[JackSpratts]

The Theft of Culture
Mazer

Western culture, the basis of our daily lives, the culmination of our works and our desires, is the arbitrary collection of the things we use to define ourselves as individuals and as a people, and many different things comprise this collection. We have our daily rituals and our friendships and our physical possessions and our belief structures, and western civilization as a whole is complex, colorful, deeply flawed, and a thing of beauty all at the same time. So all-encompassing is our culture that often it is difficult to decide whether our culture is the product of our collective experiences or if the reverse is true.

But perhaps that doesn't matter as much as the question of ownership: do we own our culture or does our culture own us? That may sound absurd, but think about it like this. Our history is the history of property disputes, and what it all comes down to is possession. A man who can prove he possess an object is considered the object's rightful owner, but for a physical item or a parcel of land that is a simple thing to prove. Perhaps a better way to put this would be: do we possess our culture or are we possessed by it? Concepts and ideas are almost impossible for one person to possess exclusively. An idea may be a phrase, a melody, a discovery about the natural world, a philosophy, or any number of intangible things, and due to their ephemeral nature there is nothing easier than to reproduce and distribute them.

So when it comes to a question of ownership of an idea, we look for the origin of the idea and attribute ownership to the person who first person who fixed it in physical form, in words on a page or the like. But because, just by talking about it, an idea may be reproduced and distributed, enforcing property laws concerning ideas is challenging, and for the past four centuries that has been the central preoccupation of the creators and publishers of books, songs, photographs, films, inventions, software, and every other form of entertainment. Suffice it to say, after four hundred years people have made a real mess of things.

Who Really Owns Ideas?

One thing will always be true: people will tend to take possession of the ideas, concepts, and stories of their times as if they had actually created them, because in a way they have. If not for the audience, the author would never write anything. The audience creates the need for ideas to be fixed in physical form, and the audience provides the motivation for specific ideas to be expressed. And because ideas are created specifically for their cultures of origin they become inextricable parts of those cultures. Take ancient Greek literature, for example. The Republic by Plato and the Odyssey by Homer were written for Greek audiences because Greeks could identify with the concepts and stories they contain. But we identify these writings as much with ancient Greek civilization as we do with their respective authors, and ultimately we have become the owners of these timeless writings because we inherited them from our ideological fore bearers; those books now belong to everyone.

It is inevitable that any creative work that endures through the ages will eventually become the property of humanity, even when the laws of the many nations are designed to prevent this occurrence. Can it be denied that this is the natural order of things? Above all, everyone can agree that people who have left this Earth for the great beyond can no longer possess earthly things, and copyrighted works fall into that category. We may certainly continue to attribute the creation of a work to its originator long after he or she has died, and often by doing so we immortalize the memory of that person. However, the exclusive ownership of an idea need not endure longer than the person who came up with it for it to survive the ages unscathed, because right or wrong, that idea will become a part of a culture and from then on it always will be.

However, the really good ideas tend to spread far and wide long before the deaths of their creators, and these days they can reach every corner of the globe in a single day. That kind of takes the fun out of being creative sometimes. It is widely agreed that once an idea is fixed in time and space that it should be protected by law to give the originator due respect and possibly monetary compensation, this that we may reward people for performing tasks that are not rewarding in and of themselves. To enforce this opinion we have given ourselves the gift of copyright, a set of laws that place unnatural limitations on society in order to benefit us in the long run by enlarging the body of our collective knowledge and the culture we use to identify ourselves. Though created with the good intent of maintaining fairness and balance, copyright has become overbearing, resulting in a impoverished public domain and the loss of the freedoms of otherwise law abiding citizens.

A Good Idea Goes Bad

People first began claiming exclusive rights to their creative works when the invention of the printing press kicked off the Renaissance. The advent of cheap, durable paper and movable type made producing books immensely easier than scribing them by hand, as had been done for centuries before. The problem was that there were people who made money from writing books and there were other people who made money from printing and selling them, and usually the right to make copies was granted to the printer rather than the author. A printer might produce and sell a few hundred copies of a book and later discover that other printers were selling the same book and not sharing the profits. So laws were made that gave certain printers exclusive rights to print books, provided they cleared them with the government first. This gave rise to printing guilds that developed their own rules of conduct concerning copyrights, and nowhere in these guilds were the concerns of authors represented. At this time in history copyrights were considered to last forever.

Then in 1709 “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned,” better known as the Statute of Anne, was enacted by the British Parliament. It gave authors rather than publishers the rights to their works and limited those rights to fourteen years from the date of publishing, renewable once for a second fourteen year term. This eventually led to the birth of public domain, the idea that after a period of time a printed work could no longer be monopolized by an individual and from then on would be freely available to everyone. Most people agree that the public domain is a great resource, providing people with a basis for future creative works and for scientific and historical research. Public domain can be thought of an aspect of culture that legally belongs to everyone.

However, as outlined above, just because an idea is the legal property of an individual does not mean that society will not take possession of it as well. When copyright law was new it may not have provided protection for a long enough period of time for the author to justify the effort of publishing a book, so the terms of protection were extended as time went on. This is evident in the history of the United States when early on the first copyright law enacted there gave the same rights to authors that the Statute of Anne did. It was eventually amended to increase the term of protection to twenty eight years plus a fourteen year renewal, then to twenty eight years with a twenty eight year renewal, and so on until the Copyright Act of 1976 extended the term of protection to the lifetime of the author plus fifty years. That act was passed so the U.S. could comply with the Berne convention which it signed in 1988.

Then Greed Set In

Such a long copyright term flies in the face of the fact that people who are dead do not need copyright protection. If all goes well, a person who publishes a book will see a large return on his work and can use the money to finance future books and provide a living for himself and his family. But a term that lasts for the lifetime of the author and longer provides no incentive for the author to write new books if his previous books continue to generate income forever. When the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was passed in the United States the motive was clear: the Walt Disney Company didn't want its copyright on Mickey Mouse to expire. It wanted to rest on the laurels of the late Walt Disney to generate revenue for the company, removing the need to hire new talent to create new animated characters. Obviously Mr. Disney himself benefits not at all from the extension of his creation's copyright term.

Copyright law also provides for statutory damages when a copyright is violated, and over the years the minimum and maximum penalties have been increased as well. The promise of cashing in on the crimes of pirates has become too much for copyright owners to ignore, and the music industry represented by the Recording Industry Association of America demonstrates this fact well. In 1999 when the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act was passed, the maximum penalty assessable for willful copyright infringement was increased to $150,000. In 2003 the RIAA took full advantage of this change in order to threaten its customers with multi-million-dollar lawsuits for their online copyright infringement activities. To date these law suits have numbered almost 20,000 cases, about half of which have been settled for amounts averaging $3,500. That comes out to $35,000,000 of revenue generated in two and a half years with out the sale of one song or album. If the record industry stopped making records today it could thrive for nearly a century by licensing the use of old recordings and suing people for infringement. Without a doubt copyright law as it stands today exists only to make copyright owners wealthy, the public welfare be damned.

The Lost Spirit of Sharing

There was a time when the leaders of this country understood that a balance must be struck between the rights of content creators and the general public. It started with the framers who, in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, wrote “the Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Two important things can be read from this clause: first that the purpose of copyright is to promote scientific and artistic progress, thereby enlarging the culture of the United States, and second that the terms of these rights are only meant to be enforced for reasonably limited periods of time. Mary Bono, who sponsored the Copyright Term Extension Act on behalf of her late husband once said, “Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever.” But when she was informed that such a change would violate the Constitution, she suggested that Congress consider a copyright term of “forever less one day,” a loophole conceived by the then-president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti. If these people had their way then nothing would ever pass into the public domain ever again.

Almost a century ago Congress did not consider their Constitutional mandate burdensome, but sought to stay true to the spirit of the copyright clause. In 1909 the 60th Congress wrote, “The main object to be desired in expanding copyright protection accorded to music has been to give the composer an adequate return for the value of his composition, and it has been a serious and difficult task to combine the protection of the composer with the protection of the public, and to so frame an act that it would accomplish the double purpose of securing to the composer an adequate return for all use made of his composition and at the same time prevent the formation of oppressive monopolies, which might be founded upon the very rights granted to the composer for the purpose of protecting his interests.” Congress then understood that there is a balance that copyright law is meant to preserve, that these lawful monopolies are not meant to be used as a bludgeon to keep the public in check, but simply to provide incentive for individual creativity. They seemed to understand that, in the end, all creative works are meant to pass into the public domain for the benefit of everyone.

We Are Not the Thieves...

In times past, and especially in recent years, infringers of copyright have been called pirates and even thieves. Those appellations are not always justified. Piracy in this sense refers to the act of infringing an other person's copyright for the purpose of personal, monetary gain. International piracy is a big business abroad, especially in Asian countries where the concept of copyright is relatively new and the laws are lax. In the instances where black market groups invest large sums of capital in CD and DVD copying equipment, those men are rightfully labeled pirates, and what they do could justifiably be called theft. Often their products are of equal quality to the legally distributed versions published by record and movie studios around the world, but they sell for half the price or less. This makes legitimate sales in those countries very difficult to sustain. In those countries that have signed international copyright treaties these criminals should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Piracy rings of such massive scale aren't as prevalent in western countries, and if they are they don't last long. Yet piracy is said by spokesmen for the RIAA and the MPAA to be as bad here as it is in Asia. These trade associations claim annual losses due to piracy of more than $4 billion and $6 billion respectively, and constantly blame peer to peer filesharing for a large percentage of those losses. They call filesharers pirates and thieves, comparing them to the real pirates and thieves who cost the entertainment industry real money. While some filesharers proudly wear the pirate label with tongue in cheek, none of them can justifiably be called thieves according to the Supreme Court of the United States. In the 1985 case of Dowling vs. United States, a pirate who was found guilty of mail fraud and copyright infringement for selling Elvis Presley recordings through the mail, appealed his theft convictions on the basis that he hadn't deprived the rightful owners of their original copies. The court agreed stating, “[transport of stolen property in interstate commerce] does not apply to this case because the rights of a copyright holder are 'different' from the rights of owners of other kinds of property.” The entertainment industry wishes to treat copyrighted works like any other kind of physical property, but they are in essence two vastly different things. The Supreme Court upheld this truth, forever eliminating the idea that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing.

...We Are the Victims of Theft

And yet property is being taken from its rightful owners, and shockingly it's one hundred percent legal. Eventually the public must inherit every idea, artistic creation, and invention so they may do the most good. Innovation and creation must not be impeded by greed, so at some point we must decide that there are certain creative works that no longer belong to their creators, and that decision must be made with all fairness in mind. So the question is not whether this should occur, but when.

For different creations perhaps different terms of protection should be applied. A patent on an invention or process, for instance, is usually based on scientific research, the kind that leads to profitable ventures and which are researched for that specific purpose. Those researchers have every right to profit from their work, but at the same time what they do cannot be called real science until their research is published and subject to peer review. For many companies this would mean the revelation of trade secrets followed by serious competition from other companies. In this instance the rights of companies to profit from their innovation must be balanced against the utilitarian need for advances in such fields as medical research. And at any rate, such innovations should be motivated by the impending expiration of previous patents in order to prevent stagnation.

Perhaps patent law needs reform, but not nearly as much a copyright law. While inventions and sciences can be said to contribute to the collective knowledge of man, literature and the arts play a major role in the expansion of culture. When asked what modern creations they most enjoy, people are probably more like to name a movie or song rather than an invention. It is the popular forms of entertainment that we identify with, these have the greatest impact on our psyches and our states of mind. They help us define who we are as a society, they become part of us. We are people who treasure individualism and we reject the idea that third parties can own or take control of us. This is why we chafe at the idea that someone else might be taking away our access to culture; we can't be who we are unless we're allowed free access to knowledge and ideas.

The problem with copyright terms isn't just that they are so long, but that they continue to be extended when there is no real need. I am 25 years old. If I live to be 75 years old this essay will be protected by copyright until the year 2126. I have no desire for that to happen, but to my despair, in the next decade or two the terms of copyright are likely to be extended again, as they have been at regular intervals for the past two centuries. So in effect, the copyright on this essay will never expire. The world will end in one way or an other long before my writings become public domain. It is for this reason that I'm publishing this under a Creative Commons license. I want people to have free access to my words, not just after I die, but now. My only purpose for writing this essay is for it to be read and passed on, and I think it's pitiful that I have to spell these rights out to my readers in advance.

This is my lesson: that which you do not deserve does not belong to you. I have done nothing to earn the right to have my works protected by law for 120 years and more, and I don't think I'll ever do something to deserve it. And I'm just like everyone else in this regard, because simply being a creative thinker does not merit perpetual ownership of a thought, especially considering that everyone is mortal and nobody can take their possessions with them when they die. But the industry cartels that publish music and movies and, to a lesser extent, books have laws on their side that make perpetual ownership of “intellectual property” possible. This doesn't just apply to the creations of contemporary artists but also to every copyrighted work since 1928 whose copyright was not allowed to lapse until 1976, after which nothing has entered the public domain without the express consent of the creator. The cartels simply do not deserve to own such a large chunk of our culture in perpetuity.

Every year that passes is a year that the cartels have contributed nothing to civilization. Every year that passes is a year that they have annexed a part of our souls. Every year that passes is a year they have stolen from us. The real shame of it all is that their continuing theft of culture is fully endorsed by international copyright law. Reform is needed, and it is needed now. The scales are tipped way to far in their direction, and if things do not change soon they'll end up owning our hearts and minds. The day our civilization as we know it ends is the day we don't mind buying pieces of our culture on a pay-per-view basis. Culture belongs to everybody until we allow a few individuals to possess it, at which point they will own us.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22784





Spike 'Wrote World's Best Joke'

Comedian Spike Milligan was the author of the world's funniest joke, a psychology professor has claimed.

Professor Richard Wiseman carried out an internet experiment five years ago to find the world's best gag.

A joke about two US hunters who go into the woods topped the poll after more than 100,000 people around the world cast their vote on 40,000 jokes.

Professor Wiseman said the gag almost certainly originated from a 1951 Goons sketch written by Milligan.

He told the BBC News website he was watching a TV show after the comedian's death in 2002 when he saw an archive clip of The Goons sketch.

The circumstances in the sketch were different to the joke - it was set in a house in England, rather than woods in New Jersey - but the punchline was identical.

"It was a very, very weird coincidence," Professor Wiseman said.

"It was a very obscure Goons archive and it just happened to be the joke that won the Laugh Lab poll."

SPIKE MILLIGAN SKETCH

Bentine: I just came in and found him lying on the carpet there
Sellers: Oh, is he dead?
Bentine: I think so
Sellers: Hadn't you better make sure?
Bentine: Alright. Just a minute
Sound of two gun shots
Bentine: He's dead.

Professor Wiseman said he contacted Milligan's daughter Sile, who said she was confident it had been written by her father.

He said it was very rare to be able to track down the origin of any joke, as they are usually passed on by word of mouth.

"We will never know for certain if it wasn't something he heard and incorporated into a sketch, but that's unlikely, as he was a prolific writer of his own material," he said.

Professor Wiseman said the joke contained all three elements of what makes a good gag - anxiety, a feeling of superiority, and an element of surprise.

"It plays on the death theme and it makes us feel superior to the complete idiot who does not understand," he said.

"It also has the surprise element as we don't see the death coming."

Professor Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, said he was "delighted" that Milligan was behind the winner.

"I actually much prefer the Spike Milligan one because it is in a much funnier setting.

"I think Spike was a genius with that great kind of surreal humour.

"He actually once wrote a sketch about finding the world's funniest joke so it's a fantastic quirk."

Milligan, who died in 2002 at the age of 83, was one of the UK's most respected performers and was known to millions as one of the founding members of The Goons.

Together with Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe, the quartet helped redefine comedy programmes for a generation.

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/5064020.stm





Pixels, Photos and Moore
Nathan Myhrvold

Digital technology has taken the world by storm, so much so that it might be easy to think the revolution is over.

In photography, for example, it is tempting to think that once everybody has a digital camera, the transition will be complete and things will settle down, right? Wrong. The revolution is taking off; it is only the boring part that's nearly over.

The reason is Moore's Law, the notion behind advances in the computer industry for the past 40 years. Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip doubled every 18 months, and that is pretty much still true. More transistors for the computer mean more features and more bang for the consumer's buck. For digital cameras, the bang has meant sensors with more megapixels and bigger memory cards.

Some say the megapixel race will stop, just as people used to think that 8- bit, 16-bit or 32-bit computers would be enough. The problem with that reasoning is all the smart engineers who wake up every day looking for a competitive edge by turning computing power into something worth buying. I'm betting that they will succeed, because there are so many opportunities.

So far, camera designers have focused on vital but mundane tasks, like producing picture quality equal to that of film. Professionally, my 16-megapixel Canon is vastly better than film.

Yet why stop at film? I'm eagerly awaiting Canon's next move, probably to 25-plus megapixels. I'm what marketing people call an early adopter, but mark my words - you'll own a 16- or even a 25-megapixel point-and-shoot in a few years, and it will not stop there. By some estimates, your eyes have an effective resolution of more than 500 megapixels. If you can see it, why shouldn't a camera record it?

Even so, image resolution is the most mundane way to measure progress. Here are some things that are coming next:

The best digital cameras are already limited by the quality of their lenses. This won't last long because you can use more pixels - and some added digital processing power, courtesy of Moore's Law - to help correct lens defects. In an abstract mathematical sense, a lens performs a "calculation" on a scene, which can be done partly with signal- processing algorithms. This happens in Photoshop and other software, but it can be done better in the camera itself.

A key factor in quality is the ratio in brightness from the darkest to the lightest. The reason many pictures don't turn out is that in daytime the human eye can easily perceive a dynamic range of 10,000:1, while at night it is more like 1,000,000:1. Meanwhile, color slide film can record only about 32:1, and digital cameras, about 64:1.

In many situations, this forces a choice - do you expose for the light parts of the scene and let the dark parts go dead black, or save the shadows and turn the bright parts pure white? Future digital sensors will fix this, with ever broader dynamic range and greater light sensitivity (the ISO rating). At the same time, the digital noise that comes with high ISO today will diminish.

Of course, there will be a cost because the image files will get bigger. Today, most digital images use 24 bits for each pixel. High-end cameras already use 36 bits, and there will be a trend to 48 and then 96 bits. Photoshop already supports all these. This will require much more storage, but Moore's Law kicks in - doubling the number of bits at the same cost takes about 18 months.

Focus is another problem. How many of your pictures wind up fuzzy? Autofocus technology can help, but cameras today still have a limitation on how much of a scene can be in focus at one time, known as depth of field. If you focus on the flower in front of you, the mountain in the background is apt to be fuzzy. Yet technically there is no reason we can't get essentially infinite depth of field, again by using more digital processing.

Cameras will also change form. Today, they are basically film cameras without the film, which makes about as much sense as automobiles circa 1910, which were horse-drawn carriages without the horse. A car owner of that time would be pretty shocked by what is in a showroom now. Camera stores of the future will surprise us just as much.

Why choose between still and video; why not both? While you're at it, throw in 3-D data, wireless networking and Internet access.

So much change will lead to gnashing of teeth by traditionalists. But in the end, it is not the annoying limitations of old technology that matter. The wonder of photography comes from the nearly magical effect that captured moments in space and time can have on our hearts and our minds. That won't change, because it is in us, not in the equipment.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/...ss/cameras.php





New LCD Technology Outperforms CRT
Tuan Nguyen

LCD panels have traditionally been lagging behind CRT monitors in terms of color response, saturation, accuracy and overall black-level response. Because LCDs are "always lit" by a backlight, deep dark blacks have been the Achilles heel of LCD technology. However, a company named eCinema Systems has announced a new LCD technology that it claims surpasses CRT in virtually every respect.

eCinema's new LCD technology is being called high dynamic range LCD, and also supports "deep color", which is higher than 24-bit color, starting at 30-bit or 36-bit and can go up to 48-bit. The new panels are able to display 36-bit color (12-bits per color channel), and 1000 to 4000 step gray-scales, producing fantastic gradients. Most LCDs today produce only 256 gray steps at most. This new "deep color" technology will be standard with the new HDMI 1.3 specification. What's most spectacular about eCinema's LCD display however, is its contrast ratio: 30,000:1. At this rating, eCinema's new DCM40HDR panel can achieve black levels that even CRTs cannot match. eCinema CEO Martin Euredjian said:

"It is well known that LCD displays did not until now produce the same deep blacks that were achievable when using a CRT. Color depth is, of course, the 8 bit bottleneck issue. Images on the screen -- at the pixel level -- are limited to a best-case of 256 levels between black and white. In other words, if you painted a gray scale you could, at most, see 256 steps. The reality of the matter is that due to calibration and gamma adjustments most displays can't do much better than about 200 steps between black and white."

eCinema will be launching its new DCM40HDR 40-inch LCD by Q4 of this year. The new panel will be a true 1080p display and will be suitable for professional applications where only CRTs were used. Key features of the DCM40HDR will be:

• Darkest black level output of any TFT in the market
• Can be used for professional color grading -- previously done using only CRTs
• Can be used for professional critical picture evaluation -- previously done using only CRTs
• Allows accurate viewing of intra-field motion on interlaced standards
• Video displayed at true frame rates for all standards
• Rugged shock mounted components for field operations

If eCinema's displays perform well, this could mean higher quality LCD panels across the industry. The company says that its DCM series of LCD panels are reference-grade monitors suitable for critical viewing environments:

Production and Post can now discuss color with accuracy, confidence and reliability. Post production partners can work on common projects knowing that all work is viewed on precisely matched no-maintenance monitoring systems. In addition to this, clients can evaluate in-progress or finished work remotely while assured that the colorist saw exactly what they are seeing.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2860





Camera. Action. Edit. Now, Await Reviews.
Scott Kirsner

The music video for the surreal folk song "I Got a Bunny," written and performed by Juanito Moore, is not something you will see on VH1.

But the video, shot on a rainy sidewalk in front of Mr. Moore's home in Grand Rapids, Mich., has another distinction: it was assembled, not in a traditional cutting room or with PC-based editing software, but entirely on the Web, using an online service called Jumpcut.

The minute-and-a-half video was shot with a digital still camera, which Mr. Moore occasionally swings around by its tripod as he lists the bizarre animals in his imaginary menagerie.

While sites like YouTube and Veoh have lately become popular for allowing users to share their self-produced videos, Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is part of a new class of sites that also offer simple tools for stringing together video clips and then adding soundtracks, titles, transitions and unusual visual effects.

All of the sites, which include Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.

Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.

"We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing," said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. "We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail."

Mr. Kaskade refers to the process as "mixing," however, saying he believes that the term "editing" may sound labor-intensive to the amateur videographer. Previously, putting together a multishot video like Mr. Moore's would have involved installing and learning to use a piece of software like iMovie from Apple, Adobe Premiere or Studio from Pinnacle Systems. Some of that software is packaged free with new computers or sold for about $100.

The analyst firm Parks Associates estimated last year that only about four million people regularly use such software for video editing — far fewer than the number who capture video using camcorders, Webcams, digital still cameras and cellphones.

But with more videos of soccer games, weddings and cruise vacations being posted online — and potentially being seen by people who have not been dragooned into the living room for a showing — editing gains in importance, Mr. Kaskade says, even if it involves trimming only the dizzying camera whirls at the beginning of a shot, or the inevitable question, "Are you taping right now?"

People who have experience with both desktop software and the new online editing services say the desktop software offers a wider range of features and enables them to manipulate the video more precisely, but they appreciate the speed and simplicity of online editing.

GK Parish-Philp, a product manager at a San Diego software company, said that while he used Pinnacle Studio to assemble a video of his daughter's birth a year and a half ago, he had not used it in a long time. The birth video "came out really well, but it took forever," he said.

Instead, Mr. Parish-Philp now uses video clips taken with his digital still camera and edited on the Eyespot site (www.eyespot.com) to provide weekly video updates to his mother in Texas. One chronicled his family's recent trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, complete with deft cuts between close-ups and long shots, plenty of pointing at animals, and a soundtrack by the 1980's pop group Toto. (Their hit "Africa," of course.)

Many of the early users of online video editing are new parents like Mr. Parish-Philp, or pet owners, said Kevin Sladek, co-founder of VideoEgg (www.videoegg.com). "We see a tremendous diversity of things," Mr. Sladek said, "but the largest bucket of footage is baby videos."

Other users have been editing videos to support online auctions, as when Todd Hernandez tried to sell a Nissan 350Z coupe on eBay this year, or to stay in touch with friends back home, as when Lisa Boghosian, who moved to San Francisco recently, made a St. Patrick's Day video collage for her Irish friends in Massachusetts.

The number of online editors is still small, however.

"Eighty percent of our users want to watch videos, and about 20 percent want to share videos," said Jonathan Shambroom, a vice president of Grouper. "But only a small fraction of that 20 percent will edit their videos first — maybe a quarter."

All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)

Users of Grouper (www.grouper.com) must first download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in tandem with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their computer and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.

The sites make possible new kinds of collaborative editing. A group of parents attending a school play can upload all their video, and then edit a single version of the play that makes use of the best shots. Or a vacationer who returns with a shaky shot of the Grand Canyon can incorporate another person's river shot into the video — the home-movie equivalent of stock footage.

"Before, moviemaking was 'one computer, one author,' " said Jumpcut's chief executive, Mike Folgner. "What we've done, on a team level or a group level, is allow people to share these assets. You can make a movie out of anybody's stuff."

Steven Cohen, a Hollywood editor who was in the early 1990's one of the first in his profession to rely on a digital editing system for making a feature film, has tinkered with Jumpcut and Eyespot. While the current services are not as responsive or flexible as the high-end software he is accustomed to using, "online editing seems inevitable," he wrote in an e-mail message. "What makes it appealing is that it gets rid of the problem of storage, and for that reason it seems very freeing. Let somebody else worry about where all this stuff is and how to back it up!"

Many of the earliest users of the online editing services report two changes in the way they capture and assemble video. First, they tend not to use their camcorders as much, because the tendency with a camcorder is to record long, meandering stretches of birthday parties and parades, which are time-consuming to import to a computer and edit. Instead, they record more impressionistic scenes of a few seconds or a few minutes, using a digital still camera or a cellphone.

Second, even if they have experience using more powerful, PC-based editing software, they find themselves using the online services more often when they are working with the shorter snippets — and trying to assemble them quickly for a grandparent in a distant city.

Jan McLaughlin of North Passaic, N.J., makes three or four short movies a week, often using her Nokia cellphone. She spends only about 5 or 10 minutes, on average, refining her video with Eyespot.

"It's the difference between making a gourmet meal that takes days, or throwing something in the microwave," Ms. McLaughlin said. "Ultimately, sometimes you just need to separate the good footage from the bad and stick it together."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/te...y/15video.html





China Walks Out Of Meeting To Resolve Bitter Feud Over World Wireless Encryption Standard

An international dispute over a wireless computing standard took a bitter turn this past week with the Chinese delegation walking out of a global meeting to discuss the technology.

The delegation's walkout from Wednesday's opening of a two-day meeting in the Czech Republic escalated an already rancorous struggle by China to gain international acceptance for its homegrown encryption technology known as WAPI. It follows Chinese accusations that a U.S.-based standards body used underhanded tactics to prevent global approval of WAPI.

"In this extremely unfair atmosphere, it is meaningless for the Chinese delegation to continue attending the meeting," the Standardization Administration of China delegation said in a statement carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The U.S.-based group, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, denies any impropriety and says China isn't playing by the established rules.

At stake is a leg-up in technology research and billions of US dollars (euros) in licensing fees and component sales for laptops, mobile phones, handheld computers and other wireless devices that connect to wireless networks around the world, including hotels, coffee shops and universities.

These gadgets run on networks based on the IEEE's 802.11 standards. The original standards, however, have security holes that allow digital snoops to steal data from those who are logged on to the networks.

Members of the IEEE, an open international professional organisation, and a Chinese government-backed group of engineers with military backgrounds, have developed competing technologies to plug the security holes: for China, WAPI, for the IEEE, 802.11i.

China had earlier tried to compel Intel and other tech companies to adopt its WAPI standard domestically, leading to a showdown with Washington that ended with Beijing backing down last year.

But the push for the Chinese standard persisted and Beijing decided to follow Washington's advice and put the Chinese standard before the International organisation for Standardization, or ISO, a world body made up of representatives from national standardization groups.

In March, delegates representing standard bodies from 25 countries voted in favor of the IEEE's version over WAPI.

China quickly asked the ISO to freeze the process and demanded an apology from the IEEE which it accused of "dirty tricks" in lobbying for its standard, Xinhua said.

The Standardization Administration of China, in a statement, accused backers of the American technology of "a lot of dirty tricks including deception, misinformation, confusion and reckless charging to lobby against WAPI," Xinhua reported.

The Standardization Administration of China declined requests for comment.

At the meeting in the Czech Republic on Wednesday, as the ISO was explaining to China procedures "related to this matter," the Chinese delegation walked out, said ISO spokesman Roger Frost.

Frost on Thursday refused to comment on the walkout.

The IEEE has called on China to return to the talks and offered to work with the country on harmonizing the WAPI technology with international standards.

Steve Mills, the chairman of the IEEE Standards Association Standards Board, said in a statement, China "has lost another valuable opportunity to constructively discuss the technical merits of the two security amendments." Instead, Mills said, China continued "to focus its attention on complaints about the balloting process."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Techno...54947518.html#





Big Microsoft Brother
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

It turns out that Microsoft's Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is also keeping daily tabs on Windows users. Who knew?

Well, until a few days ago, nobody outside of Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., knew.

According to an Associated Press report, David Lazar, director of the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) program, Microsoft was doing this as "kind of a safety switch."

A safety switch?

Because, Microsoft told 'top Microsoft reporter in the known-world' Mary Jo Foley that "if Notifications went amok on Microsoft's side, Microsoft wanted a way to terminate the program quickly."

Amok? On Microsoft's side?

Help me out. I'm a little confused here. Microsoft wants my Windows PC to phone home everyday so that if Notifications went 'amok' on their servers, it would turn my local Notifications component off?

Now, when you use Windows Genuine Advantage for the first time, it gathers up, Microsoft tell us, and it will grab your PC's XP product key, PC manufacturer, operating system version, PC BIOS information and user locale setting and language.

Nothing at all, Microsoft assures us, that could identify us or what programs we use, or anything like that. No siree. No chance of that.

So ... why do we need that daily Notification ping?

Good question. I guess we really don't need it that much because Microsoft has also clarified that, "As a result of customer concerns around performance, we are changing this feature to only check for a new settings file every 14 days. This change will be made in the next release of WGA. Also, this feature will be disabled when WGA Notifications launches worldwide later this year."

I don't mean to be paranoid, but when someone tells me that, oh, by the way, they've been checking on my XP and Windows 2000 PCs every day since July 2005 when Microsoft made WGA mandatory or you couldn't download patches, I get a little concerned.

Still, it's not like Microsoft would actually collect more information and then use it against such competitors as Firefox would they?

Oh wait, come to think of it, didn't Microsoft once cause Windows to produce fake error messages if a user was running DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS?

While they never admitted to it, they did finally end up paying Caldera Systems, one of the ancestors of today's SCO, approximately $60 million to make the resulting lawsuit go away.

No, nothing like that has happened. I mean maybe they're using WGA to report on what applications people are really using for market information, but that's harmless isn't it? I mean lots of spyware, ah, programs do that, right? Of course.

OK, let me be straight for a minute. There's no proof whatsoever that Microsoft is actually doing anything to anyone else's software or tracking information on their users.

Well, except when you try to update a WGA program that's running on Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API (applications program interface) that runs on x86 Linux and Unix OSes like Solaris and FreeBSD. Those users won't be able to get patches. Let's leave that aside for now.

Here's the point. For over a year, Microsoft has planted a program on every modern Windows-powered PC that reported home every day. They don't have an intelligent reason, never mind a good one, for this move. And, they never told anyone that they were doing this.

I guess it must do a darn good job of hiding itself from firewalls and network monitoring tools too since we've only now found out this daily checkup call after tens of millions of PCs have been phoning in for almost a year.

Maybe you can trust your computer, your livelihood, your home finances, your kids' games, everything you do online, to a company that would do that, but you can count me out.

I've been using Linux for my main desktop for years, and it's revelations like this one that makes me damn glad that I do.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1974911,00.asp





Oz

How We Learnt To Love Big Brother

The Orwellian future is here, with computers and surveillance cameras tracking our every move. And just like Winston Smith, we've stopped trying to hide, writes Thornton McCamish.

At the bottle shop where I worked years ago there was an underground cellar. Long before I started working there, someone had rigged up an old video camera on the cellar wall. The camera was a wood-duck. It didn't work. It didn't really look like it worked either, since the other end of its dusty cord was pretty clearly jammed into a gap in the crumbly mortar.

But customers couldn't be sure. That was the point. Still, I was always surprised by how many people noticed that camera, perhaps because we thought of it as a joke. They'd come upstairs to the counter and furtively look around to see if they could spot the monitor. A few even asked if the thing worked. I think they wanted us to know that they knew they were being watched, and that they didn't like it.

Who does? Australians weren't exactly elated either when the Hawke Government tried to sell them the Australia Card in the '80s. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest the introduction of an identity card. Then, late last year, the Howard Government raised the possibility of trying to get an Australia Card up again. The Sydney Morning Herald predicted that "the controversy about individual rights and freedoms will burn far brighter now than two decades ago".

Australia Card Mark II was formally dropped a few weeks ago. What we got instead was Australia Card lite: a Smartcard that would streamline access to government services.

Controversy didn't burn bright. In fact, the muted public reaction seemed to suggest not protest so much as fatalistic acceptance, a weary acknowledgement of yet another tightening of our rights and freedoms in the age of terrorism.

Not that the debate over privacy and rights in the age of global terrorism is dead. Privacy campaigners are still fighting for the hearts and minds of the public, with very persuasive arguments. The increased powers for police and spooks are a blunt instrument in the fight against terrorism, they say. The British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has admitted that a national ID card would not have prevented the London bombings. Nor would it prevent immigration stuff-ups here. We also know that while the Smartcard is designed to simplify access to services, its uses could be incrementally expanded.

We know all this but it seems that our hearts just aren't in it. In an ACNeilson poll of August 2005, more than two-thirds of Australians indicated that they were willing to sacrifice privacy and civil liberties for safety from terrorists. On the balance of anxieties, we'll opt for a chance of greater safety over the risk of more state snooping. But perhaps it's not just fear that's making us fatalistic about the erosion of our privacy. Perhaps we're willing to trade it away because privacy's going cheap these days, whether we like it or not.

In a digital world, privacy feels like a lost cause. To go about your business in 2006 is to be constantly reminded of how many footprints we leave in the digital snow. Each time we use a credit card or rent a flat, more information about us is logged and stored. We can be tracked by e-tag on the toll-road or by our mobile phones. Intersecting CCTV coverage has us covered as we stroll through the city and its stores. No point staying at home to avoid the unblinking gaze of the world: as soon as you turn on the computer you're tangled up in the sticky flypaper of the internet. "Privacy is dead", Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy cheerfully informed us back in 1999.

Forget about it. We all know that we're constantly dropping more cookie crumbs as we make our way through daily life. Several times a week CSIs Las Vegas to Miami deliver a bleak finding on the human body's helpless propensity to leave traces on everything it touches. The trail is there for anyone with a warrant. Or the hacking skills.

In the old days, the futuristic future used to keep resetting itself in the distance, like the mirage on a long, straight highway, always intangible ahead. Now it feels like we've caught up with it. Orwell's "Big Brother" from his futuristic novel 1984, used to be as fantastical an imagining as a time machine, and, thankfully, the totalitarian part still is for Australians. But BB's technology platform looks antiquated now that digital information is so easy and cheap to store. Already government agencies and instrumentalities keep considerable amounts of information about us on file. With the exponential growth in computing power over the past few years it would be a doddle to recombine these separate threads of information to produce 3-D portraits in data of individual citizens.

The Americans have already tried it. The Total Information Awareness Program was a government project designed to collate as much data about the population as possible into a mother of all databases which could then be electronically sifted for suspicious patterns. Data-mining, it's called.

Public protest shut the program down in 2003, not before it had shown itself to be quite useless for winkling out terrorists. But data has a habit of sticking around. As long as it exists, it is vulnerable to hacking or misuse. As Australians have learnt, it's also prone to being left in airline club lounges and randomly mailed to members of the public.

Data-mining or surveillance only produces a picture of an individual if someone, somewhere, wants one. But that's the trouble with an ambient mood of surveillance: there's a tendency to assume that somewhere, someone may well want one.

Sometimes they do. Glance sideways from the moral straight and narrow and see the traps set all around. Every day hapless root-rats are sprung by DNA testing, pill-popping athletes are busted by random drug tests and cheats are indicted by their own mobile-phone records. If you're a celebrity, increasingly ingenious and elaborate snares await. Shane Warne could write a book about it. And probably will.

The self-righteous view on this is that you're only against tightened government record-keeping if you've got something to hide. As an argument it's not much chop, since it merely confuses privacy with criminal secrecy. But it's gaining ground in a time when the whole atmosphere surrounding our social privacy seems to be changing.

We're just not as private as we used to be. Traditionally, Australians are seen as fairly reserved. Dry. Laconic. Undemonstrative.

WHEN Jerry Springer appeared on Australian televisions, featuring folk whose discretion genes seemed to have been surgically removed, here was proof of our fundamental difference to Americans. Or at least to those on Jerry Springer. In the Australian mythos, there was an idea of behaviour that linked privacy and dignity.

But somewhere along the line the rest of the Western world caught up with Australian self-containment and we went all California. I blame Oprah, myself; Oprah, that milkmaid of confessional nectar who never tires of squeezing intimacies out of her victim-guests. The confessional had long provided this consolation for the devout; in the age of the public talking cure, Oprah's couch does the job instead. So does the AA meeting, or the true confessions page of Woman's Day. The idea that revealing your soul is good for you is not even questioned now. The days when your sins and suffering were between you and your god, or whatever passes for it, are over. And since confession comes with automatic redemption - Rex Hunt seemed to think that admitting to his moral atrocity and being forgiven for it were simultaneous processes - what's holding you back? Go on, get it off your chest. If the thought of spilling your guts to the world makes you blanch, then there are pills you can take for your problem.

And perhaps you should. Because isn't there something a bit shifty about people who keep too much to themselves? Ah, we say, when the neighbour fronts the TV news cameras to tell us that the bomber/murderer/pedophile next door had always been a pretty quiet sort of bloke, now you mention it, yes - kept to himself. Yes, we nod. Of course he was.

You might think that living as we do in a constant state of traceability would make us more protective of the privacy we still have. Apparently not. The digital era has only encouraged plenty of us to expose ourselves more. For some, the number of hits Google finds for their name is a vital statistic, an index of status. At least it's proof that the world knows they're there.

Perhaps privacy feels too much like anonymity today. It's as if we need to assert our individuality in a world of barcodes. We are not merely our statistical fragment, our biometric bits; that's not our full story. So we rig up web cams, and blog fragments of ourselves on to the walls of the World Wide Web, even if the gallery's empty and no one's looking.

Privacy is a right that plenty of Australians can't forfeit fast enough in the rush to tell their stories. The self-exposure phenomenon is not limited to Big Brother or Idol, or late-night talk-back radio. Enough Rope and Australian Story have made an art form out of getting people, famous and not, unbuttoning their joys and sorrows.

We expect to know more about others, too. Australians have never been so interested in real-life stories. In the bookshops, it's the age of the memoir, and the more relentlessly explicit the better. There's a vast and hungry audience for the excruciatingly personal peelings, for books like Mary Moody's Last Tango in Toulouse or Edward White's memoir My Lives.

There's nothing wrong with telling one another our stories and feelings, of course. What better way to understand this human clay we share? Besides, we're all managing the cost-benefit analysis of privacy all the time: whenever we buy online with a credit card because it's faster than sending a money order, signing petitions, or giving our details to estate agents so we can have a sticky-beak around a house. Indeed, franker public talk has helped expose horrors such as sex abuse and domestic violence by making them speakable.

But in the age of the tell-all memoir, we're less squeamish about other people's privacy, too. Encryption software might be evidence of a longing for privacy, but there's a lively market in recreational spying equipment these days - items such as the Pen Holder Hidden Camera system (watch your office or living room, your nanny or workman, RRP $299) or Australian OK! (RRP $5.95). Paparazzi ply a revolting trade, but who can resist the stars-without-their-make-up pictures they get?

Being less squeamish, we tend to be less discerning, too. Under new uniform defamation laws, media outlets no longer have to demonstrate that a story is of public interest, just that it's substantially true. Open season for the gossip rags, then. Already when we open our eyes in the rough vicinity of a television or the magazine rack at the supermarket were consuming privacy, the traducing of other people's privacy.

Or their negotiated sale of it. Now that we've got a taste for other people's business, privacy has become the basis of a grey moral economy. In her exclusive interview with miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell, Tracy Grimshaw was determined to get full bang for Channel Nine's buck on our behalf, right down to reading out personal letters written by the miners to their wives and children. Celebs can leverage their privacy, rushing from photo shoot, where they sell it, to court, where they cash in on unauthorised incursions into it. Or pay through the nose like Rex Hunt in the hope of preserving some part of it.

There's even good money to be made on privacy speculation now. Pseudonymously authored sexcapade novels such as The Bride Stripped Bare and Landscape With Animals tend to sell well, partly because we want to know whose orgasm it is we're reading about. And at the bottom end of the privacy market, there's the samizdat of bootleg celebrity sex tapes passing from hand to sweaty hand: proof that what interests the public is not the same as what's in the public interest. Inevitably, our interest in other people's private business seems to take up more and more space in the public realm, leaving less room for issues of genuine public concern.

Privacy has become a debased coin. It's not that it's worthless, just that we're not sure how to value those aspects of privacy that can't be traded. Which is a pity, because a bit of mystery does wonders for civilised social relations.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/techno...e#contentSwap2





Copy Wrongs and Rights

We will soon be able to copy music legally, but it will be for our ears only, writes Louisa Hearn.

Australians soon will have the right to tape TV programs and copy a track from a CD onto their MP3 players under copyright laws being proposed by the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock (http://www.ag.gov.au).

Many of us thought we already had the right to do this, but the practice of making a recording of someone else's song, movie or virtually any other form of commercial media is illegal in Australia - and will remain so until the new laws are introduced later this year.

Consumer advocates and copyright experts have long labelled the existing copyright laws as out of touch with reality. The proposed changes will be widely welcomed, but many believe the law will still be too restrictive.

United States copyright law has a "fair use" provision, which assumes a certain level of flexibility in copying media content on the basis that it is for personal consumption only. Our Attorney-General will grant far tighter laws.

Perhaps as a concession to media owners who fear large-scale piracy of their digital content, consumers will face restrictions on how they may transfer and use copied content - such as a seemingly unenforceable requirement that they may watch a recorded television program once only, then delete it.

When it comes to music, copies can be made only onto different formats for personal use, meaning that it will become legal to record a song from a CD onto an MP3 device, but burning back-up copies of CDs onto other CDs will continue to be illegal.

The concessions also may prove an ultimately hollow victory for the many consumers unaware that media companies are already racing to implement digital rights management (DRM) software across a huge range of devices from music players to DVD recorders.

Apple and Microsoft already embed DRM technology into digital music products and a new process called Advanced Access Content System (AACS) was recently created to restrict copying in new high-definition DVD technologies such as Blu-Ray.

The Attorney-General plans to address the matter of technological copyright restriction in future reforms, but many fear that the interests of media owners seeking to stamp out piracy will prevail against those of consumers.

This will mean that anyone circumventing technological copy controls is breaking the law, even if operating within the restrictions set out in the copyright law amendments.

David Vaile, executive director of the Baker & McKenzie cyberspace law and policy centre at the University of NSW, says: "Media owners will use a variety of methods to limit rights of users with technology and contracts. No one is trying to justify mass-scale piracy but the end users get caught in the middle."

However, music industry commentator Phil Tripp sees consumers' transition into the digital world differently. "Music for [a long time] was a collectable commodity in a hard carrier," he says. "It was a product but it then became a service through digital downloading. This is like shipping wine without bottles. The next step is it becomes a utility where you pay for as much music as you want as long as you don't share it."

Some have hailed Apple's iTunes music service as a distribution model for other media now contemplating the shift to online content delivery methods. But not everyone is convinced consumers will welcome such a total transformation.

Kim Weatherall, associate director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, says consumers will still want to buy media in retail stores.

"I'm somewhat sceptical. It doesn't really reflect the way people are. They like to collect and people buy CDs even when they can download off iTunes. That urge won't go away all that soon."

For more information about the proposed laws, visit the Attorney-General's website via http://tinyurl.com/gclx9/.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/techno...359817536.html





Singer Kevin Aviance Beaten In NYC
AP

A singer whose songs have topped the Billboard dance chart was attacked by a group yelling anti-gay slurs, and four people were arrested on hate-crime charges, police and his publicist said.

Kevin Aviance, 38, underwent surgery for a broken jaw after the attack Saturday, said his publicist, Len Evans. Police said the singer, whose song "Alive" hit the top of the chart in 2002, was in stable condition.

A group of six or seven men attacked Aviance early Saturday, and passers-by did not stop to help as they threw objects at him, Evans said.

Four people were arrested on charges of first-degree assault as a hate crime, police said. They were identified as Jarell Sears and Akino George, both 20; Gregory Archie, 18; and Gerard Johnson, 16.

Aviance performs in drag but was "dressed like a boy" when he was attacked, Evans said. He had planned to take part in next week's Gay Pride parade and festivities, but will now be unable to perform, the publicist said.

Other popular songs by the singer have included "Give It Up," released in 2004, and "Din Da Da," which topped the Billboard dance chart in 1997.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Secret Techie Fight Clubs Pop Up

Does the latest enterprise management software make you want to hit something? Or someone?

A group of Silicon Valley techies has found a new way to deal with the frustrations of modern technology.

They may have love handles and Ivy League degrees, but every two weeks they make like Brad Pitt and turn into vicious street brawlers in a real-life, underground fight club.

Kicking, punching and swinging every household object imaginable - from frying pans and tennis racquets to pillowcases stuffed with soft-drink cans - they beat each other mercilessly in a garage south of San Francisco.

Then, bloodied and bruised, they limp back to their desks in the morning.

Inspired by the 1999 film Fight Club, starring Pitt and Ed Norton, underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs have sprung up across the country as a way for desk jockeys to vent their frustrations and prove themselves.

Gints Klimanis, a 37-year-old software engineer and martial arts instructor, started the invitation-only Gentlemen's Fight Club in 2000 after his no-holds-barred sessions with a training partner grew to more than a dozen people. Most participants are men working in high-tech industries.

"You get to be a superhero for a night," Mr Klimanis says. "We have to go to work every day. We're constantly told to buy things we don't need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do." Shiyin Siou, a Santa Clara software engineer and three-year veteran of the clandestine fights, says it's a very "un-macho thing" to be beaten down. "But I don't need this to prove I'm macho," the softly-spoken 34-year-old says. "I'm macho enough as it is. This is as close as you can get to a real fight, even though I've never been in one."

Despite his reserved demeanour, he daydreams about inflicting pain on an attacker. "I have fantasies about it," he says.

Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York, says a sadomasochistic thread runs through these clubs.

"All day long these guys think they're the captains of the universe, technical wizards," he says. "They're brilliant but empty. They want to feel differently. They want to get hit, they want to feel something real."

The only protective equipment used is fencing and hockey masks. Several fighters have suffered broken noses, ribs and fingers.

Five-year fight club veteran Dinesh Prasad, 32, a Santa Clara engineer, says he recently skipped his first wedding anniversary to attend a fight rather than drive to Los Angeles, where his wife is finishing law school.

"I came here to get over my fear of fighting, and it's working," he says.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/techno...359642610.html





Dave Winer video interviews tech pundit John Dvorak

How-to Piss Off Mac Users
Transcribed by Jack

(Winer): Tell us how it works John.

(Dvorak): Ok, there's a formula for pissing off Macintosh users and getting a lot of links or attention. And this has been deconstructed, but never accurately. I'm going to give you the deconstruction.

First, I’ll write something that would be semi-innocuous, with just enough insulting stuff to get a lot of attention from the Macintosh community. So then they would write in - and by the way, it would always be done in such a way that I had outs - in other words, I would write stuff in kind of a weasely way. That would get me one column with a lot of numbers.

Then I'd get a lot of hate mail, and all kinds of weird Macintosh reaction. And then, I would react to it as though I was flabbergasted that everybody misinterpreted me, and that they hated it, and "I don't get it," and "What's wrong with these people?" Which would piss them off even more.

So I'd get like huge hits…

(Winer): So what was the point of all this?

(Dvorak): Now wait a minute…for numbers!

(Winer): Which numbers - exactly, what numbers are you looking for?

(Dvorak): I get them. Believe me. Lots of numbers.

Now, then I let it simmer down for a while, and then whatever position I took originally, I would change the position exactly the opposite and tell the Macintosh people I was completely wrong and they were right all along, and the numbers would go through the ceiling!! (Laughs)

(Winer): Ok.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/scripting/dvorak.mov?torrent]BitTorrent Link[/url]





The Sound That Repels Troublemakers

A device emitting a soundwave which is designed to drive young troublemakers away from a problem area of Swindon has been hailed as a success. Listen to the sound online.

The 'Mosquito' sonic deterrent device was installed by the Wyvern Theatre in an attempt to stop groups of up to 100 youngsters from gathering around Theatre Square.
Click below to listen to a feature about the 'Mosquito' device from BBC Radio Swindon's Breakfast Show with Peter Heaton-Jones broadcast on 14/06/06.
BBC Radio Swindon feature >

It was named the 'Mosquito' because the sound resembles that of a buzzing insect. And it works by emitting a harmless ultra sonic tone that generally can only be heard by people aged 25 and under. In trials, it has proven that the longer someone is exposed to the sound, the more annoying it becomes.

Crime Reduction Officer Bob Walton elaborated further: "Effectively, it's a transmitter which sends out a specialised frequency noise which according to the manufacture is particularly audible to young people under the age of 25.

He said: "I'm in my fifties and when it's turned on all I can hear is a very faint buzz. But I understand from young people who have been exposed to the noise, it is very annoying."

Swindon's anti-social behaviour co-ordinator Cheri Wright says it is working well.

She said: "We had a meeting with local retailers arounds here - after it had been installed for around three weeks - and feedback was really positive.

"Everyone was saying there has been a marked reduction in criminal damage and problems with the shops, so they've really welcomed it."
Click the link below to listen to an MP3 of the 'Mosquito' sonic deterrent soundwave to see if you are susceptible or not.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/conte..._feature.shtml





Behind the Haze of Allegory, the Hard Glint of Technology
Nate Chinen

Half a dozen songs into Radiohead’s show on Tuesday night in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Thom Yorke rolled out a new lyric rooted in allegorical imagery. “When I’m at the pearly gates,” he sang, “this’ll be on my videotape.” Then, in his next breath: “When Mephistopheles is just beneath / And he's reaching up to grab me.”

The language was evasive, cryptic and archly literary, and the tone was ambiguous and anxious. In other words, it was a characteristic effort by Mr. Yorke. But within that haze there was the hard glint of something: a notion that even heaven could be mediated by technology, and well within the grasp of peril.

That’s not what you’d call a standard crowd-pleasing sentiment. But dystopian unease is to Radiohead what tumbling surf is to Dick Dale, and there were as many cheers for “Videotape” as there were for six other brand-new songs.

Judging by the applause, it’s safe to say that much of the audience was already familiar with this still-unreleased material from the currently unsigned band. Tracks have been surfacing on the web – thanks to technology a bit more advanced than videotape – since Radiohead began its current tour in Europe last month.

There was another, more important reason for the crowd response: “Videotape" was a gripping piece of music. It began austerely – Mr. Yorke’s quavering voice, a few major chords on the piano, a backwards-processed guitar – and gradually assumed the dimensions of a rock song. Its crescendo had a sense of lift and motion; surrendering to it felt like being pulled downstream.

Radiohead’s last album, 2003’s “Hail to the Thief,” was widely understood as a reconciliation of the band’s warring instincts. Ostensibly it was a return to guitar-driven rock after a pair of keyboard-heavy releases – “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” – that bent toward the ambient and abstract. But Tuesday’s concert supported the band’s conviction that it could be omnivorous, letting each side bleed into the other.

The new songs themselves were vivid proof. “Bangers and Mash” had a noisily aggressive thrust, the combined result of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s interlocking guitars, Colin Greenwood’s bass and an unrelenting drum part doubled by Phil Selway and, on a spare trap set, Mr. Yorke. As a rock tune, “Bodysnatchers” was even better, especially as it roared into the chorus. (It was also amusing to hear Mr. Yorke keening the line “I have no idea what I am talking about.”)

Sound has supplanted technique for the musicians in the band; or to be more precise, the manipulation of sound has effectively become a technique in itself. On more than one tune, Mr. Greenwood and Mr. O’Brien laid aside their guitars to squat at analog consoles, precisely shaping noise. In similar fashion, Mr. Selway blended his drumming with various electronic beats, erasing the distinctions between them.

But it was Mr. Yorke’s voice that inevitably carried the music, and one striking thing about the concert was how often he let it loose without guttural strangulation. That’s one reason why “Nude,” a new ballad, was gorgeous; during one soaring falsetto note, the band faded out, and the effect was angelic.

Of course the intent was exactly the opposite. Mr. Yorke’s last words in the song were, “You'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.” Once again he was suspended between extremes. And he seemed to revel in it, along with everyone else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/ar...radiohead.html





Media Frenzy

Coming Soon (Maybe): Even More TV Channels
Richard Siklos

LET'S take a poll, couch potatoes. Raise your hand if you are excited about the possibilities of television multicasting.

We jest, of course. Chances are that only people who work as lobbyists or media executives have a vague notion what multicasting means, though it has been kicking around for years.

But the word is likely to gain a much higher profile in coming weeks — not just because a regulatory showdown is looming but also because of a wave of new television channels and ventures that are suddenly being hatched.

Indeed, as America careers toward its much-touted conversion to the all-digital transmission of television signals — the digital switchover is now set in stone for February 2009 — the debate over multicasting is looking like another shining example of the law of unintended consequences when technology comes into play.

Multicasting, by the way, is the entertainment industry term for broadcasting several television channels in the space, or bandwidth, of a current analog broadcast signal.

There are technical issues related to this, but the upshot is that with new digital frequencies and equipment, a local station can now beam roughly four digital channels on its signal where a single analog channel once existed. Or it can broadcast the current signal and sublet the extra spectrum, or space, for other purposes, like Internet access, infomercials or pay-TV services.

Now, the first question one might rightly ask is this: Who cares about multicasting when there are already hundreds of cable channels available in millions of households, and a bewildering array of new download services and Webby ways of getting video material? Where television programming is concerned, there is no reason to believe that more is more.

But there is a compelling argument to be made that multicasting is a public good because it uses a national resource — the airwaves — to deliver more and better free television into people's homes. While only 15 percent of America's households currently receive their television over the airwaves, rather than through cable or satellite, some cool new channels may help to quell a potential uproar over the fact that old analog televisions will not work with new digital signals. Bruce Leichtman of the Leichtman Research Group in Durham, N.H., estimates that when the digital switch is thrown in 2009, there will be about 75 million analog TV's nationwide that get their signals only from rabbit ears. Their owners will need to buy $50 converter boxes to tune in after that.

Unfortunately for broadcasters — and, arguably, for viewers — that 15 percent of households is not a big-enough market to make these new niche channels economically viable. For the model to work, broadcasters also need to make the new channels available to people with cable and satellite services — and they want the channels to be distributed free, in the way federal law currently obligates cable companies to carry their primary local channels.

The law is known as the must-carry rule, and several groups, led by the National Association of Broadcasters, are lobbying for what they call the digital must-carry rule: that all their broadcast signals, including whatever new digital multicast channels they cook up, should be included, free, on the basic cable lineup.

There are several arguments for this. One of the most sensible is that local broadcasters have had to invest small fortunes in equipment to convert to digital broadcasting at Washington's behest, and that this is a way for them to recoup their costs.

The broadcasters have a powerful ally for this cause in the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J. Martin. The F.C.C. has rejected digital must-carry twice already — the last time in 2005, when Mr. Martin, before he was chairman, was the sole vote in favor — but the composition of the commission has changed and the subject is expected to come up for a vote again in the next few weeks.

Some cable companies are already carrying the big television networks' new channels — NBC Weather Plus, for instance, is carried by Time Warner Cable in Manhattan. But that is because cable companies have broad relationships with the big broadcast networks, which supply much of the programming that causes people to buy cable service in the first place. Digital must-carry is crucial for independent station groups, which do not have that leverage.

The cable industry, to no one's surprise, regards this as rubbish and views digital must-carry as an unconstitutional way to force them to put free channels on their private networks. Kyle E. McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, has said that his members spent $100 billion upgrading their systems over the past decade and would be forced to carry channels "that may have no appeal at all." That would be unfair not only to operators like Comcast, the argument goes, but also to all the CNN's and ESPN's that have to compete on their merits for places on the cable dial.

Besides, some broadcasters are talking about multicasting eventually growing into a free, over-the-air alternative to bare-bones cable service.

Even as that regulatory showdown shapes up, some viewers are already seeing glimpses of what multicasting promises to bring into America's households: CBS is planning an entertainment-based channel that provides the rough equivalent of extra features on DVD's for some of its top network shows; NBC is already offering local weather channels around the country and, in New York, a spin-off of its Channel 4 flagship called WNBC 4.4.

Broadcasters like multicast channels because they help them to aim at smaller and smaller slices of the overall audience, which is rapidly being fragmented by the Internet and other new technologies. "It's a great advantage for us because it gives us a number of alternative platforms to give more local programming to our viewers," said Jay Ireland, the president of NBC Universal Television Stations.

But in addition to local and network spinoffs, multicasting is giving rise to wholly new national channels. One start-up broadcaster, for example, is offering a channel called the Tube, promoted as a free competitor to MTV; another company, Ion Media Networks, has announced plans with partners to start national channels with health and children's programming as themes.

Ion was previously known as Paxson Communications, a group of 60 TV stations. Ion's new chief executive, R. Brandon Burgess, said he believed that multicasting was the ticket to making free TV a viable alternative to cable for the first time in decades. That is no small matter as he tries to rescue the company from the brink of financial collapse. Mr. Burgess, a former NBC Universal executive (NBC has a big stake in Ion), said that a package of free national channels could be assembled alongside all the new local digital signals.

A typical viewer would then have a package of 30 or more free channels that could represent a far better alternative to cable than what is now available over the air. A similar service in England, called Freeview, has attracted seven million households; it delivers free channels via a set-top box that viewers buy.

Beyond the free services, companies like USDTV and Moviebeam are already leasing spare spectrum from local broadcasters to offer pay-TV and pay-movie services to people who buy special set-top receivers.

DESPITE all this activity, it is far more likely that you would raise your hand about high-definition TV than about the equally game-changing notion of multicasting. And, indeed, even if cable companies are forced to carry the new channels by the F.C.C., legal challenges could delay their widespread availability.

"The industry has done a pretty good job of marketing HDTV but not as good a job of even hinting to the public that they could get lots more channels for free," Martin D. Franks, executive vice president of CBS, said. The uncertainty over whether these new channels will ever see the light of day, he added, "does not help."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/bu.../11frenzy.html





House of Representatives Passes COPE Act
Bary Alyssa Johnson

The House of Representatives voted late Thursday night to pass the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act, which has been making rounds on the House floor since earlier this year.

The COPE Act, which was originally introduced by Representative Joe Barton (R-Tex.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill) earlier this year, seeks to increase competition in the broadband marketplace. It passed through the House with a 321-to-101 vote, with 215 Republicans and 106 Democrats voting in favor of it.

"[This bill] seeks to strike the right balance between ensuring that the public Internet remains an open, vibrant marketplace, and ensuring that Congress does not hand the FCC a blank check to regulate Internet services," Barton said.

The legislation was designed to enable a number of things, which include creating a "streamlined" national approval process that enables telecommunications companies to offer subscription TV services, and allowing cities to build their own broadband infrastructures and implement strong anti-child-pornography and anti-discrimination protections.

However, a number of other big political names as well as several consumer-advocate groups argue that the legislation fails to properly address the controversial issue of net neutrality.

"The Internet had always been a neutral network, which is the central reason for its overwhelming success," said Benn Scott, policy director for Free Press, in a statement. "This issue is not about whether or not the government will regulate the Internet. It's about whether consumers or cable and phone companies will decide what services and content are available on the net."

A popular net-neutrality provision—The Markey-Boucher-Eshoo-Inslee Amendment—was struck from the legislation after being voted down during Thursday's debate. Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) issued a statement Friday regarding the defeat of his amendment.

"We are making progress, and although we did not prevail tonight, we intend to prevail in the end," Markey said. "The Internet community is now aroused, and as the telephone and cable companies continue to use their political clout to turn the Internet from a democratic Field of Dreams to an exclusive set of Gated Communities…I will continue to fight for an open and non-discriminatory Internet because the future of our country depends on it. Literally."

However, there are still plenty of players in the IT industry, as well as on Capitol Hill, who argue that concerns over the issue are speculative and not based on the reality of today's marketplace.

"The United States doesn't even rank in the top 10 of the nations of the world in broadband deployment," Barton said in a statement. "This bill should change that."

In addition, although the Markey Amendment was struck down from the COPE Act, the legislation includes other net-neutrality provisions.

"I wouldn't agree that there's no net-neutrality provisions," said a spokesperson for Rep. Barton. "There were two amendments related to net neutrality, one was approved and one was rejected. An amendment by Congressman Smith of Texas was approved."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1974953,00.asp





In the middle of everything from the middle of nowhere

EchoStar, DirecTV to Resell Broadband

Targeting rural homes, satellite-TV providers EchoStar Communications Corp. and DirecTV Inc. will resell broadband Internet access via satellite from WildBlue Communications Inc., WildBlue said Friday.

The agreement is a big deal for WildBlue, a privately held company based in Greenwood Village, Colo. It has about 60,000 customers in the United States. EchoStar and DirecTV have 27 million customers combined, many of them in rural areas with access to few, if any, choices for broadband Internet.

In addition to this newest distribution agreement, WildBlue inked a pact with AT&T Inc. last month.

As part of the latest agreement, EchoStar and DirecTV agreed not to team up with any other satellite-broadband provider for the next five years. Other satellite services include HughesNet, which was formerly a part of DirecTV, as well as Starband and Ground Control.

The value of the transactions was not disclosed.

The recent flurry of deals shows just how far satellite broadband has come since its early days. In its earlier versions, satellite broadband was far too expensive to be practical since equipment and subscription costs came to hundreds of dollars a month. Prices have since come down, making the product appealing to a broader range of customers. However, prices are higher than cable or DSL service and speeds are lower.

WildBlue charges between $50 and $80 a month for speeds up to 1.5 megabits per second. The satellite dish and other initial equipment costs $300. WildBlue spokeswoman LaRae Marsik said it will be up to EchoStar, DirecTV and AT&T to determine how to price their customer packages since WildBlue will be serving as a wholesale provider. The companies expect to offer service this fall.

For satellite-TV providers, the service is another way to offer a full line of products. Since undergoing a $100 billion makeover in the 1990s, cable companies have flaunted their ability to offer TV, Internet and phone service. Satellite TV, by contrast, has been more limited in its ability to expand beyond TV service.

Wildblue uses a satellite operated by BCE Inc., Canada's largest phone company. BCE is also a major owner of WildBlue. Other investors include Intelsat Ltd., the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Liberty Media Holding Corp.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060610/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-





Whatcha Up To?
http://blog.familopia.com/whateveryonedoes/





AT&T to Roll Out Internet TV
Star report

AT&T will announce a long expected investment in its fiber optic network and the roll out of an Internet-based TV service, according to AT&T officials.

The announcement will come Wednesday at the Indiana State Museum where state and local officials will watch a demonstration of the IPTV service at the IMAX theater.

The company plans to launch the service in the fall and will use it to compete with digital cable offerings. The new service will be branded AT&T U-Verse.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dl...NESS/605300449





Billy Bragg Prompts Myspace Rethink

All your content belongs to Rupert?
Andrew Orlowski

Myspace says it's revising its legal terms and conditions after songwriter Billy Bragg withdrew his songs from the website in protest.

Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International, a bete noir for Bragg for more than 20 years. On 18 May, Bragg's management withdrew the song files, citing the T&Cs.

Bragg said the terms allowed News International to reuse his content without remunerating the artist.

"The real problem is the fact that they can sub-license it to any company they want and keep the royalities themselves without paying the artist a penny. It also doesn't stipulate that they can use it for non-commercial use only which is what I'd want to see in that clause. The clause is basically far to open for abuse and thus I'm very wary."

It's the return of the old favorite, the ambiguous ownership contract. Myspace is actually using a boilerplate text designed to allow it to republish the content. Five years ago Microsoft was forced to change a similar, but even more acquisitive click through contract. Microsoft's Passport sign-on permitted the company to:
Use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, publish, sublicense, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any such communication.

The terms included the right to grab trademarks and business plans. Microsoft retreated after a storm of protest.

But Redmond wasn't the first to attempt this, nor has it been the last. Apple had introduced a similar click through before retreating, and two years ago Google attached almost identical terms to its Orkut service. That was in 2004, the bloggers' love affair with the ad giant was still untarnished, and very little protest was heard.

In response to Bragg, Myspace says the T&Cs are confusing and affirmed that it had no claim on artists' materials.

"Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist's work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends," Jeff Berman told the New York Daily News. "Obviously, we don't own their music or do anything with it that they don't want."

All clear? Not quite.

In the much hyped "Web 2.0" world of "user generated content", punters are expected to contribute their works for commercial exploitation for nothing. While MySpace is pretty unambiguous about copyright, exploitation isn't so much a distant temptation, but an integral part of its business.

You can find the T&Cs here.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/06/0...bragg_myspace/





Computer Energy Use Under Scrutiny
Bob McDowall

Well-honed phrases about cheaper and greater computing power have all but faded from the marketing, sales, and other promotional material of IT vendors and consultants to the sector.

Rising energy costs over the past year, as well as concerns about the scale of availability of energy in the short-term, especially over the winter period, and more strategically over the longer term, are encouraging enterprises to review their energy requirements for computing purposes. This historically somewhat dull subject is assuming an unheard of level of interest and importance.

Computer technology installations both large and small comprise many parts. Power consumption fluctuates so much depending on use that it is extremely difficult to calculate. As a very rough rule of thumb, the quieter a computer is, the lower the power consumption. This is because it is creating less heat, and therefore needs fewer fans to cool it. The main areas of consumption are power supply, high performance graphics cards, and processors. Screensavers do not save energy. Switching-off local printers and determining if computers have energy saving facilities help. Most operating systems will automatically switch the monitor into standby mode if left unused for a specified period of time, specifying the shortest time delay possible - five minutes is ideal.

Mid range desk computers uses between 200W and 300W depending on how hard they are working, but the high-end range can use over 400W, excluding monitors, speakers, printer, network, and other extraneous equipment. Moreover, most computers are excessively powerful for everyday use - something of a status symbol for many people? "Normal" office use of a computer with all the standard office applications, web browser and internet radio open only uses around five per cent of the processor.

Short-term efforts are focused on energy saving with computer installations. At a simple housekeeping level, for example, switching off computers overnight and at weekends, results in energy and cost savings of 70 per cent to 80 per cent. Equally, switching off your monitor when at lunch, or during periods of absence, can halve the energy consumption. Newer computers will also allow the hard-drive to "spin-down" if left idle. Some printers also have similar facilities. However, these procedures are, at best, only housekeeping measures; reminders of energy costs but doing little to combat the growing demand for computing power

Unfortunately, the demand for computing power is growing, encouraged by increasing commercial and recreational use of computer technology and the proliferation of devices using computer technology. How can computing power be contained rather than rationed for the growing demand? Some form of rationing or allocation solution will be the knee-jerk solution, unless an alternative solution is found.

One solution may be found in the analogy of the WEEE Directive, where the supplier has a legal responsibility for safe disposal: the supplier would be responsible for supplying a new and exclusive energy source for new and extended computer equipment, but not replacement equipment after a specified cut-off date.

This would encourage more and extensive research and development into efficient and cost effective sources of power by the hardware vendor community - be it generator, solar, battery or even wind-up power.

• Applying the inventive intellect and innovative skills of the IT hardware developers to energy sources would be a powerful message to other industries to apply the same logic.
• The IT hardware sector would provide a very powerful boost to investment in new, alternative and cost-effective energy sources, enabling it to influence creation and development of energy sources for commercial and social benefit.
• The sector would be able to shake itself free from some elements of the commoditisation model into which it has evolved through maturity.
• The sector's "social responsibility" rating would rise benefiting its governance profile and some investor ratings.
• The sector would head-off potentially longer-term draconian energy restriction measures, which could restrict growth in the industry on a more permanent basis.

A more integrated approach to computing and its energy power and sources is essential if the industry to promote cheaper computing power transparently.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/04/2...pc_energy_use/





Portugal Builds World's Biggest Solar Plant

11-megawatt sun trap
Lester Haines

Portugal has started work on what will be the world's biggest solar power plant - a 52,000 photovoltaic module, 11-megawatt facility covering a 60-hectare south-facing hillside in the southern Alentejo region.

According to the BBC, the cost of the monster 'leccy factory is €58m - or £40m in old money - for which the Portuguese will get enough juice for 8,000 homes.

The project is funded by General Electric Energy Financial Services who've provided the cash for indigenous renewable energy power company Catavento's eco-friendly initiative.

Catavento's Piero Dal Maso declared: "The Serpa solar power project, along with other renewable energy initiatives, helps lay the foundation for Portugal's energy future. The project takes maximum advantage of the excellent environmental conditions in Portugal for solar power."

However, and as many of you might have spotted, supplying green juice to just 8,000 homes will hardly allow Portugal to tell OPEC to take a running jump. Dal Maso admitted: "It is a drop, but we think in Portugal that it will make sense to use renewables to get away from oil issues and the dependency on energy from outside which we have in Portugal."

The plant will, once completed, have another green string to its bow: the solar panels will be mounted two metres off the ground, allowing sheep to graze the grass below in delicious shade.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/04/2...pc_energy_use/





Verizon Bets Big On Fiber Optic Overhaul
Peter Svensson

Lisa Donohue squats on the floor with her 2-year-old son Calum in front of their high-definition TV, watching a children's cartoon. "What kind of animal is Franklin?" she asks him. Calum is a little under the weather, and his eyes droop a bit, but they stay fixed on the turtle on the screen.

Calum probably doesn't know, but the image of Franklin's bright green skin is brought to him not by cable, satellite, or broadcast, but by pulses of light that go straight to his home here on suburban Long Island from a telephone-company building miles away, via optical fiber.

Optical fiber — strands of glass 15 times thinner than a human hair — have been used by telecommunications companies over long-haul routes since the 1980s.

Now, Verizon Communications Inc., is making a big and expensive bet on replacing the network of copper wires that has provided phone service since the 19th century with fiber, giving it the capability to carry TV and super-fast Internet service in the bargain.

Investors have been skeptical of the plans, sending Verizon's stock down by about 20 percent since the rollout started last year, and other phone companies have not made the same gamble. Donohue, however, is happy with the service Verizon calls FiOS.

"With cable, the picture would stop. Or we'd have those digital things going," she says, gesturing to mimic the picture breaking up.

"We could get satellite, but our only tree in the garden is in the southwest corner, so we'd have to chop our only tree down" to get a clear line of sight to the satellite, she says.

The family pays about $220 a month for TV, phone, high-speed Internet service and two cell phones, which she says is cheaper than what they were paying before, when they had cable.

"It comes as one bill, which is nice because I don't have to remember to pay four times," Donohue says.

Factors like that have made Verizon's FiOS TV a success in the few areas where it's available, judging by Verizon's data. It has said that 6.5 percent of households in Massapequa Park signed up for TV in the first three months after its launch on Jan. 24. That figure is disputed by Cablevision Systems Corp., the incumbent cable company, which said it had a net loss of less than 2 percent in the area.

Verizon has permission to sell TV service in about 80 communities in New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia. It has fiber available for phone and Internet service in many more — 3 million homes. Verizon doesn't say how many homes are connected, but analysis of a tally by research firm RVA LLC indicates that Verizon had about 400,000 homes connected as of April.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime project," said Paul Lacouture, Verizon's vice president of engineering and technology.

Chief among fiber's advantages is its almost unlimited capacity to carry information, which Verizon only nibbles at with its current system: It lights fiber to the home with just three laser beams, though the fiber can carry many more.

The single beam that carries video (the others carry data and telephone calls to and from the home) has more capacity than an entire coaxial cable of the kind used by cable companies.

In practical terms, that means better image quality, because the digital TV channels don't need to be degraded to save bandwidth.

"If you're watching a program, you see the faces elongate, smear out" on digital cable, says Alex Fazi, who as owner of a videography studio in nearby Wantagh has a keen eye for video quality. He said he'll sign up for fiber TV as soon as it's available in his area.

In a similar way, fiber provides almost limitless Internet connection speeds. With current technology, Verizon could provide download speeds of 644 megabits per second, a bigger step up from DSL at 1.5 mbps than DSL is a step up from dial-up.

But for now, the maximum speed Verizon sells is 30 mbps for small businesses, or 20 mbps for homes.

"Right now there are not a lot of applications online that demand 100 megabits," Lacouture said. That's true, but probably in large part due to the lack of home connections at that speed — a chicken and egg situation.

Speeds may be going up soon, though: Verizon already raised them once (from 5 mbps to 10 mbps at the lowest tier) in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — the three states where it competes with Cablevision, a technologically sophisticated company that provides downloads at up to 30 mbps.

Apart from capacity, fiber has the advantage of being immune to interference and crosstalk, and nearly immune to rain, which can cause problems on the phone network.

"Customer reports have dropped by a factor of four or five when we've replaced the copper with fiber," Lacouture said.

Verizon expects to cut costs for its outside equipment by 40 percent by switching to fiber. But to get there, it has to spend big.

Verizon's average cost of pulling fiber down a street was $1,400 per home at the beginning of last year, not including the cost of actually connecting the homes. The target cost this year is $890 per home, reflecting improvements in materials and techniques. If it reaches its target of laying fiber by another 3 million homes by the end of the year, that's a cost of $2.7 billion — about half of Verizon's annual earnings.

Verizon is in essence taking the lumps as it blazes a trail for large-scale fiber deployment in the United States across its 28-state territory — it's creating the demand for equipment that allows manufacturers like Motorola Inc. and Tellabs Inc. to bring down costs.

"Every month that goes by we see another improvement," Lacouture said.

A large part of the cost, however, is labor, which doesn't get cheaper by the month. Drawing fiber along a street involves digging a trench to lay it, or putting up plastic tubes on the utility poles, then pulling the fiber through the tubes.

Paul McIlrary, Verizon's area manager for outside plant construction around Massapequa, says his teams of about three people lay fiber at a speed of 25 feet to 35 feet per day in the dense Long Island suburbs. That may sound slow, but McIlrary has 90-110 linemen working to lay fiber just in Freeport, which has 45,000 inhabitants.

"With fiber, it's a light source, and any bend can distort the signal," McIlrary says. "So we have to be careful that we don't bend or kink it."

Other than that, the actual placing operation isn't much different from copper, which Verizon's people have a lot of experience with.

Home installation is another cost: the target here is $715 this year, but Verizon has acknowledged that costs are running above that target. It's a big job, at least if TV service is involved. It took the installer all day to get the Donohues up and running, for instance.

Getting a "drop cable" with fiber to the home from the nearest utility pole is the small part. The installer then attaches a large box, called an Optical Networking Terminal, to the side of the house. On the other side of the wall, he installs a backup battery, which should keep the ONT running for six hours if there is a blackout.

Then he strings coaxial cable from the box to the TV sets (Verizon will use existing coax if it's not substandard), Ethernet cable to an Internet router, and a phone line to handsets. In addition, a small box called a Network Interface Module is installed inside that needs to connect both to the coaxial and Ethernet cables.

With costs like that, it's perhaps no mystery why the other big telephone companies, like AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp., are focusing on upgrading their copper DSL lines rather than bringing fiber to the home (though they do draw fiber in new subdivisions). But analysts believe the DSL upgrades are stopgaps, and that the other companies will eventually move to fiber in a few years. By that time, Verizon's efforts may have made the process simpler and cheaper.

"People talk about the risks of doing this," says Michael Render, who tracks fiber buildouts for RVA, the research firm. What they should be talking about, he says, is the risk of not building out fiber. "The world is changing very rapidly."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060611/...kxBHNlYwN0bQ--





Irreverent Blogger To Leave Microsoft

A prominent Microsoft Corp. blogger who sometimes bluntly bashed the software behemoth is leaving the company to join PodTech.net, a Silicon Valley video blogging startup.

Robert Scoble, 41 said Sunday he's going to miss the company, which seemed to love him the more he criticized it.

Asked why he thought Microsoft didn't mind his public criticism, Scoble said he thinks it's because Chairman
Bill Gates "loves arguing out ideas."

"He knows that an idea can change the world. How are you going to get the best ideas from 60,000 people? Let an idea get out in the public square and let people talk about it," Scoble said in a telephone interview Sunday from San Francisco, where he and PodTech executives were planning to attend a video blogging conference.

Scoble, a "technical evangelist" and strategist for Channel 9, a Web site created two years ago to strengthen ties between Microsoft and outside software developers, said he submitted his letter of resignation on Saturday.

"We are sorry to see Robert leave Microsoft," the company said in a statement its public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom, e-mailed the AP. "Robert made a strong contribution through Channel 9 and his blog during an important time for the company. We wish him well in his future endeavors."

Scoble said he will continue working at the Redmond-based tech giant through the end of the month and begin his job as vice president of media development at PodTech, based in Menlo Park, Calif., in early July.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060611/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-





EBay to Unveil Further Skype Tie-Ins

Online marketplace eBay Inc. is set to detail on Tuesday how it plans to combine its Skype Web telephone-call service into its core U.S. auction business, executives said on Sunday.

"We will have some news on Tuesday about Skype," John Donahoe, president of eBay's Marketplace unit, told an audience of software developers at the company's annual developer conference in Las Vegas.

Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday that the company plans to encourage eBay sellers to embed Skype calling links into auction pages in a few product categories, including cars, real estate and diamond solitaire rings.

So-called "click to call" features through which eBay customers can contact sellers directly via text message, voice or video conference have been a main selling point of eBay's acquisition of Skype in October for as much as $4.2 billion.

Executives declined to provide further details during a panel discussion at the developers' conference. The eBay-Skype announcement will be made during Bill Cobb's keynote speech Tuesday evening at the company's annual user conference here. Cobb is president of eBay's core North American unit.

A Skype spokesman declined to comment on the plans.

So far, eBay has moved cautiously to knit Skype into its core eBay auction business.

While more than 100 millions users worldwide have signed up to use the free or low-cost computer and phone calling service, the U.S. market has been slower to develop. Initially, there was little overlap between eBay's audience and Skype users.

In its most basic form, Skype differs little from other popular instant messaging software systems. And while its Web calling features are catching on among computer users, users must first buy earphones, microphones or special phone handsets to take advantage of cheap phone call features.

Len Pryor, Skype's head of developer relations, said in interview that the company has been testing Skype integration with eBay in five smaller country markets in Asia and Europe, including Belgium.

"The key markets will be coming online later," Pryor said, when asked about the time frame for embedding Skype features in the auctions business in its main markets of the United States, Germany and Britain.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060611/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-





EBay to Add a Phone Link From Listings to Sellers
Ken Belson

EBay said yesterday that sellers on its auction site would be able to add a link to their listings allowing potential buyers to reach them through Skype, the Internet phone service.

The announcement comes nine months after eBay raised eyebrows by spending $2.6 billion for Skype, a European start-up that at the time had just $60 million in sales.

With a few clicks of the mouse, shoppers with Skype's free software installed on their computers can then talk or send short messages to the sellers, ask for more information and, eBay hopes, buy more goods.

Starting Monday, the Skype feature will be available to sellers advertising their products in 14 categories, including real estate, cars and trucks, silver coins and beds. EBay said it chose those categories because they included expensive items or complex products that could generate many questions. EBay expects Skype to generate $200 million in sales this year.

"We believe that Skype will enhance the way that people communicate and trade on eBay, especially in high-involvement and high-price categories," Bill Cobb, the president of eBay North America, said in a statement issued as a convention of eBay sellers was under way in Las Vegas.

While calls between the computers of Skype users are free, the company makes most of its money when users buy prepaid blocks of minutes so they can make calls from their PC's to landlines and cellphones.

The perception in the market that eBay paid too much for Skype is one reason eBay's stock has tumbled 22 percent since the deal was announced in September. Shares of eBay rose 40 cents, to $30.51 yesterday before the Skype announcement.

EBay executives, however, continue to say that Skype will help buyers and sellers close deals because they can talk to each other. With Skype's free videophone feature, buyers can also get another look at products.

To encourage more people to use Skype, eBay last month eliminated the 2-cents-a-minute charge users in the United States and Canada would normally pay to call landlines and mobile phones in their countries.

Many analysts say that Skype will be hard pressed to turn a profit on its own because it is cutting potential sources of revenue and must fend off Yahoo and AOL, which are developing competing products. But they say that the free phone service should help to relieve some of the concerns that eBay overpaid for Skype.

"It will be a long time before we have the hindsight to determine the value of the purchase," said Timothy M. Boyd, an analyst at Caris & Company. But "if Skype becomes the No. 1 Internet phone product and totally ubiquitous, it becomes one more spoke in eBay's strategy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/te...gy/14ebay.html





Fried Gatsos
Jack

What’s that you say? never heard of it? Well well, you would if you lived in great Britain. as a matter of fact, you might even call it your favorite dish.

It is the ubiquitous autoroute camera that has sprung up nearly everywhere, dispensing tickets and keeping a paternal eye on those naughty Brits.

But some people haven't quite gotten the message that all these cameras and all this watching is good for them. These camera hooligans have even taken to torching the boxes that house the sleepless safety eyes, making poor neighborhood souls worry that no one's watching over them anymore!

Never fear, you're always being watched. This is England! Authorities make sure they pop right back up again, good as new.

This is another burnt out Gatso in West Yorkshire. The damage is extensive: the glass has shattered in the windows, the metal has buckled on the roof and so have the sides of the window containing the flash. To top it all off there is a sticker saying Free Country.

Free country? FREE COUNTRY!? The unmitigated gall!

God Save the Queen.

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22775





A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears
Paul Vitello

In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear.

Audio: The High-Pitched Ring Tone (mp3)

In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.

"When I heard about it I didn't believe it at first," said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. "But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could."

The technology, which relies on the fact that most adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds, was developed in Britain but has only recently spread to America — by Internet, of course.

Recently, in classes at Trinity and elsewhere, some students have begun testing the boundaries of their new technology. One place was Michelle Musorofiti's freshman honors math class at Roslyn High School on Long Island.

At Roslyn, as at most schools, cellphones must be turned off during class. But one morning last week, a high-pitched ring tone went off that set teeth on edge for anyone who could hear it. To the students' surprise, that group included their teacher.

"Whose cellphone is that?" Miss Musorofiti demanded, demonstrating that at 28, her ears had not lost their sensitivity to strangely annoying, high-pitched, though virtually inaudible tones.

"You can hear that?" one of them asked.

"Adults are not supposed to be able to hear that," said another, according to the teacher's account.

She had indeed heard that, Miss Musorofiti said, adding, "Now turn it off."

The cellphone ring tone that she heard was the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.

It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis, or aging ear. While Miss Musorofiti is not likely to have it, most adults over 40 or 50 seem to have some symptoms, scientists say.

While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz (a hertz being the scientific unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second), most adults' ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.

"It's the most common sensory abnormality in the world," said Dr. Rick A. Friedman, an ear surgeon and research scientist at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.

But in a bit of techno-jujitsu, someone — a person unknown at this time, but probably not someone with presbycusis — realized that the Mosquito, which uses this common adult abnormality to adults' advantage, could be turned against them.

The Mosquito noise was reinvented as a ring tone.

"Our high-frequency buzzer was copied. It is not exactly what we developed, but it's a pretty good imitation," said Simon Morris, marketing director for Compound Security, the company behind the Mosquito. "You've got to give the kids credit for ingenuity."

British newspapers described the first use of the high-frequency ring tone last month in some schools in Wales, where Compound Security's Mosquito device was introduced as a "yob-buster," a reference to the hooligans it was meant to disperse.

Since then, Mr. Morris said his company has received so much attention — none of it profit-making because the ring tone was in effect pirated — that he and his partner, Howard Stapleton, the inventor, decided to start selling a ring tone of their own. It is called Mosquitotone, and it is now advertised as "the authentic Mosquito ring tone."

David Herzka, a Roslyn High School freshman, said he researched the British phenomenon a few weeks ago on the Web, and managed to upload a version of the high-pitched sound into his cellphone.

He transferred the ring tone to the cellphones of two of his friends at a birthday party on June 3. Two days later, he said, about five students at school were using it, and by Tuesday the number was a couple of dozen.

"I just made it for my friends. I don't use a cellphone during class at school," he said.

How, David was asked, did he think this new device would alter the balance of power between adults and teenagers? Or did he suppose it was a passing fad?

"Well, probably it is," said David, who added after a moment's thought, "And if not, I guess the school will just have to hire a lot of young teachers."

Kate Hammer and Nate Schweber contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/te... tner=homepage





ACLU Tries to Stop Warrantless Wiretapping
AP

Critics of the government's domestic surveillance program claim it violates the rights of free speech and privacy. The Bush administration says it is necessary and legal.

Both sides were in court Monday to argue the constitutionality of the program, with the American Civil Liberties Union seeking an immediate halt to warrantless wiretapping.

The Bush administration has asked U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to dismiss the lawsuit, saying litigation would jeopardize state secrets.

The administration has acknowledged eavesdropping on Americans' international communications without first seeking court approval. President Bush has said the eavesdropping is legal because of a congressional resolution passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism.

The parties in the ACLU lawsuit, who include journalists, scholars and lawyers, say the program has hampered their ability to do their jobs because it has made international contacts, such as sources and potential witnesses, wary of sharing information over the phone.

Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said the administration's arguments in defense of the program don't square with the Constitution.

''The framers never intended to give the president the power to ignore the laws of Congress even during wartime and emergencies,'' she said last week during a conference call with reporters.

She said no state secrets need to be revealed to litigate the case because the administration has already acknowledged the program exists. The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a similar lawsuit on the eavesdropping in federal court in New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...rtner=homepage





In Web Era, Big Money Can't Buy an Exclusive
Julie Bosman

After winning the very expensive rights to the first photographs of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, the editors at People magazine formed a publicity plan. Appear for an interview with Matt Lauer on the NBC "Today" show. Give the photos to the tabloids, which will run them in full color on their front pages. Then, on Friday, release the pictures in glossy form to the world on newsstands everywhere, for an increased cover price of $3.99.

Instead, days before their official publication, the pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt cuddling their days-old infant first appeared on Gawker, PerezHilton.com and about two dozen other gossip blogs and Web sites. Some photos were taken from a bootleg copy of Hello! magazine, which had obtained the rights in Britain to the photos for a reported $3.5 million. Others that appeared later were from copies of People that the magazine says may have been stolen before official distribution. Within an hour of the first postings, lawyers for the magazine began unleashing cease-and-desist letters to the offending Web sites.

But did the Internet publication of the pictures really undermine People's publicity plan?

Magazine analysts say the blogs may have actually done the magazine a favor by drumming up even more interest that may translate into higher newsstand sales. But the episode does show that it is no longer business as usual for celebrity magazines, as gossip blogs take on an ever-larger role.

People magazine has been there before — most memorably when it planned to publish the exclusive pictures of Britney Spears's newborn son, only to see them reproduced prematurely on Web sites — but never with pictures worth so much and illegally posted so widely.

People's editors, who had just lived through an intense all-night bidding war that lasted by some accounts into Sunday morning, were livid when the photos were first leaked on Tuesday.

"As a guy who went through all the efforts to get these pictures, my initial reaction was anger," Larry Hackett, the managing editor of People, said in an interview on Friday. "Someone's taking your stuff."

The photos, after all, had come at a price: The New York Post reported that People had paid $4.1 million for the exclusive North American rights to the photos. Mr. Hackett said the number was inaccurate, but declined to name the real figure. "It was a substantial amount of money" was all he would say.

"Pics of the Messiah!" trumpeted the gossip blog DListed, with pictures that contained the tell-tale fold down the middle that are produced when a magazine is pressed onto a photo scanner. At PerezHilton.com, the pictures were enhanced with white handwriting over them. ("Hot Pop" on a picture of Mr. Pitt; "The Little Ladies" was written over a photo of Ms. Jolie, Shiloh and her other daughter, Zahara.)

A post on Gawker said the first letter from Nicholas Jollymore, a lawyer for People's parent company, Time Inc., came within an hour of the photo's appearance on the blog.

Then Gawker reprinted an e-mail exchange between its managing editor, Lockhart Steele, and Mr. Jollymore.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hackett was interviewed by Mr. Lauer on the "Today" show on Thursday morning, the same day the pictures appeared — free of charge — on the covers of The New York Post and The New York Daily News.

By late Friday afternoon, Gawker had cried uncle. "This time, turns out that posting the pics actually is illegal," a post read. "Or so we're told. Our lawyer could just be drunk and not wanting to deal. Whatever."

But magazine analysts say the widespread posting of exclusive photos on Web sites could feed sales on the newsstand, where People will make extra revenue by raising the price of the magazine to $3.99 from its usual $3.49.

"I think it gins up the publicity machine," said Martin Walker, a magazine consultant and the chairman of Walker Communications in New York. "It just creates more buzz, more noise, so more people will buy the magazine."

Mr. Hackett conceded that all of the reproductions of the photographs might increase interest in the magazine. "I must confess, I think it helps," he said. "Clearly, the blogs have betrayed a huge amount of interest in these photographs and people want to see them."

But Gawker, for one, had a different interpretation. Jessica Coen, the blog's co-editor, told USA Today on Thursday that "a few less people are going to buy it if they can see it online." On Friday, Mr. Steele, Gawker's managing editor, declined an interview, saying only that he is letting the posts on Gawker speak for themselves.

Despite the steep price, acquiring the photos is both a short-term and long-term strategy, Mr. Hackett said. In the short term, publicity surrounding the newsstand sales could lift sales and generate positive publicity for the magazine.

But in the long term, People wants to reaffirm that it is the place where these kinds of high-profile photos will appear. "I would not want to give Us Weekly or any other magazine the kind of traction in this arena," Mr. Hackett said.

Analysts say that People should expect enormous sales of the issue, possibly as many as five million copies in a week. People is by far the leader in the weekly celebrity magazine category, with an average circulation of 3.7 million in the last six months of 2005, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Wenner Media's Us Weekly has a circulation of 1.7 million, while American Media's Star has 1.4 million.

But as large as People's reach is, it is a mainstream audience and may not overlap with readers of blogs with a sardonic edge, said Robert S. Boynton, the director of the magazine program at New York University and the author of "The New New Journalism."

"The blogosphere is so self-important, do you really think the same people who read blogs are going to be buying People magazine?" Mr. Boynton said. "I just can't see that the blogosphere is really as important an economic factor as something like this when it comes to a mass-marketed commercial magazine."

Even if the audience overlaps, the glossy pictures printed in People have their own appeal, said Samir Husni, a magazine analyst and professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi.

"The blogs are whetting the appetite of the public, but they want to see the real thing," Mr. Husni said. "To this addicted public, it is not real unless it is in their hands, on their laps, in their bath tub."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/bu.../12people.html





Idea for Electronic Message Tax Prompts Swift Outcry in Europe
Thomas Crampton

A French member of the European Parliament, Alain Lamassoure, recently uttered the dreaded T-word — taxes — in connection with e-mail and mobile phone text messages, and in so doing earned the wrath of the Internet generation.

No matter how remote the possibility may be — or how useful such taxes might be in financing the European Union budget — the mere mention of taxing messages was enough to ignite the blogosphere and industry lobbying groups.

Mr. Lamassoure raised the option of a Europewide tax on e-mail and text messages last month in a working group on ways to finance the European Union's rising costs. As indignant missives filled the message board on Mr. Lamassoure's Web site, he distanced himself from the proposal, saying he had mentioned the idea only as a topic for discussion, not as something he supported.

Any new tax could not move ahead without approval from all of the European Union's 25 national Parliaments, and a message tax in particular is not even at the stage of a formal proposal. Still, some politicians and technology experts say the debate could serve to highlight imbalances between casual users and Internet hogs.

West Europeans spent a total of about 15 billion euros, or $19 billion, sending 157 billion phone text messages in 2005, according to Thomas Husson, a Paris-based mobile phone analyst at Jupiter Research. International Data Corporation has estimated that the number of daily e-mails sent in 2006 — including the 40 percent that are spam — will exceed 60 billion a day worldwide, up from 31 billion in 2002.

Text messages in Europe range from about 0.10 euro to 0.15 euro each when charged individually; a set number of texts is also sometimes part of a monthly subscription. At that price, Mr. Lamassoure said, there is ample room to lower consumer prices and impose a tax of 0.01 euro a message.

E-mail messages — which are not currently counted on a per-unit basis like mobile phone text messages — would initially be more difficult to measure for taxation, Mr. Lamassoure said.

Mr. Lamassoure said he had learned that reaction from Internet users could be swift and harsh. "I appreciate their concern," he said, "but it is absurd to say that my ideas will kill the Internet."

Phone companies and Internet service providers, the companies that would be most affected by the proposed taxes, have reacted harshly as well.

"Taxation of e-mails or Internet flies in the face of principles the E.U. has been trying to support," said Richard Nash, secretary general of the European Internet Service Providers Association in Brussels, in reference to efforts by Europe to encourage the growth of technology. "This is one of the more bizarre initiatives, and it is unlikely to increase the popularity of the European Union if it succeeds."

Yet some in the technology industry say Internet costs are no longer divided equitably among users. Heavy users typically pay the same monthly price as light ones.

"The current system of payments for the Internet made sense when it all started, but the incentives are getting more and more misaligned," said Esther Dyson, a technology consultant.

Ms. Dyson said, for example, that users who consumed more network resources through downloading video should pay more than users who just viewed a few Web sites each day. For e-mail, Ms. Dyson advocates a system in which senders would pay on a graded scale to be certain their messages are delivered. Friends would not pay to send an e-mail, for example, but those who did not know the recipient, like companies sending promotional mail, would pay.

The result, Ms. Dyson said, would be to cut down on spam and make those who send unwanted e-mails bear the cost. "As it stands, the unfortunate recipients of spam pay to receive and store unwanted e-mails," she said. "It only makes sense to have those sending spam pay."

This concept provoked considerable debate in February, when AOL and Yahoo said they had signed up with Goodmail, a Silicon Valley company that charges companies for sending bulk messages that are guaranteed to arrive in users' mailboxes. AOL and Yahoo have been guaranteeing delivery of Goodmail-sponsored messages since May.

"People have become very comfortable with e-mail being a free medium, so there was some surprise that companies would pay to send e-mails," said Richard Gingras, chief executive of Goodmail. "The difference is that consumers view our e-mail as more certain."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/te...y/12email.html





"Reports of the leaks make for good drama."

Virus Spreads Private Data, Scandal Over File-Sharing Network
Carl Freire

A computer virus that targets the popular file-sharing program Winny isn't the most destructive bug or even the most widespread. But it's the most talked about in Japan as it generates headline after headline, month after month.

The malware, called Antinny, finds random files on Winny users' PCs and makes them available on the file-sharing network. So far, the data leaked have been varied and plentiful: passwords for restricted areas at airports, police investigations, customer information, sales reports, staff lists.

The constantly updated virus seems to have spared no one _ airlines, local police forces, mobile phone companies, the National Defense Agency. Even an antivirus software manufacturer has suffered.

"The virus has been quite effective in getting information off a user's computer and onto the Internet. The data is supposed to be secret, so people are quite sensitive about it," said Tsukuba University computer scientist Kazuhiko Kato.

Compared to attacks on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software, the scope of the Antinny outbreak is narrow. But the Winny mess has caused an enormous brouhaha in Japan.

Antinny also may have the dubious distinction of being the first virus to exploit the nature of file-sharing itself _ in Japan, if not in the world, said Mamoru Saito of Telecom Information Sharing and Analysis Center Japan. Other viruses and spyware are often found on such networks, though none appears to take advantage of the underlying technology to spread personal data.

And while Antinny's writers seem to be limiting themselves to Japanese file-sharing software for now, he said, the code theoretically could be modified to attack other file-sharing networks such as Gnutella and BitTorrent.

The outbreak has triggered a broad damage-control effort by government and businesses. They have banned Winny from in-house computers and fired employees who use it on them. They've also demanded that staff not take work home and delete Winny from any home PCs used for work.

"The most secure way to prevent the leakage of information is not to use Winny on your computer," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the government's top spokesman, told reporters.

But the outbreak shows little sign of abating.

"The problem has shown that many people just don't know how to use the Internet safely," said Takeshi Sato of the government's National Information Security Center.

File-sharing programs like Winny are used to find and get files _ from music to video to documents _ from the computers of other people also using the software. The PC owner typically has control over what is made available by limiting sharing to a specific folder.

The virus takes advantage of this culture to propagate itself by playing a "social" trick on users, said Telecom ISAC Japan's Saito.

When the virus is activated on a computer, it first chooses a new name for itself by taking the names of other files users are likely to be searching for _ usually photos or music. The resulting new name becomes so long that, under normal Windows' settings, the three-letter file extension that indicates the type of file disappears from view, he said.

Careless users who download the file will see only the name and think it is something they wanted _ say, a photo of a favorite movie star. They don't see that they are actually trying to open an application, not a picture.

When they do, the virus then looks on the computer for the Winny application, grabs random files off the hard drive and uses Winny to make those files _ and itself _ available for download on the network.

And so the cycle repeats.

New strains of Antinny appear all the time. Software maker Trend Micro listed 46 variations of the virus in its database as of mid-May. Trend itself lost sales data due to a Winny leak in 2005.

"Just keeping your antivirus software up to date isn't enough, because the updates can't keep up with all the new strains of the virus," the government's Sato said.

The government's concerns about Winny go beyond viruses. It's often used to share files _ and that often means illegally exchanging copyrighted materials.

Winny was already on the government's radar screen in November 2004, when its creator _ then an instructor at the prestigious University of Tokyo _ was handed a three-year suspended sentence on charges of violating copyright laws.

But now it is confidential data rather than hit songs that have Winny back in the spotlight.

Japan Airlines, for example, discovered last December that an Antinny-infected computer owned by one of its co-pilots leaked passwords for restricted areas at 16 airports around Japan as well as Guam's international airport. The airline was forced to alert the airports to have passwords changed as a precaution.

In early March, Japan's National Defense Agency said it lost "confidential information" due to a Winny leak, again from an employee's home computer. While defense officials refused to say what data had been lost, a news report said it included reports on training exercises conducted in Okinawa with U.S. troops in 2005.

In the aftermath of the leaks, the agency ordered employees not to use Winny on any computers used for work. It also announced plans to purchase 56,000 computers so employees would no longer have to use their own equipment for work.

Schools, Internet providers and electric companies are among the others who can tell of similar losses. Making matters worse, reports began surfacing in May that the virus was now attacking another Japanese file-sharing application called Share (pronounced "shah-ray"), opening the door to yet more embarrassing leaks.

The excitement being generated is all the more remarkable when one considers the outbreak's scale.

Because Antinny needs Winny to spread, both the virus and the files it picks up are limited to a small section of Internet users _ anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000 people, based on government and industry estimates.

Government statistics show Antinny was responsible for a minuscule fraction of the 24,155 virus outbreaks reported between November 2005 and April 2006.

"Reports of the leaks make for good drama," Tsukuba's Kato said. "Still, they show that people need to be careful if they connect their computers to the Internet."

The government and businesses are trying to help, with everything from educational pamphlets and Web sites to free software that can remove Antinny, Winny or both. But there are limits to what they can do.

"The industry is providing information about how to deal with the problem," said Telecom ISAC-Japan's Saito. "The question is whether or not the users do anything about it."
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleA...nnyantinny.php





Celestial Jukebox Falls to Earth
Eliot Van Buskirk

By now, we music fans are well accustomed to getting whatever we want online, whether from iTunes, subscription services such as Rhapsody or free P2P networks.

But this new freedom to listen to anything has come without freedom of movement; you're only free to get new music when you're sitting at your computer. When it comes to portable listening, you're generally stuck with whatever you loaded onto your MP3 player.

Pundits have been yammering away for years about a "celestial jukebox" that will give everyone the ability to access all content ever created, from anywhere, at any time. This long-discussed concept is finally becoming a reality, at least as far as music goes.

One option is already available: the music cell phone, which can download music from satellites, literally fulfilling prophecies of a digital jukebox in the sky. According to Kent German, senior editor of CNET's cell-phone reviews section, the two leading wireless music services in the United States are Verizon's V Cast ($2 per track, over a million songs) and the Sprint Music Store ($2.50 a track, 400,000 songs).

If you're at the gym and suddenly decide to motivate yourself with Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" during the last five minutes of your stairclimber routine, would you pay $2.50 for the privilege? Probably not. But if the song were part of a $15 monthly flat fee? It's a lot more likely (though hopefully you wouldn't get this version).

The celestial jukebox is all about impulse buying. But even if you can buy the music in theory, the pocketbook can rear up as a barrier that's as potent as any technological failure. For cell-phone carriers, price is likely to always be a brick in the wall. Even if they manage to lower prices as their wireless networks become more robust, they'll still have to charge approximately what iTunes charges per song, plus an additional amount to offset their additional infrastructure costs.

In the other corner of the sky is satellite radio. XM and Sirius let you pay a flat subscription fee, but you can't pick and choose what to hear at any given time. And although some satellite receivers let you save songs as they stream to your player, that ability is under legal attack from (who else?) attorneys for the RIAA. Technologies that promise to do the same for terrestrial digital radio (CD-quality FM, FM-quality AM, no subscription fees, with metadata included for each song) have already been threatened by a similar, albeit preemptive attack.

Even if satellite and digital radio companies can fend off the RIAA, their song-caching feature will still be only a pale imitation of services like Rhapsody and Napster, which let you download an unlimited number of songs for a monthly fee, without the need to wait for them to show up in a radio show. (They also offer radio and playlists for when you don't know what you're looking for.)

The celestial jukebox needs to incorporate a Rhapsody-like flat fee subscription in order to allow impulse downloading. If you're going to pay the same $10 to $15 a month whether you download "Eye of the Tiger" or not, why not do it? As far as current wireless options go, neither the expensive a la carte cell-phone model or satellite radio broadcasts can make this happen.

There's another way to get there: by combining an internet-based subscription service with Wi-Fi wirelessly completing the so-called "last mile of service" (well, in this case more like the last 50 feet or so). At least two companies have incorporated Wi-Fi into release or pre-release MP3 player units: MusicGremlin and SoniqCast.

The SoniqCast devices I tested used their Wi-Fi connections to grab music from your PC, but MusicGremlin announced plans at CES earlier this year for a subscription service that'd let you download any of 1.5 million tracks (anything in MusicNet's catalog) onto one of its 8-GB MP3 players using Wi-Fi.

A Wi-Fi-enabled subscription service would lead to all sorts of impulse listening. While reading a music magazine in bed, you could queue up downloads of the artists mentioned without getting up. Or if a friend tells you about a band they think you'll like, you could listen to it on the way home (provided there's some Wi-Fi nearby, as is increasingly the case).

The celestial jukebox, which will famously follow you around reacting to your every musical whim, could be enabled by mere earthbound internet cables and Wi-Fi hot spots.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_3





Blues Legend B.B. King Still Touring at 80
AP

Blues legend B.B. King likes to pass the time while on tour relaxing in his jumbo-sized luxury bus, playing dominoes and checkers on his silver laptop computer.

But King plays a lot more than just computer games, obviously. He's been exceptionally busy lately playing his favorite guitar, Lucille, at tour stops that included Chicago, Santa Cruz, Calif., and Fort Worth, Texas, as well as his annual homecoming festival in Indianola, Miss.

His performance here this weekend was his last scheduled appearance in his home state before he heads off for several more around the U.S. and then on to Europe early next month for his final overseas tour performances. And then back to America for a last leg.

''I still will tour domestically somewhat, not nothing like I've been,'' King told The Associated Press, on the bus before the sold-out show. ''It is time to cut down a bit. Now that I am 80 years old, I said that once I'd made it -- 80, that is -- I would cut back.''

So much for that idea.

He also managed during this part of the tour to squeeze in some living history segments for the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, which is under construction near the cotton gin where King once worked.

''I went to a place I haven't been in 80 years -- my birthplace,'' King said, with laughter.

He was born on a plantation in Itta Bena near Indianola. To find it, he said the crew used audio recordings of his late father giving directions to get there. Hearing Albert King's voice was a very emotional experience for the blues legend.

''My dad never told me he loved me -- outward,'' King said. ''He never said it in words, but he had a way of talking to me that made me know,'' he said. ''I learned when he was very pleased with me, he called me `Jack.' I don't know why. I knew when he said `Jack,' I could see the look in his eyes.''

Born Riley B. King, the blues great was named after his father's friend Jim O'Reilly. King said he once asked his father why his name didn't begin with the ''O.''

''He said, `You didn't look Irish enough,''' King quipped.

The memories came flooding back to King during his birthplace visit, including one moment when the father remarked about the son's guitar skills.

''He never told me I was good as an entertainer. He did tell me once, `Boy, you'll never play guitar as good as I am.' I didn't argue with him,'' King said.

King hopes the museum will help keep his music alive.

''I want to be able to share with the world the blues as I know it -- that kind of music -- and talk about the Delta and Mississippi as a whole,'' he said. ''I'm hoping I can live long enough to see it up.''

A diabetic, King keeps several sugar-free snacks in the back of his bus. He favored the cheddar-cheese flavored Goldfish crackers.

''Would you like some?'' King said. ''I like them. They are good.''

As King ate a handful, he fastidiously kept any crumbs from falling on his black tuxedo. The temperature in the bus was around 75 degrees, but King was comfortable in his slacks, trademark leather shoes and long-sleeved white dress shirt.

''I like to think that when you go on stage you should never go on stage with the clothes that you wore in the street,'' he explained. ''If I go and see a concert and see everybody in overalls... it is not as exciting to me as to see them looking like they are show people.''

As famous as King is for his guitar mastery, he also stands out because of his mellifluous voice, and the stories he tells with it.

''When I'm singing I don't want you to just hear the melody,'' he said. ''I want you to relive the story because most of the songs have pretty good story telling.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...c-BB-King.html





Fox's Own Superheroes: A Daring Duo at the Studio
Laura M. Holson

In Hollywood, candor is as common as a blue polyester pantsuit on Rodeo Drive.

That is why the actor Hugh Jackman reacted with surprise at what he heard in a meeting at 20th Century Fox last year to discuss "X-Men: The Last Stand," the third entry in the "X-Men" trilogy. Tom Rothman, Fox's energetic co-chairman, wanted to share an idea for the movie's plot: it would center on a medical cure for the mutant gene.

"I love this idea," Mr. Rothman said effusively as he bounded across the room to greet the actor, who was deciding whether to rejoin the cast. But there was one problem, Mr. Rothman conceded: he had no other ideas. If Mr. Jackman did not like the idea, Mr. Rothman described that situation in a harshly profane term.

"Can you think of any other studio executive who would have said that?" said Mr. Jackman, laughing. "There was no game playing. No tricks. No one talks like that in Hollywood. I suppose some people here don't want a straight answer; they want the candy-coated version. But at Fox they are not shy about giving their opinions."

However un-Hollywood the approach, it seems to be working for Fox, a unit of the News Corporation. Since becoming the co-chairmen of Fox Filmed Entertainment in 2000, Mr. Rothman and his partner, Jim Gianopulos, have churned out blockbusters like "The Day After Tomorrow," "Ice Age" and its sequel and the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies.

At the same time Fox's specialty divisions have scored with lower-budget films, including last year's Academy Award winner "Walk the Line," "Sideways" in 2004 and the cult hit "Napoleon Dynamite."

With those hits, the studio has increased operating profit in the filmed entertainment division (which includes television production) year over year for the last four years, from $473 million in fiscal 2002 to $1 billion in fiscal 2005. Other studios in recent years have had more mixed results.

For the year to date, Fox is No. 1 in theatrical market share. As important, it has fostered a corporate culture that the News Corporation seeks in all its television, news and mobile entertainment divisions: eyes fixed on the bottom line while remaining fearless about creative risks.

Indeed Fox's success may well reflect less the current state of Hollywood movie making than the way News Corporation's chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, and his No. 2, Peter Chernin, run the company.

"The only thing you can ask is that people be straightforward to the point of bluntness," said Mr. Chernin, News Corporation's president. "That sort of backslapping, slick Hollywood attitude is not good for us or the business. It tends to lead to problems."

Problems, that is, with actors, producers and directors who demand as much money and power as a studio is willing to cede. As a result, Fox's make-no-excuses philosophy can be off-putting for some filmmakers. Fox won't approve a movie production until all contracts are signed. Movie directors are forced to defend their artistic decisions vigorously. And studio executives spare no ego if they decide a movie is too expensive.

"I'd heard the horror stories about the studio taking away movies and such; I was curious to see if it was that bad," said Brett Ratner, who directed "X-Men: The Last Stand."

Mr. Ratner, whose movie is a hit, said he was happy with Fox. But other directors were not so lucky. In May, a month before Jay Roach was to begin directing the comedy "Used Guys," the studio pulled the plug on the movie, citing a high budget ($112 million), scheduling concerns and the actors' generous profit-sharing arrangement. Mr. Roach declined to comment on the matter.

Still, despite what some would regard as bare-knuckled behavior, Mr. Rothman and Mr. Gianopulos maintain longstanding relationships with a stylistically diverse cadre of filmmakers.

Seated side by side in craftsman-style chairs in Mr. Rothman's office last week on the Fox lot, the executives displayed different yet well-matched personalities.

Mr. Gianopulos, 54, compact and given to warm laughter, absently plays with a bottle cap from a soft drink that Mr. Rothman brought to him from a refrigerator just outside the office. The 51-year-old Mr. Rothman, on the other hand, is tall and lanky, vibrating with the intensity of an overeager puppy ready to pounce.

"We are not here to be liked," Mr. Rothman said. "We don't work for talent agencies. We work for Fox. Our job is not to worry about agents who jibber-jabber to reporters, who worry about headlines." Mr. Gianopulos added that currying favor "is not tolerated around here from anyone; you are not going to get ahead scheming."

While the talk is tough, at least the rules are clear. "They never try to stuff their ideas down your throat," said Peter Farrelly, who has directed several films for Fox. "They will let you argue your point, and if you can't back it up, they won't back down."

Last year, for instance, Jim Ward, the president of LucasArts and the person responsible for marketing George Lucas's "Star Wars" movies, which are distributed by Fox, was troubled when Fox announced it would release Ridley Scott's epic "Kingdom of Heaven" nine days before the release of "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith." His concern was that "Kingdom of Heaven" would hurt ticket sales for the opening weekend of "Star Wars."

Mr. Ward confronted Mr. Gianopulos about moving "Kingdom" to another date. In the past, Mr. Ward said, Fox would have acquiesced to Mr. Lucas's requests. But Mr. Gianopulos refused, sticking by Mr. Scott.

"I didn't like it," Mr. Ward said, "but I had to respect it." In the end "Kingdom of Heaven" was no threat to "Star Wars," which brought in $380 million at the domestic box office.

There are plenty of stories in Hollywood about coequal executives plotting to push each other out. But Mr. Rothman and Mr. Gianopulos, both lawyers, do not seem headed in that direction. Mr. Rothman, who has worked at Fox for 12 years developing movies, oversees much of the studio's creative efforts. Mr. Gianopulos, a longtime international theatrical executive, also handles movies, but is active in exploring new technologies.

To ensure that enterprising executives (or agents and managers) do not try to pit the two against each other, the men instituted the "chairman's rule": if one of the two makes a decision, the other agrees no matter what. Of course that does not bar them from sparring with each other.

"O.K., I admit it. I didn't understand 'The Day After Tomorrow,' " Mr. Rothman said, referring to the blockbuster about global warming that brought in $187 million at the domestic box office in 2004. "That was Jim's call and we had a big fight over it."

"Come on," Mr. Gianopulos shouted. "I like that kind of movie!"

"I had a question about how to make it look fresh and original, and if we could execute in time," Mr. Rothman said. "But he was totally enthusiastic."

"I beat him into submission," Mr. Gianopulos said, laughing.

"It wasn't that I yielded; I was happily persuaded," Mr. Rothman countered.

Indeed persuasion, or more likely fiery debate, seems to be the way to get a movie made at Fox.

"Walk the Line" was rejected by every studio in Hollywood before Elizabeth Gabler, another Fox executive, lobbied her bosses to make it, at the low cost of $29 million. It brought in $120 million in the United States.

More recently, Mr. Rothman and Mr. Gianopulos were flummoxed over whether Rogue, a character in "X-Men," should give her beau a passionate kiss at the movie's end or simply hold his hand. The two executives screened the movie for their daughters as well as the studio's female marketing executives, and the hand holding prevailed. "The kissing was all about sex, and we didn't want that," said Mr. Gianopulos, grimacing.

Oddly, these are the same executives who backed the Farrelly brothers movie "There's Something About Mary," which showed a woman using semen as hair gel and a man getting his penis caught in his zipper. "I like the fact that decisions aren't easy," Mr. Rothman said. "I like to talk through the issues before they get done, working things over."

Mr. Rothman's probing, though, can be grating, filmmakers and former Fox staff members said. And his tendency to raise his voice when he gets worked up takes getting used to.

"It's no secret that it took a long time for Tom and I to work things out," said Baz Luhrmann, who has been making films for Fox since 1993, including the critically acclaimed "Moulin Rouge," and continues to do so. "There are a lot of Tomisms. He'll say 'It's not exactly my first day.' "

Mr. Rothman insisted that his reactions are never personal, that he is just trying to make the best movie. The director Bryan Singer, who upset Mr. Rothman when he dropped out of the third "X-Men" movie despite a scheduled release this past Memorial Day weekend, described it this way. "I call it a Hollywood moment," he said.

Mr. Rothman had picked Mr. Singer to direct the first "X-Men," and together they shepherded the first two hit movies onto the screen. But as Mr. Singer was negotiating to direct the third "X-Men: The Last Stand" in July 2004, Warner Brothers gave him the offer of directing "Superman Returns." Mr. Singer jumped at the chance and, without first talking to Mr. Rothman, accepted the job.

"If I had done it openly, Tom would have driven to my house and we would have talked about it until sunrise," said Mr. Singer, who still considers Mr. Rothman a friend.

Rumors swirled that Mr. Singer was banned from the Fox lot.

Mr. Rothman, who confirmed Mr. Singer's account of the break, said Mr. Singer had not been banned from the lot, but conceded that the director's leaving was a "personal disappointment." For nearly a year and a half the two did not talk.

Skeptics predicted the franchise was doomed. Mr. Rothman and his team then revised the "X-Men" script and hired Mr. Ratner to direct. And one day earlier this year, Mr. Singer said, he got a phone call from Mr. Rothman asking him to "bury the hatchet" over lunch at Prego.

Of course, for Mr. Rothman and Mr. Gianopulos, the un-Hollywood story is having the perfect Hollywood ending. "X-Men: The Last Stand" was released on Memorial Day weekend as Mr. Rothman had wanted, and raked in $122 million — the biggest opening ever for a movie released over that holiday period.

As of last Friday, "X-Men" was the No. 2 movie this year, bringing in $185 million domestically according to the studio and Nielsen EDI, which tracks box office figures. And No. 1? Another Fox hit, the animated "Ice Age: The Meltdown" with $194 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/bu...a/12movie.html





Dogs and Their Fine Noses Find New Career Paths
Jennifer 8. Lee


Jada, with her owner, Carl Massicott, seeking out bedbugs for pay. James Estrin/The New York Times


A year ago, Jada, a frisky black mutt, was living in a Florida pound, her days numbered. Today she commands hundreds of dollars an hour at some of Manhattan's most exclusive hotels and apartment buildings. Her fate turned on her newly gained ability to sniff out something reviled in New York these days: bedbugs.

Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America started using two dogs, Lucky and Flo, to sniff out DVD's in the cargo area of Heathrow Airport in London, a major transit point for pirated DVD's. "First we had Lassie, then Rin Tin Tin and now Lucky and Flo," said Dan Glickman, the president of the association.

Dogs have long been partners in law enforcement's searches for narcotics, explosives and people (both dead and alive). But now their keen noses are being put to use in a wider variety of areas, like medicine, environmental protection and anti-piracy efforts. The number of dogs with the new, specialized skills remains but a fraction of the number trained for more traditional law enforcement uses.

Still, dogs are entering new career paths, learning to sniff out mercury in Minnesota schools, invasive weeds in Montana, cancer in people — even cows in heat.

"The dogs do better than bulls," said Lawrence J. Myers, a professor of veterinary science at Auburn University who wanted to increase the success rate of impregnation attempts, a pressing demand in the dairy industry. Dr. Myers, a leading expert on dogs' sense of smell, added that because dogs "have no innate interest in cows in heat," it takes repetitive training to teach them how to know when the cows are ready. (The bulls do not benefit from the dogs' work. Dairy cows are usually artificially inseminated.)

Dogs' sniffing prowess, well known for ages, lends itself to any number of needs. "Cocaine or peanut butter: whatever you want to find, we can train a dog to find it," said Bill Whitstine, Jada's original trainer and the founder of the Florida Canine Academy in Safety Harbor, Fla.

Engineers are still years away from creating instruments as sensitive or as flexible as a dog's nose. Until then, Mother Nature remains the master engineer. "You can train a dog for anything that has a unique or mostly unique odor," Dr. Myers said. In the case of DVD's, the smell that Lucky and Flo have been trained to detect is polycarbonate plastic. In the case of cancer, scientists believe that dogs may be picking up biological compounds, like alkanes and benzene derivatives, that are not found in healthy tissue.

The cancer detection research is in a preliminary stage, but some early tests with a variety of cancers like lung and bladder show a success rate better than conventional tests'.

Because dogs have 20 to 40 times the number of nasal receptor cells that humans do, they can detect the tiniest levels of odors, even a few parts per billion, Dr. Myers said. In addition, the dogs' nasal anatomy is very effective at sampling air, so much so that researchers are studying whether they can adapt it for a mechanical detector.

To be sure, dogs are but one animal with an extremely acute sense of smell (think European pigs and truffles), but being man's best friend helps with employment opportunities.

"I don't think you could ever get a police officer to get a pig around a car for a narcotics search," said David Latimer, a dog trainer in Birmingham, Ala., who has taught a dog to sniff out cellphones, part of an effort to thwart terrorists who plan to use them to detonate bombs. The dog has not been put to use in the field, however.

The training process is similar for almost all odors. For months, the dogs are given multiple items in succession to smell. When they come to the target odor — bedbugs or mold, for example — they get a reward. Eventually they associate the odor with the reward.

"All animals strive for food, sex and praise," Mr. Whitstine said. "We can't give them the middle one, but we can give them the food and praise." The more odors a dog is being asked to pick out, the longer the training. Mold dogs, for example, are taught to detect about 18 toxic molds, some of which cause allergies.

The training has to continue even after the dogs start working, so they remain sharp. Every day, Jada gets a refresher course from her owner, Carl Massicott, who runs Advanced K9 Detectives in Milford, Conn. To conduct the retraining, he built a contraption out of aluminum bars, a lazy susan and plastic containers. He spins the wheel and says, "Jada! Seek! Seek!"

Jada sniffed around the containers — one containing bedbug carcasses and the others containing decoy materials like carpet and plaster. When she got to the one with the dead bedbugs, she stopped. Then she tapped the container with her paw. "Good girl!" Mr. Massicott said, giving her a snack out of his waist pack.

He also uses live bedbugs for the retraining, which troubles his wife. Once, one escaped. "We weren't going to bed until we found it," Mr. Massicott said. Jada tracked the wayward bedbug down.

Jada needs only two minutes to check a room that can take a human up to half an hour to inspect. She has rooted out clusters of bedbugs in $500-a-night hotel rooms, elegant Park Avenue co-op buildings and Queens low-rise rentals. She has found bedbugs behind radiators and in cracks in the wall.

Many dogs who end up as career sniffers are rescued from shelters or pounds, just as Jada was, because the most important trait for them is not pedigree but personality. Trainers look for dogs that are eager and enjoy games. A common test is to see if they react enthusiastically to a tennis ball.

"Some dogs are too smart," said Alice Whitelaw, who works for a nonprofit conservation group in Montana and uses dogs to track wild animal excrement for biological surveying. "They're like, 'I don't need this. I could be lying down all day.' "

There are other limitations, since dogs are not machines. Jada can look for bedbugs only six hours a day before her accuracy declines. Dogs get tired. They are temperamental. They make mistakes in trying to please their handlers. In fact, overly high expectations helped fuel a boom and bust in termite-sniffing dogs in the 1980's. "We realize their fallibility," said Mr. Latimer, the trainer from Birmingham who is also training bedbug dogs. "I think that has caused them to gain in popularity and, quite frankly, in credibility."

Also, using sniffing dogs makes economic sense only when there is sufficient demand, like the recent surge in bedbugs in New York City.

As for sensing cows in heat, Dr. Myers sighed. "There is economic interest, but not enough to sustain it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/ny... tner=homepage





Broadcast TV

Hoping to 'Come on Down' to 'The Price Is Right'
Jennifer Steinhauer

The daytime television schedule may be littered with gabby talk shows, sunny news programs and adjudications of who, precisely, put his foot through the window of the neighbor's El Camino.

But nearly 35 years since Bob Barker first beckoned Americans to come on down, his game show, "The Price Is Right," continues to corner a certain market.

Thousands of fans — from 19-year-old Midwestern college students to octogenarians who have had crushes on Mr. Barker since he and they were middle-aged — continue to line up along Fairfax Avenue here at 3 a.m., four days a week, most of the year, hoping for one of the 325 spots in the studio audience.

They come in intergenerational groups or solo. They schedule vacations around tapings of the show, and spend months organizing friends and family members to meet them here, wearing T-shirts that identify them by their town or family name. (One man was recently spotted refusing to don his group's shirt at breakfast. Things did not go well for him.)

They stay by the dozens at the Farmer's Daughter hotel across the street from the CBS studio where "The Price Is Right" is taped, and get a nightly tutorial from a desk clerk on how to become members of the studio audience.

For every American who dreams that a singing voice, dance skills or back-stabbing boardroom tactics will earn him a piece of prime-time fame, thousands more have dreamed smaller, longing only to guess the price of a sectional couch or a pint of heavy cream. They don't want a record contract; they want an all-expenses-paid trip to Asia, or maybe a banjo.

"I have been watching this show all my life," said Gregory Bourgard, 26, who comes several times a year from Odenton, Md., to line up for a spot in the audience, even though he can never be a contestant again because he was once a showcase winner.

"I'm not trying to relive the moment," he said on a recent Sunday night at the Farmer's Daughter, where he was gearing up for visit No. 30. "I just want to be in the audience again."

Game shows may come and go, but "The Price Is Right" is a cultural touchstone for generations of Americans.

Who under 50 — except for those raised by parents who banned television and put rice cakes rather than Ring Dings in their lunchboxes — did not spend dozens of childhood mornings zoned out on the couch, playing along with the Dice Game or screaming at the fool from San Diego about to overbid on a bag of corn chips?

"We're here for our parents, our grandparents and people in our lives who have since passed on who watched the show," said Cindy Kilkenny, 57.

It is the democracy of the audience, and the show's theme — how to gauge inflation, essentially — that has sustained its appeal, said Mr. Barker, the show's 82-year-old host (and its executive producer).

"Everyone in the United States can identify with our show," he said. "On most game shows today you will see contestants between 20 and 45 who are physically attractive. We have people on 'The Price Is Right' who are between 20 and 45 who are physically attractive too."

"But we have people who, when they became 18, the first thing they did was come to 'The Price Is Right,' " he continued, "and I had a big winner on a recent show who was 95. We deliberately select contestants that are black, white and brown. We deliberately pick contestants from all over the United States. We have fat people, thin, short, tall, you name it."

How much stuff costs, he added, is what people think about every day, anyway. "The premise is so overpowering," he said. "Everyone identifies with prices. Whether you're a television executive or a newspaper reporter or a policeman or unemployed."

And while television may worship 22-year-olds and body parts created in the operating theater, Mr. Barker is also part of the show's grand appeal, and he has the X-rays to prove it. One overzealous fan bear-hugged Mr. Barker and broke a rib; several have crushed his toes; and one raced onto the stage and head-butted him in the solar plexus.

"It is a dangerous job," said Mr. Barker, who holds special affection for a fan who raced to her contestant's seat with such enthusiasm that her tube top fell down. She failed to adjust it for several live minutes.

The audience is largely filled by groups on buses who are guaranteed seats. The rest are fans who line up, often beginning at midnight, for the extra spots, which are doled out on a first-come-first-served basis. Some days there are two, others 200.

For these fans Ted Ott, a clerk at the Farmer's Daughter, gives free workshops each night before tapings (two on Mondays and one Tuesday through Thursday).

Mr. Ott, who lines up on his day off, uses a broken section of a backgammon board to represent the "Price Is Right" studio, and lectures for roughly 40 minutes, in between checking in guests.

He gives the following advice: Do not wear costumes. ("The show's producers have a horror of waking up and finding out they are on 'Let's Make a Deal,' " he said.) Show up on time to get your four-digit line-spot number, and guard it with your life.

If you get a spot in the audience — and are thus granted a 20-second interview with the producer to see if you might be called down — be clever. Don't go to the restroom when people are being called down. If you are thinking of bringing in a cheat sheet on prices, think again, because that is a felony.

But to that quintessential American question: is it worth it? For Sean Steiner, 22, who came from Akron, Ohio, to be the first in line for the show, it was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience," he said. "I was feet from Bob. He was cracking jokes, telling stories about the ducks who live in his swimming pool during the commercial break. The best part was, I got to come home and watch myself on TV."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/ar...on/13pric.html





With That Saucy Swagger, She Must Drive a Porsche
Benedict Carey

Some people seem a perfect fit for the cars they drive, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Hummer, Michael Jordan and his Ferrari. Yet most drivers' faces and bearing give away clues that tip off their favored model, a new study has found.

Psychologists at Julius-Maximilians University in Wurzburg, Germany, report in a recent issue of the Journal of Individual Differences that students correctly matched photographs of male and female drivers to pictures of the cars they drove almost 70 percent of the time.

The drivers' age and wealth were the most helpful cues, the researchers reported.

Psychologists had shown in previous studies that people can accurately gauge some personality traits, like extroversion, from photos of strangers, and from personal effects, like a CD collection or bedroom decorations. The German study is the first to demonstrate that clues from both sources can be combined to match owners to their cars, the authors say.

The finding demonstrates how nuanced our habitual, often stereotype-based, judgments can be, said Samuel Gosling, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, who did not take part in the research.

"It is possible that when the traffic light turns green, the tan minivan will race away and the red Corvette will move away slowly, but people don't buy cars randomly, and usually we make accurate assumptions about them," he said.

He added, "We don't just make inferences about the drivers but about their behavior, their music collection, whether they're more likely to listen to jazz or rock, their movie preferences, whether they like romantic comedies or action films."

In the study, the psychologists took photographs, from the waist up, of 60 men and women at a rest stop who agreed to participate in the study. Their cars, also photographed, included luxury models, modest family sedans and compact cars, from BMWs and Audis to Opels, Fords and Volkswagens.

The students looked at 60 sets of three photos, matching one of a driver to one of two car pictures — either the correct one, or one belonging to another driver.

In matching experiments like this, early choices often alter later ones: if you have already found someone to match with a black-cherry Porsche Boxster, you are less likely to pair it with another person later. But because many of the cars were similar in color and model, students' early matches were not likely to alter later ones, the authors said.

The researchers found that 41 pairs, or about 68 percent, were correctly matched by more than half of the students. "Interestingly, it seems to be easier to match people with cars than people with animate beings like dogs. Or people with their babies," concluded the authors, Georg W. Alpers and Antje B. M. Gerdes.

A nearly 70 percent accuracy rate is very high, and partly reflects the significance of two clues in particular — age and apparent affluence, the authors report. Matching older, wealthy-looking drivers to luxury cars and young ones to compacts almost certainly proved a good strategy.

But there is more to the matching than that, other experts said. Scratches, dings and dents in a car suggest one thing about a driver, while a factory polish reflects another. A four-wheel-drive Subaru with a ski rack suggests an active owner — unless the racks appear unused. And people choose cars, within their budget or not, partly to project a public identity, and the public well knows it, Dr. Gosling said.

Moreover, in making judgments, people soak up dozens of clues unconsciously, noting the emotional cast of a person's face in a photo, say, or the style of the hair, the texture of the clothing, the tilt and quality of the eyeglasses.

"We are constantly trying to make sense of the world by picking up clues from the physical and social environment, in order to predict what's going to happen," Dr. Gosling said.

Given the necessity, value and danger of cars — and the cultural connotations of particular models — it is hardly surprising that people are attuned to their social meanings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/health/13cars.html





TMZ.com Users Post Their Own Views of Gossip
Virginia Heffernan

Lindsay Lohan "shoots out freckles." Mean anything to you?

Yes, that's the bravura insight of Brandon Davis, the fun-loving grandson of Marvin Davis, the billionaire who died in 2004. The young Mr. Davis used this image to describe Ms. Lohan, the redheaded actress, in a short but powerful video that first appeared on TMZ.com, the "entertainment news" — that's gossip — Web site produced by AOL and Telepictures Productions. In the video, which quickly became an Internet hit, Mr. Davis, a pugnacious party boy, hurries importantly to his car while savaging Ms. Lohan, who is nowhere in sight.

The video, which was shot by the paparazzi comer Josh Levine, first appeared on May 17, marking both a high and low point for TMZ.com. In a mere six months of operation, the site has ridden a wave of enthusiasm for online video, attracting links from other gossip sites with its run-and-gun sequences of stars acting stupid. The site covers music, movies, television and industry gossip. It supplies, with occasional glitches, photo essays, copious video and, as of yesterday, blogs. Over the last few months there have been glimpses of the mothering missteps of Britney Spears and interviews with players in the Heather-Denise-Charlie-Richie double-divorce circus.

But the Brandon Davis video offered something new: one Hollywood rich kid baiting another through TMZ video, uncorking invective that was at least imaginative and delivering it to the camera, with none other than Paris Hilton in the role of moll. This was Mr. Davis's mean-spirited, freckled message to the world.

And it wasn't exactly spontaneous: days earlier, outside another Los Angeles club, Mr. Davis had refined his routine in front of another TMZ camera, trying out some of the wacko language that would become the May 17 aria. For connoisseurs of online video, the earlier rant was like a theater workshop.

In any case it doesn't take a high-handed analysis of American celebrity culture to locate the uneasy moral void at the center of this. Certainly the site's avid users are already tuned into what's wrong with it.

Take the responses to a June 9 post by Harvey Levin, the site's managing editor, a lawyer and the former executive producer of the sweet-spot-hitting legal show "Celebrity Justice." On the recently redesigned site, which now appears in blog format, Mr. Levin writes a celebrity chatterbox column called "Mali-bu Hoo Hoo," in which he sets out to walk a thin line drawn by Dominick Dunne: trying to come across as with the stars — at their parties, in their orbits — without being quite of them, kept apart as he is by concerns about justice and fairness.

In the post Mr. Levin shed some light on the real estate concerns of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who returned this weekend from Namibia, where their first child was born. The entry was called "Brad's Weird Malibu Pad," and an aerial photo showed an estate on a beach. It's not really the kind of photo that noncelebrities can easily interpret: it's too abstract and scale-free, with none of the columns or gilt that signify opulence.

Mr. Levin tried to put it in context. "It just so happens, the guy who sold Brad the house is a friend of mine," he wrote. The place has great views, he went on, but the beach and pool are hard to reach, and the place has a mere 3,000 square feet. "That's perfectly fine for you and me," he wrote. But stars need more.

None of this played very well with some readers, who got all what-you-mean-we on Mr. Levin. "It's a nine-million-dollar estate on the Malibu coastline, you moron," wrote one.

At lightning speed the debate became grandiose. Posters defended the humanitarian work performed by Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt, and urged people to follow the couple's example in fighting for "a world where everyone is fed, clothed, has shelter, access to education and health care and living a life that they love."

It was kind of astonishing: as environmentalism, philanthropy, saving and debt, trust funds, fame, slave morality and real estate all reared their heads in the fairly literate comments section, it became clear that the house of Brangelina — and Mr. Levin's disingenuous take on it — was as good a subject as any to ignite a great American debate.

TMZ is getting it right. It has lots of video, quickly mounted, intelligently bleeped and edited so it's not horrifying. And it has found a way through smart-enough blogging — Claude Brodesser of NPR is also writing one — to tease out some big themes. It's almost moving. Almost. As a reader named gigi put it in the same Brangelina thread: "You read all this empty trash to entertain your bored soul and then decide to get weepy? HA. That's funny."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/movies/13heff.html





Pirate 1: Arrr! The RIAA ship has been swashbuckled!

Pirate 2: Ayye! The fools even think they sunk us! ARRR!


RIAA Chief Says Illegal Song-Sharing 'Contained'
Jefferson Graham

Nearly a year after the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling against online music file-sharing services, the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America says unauthorized song swapping has been "contained."

"The problem has not been eliminated," says association CEO Mitch Bainwol. "But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat."

That's an optimistic view from an industry that saw its numbers slide to near oblivion after the launch of the original Napster in 1999. CD sales fell as much as 30%, and the RIAA pressed Congress and the courts for relief against what it said was rampant piracy.

After the Supreme Court ruled that the services could be liable for piracy by their users, the RIAA sent cease-and-desist letters to several firms. Most — including BearShare, WinMX and Grokster — shut down. EDonkey and others said they would switch to a licensed, paid model.

EDonkey, which along with BitTorrent is one of the most-used file-sharing services, has yet to make the switch.

Even with Grokster and WinMX shut down, their software programs still exist. Eric Garland, CEO of Internet measurement firm BigChampagne, says that more people than ever are using file-sharing networks. "Nearly 10 million people are online, swapping media, at any given time," he says. That May figure is up from 8.7 million people in 2005, he says.

Garland says the RIAA has made some inroads. "They have removed the profiteers from online piracy," he says. "They've also embarked on a very successful education campaign. Kids now know about copyright, and the consequences."

The RIAA has sued just over 18,000 individuals for sharing songs online, with 4,500 settling for about $4,000 per case.

Album sales are still down — about 3% this year. But Bainwol says digital sales — up 77% — make up for the shortfall.

The wide availability of legitimate alternatives to file-sharing services has helped wean computer users away, says Russ Crupnick, president of the music group for market tracker NPD Group.

Apple's iTunes has sold more than 1 billion songs to consumers, and online stores Rhapsody and Napster are gaining traction. Crupnick says digital store purchases have "almost doubled" while file-sharing is flat among computer users in 12,000 homes in an NPD survey.

Meanwhile, the RIAA is suing XM Satellite Radio, which introduced a portable $399 player (from Pioneer and Samsung) that lets subscribers record songs.

Bainwol says he doesn't mind consumers acquiring songs on the device — it's just that XM hasn't licensed the songs for download.

"We love the technology and think it's cool, but if you want to be an iTunes clone, you should pay for it," he says. XM has called the RIAA lawsuit a "negotiating" tactic.

About 1.5 billion songs are available for free swapping at any given time on file-sharing networks, says Garland, a mix of current hits and songs from such artists as the Beatles and Led Zeppelin that have yet to be released to the digital music stores.

That number is huge but hasn't grown substantially, while video piracy has. "The music industry isn't seeing double-digit growth in piracy anymore, but Hollywood is," Garland says.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/product...-12-riaa_x.htm





Samsung Ships the First Blu-Ray Player
Dan Costa

The format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has finally reached consumers, now that Samsung is shipping the BD-P1000 Blu-Ray player to retailers. The BD-P1000 ($999.99 list), will go on sale June 25th, making it the first Blu-Ray player to hit the market. Until now, the only high-definition video player shoppers could buy has been the Toshiba HD-A1, which has been in short supply.

The BD-P1000 is twice the price of the HD-A1, but Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of marketing for Samsung's Audio and Video Products Group, says that won't hurt sales. "Dealer demand is really strong," Sanduski says. "Yes, we are double the price of HD-DVD, but we are confident people will buy as many as we can build."

The Samsung BD-P1000 supports full 1080p playback, something the first generation of HD-DVD players do not. The BD-P1000 also up-converts conventional DVDs to 1080p to improve video quality. The player comes with HDMI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs. Samsung has also included a 10-in-2 multi-memory-card interface for viewing digital images directly from flash cards.

There will be just 10 Blu-Ray titles available when the BD-P100 ships, including 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight's Tale, The Last Waltz, Resident Evil Apocalypse, and xXx. Sanduski says by the end of year the number of titles will swell to as many as 200.

This is one area where Blu-Ray could have a potential advantage over HD-DVD. "Eighty-four percent of all the movies released last year were made by studios that have announced support for Blu-Ray," according to Sanduski. "That is a huge strike against HD-DVD." To be fair, some studios plan to release movies on both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Samsung's BD-P1000 release comes as other Blu-Ray manufactures have pushed back their launch dates. Both Sony and Pioneer initially planned to offer Blu-Ray players in June, but have pushed their U.S. launch dates to August and September, respectively.

Movies on Blu-Ray discs will sell for about $30, according to Sanduski. He compares that to the healthy premium people paid over VHS when DVDs first came out. HD-DVD titles currently sell for about $20.

Sanduski says that the Blu-Ray prices will come down quickly once other manufacturers bring their players to market. "There are nine manufacturers building Blu-Ray devices," according to Sanduski. "There is only one building HD-DVD drives: Toshiba."

The BD-P1000 will be sold at more than 200 retail locations, including Best Buy, Tweeter, and Circuit City.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1977327,00.asp





News Corp.'S MySpace to Solicit Bids for Search

News Corp. said on Tuesday that its MySpace.com Web site plans to tap one of the three leading Internet companies to provide its popular youth-oriented network with search-based advertising.

The global media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch plans to solicit bids from Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin said at a Deutsche Bank Media & Telecom conference broadcast over the Web.

``We will auction off our search business to Google, Yahoo, or MSN,'' Chernin said, confirming market speculation.

Murdoch has previously said that News Corp. was seeking an investment in the search business. On Tuesday, Chernin said, ''Our instincts are we can't get into the search business in the same way.''

News Corp. purchased MySpace, one of the Internet's biggest online hangouts for teens and young adults, last year for about $580 million.

But despite owning one of the largest customer bases on the Internet, with about 85 million members, it has not fully exploited advertising sales opportunities at the unit, Chernin said. ``We've just scratched the surface of how to monetize it.''

MySpace has become a focus of investor attention for News Corp.'s media empire, which spans the Fox television and cable news networks as well as the New York Post newspaper, even though it remains a tiny part of the company's operations.

The division is being viewed as a testing ground for new media opportunities, particularly efforts to reap advertising dollars from social networking, one of the hottest areas of audience growth online.

Although MySpace has transformed into the second most popular site on the Internet by page views as of May, according to comScore Networks, it continues to trail competitors in ad sales due to the types of ads it currently sells.

About 80 percent of its sales come from so-called remnant sales, or bulk sales of unused advertising space. About 20 percent comes from display ads, which cost about seven to eight-times more, Chernin said.

Chernin said he expects MySpace to flip the ratio over time.

For its well-established Fox television network, Chernin said it has completed 70 percent of its advance ``upfront'' sales to advertisers for the upcoming fall programming season, when its rates are expected to rise about 2 percent to 3 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...-newscorp.html





IT Confidential: Adware Vs. Spyware: Who's Making The Money?

What's the hottest growth area these days? It's the intersection of Technology, Privacy, and The Law.
John Soat

My son is graduating from high school and plans to attend college in the fall. Given the declining interest in the United States in the study of science in general, and computer science and technology in particular, it occurred to me that perhaps I should encourage him to major in information technology. If so, I'd have to make a strong case for it, because the appeal of such interesting and rewarding careers as celebrity bodyguard or cable-TV chef is strong these days. I started casting about for examples of career-oriented areas in IT.

I received a note recently about a job posting on Craigslist that reads, "seeking an individual with an interest in technology, privacy, and the law." If there's a growth area related to technology these days, it's privacy. The company sponsoring this job posting is called WhenU.com. The posting gave a general description of the job's responsibilities: "This person will be a critical member of the company's efforts to monitor how its products are detected and treated by various anti-spyware vendors. This individual will run a wide range of anti-spyware products and document the treatment of WhenU's products as well as its competitors."

InformationWeek recently ran a profile of the CEO of WhenU, Bill Day, and referred to his company as a "'good' adware purveyor that wins praise, not jeers, from industry pundits" ("Bill Day, CEO Of WhenU.com," May 1,). Now, the distinction between spyware and adware is tricky; one person's automated service is another person's interloper. There's been a great deal of litigation over it. Legislation in Congress has stalled, in part over an adequate definition of spyware. When I tried to visit WhenU's Web site to find out more, the corporate Internet filter wouldn't let me go there: "The Websense category 'Spyware' is filtered."

A light went off in my head--this company has issues. I began to wonder if I should encourage my son to put his college plans on hold and apply for this position immediately. It's an exciting opportunity, dead center in several of today's most pressing technology issues--the nature of the online experience, the Internet business model, the responsibility of companies to their customers. And it might be a good fit. "The ideal candidate will be extremely familiar with anti-spyware products and downloadable software," reads the posting. If a hard-earned proficiency in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas comes close to fitting that description, my son is extremely well qualified

Then I noticed this: "Full-time at $12/hour." When I was 18, $12 an hour was a lot of money, but would it be enough to entice my son? The bigger issue: Would he be able to move out of the house on less than $25,000 a year? Probably, but did I really want to take that chance?

So maybe college isn't such a bad idea after all. I hate to say it, but I think I'll encourage him to set his sights on law school. Technology is still an interesting and exciting field, but the lawyers end up with all the money, anyway.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...ection=Columns





Peter, Paul & Mary Still Have a Song to Sing All Over This Land
Felicia R. Lee

For many years Mary Travers thought of her songs with the trio Peter, Paul & Mary as carrier pigeons, ferrying messages of love, hope and defiance. When Ms. Travers was told she had leukemia in 2004 and rolled bad survival odds, those pigeons fluttered back to her, bearing best wishes in the form of 10,000 e-mail messages. They came from fans who recalled the trio's classic renditions of songs like "Puff the Magic Dragon," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and "If I Had a Hammer."

"I didn't think my prayers would get me out of the soup, but it doesn't mean everybody else's prayers didn't do it," Ms. Travers, now 69, said in a recent interview. "I read every one of those e-mails. You can look at record sales and say it sold eight million and eight million loved your music. But the messages, they meant something; it nails you into the now, people right now week after week caring about my getting better."

Ms. Travers had a bone marrow transplant last year and resumed a reduced schedule of 12 concerts with Peter, Paul & Mary this year. Tomorrow the trio, together for 46 years (with a few years' hiatus), will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan. Ms. Travers and the other members, Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey, say they are thankful for the award, but they are quick to add that awards and record sales are not how they define themselves.

"I don't think we've changed very much, certainly not in the intent of our work," Ms. Travers said. "The intention has always been to talk about justice, to talk about peace, to talk about equality."

Although many of their hits were traditional folk songs or the work of writers like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Ms. Travers said she sees the award as an honor especially for Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey, who did "the heavy bulk of the songwriting" for much of the group's original work.

"I've always been the editor, the one-liner," Ms. Travers said of the writing process. "I helped when it was almost there."

Among her favorite songs by Mr. Yarrow or Mr. Stookey are "The Great Mandala (The Wheel of Life)" by Mr. Yarrow, co-writer of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and Mr. Stookey's "Wedding Song (There Is Love)."

Peter, Paul & Mary brought folk music to a new prominence in the post-McCarthy era, putting songs about politics and morality on the radio amid the syrupy boy-girl love songs that dominated when their first album came out in 1962. They have five Grammy Awards and a handful of gold and platinum albums. As for some criticism that they were overrehearsed or even a manufactured act, Ms. Travers dismissed that as the words of people who equate success with selling out.

Hal David, the songwriter who is now chairman and chief executive of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, said the award was about more than songwriting. "They did so many songs that have become national standards," he said.

"The fact that they did or did not write some of the songs doesn't take away from them," Mr. David added. "The lifetime achievement award is not necessarily just for writing; it's just the whole, beautiful package they became. The fact that Mary came back from her illness and still sounds so good is wonderful."

These days Ms. Travers's thoughts turn to much more than music. In conversation, she mused on mortality and the trio's long relationship.

"I think I scared the boys," Ms. Travers said of her ordeal, referring to Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey, who are both 68. "I think of them as my brothers." She was sitting in Mr. Yarrow's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where her husband, Ethan Robbins ("I call him St. Ethan"), often stayed while she was being treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Said Mr. Yarrow said of the cancer scare, "In our case, every little bit of nonsense between us disappeared."

Mr. Stookey, in a telephone interview from his home along the Maine coast, said the three are close friends who have become closer. "Looking back at some of the film footage from 46 years, I was incredibly impressed by Mary's power on stage," he said. "You see how edgy it is, and she said in private conversations later that some of it was nervousness. Since the leukemia, there is a graciousness, a sense of the serene, a patience you never saw before."

Ms. Travers looks different, too. She lost 60 pounds and her now-short hair has a slight wave, a very different look from her trademark curtain of straight blond hair. "I've discovered this great jewelry: earrings," she joked. "No one ever saw my ears before."

The cancer diagnosis came quickly, she recalled. When chemotherapy did not work, she waited for a bonemarrow transplant. It turned out that her donor was named Mary and, like Ms. Travers, had two daughters. Ms. Travers, a lifetime Democrat, joked with her family that she wondered if a Republican's marrow had save her body. She learned that this was indeed true when she called the other Mary to thank her.

Ms. Travers, who was 26 when the trio sang during the March on Washington in 1963, still sounds like her old political self. She says she is upset by, among other things, changes in the immigration laws, domestic eavesdropping, the Iraq war and efforts to ban abortion; and disappointed that artists are not fighting the powers-that-be with the same zeal as they did in the 60's and 70's.

"Do we have to rely on the Dixie Chicks?" she asked.

Still, she, Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey see hope in a fresh wave of political and artistic energy in folk music. Mr. Yarrow, for one, says he is ecstatic that Bruce Springsteen is reinterpreting Pete Seeger songs from the Peter, Paul & Mary era.

"It's great," Mr. Yarrow exclaimed. "He always was a folk singer. He always had it in his heart. Of all the people who had the legitimacy to do it, he does."

After all these years of the precise enunciation of folk music, Ms. Travers now prefers "nonverbal music" or even, as she put it, "a little schmaltzy opera." She added that when she is not thinking about politics, she is pretty happy.

"I'm certainly not upset about getting older," she said. "Having come closer to the other alternative, I am a lot better about it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/ar...ic/14folk.html





Embracing Digital Era, PBS Hires John Boland of KQED to Fill New Post
Elizabeth Jensen

Staking its future in the digital media world, the Public Broadcasting Service has created a new post of chief content officer and named a public broadcasting executive with extensive digital experience to fill the job.

John Boland, 57, is currently the executive vice president and chief content officer at KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco, which operates the PBS and National Public Radio stations in Northern California. KQED was one of the first PBS stations to have multiple digital channels to make its shows available at different times, and it was also one of the first to offer its shows on demand, through its Web site and in podcasts.

At PBS Mr. Boland, who starts in September, will oversee television programming, new media, education and promotion. As part of a restructuring, PBS will close its small Los Angeles office. Jacoba Atlas, one of PBS's chief programming executives, who is based there, will leave PBS at the end of this month. John Wilson, who with Ms. Atlas had been overseeing PBS programming and is based at PBS's headquarters in Arlington, Va., will now report to Mr. Boland.

Ms. Atlas said in an interview that she did not know what she would do next, and called it "a privilege to have been able to deal with content that is as exceptional" as that of PBS.

Mr. Boland's appointment is one of the first strategic moves by Paula A. Kerger, who took over as PBS's president and chief executive officer in March. In recent weeks she has announced an agreement to make available more PBS shows through free video-on-demand services, as well as a new partnership to offer hundreds of hours of PBS programs to schools, through Discovery Education's digital learning services.

In an interview Ms. Kerger cited "Quest," KQED's ambitious new science, nature and environment initiative, as an example of what PBS can aspire to. Under Mr. Boland's direction, KQED raised $7.5 million to pay for the first three years of "Quest," which will begin in the fall. The station's most expensive local undertaking ever, it will include weekly television and radio shows, a content-rich Web site with games and nature center tours that can be downloaded to personal portable devices, educational lesson plans that meet California teacher standards and community organization and museum tie-ins. All the broadcast material will be archived and available on demand after it is first shown.

The new digital world is "made to order" for PBS programming, Mr. Boland said in an interview. "We have content that has a very long shelf life and very long value because it was so well researched," he said. Because PBS programming doesn't rely on advertising for support, he added, it doesn't matter whether a viewer sees it when it is first broadcast or an educator accesses it 10 years later.

But PBS, a consortium of 348 local public stations, has to figure out how to make the transition from a program service that is still primarily used in a linear fashion, he said. Viewers, Mr. Boland said, "are still watching 'Nova' on Tuesday night and watching 'The NewsHour' at 6, and we need to continue to serve that majority of the public," while experimenting with all the new distribution outlets.

PBS and its stations must also find the money to finance the transition and experimentation.

Financing has been a continuing challenge at public television for the last decade, as corporate underwriters have cut back support of programming, colleges and universities have started forcing the stations they run to pick up overhead costs, and lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried to cut government financing, often successfully.

Mr. Boland, a former newspaper reporter who has been at KQED since 1995, said that Ms. Kerger, previously the No. 2 executive at the parent company of WNET and WLIW in New York, came to PBS with "more experience in fund-raising than any of her predecessors." PBS has started a new foundation to raise money, and Mr. Boland said he hoped that would be one source of financing for new digital initiatives.

Ms. Kerger said Mr. Boland would also be reassessing PBS's programming, not to make wholesale changes, but to think about new directions. "I would like him to think hard about how do we make our iconic work even better and bring new stuff onto the schedule," she said. PBS is already looking for new science programming, and Ms. Kerger said she would "love for us to think about the arts again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/ar...ion/14pbs.html





Dig it

AOL to Revamp Its Netscape.com Web Portal
Anick Jesdanun

AOL is revamping its Netscape.com Web portal to give visitors a greater role in determining what news articles get readily shown to others.

Visitors will be able to submit links to neat articles they find elsewhere and vote on the ones they like most. The items receiving the most votes will appear on the home page as well as in separate sections focusing on technology, food and other topics.

The effort comes as the Time Warner Inc. Internet unit attempts to boost traffic to its ad-supported Web sites as its access-subscription business declines.

The new Netscape portal is scheduled to launch July 1, with a public "beta" test available beginning Thursday.

Because AOL also runs AOL.com, it can experiment with its less-trafficked Netscape.com site.

According to comScore Media Metrix, Netscape had 12.3 million U.S. visitors in April, compared with 128 million for Yahoo Inc.'s portal, 102 million for Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and 87.0 for AOL.com. News Corp.'s MySpace.com and Lycos Inc.'s portal also had more traffic than Netscape.

Jason Calacanis, general manager for Netscape, said the voter choices may also appear on other AOL properties. For instance, while the top articles on autos would be central to Netscape's auto channel, the same list could appear as part of AOL.com's auto section and the AOL-owned Autoblog Web journal.

The articles themselves won't necessarily be stored on AOL computers. Rather, visitors who submit links are directed to write a summary that would appear on the Netscape page. Readers can get the full article by clicking on a link to the original site.

The outside articles appear as frames within the Netscape site, a technique over which major news organizations had sued a small news referral site in the mid-90s. The site, called TotalNews, stopped that practice as part of a settlement.

Calacanis said Netscape shouldn't run into similar problems because its site won't carry ads on the pages using frames.

The redesign is Netscape's first major one since early 2005, when the portal introduced features that heavily used Flash animation technology in response to growing adoption of high-speed Internet lines (many of those features since have been quietly dropped).

Netscape.com will still have links to weather, e-mail and other features commonly associated with portals, but they will not be as prominent.

The portal also will have some items hand-picked, vetted and in many cases amplified with original reporting by AOL staff, but they will be drawn from the user-voted pool.

That will set Netscape.com apart from digg.com and other sites that engage in what Calacanis called "social news" - tapping the collective wisdom of a community to uncover items that might otherwise be hard to find. Placement of stories on the other sites are entirely up to users.

Netscape, which AOL acquired in 1999 primarily for its once-dominant Web browser, also will add a social networking feature. Users will be able to designate fellow users as friends and see what they've submitted and voted for.

Yahoo also is introducing user-voted items as part of a redesign, but the new Yahoo Pulse feature remains a small section of the overall home page.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Pastoral Site of Historic Inventions Faces the End
Antoinette Martin


The Bell Labs building in Holmdel, N.J., the site of technology inventions for 44 years, will be demolished.

For 44 years, a six-story, two-million-square-foot structure nestled here in a 472-acre exquisitely pastoral setting was a habitat for technological ferment.

The vaunted Bell Labs, whose scientists invented the laser and developed fiber optic and satellite communications, touch-tone dialing and cellphones, modems and microwaves, was housed in the glass building, set far off the road, providing the community with some luster — not to mention a tax bonanza.

These days, the building's lobby, with its magnificent glass ceiling, is off limits to all but those having formal appointments with Lucent Technologies, which disassembled and dispersed much of Bell Labs after the collapse of the technology market in 2000.

Few outsiders have viewed its breathtaking scale or walked along the perimeters to admire displays of technological breakthroughs like a 1929 movie camera or an early office switchboard straight out of "Bells Are Ringing."

But now, the building has been sold, and the public will be invited in for at least one date while it remains, which may not be much longer. The developer who will create a future for the property says the structure will have to be demolished.

Preferred Real Estate Investments, a company based in Conshohocken, Pa., will maintain the site as office space and will keep the property as pastoral as possible, said its chief executive, Michael G. O'Neill. But Mr. O'Neill said his firm, which specializes in the reuse of outmoded commercial buildings, simply could not find a way to renovate this structure.

The soaring lobby is surrounded on three sides by stacks of windowless concrete-walled cubicles — perfect for scientists, but unappealing to office workers of any other type — he noted.

"So many of these lavish old commercial buildings have a great history to them, and then one day their useful life is over," Mr. O'Neill said a bit wistfully.

When Lucent found itself needing to downsize and leave a special building behind, it was following in the footsteps of another New Jersey telecommunications giant, AT&T, which moved out of its opulent 2.7-million-square-foot headquarters in Bedminster in 2001. The AT&T building stood empty for four years — considered nearly unmarketable by some commercial brokers. It did find a buyer last year in Verizon, which has begun renovations aimed at carving up its gargantuan spaces and stripping away some of the luxuries, like the waterfall in the cafeteria.

At one time, Lucent employed 5,600 people in Holmdel. The company plans to move the approximately 1,000 who remain to offices in Murray Hill and Whippany by the summer of 2007.

Right now, Mr. O'Neill said his primary focus was on providing reassurance to the citizenry of Holmdel that not much has to change in terms of the Lucent property's historic impact on the town.

Bell Labs has been a cash cow in a picturesque setting — paying $3.19 million in property taxes last year, while putting little strain on town services. Holmdel's mayor, Serena DiMaso, and other town officials have been adamant that a housing development, which might require additional traffic control, new infrastructure and school spending, would not be a suitable replacement.

"I think there were about 20 other developers competing against us to buy the property," Mr. O'Neill said, "and everybody we competed with wanted to put 500 to 600 houses here, and turn this into a big subdivision, but that is not our intent.

"Can you imagine? This incredible, expansive space — cutting it up, and covering it over with yet another cookie-cutter community of McMansions?"

Mr. O'Neill, whose company recently converted a pre-World War I toilet factory in Hamilton, N.J., into plush office space, said plans for the Lucent site were in very early stages. It is expected, he said, that a public meeting about the property will be held inside the Bell Labs structure during the last week of this month.

On a walking tour of the property, Mr. O'Neill said he currently envisioned three smaller headquarters-type buildings in place of the one big lab structure, providing somewhat less total space than the Bell Labs building. "The size would be in keeping with the more modest size of today's typical company headquarters, or data processing centers," he said.

Final plans will not be drawn until companies commit to moving to the site, Mr. O'Neill said.

The huge oval road around the building, the long approach from Crawford's Corner Road and even the weirdly shaped water tower at the entrance — said by locals to resemble a transistor — will most likely remain, though, Mr. O'Neill asserted. "We want to keep the country-road feel," he said.

Diving enthusiastically through thick shrubbery, Mr. O'Neill made his way to a lovely pond set behind Bell Labs, surrounded by plantings and weeping willows and adjacent to a large terrace off the company cafeteria.

"This is such a special place for a company to offer its workers," he said. "There is hardly anything like this available anywhere any more. We believe people will be beating down the doors to move their businesses here."

Founded in 1992, Preferred owns numerous properties east of the Mississippi, worth a total of more than $1.5 billion, that were once central to communities but are now vacant or heading that way, according to Mr. O'Neill.

At the former American Standard plant in Hamilton, for instance, the company pledged to tastefully renovate the empty toilet factory and fill it with high-quality tenants, and it kept its promises, said the mayor, Glen Gilmore. Last month, with that job complete, Preferred sold the property, now called American Metro Center, to two other large real estate companies.

Mr. O'Neill said he had no idea whether his company would be the long-term owner in Holmdel. "Please!" he said, laughing and throwing up his hands. "We've got a lot of work to do here and now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/re...al/14bell.html





Still waters

The Rewards of Being Shy
Michael Hochman

Shy people may be quiet, but there's a lot going on in their heads. When they encounter a frightening or unfamiliar situation--meeting someone new, for example--a brain region responsible for negative emotions goes into overdrive. But new research indicates that shy people may be more sensitive to all sorts of stimuli, not just frightening ones.

The findings come courtesy of brain scans of 13 extremely shy adolescents and 19 outgoing ones. Researchers, led by Amanda Guyer, a development psychologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, placed each child in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and had them play games in which they could win or lose money. The study subjects--who were classified as either shy or outgoing based on psychological testing--were instructed to press a button as quickly as possible after being shown a signal. If they pressed the button in time, they won money, or at least prevented themselves from losing it.

Both groups performed similarly, and there was no difference in the activity of their amygdalas--the brain region that governs fear. Shy children, however, showed two to three times more activity in their striatum, which is associated with reward, than outgoing children, the team reports in the 14 June issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "Up until now, people thought that [shyness] was mostly related to avoidance of social situations," says co-author and child psychiatrist Monique Ernst. "Here we showed that shy children have increased activity in the reward system of the brain as well."

Why this would be the case is still not clear. "One interpretation is that extremely shy children have an increased sensitivity to many types of stimuli--both frightening and rewarding," says Guyer. There are other possibilities as well, says Mauricio Delgado, a psychologist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. For example, increased activity in the striatum may help shy children cope with the anxiety of stressful situations, although not enough so to help them overcome their shyness.

These findings are also significant because they may help researchers understand why shy children develop psychiatric problems at an increased rate later in life, says Brian Knutson, a psychologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Because shy children appear to be more sensitive to winning and losing, they may experience emotions more strongly than others, putting them at risk for emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. On the flip side, shy children may experience positive emotions such as success very strongly, helping them succeed, Knutson says.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi...ull/2006/613/3





Movie Review

'A/K/A Tommy Chong,' a Documentary About the Comedian and the Law
Manohla Dargis

On Feb. 24, 2003, the nation's newspaper headlines provided a snapshot of the way we live now. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was in China that day, talking to the country's leaders about North Korea and the looming war in Iraq. A United Nations representative to Afghanistan was issuing dire warnings about that country's fragile peace. The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was threatening to arrest the leaders of a national strike; meanwhile, representatives from the Ivory Coast were in Paris trying to negotiate peace.

That same morning, in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood Pacific Palisades, more than a dozen members of the Drug Enforcement Administration were giving the comedian Tommy Chong (né Thomas B. Kin Chong) and his wife, Shelby, a very rude awakening. A nationwide federal investigation, code-named Operation Pipe Dreams and Operation Headhunter, had just gone public and, as recounted in the documentary "a/k/a Tommy Chong," was about to rock the couple's world. More than 100 homes and businesses were raided that day, and 55 people were named in indictments, charged with trafficking in illegal drug paraphernalia — meaning, for the most part, what teenagers, hippies, rappers, Deadheads, cancer patients and many millions of other regular pot smokers commonly refer to as bongs.

Mr. Chong, half of the famous stoner comedy team Cheech and Chong, was not indicted that morning. But his family's business, Chong Glass, which manufactured a line of colorful hand-blown bongs under the name Nice Dreams (after one of the comedy duo's flicks), was raided. The company had been the brainchild of the Chongs' son Paris, who made sure he and the rest of the employees were familiar with laws regulating what are euphemistically called tobacco pipes. Even so, the company succumbed to one eager head-shop owner in Beaver Falls, Pa., who — as we hear in a tape played in the documentary — really, really wanted to buy some Nice Dreams pipes. That dude turned out to be a federal agent.

Months later Tommy Chong, who had never been arrested in his life, pleaded guilty. Subsequently, on Sept. 11, 2003, he was sentenced to nine months in jail; it was the harshest sentence that would come out of this particular chapter in the government's continuing War on Drugs. "The defendant has become wealthy throughout his entertainment career through glamorizing the illegal distribution and use of marijuana," wrote one of the prosecutors in papers filed with the court. "Feature films that he made with his longtime partner Cheech Marin, such as 'Up in Smoke,' trivialize law enforcement efforts to combat drug trafficking and use."

The film "a/k/a Tommy Chong" tells the depressing, often ridiculous and generally enraging story of how and why Mr. Chong, an extremely laid-back and genial camera presence, ended up doing time in the minimum-security Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif. Written and directed by Josh Gilbert, a friend of the comedian, the 78-minute film taps a number of experts and supporters to fill out the larger story, including Eric Schlosser, the author of "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market." Mr. Schlosser provides the film a much-needed dollop of historical and political context, while friends and colleagues like Lou Adler, the music impresario who directed Cheech and Chong's 1978 film "Up in Smoke," along with Bill Maher and Jay Leno, lend more emotional and outraged support.

"With the advent of the Internet, the illegal drug paraphernalia industry has exploded," said Attorney General John Ashcroft the day agents came knocking at Tommy and Shelby Chong's door. "This illegal billion-dollar industry will no longer be ignored by law enforcement." As Mr. Gilbert pointedly notes in his film, when Mr. Ashcroft resigned in November 2004, he released another statement. This one read, in part, that "the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." By that time Tommy Chong was out of jail and working again, appearing in a play about pot and making plans to return to the television series "That 70's Show," on which he played — what else? — an old hippie with nice dreams.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/1...es/14chon.html





Dell: Facing Up To Past Mistakes
Louise Lee

Dell's laser focus on cost efficiency has long been a core strategy. But like Home Depot, Dell's cost-cutting efforts have alienated its customers. The "direct" sales model of selling computers to consumers via phone and the Internet eliminates the costs of shipping to stores and tracking inventory. But outsiders say that mentality also leads to moves that almost seem designed to put customers last. Dell, for instance, staffs some customer service call centers with fewer than 500 workers. A center that small is almost guaranteed to be frequently overwhelmed.

Enter Richard L. "Dick" Hunter, Dell's new head of customer service. If he has his way, workers in the company's call centers will soon have a colored flag to raise when they run into trouble helping a customer. When the flag goes up, a supervisor will come running to help out. It's an idea Hunter cribbed from Dell's computer factories, where an assembler can raise a similar alarm. "In the factory, if there's a problem, he flicks on a light and the next-level [builder] comes running," says Hunter. In the call center, "why not do the same?"

An eight-year veteran who made his reputation overseeing Dell's legendarily efficient assembly plants, Hunter is remarkably candid about how hard it will be to turn things around. In 2005, Dell's customer satisfaction rating fell 6.3% to a score of 74 in the Michigan ranking, the steepest decline in the industry. Analysts say poor service is complicating the $56 billion Round Rock (Tex.) giant's struggle to get back on the growth path. Competitors have matched its prices, rolled out aggressive marketing campaigns, and raised their own service levels. In the U.S. consumer market, Dell's first-quarter share fell to 28% from 31%, according to researcher IDC. "Dell has to repair its reputational damage," says Jason Maxwell, an analyst at TCW Group, which owns about 25 million Dell shares.

Hunter thinks the solution is to treat the call center like a factory. Now, many call center reps are trained to solve only one type of problem -- say, a hardware glitch on a Dimension desktop. That explains why it's so common for the agent who answers a call to have to transfer it in search of a techie with the right expertise. Hunter estimates that almost 45% of calls to Dell require at least one transfer. "That's terrible," he says. "It's like delivering materials to the wrong factory 45% of the time." Last year, to discourage people from calling at all, Dell removed the toll-free service number from its Web site, a move that Hunter says "falls into the stupid category." It put the number back a couple of weeks ago.

Just as each Dell factory worker is trained to assemble different types of computer models, Hunter plans to train the phone reps in fixing more types of machines. That's supposed to increase the likelihood that the first person who answers a call will be able to help.

Dell long ago found the optimal size for its factories. Now, Hunter intends to do the same for call centers. He plans to expand small centers to house 1,000 to 3,000 reps. That should boost the chances that any caller's problem can be solved by someone within the building. In the next six weeks, Dell will install large monitors to let workers see the number of callers who are on hold. Hunter will have access to each board from his desk so the centers will know, he says, that "Big Brother is watching." Dell points to some progress. The dismal on-hold experience has improved markedly since its November nadir. During a week in May, aided by recent service hires, only 80 people waited more than 30 minutes for an answer.

But can frustrated people be handled like so many widgets in a factory? Customers aren't so easily standardized. The bigger question, though, is whether Dell has the stomach for investing in better service. It plans to spend more than $100 million this year on the effort, far more than it spent last year, when its expenses were 9% of sales, compared with 13% for Apple and Hewlett-Packard. Hunter believes his effort will ultimately pay for itself by boosting sales. But in the meantime, as analyst Maxwell points out, "It sure doesn't help Dell make its quarterly numbers."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...pStories_ssi_5





Gates to Cede Software Reins
John Markoff and Steve Lohr

Three decades after he started Microsoft with the dream of placing a personal computer in every home and business, Bill Gates said Thursday that he would leave his day-to-day role there in two years.

He will shift his energies to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which his Microsoft fortune has made the world's largest philanthropic organization, dedicated to health and education issues, especially in poor nations.

At a news conference after the close of the stock market, Mr. Gates, 50, said he was not leaving Microsoft altogether. He said he planned to remain as chairman and maintain his large holding in the company.

"I always see myself as being the largest shareholder in Microsoft," Mr. Gates said.

But the move, analysts said, points to the changes sweeping the software industry. Probably more than any other person, Mr. Gates has been identified with personal computer software, while the center of gravity in computing is increasingly shifting to the Internet.

"I think we'll look back at this day as the separation between two eras in software — the first being software in a box, and the second software distributed over the Internet for free and funded by advertising," said George F. Colony, chief executive of Forrester Research. "The new era requires a complete re-examination of Microsoft's business model, which has been one of most profitable the world has ever seen."

Mr. Gates's college classmate and business partner of 26 years, Steven A. Ballmer, also 50, will remain chief executive of the company. He assumed that post in 2000, with Mr. Gates remaining engaged in the daily operation with the title of chief software architect.

Mr. Ballmer emphasized in an interview that Mr. Gates would give the preponderance of his time to Microsoft during the two-year transition.

But the transition will begin immediately, Mr. Gates said, with his role as chief software architect taken over by Ray Ozzie, 50, one of the company's three chief technical officers. Mr. Ozzie, whose software background includes the conception of Lotus Notes in the 1980's, joined Microsoft last year and has been leading its strategic response to the growing Internet challenge the software company faces from companies like Google and Yahoo.

Mr. Gates said that he and Mr. Ballmer had begun discussing a transition some time ago, but that a decision had been made only in the last few weeks. He noted that he had deferred telling Mr. Ballmer of his decision several times, and that his wife, Melinda, a former Microsoft product manager, had reminded him to communicate with his business partner on several occasions.

"I talked with her even before I talked to Steve about this possibility," Mr. Gates said. "I got her advice. For a couple of weeks she said, 'Have you mentioned it to Steve yet?' I said, 'No, it wasn't easy to bring up today, maybe I'll bring it up tomorrow.' "

He said his primary motivation was a desire to spend more time on the issues that he has decided to attack with his foundation, whose resources will continue to swell as Mr. Gates makes good on his commitment to shift most of his fortune, said to be around $50 billion. He remains the largest single shareholder in Microsoft, with 9.6 percent of the stock, a stake currently worth $21.6 billion.

But his decision to begin scaling back at Microsoft comes at a critical juncture for the company, a dominant force in the computing world for a quarter-century. Although revenues are at record levels and the company's profits are running at a stunning $1 billion a month, Wall Street has grown increasingly critical of Microsoft's inability to make significant headway in new markets as diverse as video games, Internet television and Web advertising.

The company's stock has fallen from a high of $28.38 in the last year to close at $22.07 on Thursday. The share price peaked at $58.89 in December 1999. The Gates announcement sent the share price down slightly in after-hours trading.

At the news conference, Mr. Gates spoke about his emotional commitment to the company that he created with Paul G. Allen in New Mexico in 1975, initially selling software stored as punched holes in paper tape to the first generation of personal computer hobbyists.

Microsoft became a dominant force in computing shortly after I.B.M. picked the company, by then based in Bellevue, Wash., to provide the principal operating system for the I.B.M. PC in 1981. In the next decade Mr. Gates, aided by Mr. Ballmer, built a software monopoly by adding a growing array of programs bundled together into a single product called Office.

"When Paul Allen and I started this 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software," Mr. Gates said Thursday at the news conference, held in a television studio on the company's corporate campus here. "I have no doubt that over the next 30 years that Microsoft will play just as important a role as it has over the last 30 years."

Even Mr. Gates's competitors described his role as pivotal in shaping the PC era and transforming modern computing.

"Bill Gates redefined the software industry and redefined the computer industry," said Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive who is now a competitor at RealNetworks, a Seattle-based Internet services company. "His retirement from a full-time role is a huge milestone, and it marks the end of this era."

Still to be determined is how quickly Mr. Gates will depart the computer industry stage. As the chairman, he will remain the face of Microsoft to the outside world, giving speeches and visiting customers.

"And he'll still be involved in all the large business decisions," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "So the structure will change, but whether the outcomes will be different remains to be seen."

As part of the realignment, the company elevated a second chief technical officer, Craig J. Mundie, 56, who will be given the title of chief research and strategy officer. Working with Mr. Gates during the transition, he will take over responsibility for the company's research and product development efforts.

Since both Mr. Mundie and Mr. Ozzie are contemporaries of Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Gates, analysts did not see the moves as designating a future chief executive.

The shift follows a September 2005 change in which Mr. Ballmer reorganized the company into three divisions, focused on operating systems, the Office product group and an entertainment and hardware business.

Mr. Gates took pains Thursday to minimize his role at Microsoft, saying that the company could innovate and continue to lead in the software industry despite his diminished presence.

"The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me," he said. "In reality, Microsoft has had an unbelievable breadth and depth of technical talent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/16/te... tner=homepage





Our Beliefs

Another Sky Press

We want people to read our books, even if they read them for free. This isn’t anything revolutionary - unless your local librarian is a subversive of the highest order.

To best accomplish this goal we release all of our novels online for free (Click is our first, but more are soon to follow). Because we know how good ‘real’ books feel in your hands, we also price our trade-paperbacks via a sliding scale system in which the base price is the cost for us to ship you a book (we don’t make a penny) and you set the final price by choosing what you’d like to contribute (if anything) to the creative team behind it (most of which goes to the author). You can’t ever be ripped off. We call this pro-artist, pro-audience system neo-patronage.

There are a whole bunch of reasons we are doing this. Some of them are idealistic (we trust people!). Some of them are economic (we want everyone to be able to afford our books!). Some of them are philosophical (we believe it is a better system!). Some of them are technological (flow with technology, don’t fight it!).

But really, it comes down to something very simple: I sat down and tried to figure out a system of commerce that was as ‘pure’ as possible. One free of greed. One that gave as many people as possible the ability to be a part of it, whether as artist or audience. One which allowed the artists who excelled to be compensated and thus continue to create art. And this system of neo-patronage is what I came up with. Is it perfect? Will it work? Questions, questions, and there’s no way to know the answers until it’s been tried. And so I am, with the help and dedication of others who want to see this system thrive.


(one - it makes sense)

Technology changes the world, whether people want it to or not. The printing press, the telephone and the car have all re-mapped the world. New technologies can bring down kings and churches, can restructure our lives right in front of our eyes. One thing is certain - we are no longer tied to traditional means of distribution (case in point, when was the last time a milkman delivered to your door?)

Rather than fight technology, we’ve decided to flow with it. Rather than ‘protect’ our ‘intellectual property’ with DRM and other consumer-unfriendly practices, we’re offering it all for free. Rather than fight against P2P and related technologies, we’ll embrace them.

Which, of course, leaves that one burning question: how does the artist get paid? We think the answer is something along the lines of neo-patronage, and we’re willing to put our money, time, and effort where our mouth is.


(two - the audience is the sole arbitrator of value)

We believe it would be better if individuals could decide the value of art after they experience it, not before. Few people, if any, would buy a painting sight unseen. Yet most of us often purchase music, films and books at a fixed price before we even know if the ‘product’ is actually any good. As a result we’ve created a market where we often support creativity based on the quality of the hype, not the quality of the actual creation. This in turn has lead to a downturn in quality because the bottom line doesn’t care whether or not you liked the movie/book/cd - you’ve already spent your money. There is little incentive to create better content when the industry knows they can simply hype the next half-assed thing that comes along.

Consider what people spend on music, films and books that they end up disliking. If this money weren’t wasted on inferior material, the collective audience would have more to spend on the artists that they love. The arts would flourish because money would be properly distributed to artists based on quality instead of filling the coffers of the already rich non-creators that control the hype industry.


(three - art for all)

Art should be for all, not for those who can afford it. Contribute when you can, if you can. Don’t feel guilty if you can’t contribute to every artist who you’ve enjoyed. Instead, be proud to contribute at a level that is comfortable to you both ethically and financially. If you have the means, by all means go above and beyond and generously support a few artists to ensure they can continue to create new work.


(four - support the artist)

There are some great, artist-friendly distributors around (CD Baby is a perfect example) but for the most part the culture industry is stacked against the artist. The perils of the music industry are well known, but the book publishing industry can be just as bad, if not worse.

We believe the money should go to the artist, not obsolete middle men hanging on to antiquated distribution paradigms. Period.


(five - dreams come true)

We believe this will work.


(in conclusion)

The corporations that currently have a strangle hold on our culture are not equipped for the impact of technology. They can not and will not adapt, for their profit lies in the realm of control and information consolidation, not freedom and information dissemination. We have the opportunity to reclaim our culture and we need to take it.

We believe a better system is for the audience to be under the honor system to contribute to those artists who have enriched their lives and to shun those who have wasted their time.

This is why we at Another Sky Press provide the entirety of our works online for free. We make no demands on our audience, we simply request that if you enjoy what we offer you that you show this via contributing to our authors or directly to us. We believe in you, and we can only hope you believe in us.

Read more on neo-patronage.

Embrace the future.

Support that which you love.

Thank you for reading,
Another Sky Press

http://www.anothersky.org/main/our-beliefs/

















Until next week,

- js.


















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