Guess who is using unauthorized software ...

Sony BMG Caught Pirating Software - mike masnick

Wouldn't you know it? The organizations who scream the loudest about how anauthorized copies are "theft" and how "piracy" is destroying their industries are just as likely to get caught making unauthorized copies themselves. In the past, for example, we've pointed out that the MPAA was using software in an unauthorized manner, and also that it had made unauthorized copies of a movie, against the demands of the movie's producer. Now, we find out (via Slashdot) that Sony BMG has been caught in a BSA raid with a ton of unauthorized software -- potentially up to 47% of the software at the offices. Now, I tend to think that BSA raids are highly questionable, but if it's true that Sony BMG is using unauthorized software, the company has some explaining to do. It's one of the major labels and has been a huge supporter of the RIAA's "anti-piracy" campaign. For a company so adamantly against piracy, it seems rather telling that it can't live up to its own standards. Considering the RIAA has been pushing for Congress to increase the statutory fines for copyright infringement, perhaps Sony would like to set a good example and pay at the high end of the range.

More Muslims than Catholics

Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.

Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.

"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.

He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population -- or about 2 billion people.

The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion.

Formenti said that while the number of Catholics as a proportion of the world's population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates.

Full Article

When you "smell" troubles

Research shows odors linked with negative experiences are more easily recalled -- a handy survival trait. The discovery could shed light on disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome.
From the Associated Press
March 29, 2008


Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, to either a great memory or bad one?

It turns out that emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose than previously believed and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois proved the surprising connection by giving volunteers electric shocks while they sniffed novel odors.

The discovery, reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science, helps explain how our senses can steer us clear of danger. More intriguing, it could shed light on disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults. The volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An "oily, grassy" smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.

Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance. A third bottle had a slightly different scent that normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.

Full Article

Ebola defeated

One of the world’s deadliest diseases, caused by the Ebola virus, may finally be preventable thanks to US and Canadian researchers, who have successfully tested several Ebola vaccines in primates and are now looking to adapt them for human use.

Dr Anthony Sanchez, from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia is presenting an overview of Ebola vaccine development today (Monday 31 March 2008) at the Society for General Microbiology’s 162nd meeting being held this week at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

“The biothreat posed by Ebola virus cannot be overlooked. We are seeing more and more naturally occurring human outbreaks of this deadly disease. With worldwide air travel and tourism the virus can now be transported to and from remote regions of the world. And it has huge potential as a possible weapon of bioterrorism”, says Dr Sanchez. “We desperately need a protective vaccine”.

So far, there have been over 1500 cases of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in humans. Illness starts abruptly and symptoms include fever, headache, sore throat, weakness, joint and muscle aches, diarrhoea, vomiting and stomach pain. A rash, red eyes and bleeding may also occur. Ebola haemorrhagic fever can have a mortality rate of around 90% in humans.

Because Ebola virus is so dangerous, producing and testing a vaccine is extremely challenging for the scientists. One significant factor slowing down progress has been that there are only a very limited number of high containment facilities with staff capable and authorised to conduct the research.

“Ebola virus is a Biosafety Level 4 threat, along with many other haemorrhagic fever viruses”, says Dr Sanchez. “As well as the difficulty in getting the right staff and facilities, vaccines for viruses like Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have been difficult to produce because simple ‘killed’ viruses that just trigger an antibody response from the blood are not effective. For these viruses we need to get a cell-mediated response, which involves our bodies producing killer T-cells before immunity is strong enough to prevent or clear an infection.”

Full Article

Wires? No, Laser Beams

Sun Microsystems is trying to do for computing what all the king’s horses and men failed to do for Humpty Dumpty. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields.

Now Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact.

The computer maker, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce on Monday that it has received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today’s supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors.

Full Article

WiMAX may not work

Australia’s first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay’s Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a “disaster” that “failed miserably.”

In an astonishing tirade to an international WiMAX conference audience in Bangkok yesterday afternoon, CEO Garth Freeman slammed the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was “non-existent” beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.

Freeman highlighted his presentation with a warning to delegates, saying “WiMAX may not work.” He said that the technology was still “mired in opportunistic hype,” pointing to the fact most deployments were still in trials, that it was largely used by start-up carriers and was supported by “second-tier vendors”, which he contrasted with HSPA with 154 commercial networks already in operation and support from top tier vendors.

What made Freeman’s presentation most extraordinary was that just 12 months ago he fronted the same event with a generally positive appraisal of the platform which at that stage he had deployed just a few months before. At the time, Freeman said that his company had signed 10% of its 55,000 user target market in just two months, a market share that rose to 25%, on the back of an advertising campaign that highlighted value VoIP prices.

Full Article

Copyright is dead

No wonder they call Economics the Dismal Science. At the Internet Video Policy Symposium in Washington yesterday (co-sponsored by Content Agenda), a chorus line of academic economists postulated that content owners face a far more difficult challenge than they know in monetizing their content on the Internet, and that the odds that we can build our way out of the current debate over how to manage scarce online capacity are virtually nil.

The most enthusiastically glum was Gerry Faulhaber, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the former chief economist for the FCC. According to Faulhaber, copyright is a dead letter.

"Copyright is a very big issue in the legal world today, but in the business world, when you talk to consumers about protecting copyrights, it's a dead issue," he said. "It's gone. If you have a business model based on copyright, forget it."

According to Faulhaber, the "world of open piracy," created by digital technology will always thwart content owners seeking to leverage the monopoly granted to them by copyright law.

"The music industry is yet to figure this out," he said. "The current iTunes model is probably the best they can do. In both movies and music this is likely to result in substantially lower revenue for content owners." The movie studios will have an even tougher time than the music companies, according to Faulhaber, because some of the monetization models that can work for music--such as advertising-- probably won't work for full-length movies.

The likely result? "Content providers will have to hook up with the conduit guys," Faulhaber said. "They're the only ones in a position to monetize content online because they can control its distribution."

Faulhaber was also gloomy about resolving the current stand-off over the allocation of bandwidth.

"Video takes lots and lots of bandwidth, and bandwidth is not cheap,"
he said. "If bandwidth were cheap, the business would be attracting new entrants, which clearly it isn't."

David Farber

How to avoid going bankruptcy

How to avoid going bankruptcy:

1) Make debts you are sure you will be able to repay.
Which is easier said than done.
Everybody is 100% sure to be successful when beginning a business.
Otherwise he wouldn't.
But from being sure and actually being, there are a lot of unpredictable and sometimes unavoidable events.
It is also easier to happen than to forecast ending up in a situation with no real prospect of paying off all your debts.

2) Avoid panicking and ask help where help can be given.
That means not from a friend or relative , but from a professional.
Since debts are the most frequent situation of today, they are usually more prepared to give the right advice and really helping to begin again.

3)Look out for the best Debt Management.

4) A good Debt Management means to plan the way to pay back all your debts, working out what you can realistically afford to pay back over a period of time.
This is just the beginning, but every success has the right beginning.

5) The plan must be realistic and can last up to 3-5 years.
Realistic, because you have to convince at least three-quarters of your creditors.
If you are able to maintain the regular monthly payments, you can come clear of debts and debt free.

6) At this point you will be smart enough to understand how far you can go.
And if you still do not, there is always a second chance...

The war of the Future is most likely to be a Cyber war

Numerous hacks from the Far East sure look like concerted attacks against U.S. military installations, but nobody's saying for sure.

Is the United States under attack again?

Recent reports have the U.S. military not quite blaming the Chinese military for a long string of cyber-attacks against U.S. military computers. It sure sounds like they believe it, but they're not quite saying it. Also left unsaid is how much actual damage and compromise has happened already.

A Wall Street Journal article March 12 described how military networks are increasingly the targets of hackers. The targets are not limited to actual Department of Defense networks, but can also include defense industries and think tanks. The full article is available only to subscribers. Another detailed article on the same material is available on DailyTech.

The Journal article quotes Gen. Kevin Chilton, "[t]he top U.S. commander in charge of cyberspace," as saying that the networks are under attack, and that there is significant evidence implicating the Chinese but not outright accusing them. "The thing about China that gives you pause is that they've written openly about their emphasis in particular areas--space and cyberspace," he said.

International cyber-wars are becoming a not-uncommon occurrence. Last year the Internet infrastructure of Estonia was largely taken down by attacks from Russia, following a dispute with Russia over the fate of a World War II memorial. But that attack was against the civilian Internet infrastructure: the ISPs and banks, for example, not the Estonian military or government.
Such attacks can impact the entire Internet, and are fundamentally different from targeted hacks against specific installations. It's the difference between war and espionage.

I asked Gadi Evron, who consulted on the Estonian responses to the attacks they received. He confirms that China is a dangerous place for the Internet. "I can confirm targeted attacks with sophisticated technologies have been launched against obvious enemies of China. I can also confirm that China's network is the most plagued with cyber-crime in the world, being abused and used to launch attacks ranging from fraud to denial-of-service, worldwide. Who is behind these attacks can't be easily said, but it can be an American cyber-criminal, a Nigerian spammer or the Chinese themselves."

The Chinese government may try to exert control over the Internet that we find despotic, but they're not the only people using it there. Other actors in China can and do engage in the same Internet crimes that occur everywhere else.
Evron adds: "Due to IP address spoofing and the fact criminals can take over and use computers worldwide as if they were their own, being sure about this is not possible by technical means--the Internet is perfect for plausible deniability."
But plausible deniability is not proof either way, and it's still reasonable for intelligence estimators like General Chilton to come to reasonable conclusions based on evidence. Even if you can't prove that the government was involved in an attack coming from China, it still bears some responsibility.

So is this a unilateral war or are we also attacking them? Don't expect a straight answer out of the U.S. military on that one either, or from the Chinese military for that matter. We have plenty of civilian and military networks capable of performing similar attacks and having an interest in doing so. It's just another espionage tool, and no more or less moral than others we've used in the past.

Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer has worked in and written about the computer industry since 1983.

Many Rhythms, one Music

Between speaking and singing, between rhythm and beat, there you can find the Hip Hop.
The Hip Hop culture was born in the 70s, in New York, mostly among African Americans and Latinos.
Hip Hop music is a part of Hip Hop culture.
The DJ began using the percussion break instead of disco songs for their audiences to dance to.
The "microphone jockey" began speaking between songs, inviting people to dance, telling jokes and stories.
This got more stylized and was called "rapping".
Soon Hip Hop became a commercial music genre and Rap became a part of American music.
Around 2000 became a popular music and spread all over the world.
If you are a fan, or you just want to know something more about it, you can join the
hip hop forums, where you can discuss about Hip Hop and Rap, promote all your announcements, or other business related to it, or just comment and leave your feedbacks and suggestions.

What is happiness?

If asked to define what happiness is I used to answer:
Happiness is finally getting rid of a hurting pair of shoes...

But I collected a few definitions I like:

Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting
what you get... (James L)

Happiness is not about what happens to you; it's about your
attitude to what happens to you.

I am always happy. If I am alone, walking down a
street in Rome , I am happy. I feel loved. In fact. I
feel so happy sometimes that it is overwhelming and
almost makes me dizzy

'Happiness is wanting what you have in your life,
right now...' (Deepam)

Happiness is an inside job

And I would add:
Happiness is what we do not have.
If we have it, it's just normality...

What is happiness?

When one of the two or both cheat

"Some sociologists have argued that 'being faithful' is the central, defining norm of marriage," said Paul Amato, a professor of sociology at Penn State. "Although marriage implies multiple obligations, the obligation to be sexually faithful to one's spouse seems to carry the most weight."

The prevalence of marital infidelity and extramarital sex varies widely depending on the definition of infidelity used and the survey referenced, ranging from about 10 percent of couples to more than half.

A 1994 study by sociologist Edward Lauman found that 10 percent to 11 percent of spouses had cheated in the prior year. Over a lifetime, that study revealed about 18 percent of women and 24 percent of men reported an extramarital affair.

While Americans have become much more accepting of premarital sex during the past several decades, they still view extramarital sex as somewhat intolerable, Amato said.

When deciding whether to go the divorce route or follow the winding roads of marriage-repair, many factors come into play. In addition to cheating for different reasons, men and women react differently to an unfaithful spouse.

"Typical reactions from both sexes include becoming enraged, sad, humiliated, and depressed," said David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. "There are large individual differences within each sex; men tend to focus more heavily on the sexual aspects of the infidelity; women more on the emotional aspects."

These differences may have deep evolutionary roots. "From a man's perspective, sexual infidelity historically jeopardized his paternity certainty -- 'mama's baby, papa's maybe,'" Buss said. "Male sexual jealousy is, among other things, an adaptation designed to solve the problem of genetic cuckoldry."

Women, on the other hand, are 100-percent certain they are the mothers of their children. And the most upsetting acts of infidelity from a female perspective involve the emotional ties their husbands may have formed with the significant or insignificant others. They are more likely to forgive their husbands if the affair "meant nothing" and involved no emotional intimacy. Overall, women are more likely than men to forgive a cheating spouse.

"So one-night stands and use of prostitutes is less threatening than is a long-term, emotionally bonded extramarital relationship," Amato told LiveScience. "Wives are more likely to forgive their husbands if their husbands were not 'in love' with the other woman."

"Women are more likely to take into account their children, their economics, their general survival," Schwartz said. "Men are just crushed or upset about what happened to them. They won't think as quickly about their children as the first or second issue; but they will eventually consider that."

"Men are less willing to forgive," said Ruth Houston, founder of www.InfidelityAdvice.com and author of "Is He Cheating on You? - 829 Telltale Signs." She added, "Men view infidelity as a statement about their manhood, so it's such an affront to him that most men cannot get over this hurdle."

"Wives are also less likely to consider divorce if they are economically dependent on their husbands, have children or hold strong religious views," Amato said. "Nevertheless, most wives at least consider the option of divorce. And, in fact, infidelity is the marital problem most likely to lead to divorce."

Full Article

Is there still a meaning for the word Privacy?

The creator of the web has said consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he would change his internet provider if it introduced such a system.

Plans by leading internet providers to use Phorm, a company which tracks web activity to create personalised adverts, have sparked controversy.

Sir Tim said he did not want his ISP to track which websites he visited.

"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form
of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company
and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5%
because they've figured I'm looking at those books," he said.

Sir Tim said his data and web history belonged to him.

He said: "It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for
something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree,
I have to understand what I'm getting in return."

Full Article

Backup problems?

As I am fed up with creating CDs and/or DVDs saving my critical and important data, I was always waiting for a service like this, offering

- fully automated Remote backup
- continuous backup of my modified files every 10 minutes
- easy drag n drop file restore
- all done in a secure way with encryption
- web based views of backup logs and summary

And this all for free with 2 GB of space.
If I need more, I can upgrade to the Pro version for a small fee of just USD 49.50 per year and 50 GB space.

There is also a version for small businesses, which covers all their needs for just USD 99.50 per year.

Have a look at Online Backup, it pays off...

Griffin and Phoenix

Cancer is what is looming ahead of ALL of us.
Who didn't suffer a loss of a loved one thanks to a tumour?
In this particular movie IS VERY ACTUAL.
The non actual is the story behind.
Can we still find friendship and love in this everyday life?
If we can, then also death won't be that terrible as it can look.

What matters is life and living.
Death is unavoidable and sooner or later we have to face it.
But living as if we knew we have, and still be able to enjoy life, that is the secret recipe of this movie.
Don't live as if everyday you live was the last one.
Live as somebody who knows that the joy of life is in what you can reach and in love and friendship.
We are born alone, we die alone, that is why we should succeed in sharing our loneliness, at least for the time we live...

Patrizia The Movie Whisperer

The Lake House

Very unusual story.
Unusual because impossible, but nevertheless intriguing.
Good sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.
Dramatic romance, love story without the story, just the written love.
The king of the film is the Glass House on the lake.
No privacy, but like living on the lake with all the comfort of a house.
Who wouldn't like it?
When it snows, you see the snow falling on your head and it stops just a few centimters before falling on you.
You see the stars from your bed and also the first rays of light.
The sudden death frees the Director to explain how you could live in two different years.
But a dream doesn't need to have an explanation, does it?

Patrizia The Movie Whisperer

Movie and Music Industry

"Back in high school I used to drive to a friend's house to copy cassette tapes. Would a reasonable response to this piracy have been to place a toll (voluntary or not) on all roads, since they might be used to transport illegally copyrighted material? The Internet is just today's highway, and its used for a lot more than illegally copying music.

If the music industry wants to offer $5/month unlimited licenses to users enabling them to freely copy any material that is a separate issue. But why tie the license to the transport mechanism ? It is possible to copy material without using the Internet, and if I actually bought a license I would expect to be able to copy material using any medium I chose."

Vanu Bose [vanu@vanu.com]

There is nothing wrong or nothing right.
It is just a way to get still something out of a market that is disappearing.
Or at least that doesn't produce as much revenues as it did before.

Once you could see a movie just in a movie theatre.
You paid, you saw it, you went away and if you wanted to see it a second time you paid again.
Technology came with Videotapes.
You rented a movie, you paid and you saw it as much as you liked and you paid in base of the time you kept the cassette.
But parallel to the movie industry there is the hardware industry that saw the big chance to make big profits in making VideoTape recorders. You rented the movie, you copied it and paid just for the time you needed it.
Then the copy travelled around.

With the Internet the travels are shorter, easier and more alluring because "global".
Instead of a circle of few friends you have millions.
And this is the beginning of the end of rentals, videos, dvds and so on...
You still go to the teather to see a high definition movie.
But how long?
There are hardware and projectors not too expensive anymore and if you are lucky to have a big room, you have the real thing in YOUR OWN HOME.

There are two possible solutions.
Either the Police does nothing else than fining and prosecuting violators (but a fair thing would mean to sue ALL the violators and that would mean the collapse of Justice) or being an actor is going to become a job like many others.
Not a million dollars for a movie, but a month salary.
Technology can help producers to lower the cost of directing and recording a movie to the minimum.
There will be many more broadcasters than today and the cost of a movie won't be anymore millions. Of course also the revenue.
IT WILL BECOME just a normal JOB.

You will earn by commercials in the movie, or sponsored films or any other way to come back to expenses and ROI.
Why not? Also a few dollars fee from the ones willing to download from a LEGAL SERVER.
One thing is for sure, the Stars of tomorrow won't be motivated by the earnings, that is for sure.

The end of copyrights

"If he seriously believes that BitTorrent users are the same as eMusic or iTunes customers, he should have another look at the data. His service and others will be more profitable, not less. Like public radio, music that "feels free" at the moment of use leads to the use of more music. Those with more time than money are not likely his audience; People with more money than time will always shop for music at convenient services like his.
Rental, sales and the public library have co-existed well for a long period of time, and always will.

End prohibition. You can get a fee from the liquor or the music or the service or what have you. It's time to move forward."

Jim Griffin [griffin@onehouse.com]

There are things that evolve, either we want it or not.
Technology changes everybody's life.
When infringing copyrights is done by a few people is a crime, when is done by millions it becomes a habit you cannot control.
Kill the Internet and you will stop illegal downloading, but you will also stop the Future.
It's like as if people at the beginning of 1800 wouldn't have used the machines for saving human jobs.
Progress is something you cannot stop with the bad and the good which it brings.

With a price of $300 the laptop won't be anymore a Staus Symbol

Since The ASUS Eee PC got super popular, competitors have been coming out of the woodwork, including Elonex, Everex, ECS, Acer, MSI, HP and others. Most of these companies have introduced aggressive pricing, but have struggled to approach ASUS's $400 entry-level price point. Now, another "killer" is planning an under-$300 laptop.

The company is Norhtec, a systems integrator based in Thailand, of all places, that specializes in tiny servers. The company is working on what they call the Gecko Laptop.

Full Article

He, She, It, on the Internet they are just "Surfers"

"The number of young people who openly identify as transgendered has grown for a few reasons. Some parents of young children who are “gender nonconforming” — usually children who identify psychologically with the opposite sex but also children who have hermaphroditic traits, like indeterminate sex organs — now allow their kids to choose whether they are referred to as “he” or “she” and whether to wear boys’ or girls’ clothing. And some of these parents, under a doctor’s supervision, have even begun to administer hormone blockers to prevent the arrival of secondary sex characteristics until a “gender variant” child is old enough to make permanent choices. The Internet also offers greater access to information about transmale and gender-variant identities. "

The New York Times

The Internet as a Real Democratic Land is the virtual place where real people live.
Every kind of them.
Here we are all just "Humans" or better "Surfers" of any gender.
The Internet is the place where the Future comes sooner than life, because it is faster, it is easier, it is the "global" land.

Heartland

Where is heartland?
May be much closer than you think.
Thanks to technology most of the things we used to do have become easier and faster and I would even arrive to say that sometimes technology has made possible the impossible.
You just need to know the right website and it will be very easy to find a date with a single woman or man.
Once people married and that used to be forever, in good or bad.
Now a days it is mostly in good, because when bad comes (and it always come) most of us decide to be single again.
But that lasts till we realize how nice it was not being a single and we start looking again.
To find a single it is mostly a matter of how than of when and if.
To find the RIGHT single, Miss X or Mister Y more a matter of choosing the right Dating Site than a matter of luck.
So, what do we all have to do in order to find the Perfect Match?
Even if finding the person to share our life is number first on the list, usually comes on the last in our daily life.
But choosing the right date website can help us to have an active social life and a flourishing career without jeopardizing any of the two.
You just need a computer and an Internet connection.
This of course is the first step, finding is not getting.
You have good chances, but still need something more...
I find it easier to write emails to a person I do not personally know than meeting somebody and having to keep alive a conversation.
And it is also full of mystery and exciting to have a virtual relationship with somebody you actually never met...even better than a blind date.
But if you are still too shy to make the first move, let Date.com do it for you.
You just need to sign in to become a member, you will receive some e-mails that will introduce you to other compatible singles based on shared preferences. They will also send the same introduction to the other party.
And it is done!
From this point on it is JUST UP TO YOU...

Where prostitution meets technology

It may be the world's oldest profession, but prostitution is using some 21st-century tricks.

The prostitution scandal involving New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer lays bare some of the inner workings of modern-day sex work: text messaging to clock in the client, electronic fund transfers, a Web site featuring color photos, prices and rankings.

There's always been a distinction between indoor and street-level prostitution, and advances in technology have increasingly separated the two, said Ronald Weitzer, author of "Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry."

Not only can prostitutes and escort services now run more efficient businesses, but they can leverage word-of-mouth advertising in new ways to build their brands and troll for clients. Online social communities built around the escort and sex worker industries can solidify customer loyalty.

"It's commercial, but it's also social, so people do really form relationships," says Audacia Ray, author of "Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration" and a former sex worker.

"Clients become buddies," she said.

There are a host of online message boards where clients or potential clients can discuss, rate and exchange information about individual women.

Full Article

How to stop a bullet

Scientists have figured out how to stop a bullet, albeit a very tiny one, in mid-air.

US researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have built a so-called coilgun that works in reverse, stopping atom- and molecule-sized bullets in flight.

The research, which sounds like something from an X-Men movie, could eventually help measure the mass of one of the most elusive and ubiquitous particles in the universe, the neutrino.

The study appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"What motivated this was weapons research," says Mark Raizen, a professor of physics and one of the study's authors.

"It's not often that weapons technology leads to basic research."

Coilguns are a standard feature of science fiction, but the military's attempts to make such weapons practical have yet to succeed.

Conventional guns use chemical explosives to create hot gas, which propels lead bullets down a barrel.

But a coilgun accelerates a magnetic projectile, usually iron-based, with a series of coiled wires that create a strong magnetic field.

There is no physical contact between the projectile and the coils. Only a few materials the size of real bullets are magnetic.

"[But] when you look at individual atoms, just about everything is magnetic," says Raizen.

The coilgun consists of 64 hand-made units and is powered by its own capacitor.

Full Article

By the way, you'll need water

It's a longstanding joke among people who sell land. The closing is over, signatures secured, the deed transferred, and after a final handshake, this off-hand comment is delivered over-the-shoulder:

By the way, you'll need water.


That's become the story of corn ethanol in the US, and it's no laughing matter.

Last year's energy bill requires 36 billion gallons of annual biofuels production by 2022 -- probably about half of them from corn. The measure, largely a giant gift to agribusiness interests, appeared to address both environmental and energy security issues, while really doing neither. And now what's surfacing is a threat to the nation's water security.

The question of water, like oil supply, takes us deep underground, where deposits of sand, gravel and silt store water in ancient aquifers. This supply of groundwater, which is what half of the nation relies on for drinking, is not inexhaustible.

Full Artile

A new type of cheap Solar Cells

Cheap and easy-to-make dye-sensitized solar cells are still in the early stages of commercial production. Meanwhile, their inventor, Michael Gratzel, is working on more advanced versions of them. In a paper published in the online edition of Angewandte Chemie, Gratzel, a chemistry professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, presents a version of dye-sensitized cells that could be more robust and even cheaper to make than current versions.

Dye-sensitized solar cells consist of titanium oxide nanocrystals that are coated with light-absorbing dye molecules and immersed in an electrolyte solution, which is sandwiched between two glass plates or embedded in plastic. Light striking the dye frees electrons and creates "holes"--the areas of positive charge that result when electrons are lost. The semiconducting titanium dioxide particles collect the electrons and transfer them to an external circuit, producing an electric current.

These solar cells are cheaper to make than conventional silicon photovoltaic panels. In principle, they could be used to make power-generating windows and building facades, and they could even be incorporated into clothing.

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It's Semantic Web Time for Yahoo

Yahoo’s embrace of all things open continues today - expect an announcement in an hour or so that they are expanding their Open Search Platform that we wrote about last month.

In that previous announcement, Yahoo talked about their plans to allow third parties to alter and enhance search results with structured data that may be useful to users. Today, they’ll give more details on the developer platform and will announce support for a number of semantic web standards.

What does all this mean? It means we can expect the web to get itself organized, in a hurry. At stake is a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo search, and anyone else that may choose to build applications on top of this data.

Yahoo’s support for semantic web standards like RDF and microformats is exactly the incentive websites need to adopt them. Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web (think Twine), Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should. Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.

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It's Recession Time

Economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey are increasingly certain the U.S. has slid into recession, a view reinforced by new data showing a sharp drop in retail sales last month.

"The evidence is now beyond a reasonable doubt," said Scott Anderson of Wells Fargo & Co.

The Commerce Department said yesterday that retail sales fell 0.6% in February; sales excluding the volatile auto and auto-parts categories fell 0.2%. The declines reflect a sharp slowdown in consumer spending, which accounts for more than 70% of U.S. economic activity, as Americans grapple with high gasoline and food costs and declines in home values and other asset prices.

The survey marked a precipitous shift toward pessimism from the previous survey, conducted five weeks earlier. The economists now expect nonfarm payrolls to grow by an average of just 9,000 jobs a month for the next 12 months -- down from a previously expected 48,500. Twenty economists expect payrolls to shrink outright. On average, the economists predicted the unemployment rate will be 5.5% in December, up from the current 4.8%.

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Short man syndrome

It is said to have motivated Napoleon, spurred on Mussolini and driven Attila the Hun.


Now scientists may finally have proof for the "short man syndrome" - the phenomenon where tiny men overcompensate for their lack of height through acts of aggression.

A new scientific study has shown that shorter men are more likely to be jealous husbands and boyfriends than their taller counterparts.

Controversy over short man syndrome - or the Napoleon Complex - has raged for years.

Supporters of the syndrome say that society's obsession with height forces small men to overcompensate by becoming chippy, more aggressive and - in extreme cases - lust power.

The new findings come from two studies carried out at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

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Music industry proposes a piracy surcharge on ISPs

Music industry proposes a piracy surcharge on ISPs Wired Magazine By
Frank Rose

Digital-strategy consultant Jim Griffin thinks ISPs should be made to collect a music surcharge from broadband users to compensate the copyright holders.

Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea's chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that's shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.

"It's monetizing the anarchy," says Peter Jenner, head of the International Music Manager's Forum, who plans to join Griffin on the panel.

Griffin's idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers something like $5 per user per month -- and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels. A collecting agency would divvy up the money according to artists' popularity on P2P sites, just as ASCAP and BMI pay songwriters for broadcasts and live performances of their work.

First rule of the Market: when the offer is higher than the demand prices go down

"The reality is that people who bought houses with little or no money down are not really owners in the financial sense even though they appear on the deed; they are renters with an option to buy. When prices went up, almost everyone exercised that option, at least in part, although many preserved their renter status by diligently withdrawing every dollar of equity in a refinancing or a home equity loan.

Now that prices are down, people both don’t want to and can’t afford to exercise their options to buy. If you had an option to buy a stock at 80 and it was trading at seventy, you obviously wouldn’t want to exercise the option. Surprise Wall Street, Main Street doesn’t want to buy a $400,000 house for $600,000 when prices are falling and the market is glutted. Mr. and Ms. Main Street don’t want to do that even if they live in the house. Maybe – if they can – they’ll keep paying the rent; maybe they’ll go somewhere cheaper.

Walkawayplan.com offers people help in escaping an underwater mortgage with minimal damage to their credit and other assets (they say, I don’t know anything about them first hand). It’s good that buyers have some leverage in dealing with the banks whether this outfit is helpful or not." Tom Evslin


When two parties commit, one on giving money and the other on taking it and repaying in a certain amount of time, it should be a pair commitment in the sense that while the Lender cannot take back house and loan in the case of an upgrade of the property, so the other shouldn't be able to just walk away.
That would be possible if the contract didn't admit in the case of insolvency that the Lender should get back the property instead of the money.
The whole business was OK as long as the property value was going up.
They were both safe, because in any case the asset would have been a bigger value than the money.
But it occurred what lenders were not prepared for, because it never happened.
Usually with a devaluated currency the price of houses goes up.
In a normal market situation.
But if you inflate the market offering a higher number of properties than the request, as with any other item, the price goes down.
That is why in every economy the competition is good because keeps the prices down.
In this case the first need is to end this game.
And the only way is lowering the offer.
Which will happen naturally the moment the builders will realize that the price of the house they are going to build will be lower than the cost.
For that we will have to wait some time, in certain areas.
Prices are more likely to go up in big cities or in good locations, because there is no alternative (in central NY you do not find anymore land to build).
So, what we can forecast is that this business will NATURALLY end, when, we do not know.
The question is: is it worth to kill the game or just let the prices war find its natural end?
The answer very much depends on which side you are (borrower or lender).

Need Ink? Grab a deal.

Since the first days I could own a colour printer my dream has always been to be able to find such a cheap ink that I could print ALL what I wanted.
That was a big issue at that time, because, I still remember, the ink cartridges where so expensive I used to avoid the images with a lot of the same colour.
Because that meant I was going to need to recharge my printer sooner than what I would have liked, and the recharge was usually not so cheap.
Things have changed a lot.
Now a days you can find many websites with good quality, good price ink.
Where to find them?
At Inkjet Deals you can easily find not only discount ink websites' addresses, but also coupons and discounts.
For example at Carrot Ink Coupons Cheap inkjet cartridges doesn't mean low quality, but discount prices.
And you can really save with Carrot Ink coupons, discount codes, promotional sales and online coupon code offers.
What if you're looking for cheap laser toner or fax supplies for your fax machine?
Inkgrabber Coupons, together with discounter toner, offers free shipping on orders over $75 and satisfaction guarantee.
What I also like of that website is the fact they have articles and tips on how to make the best out of your ink and of course of your printer, tips on conserving ink, or suggestions how to solve your printing problems.
So, if you Need Ink, just Grab a deal.

How to better post

These are some blogging tips I agree with.
From The Net Before You

1.Data Mining
Use traffic stats of your site to learn what your users are looking for . Data Mining helps you in telling you what you should offer to your readers .

2.Experiment
Spice up your blog by periodically telling your readers not only what your blog focuses on but everything that is related with .
For Example - If i have a blog on iPhone , I would also keep a check on other competing phones and review them up on my blog .

3.Opinion Matters
Being frank and unbiased is key to success . Your readers should feel that whatever you talk about is in their's interest and not yours .

4.Competition
If you have a new blog and try to judge other people's opinions then thats not a good idea .
You would be criticized .
It would show up inexperience at your side .

5.Research
The more you research the more information you tend to share with your readers . It's the EXTRA part that should distinguish your blog from others .

6.Quality
Just forget the quality versus quantity. Rather move over to posting only when you have something that you write with passion.

About point 3
You do not necessarily need to write in the interest of your readers.
You will never be able to do so.
At least NOT in all readers'.
But you have to post your opinion and ask for theirs' opinion.


About point 4
Explaining your opinions and having different opinions IS ALWAYS a good idea.
That is how very often a dialogue begins.

Plastic without oil

Plastic has changed little since its heyday in the 1960s. It's still ubiquitous, oil based, and dirty as hell for the environment. Makes you wonder what we've been doing all these years.

For one thing, not listening enough to chemist Geoffrey Coates. In his lab at Cornell University, he's been reinventing plastic. Making it environmentally friendly and biodegradable -- with orange peels.

The key is limonene, a citrusy-smelling chemical compound made from orange rinds that when oxidized and mixed with carbon dioxide and a catalyst can be turned into a solid plastic. The final product can be made into anything from Saran wrap to medical packaging to beer bottles and naturally biodegrades in just a few months. And because it can be produced using recycled CO2 from carbon-spewing factories, simply making Coates's plastic can help the environment.

Since 1999, when Coates and his colleagues first began experimenting with limonene, they've discovered a number of other natural materials, such as pine trees and soybeans, that can be manipulated into biodegradable polymers as well. And more recently, they've been experimenting with artificially creating polyhydroxybutyrate, a polypropylene-like plastic that is naturally produced by bacteria.

While Coates's natural polymers are more expensive to produce than most current plastics, he stresses that this isn't just another radical innovation that will never make it out of the lab. Novomer, a company he cofounded in 2004, will see its green plastics used in high-end electronics in the next couple of years. Once production is scaled up, less-expensive mainstream consumer products such as food containers will follow soon after.

Doug Cantor

Health problems? Bupa can help you

Being healthy is a matter of lifestyle.
And that includes a good diet, good exercise, regular living.
It probably takes less than what you think.
It's a matter of getting used to live in a certain way, which includes regular exercising.
For example, spending a few minutes a day with something like exercise balls such as the phisio roll, which is a is a peanut-shaped vinyl ball used to strengthen or re-educate your muscles, or improve your balance and co-ordination.
This, with the appropriate exercise will keep you in shape.
Another secret to avoid health problems is frequently monitoring your blood pressure.
In order to do so it is convenient to have a Blood Pressure Monitor always ready to use, and of course regularly use it.
Another good help to feel in shape also when you have headache is using the TENS Machines, instead of a pain relief like pills or any other pharmacological aid.
They can be quite effective also for pain relief from pains and injuries.
Well, as it goes, nothing comes with nothing and if you want a good quality life it pays to train to it.