NewsScan Daily, 16 February 2005 (" Above The Fold" )

NewsScan Daily, 16 February 2005 (" Above The Fold" )
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NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
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management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn Tapped for Turing Prize
        Telecom Mergers Raise Internet Access Concerns
        Wife Broke Law in Using Spyware
        'Peer-to-Peer' Radio Passes RIAA Scrutiny
        EDS to Upgrade Skills

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Ellen Gould Harmon White
        Mailbag: The World As We Find It

VINT CERF AND ROBERT KAHN TAPPED FOR TURING PRIZE
      Internet pioneers Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn have been 
selected as winners of ACM's prestigious A.M. Turing Award, widely 
considered to be the computing field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The 
two scientists have been credited with coming up with the structure for the 
Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, which 
enable different computer networks to communicate and share information. "A 
lot of people are responsible for the success of the Internet. Vint and Bob 
are responsible for the vocabulary of the Internet," says David Patterson, 
computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Cerf 
says part of the reason the TCP/IP protocols took hold so quickly was that 
he and Kahn made no attempt to restrict usage or claim intellectual 
property rights: "It was an open standard that we would allow anyone to 
have access to without any constraints." Cerf and Kahn plan to split the 
$100,000 prize, which is named for Alan Mathison Turing, the British 
mathematician and cryptographer who broke German codes during WWII. (New 
York Times 16 Feb 2005)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16internet.html>

TELECOM MERGERS RAISE INTERNET ACCESS CONCERNS
      The recently announced mergers of AT&T and SBC and MCI and Verizon 
are raising concerns among both the corporate crowd and consumer groups, 
who note that both AT&T and MCI are major providers of "Internet backbone," 
the big pipes that carry most of the Internet traffic in the U.S. With the 
prospect of Verizon and SBC owning such a large share of the backbone, some 
worry that they could bundle their business services in a way that would 
make it impossible for rivals to compete. "Verizon and SBC are 
well-positioned to dominate and make it more difficult for other backbone 
providers to offer packages of services," says Gene Kimmelman, head of the 
Consumer Union's Washington office. (Washington Post 16 Feb 2005)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27724-2005Feb15_2.html>

WIFE BROKE LAW IN USING SPYWARE
      A Florida appeals court has ruled that a suspicious wife, who 
installed spyware on her husband's computer to secretly monitor and record 
his electronic interactions with another woman, violated Florida's 
wiretapping law. The law says anyone who "intentionally intercepts" any 
"electronic communication" commits a criminal act. The wife had argued that 
her use of Spector spyware should be viewed as similar to reading a stored 
file on her husband's computer. But Judge Donald Grincewicz wrote that 
"because the spyware installed by the wife intercepted the electronic 
communication contemporaneously with transmission, copied it and routed the 
copy to a file in the computer's hard drive, the electronic communications 
were intercepted in violation of the Florida Act." (CNet News.com 15 Feb 2005)
<http://news.com.com/Court+Wife+broke+law+with+spyware/2100-1030_3-5577979.html>

'PEER-TO-PEER' RADIO PASSES RIAA SCRUTINY
      With the pressure on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to stop 
enabling illegal music-swapping, several companies are trying to find ways 
to squeeze P2P technology into a legal framework. Mercora offers users a 
way to create playlists of their favorite songs and then "broadcast" them 
over the Internet to fellow users. When the "broadcasters" aren't online, 
neither are their "radio stations." America Online offers a similar service 
called Shoutcast, and Live365 charges amateur broadcasters a fee to upload 
their music to a central server, which then sends the music out to 
listeners' PCs. A London Web site, Last.fm, takes an "affinity sharing" 
approach, using a list of each user's favorite music to find "neighbors" 
with similar tastes. It then creates a customized broadcast for each 
listener, based on what their neighbors are listening to. Because in these 
cases the music files are temporarily "streamed" to listeners' PCs instead 
of taking up residence permanently on their hard drives, the Recording 
Industry Association of America has given its blessing and is working with 
some of the companies to ensure they stay within legal boundaries. KEXP 
executive director Tom Mara says traditional radio stations can learn a lot 
from these grassroots efforts. "It's no longer a case of a person in a 
booth broadcasting to people anonymously. Now we need to figure new modes 
of interaction -- not only between the listener and the station, but 
between listeners." (Wall Street Journal 16 Feb 2005)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110851022683155825,00.html> (sub req'd)

EDS TO UPGRADE SKILLS
      Call it a sign of the times -- global services giant EDS has embarked 
on a massive retraining program to instill its mainframe veterans with Web 
services expertise, ahead of expected skills shortages. It will shortly 
announce a strategy for bringing specialist work from overseas to stem the 
flow of IT services business to cheaper offshore markets such as India. EDS 
Asia-Pacific service delivery VP Iain Blacklaw said the global retraining 
effort would include a multimillion-dollar investment in upgrading the 
skills of 6,500 technical staff in Australia. The investments follow a long 
period of training neglect at EDS as reskilling programs were dropped in 
cost-cutting measures during through the company's troubled past two years. 
"We clearly dropped the ball in training and front-end skills," Mr Blacklaw 
said. (The Australian, 15 Feb 2005) rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin U.
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,12245977%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without 
theory." (Benjamin Disraeli)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ELLEN GOULD HARMON WHITE
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the late 19th century American 
religious personage Ellen Gould Harmon White (1827-1915), who as an early 
leader of the Seventh-Day Adventists promoted the priorities the church 
placed on health reform and sound health practices. She energetically 
promoted the medical missionary program and the building of sanatoriums, 
and her voluminous writings also provided a popular source for 
understanding the basis for the two central Adventist doctrines of 
millennialism and Sabbatarianism.
      White was born Ellen Harmon in Gorham, Maine, and grew up there until 
she was nine, when her family moved to Portland. That same year she 
suffered an injury that disfigured her face and kept her out of school for 
some time. Later she attended Portland's Westbrook Seminary and Female 
College, finishing in 1839. The following year she experienced a religious 
conversion at a Methodist camp meeting that led to her baptism in that 
church in June 1842.
      Shortly thereafter, along with other members of her family, she 
became a follower of William Miller, an Adventist prophet who was preaching 
the imminent return of Christ, predicted for October 22, 1844. When the 
Second Coming of Christ did not occur on that date, the occasion became 
known as the "Great Disappointment" -- but White and many other Millerites 
did not abandon millenarianism, reinterpreting Miller's prophecy to be the 
date on which a screening process began for gathering the names of all 
those who would be saved when the Second Coming actually did occur. White 
then began to report experiencing a long series of visions in which she 
became the bearer of messages designed to bolster the faith of discouraged 
Millerites.
      In 1846 she married the Adventist minister James S. White and 
together they traveled together throughout New England, spreading the 
Adventist faith. In 1855 they ended their wandering days by settling down 
in Battle Creek, Michigan, making that city the center of Adventist 
activity and headquarters for their various publishing activities, 
including the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, and her growing number of 
books.
      In 1860 the Adventists adopted the name Seventh-Day Adventists, and 
the published visions of White provided the major source of Seventh Day 
Adventist orthodoxy. The church program incorporated her views on health, 
especially her opposition to the use of coffee, tea, meat, and drugs, all 
of which she published in her Testimonies for the Church, which grew to 
nine volumes in length.
      In 1866 she helped Dr. John H. Kellogg establish the Battle Creek 
Sanatorium, which became famous in the field of diet and health food. (Dr. 
Kellogg's brother, Will, invented Kellogg's Corn Flakes there.) White also 
helped found Battle Creek Adventist College, with her husband as president.
      When her husband died in 1881, White moved to Healdsburg, California, 
and began traveling and lecturing extensively in Europe and Australia. Back 
in the United States, in 1903, she relocated the church headquarters and 
newspaper to Tacoma Park, Maryland. After that she retired to St. Helena, 
California, where she died in 1915.

[To find a library copy of White's "Spirit of Prophecy" visit RLG's 
RedLightGreen service at

<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=26492090&> 
-- or to purchase a copy of her "Prophets and Kings" go to: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0816300402/newsscancom/ref=nosim> 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE LOCKSMITHS
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=12087>
      Regarding "A Keyless Future" where it is claimed that "Locksmiths 
today are a little like a buggy maker in 1900." I'm not so sure. There will 
be lots of keyed locks for various purposes for a long time to come. Not 
everything is electronic, even these days. And, the smart locksmiths will 
acquire the knowledge to handle keyless entry systems, too. They'll still 
be locksmiths, just with additional skills and tools.
      Thanks for NewsScan, an interesting way to keep up with some new 
things in technology. (Michael Cook)

HUGHES AND RADIATION
Re: 
<http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=honorary_subscriber&id=472>
      You did a nice bio on the always-interesting story of Howard Hughes. 
But did you know the story behind one of his other movies, "The Conqueror?" 
See <http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_016.html> (Ben White)

SMALL POINT, BIG BUCKS
Re: 
<http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=honorary_subscriber&id=472>
      From Feb 15 NewsScan: "He died without a will, and considerable legal 
debate arose over the disposition of his estate. The courts finally made 
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute the beneficiary of his vast fortune. 
Originally set up by Hughes as a tax shelter and public relations ploy, 
this Institute is now the largest U.S. source of funds for biomedical 
research." Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is the largest PRIVATE 
source of funds, today. It is dwarfed by the $28B/yr from the National 
Institutes of Health (NIH). Small point. Big bucks. P.S. I really enjoy 
NewsScan and the Flash Cards daily! (Charles R. Sherman, Ph.D)

CONGRESS ASTOUNDS
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=12082>
      According to this article, it sounds like (if the 'real ID act' is 
passed) you would need to have a driver's license to take a train, fly in a 
commercial aircraft or even attend court... isn't this a bit of flawed 
logic? What about those people who have medical issues (such as blindness, 
deafness, etc.) that prevent them from obtaining a driver's license. Does 
this mean that those people who are not legally entitled to drive an 
automobile will also be excluded from taking other means of transportation 
or participating in the judicial process? This lack of logic by members of 
the U.S. Congress absolutely astounds me! (Phil Lindsay)

WHO DECIDES 'FREE SPEECH'?
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=7686>
      John and Suzanne, I am deeply disturbed by a phenomenon there seems 
to be very little comment on - the nature of "free speech." If we break 
down the expression into its components, it refers to unrestricted 
COMMUNICATION, whether verbally or in writing. But items up for auction -- 
how are these related to free speech?
      Today's media and special interest groups lump all manner of things 
under the "free speech" label, usually when something is proscribed and 
they need some legally plausible excuse to complain about it. This is 
obfuscation of the worst sort, driven by ideological motives. In the case 
of the Nazi memorabilia, there is no evidence that anyone's right to 
communicate has been infringed; rather, it is a case of declaring some 
objects, due to the negative historical baggage they carry (and rightly 
so), outside the bounds of good taste in the eyes of most people. Things 
like this should not come under the heading of free speech issues.
      We need not be ashamed of censorship rightly exercised; there is a 
time and a place for it. We censor the behavior of smokers. We censor 
drunkenness. We censor drug abuse. We censor murder. (We should censor, if 
we are a moral people, the convenience-killing of babies.) We can also 
decide, as an upright society, to censor other things that fall outside the 
bounds of near-universal moral consensus and good taste. But such controls 
have nothing to do with free speech, rightly understood. This distinction 
needs to be broadcast widely and the essence of what constitutes "free 
speech" reclaimed, so lawyers are not permitted to get away with redefining 
what constitutes "free speech" for their own purposes. (Richard Lanser)

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