[JackSpratts]

"The WinMX community is back, the files are back, and the users are taking a stand." – Melody


"Reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable, a concept called 'it from bit'." – Dennis Overbye


"The world is not as real as we think." – Dr. Anton Zeilinger


"It's the Google Zeitgeist of crime." – Kevin Poulsen


"My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that." – Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell


"There is a little difference between shoe fetish and Mr. Sylvester Stallone." – Judge Richard Casey


"Don't even think about mileage during more spirited driving: at maximum speed, the car would theoretically run out of fuel in 12 minutes." – Richard Feast


"Remember me?" – Adolf Ruschitschka



































December 31st, ’05





Winmx Is Back
Melody

The WinMX community is back, the files are back, and the users are taking a stand. Get connected Today.

It is time for the RIAA to understand that they cannot destroy filesharing by intimidation any longer. They may be able to bully Corporations, but the users are not going to sit by and let it happen.

MXPIE is an effort by the users and for the users, with an agenda of making WinMX a p2p network not only for the users, but maintained, organized and perpetuated by the people.

Come Join us, we believe that we can make a difference in this fight to take away our rights. We welcome all of those who are tired of going from one p2p network to another simply because the RIAA flexed its billions of dollars worth of muscles.

MXPIE is quick, easy and free to use, it contains no spyware, adware or any other form of malware. We even provide a manual modification that allows you to see exactly what is being done that only takes minutes to do yourself.

Another site worth note is Computer Problem Help Forum, this site has also been at the forefront of this movement, and can help you with any general computer problem that may or may not be related to WinMX.

Check out the MXPIE Website for everything you need.

I hope to see you on WinMX soon! Realtime help is available for WinMX 3.53 users. Go to WinMX Channels.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...325#post242325





The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels
Jeff Leeds

Even as the recording industry staggers through another year of declining sales over all, there are new signs that a democratization of music made possible by the Internet is shifting the industry's balance of power.

Exploiting online message boards, music blogs and social networks, independent music companies are making big advances at the expense of the four global music conglomerates, whose established business model of blockbuster hits promoted through radio airplay now looks increasingly outdated.

CD and digital album sales so far this year are down 8 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. And while sales of digital tracks through services like iTunes have risen 150 percent, to well over 320 million songs this year, that rise is not enough to offset the plunge in album sales. Overall sales are down less than 5 percent if the digital singles are bundled into units of 10 and counted as albums, according to estimates by Billboard magazine.

Still, despite the slide, dozens of independent labels are faring well with steady-selling releases by, among others, the Miami rapper Pitbull and the indie bands Hawthorne Heights, Bright Eyes, Interpol and the Arcade Fire. Independent labels account for more than 18 percent of album sales this year - their biggest share of the market in at least five years, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. (If several big independent companies whose music is marketed by the major music labels distribution units are included, the figure exceeds 27 percent.)

The surge by independents comes as the four dominant music conglomerates - Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group - find themselves hamstrung in their traditional ways of doing business by an array of forces, including a crackdown on payola (undisclosed payments made to broadcasters in exchange for airplay).

In a world of broadband connections, 60-gigabyte MP3 players and custom playlists, consumers have perhaps more power than ever to indulge their curiosities beyond the music that is presented through the industry's established outlets, primarily radio stations and MTV.

"Fans are dictating," said John Janick, co-founder of Fueled by Ramen, the independent label in Tampa, Fla., whose roster includes underground acts like Panic! At the Disco and Cute Is What We Aim For. "It's not as easy to shove something down people's throats anymore and make them buy it. It's not even that they are smarter; they just have everything at their fingertips. They can go find something that's cool and different. They go tell people about it and it just starts spreading."

There are several signs that as more consumers develop the habit of exploring music online they are drawn to other musical choices besides hitmakers at the top of the Billboard chart - a trend that suggests more of the independent labels' repertory will find an audience.

On the Rhapsody subscription music service, for example, the 100 most popular artists account for only about 24 percent of the music that consumers chose to play from its catalog last month, said Tim Quirk, Rhapsody's executive editor. In the brick-and-mortar world, he estimates, the 100 most popular acts might account for more than 48 percent of a mass retailer's sales.

"It's no longer about a big behemoth beaming something at a mass audience," Mr. Quirk said. "It's about a mass of niche audiences picking and selecting what they want at any given time."

The independent sector as a whole already outsells two of the big four companies, Warner Music and EMI. And the more ambitious of the independent labels' managers have set their sights on seizing even more terrain. This year they formed a new trade organization to establish a unified front when striking deals with online music services, among other priorities.

At the major labels, many executives privately dismiss the independents' quick expansion as a blip that has more to do with consolidation of the big companies - Sony and Bertelsmann merged their music divisions last year - than it does with savvier marketing by the small labels themselves. In fact, the independent labels collectively are selling fewer albums than they did five years ago, too - they just aren't sliding as quickly as their bigger rivals.

But the big music companies have also embraced many vehicles that had primarily showcased independent material. Many labels buy advertising space on blogs that post free music files, and this year Interscope Records, a division of Universal, struck a deal to distribute music from a new label created in partnership with MySpace, the popular social networking site that claims 40 million members.

Even so, the gains of independent labels appear to stem from more than online buzz: the small labels have also found themselves the darlings of television and film music supervisors looking for out-of-the-mainstream sounds; and the labels are placing their albums on the shelves of big-box retailers like Best Buy, often with the help of a distribution company owned by one of the four music giants, like Warner Music.

But no factor is more significant than the Internet, which has shaken up industry sales patterns and, perhaps more important, upended the traditional hierarchy of outlets that can promote music. Buzz about an underground act can spread like a virus, allowing a band to capture national acclaim before it even has a recording contract, as was the case this year with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, an indie rock band.

Yet the independent sector has felt the sting of the industry's slump, which began more than five years ago. Many small labels complain that widespread CD burning and trading of songs on unauthorized file-swapping networks has dampened their sales the same way it has those of the major record companies.

In addition, the music specialty shops and small retailers that once provided an anchor for independent label sales are being squeezed out by mass merchants who heavily discount new releases, and the broader problems of piracy and competition from other products like DVD's and video games. Still, the sense of foreboding that sends chills through the hallways in certain major-label office suites does not pervade the independent labels.

For many independent entrepreneurs, there is a degree of confidence that comes from running leaner operations while aiming for more modest sales levels. Unlike the majors, independent labels typically do not allocate money to producing slick videos or marketing songs to radio stations. An established independent like Matador Records - home to acts including Pretty Girls Make Graves and Belle and Sebastian - can turn a profit after selling roughly 25,000 copies of an album; success on a major label release sometimes doesn't kick in until sales of half a million.

"No one's trying to sell six million records; we're trying to sell as many as we can," said Chris Lombardi, Matador's founder. "We're working with realistic success."

The market slide, coupled with the pressure on the big companies to meet quarterly financial targets, plays directly into the hands of small labels that have the patience to attract new fans over time, independent entrepreneurs say.

"They're all terribly under the gun to justify every investment and tie it to an immediate return," said Steve Gottlieb, chief of TVT Records, which is home to acts like Lil Jon and Ying Yang Twins, two of a handful of independent acts to secure placement on major radio playlists. "That type of discipline doesn't allow for the extra time or the extra album it took to break a U2 or a Bruce Springsteen. The majors are really just focusing on platinum artists and no longer have an appetite for artist development except in the rarest instances."

Britt Daniel, the singer and songwriter who leads the Austin, Tex., band Spoon, agrees, and counts himself among the beneficiaries. After the band was dropped from the major label Elektra in 1998, Mr. Daniel found his way to a new contract with the independent label Merge, and Spoon's third album for the company, "Gimme Fiction," has racked up sales of nearly 100,000 copies, outstripping the previous two and ranking as one of the year's best-reviewed releases.

"There are great bands on major labels and bad bands on independent labels, but it seems like the records made on independent labels are more about real creativity and more heartfelt stuff," Mr. Daniel said. "It may just be a three-, four-, five-year cycle where indie music is cool. Sometimes I get cynical, but people tell me, 'No, this is the way things are going to be from now on.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/ar...ic/27musi.html





Internet Fosters Local Political Movements
Ron Fournier

Frustrated by government and empowered by technology, Americans are filling needs and fighting causes through grass-roots organizations they built themselves — some sophisticated, others quaintly ad hoc. This is the era of people-driven politics.

From a homemaker-turned-kingmaker in Pittsburgh to dog owners in New York to a "gym rat" here in southwest Florida, people are using the Internet to do what politicians can't — or won't — do.

This is their story, but it's also an American story because ordinary folks are doing the extraordinary to find people with similar interests, organize them and create causes and connections.

"People are just beginning to realize how much power they have," said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic consultant who specializes in grass-roots organizing via the Internet.

"At a time when we are craving community and meaning in our lives, people are using these technologies to find others with the same complaints and organize them," he said. "They don't have to just sit in a coffee shop and gripe about politics. They can change politics."

Mary Shull changed her life, if not politics.

A lonely and frustrated liberal, the stay-at-home mother of two joined the liberal online group MoveOn.org in 2004. Working from home, the Pittsburgh woman helped round up votes for presidential candidate John Kerry and other Democrats. On Election Day, Kerry prevailed in Pennsylvania, but failed to unseat President Bush.

"I was upset with Kerry's loss, but what really devastated me was the loss of that sense of empowerment in my life, this sense of engagement, that I got with MoveOn," she said.

Shull, 31, was brimming with ideas for liberal causes, but MoveOn had virtually shut down after the election and the Democratic Party was catatonic. So she took matters in her own hands, e-mailing the 1,500 contacts she had made through MoveOn and asking if they wanted to keep busy.

Their first meeting drew 85 people. They got involved in local races, and Shull tended to her e-mail list — each name coded with the person's pet issue.

"This wasn't about a huge agenda. This was people gathering together and working with each other on things that interested them," she said. "It was just a way for people to connect with each other."

Politicians took notice. When former Rep. Joe Hoeffel decided he might want to run for lieutenant governor, he called Shull and asked for her support.

"Ten years ago, somebody like Mary would be as interested as she is in politics, but her circle of influence would not have extended beyond her home or block or even voting precinct," said Hoeffel, a Democrat who gave up his House seat in 2004 for an unsuccessful Senate bid.

"Now, she's got 1,500 other self-motivated and influential people at her fingertips, and carries as much clout as half the people I've been calling."

MoveOn, founded in 1997 to fend off President Clinton's impeachment, raised $60 million for liberal causes in 2004. The group put its organizing muscle behind Cindy Sheehan last summer and helped make the "Peace Mom" a symbol of the anti-war movement.

Political activist Tom Hayden believes that the anti-war movement in the 1960s, which he helped organize, could have gained steam sooner had the Internet existed.

"Movements happen so much faster today," he said.

And they come in all shapes and sizes.

___

Shannon Sullivan's 9-year-old son wanted to know why Mayor James E. West used a city computer to solicit gay men over the Internet, and why nobody was doing anything about it.

"He's the mayor," Sullivan replied.

"Mom, you better do something."

So she did. A single mother with a high school education and no political experience, Sullivan launched a recall campaign that used an Internet site to organize rallies and media events. Turns out there were thousands of other people in Spokane, Wash., who wondered why nobody was doing anything about West.

"I was mad at people for not doing anything. I was mad at the system and I was mad at James West," she said after her campaign succeeded in convincing voters and the mayor was recalled. "I'm not so mad anymore."

___

Roberta Bailey likes Pugs — the jowly, wrinkly faced breed of dog she keeps as a pet. She also likes punk rock and people. With the help of the Internet, the Manhattan photographer found a way to combine her interests: She organized a group of Pug owners who fought to save a legendary punk venue.

"I got off my butt and did something cool," she said.

Using the Meetup.com Web site, Bailey organized a "Million Pug March" in Washington Square Park to show support for the venerable club CBGB. It's as close to politics as she has ever come.

"Who knows what me and the Pugs can do to change the world some day," she said, giggling.

Howard Dean used Meetup.com in 2003 to organize anti-war activists behind his Democratic presidential campaign. Though his candidacy petered out, the Web site continued to grow.

Nearly 2 million people log into the site to find others with similar interests. There are more than 4,000 topics — everything from witches and pagans to wine enthusiasts, working moms and divorced dads.

"People really get a certain high about connecting with other human beings," said Scott Heiferman, the site's co-founder. "Because we live in such an isolated culture, when people come together with other like-minded people, there is a sense of, 'Let's organize to do something.'"

___

Matt Margolis got tired of hearing about the rising influence of liberal blogs so he scrolled the Internet for advice on how to start an online diary of his own. He enlisted writers. He got help with designing a home page. He found somebody who knew how to write computer coding.

Blogsforbush.com was born.

"It took a community of people to get me going," said the 25-year-old architecture student from Boston. By the end of the 2004 election, he had a nearly 1,500 other bloggers posted on his site — an army of Bush backers who donated time and money to his campaign and wrote letters to the editor on the president's behalf.

___

Dave Renzella is a fitness instructor at Omni gym in Fort Myers, Fla. In his spare time, he plugs into the MoveOn Web site to get the e-mail addresses of fellow liberals and tries to organize them.

"I'm not an activist at heart. I'm a gym rat," he said, "but the Internet makes it easy to combine an interest in people with an interest in politics."

___

Eli Pariser, the 25-year-old executive director of MoveOn Political Action, said the people-driven trend is a good thing for democracy, a chance to "shift the balance of power from established interests that can raise of lot of money and lobby special interests to a bunch of bubble-up, bottom-up citizen campaigns."

These newly empowered constituents are using technology to send a message to politicians. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack frequently hears from citizens via e-mails on his Blackberry.

"It's great because it reconnects people to government. It's created a sense of community and a sense of belonging," he said.

Politicians who pay little heed could find frustrated voters banding together and creating a third-party movement.

"At some point this has got to reach critical mass," Kofinis said. "Nobody knows when that will happen or how that will happen, but it will literally explode into a movement."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051225/...riven_politics





Linkin Park Will Stay With Warner Music
Jeff Leeds

Less than eight months after issuing a stinging, public vote of no-confidence in its record company, Warner Music Group, the multiplatinum rap-rock act Linkin Park has signed a lucrative new pact with the recording giant. The six-member Los Angeles band and its management company, the Firm, last week reached a deal with Warner calling for an estimated $15 million advance for the group's next album, executives involved in the contract negotiations said. The pact provides the company's Warner Brothers Records unit with an option for up to five more albums from the band, one more than had been called for in their original deal.

Warner also agreed to increase the musicians' royalty rate to an estimated 20 percent. The next Linkin Park CD, still untitled, is expected to be released as early as mid-2006.

The deal emerged from intense talks after Linkin Park, days before an initial public stock offering by Warner in May, demanded to be released from its contract. In a public statement, the musicians said cost cuts made before the stock sale had rendered the corporation too weak to promote the band's recordings properly. The offering followed private investors' $2.6 billion purchase of the company from its former corporate parent, Time Warner.

The record company's executives had dismissed the band's complaint as a sham intended to bolster its position in renegotiating its contract.

Linkin Park joins a long list of major acts who have publicly threatened or taken legal action against their label only to back down after receiving a hefty check. Acts like the Dixie Chicks, Beck, Incubus and Don Henley have traveled the same path.

Representatives for Warner and the band declined to discuss details. In a joint statement, the two sides said: "We would like to thank Linkin Park fans worldwide for their continued support. Despite initial concerns after last year's change in ownership, the band is pleased with the direction of the company and in Warner Brothers Records' ability to effectively market their music worldwide under the leadership of Tom Whalley," the label's chairman.

Linkin Park - Chester Bennington, Mike Shinoda, Brad Delson, Joseph Hahn, Rob Bourdon and Phoenix - have sold more than 18 million albums for Warner in America since 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In the war of words that led to the public dispute, the band's management company estimated that the group accounted for more than 10 percent of the music giant's sales; Warner countered that the figure was actually less than 3 percent. In any event, the Grammy-winning band ranks as one of the most popular and commercially successful rock bands in the world.

Its fight with Warner erupted in April, when the band's representatives sent a letter to the corporation inquiring about receiving a cut of the upcoming stock sale, industry executives familiar with the exchange said. Warner responded by saying that none of the company's artists would be paid from the stock sale proceeds but that it remained open to discussing the band's compensation.

But the two sides quickly hit a stalemate, and in early May the band issued its statement. The group said it worried that internal cutbacks might result in "a failure to live up to W.M.G.'s fiduciary responsibility" to market Linkin Park. And while the stock offering meant Warner's owners would be "reaping a windfall," the band said, "Linkin Park, their biggest act, will get nothing."

In an interview days later, Mr. Delson, the band's guitarist, said the company "is bad news and that's why we don't want to stick around and see what happens."

The record company had held firm in a similar clash in 2004 with Madonna. In a dispute over whether Warner would continue to finance the record label Maverick, its joint venture with her, Madonna sued for $200 million, contending the giant had cheated her and her partners out of millions of dollars with accounting trickery. In the end, Warner paid the Maverick owners $17 million in a buyout to settle the dispute.

In Linkin Park's case, the band might have faced tough legal hurdles if it tried to sever its contract. (As talks proceeded, Mr. Shinoda, the group's rapper, released a side project, "The Rising Tied," which has sold roughly 56,000 copies since its release last month.) While Warner has been awaiting Linkin Park's new record, it has rung up big sales for one of its acts, Green Day, whose album "American Idiot" has sold an estimated five million copies in America, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/ar...ic/28cont.html





RIAA, MPAA Anti-P2P Cops
p2p news / p2pnet

"A fantasy," writes Rod Smith in the Seattle Weekly. "Cmdr. Bainwol snakes through the maze of agents poring over the shabby apartment that, until a few hours ago, had served as a terrorist safe house. Ducking into a hallway closet, he whips off his gas mask, finally away from the smoke. His satellite phone vibrates.

" 'They started firing as soon we hit the buzzer,' he says. 'We lost three guys: two FBI, one RIAA. They got away. But our intelligence was dead on. We nabbed a couple dozen mix CDs and some mash-ups. It looks as though a lot of stuff on the discs was illegally downloaded. We slipped the bodies out well before the fire engines got here. First responders don't move all that fast in Sioux Falls'."

Sound far-fetched? – asks Smith and, "Of course it is," he answers himself. "No one has equated casual violation of intellectual property laws with terrorism since former Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped down. Nor has Mitch Bainwol, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America - a trade organization representing the nation's major recording labels and their subsidiaries - ever participated in an armed raid. But ever since Bainwol replaced Hilary Rosen, in 2002, the RIAA has been awfully cozy with the feds, and far more active in attempting to plug the myriad ruptures plaguing the music industry's revenue pipeline."

Actually, Rod, as the boss of Organized Music's RIAA, Bainwol would more fittingly be called Godfather than Commander, but sticking to the police analogy, although he personally may not have taken part in "an armed raid," his troops have, or damned near.

The RIAA and its brother pseudo-cop organization the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) both brag every chance they get that they regularly and routinely initiate, and take part in, raids against on supposed 'pirates' [counterfeiters] around the world.

For example, the MPAA is currently boasting about Big Broom, an entirely corporate bust in the Philippines which, it emphasises proudly, tied up 60 vehicles and nearly 500 people.

In Malaya, a 20-year-old man who'd been selling VCDs was shot and critically wounded by police. "There was a struggle which led to an enforcement officer opening fire. The shot was at close range and it penetrated the youth’s chest and hit the patron of a coffeeshop, who was having his dinner, in the back," said reports. A police officer was quoted as saying, “An assortment of items such as the iron stand of the VCD stall, which could have been used as a weapon, were recovered at the scene."

Shot for trying to sell a CD, even if it was probably counterfeit? And guess who inspired the 'bust'?

But he was lucky. He survived, unlike Ousmane Zango who was killed by New York city police May 22, 2003, when they raided a warehouse trying to "crack down on pirated CDs".

Moreover, the two outfits often work together and in case you're thinking they have no hard connection to the cops handling the raids, two New York Police Department cops said to have taken MPAA payoffs to arrest people who allegedly sold counterfeit DVDs were being investigated by NYPD Internal Affairs.

But back to Rod Smith's Seattle Weekly article, "Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore," says an LA Weekly item. "The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read 'RIAA' instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

"The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets. Even as it suffers setbacks in the courtroom, the RIAA has over the last 18 months built up a national staff of ex-cops to crack down on people making and selling illegal CDs in the hood."

And, "With all the trappings of a police team, including pink incident reports that, among other things, record a vendor’s height, weight, hair and eye color, the RIAA squad can give those busted the distinct impression they’re tangling with minions of Johnny Law instead of David Geffen," the LA Weekly states, adding:

" 'They tried to scare me,' Borrayo said. 'They told me, ‘You’re a pirate!’ I said, ‘C’mon, guys, pirates are all at sea. I just work in a parking lot'."

Meanwhile, "Even more pressing problems loom for the RIAA, especially regarding the 14,800 lawsuits filed by the organization against alleged illegal downloaders," says Smith. "After successfully settling out of court with hundreds of victims, er, defendants - many of whom protested their innocence while balking at potentially astronomical court costs - the association is finally getting its day in court, thanks to Patricia Santangelo, a divorced mother of five living in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., accused of downloading six songs. Given that the presiding judge has already rebuked the RIAA's attorney for attempting a final round of flagrant, last-minute intimidation, Santangelo's prospects are good, thanks to her all-too-believable contention that a friend of one of her children downloaded the offending tracks. Hello, PR disaster.

"On top of that, the association's clout in scandal-ridden Washington might very well wane, as Mr. Bainwol's Republican-insider status turns from asset to liability. It's conceivable that he might end up on the witness stand at some point, given widespread allegations of illegal activity on the part of the National Republican Senatorial Committee prior to the 2002 elections.

"Just before joining the RIAA, he served as executive director of the NRSC, directly below Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Sen. Frist, needless to say, currently has problems of his own."
http://p2pnet.net/story/7410





Spitzer Subpoenas Music Cos. On Pricing
Mark Johnson

State investigators have subpoenaed several major music companies as part of a preliminary inquiry into whether the digital music services have engaged in any illegal price-fixing activity.

Darren Dopp, a spokesman for state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, said the office was seeking information on wholesale prices the music labels charge for digital music files that can be downloaded. Dopp said Tuesday that it would take months for the office to launch a full investigation, if one is warranted.

Warner Music Group Corp. said in a regulatory filing Friday that the subpoena it received is part of "an industrywide investigation."

"As disclosed in our public filings, we are cooperating fully with the inquiry," Amanda Collins, a spokeswoman for Warner Music Group, said in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group had also received subpoenas.

Neither company returned calls for comment. Calls to EMI Group PLC's offices in New York and London went unanswered.

In September, Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs publicly criticized music companies, calling some major labels "greedy" for pushing Apple to hike prices on its popular iTunes service. Recording company executives have scoffed at the suggestion.

In a speech before an investors conference, Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said that Apple's 99-cent price for single tracks ignores the issue that not all songs are the same commercially and, like any other product, shouldn't be priced the same.

Such discord has not kept the labels from licensing their music videos to Apple. Still, as their contracts with Apple come up for renewal, the music companies are seeking to improve their take.

"All the prices do seem to move in lock step," said industry analyst Phil Leigh, who runs U.S. market research firm Inside Digital Media. "There has been talk of raising prices for several months. I'm surprised (music companies) raised the issue. It's clear the industry convention is 99 cents."

The subpoenas issued this month are not the first time Spitzer, a Democrat running for governor in 2006, has looked into the music industry.

In November, Warner Music agreed to pay $5 million to settle an investigation into payoffs for radio airplay of artists. In July, Sony BMG agreed to pay $10 million and stop bribing radio stations to feature artists.

Spitzer also asked for documents from EMI Group and Vivendi Universal in that probe.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005
Thomas Mennecke

The year 2005 was an excellent year, depending of course on your point of view. For the tech industry, BitTorrent soared to new heights while Steve Jobs enjoyed record breaking iPod sales. Yet not everyone shared this success. The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect, as Sony-BMG disgraced itself and the DRM concept.



Winners



BitTorrent - There is little doubt BitTorrent has emerged as the quintessential file- sharing protocol in 2005. Estimates on its size are staggering – anywhere from 60%- 90% of a ISPs bandwidth is consumed by this protocol. In addition, it’s suggested that up to 10 million individuals are transferring files via the BitTorrent protocol at any given moment.

BitTorrent has emerged as a legitimate distribution source as well. Being a highly efficient protocol for the distribution large files, it has become a popular method for distributing the Linux operating system and authorized multimedia entertainment.

Apple Computers, Inc. – Apple has managed to resurrect itself despite the overwhelming PC market. But Steve Job’s success isn’t attributed to a more practically priced Mac. Instead, Steve Jobs can thank the iPod. After selling over 30 million units, it has become nearly synonymous with the term “MP3 Player.”

Several variants of the iPod; the iPod Nano, the iPod Shuffle, and the new video iPod, have helped Apple once again become a house hold name. The residual effects of the iPod success story have helped Apple add 1 million Mac users, while doubling its stock value from $34 a share in January to $74 at close of business yesterday.

LimeWire – There was a time when the Gnutella network was little more than a running joke in the P2P world. The network was largely inefficient, file transfers were slow, and resources were scant. But then the remarkable happened. Led by the developmental efforts of Limewire and BearShare, the old problems associated with this network were swept away paving the way for the Gnutella resurrection.

Limewire has since remained at the forefront of Gnutella development and has quickly become the mainstream P2P program of choice. However unlike Kazaa, Limewire is highly respected among new comers and hard core file-sharers alike. Although Limewire’s network crawler estimates over 2 million connected users (a majority of which are Limewire clients), the number is suspected of being much higher – perhaps exceeding 5 million.

Open Source P2P – On September 13th, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) sent approximately seven ‘cease and desist’ letters to various commercial P2P developers. The letters demanded they impede the infringing activities of their users or face litigation.

Limewire, BearShare, MetaMachine (eDonkey), WinMX, and Ares Galaxy are believed to be among those contacted by the RIAA. The reaction varied among each developer. BearShare closed its forums and hasn’t released another version since September. WinMX completely shut down its operation. MetaMachine “threw in the towel.”

While the effort appears to have stifled commercial development of file-sharing, it served only encourage open source development.

Because of Limewire’s open source nature, development continues unabated. Even if Limewire institutes the anticipated DRM version, or shuts down completely, development should prosper without consequence. Limewire development is a community affair that exists outside the mere confines of a corporate office. The result of this community effort has spawned the popular Frostwire variant that likewise is built upon the same open source principles.

Although it’s doubtful we’ll ever see another official eDonkey client, eMule and its variants continue to evolve. Already controlling over 90% of the network, open source eDonkey2000 applications have made MetaMachine irrelevant. If you’re worried about eMule, don’t. Considering it’s an already stable client, development has always been on the slow side. Yet to sooth any concerns, an eMule developer recently told Slyck.com, “Development goes forward normally, and a new version will be released eventually.”

The story is similar for BitTorrent as well. Built on similar principles as Gnutella, BitTorrent is the very definition of a free community. Dozens of open source clients are regularly updated, and of course the protocol is free for anyone to examine.

At the end of 2005, 4 of the 5 largest communities – BitTorrent, eDoneky2000, Gnutella, and Ares Galaxy – are all open source.

ThePirateBay – With 836,879 registered users, 2,451,086 peers and 113,419 tracked torrents, ThePirateBay.org has become the most popular BitTorrent indexing site. Its ever expanding server farm helps millions of individuals share information, and the fact it resides in the BitTorrent friendly country of Sweden has allowed this tracker to remain intact.

ThePirateBay has grown in notoriety as being clearly defiant of any kind of copyright enforcement. The site’s administrator, Anakata, has become well known for his handling of DMCA and other copyright violation notices. From its early days in mid- 2004, when it only served 6750 torrents and 156389 peers, ThePirateBay.org has become a leader in this community.



Losers



RIAA – The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) wasn’t without its fair share of successes in 2005. As a co-plaintiff in the Grokster vs. MGM lawsuit, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower courts and ruled this file-sharing company could be sued.

But what good is a Supreme Court victory if you can’t enforce it? January 2005 began with 8.4 million calculable P2P users. By June, this number had grown to 8.9 million. Today, it resides at 9.4 million users (without including BitTorrent users), with no slowdown in sight.

It’s become apparent the RIAA’s lawsuits, whether against individuals or file-sharing developers, are having the exact opposite effect on the exchange of information. Adding to the RIAA’s woes, the authorized digital music market is showing signs that it is not the silver bullet the record labels hoped it would be. Indeed, music sales have stagnated going into the fourth quarter of 2005.

With more people using P2P and file-sharing technology, while fewer are buying into digital music services, it’s clear the RIAA is running a broken machine. Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA, simply appears out of touch when he gave his interpretation of the exponential growth of P2P.

“There's a lot of conflicting data about the level of p2p file sharing. It's not easy to monitor what is actually happening on the Internet, so I guess it's not surprising that the data would be inconsistent. We've seen data that shows that file-sharing has remained relatively flat, and some that shows growth, but at far lower than the rate it was growing before the lawsuits. And relative to broadband penetration, which has gone way up, file-sharing has been either level or gone up only slightly.”

At least the MPAA’s Dean Garfield admits if recent reports are indeed true, the movie industry doesn’t have a grip on the situation at hand. The music industry on the other hand must find a new way of dealing with the information age if it ever hopes to turn the tide of Internet piracy.

Sony-BMG – "Most people, I think, don't even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

Remember those words? They’re true. Most people didn’t know what a rootkit was. But Sony-BMG gave us all an excellent education on rootkits, spyware, and Digital Rights Management.

Sony-BMG’s XCP (Extended Copy Protection), designed by First4Internet, is a DRM scheme that prevents individuals from copying unlimited CDs. If an individual is unfortunate enough to have auto run enabled and agrees to the EULA, the XCP CD installs the DRM software. The only problem is the EULA doesn’t include all the specifics. It doesn’t state the DRM would be hidden on one’s machine, and it doesn’t articulate its removal process. In addition, those who are able to remove this software run the risk of damaging their machine. It’s also discovered that Sony-BMG’s proprietary music player “phones home” with information.

Not only did Sony-BMG break the trust with the consumer, it was discovered their copy protection scheme could be easily exploited by a malicious individual. Quite simply, the individual could name a virus identically to the XCP copy protection files. Since a rootkit file or folder is hidden by its very nature, most anti virus or spyware applications would be unable to discover the virus. It was soon discovered that Sony’s other copy protection software, Media Maxx, created by SunnComm, also suffered from easily exploitable vulnerabilities.

Sony-BMG has since been sued by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott under the states new spyware law. The state of Texas finds that Sony-BMG used deceptive trade practices when they distributed CDs with MediaMax and XCP software.

Because of Sony-BMG’s fiasco, the future of the DRM has been cast into doubt and destroyed any credible argument against online piracy. Most of all, they betrayed the consumer.

Sharman Networks – Despite a few serendipitous courtroom battle victories, Sharman Networks is in serious trouble. It has managed to stay afloat thanks to a serious blunder by an ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) lawyer, who gave Sharman Networks the leverage needed to maintain their business model until at least February.

Although Sharman Networks is superficially polar opposites from the RIAA, they actually have a lot in common. Perhaps most notably, Sharman Networks is also running a broken machine.

Marginally surviving off a network that has remained virtually unchanged since its introduction in 2002, FastTrack is a primordial swamp of malware, spyware, viruses, Trojans, and other undesirable third party software. In fact, a recent study estimated that 50% of all files on the FastTrack network are corrupt in some way.

Although FastTrack has enough internal strength to pull itself together, it simply doesn't have the technical ability to do so. Expect the ARIA to regroup in 2006 and finally do away with Sharman Networks.

Grokster – Grokster has always been the one of the most recognizable losers of the file-sharing world. Throughout its existence, it was infamous for its third party software – a malicious cocktail of crippling spyware and adware.

The inclusion of third party software made Grokster virtually unusable. The amount of pop-ups, subversive programs, and other resource sapping malignancies created a hostile computer environment – a problem only solvable by reformatting.

This menace was finally taken out of its misery on November 7th. A result of the Supreme Court ruling on June 27th, the Grokster P2P client was forever removed from Grokster.com. Topping off its unfortunate existence, the music and movie industry forced Grokster into a $50 million settlement, ensuring its banishment from the P2P world.

Pay P2P – PeerImpact, iMesh, Altnet. Along the way, someone got the brilliant idea to create a pay P2P network. But they left out one key ingredient in the thought process. If people aren’t willing to spend money in the record stores, why would they spend it online? And furthermore, why on Earth would they spend money to download from a P2P network when free communities are profuse? There’s an old saying that there’s a sucker born every minute, and perhaps pay P2P networks prove that. Yet for the most part, pay P2P is a dismal failure compared to more intelligently marketed pay download sources such as iTunes.

Pay P2P is a doomed industry (where’s MashBoxx?) thanks to the Sony-BMG fiasco. People are interested in music that is unencumbered with DRM, not the excuse for digital entertainment masquerading on pay P2P networks.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1040





U.S. Music Album Sales Down 7 Percent
Alex Veiga

U.S. album sales were down about 7 percent as 2005 drew to a close, but the budding market for music downloads, which more than doubled over last year, helped narrow the revenue gap, according to figures released Wednesday.

Album sales from January through the week ending Dec. 25 stood at 602.2 million, compared with 650.8 million for the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Combined, album and singles sales fell about 8 percent over the same time last year. More than 95 percent of music is sold in CD format.

Downloaded tracks from online retailers soared to 332.7 million this year, compared with 134.2 million in 2004, an increase of 148 percent.

While good news for recording companies looking to expand download sales, it doesn't bode well for music retailers relying on customers to buy music CDs rather than digital downloads to turn a profit amid declining sales.

"More and more we're seeing customers switch to downloads or burning CDs from their friends," said Jesse Klempner, owner of Aron's Records in Hollywood. "The last couple of years we've been hanging on by our teeth."

The top three best-selling albums of 2005 through Dec. 21 were rapper 50 Cent's "The Massacre," which had sold 4.8 million copies, followed by Mariah Carey's "The Emancipation of Mimi" with 4.6 million sold, and Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway," which sold 3.3 million units, Nielsen SoundScan said.

Full-album downloads are counted under album sales along with other formats. Most digital downloads reflect single-track purchases.

Sales of music-related videos, another key revenue source for brick-and-mortar retailers, plunged 23 percent over the same time last year, Nielsen SoundScan said.

Holiday shoppers helped pump up music download sales figures with some last-minute shopping, buying 9.6 million downloads - the biggest sales week ever for digital downloads, according to the company.

Music lovers bought 5 million tracks during the same week last year.

Final 2005 figures won't be available until Jan. 4, 2006. The last week of the year typically sees a boost in music sales as gift certificates or other promotions given out for the holidays are spent. Those additional sales could help narrow the sales gap further.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT





Verizon Loses Some Edge Atop the Bells
Ken Belson

Is the Verizon premium fading?

For the last few years, Verizon's stock has traded more than 30 percent above its Baby Bell peers - AT&T, BellSouth and Qwest - because investors felt it had more valuable, wealthier customers in the Northeast, and because its cellular group, Verizon Wireless, was the industry's most profitable.

But investors decided in 2005 that Verizon may not be worth the extra money any more. In addition to the continuing loss of its landline customers, investors are worried about the company's decision to spend billions of dollars to build fiber optic lines to homes and expand into an already crowded cable television market.

Investors also figure that Verizon will, sooner or later, buy out Vodafone, based in Britain, which owns 45 percent of Verizon Wireless. Ending its partnership with Vodafone would allow Verizon to report all of the profits from the fast-growing wireless group on its income statement. It would also give Verizon greater freedom to pursue other wireless companies, including Alltel, which some analysts say is dressing itself up to be sold.

But analysts expect Verizon to have to spend tens of billions of dollars to buy out Vodafone, a prospect that makes some investors uneasy.

With these factors in play, investors have sent Verizon's stock down 24.8 percent this year. Shares in AT&T (the former SBC Communications) and BellSouth, which face many of the same problems, have dipped less than 5 percent each. Qwest, the most beaten down of the Bells, has rebounded 32.3 percent.

As a result, Verizon's shares are just 19 percent higher than shares of AT&T, down from nearly 37 percent at the beginning of the year.

Verizon's shares dipped 4 cents to close at $30.44 yesterday.

The gap between the Bells may narrow further in 2006, industry analysts say. Last week, Washington became the last state to approve Verizon's $8.4 billion purchase of MCI, which clears the way for Verizon to absorb the country's second-biggest long-distance carrier in early January.

Verizon will then begin the messy business of cutting costs at MCI, including eliminating thousands of jobs. Even so, the MCI merger is likely to dilute Verizon's overall growth because MCI's revenue has been shrinking. Verizon Wireless, the fastest-growing part of the company, will contribute 35 percent of total revenue after the merger, down from 42 percent now, according to Precursor, a research group.

Verizon has also been hit harder than the other Bells by competition from cable companies, which are expanding rapidly into the phone business.

Cablevision, which serves mostly the New York metropolitan area, has signed up more than 600,000 customers for its Internet-based phone service. Time Warner Cable, which also operates in the New York area, has 854,000 Internet phone customers. Comcast, which operates in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and other cities in Verizon's territory, is entering the phone market, too.

To retain its phone customers, Verizon has started heavily discounting its local and long-distance plans and marketing its own Internet phone service, called VoiceWing.

In an interview earlier this month, Verizon's chief executive, Ivan G. Seidenberg, acknowledged that investors had grown restless with his company, which for years faced few rivals in the phone business.

"Investors have been so used to what they considered an industry that had limited or minimal competition," Mr. Seidenberg said. "Now they get concerned about which companies win and which companies lose."

But Mr. Seidenberg has been steadfast in pursuing an aggressive plan to build a fiber optic cable network that will reach six million customers by the end of 2006. He hopes that with these high-capacity data lines in place, customers will buy not just phone and broadband services, but television programming as well.

The trouble is that customers are under no obligation to unplug their cable or satellite service. This means that Verizon has to spend billions of dollars to put a network in place with no guarantee it will generate substantial revenues.

The biggest challenge for Verizon, though, is how to take control of all of Verizon Wireless. Vodafone, the world's largest cellphone company, collects checks each quarter from Verizon, but it has often signaled that it would prefer to control an American subsidiary using its own name.

Vodafone is likely to demand at least $20 million for its stake, and possibly more, according to industry analysts. Perhaps with an eye toward opening negotiations with Vodafone, Verizon said this month that it was looking for a potential buyer for its phone directories business, which it hoped would bring upward of $17 billion. Verizon also said it would freeze pension and health benefits for 50,000 managers to save $3 billion over 10 years.

Verizon may also have to sell off sections of its landline network or scale back its plans to introducing fiber optic services, analysts say.

"The priority for 2006 will be unwinding the Vodafone deal because that's held Verizon on the sidelines for several years," said Daniel Berninger, an analyst at Tier 1 Research, an independent research firm. "It's painful for them because you add up all the parts and they don't have enough."

Mr. Berninger added that "people will start asking whether it is worth it" to own Verizon shares.

He is not alone in noting Verizon's challenge. Last week, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the credit rating on Verizon's $45 billion in debt to A3, from A2, one notch below AT&T's credit rating. Moody's cited the high costs of trying to reach homes with fiber optic cable and heightened competition between the Bells and cable companies.

Verizon's chief financial officer, Doreen A. Toben, who is on the board of The New York Times Company, took the unusual step of publicly rebuking Moody's decision. But most analysts say that Moody's decision was a recognition that Verizon, for all its resources, is no longer head and shoulders above its peers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/business/28place.html





Viacom Comes to the Great Divide, and Calls It a Path to Growth
Geraldine Fabrikant

On Jan. 3, Sumner M. Redstone will get his wish when Viacom, the sprawling media company he built, is split into two separate entities.

Now what?

Even before the actual separation, the two companies - Viacom, which includes Paramount and the cable networks like MTV and Nickelodeon, and will be led by Thomas E. Freston; and CBS, encompassing the CBS network, television and radio stations, Simon & Schuster and an outdoor advertising business, to be run by Leslie Moonves - have been establishing their own identities. And lately Wall Street has begun to show a bit of enthusiasm.

When the split was announced on March 17, Viacom stock closed at $36.72 a share. By October, it had dipped to $30.06 a share, but it has since risen somewhat to close at $33.34 a share last Friday.

One question for investors is whether the split is a prelude to a buying spree; that is, does Mr. Redstone plan to build up two new companies, just as he built up Viacom the first time?

A bigger question is whether Mr. Redstone will decide to sell off assets if the split fails to bolster the stock price of either company.

No one has more riding on the breakup than Mr. Redstone himself, who will remain chairman of each company.

The 82-year-old entrepreneur has always been focused on the company's stock price and has been vocal in his concerns about its decline.

Mr. Redstone adamantly denies that he has plans to part with either company. "I have no intention of selling," he said firmly in a telephone interview last week.

"I happen to like both companies, not just Tom's company," he said. "I happen to like Les's company."

Mr. Redstone's daughter, Shari E. Redstone, who is to serve on the boards of both companies, and who one day is to control the family's holdings, is equally adamant.

"No, this is not a precursor to selling the businesses," Ms. Redstone said. "They are two different companies, and they have two very different visions. This was done to maximize the value, and we are going to do it. There is no intent to sell this. That is absurd."

Some analysts are skeptical, pointing out that Mr. Redstone, who has rarely sold stock, has watched his Viacom holdings decline by roughly half, to $6 billion. That has prompted some speculation that Mr. Redstone is teeing up one of his properties for a sale.

"Regardless of what they say, whether it is their intention or not, I think a sale is a real possibility," said Richard Routh, a media analyst at Jeffries & Company. "Sumner has set it up in such a way that it makes perfect sense."

Mr. Redstone built Viacom into a media behemoth by acquiring Paramount Communications in 1994 for nearly $10 billion and merging with CBS in 1999 in a $37 billion deal.

At its height in August 2000, Viacom stock traded at $71.13 a share. Since then the stock has tumbled as investors worried that the radio station and television businesses were in jeopardy as new media outlets competed for audience and advertising.

Whether they agree that carving up Viacom is a smart strategy, investors generally consider Mr. Freston and Mr. Moonves "very good managers," as Christopher J. Marangi, a media analyst at Gabelli & Company, whose affiliate, Gamco Investors, owns 10 million shares of Viacom, put it.

To be sure, when companies get smaller, there is always the possibility that they will immediately turn around and race to make acquisitions, undermining the very reason they were overhauled and recreating the conglomerates they had sought to dismember.

Indeed, CBS earlier this year said it would spend $325 million to acquire the College Sports Network, to increase its presence in cable sports.

Since the CBS network owns the universal rights to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, it can, for example, promote those games on its new cable channel.

To Leo J. Hindery Jr., a former cable executive who now heads InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm, that purchase underscored the pointlessness of splitting the company.

"Their strategy is belied by their actions," said Mr. Hindery. "Soon after the decision to split, CBS acquires a cable channel just like the kind it left behind."

So far at least, the planned acquisitions at both companies are relatively small. Earlier this month, Viacom and its studio division, Paramount, made a big splash by announcing it would acquire DreamWorks for $1.6 billion.

But in a move that helped soothe anxious Viacom investors, $800 million to $1 billion of the price is to come from private equity partners, significantly reducing Viacom's exposure to the uncertainties of the movie business.

Mr. Redstone seems intent on avoiding large deals. "I told the guys that they would only make 'tuck in' acquisitions,' " he said in a telephone interview last week.

He added that when the first opportunity to buy DreamWorks for $1.6 billion came up, he told Mr. Freston. " 'Tom, this is your call, but the board will never approve it and it won't fly with Wall Street.' "

Viacom is to continue to build its portfolio of cable channels overseas in a series of smaller acquisitions. Last year, for example, it acquired Viva Media, a clutch of music channels in Germany, in an effort to broaden its menu of programming for advertisers. That strategy is aimed at highlighting the fast-growing cable network business.

Meanwhile CBS is taking steps to make its stock more attractive to value investors, those who seek reliable income and dividends rather than rapid growth.

First, it is to maintain the current dividend that the old Viacom paid. That works out to about a 2 percent yield. The company is also to contribute a portion of its cash flow to its underfinanced pension plan. Corporations are allowed to deduct the entire amount they contribute to their pension plans from pretax earnings.

"For book purposes you spread it over many years, but for tax purposes, you can get it in the first year," said Richard Bilotti, a media analyst at Morgan Stanley. "So you can get a big tax benefit and it boosts earnings."

Mr. Bilotti, who favors the split, says that financing the pension would not have been meaningful at the old Viacom. "I think that each company will benefit from concentrating more intently on their discrete financial issues," he said.

But even if these moves fail to pay off, a number of people who know the family well say they believe that Mr. Redstone will never sell the new Viacom, where he has been deeply involved for a decade.

Indeed, his autobiography, "A Passion to Win" begins with the quote "Viacom is me. I have a love affair with this business and this company."

But clearly, he has a lot at risk. "The company has been undervalued for some time, and the split will shed some new light on Viacom and surface the value that is there," said Mr. Marangi of Gabelli.

If this does not prove to be a catalyst, what will he do?

"Sumner has a very valuable asset in this industry, and if the market does not give it real value, I have to believe there are other players who would buy those assets," said Richard Greenfield, of Fulcrum Global Partners. "He is taking drastic action acknowledging how significantly the media landscape has changed over the past couple of years.

"Radio is not the business people had thought it was. TV stations have been impacted by the TiVo phenomenon and the overall shift of ad dollars to the Internet."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/bu.../26viacom.html





Microsoft Quits MSNBC TV, but Web Partnership Remains
Bill Carter

Ending a partnership that soured long ago, Microsoft and NBC announced yesterday that they would dissolve their joint ownership of the cable news channel MSNBC, with NBC taking control.

NBC has completed a deal to assume majority control of the channel immediately, with an 82 percent stake, and it will become the sole owner within two years, NBC executives said yesterday. The two companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

But the partners will continue their 50-50 ownership of the MSNBC Web site, which, partly as a consequence of its affiliation with Microsoft, is the most-used news site on the Internet.

The news channel, which began in 1995, has always been more of the problem child in the partnership, almost always trailing the other two news channels, Fox News and CNN, in audience ratings.

More seriously, the financial arrangement that set the channel up in 1995 had become a bone of contention between the partners, with Microsoft feeling it had paid, and was continuing to pay, far too much.

With this dissension as a backdrop, the dissolution of the mutual ownership of the cable channel has been anticipated for some time, though NBC executives on occasion tried to put down rumors that a breakup was imminent.

The less-than-celebratory nature of the breakup seemed to be underscored by the timing of the announcement. NBC and Microsoft released the news at 8 a.m. yesterday, the Friday before Christmas, when the offices of both companies were already closed for the holiday weekend.

Of the two contacts listed on the release, one, from NBC, had a message on her office phone number saying she would be gone until Tuesday, and the other, from Microsoft, was at an airport with two toddlers ready to fly home for the holiday.

That spokeswoman, Kristen Batch, from a public relations firm, Waggener, Edstrom, said Microsoft executives would have no comment anyway, beyond what was said in the official news release.

In the release, a Microsoft executive, Bruce Jaffe, mentioned only the continuing partnership on the Web site and said nothing about the decision to walk away from the cable channel.

Microsoft has made no secret of its lack of enthusiasm for the cable channel. In 2002, Steven A. Ballmer, the company's chief executive, said publicly that if Microsoft had an opportunity to turn back time, it would never have gone through with the deal for MSNBC. Microsoft agreed to a 99-year partnership, put up a reported $500 million, and then committed to paying NBC about $30 million a year in license fees.

Reached at home yesterday, Julie Summersgill, a corporate spokeswoman for NBC, said that despite the timing, the companies were not trying to bury the news on the slowest news weekend of the year. It simply worked out that way, she said.

"Ideally, we would have put this out on Tuesday," Ms. Summersgill said. The deal was completed late Wednesday night, but neither company could apparently manage to prepare an announcement in time to be released Thursday.

Executives at NBC News professed enthusiasm about the opportunity to run the channel on their own. Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, said in a statement that the deal would permit NBC to "fully integrate the channel into our news operations." But NBC executives have said for years that Microsoft never had any editorial control of the channel.

NBC News executives have said they were encouraged lately by some ratings gains, especially in prime time. And they have said they continued to believe that the news channel gives NBC a sizable advantage over CBS News and ABC News, neither of which has a 24-hour cable news channel.

One looming question is whether the channel's name will be changed, now that MSNBC has no association with Microsoft. The Web site will retain the name.

Ms. Summersgill said, "Nobody is talking about things like a name change for the channel right now."

Microsoft sold Slate, its online magazine, to The Washington Post last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/bu...a/24msnbc.html





Local news

Backer of Microsoft Challenge Steps Down
Mark Jewell

Massachusetts' tech adviser is resigning after leading the state to embrace an open, nonproprietary electronic data format that challenges Microsoft Corp.'s dominant Office suite of business software.

Peter Quinn, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney's technology adviser, says the plan is drawing so much attention that it is hurting other state technology initiatives. So he's resigning, effective Jan. 12.

Quinn wrote in an e-mail to state Informational Technology Division staff that it was "readily apparent that I have become a lightning rod with regard to any IT initiative," The Boston Globe reported.

Romney spokeswoman Julie Teer told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Quinn's resignation would not affect plans to have the state's executive offices store records in a new "OpenDocument" format by Jan. 1, 2007.

The goal is to ensure records can easily be read, exchanged and modified decades into the future. "OpenDocument" is proprietary-free, meaning the technical specifications are publicly available and can be used by other developers without licensing restrictions.

Last month, Microsoft pledged to standardize the format for an upcoming version of Office by submitting it to a technical standards body. The Romney administration has said Microsoft's move could reduce the possibility that the state may eventually remove Office software from government computers.

Massachusetts is the first state to take the step and is being closely watched by the information technology industry and other state governments.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Fate Of High-Def DVD May Lie With Microsoft
Junko Yoshida

After months of intense wrangling between the competing Blu-ray and HD-DVD groups, the battle lines in the war over a next-generation high-definition DVD format have moved to the doorstep of Microsoft Corp.

Several industry sources last week told EE Times that Microsoft is muscling into the optical-disk fray by leveraging its operating-system clout to bundle HD-DVD within Vista, the company's next-generation OS. There is also talk that the software giant may be planning to offer cash incentives — in the form "coupons" — to system vendors or retailers if they agree to support HD-DVD. Such coupons would provide "credits" or "memos" for each PC that is sold with HD-DVD inside.

Many consumer electronics companies in the Blu-ray camp are scrambling to figure out, respond to and possibly preempt the next move by the world's largest — and richest — computer software maker.

Microsoft would neither confirm nor deny such reports. Asked about financial incentives the company might be dangling in front of PC OEMs to lure them into the HD-DVD camp, a spokesman said, "Microsoft doesn't comment on the details of meetings we've had with our partners."

One fact, however, is hard to miss: In the short span of two months, Microsoft has gotten through to Hewlett-Packard Co. HP, which still sits on the board of the Blu-ray Disc Association and previously supported the Blu-ray format exclusively, joined the HD-DVD Forum earlier this month. This semi-reversal came in the wake of a series of meetings with Microsoft, said Maureen Weber, general manager of HP's Personal Storage Business.

In October, when Microsoft and Intel Corp. announced their support for HD-DVD, Weber warned of "legal implications, if Microsoft is using its dominance in the operating system market — virtually a monopoly — to play favorites and hurt the competition" (see http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showA...leID=171202192).

Asked whether Microsoft is now doing just that, Weber said that in the end, "It's about money and the cost to the PC industry." Whereas the overall Blu-ray royalty structure adds up to $30 per PC drive, she said, everything a PC vendor needs to support HD-DVD "comes free, shipped and integrated with Vista — Microsoft Corp.'s next- generation operating system."

Most PC companies have no choice but to support Vista in the Microsoft-dominant OS market.

Still, many consumer electronics executives involved in negotiations with PC OEMs believe there is more to the story of HP's flip. Some sources expect clarifications and new developments to emerge within the next several weeks, shedding light on the decision.

Dell Inc., for its part, has no intention of switching its support from Blu-ray, Brian Zucker, a Dell technology strategist who sits on the Blu-Ray DVD committee, told EE Times. "The only reasons we would make a change would be if we saw significant customer demand not to back the format we have been working on," he added.

Dell, which was not involved in defining the original CD or DVD specifications, decided a couple of years ago that it was important to get involved in the current format discussions. "This time we wanted to work upstream a little bit more, particularly as we are getting more interested in the digital home," Zucker said.

Dell chose Blu-ray for two reasons: its higher capacity (25 Gbytes for an entry-level disk, compared with about 15 Gbytes for a basic HD-DVD) and its longer list of industry backers. Two years later, Dell now feels it has a vested interest in Blu-ray because it helped make sure the spec represented its customers' interests, Zucker said.

Zucker added that he has no idea why Dell's major partners — Intel and Microsoft — are opposing Blu-ray and backing HD-DVD. In his opinion, slight differences in the copy protection scheme for Blu-ray will not prevent users from making so-called "managed copies" of content on the disks, a feature that he said was a priority for both camps.

Intel provides no optical-disk technology, so a difference of opinion between Dell and Intel on the subject has little impact on the PC maker. Likewise, Microsoft, which does not make optical drives, has a history of letting third-party software companies supply key optical-disk support rather than write its own optical-disk code into Windows.

Given that history, the overarching question for many industry watchers is: Why is Microsoft now siding with HD-DVD, a format that has generated relatively little enthusiasm among Hollywood studios and hardware vendors?

While Dell may have no idea about Microsoft's motives, those in the consumer electronics industry have several theories.

Many, who spoke on condition of anonymity, believe Microsoft is committed to prolonging the format war, not necessarily winning the battle for HD-DVD. Rather, they say, HD-DVD is a Trojan horse, rolled into the format war to create advantages in battles yet to be fought — especially against Sony Corp.

Xbox vs. Playstation

Consider, for example, Microsoft's Xbox 360. The new game console is already on the market despite the absence of a high-definition strategy, said one source. The Xbox
360 is based on a current-generation DVD drive. The longer the next-generation high-definition DVD format battle persists, the better the opportunity for Microsoft to downplay the HD capability scheduled for integration in Sony's upcoming Blu-ray-based Playstation 3 game machine.

Second, a drawn-out high-definition optical-disk format battle helps Microsoft buy time to promote its connected-home strategy. By undercutting the value of standalone prerecorded media devices, Microsoft hopes to accelerate a consumer electronics transition into the brave new world of "downloadable" content, some observers say.

As Peter Barrett, chief technology officer of the Microsoft TV Division, explains it, the company believes that "the point of integration, the point of convergence, is the service, not the device" (see Interview, page 1).

In Microsoft's view, next-generation consumer devices will no longer be simply connected to one-way broadcast or removable media. Rather, the company envisions HD- DVD players tied to the network via subscription services. In essence, said a longtime Microsoft observer, by leveraging its .Net strategy, Microsoft "wants to become the telephone company of the living room."

Third, the classic battle between Microsoft and CE companies always comes down to the stickiest issue: to Java or not to Java.

For Microsoft, hoping to establish control over the software platform in the living room, support for HD-DVD is critical in this regard. The format uses iHD, an XML-based technology, to add interactivity, rather than Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java language.

In contrast, consumer electronics companies are committed to deploying the Java-based Multimedia Home Platform in the Blu-ray format. MHP has already established itself in the TV world as the standard platform upon which to offer interactivity. MHP is widely used in Europe, and is the foundation of CableLabs' Open Cable Application Platform and the Advanced Television Systems Committee's Advanced Common Application Platform in the United States.

"For MHP, the industry already has development tools, experience and a growing installed base that will grow regardless of any DVD decision," said Stu Lipoff, partner at IP Action Partners (Newton, Mass.).

The Java-averse Microsoft "is trying to displace MHP so that they have a big dog in the fight," he said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is blaming Blu-ray's use of Java for its potentially much higher royalties. Java-based Blu-ray format royalties include the licensing of the Globally Executable MHP standard, the cost of a Java test kit from Sun Microsystems and the cost of BD-Java, the version on which the Blu-ray Disc format is built, said HP's Weber.

PCs don't need Java because they already offer interactivity. In contrast, consumer electronics companies do need Java to make their end products interactive. Just as consumer electronics manufacturers regard integrating Microsoft's Windows as overkill, HP feels that Java in a PC platform is too costly.

Big backers

Until Microsoft stepped into the battle, the Blu-ray Disc format was gaining ground steadily over HD-DVD, with support from a majority of major studios in Hollywood — with
the exception of NBC Universal — and a much longer list of hardware companies than HD-DVD can boast. Besides Dell and fellow computer maker Apple, supporters include Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson.

But even with that list of heavyweights, nobody is declaring a Blu-ray victory, because everyone understands the sheer power Microsoft can — and often does — exercise, all by itself.

Among familiar Microsoft tactics is to offer incentives — promotions, discounts and credits — to PC OEMs. If a certain percentage of an OEM's systems use Windows, Microsoft typically chips in on advertising campaigns and co-sponsors promotional events. When a PC manufacturer is living on a 3 percent margin, such market- development payments or volume-discount rebates can be make-or-break factors. Some industry observers have termed these in-kind subsidies from Microsoft "the heroin of the PC industry."

Asked whether Microsoft was offering Dell or anyone else financial incentives to join the HD-DVD consortium, Dell's Zucker said, "I have not heard anything about that, nor would I comment on it."

The last few months have seen a tug-of-war between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD camps over HP and Dell. Negotiations that played out at a very high level, according to sources familiar with the situation, resulted in HP's flip and Dell's refusal to budge.

Cause for anxiety

But even as they claim victory by keeping Dell on board, Blu-ray backers are not anxiety-free. Consumer electronics manufacturers recognize the expanding role played by
the PC platform in the home. "While the major next-generation DVD market will be based on dedicated DVD player platforms, there is a substantial and growing market for playback on PCs," said Lipoff of IP Action Partners. "Microsoft, then, can add the needed digital rights management to the Windows operating system for a more-seamless and perhaps higher-security protection of the content than would be possible for DRM software that is an add-in."

No one in the consumer industry can ever safely ignore the Microsoft/Intel support for HD-DVD. On the other hand, there is no assurance that the alliance within the Blu-ray group, now united against Microsoft, will remain tight forever. Ben Keen, chief analyst at Screen Digest, a London-based market research firm, said, "One of the most potentially divisive elements in the Blu-ray camp is Sony undercutting all the CE products with a Playstation 3 that does everything a Blu-ray player will do — and much more."

Additional reporting by Rick Merritt.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...leID=175400242





Fiddling With Format While DVD's Burn
Ken Belson

The war for control of the next-generation DVD is approaching a critical juncture: next week in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, companies championing the two competing high-definition DVD standards - Blu-ray and HD-DVD - will unveil their lineups of new players and movie titles.

There are growing signs, though, that the battle for supremacy in this multibillion-dollar market may yield a hollow victory. As electronics makers, technology companies and Hollywood studios haggle over the fine points of their formats, consumers are quickly finding alternatives to buying and renting packaged DVD's, high definition or otherwise.

"While they fight, Rome is burning," said Robert Heiblim, an independent consultant to electronics companies. "High-definition video-on-demand and digital video recorders are compelling, and people will say, 'Why do I need it?' " when considering whether to buy a high-definition player.

The fight between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD groups is based on different views of what consumers want. The HD-DVD camp, led by Toshiba, assumes that consumers will buy high-definition DVD's and players, but only at the right price. So it is improving existing DVD technology, which can be made cheaply and quickly.

The Blu-ray group figures that something brand new is needed to get consumers interested, so it is developing discs with enough capacity to allow for innovative features in the future.

Both sides agree, however, that now is the time to introduce high-definition DVD discs and players. Sales of high-definition televisions, with their sleek design and superior picture and sound quality, are soaring, and the major networks are broadcasting more programs in high definition.

Game console makers like Sony see high-definition video games as a way to increase sales, and Hollywood hopes that high-definition discs will offset slumping sales of current-generation DVD's in the $19 billion prepackaged disc market.

Yet the alternatives to these new players and DVD's are growing by the day. The most promising is the on-demand programming, both standard and high definition, being offered by cable companies. The percentage of cable customers who watch on-demand television has doubled in the past year, to 23 percent, according to the Leichtman Research Group.

With thousands of free movies available at any time, consumers have fewer reasons to rent a DVD at Blockbuster or buy a new one at Best Buy. They are also likely to think twice before spending $1,000 or more for a new high-definition DVD player, or $25 or so to own a disc of a movie they might already have in standard definition.

Of course, these newfangled ways of watching video are still a small piece of the overall video market, and industry executives and analysts say they expect most consumers to continue buying prerecorded DVD's for years to come. They also say they believe that high-definition programs - and the televisions to watch them on - are the way of the future. The question is how consumers will get that programming.

Even without these alternatives, high-definition DVD's face an unpredictable start. The inability of the Blu-ray group and HD-DVD camp to agree on a standard means that consumers must consider two sets of machines. Except for avid technophiles, consumers are likely to wait out the standards battle, lest they get stuck with an obsolete player.

Machines will also be expensive - $1,000 or more - and consumers will need a television capable of playing high-definition programs, which can easily cost several thousand dollars more. The list of movies available in the formats will be skimpy at first.

Sony, which leads the Blu-ray group, has said that its new video game consoles, due out this spring, will play Blu-ray DVD's. But few industry analysts expect consumers to buy the game machine just to watch movies.

In the meantime, other companies are making it easier to watch and copy high-definition movies. Scientific-Atlanta has a new set-top box with a digital video recorder and DVD recorder built in, so cable subscribers can use a single machine to record programming and burn it onto blank discs.

"Consumers are getting hooked on video-on-demand and the flexibility of moving content around the home," said Ted Schadler, an industry analyst at Forrester. "The battle over the format is silly. For the product to grow, they have to promote the benefits of HD, not battle each other."

Yet the two sides are digging in their heels, not shaking hands. Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and other backers of the Blu-ray format expect to flood stores next year with high-definition DVD players, and half a dozen studios will make movies for them.

Not to be outdone, the HD-DVD camp led by Toshiba has won endorsements from Microsoft and Intel. Hewlett-Packard, a member of the Blu-ray group, agreed last week to work with the HD-DVD camp as well.

These allies say that the wall between computers and consumer electronics is blurring and that the new formats should let users move movies and other content among various devices seamlessly. Not surprisingly, they see computers as the main conduit, not stand-alone electronic devices.

"If PC's don't adopt these technologies, it will be a ho-hum 2006" for next-generation DVD's, said Maureen Weber, the general manager of the personal storage group at Hewlett-Packard. "It all boils down to Microsoft and Sony wanting to dominate the connected home. It's a showdown between consumer electronics and personal computers over convergence."

Ms. Weber, like many other executives, acknowledges that the longer the format battle continues, the higher the likelihood that consumers will find other solutions, including video-on-demand.

Comcast, the country's largest cable provider, already gives its 20 million subscribers access to 3,800 movies and television shows. The 44 percent of Comcast's subscribers who have the set-top box needed to see on-demand programs have watched more than a billion of them so far this year.

There are signs that rising on-demand viewing is denting DVD sales and rentals, a worrying sign for Hollywood executives who increasingly rely on disc sales to offset the rising cost of producing movies. Since consumer electronics makers and Hollywood studios earn much of their profit on sales margins, they will feel the pinch if these new viewing options grab even 5 or 10 percent of video market.

A poll by the Starz Entertainment Group this month showed that 60 percent of those who watch on-demand video buy fewer DVD's, while 72 percent of those surveyed are renting fewer movies.

Starz has also broadened the definition of on-demand with Starz Ticket, which lets users download movies to their laptops or other devices for $12.95 a month. The service includes a rotation of 300 movies that can be watched repeatedly and, like a digital video recorder, can be paused, rewound and fast-forwarded. Like store- bought DVD's, they also include directors' cuts, foreign-language versions and other bonus material.

"We're on the verge of another major shift in terms of how consumers receive video," said Tom Southwick, a spokesman for the Starz Entertainment Group. "What's happening in the video arena is just like what is happening in the MP3 market. Over time, there's going to be so much available with cable on-demand and the Internet that having a library of tapes that you buy or borrow will become inconvenient."

For now, none of the Starz Ticket movies are in high definition because typical broadband connections are too slow to make downloads feasible. The current generation of discs hold up to 8.5 gigabytes, not enough for a full-length movie in high definition.

Consumer habits also die hard.

"You can change technology all you want, but you can't change people," said Andy Parsons, a Blu-ray group spokesman who noted that the vast majority of music fans still buy CD's. "Average folks still want to watch the movie and buy it. It's presuming a lot to think that they will replace the model they've used for decades."

But even average folks may learn fast when they have cheaper and more convenient options.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/te.../26format.html





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Pioneer Prepares to Launch Blu-ray Disc Drive

Optical drive for PCs will debut at next month's Consumer Electronics Show
Martyn Williams

Pioneer plans to unveil at the International Consumer Electronics Show its first Blu-ray Disc format optical disc drive for personal computers, it said this week. The drive will go on sale in Japan at the end of January pending the completion of two licensing issues, the company says.

The BDR-101A drive is compatible with non-cartridge single-layer recordable BD-R and rewritable BD-RW discs and single and dual-layer read-only BD-ROM discs, the company says. It is also compatible with a wide range of DVD-based media and can write DVD-R and DVD-RW discs, says Pioneer.

Pioneer plans to initially offer it direct to Japanese PC makers for inclusion in their desktop computers and systems and will later expand sales to other countries, says Akira Muneto, a spokesperson for Pioneer in Tokyo. It's scheduled to be available in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2006. This schedule means that PCs on the market boasting Blu-ray Disc support could appear in the first half of 2006.

The drive will have an ATAPI interface that delivers a data transfer rate of 33MB per second, says Muneto.

The company did not specify a price for the drive or plans for sales of the drive direct to consumers.

Content Management Concerns

Pioneer's drive is the first announcement of a shipping date from any optical disc drive maker although its January schedule may be derailed by a delay in licensing of the content management system or Blu-ray Disc logo, it says.

The inability of the companies behind the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) content management system to complete their work has already caused Toshiba to put launch plans for its HD-DVD player on hold. AACS is made up of a number of companies from the electronics and content industries. The group's founders include IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Sony, Toshiba, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros.

The group has declined several requests for comment or interview regarding when the first version of its format will be completed.

CES runs in Las Vegas, Nevada, from January 5 to January 8, 2006.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/arti...RSS,RSS,00.asp





$13 Million Award to Enhance Resource-Sharing Software

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $13.3 million award to sustain and enhance the Globus Toolkit, the software that underpins a rapidly increasing number of large information-intensive science projects in the United States and abroad. Globus founders Ian Foster of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory and Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) will lead the project.

“A growing skyscraper of front-line research is now based on Globus,” Foster said. “This grant will secure the foundations of that skyscraper. Researchers and educators can now build on this software with confidence, knowing that a dedicated team is available to address problems and to enhance its capabilities as their needs evolve.”

Globus is open source software for distributed computer systems, freely available for use and modification by programmers. It is designed to coordinate the use of geographically distant computers—their raw computing power, the data they contain, and the instruments controlled by them. The software addresses the security, data-management, execution management, resource discovery and other issues that arise from such sharing.

Foster and Kesselman began the Globus effort in 1996 with their colleague Steve Tuecke (now CEO of Univa Corporation, which builds commercial applications based on Globus). Globus underpins numerous highly visible projects including the U.S. TeraGrid national computing infrastructure project and NEESGrid earthquake engineering system, the international Large Hadron Collider particle physics grid, and also major efforts in astronomy, genomics, and other fields. Said Charlie Catlett, TeraGrid Director: “It is Globus software that allows TeraGrid’s eight sites to function as a single distributed facility—and thus enables frontier computations in fields as diverse as medicine and environmental science. This award is great news for U.S. science and engineering.”

The award, entitled “Community Driven Improvement of Globus Software,” will support scientists and engineers at UC and USC/ISI. Staff at those two organizations, along with other Globus developers around the world, will work with the scientific community to define and prioritize Globus enhancements. “What’s exciting about this award is that it permits both ourselves and our partners to make long-term plans,” Kesselman said. “Many projects that use Globus software have five or even 10-year planning horizons. We can now engage with them in defining and developing the software technology needed to support 21st Century science and engineering.”

The Laser Interferometry Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO), established to search for evidence of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, uses Globus software to distribute more than a terabyte (1 million megabytes) of data per day to each of eight sites across the United States and Europe. Said Albert Lazzarini of Caltech, LIGO Laboratory Data and Computing Group Leader: “Globus provides a common foundation of grid middleware on which the science and engineering community has been able to build. Globus not only enables individual projects to advance, but also promotes cross-disciplinary connections that are important to discovery and progress at the frontiers of science and engineering.”

The new award is funded by the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) program of the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), which NSF established to produce and apply the enabling software technology (“middleware”) needed by scientific applications. Deborah Crawford, Acting Director of OCI, said: “Technologies like Globus are key to delivering the promise of cyberinfrastructure, by providing a broad set of integrated technologies to support complex, multi-scale and cooperative scientific endeavors.”

Development of Globus software was first supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Department of Energy (DOE), and later also NSF, IBM, and Microsoft. DOE and (in Europe) the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Sciences Research Council and Swedish Research Council continue to provide important support for Globus-related research and development.

In addition, the open source nature of the software allow a large international community of developers and users, in both research and industry, to contribute to its development.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/516363/?sc=swtn





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Free jazz downloads

Like wow, man.

- js.





Why Haven't Online Newspapers Gotten it Right?
Kirk McElhearn

Like most Internet users, I get a lot of news from web sites: whether newspapers, magazines or TV channels, the main purveyors of information are the leading media brands. I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, along with other media web sites, and subscribe to RSS feeds for dozens of others. (And that's just for "hard" news, not for tech-related subjects.)

I've watched, over the years (I've been using the Internet since 1995), as these media have first staked out their territory, then expanded their presence, then attempted to develop their online offerings to compete with others. Yet throughout these ten years, and through the many variations in web sites, I don't understand why online newspapers can't get it right.

I'm a reader--I read lots of books, subscribe to many magazines, and read a lot on the web. I'm also a follower of news--local and international, partly because, as a lapsed American living in France, US news is for me, by its very nature, international. But I'm also very interested in history and politics, and find it essential to keep up-to-date with the major issues and conflicts occurring around the world.

While much of my reading is done on dead-tree media (books and magazines), it is too onerous for me to subscribe to a newspaper (on paper): the only solution I would have, at least for an English-language source, is the International Herald Tribune (owned by the New York Times), which, at €355 a year, is out of my league. Yet I would like to have a paper newspaper to read each day, because online newspapers just don't cut it.

The advantages to online media are many: their ability to be up-to-the-minute, their flexibility, and their customizability are all prime reasons to use them. But these same features are their downfall: readers of online media don't all see the same news, since they can customize what they want to see, and since many newspaper web sites display stories according to what readers have seen before; stories may change from hour to hour, even from minute to minute, so different readers will see different versions of stories. (The advantage to this is that online newspapers can update stories for breaking news and changes, as well as corrections, but since, for most stories, such updates are not necessary, this is a moot point.) This means that if I read a story this morning, then go back to the web site, that story may no longer be visible, or it may have moved to a place where I cannot locate it. While newspapers (the paper ones) offer a fixed, daily dose of news that everyone shares, online newspapers tend to fragment the news into only what catches the eye.

And that last point is the one that makes online newspapers pale copies of their paper originals. Leafing through a paper newspaper, one sees headlines on each page, and may end up reading stories that would not be likely to show up when customizing a web site by subject and keyword. Instead of receiving a "customized" version of the news, you get all the news that's fit to print (to coin a phrase). In this time of fragmentation, people tend to seek out media sources that fit their point of view, whereas a paper newspaper, by its very nature as a source of news for all readers, has to include as many viewpoints as possible. Nowhere is this more obvious than on the editorial pages of any paper.

When you read a newspaper, you use special strategies called "skimming" and "scanning" to navigate the pages. Skimming means you glance over pages until you find things you want to look at more closely, reacting to certain words or photos, and scanning is taking a closer look, reading for gist, or reading introductions and conclusions that give you more information and often help you decide whether you want to read an entire article. With online newspapers, however, you don't have this option. You only see headlines--and they are often clipped to fit in a limited amount of space (the front page of the Washington Post is a good example of this: scroll down and see how short the headlines are under the different "sections". The New York Times does this better, as their "headlines" can be longer, even covering several lines, but the fact remains that one only sees the headline, not an introduction, photo or other information. Also, both these newspapers seem to be obsessed by threes; they each show exactly three stories, no more, no fewer, under each section header. If there is more news, they'll still show only three stories.

This is the case for all major online newspapers: with a goal of fitting as much "information" as possible on their main pages, they skimp and shut out their readers. They don't realize that less can be more, nor do they think in terms of the way people read newspapers. Sure, reading the news on a web site is different from reading a newspaper, but not by much. Which is why the auto-generated Google News does it better; their stories show introductions, the first few dozen words of stories, allowing readers to have more context. However, the very nature of Google News, with its selection of stories by "computer algorithms, without human intervention" is the antithesis of any newspaper. Sure, Google claims that "news sources are selected without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, enabling you to see how different organizations are reporting the same story," but rarely do opinion pieces show up on its pages, and only the most reported news appears. Quantity rules chez Google.

A newspaper is an institution that has a social contract to fulfill. In part, it must entertain and inform, but it must also provide a unity of the news it prints. For this reason, paper newspapers (or their brands) have a long future ahead of them. However, they need to rethink the way they present news and the navigational tools they provide to their readers. I don't have any answer to this conundrum, I don't know the best way to do this, but I do know that no newspaper I've read online gets things right. I want to be able to read the important news and the editorials, but also discover the stories that stay under the radar. I don't want to only read those stories that I have selected, nor those that a newspaper has selected for me--I want to be able to see the full range of stories the newspaper publishes, and decide for myself.

But today's newspaper web sites have too many links, too many stories, too much information (and way too many ads, including animated ads that make it all but impossible to read the text which is the essence of a newspaper) all on one page, with the idea that more is better. They can't understand that there could be other ways of attracting readers to the diverse content they offer. While most of the newspapers do this very badly, I give my special bad layout award not to a newspaper, but to a magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, which I read on paper, for the way they seem to just dump so much on their main page. This site is horrendous, and looks as though it was designed by a committee.

But look at the New York Times or Washington Post, to cite only two "newspapers of record". Their main pages are also a cacophony of links; hundreds of them, to stories, columns, sections, ads and more. It is virtually impossible to navigate any of these pages. For a really bad layout, see Le Monde, one of France's newspapers of record: even if you read French, there is little hope that you'll be attracted to anything in their miasma of links.

Why can't newspapers do better? Part of this could be because of the way a newspaper itself is laid out: the goal is to squeeze as much as possible into a page, compromising the content (the news) to fit around the ads. On the web, this is less of a problem, but it is likely the same designers who don't understand usability and don't know how to envisage a web page as a visual unit. Salon, which was never a newspaper, does much better than any of the larger media because their designers are not of the column-inch breed. However, their layout is good only when you click a link to read an article; their main page is as hard to navigate as any newspaper's.

What is needed is some way to approximate the leafing-through of pages that one does with a newspaper; to allow the serendipity of discovering a story you might otherwise have missed, and to see, at a glance, the scope of what has happened during a 24-hour period. Web sites should not simply replicate their paper cousins, but use today's technology to improve upon the tradition of the print press.

As newspapers dumb down their presentation in order to fight the clickitis of modern readers, they do themselves a disservice, and end up killing off many of their potential readers. In addition, they fill their pages with annoying flashing, moving ads, which will scare off ever more readers, at least those who don't use ad-blocking software. I don't see the ads they expect me to blindly click on to pay for their services--I use software to block ads--and I don't feel bad that I deprive newspapers of any such revenue, because those ads are so badly designed as to prevent reading. However, give me a good online newspaper, and I'll be happy to pay for it. As long as there are no ads...
http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php...51227200149536





Insider Editing at Wikipedia
Dan Mitchell

THE debate over Wikipedia has hit a fever pitch in recent weeks.

Supporters of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, are pitted against traditionalists who call the site inaccurate and irresponsible.

The latest salvo came this week thanks to Rogers Cadenhead, who did a bit of cybersleuthing and reported on Workbench that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, had altered his own Wikipedia biography. Wired News picked up Mr. Cadenhead's discovery, and a heated debate ensued on Wikipedia discussion boards.

According to Mr. Cadenhead's interpretation, Mr. Wales made the changes to play down the role of his former editor, Larry Sanger, by deleting references to him as a co-founder. When other volunteer editors undid his edits, Mr. Wales repeated them twice.

As Wired News points out, Wikipedia warns that editing one's own bio "can open the door to rather immature behavior and loss of dignity."

Mr. Wales told Wired News he wasn't trying to change history, but merely clarifying technical details regarding Mr. Sanger's role at Wikipedia.

Mr. Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, took to the discussion boards. Mr. Wales edits were "a futile process," he wrote, "because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication" the truth will prevail.

A few weeks earlier, John Seigenthaler Sr., a former newspaper editor, wrote an op-ed article in USA Today complaining that Wikipedia's entry on him asserted that he had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. A sleuth identified the anonymous prankster, and Mr. Wales, while insisting on the encyclopedia's reliability, announced that Wikipedia would no longer allow anonymous users to create entries.

Shortly thereafter, Wikipedia got a much-needed boost when a study by the journal Nature (nature.com) concluded that Wikipedia's science-oriented entries were only slightly less accurate than those in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Still, Wikipedia, which dwarfs traditional encyclopedias in scope, faces the potential for inaccuracy - or abuse. Anyone can edit any entry at any time. The entries for George Bush and John Kerry had to be frozen during last year's election because of constant vandalism. There are dozens of accounts of people editing entries to suit their own business or personal interests, or their biases.

But Wikipedia's weakness is also its greatest strength. With thousands of editors, most of them interested in accuracy, errors and vandalism are usually cleaned up quickly. And entries are living organisms, constantly updated. Within hours of his death, the entry for the actor John Spencer carried the news.

Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia, he said at the time, because it gave too much power to "difficult people, trolls, and their enablers." He says his latest endeavor, Digital Universe, will combine the strengths of Wikipedia with those of a traditional reference work. With $10 million in backing, Digital Universe, called "a Wikipedia for grown-ups" by The Register, a technology news site, will go online next month (digitaluniverse.net). It will allow anyone to contribute and edit entries, but experts vouching for the accuracy of entries will oversee major areas of content, according to ZDNet Asia.

Whether such a product will be as wide-ranging as Wikipedia, or as trustworthy as Britannica, is unclear. But between all those, and the thousands of other available sources out there, nobody can complain that information is hard to come by.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/te...ine.ready.html





J. K. Rowling Ponders the Last of Harry Potter
Lawrence Van Gelder

J. K. Rowling is facing 2006 with trepidation. It is "the year when I write the final book in the Harry Potter series," she said in a posting on her Web site, www.jkrowling.com. "I contemplate the task with mingled feelings of excitement and dread, because I can’t wait to get started, to tell the final part of the story and at last to answer all the questions (will I ever answer all of the questions? Let’s aim for most of the questions); and yet it will all be over at last and I can’t quite imagine life without Harry." She said, "I have been fine-tuning the fine-tuned plan of seven during the past few weeks so that I can really set to work in January." No title or date of publication was given for the final installment of the adventures of the boy wizard, whose six volumes have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/books/28rowl.html





Congress Has Big Plans For Technology Reform In 2006
Ryan Paul

Congress plans to cover some important tech issues in 2006, and there are a few pieces of interesting legislation on the table. I often wonder what our elected officials do when they aren't wasting our money, diminishing our freedom, or bickering with each other like ill-mannered children. Although the situation in Iraq is sure to monopolize a big chunk of their time, they also want to spend time on issues like digital communication, intellectual property law, and computer security.

Communications reform is an important issue this year, and any of several proposed reforms could be used to mitigate some of the problems that currently afflict companies and consumers. Existing telecom laws are woefully out of date, and some fresh ideas will definitely shore up the cracks. House Energy and Commerce Committe Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) wants a network neutrality law to prevent broadband providers from limiting consumer choices. In October, SBC (now AT&T) publicly stated that they did not want consumers to be able to use competing VoIP services over SBC broadband. The network neutrality provisions would effectively prevent anticompetitive ISPs from artificially impeding third-party network services desired by consumers.

Despite SBC's public expression of anticompetitive sentiment with regards to VoIP, some broadband providers don't feel that the network neutrality proposal is necessary or relevant. The vice president of government affairs at Comcast called it a "solution in search of a problem." On the other side of the fence, Google, EBay, and Microsoft all support network neutrality provisions, because they are concerned that the broadband providers will abuse network control and stifle innovation of Internet technologies to the detriment of the consumer. Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) prophetically argues that without the network neutrality provisions the Internet would degrade into "a series of toll booths." Rick Boucher and Joe Barton are familiar names in the consumer advocacy crowd. In November, they heroically supported the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, which would have added fair use exemptions to the DMCA.

Patent reform is also on the menu. Industry groups have requested that the government allow them to participate in the patent review process, and some legislators have discussed imposing stricter constraints upon patent related injunctions. Such injunctions prevent companies from distributing products with components that potentially infringe on patents. Anyone who has followed the long battle between patent-holding company NTP and BlackBerry maker RIM knows how this story plays out. Additional injunction constraints would prevent patent litigation from putting companies in similar situations out of business.

The American patent system is fundamentally broken at virtually every level. Companies use their patent portfolios to exploit consumers, and eliminate competition. Without reforms, American intellectual property law will eventually push innovation overseas. The European Union wisely rejected software patents earlier this year, and while it is unlikely that the United States will follow suit, something does need to be done.

The government is also looking at other ways to promote technological innovation in the United States. Some organizations have asked Congress to increase federal spending on IT research and academic programs that encourage American students to learn more about math and science. The Technology Retraining and Investment Now (TRAIN) Act would establish a tax credit program to help individuals and businesses pay for technical training. Roger Cochetti, group director for public policy at CompTIA calls it "a meaningful and concrete way to respond to [concerns about] outsourcing."

Our elected representatives are legitimately concerned that youngsters today aren't as interested in science as in days past, a trend that isn't particularly surprising in light of the fact that some public school districts don't even understand the difference between science and mythology. Maybe if the government spent less money lying to youngsters about the evil of drugs, they would have more money to spend promoting valid and useful science education. No doubt President Bush's well meaning but misguided No Child Left Behind Act is partly to blame as well. As the son of a science teacher, I regularly hear about how government emphasis on unrealistic academic standards incapacitates effective science education. And as a victim of the public school system myself, I am painfully aware of how it impedes learning. I'm sure I'm not the only technology enthusiast that ditched school spirit assemblies and spent the time programming in the school computer lab instead.

Our elected representatives are also very concerned with computer security issues. There are several new antispyware proposals scheduled for discussion in 2006. The Spy Act would effectively outlaw programs that log key presses and divert the web browser without user consent. The bill would facilitate fines of up to $3 million for companies that deploy spyware. The I-Spy act imposes jail sentences of up to 5 years upon malicious users that utilize spyware to commit other federal crimes. The SpyBlock act targets trojan horse users. Although the laws are widely supported, some skeptics argue that the laws don't have much relevance, since they will be impossible to enforce overseas where many spyware applications are developed.

It looks like the legislators have their work cut out for them. Many of these issues are extremely complex, and additional regulations will affect many different people, companies, and organizations. Our elected representatives seem to have a particularly difficult time balancing out the needs of businesses and consumers, and err too often on the side of businesses at the expense of consumers. Hopefully, some of these new proposals will lead to helpful and productive changes, but when there are corporate interests on the table, it is generally safe to assume the worst. Will the media industry, broadband providers, and patent pushers extend their avaricious reign of terror into 2006, or will the government restore fair use rights and elevate consumer freedom? If this past year is any indication, corporate interests will probably continue to erode consumer rights.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051227-5854.html





Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory
Dennis Overbye

Einstein said there would be days like this.

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.

The idea that measuring the properties of one particle could instantaneously change the properties of another one (or a whole bunch) far away is strange to say the least - almost as strange as the notion of particles spinning in two directions at once. The team that pulled off the beryllium feat, led by Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colo., hailed it as another step toward computers that would use quantum magic to perform calculations.

But it also served as another demonstration of how weird the world really is according to the rules, known as quantum mechanics.

The joke is on Albert Einstein, who, back in 1935, dreamed up this trick of synchronized atoms - "spooky action at a distance," as he called it - as an example of the absurdity of quantum mechanics.

"No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," he, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen wrote in a paper in 1935.

Today that paper, written when Einstein was a relatively ancient 56 years old, is the most cited of Einstein's papers. But far from demolishing quantum theory, that paper wound up as the cornerstone for the new field of quantum information.

Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic version of Star Trek beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now known as "entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at once.

Niels Bohr, the Danish philosopher king of quantum theory, dismissed any attempts to lift the quantum veil as meaningless, saying that science was about the results of experiments, not ultimate reality. But now that quantum weirdness is not confined to thought experiments, physicists have begun arguing again about what this weirdness means, whether the theory needs changing, and whether in fact there is any problem.

This fall two Nobel laureates, Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois and Norman Ramsay of Harvard argued in front of several hundred scientists at a conference in Berkeley about whether, in effect, physicists were justified in trying to change quantum theory, the most successful theory in the history of science. Dr. Leggett said yes; Dr. Ramsay said no.

It has been, as Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted, "a 75-year war." It is typical in reporting on this subject to bounce from one expert to another, each one shaking his or her head about how the other one just doesn't get it. "It's a kind of funny situation," N. David Mermin of Cornell, who has called Einstein's spooky action "the closest thing we have to magic," said, referring to the recent results. "These are extremely difficult experiments that confirm elementary features of quantum mechanics." It would be more spectacular news, he said, if they had come out wrong.

Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna said that he thought, "The world is not as real as we think.

"My personal opinion is that the world is even weirder than what quantum physics tells us," he added.

The discussion is bringing renewed attention to Einstein's role as a founder and critic of quantum theory, an "underground history," that has largely been overlooked amid the celebrations of relativity in the past Einstein year, according to David Z. Albert, a professor of philosophy and physics at Columbia. Regarding the 1935 paper, Dr. Albert said, "We know something about Einstein's genius we didn't know before."

The Silly Theory

From the day 100 years ago that he breathed life into quantum theory by deducing that light behaved like a particle as well as like a wave, Einstein never stopped warning that it was dangerous to the age-old dream of an orderly universe.

If light was a particle, how did it know which way to go when it was issued from an atom?

"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it seems," Einstein once wrote to friend.

The full extent of its silliness came in the 1920's when quantum theory became quantum mechanics.

In this new view of the world, as encapsulated in a famous equation by the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, objects are represented by waves that extend throughout space, containing all the possible outcomes of an observation - here, there, up or down, dead or alive. The amplitude of this wave is a measure of the probability that the object will actually be found to be in one state or another, a suggestion that led Einstein to grumble famously that God doesn't throw dice.

Worst of all from Einstein's point of view was the uncertainty principle, enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927.

Certain types of knowledge, of a particle's position and velocity, for example, are incompatible: the more precisely you measure one property, the blurrier and more uncertain the other becomes.

In the 1935 paper, Einstein and his colleagues, usually referred to as E.P.R., argued that the uncertainty principle could not be the final word about nature. There must be a deeper theory that looked behind the quantum veil.

Imagine that a pair of electrons are shot out from the disintegration of some other particle, like fragments from an explosion. By law certain properties of these two fragments should be correlated. If one goes left, the other goes right; if one spins clockwise, the other spins counterclockwise.

That means, Einstein said, that by measuring the velocity of, say, the left hand electron, we would know the velocity of the right hand electron without ever touching it.

Conversely, by measuring the position of the left electron, we would know the position of the right hand one.

Since neither of these operations would have involved touching or disturbing the right hand electron in any way, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued that the right hand electron must have had those properties of both velocity and position all along. That left only two possibilities, they concluded. Either quantum mechanics was "incomplete," or measuring the left hand particle somehow disturbed the right hand one.

But the latter alternative violated common sense. Such an influence, or disturbance, would have to travel faster than the speed of light. "My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion," Einstein later wrote.

Bohr responded with a six-page essay in Physical Review that contained but one simple equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. In essence, he said, it all depends on what you mean by "reality."

Enjoy the Magic

Most physicists agreed with Bohr, and they went off to use quantum mechanics to build atomic bombs and reinvent the world.

The consensus was that Einstein was a stubborn old man who "didn't get" quantum physics. All this began to change in 1964 when John S. Bell, a particle physicist at the European Center for Nuclear Research near Geneva, who had his own doubts about quantum theory, took up the 1935 E.P.R. argument. Somewhat to his dismay, Bell, who died in 1990, wound up proving that no deeper theory could reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. Bell went on to outline a simple set of experiments that could settle the argument and decide who was right, Einstein or Bohr.

When the experiments were finally performed in 1982, by Alain Aspect and his colleagues at the University of Orsay in France, they agreed with quantum mechanics and not reality as Einstein had always presumed it should be. Apparently a particle in one place could be affected by what you do somewhere else.

"That's really weird," Dr. Albert said, calling it "a profoundly deep violation of an intuition that we've been walking with since caveman days."

Physicists and philosophers are still fighting about what this means. Many of those who care to think about these issues (and many prefer not to), concluded that Einstein's presumption of locality - the idea that physically separated objects are really separate - is wrong.

Dr. Albert said, "The experiments show locality is false, end of story." But for others, it is the notion of realism, that things exist independent of being perceived, that must be scuttled. In fact, physicists don't even seem to agree on the definitions of things like "locality" and "realism."

"I would say we have to be careful saying what's real," Dr. Mermin said. "Properties cannot be said to be there until they are revealed by an actual experiment."

What everybody does seem to agree on is that the use of this effect is limited. You can't use it to send a message, for example.

Leonard Susskind, a Stanford theoretical physicist, who called these entanglement experiments "beautiful and surprising," said the term "spooky action at a distance," was misleading because it implied the instantaneous sending of signals. "No competent physicist thinks that entanglement allows this kind of nonlocality."

Indeed the effects of spooky action, or "entanglement," as Schrödinger called it, only show up in retrospect when the two participants in a Bell-type experiment compare notes. Beforehand, neither has seen any violation of business as usual; each sees the results of his measurements of, say, whether a spinning particle is pointing up or down, as random.

In short, as Brian Greene, the Columbia theorist wrote in "The Fabric of the Cosmos," Einstein's special relativity, which sets the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit, "survives by the skin of its teeth."

In an essay in 1985, Dr. Mermin said that "if there is spooky action at a distance, then, like other spooks, it is absolutely useless except for its effect, benign or otherwise, on our state of mind."

He added, "The E.P.R. experiment is as close to magic as any physical phenomenon I know of, and magic should be enjoyed." In a recent interview, he said he still stood by the latter part of that statement. But while spooky action remained useless for sending a direct message, it had turned out to have potential uses, he admitted, in cryptography and quantum computing.

Nine Ways of Killing a Cat

Another debate, closely related to the issues of entanglement and reality, concerns what happens at the magic moment when a particle is measured or observed.

Before a measurement is made, so the traditional story goes, the electron exists in a superposition of all possible answers, which can combine, adding and interfering with one another.

Then, upon measurement, the wave function "collapses" to one particular value. Schrödinger himself thought this was so absurd that he dreamed up a counterexample. What is true for electrons, he said, should be true as well for cats.

In his famous thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box where the decay of a radioactive particle will cause the release of poison that will kill it. If the particle has a 50-50 chance of decaying, then according to quantum mechanics the cat is both alive and dead before we look in the box, something the cat itself, not to mention cat lovers, might take issue with.

But cats are always dead or alive, as Dr. Leggett of Illinois said in his Berkeley talk. "The problem with quantum mechanics," he said in an interview, "is how it explains definite outcomes to experiments."

If quantum mechanics is only about information and a way of predicting the results of measurements, these questions don't matter, most quantum physicists say.

"But," Dr. Leggett said, "if you take the view that the formalism is reflecting something out there in real world, it matters immensely." As a result, theorists have come up with a menu of alternative interpretations and explanations. According to one popular notion, known as decoherence, quantum waves are very fragile and collapse from bumping into the environment. Another theory, by the late David Bohm, restores determinism by postulating a "pilot wave" that acts behind the scenes to guide particles.

In yet another theory, called "many worlds," the universe continually branches so that every possibility is realized: the Red Sox win and lose and it rains; Schrödinger's cat lives, dies, has kittens and scratches her master when he tries to put her into the box.

Recently, as Dr. Leggett pointed out, some physicists have tinkered with Schrödinger's equation, the source of much of the misery, itself.

A modification proposed by the Italian physicists Giancarlo Ghirardi and Tullio Weber, both of the University of Trieste, and Alberto Rimini of the University of Pavia, makes the wave function unstable so that it will collapse in a time depending on how big a system it represents.

In his standoff with Dr. Ramsay of Harvard last fall, Dr. Leggett suggested that his colleagues should consider the merits of the latter theory. "Why should we think of an electron as being in two states at once but not a cat, when the theory is ostensibly the same in both cases?" Dr. Leggett asked.

Dr. Ramsay said that Dr. Leggett had missed the point. How the wave function mutates is not what you calculate. "What you calculate is the prediction of a measurement," he said.

"If it's a cat, I can guarantee you will get that it's alive or dead," Dr. Ramsay said.

David Gross, a recent Nobel winner and director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, leapt into the free-for-all, saying that 80 years had not been enough time for the new concepts to sink in. "We're just too young. We should wait until 2200 when quantum mechanics is taught in kindergarten."

The Joy of Randomness

One of the most extreme points of view belongs to Dr. Zeilinger of Vienna, a bearded, avuncular physicist whose laboratory regularly hosts every sort of quantum weirdness.

In an essay recently in Nature, Dr. Zeilinger sought to find meaning in the very randomness that plagued Einstein.

"The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the 20th century," Dr. Zeilinger wrote.

Dr. Zeilinger suggested that reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable, a concept that Dr. Wheeler, the Princeton physicist, called "it from bit."

In information, the basic unit is the bit, but one bit, he says, is not enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one quality remains unknown, irreducibly random.

As a result of the finiteness of information, he explained, the universe is fundamentally unpredictable.

"I suggest that this randomness of the individual event is the strongest indication we have of a reality 'out there' existing independently of us," Dr. Zeilinger wrote in Nature.

He added, "Maybe Einstein would have liked this idea after all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html





World Reflects on Fury of Asia Tsunami



Five thousand floating paper lanterns fill the sky in remembrance of tsunami victims during the
one-year anniversary in Khao Lak, Thailand. Rungroj Yongrit-European Pressphoto Agency


Chris Brummitt

Survivors wept and prayed beside mass graves and at beachside memorials Monday, marking one year since earthquake-churned walls of water crashed ashore in a dozen nations, sweeping away hundreds of thousands of lives and uniting the world in grief and horror.

Mourners filled mosques in Indonesia's shattered Aceh province, the region hit hardest. Candlelight vigils in chilly Sweden remembered citizens lost during sunny holidays. An achingly personal tribute - a bouquet of white roses - stuck in the sand in Thailand.

In a taped message, President Bush recalled "the acts of courage and kindness that made us proud" in the sorrowful days after the disaster. Former President Clinton, the U.N. special envoy for tsunami recovery, promised not to let the world forget its pledges of aid.

Survivors relived the terrible awe they felt when the sea rose as high as 33 feet and surged inland for miles with seemingly unstoppable force, carrying along trees, houses, train cars - and thousands people - in a churning rush.

"I was not afraid at the time," said Muhammad Yani, 35, who scrambled to the second floor of an Aceh mosque and watched a muddy torrent roiling with people and debris. "I was more aware than ever that my soul belonged to Allah."

Like most survivors, Yani's family was devastated. Both his parents and a younger brother were killed.

"It was under the same blue sky, exactly one year ago, that Mother Earth unleashed her most destructive power upon us," Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told a crowd at a ceremony in Banda Aceh, provincial capital of Aceh province, which had 156,000 dead and missing.

He sounded a tsunami warning siren - part of a system that did not exist last year - at 8:16 a.m., the moment the first wave hit, to herald a minute's silence.

On Dec. 26, 2004, the region's most powerful earthquake in 40 years tore open the sea bed off the Sumatran coast, displacing billions of tons of water and sending waves roaring across the Indian Ocean at jetliner speeds as far away as East Africa.

The impact was staggering. Water swept a passenger train from its tracks in Sri Lanka, killing nearly 2,000 people in a single blow. Entire villages in Indonesia and India disappeared. Lobbies of five-star hotels in Thailand were filled with corpses.

At least 216,000 people were left dead or missing and nearly 2 million lost their homes in a disaster that still rends hearts.

On Monday, about the time the waves hit a year ago, a man sat alone on Patong beach in Thailand weeping quietly as the sea gently lapped before him, belying its earlier fury. A white rose bouquet jutted from the sand nearby. He refused to talk to a reporter.

Nearby, Ulrika Landgren, 37, had come from Malmoe, Sweden, to see where nine of her friends died. "Somehow it's good to see this place," she said, tears leaking from behind her sunglasses.

Indonesia tested its tsunami warning system for the first time Monday. Alarms sounded in the Sumatran town of Padang, 620 miles south of Banda Aceh, sending residents fleeing for higher ground in a simulation.

"We knew it was just a drill," said Candra Yohanes, 55, who was among those who ran. "Still, when I heard the siren, my heart was pounding so hard."

Dozens of powerful aftershocks have rattled the region since last year's magnitude-9 quake, keeping people anxious about the possibility of another tsunami.

Somber ceremonies were held around the world.

In Sri Lanka, President Mahinda Rajapakse met with survivors near the site of the deadly train accident. Butchers hung up their knives to show respect for life, and Buddhist monks chanted prayers through the night.

Thousands of Indians attended an interfaith service at an 18th century church, then marched to a mass burial ground.

Sweden, Germany, Finland and other European countries held memorials to mourn their dead. The tsunami killed more than 2,400 foreigners, many of them European tourists, in Thailand.

Somalis gathered in mosques along the East African nation's coast to commemorate the 289 people who disappeared in the waves and to pray for the tens of thousands still homeless.

"It was so brutal, so quick, and so extensive that we are still struggling to fully comprehend it," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a videotaped message played in Banda Aceh.

The tsunami generated one of the most generous outpourings of foreign aid ever known - some $13 billion in pledges. But frustration is growing among the 1.4 million people still living in tents, plywood barracks or with family and friends.

"You want to talk about changes, we've seen nothing," said Baihqi, a 24-year-old Acehnese survivor, waving a hand dismissively at the jumble of scrap iron and plastic sheeting that is all that remains of his neighborhood. "Many promises of aid, but that's all we get - promises."

The anniversary "just means we've existed for one year," he said.

For most, though, it was a day to think about the hellish events of a year ago, about death, about survival.

On Thailand's Patong Beach, Raymond and Sharon Kelly recalled how she escaped because her husband boosted her onto a wall. He was swept away and washed inside a shop, but managed to open a skylight and get on the roof.

"I never thought I would come back. Every day I would cry," she said.

Despite their fears, the couple from Hull, England, came back to remember and to pay respects to those who were lost.

As they talked, a man tapped Sharon on the shoulder and said, "Remember me?"

It was Adolf Ruschitschka, 69, from Ruesselsheim, Germany. The two had been trapped together on a rooftop ringed by the savage, swirling waters.

Shaking with emotion, Sharon embraced him, tears pouring down her face.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/fee...ap2414590.html