My friend Bruce Kushnick is a man on a mission. In The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal, he writes:More here.. . . in the early 1990's . . . every Bell company . . . made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions . . . In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells' promises by removing the constraints on the Bells' profits as well as gave other financial perks . . . The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household.The manipulations, deceptions and broken promises are documented in detail in New Jersey, Texas, Pennsylvania, California and Massachusetts. Book synopsis here.
"Newspapers," he said right off the bat, "are dead."
Uh, to be honest, I was hoping for something a little funnier. But, the more he talked about it, the clearer it became that it is a worthwhile topic for discussion. And Barry may even be right.
Everyone has heard about cutbacks in the newspaper business, from the big names on the East Coast to the papers in your driveway. And if there is anyone who typifies the rapid pace of change in the business and its effect on how you get your news, it is Barry.
Sears’ lowest-priced 10-inch table saw: 52.35 hours of work required in 1975; 7.34 hours of work required in 2006.
Sears’ lowest-priced gasoline-powered lawn mower: 13.14 hours of work required in 1975 (to buy a lawn-mower that cuts a 20-inch swathe); 8.56 hours of work required in 2006 (to buy a lawn-mower that cuts a 22-inch swathe. Sears no longer sells a power mower that cuts a swathe smaller than 22 inches.)
That's because state elections law says that anyone who spends more than $25 a year to advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate - without that candidate's knowledge or control - must register with the state as an independent committee and disclose the sources of the money spent and how it was expended.
Should bloggers be regarded as a part of the news media, exempt from such rules, or should they be seen as partisan actors in a campaign who must register? Few bloggers draw the line where Berg did.
Every three weeks, a FedEx flight departs Zaventem Airport on the edge of Brussels carrying Michel Boey's products to the United States. Call it the chocolate bomber.
"It is exactly as in wine," he said, receiving a visitor amid heavy aromas of dark chocolate. "Once, wine was wine. Now we appreciate smaller quantities, but the quality is better."
John Sununu (R-NH), an MIT graduate, questioned the necessity of the restriction. He said that advocates of the restriction maintained that its absence would "stifle creativity." He demurred. "We have now an unprecedented wave of creativity and product and content development…new business models, and new methodologies for distributing this content. The history of government mandates is that it always restricts innovation…why would we think that this one special time, we're going to impose a statutory government mandate on technology, and it will actually encourage innovation?"
The winners, the laggards, and the just-plain-so-expensive-that-almost-no-one-buys-them cars.
his past week, Cash released what is perhaps her most personal album to date -- and what might just be her finest: "Black Cadillac." It's a musical memoir of mortality, loss and redemption.
Cash explains that the album served as a catharsis.
"The writing of it was a release in a way," she says. "And so to bring my reason and discipline and my sense of poetry to this -- these feelings that something manageable, this tremendous sense of grief and loss, to bring all of those things to this, to this kind of tidal wave of feelings was useful to me."
Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers’ unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.
What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Forgive me here if I take a position against taxes, but as you may know, it's a bit of a favorite American pastime. It's OK for everyone else to pay taxes, just don't raise mine, and just don't ask me to pay any more than my fair share. By the way, if I can figure out a way to avoid paying some of those taxes, don't begrudge my deduction.
It's admittedly a tough position to take knowing that lower tax dollars may mean that our men and women in green may not have enough armor, that the shuttle is built by the lowest bidder, our school teachers aren't paid sufficiently, and on and on, all the way down to the pothole across the street that is now big enough to swallow my left front end if I don't swerve in time to avoid it.
But I better stop before I talk myself out of complaining about taxes. Who hasn't heard of the $400 hammer, after all?
This article about the IRS prosecuting lawyers who come up with tax shelters did more than strike me. It's just plain wrong. Think about it. Congress passes laws that require us to pay taxes. Once you establish the rules and write them down, it's up to the lawyers to figure out the loopholes and the way around them. The tax code fills up 24 megabytes of space on my hard drive, which on my iPod leaves only enough room for Stairway to Heaven and The Long and Winding Road. There really isn't much difference between the songs and the code anyway, but I digress.
So, when enterprising lawyers go out there and successfully figure out how to shelter money from taxes, the IRS takes aim and prosecutes the lawyers for being smart enough to figure out what they did wrong when they wrote the code. I'm not sure if the lawyers are being prosecuted because they showed the ________ (fill in your own word) of the IRS and Congress to the rest of us or because the result of their work actually means less dollars in the government's hands and more money in our hands.
Sure, there's another way to look at it: the lawyers actually did something illegal that was precluded by the code, and they should be punished. As you can see just from these paragraphs, however, there's no such thing as black and white in the Internal Revenue Service code. To prove that, all you have to do is look up section 61 that defines income and see what a mess the whole thing starts with.
If the IRS wants to collect money from us, how about making it simple? You know, just like it was when we were kids and dividing up the spoils from the lemonade stand: "One for you and two for me, one for you and two for me..."
For the man who will stride to midfield for the coin toss before the Super Bowl next weekend, it will be something of a homecoming.
Bart Starr, one of football's greatest quarterbacks and the most important player of the Green Bay Packers dynasty in the 1960s, stepped away from the game and the public eye in 1988 after a family tragedy. Kickoff of Super Bowl XL will see his public reunion with the National Football League. And after the game he'll be presenting the Lombardi Trophy, named after his old coach, the man with whom he won five NFL championships and two Super Bowls.
Our analysis indicates that market evolution hinges on two key market drivers: openness of access channels and levels of consumer involvement with media. For the next 5-7 years, there will be change on both fronts — but not uniformly. The industry instead will be stamped by consumer bimodality, a coexistence of two types of users with disparate channel requirements. While one consumer segment remains passive in the living room, the other will force radical change in business models in a search for anytime, anywhere content through multiple channels.Via Terry Heaton.
JPMorgan Chase analyst Spencer Wang says the earliest signs of this fundamental value shift is the sharp contrast between the languishing stock price of traditional media companies (representing an estimated loss of $31 billion in collective market capitalization) and the meteoric rise of so-called new-media stocks (reflecting an aggregate $69 billion gain in market cap).
More directly, evolving new business models are gradually redefining the value of content in the digital age: what distributors and consumers are willing to pay, what it costs to produce and how much revenue and profit is generated as compared to traditional ways of doing business.
Electronic surveillance is also examined in a brief that is part of NCSL's series, "States Respond to Terrorism," which surveys states' efforts to protect democracy from future terrorist attacks.Electronic Surveillance involves the traditional laws on wiretapping--any interception of a telephone transmission by accessing the telephone signal itself--and eavesdropping--listening in on conversations without the consent of the parties.
Following the tragedies of September 11, there is growing support to give law enforcement agencies more power to tap into private communications to thwart further acts of terrorism by monitoring private electronic communications. State and federal policymakers face the challenge of balancing security needs via electronic surveillance against the potential erosion of individual privacy.
We all knew it was a matter of "when" not "if", but it's surprising to see that it had to happen this way. Over on Google Blogscoped, I see that Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship: The page which used to say: Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.Read the comments for a rather troubling look at Google's censorship.
Now simply 404s. It's gone. Well, except for the cached copy in Google itself.
Rather than using that page to explain how and why they've compromised their corporate philosophy in China, they've removed it entirely with no e
About one out of every 40 cars and trucks in the United States can now run on a commercial mix of gasoline and ethanol, mostly made from corn. And the federal government is backing the renewable fuel industry. But does ethanol really reduce dependence on fossil fuels?
Sutter, white-haired and soon to be 85 but still razor-sharp, has finally told his life's story, and that of the 747, in a book with aviation writer Jay Spenser.via enplaned.
"747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation," won't hit book stores until May. But last week I received an advance copy from the publisher, Smithsonian Books.
So it has happened. Google has caved in. It has agreed to actively censor a new Chinese-language search service that will be housed on computer servers inside the PRC.
Obviously this contradicts its stated desire to make information freely available to everybody on the planet, and it contradicts its mission statement: "don't be evil." As Mike Langberg at the San Jose Mercury News puts it: their revised motto should now read "don't be evil more than necessary."
Ed Felten writes about his attempt to find out about the VEIL content protect technology specified in the Sensenbrenner/Conyers bill that would mandate that electronic devices plug the "analog hole." (The analog hole is the fact that analog playback can be converted into digits. E.g., point a digital camcorder at a movie screen. Or, play a DRM'ed mp3 on your computer and use digital recording software to intercept the analog signal on its way to your speakers.Obviously, these matters are vital to Wisconsin and Michigan constituents.
Jack Weil, founder and CEO of Denver-based Rockmount Ranch Wear, turns up for work every morning just as he has done since 1946. At 104 years old, he's not planning to go anywhere else because "what else am I supposed to do all day?".
I sat there listening to the Ford Motor Company press conference Monday morning - as first Bill Ford, Jim Padilla and then Mark Fields outlined the "Way Forward," confirming the elimination of up to 30,000 jobs and the closings of 14 manufacturing facilities over the next several years, while basically admitting that the company was culturally bankrupt, bureaucratically paralyzed, and woefully and relentlessly clueless about how to function in the modern automotive world - and the first thought that came to my mind is that it's a flat-out miracle this iconic American company has managed to survive this long.I have to agree with Peter. Reading the blowback from Ford's Monday announcements, I, too wondered where the company is heading, and, if indeed it has been so rudderless, how has it survived?
Monday morning's presentation, designed to take us under the tent with Ford executives thinking and talking out loud for the assembled media, financial analysts and a worldwide Ford company audience, was a lurid combination of multiple mea culpas and a blatant pep rally - and the net-net of it was that it exposed Ford to be a company so far out of touch and so far removed from being a competitive force in the U.S. market that I was literally stunned at what I was hearing.
Marketing is not a do-it-to-the-customer, one-way process. The highest aim of marketing is to create products and stories about them that empower customers to sell for you. Don’t simply create loyal customers. Create customers who are enraptured with your product and sell for you. Turn customers on so they will turn others into customers.
Think of eBay conclaves where loyal users tell eBay CEO Meg Whitman how to run the company and what acquisitions to make. Hark back to 1984 and the launch of Apple’s Macintosh computer. Think of all those Mac users who tried to convert you to their form of technology.
Developed by Bram Cohen as a solution to large-file download bottlenecks—not to mention the problem of "leeches," people who download files but then don't share them as uploads—BitTorrent is a very effective tool for distributing big files online. And with good reason: BitTorrent works amazingly well to spread out the burden of creating thousands of copies of a file across the clients, or peers, that are downloading the file. That means there's no large central server to keep running, or massive bandwidth bills to pay for. It also means we can download, say, a 600MB Linux distro in a few short minutes.
Today you absolutely need a quality presence on the Internet, and that needs to be crisp, clean and informative. Consumers need answers to questions quickly, and, online, it's just like the telephone. People have the same high expectations in dealing with your business. They need to get answers to their questions quickly. They need to know what products or services you offer, how to find them and what differentiates you from your competition.
At issue: Is Internet access a freedom or a privilege? Just as Freedom of Speech means that, with very few limitations, nobody has the right to tell somebody else what to say, so should Internet freedom mean that gatekeepers should not control Internet applications or content. This is essential not just as a matter of freedom, but also as a matter of commerce, because the Internet’s success is directly due to its content-blindness. If the United States fails to understand this, U.S. Internet leadership will follow U.S. leadership in agriculture, in steel, in autos, and in consumer electronics to other countries that do.
During the War of 1812, an angry mob smashed the printing presses of a Baltimore newspaper that dared to come out against the war. When the mob surrounded the paper's editors, and the state militia refused to protect them, the journalists were taken to prison for their own protection. That night, the mob broke into the prison, killed one journalist and left the others for dead. When the mob leaders were brought before a jury, they were acquitted. Alexis de Tocqueville tells this chilling story in "Democracy in America," and warns that the greatest threat the United States faces is the tyranny of the majority, a phrase he is credited with coining.
The turbocharger recently turned 100 and the supercharger is even older. And despite their long histories, neither seems a clear winner.
Which is best suited to a vehicle depends on the intended use. With both alternatives at their disposal, engineers consider cost, driving characteristics and the space available under the hood to determine which system belongs where. Even on the same basic engine, the choice may change depending on the vehicle in which it will be used.
Here's an indicator of when a product crosses the rubicon of word-of-mouth phenomenon to mass-market adoption: the iPod as an accessory in the $80 billion wedding industry.
Relationships between parents and children, between the past and the future, between public and private lives are among the threads running through Ms. Cash's new album, "Black Cadillac" (which is being released this week on Capitol). Its 12 songs were written between the spring of 2003 and the spring of 2005, a period in which Ms. Cash, now 50, lost three parents: her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin; her stepmother, June Carter Cash; and, in between, her father, Johnny Cash.
Reuters has published a look at the presence of bloggers at Sundance, the popular independent film festival held each year in Park City, Utah.
It’s increasingly obvious that this necessary (not to say inevitable) “restructuring” will have to wait until GM goes under. The General’s generals made that clear when they reacted to Turnaround King Jerry York’s suggestion that GM should deep-six or sell their Saab and Hummer brands. GM execs dismissed the idea with the PR equivalent of a derisive snort. Marketing Maven Monster Mark LaNeve, a man whose comments about GM’s pricing strategy sound a lot like a snake-handler speaking in tongues, assured the press that “all GM’s brands will eventually be profitable.” Bet your bottom dollar? Done. GM has mortgaged its future on baseless brand optimism.Harsh. We'll see how it plays out.
Designer Kenneth Melville explains how just how tough it is to build a $6,000 car, including some swallowing of pride
Airline passengers who buy a preapproved security pass could have their credit histories and property records examined as part of the government's plan to turn over the Registered Traveler program to private companies, federal officials say.
On Thursday, The Mercury News reported that the Justice Department has subpoenaed search-engine records in its defense of the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA. Google, whose corporate credo famously includes the admonishment "Don't Be Evil," is fighting the request for a week's worth of search engine queries. Other search engines have already complied.Google's data mining tools are not without controversy. Battelle has more here.
The government isn't asking for search engine users' identifying data -- at least not yet. But for those worried about what companies or federal investigators might do with such records in the future, here's a primer on how search logs work, and how to avoid being writ large within them.
Older adults who exercise at least three times a week keep their minds sharper as they age, a new study shows.
Researchers at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle found that regular exercise, in as little as 15 minute intervals, can delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's disease in adults over 65. Their study offers the most conclusive evidence to date that physical activity can help stem the degenerative diseases.
But that was before she tried MP3 workouts. Taking advantage of sale prices last January at www.cardiocoach.com, she downloaded the first three volumes of a five-part series. Cardio Coach audios are designed to be used during any kind of cardiovascular exercise: running, stair climbing, even walking. For 30 to 60 minutes Sean O'Malley, the personal trainer who created the programs, offers encouragement as he guides the listener through a series of sprints - and for those exercising on machines, hills - that alternate with easier periods. Original music accompanies the ebb and flow of the intervals.
This will be the next big copyright war — whether this form of noncommercial creativity will be allowed. But there will be a big difference with this war and the last (over p2p filesharing). In the p2p wars, the side that defended innovation free of judicial supervision was right. But when ordinary people heard both sides of the argument, 90% were against us. In this war, the side that will defend these new creators is right. And when ordinary people hear both sides, and more importantly, see the creativity their kids are capable of, 90% will be with us.
Some commercial outfits are painting giant ads on their roofs for the benefit of the aerial/satellite photos used by services like Google Earth/Google Maps.
The documents, products and records a company keeps in its archive help it to create institutional memories -- good and bad. Nike turns to shoes in its archives to be reminded of past successes and failures.
With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.Sort of a bolt of lightning as I've been reading Shirer's the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I'm now entering 1939 in this amazing 1960 work. The look back with respect to opportunities missed is simply astonishing. I hope Ferguson is dead wrong, but one can see the seeds of war...
The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.
The book's central question is: How can companies innovate continuously? He writes: "Evolution requires us to continually refresh our competitive advantage, sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in major cataclysms, but always with some part of our business portfolio at risk and in play. To innovate forever, in other words, is not an aspiration; it is a design specification. It is not a strategy; it is a requirement."Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution Author Geoffrey A. Moore
Dan Drezner writes:
Given the fact that foreigners currently have a net claim on $2.5 trillion in U.S. assets, one would expect the U.S. to be paying out a lot more in interest, dividends, and profits to foreigners than Americans would receive from their investments.
The weird thing is that, so far, this hasn't been true. Last year the U.S. earned $36 billion more on their foreign investments than foreigners earned in the United States. The question is, why?
It turns out Americans both (seem to) make riskier investments and earn a higher return on investment. One extreme view (not Dan's) suggests the following:
But the wintertime blues disappeared Friday night, Day 2 of the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby, which residents herald as the Indianapolis 500 of snowmobile racing.
Jimmy Blaze followed a fireworks display, which opened Friday Night Thunder, by defying physics and doing a back flip on a snowmobile to the whoops and mitten-muffled applause of the 10,000 people who crammed on a snow-covered hill at Eagle River Derby Track. The temperature had dropped to 25; the wind chill made it feel like 11 and a steady snow fell.
Hundreds of the young men and women in parkas bearing the logos of their favorite sled manufacturers, like Polaris and Arctic Cat, arrived by snowmobile. Families, too, planted camping chairs in the white bowl, but while mothers and fathers watched the racers hit 100 miles an hour on the track's icy oval, their snowsuit-bundled children found a steeper hill for body-sledding.
How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore. Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan.It will be interesting to see where our Wisconsin politicians land on this matter.
No one else is writing this piece, so it will have to be me. I should say upfront that I'm not predicting that this will happen (yet), and I'm certainly not making a recommendation. I'm just laying out a scenario that could kneecap Google and take its stock back to, say, $100 a share.Rather ironic - and refreshing, coming from Blodget.
Google's major weakness is that it is almost entirely dependent on one, high-margin revenue stream. The company has dozens of cool products, but with the exception of AdWords, none of them generate meaningful revenue. From an intermediate-term financial perspective, therefore, they are irrelevant.
So, the question is, what could happen to AdWords, and what will happen to the company (and stock) if it does?
Former KPMG tax professionals who are facing criminal charges over questionable tax shelters challenged the government yesterday to prove that they had broken the law.
The defendants filed more than two dozen motions in United States District Court in Manhattan yesterday, asking among other things that charges be dropped because no court had ever ruled the shelters in question illegal.
One defense filing, submitted to the U.S. District Court in New York, accused prosecutors of "distorting" the facts and "obfuscating the truth-finding process" in order to win the case. By threatening KPMG with criminal indictment, the motion said, the government forced the firm to accept a "draconian" deferred prosecution agreement in which it admitted the tax strategies were fraudulent and agreed to waive attorney-client privilege.
"The goal is obviously not justice, nor truth, but instead the unsavory desire to tack another skin to the wall," the filing said.
Google is likely central to the Internet portion of this effort. There's no doubt in my mind that Google has a fat contract with the Homeland Security Department. They can track your search behavior using cookies. Affiliates using cookies on adwords. Analyze the content of your weblog for dangerous phrases. Anonymity doesn't help. They have your IP address and therefore can get the records they need to put a name and a credit history next to your Internet behavior (all without a warrant).A USDA Yin to that Yang.
Just dropping a bunch of new personal computers on workers' desks is unlikely to contribute to productivity. A company has to rethink how business processes are handled to get significant cost savings.
As the Stanford economic historian Paul A. David has pointed out, the productivity effects from the electric motor did not really show up until Henry Ford and other industrialists figured out how to use it effectively to create the assembly line. The same is true for computers: just as the early industrialists had to learn how to use manufacturing technology to optimize the flow of materials on the factory floor, companies today must learn how to use information technology to optimize the flow of information in their organizations.
In this video, shot by AccordionGuy, a geek who lives in her riding (district), Bulte is asked whether she will take the pledge, and she responds with bile, vowing not to allow "Michael Geist and his pro-user zealots, and Electronic Frontier Foundation members" to "intimidate her." Her entire response is an embarassment to her and her party, and it's must-see video for anyone going to the polls in Parkdale/High Park.
For our latest podcast, we spent some time with Maker's Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr., who described how one rather influential person helped launched the bourbon manufacturer into the stratosphere of recognition.
He also discusses the rationale and practice of "marketing without fingerprints" and the rapid growth of its ambassador community.
Madison based TomoTherapy recently raised $14M in Venture Capital.
For 80 years, groundbreaking aesthetics coupled with sci-fi features, such as a CD player that opens with the wave of a hand, or self-equalizing speakers, have given B&O products a magical quality that transcends the stylistic comings and goings of competitors. In the eyes of B&O's brain trust, making that happen boils down to a shocking, and shockingly simple, strategy: Design always wins.
"Personally, I have no influence on design," says B&O CEO Torben Ballegaard Sorensen, an always smiling, somehow exquisitely tan, square-jawed Dane. In other words, Sorensen, despite his business acumen (or because of it), serves as little more than a steward whose task it is to ensure that B&O's design process continues unfettered, as it has since the 1960s. Sorensen runs the company's operations, but he hands over control of product development and design to one superdominant personality--a freelance designer, no less.
Records showing how thoroughly the Internal Revenue Service audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits, are being withheld from the public despite a 1976 court order requiring their disclosure, according to a legal motion filed last week in federal court in Seattle.
For decades, the information was given at no charge to a professor at Syracuse University, Susan B. Long, who made it available on the Internet at trac.syr.edu, with tools for people to conduct their own analyses.
Among other findings, Professor Long's information has shown that in 1999 the poor were more likely than the rich to be audited.
David Burnham, co-director with Professor Long of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects raw government data, said the withheld information made it impossible to evaluate the intensity of audits. Mr. Burnham noted that the withheld data included figures that indicated how much auditors say is owed in extra taxes, but that the tax agency lets taxpayers negotiate down.
"It is simply impossible to evaluate the I.R.S. without this data," Mr. Burnham said, "and they know it."
And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.
No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the "Post-Intelligencer" more than something called "Yahoo" or "Google," don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say you are?
DNA Direct offers genetics tests that can reveal a predisposition to a half dozen diseases or conditions, among them breast and ovarian cancer, cystic fibrosis, clotting disorders and infertility. Phelan obtained her chromosomal analysis the same way any client could. She spoke with the company's genetic counselor and then went for a blood test. The counselor reviewed the findings to help her interpret what they meant. In Phelan's case, the results provided a surprise -- what looked like partial Turner's syndrome. It was a possible clue to her past struggle with infertility, although she's never had any other symptoms.
"When I realized this I was thrilled," she said. "There may have been an underlying genetic factor. ... I thought, wow, women could go through this and have this help. It can work backward and help diagnose the past."
Some online services might be skirting the law to obtain these phone lists, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use.
In some cases, telephone company insiders secretly sell customers' phone-call lists to online brokers, despite strict telephone company rules against such deals, according to Schumer.
And some online brokers have used deception to get the lists from the phone companies, he said.
All House members who use cookies either acknowledge it or have privacy policies that are silent on the topic. Of the 23 senators who pledged not to employ cookies but do anyway, 18 are Republicans and five are Democrats.
"It shows their lack of understanding of technology," said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. "It's willful ignorance. They're complete hypocrites. How can they accuse companies of poor data management when they're not doing it on their own Web sites?"
No rule prohibits the use of Web monitoring techniques by Congress. But such a restriction does apply to executive branch agencies. The Pentagon and others scrambled this week to eliminate so-called Web bugs and cookies after inquiries from CNET News.com.
Today's Wall Street Journal had a cover story on the Telco's desire to charge consumers extra to download video from Google or a song from iTunes.Sure, the Telcos might be able to get more money from people who need super fast, six sigma reliability Internet connections. There has always been a business model around super high performance networks.
But this is really just marketing spin. What's really going on is the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and the other Telcos are looking at their margins going down month after month while the service providers like Apple and Google, who deliver their services to consumers over the Telco's networks, are watching their margins go up and up.
Jarvis calls the Telcos "robber barons" and Om Malik calls this hairbrained scheme a "chimera". I had to look that up. Om's either calling this money grubbing scheme a "fire breathing she monster" which sounds about right, or a "creation of the imagination" which it clearly is.
This recovery is different because it was spawned and subsequently nurtured on the back of asset appreciation alone. Greenspan and company have high hopes that investment and then employment will ultimately kick in and work their self-sustaining magic one more time, but jobs and investment these days go to Asia at the margin, and domestic animal spirits have been squelched by the looming inevitability of reduced returns on risk capital in a low interest rate world. I’ll leave the Asian story for another day or let you turn on CNN at 11:00pm EST to get your fill of Lou Dobbs - the Dobbsian spectre of foreign competition on the march is undeniably real. My point in this Outlook will be an extension of the thoughts expressed over the past few months that this recovery is on fragile legs because it is asset-appreciation-based and that future asset appreciation is vulnerable based on the weakening stimulative power of interest rates. Therein lies the potential for a white hot speculative blaze turning into a destructive recessionary fire. Such an analogy inevitably suggests that in future years, Rome, Georgia, may not be on fire, but burning.
While veteran rocker Pete Townshend blames his hearing loss on a lifetime spent using headphones, experts say today's iPod Generation is storing up trouble for the future by listening to music at high volumes. Is this a crisis in the making?
It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don't have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here's an example.
There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read. Isn't that why the Patriot Act specifically requires libraries to release information on who's reading what? For this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the popular Amazon wishlists.
Interesting look
at labor issues for Madison's #1 air carrier:Northwest's scope clause is, in fact, particularly onerous relative to scope clauses at other major airlines. United, Delta, American & US Airways can outsource (to regional airlines) aircraft up to at least 70 seats (US Airways can even outsource some aircraft of 86 seats). Continental's limit is 59 seats, but can do a virtually unlimited number of those.The issue at Northwest is particularly acute because Northwest flies smaller mainline aircraft than any other major airline. Northwest itself flies over 100 DC-9s (photo above). These geriatric aircraft (many of them over 30 years old or more) have just over 100 seats. Click here for further DC-9 data.
2006 is expected to be a challenging year for the advertising industry. Dollars continue to flow out of television budgets and into Internet ads. And viewers have more ways to skip commercials. With TiVos and iPods giving consumers more power, what's an ad guy to do?
Throughout the state, the emergence of this form of direct communication is mirroring national trends. Political blogs dominate the field, though increasingly more writers focus on contentious topics of other stripes, such as places of eating and merriment. In Madison, locally-oriented blogging is being led by a number of group efforts focused upon education, taverns, and the overall experience of living in town, complemented by a growing host of political writers. Here's my thoughts about the growth of blogging in Madison over 2005.
Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer. On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)
Note, this blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.
Though the added weight of SUVs conferred some protection in non-rollover accidents, the vehicles were twice as likely as cars to roll over during a wreck, the report published in the journal Pediatrics said.
He won by promising to be frugal and restoring ethics, a blueprint he's following again. "As Governor, right off the bat, that first day in office, I would call a special session to pass a true property tax freeze on all four years I'm in office," said Walker. "On all levels of government." Walker admits Gov.Doyle's plan has helped some people but calls it a phony freeze because on average tax bills went up. He criticizes Doyle saying the governor essentially borrowed the money to pay for it instead of cutting programs.
I've been collecting data on just how bad it's getting in the music industry, and this useful list of the 100 all-time bestselling albums offered another lens on the meltdown. I looked up the release dates of each and grouped them in half-decade bins. The data speaks for itself
The pace of change isn't limited to the vehicle itself, but also how it is designed, engineered, manufactured and sold.
With automakers fighting fiercely for new customers in the U.S. market, innovation can mean the difference between success and failure.
"The ability of the industry to create variety at a low cost is greater than it ever has been," said David Cole, director of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. "The cost of risk is decreasing."
The Berklee College of Music, in Boston, already supplies NoteTaker software to all 3,850 of its students and plans to issue NoteShare to them, too. David Mash, its vice president for information technology, wrote that because "notebooks are immediately available without servers," students can "collaborate on projects as the ideas hit them." For instance, they could "drag their music into a notebook, add some comments and ask for criticism" from friends and teachers on the network.The interesting aspect of this software is that it does not require any expensive/time consuming server tools. NoteShare FAQ.
Classic photo that reminded me of my San Francisco days. We shovel snow and they shovel mud... via the NYT
Many Airport authorities are adding Free Wi-Fi high speed internet access as an amenity for travelers. Some offer access in the entire airport while others may limit access to specified terminal or waiting areas. In addition, many airline club lounges may have their own free access available.Green Bay's airport offers free wifi, while those of us in Madison are still waiting....
Asked why he made sure the Democratic senator from Madison personally got a $40,000 check from what was then called SBC/Ameritech for a shadowy campaign fund Chvala secretly controlled, Broydrick said: "It was very clear to me that, if you played ball, you got what you wanted."Filling up my car recently, I stood next to a woman doing the same to her 3-Series. The trunk and bumper were filled with anti-national political figure stickers. I told her that I agreed with many of her concerns but simply asked that she put some energy into local issues such as public schools or city/county government.
The regional phone company, one of Broydrick's many clients, got what it wanted in the summer of 2001.
Before the $40,000 corporate check was written, the state budget contained a tax-code change that would have cost the telecommunications industry money. After the check was delivered, the provision was removed from the budget, which Chvala and Assembly Republicans wrote over the next two weeks.
Like I said, this isn't about having/not having a tiered Internet. It already is tiered. This is a battle over whether or not we have an OPEN Internet. The Ed Whitacre's of the industry want it to be a RESTRICTED Internet. A restricted Internet where they not only hold the keys, but where they're free to swing their swords as well.I have many more posts and links on this issue here.