CULTURAS IN VITRO
Le Japon, tête de pont digitale à Linz

File-Sharing Networks Relying on VCR Ruling

Want Video on Demand? Press Pause
The company received a patent in 1992 for technology that delivers video on demand. USA Video didn't do anything with the patent immediately, waiting for technology to take off. Now that it has, the company wants video-on-demand providers - starting with Movielink, a joint venture between five major studios - to pony up the licensing fees.

Was Hitler human? John Cusack talks about his new movie, "Max," which is sparking a firestorm even before its opening.

ECO-TERRORES
9/11: One Year Later [Scientific American]
Making a date: There will be similar but decreasingly grandiose ceremonies on every successive 11 September - with minor blips at anniversary years divisible by 10 or 25. Unless 11 September is removed from the calendar altogether.

The Complete 9/11 Timeline
Seismic Evidence Points to Underground Explosions Causing WTC Collapse
Enquêtes sur le 11 septembre 2001

Geopolitics have changed for the worse: The temptation of hegemony
As President George W. Bush himself recently said at West Point, America is the "single surviving model of human progress."
Their complacence is that they think American power can bring this new international order into being. They believe in using American power without compunction. They are hostile to international constraints and regard international law as in important respects outmoded.
Europe and Japan, they say, are irrelevant because, as Robert Kagan has written, on "the all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are diverging." Europe "is turning away from power." Only the United States can reorder the world.

It's a connected world, so watch your language: "Jihad" and "fundamentalism"

A Recruiting Tape of Osama bin Laden: Excerpts and Analyses

The Taliban minister, the US envoy and the warning of September 11 that was ignored: [T]he message was disregarded because of what sources describe as "warning fatigue".

Surveillance Society: Don't look now, but you may find you're being watched

Muslims in UK jails tell of plight: Two of the nine men detained without charge for nine months under British anti-terror legislation introduced in the wake of the September 11 attacks have spoken for the first time about their imprisonment and their fears that they will be held for many years.

U.S. Will Fingerprint Some Foreign Visitors: Immigration agents at the nation's border crossings, airports and seaports this week will begin to fingerprint foreigners who they suspect may pose security risks and will require those visitors to regularly report where they are staying and what they are doing in the United States.

Legal Issues Concerning Military Use Of Non-Lethal Weapons

China's New Rulers

VITAMEDIAS
One year on: September 11 remembered
Stephen Evans, the BBC's business and economics correspondent in North America, was sitting in the foyer of the World Trade Centre when the two planes flew into the twin towers. One year on, he assesses the effect 9/11 has had on the media.

The Information Squeeze: Openness in government is under assault throughout the United States - at every level. Can the news media, reluctant combatants thus far, mount a successful counterattack?
Douglas C. Clifton, editor of Cleveland's Plain Dealer, says many newsrooms place so little emphasis on freedom of information "that reporters accept as a given that they are going to be shut out of open records."
"Reporters are more than willing to go to court," Harry Hammitt, the editor of Access Reports, a Virginia-based government watchdog publication, has observed, "but editors and publishers have decided they don't really want to spend the money."

Peeling the Onion: With its often hilarious, pitch-perfect parody of news-writing conventions, the Onion has attracted a dedicated audience for its print and online incarnations.

After the tiers, comes analysis
The research involved a hefty 4000 respondents throughout the US, and spun off from a similar survey in 1997. The aim was to see how media usage had changed in three years.
In a nutshell, newspaper usage as a source of news was down, from 76 per cent to 68 per cent, but so, too, were alternative sources, such as local TV news (88 to 80 per cent), world/national news (73 to 64 per cent) and radio (68 to 62 per cent).
The use of the internet as a source of news rose from 15 per cent to 34 per cent. The strongest internet rises were among younger people who felt more comfortable with the technology.
Audience priorities were pretty stable over the three years. Top of the list was weather information, with 75 per cent saying they were extremely or very interested in it, followed by local news on 71 per cent, world/national news on 69 per cent, news and information that helps communities deal with problems, 67 per cent, and state news on 61 per cent.
On the middle tier of priorities was local government and political news (54 per cent), science and technology (52), environment (51), health (48), news and information about local entertainment in your area (48), local business news (47), personal finance information (45), national business news (43), faith and religion (44), and professional sports (41).
On the bottom tier were TV listings and news (37), opinion and analysis (37), theatre/movie listings (36), sports scores and statistics (35), college sports (31), high school sports (27), fashion (27), and women's sports (23).
I'll bet there will be plenty of raised eyebrows among editors chewing over that list, and it will be good for more than a few pub debates.
But my advice is to ignore it.

The Glossies: The Un-magazines
Look closely: The most successful magazines of the moment may not actually be magazines

Authors attack "propaganda" of government-sponsored novels: "Sponsored" novels are about to come into their own with the launch of a new company that aims to provide respected authors to write specially commissioned novels for government departments and big business.

One $30 Million Happy Meal, to Go: ABC, McDonald's in Prime-Time Pact
The Happy Hour deal represents an increased level of involvement between broadcast networks and advertisers as networks seek to increase ad revenue and advertisers look for new ways to reach viewers beyond 30-second commercials. McDonald's sponsored a tie-in game for ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" show, but this deal is believed to be the first in which a company has promoted an entire time slot.

Sexism in blogging

TECNO-HOUSE
Serviço de Acesso à Internet - 2º Trimestre de 2002
Número Total de Clientes: 4.413.578
Clientes de Acesso Gratuito (dial up): 3.934.470 [que podem ter várias contas...]
Clientes Individuais de acesso pago: 178.157
Clientes de Acesso de Banda Larga (ADSL e Cabo): 268.841 (o ADSL apresenta um crescimento de cerca de 40% face ao trimestre anterior, contando no final do período em análise com 5.161 acessos.)

The Risk Taker Returns: Xbox cocreator Seamus Blackley floats a radical business model
Video and computer gaming has since grown into a $10 billion industry. Today’s titles are made by teams of as many as 100 people, cost on average $12 million to $15 million, and are some of the most intricate creative and technical works the entertainment world has ever seen. So how come every new release is just the same old crap? What happened to the days of seemingly endless innovation?
The answer, of course, is economics.

Sony to Unveil Head-Mount Display for PS2: Gadget will allow PlayStation users to feel as if they're part of the game, but it may only be available in Japan.

Court allows Greek gamers to play on

Intel to make hacker-resistant chips: Intel Corp. next year plans to build special security features into its microprocessor chips for the first time, a move designed to address problems such as computer viruses and tampering by malicious hackers.

Predicting the Future of Instant Messaging: IM will move beyond person-to-person text messages, and become a tool that connects us to machines--and machines to each other.

Companies Snooze on Cyber-Security: To a shocking degree, top execs remain largely uninvolved with this critical issue, and their businesses remain vulnerable

Hacking Las Vegas: The Inside Story of the MIT Blackjack Team's Conquest of the Casinos

Replacement of Google with Alternative Search Systems in China: Documentation and Screen Shots

Gates Stocks Up On Health Care: Bill Gates has sold 9 million shares of Microsoft and bought millions of shares in health-care firms.

CONTAMINANTES
Words to the wise on the Web
Is the language changing at all with the new technology?
It depends what you mean when you say "the language." We've added a few new words, but we always do that with new technology. Sailing gave us a whole bunch of new words, railroads, aviation--computers are giving us a bit more of that than they did. People, of course, are fascinated by that. But it's not a big deal in any sense - so we'll have a bunch of new words from technology.
I think there are two more-interesting consequences for language, at least. One is the fact that huge numbers of people are communicating online either via e-mail or discussion lists or forums or Web pages. The number of writers, the proportion of writers to readers in society - which has been growing slowly - has changed enormously in a short period of time. And that's a very interesting difference, it's one of the things that explains the impression that grammar is going downhill. Because you go online, and you see it seems that nobody knows when to (use) an apostrophe...But those are people who never knew when to put an apostrophe on "it's."
The second consequence of that - particularly forums and e-mail and so on - is that the language of public discussion - and blogs are a good example of this - has gone from the kind of high, neutral, public style that's exemplified by the op-ed pages of The New York Times, to something more informal, more colloquial, more conversational, which rests more, in fact, on the norms of middle-class speaking. It's something poised, as it were, between the formal style of official journalism and the informal conversations that we have with one another. And that's a very interesting development, it's a profound development - in one sense, it opens the discussion to a larger number of people. In another sense, it closes the discussion to people who aren't familiar with the implicit norms of that kind of interaction.

Should Court Records Be Available on the Internet? Striking the proper balance between public disclosure and protecting privacy rights will be a challenge going forward.

Moon opens for business: The first private Moon landing has finally been given the green light by the US Government

Missed ZZZ's, More Disease? Skimping on sleep may be bad for your health

The Great Thirst: Drought and disease threaten to set off a water war in volatile Central Asia. US scientists are fighting back with a data-crunching system that could pump fresh hope into the region. Call it the New Hydronomy.

Parents pay to choose baby's sex: A controversial technique that promises to help couples choose the sex of their child is being offered to British families at a Belgian clinic.

.DE!
Genetic modification alters hair colour

Blood banks threw away more than 200,000 units in weeks after Sept. 11... as donations from a shaken public far outstripped the needs of victims.

Pirate talk could shiver your timbers: [A] concept that is going to make you kick yourself for not thinking of it first: Talk Like a Pirate Day. As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea or what? There are so many practical benefits that I can't even begin to list them all.

Hawk gets stuck on Wing: "Call 911! I have a hawk stuck to my arm." It didn't take long for gas station customers to see Jamie Wing wasn't kidding.

Record Number of Japanese Live to 100 or More: The number of centenarians rose by 2,459 to reach 17,934 this year, compared with just 153 in 1963 [...]. More than 80 percent of the centenarians are women.

Owner denies spatula attack: The owner of the Springfield Mobil station on River Street has pleaded innocent to charges that he threw raw hamburger at a customer and beat the man with a spatula.

PHOTO-GRAFIAS
Cauchemar: l'an 1

Images of September 11 on the Web

ZITE
Hold the Button: How Long Can You Hold the Button?

Coffee Break Arcade: Free Internet Games Directory

Large Hot Pipe Organ: the world's only MIDI controlled, propane powered explosion organ