All your cash are belong to M$OFT

Microsoft and Best Buy accused of scam

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But now the crews operating over Iraq from the Ali Al Salem airbase in northern Kuwait are about to go to the opposite extreme and use "inert bombs".

These are basically blocks of concrete shaped as bombs and painted blue to identify them as non-explosive if they are discovered still intact after the war.

Great accuracy

But they will be laser-guided 1,000lb blocks of concrete, capable of destroying a tank or artillery piece, but without causing a devastating explosion that would put civilians at risk and shatter surrounding buildings.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Tornadoes to drop 'concrete bombs'

The Sound of Things to Come
By MARSHALL SELLA

No one ever notices what's going on at a Radio Shack. Outside a lonely branch of the electronics store, on a government-issue San Diego day in a strip mall where no one is noticing much of anything, a bluff man with thinning, ginger hair and preternaturally white teeth is standing on the pavement, slowly waving a square metal plate toward people strolling in the distance. ''Watch that lady over there,'' he says, unable to conceal his boyish pride for the gadget in his giant hand. ''This is really cool.''

Woody Norris aims the silvery plate at his quarry. A burly brunette 200 feet away stops dead in her tracks and peers around, befuddled. She has walked straight into the noise of a Brazilian rain forest -- then out again. Even in her shopping reverie, here among the haircutters and storefront tax-preparers and dubious Middle Eastern bistros, her senses inform her that she has just stepped through a discrete column of sound, a sharply demarcated beam of unexpected sound. ''Look at that,'' Norris mutters, chuckling as the lady turns around. ''She doesn't know what hit her.''

Norris is demonstrating something called HyperSonic Sound (HSS). The aluminum plate is connected to a CD player and an odd amplifier -- actually, a very odd and very new amplifier -- that directs sound much as a laser beam directs light. Over the past few years, mainly in secret, he has shown the device to more than 300 major companies, and it has slackened a lot of jaws. In December, the editors of Popular Science magazine bestowed upon HSS its grand prize for new inventions of 2002, choosing it over the ferociously hyped Segway scooter. It is no exaggeration to say that HSS represents the first revolution in acoustics since the loudspeaker was invented 78 years ago -- and perhaps only the second since pilgrims used ''whispering tubes'' to convey their dour messages.

The Sound of Things to Come

Part 3 of the interview with Sony's Chairman and CEO.

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The second platform will tie together the PlayStation, the home server, and the TV. We have announced jointly with Panasonic and Philips that we have agreed on the basic Linux kernel for this platform. Based on this Linux kernel, we are developing the middleware and the application interfaces so that our PlayStation, future TVs, and future home video cameras will all work on a single platform.

Sony's Idei - Part 3 :: AO

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I am the coolest stud at MIT. I hacked an old-school telephone handset on my cell phone. Now I walk around Cambridge MA, looking like a phat pimp!

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Why I'm the Coolest Stud at MIT

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 4, 2001; Page A01

TEHRAN -- Arash Fahimi is a teenager in a nation that frowns on dating, outlaws rock music and offers a 17-year-old almost no chance for travel beyond its borders.

But Fahimi, like hundreds of thousands of young Iranians, has discovered an escape from his cultural cocoon. Sitting at a computer terminal in an Internet cafe, he downloads the latest Western pop music hits and chats daily with cyber-acquaintances around the globe. He even found a girlfriend on the Internet.

"I want to have a better idea of what the world is like," said Fahimi, earphones clamped under a Nike baseball cap and fingers tapping out a chat room response on his screen. "If I can't make a trip abroad, the Internet is the best way."

washingtonpost.com: Cybermania Takes Iran by Surprise

... When we net it all out, competition in the telecommunications industry has come at a tremendous cost -- our country has lost its crown jewel.

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel

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Joseph E. Sullivan, Director of Compliance and Law Enforcement Relations, Senior Counsel, Trust and Safety for online auction powerhouse eBay, recently addressed a group of law enforcement officials regarding eBay's policies for cooperating with government investigations. Below are verbatim quotations from his briefing at the recent CyberCrime 2003 conference:
We [eBay] try to make rules to make it difficult for people to commit fraud and easy for you [law enforcement agencies] to investigate. One is our Privacy policy. I know from investigating eBay fraud cases that eBay has probably the most generous policy of any internet company when it comes to sharing information.
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LAWMEME - eBay to Law Enforcement - We're Here to Help

Since they were enacted in 1998, the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright pirates from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works, and to ban “black box” devices intended for that purpose.[1]

In practice, the anti- circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright piracy. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to three important public policy priorities:

EFF Unintended Consequences: Four Years under the DMCA

Embrace file- sharing, or die

A record executive and his son make a formal case for freely downloading music. The gist: 50 million Americans can't be wrong.

Editor's note: John Snyder is president of Artist House Records, a board member of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), and a 32-time Grammy nominee. On Thursday night, he submitted the following paper to NARAS.

Salon.com Technology | Embrace file-sharing, or die