor's Extreme Life Extension Conference. Discussions among leading researchers in nanotechnology, cloning and artificial intelligence focused on much more than cryonics, the process of freezing the body in liquid nitrogen after death to be later reanimated. Cryonics is basically a backup plan if technology doesn't obliterate mortality first. About 1,000 people pay Alcor $400 a year and have named Alcor as their life insurance beneficiary to cover the cost of freezing just the head for $50,000 or the entire body for $120,000.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,56476,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,56482,00.html

Making Headlines in 10,000-Point Type
It's the morning rush in Times Square, and Ed Schlossberg is standing on Seventh Avenue, pointing up. At 57, Schlossberg is a leader in interactive design, a seamless blend of graphic arts, technology, and psychology. Right now, he's showing me the $20 million sign he and his Manhattan firm, ESI Design, conceived for Reuters' New York headquarters. The sign, built with the help of the interactive agency R/GA, blinked to life last December. It's a 7,000-square-foot videoscreen that descends in a narrow strip from the roof and expands into four King Kong-sized screens just above street level, with a final display curving out of the doorway. Photos, text, data, and video clips slip down the rectangle or burst from the lobby. Watching it, you feel as if You've Got Mail — from Zeus.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/headlines.html

Argentina's New Wireless Problem
On a normal day, the telephones at the meteorological station in the airport of Salta, one of Argentina's northern provinces, ring all the time -- people phone in to get the latest local weather report. But on the morning of Nov. 5, they were strangely silent. "We thought it was really unusual," said Major Ramón Galván, the airport chief. "We went to check the lines, and found out we had lost all external phone communications. All the area's telephone cables had been stolen during the night." During the day, the service was reinstalled by the regional telephone company, Telecom, which didn't seem surprised in the least by the power failure. Telecom had almost been expecting it to happen.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,56365,00.html

Spacey Site Screens Writers
There was a time when some Hollywood agents specialized in developing young writers and directors. No longer. "Most of the smaller and middle-sized agencies that used to focus entirely on the development of young talent have folded," lamented actor Kevin Spacey, who won an Academy Award for his 1999 role in American Beauty. "Not a single agency (currently) has a young, new talent division." Spacey's new TriggerStreet.com is designed to address that situation. Any aspiring filmmaker or screenwriter can upload a short opus to the site and have it reviewed by their peers, gratis. The top-rated works are ranked daily. And they might have a shot at catching the eye of Hollywood bigwigs -- including Spacey himself -- who ordinarily wouldn't see a young filmmaker's work because agencies won't bother with it.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56480,00.html

MS accused of banning mod chip Xbox from Live service
Microsoft's campaign against Xbox mod chips has ratcheted up a notch with the launch of the Xbox Live online gaming service. According to a posting at Got Mod?, (there's a site that's going to be pretty concerned about the issue) the company is attempting to detect mod chips when users connect, then placing them on a banned list - forever. If this really is the case then it means we're already seeing how unique hardware IDs could be used in anger by certain companies. Because it's the unique ID of the Xbox that's claimed to go onto the banned list. The Got Mod? poster says that after persistent connectivity problems (which we hear exist for people who don't have mod chips fitted too) he called up the support line and confessed to a rep that he'd modded his Xbox.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28180.html

Black holes are double trouble for galaxy
Two monstrous black holes are jostling for power in the same galaxy, the Chandra X-ray satellite has revealed. The pair will slam into each other in a few hundred million years, giving the fabric of space-time a good shake. "Today for the first time, thanks to the Chandra X-ray observatory's unparalleled ability to spot black holes, we see something that is a harbinger of a cataclysmic event to come," a NASA official told a press conference on Tuesday. Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and her colleagues used Chandra to look at an extraordinarily bright galaxy called NGC 6240, which is about 400 million light years from Earth.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993088

More news later on

20-11-02, 09:47 PM	#2
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	Big Retailers Squeeze FatWallet Can the unpublished discount price of a DVD player for next week's big sale at Wal-Mart be copyrighted? That's the question at the heart of a legal dispute involving several big retailers and FatWallet, a popular website that caters to bargain shoppers. After receiving legal threats from Best Buy, Staples, Target and Wal-Mart, FatWallet removed several user postings in its Hot Deals section. Scooping sales circulars by several days, the postings, apparently from site users who had access to proprietary sales information, included lists of products, along with reduced prices, that will go on sale Nov. 29 -- the day known as "Black Friday" for U.S. retailers because it kicks off the holiday buying season. According to FatWallet owner Tim Storm, the retailers all cited the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act as the legal basis for serving FatWallet with "takedown" notices. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56504,00.html A Few Ways to Win Mortality War People who want to live forever are often pegged as narcissists, heretics or just plain crazy. But about 200 people bent on immortality who did not appear to be crazy, narcissistic or sacrilegious (well, maybe a little) gathered in Newport Beach, California, over the weekend for Alcor's Extreme Life Extension Conference. Discussions among leading researchers in nanotechnology, cloning and artificial intelligence focused on much more than cryonics, the process of freezing the body in liquid nitrogen after death to be later reanimated. Cryonics is basically a backup plan if technology doesn't obliterate mortality first. About 1,000 people pay Alcor $400 a year and have named Alcor as their life insurance beneficiary to cover the cost of freezing just the head for $50,000 or the entire body for $120,000. http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,56476,00.html http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,56482,00.html Making Headlines in 10,000-Point Type It's the morning rush in Times Square, and Ed Schlossberg is standing on Seventh Avenue, pointing up. At 57, Schlossberg is a leader in interactive design, a seamless blend of graphic arts, technology, and psychology. Right now, he's showing me the $20 million sign he and his Manhattan firm, ESI Design, conceived for Reuters' New York headquarters. The sign, built with the help of the interactive agency R/GA, blinked to life last December. It's a 7,000-square-foot videoscreen that descends in a narrow strip from the roof and expands into four King Kong-sized screens just above street level, with a final display curving out of the doorway. Photos, text, data, and video clips slip down the rectangle or burst from the lobby. Watching it, you feel as if You've Got Mail — from Zeus. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/headlines.html Argentina's New Wireless Problem On a normal day, the telephones at the meteorological station in the airport of Salta, one of Argentina's northern provinces, ring all the time -- people phone in to get the latest local weather report. But on the morning of Nov. 5, they were strangely silent. "We thought it was really unusual," said Major Ramón Galván, the airport chief. "We went to check the lines, and found out we had lost all external phone communications. All the area's telephone cables had been stolen during the night." During the day, the service was reinstalled by the regional telephone company, Telecom, which didn't seem surprised in the least by the power failure. Telecom had almost been expecting it to happen. http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,56365,00.html Spacey Site Screens Writers There was a time when some Hollywood agents specialized in developing young writers and directors. No longer. "Most of the smaller and middle-sized agencies that used to focus entirely on the development of young talent have folded," lamented actor Kevin Spacey, who won an Academy Award for his 1999 role in American Beauty. "Not a single agency (currently) has a young, new talent division." Spacey's new TriggerStreet.com is designed to address that situation. Any aspiring filmmaker or screenwriter can upload a short opus to the site and have it reviewed by their peers, gratis. The top-rated works are ranked daily. And they might have a shot at catching the eye of Hollywood bigwigs -- including Spacey himself -- who ordinarily wouldn't see a young filmmaker's work because agencies won't bother with it. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56480,00.html MS accused of banning mod chip Xbox from Live service Microsoft's campaign against Xbox mod chips has ratcheted up a notch with the launch of the Xbox Live online gaming service. According to a posting at Got Mod?, (there's a site that's going to be pretty concerned about the issue) the company is attempting to detect mod chips when users connect, then placing them on a banned list - forever. If this really is the case then it means we're already seeing how unique hardware IDs could be used in anger by certain companies. Because it's the unique ID of the Xbox that's claimed to go onto the banned list. The Got Mod? poster says that after persistent connectivity problems (which we hear exist for people who don't have mod chips fitted too) he called up the support line and confessed to a rep that he'd modded his Xbox. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28180.html Black holes are double trouble for galaxy Two monstrous black holes are jostling for power in the same galaxy, the Chandra X-ray satellite has revealed. The pair will slam into each other in a few hundred million years, giving the fabric of space-time a good shake. "Today for the first time, thanks to the Chandra X-ray observatory's unparalleled ability to spot black holes, we see something that is a harbinger of a cataclysmic event to come," a NASA official told a press conference on Tuesday. Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and her colleagues used Chandra to look at an extraordinarily bright galaxy called NGC 6240, which is about 400 million light years from Earth. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993088 More news later on __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies