NewsScan Daily, 11 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 11 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        FCC Says Landline Numbers Can Transfer to Cell Phones
        High-Tech Espionage Case Heads to Court
        PC Users Seek Sounds Of Silence
        All I Want for Christmas Is… More Spam?
        Thanks for the Memories…

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Farewell to a Wonderful Friend
        Worth Thinking About: Why Poets Defy Extinction

FCC SAYS LANDLINE NUMBERS CAN TRANSFER TO CELL PHONES
Telephone customers in large U.S. metropolitan markets will be able to 
transfer their home phone numbers to their cell phones, allowing them to 
drop their landline service altogether without having to get a new number. 
The new rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission will also 
allow some wireless customers to keep their numbers if they switch over to 
landline phones. "This give consumers much sought-after flexibility and if 
provides further competitive stimulus to telephone industry competition," 
says FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. As many as 7 million people use their 
cell phones exclusively, and another 19 million are likely to drop their 
landline service for cellular once the rules go into effect. (AP 11 Nov 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031111/D7UOCLQO0.html

HIGH-TECH ESPIONAGE CASE HEADS TO COURT
A federal judge has ruled that two Chinese businessmen who allegedly stole 
trade secrets and equipment from U.S. tech companies and tried to smuggle 
them back to China will stand trial for their misdeeds. Attorneys for the 
defendants had argued unsuccessfully that the case should be dismissed 
because the 10 counts of criminal indictment were too vague, and the 
Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was unconstitutional. Prosecutors say the 
men stole microchip blueprints and computer-aided design scripts from Sun 
Microsystems, NEC Electronics, Transmeta and Trident Microsystems, and 
intended to use the information to start up their own microprocessor 
company in China. The lawsuit could signal a new willingness to prosecute 
what is believed to be rampant trade-secret theft in Silicon Valley. A 
PricewaterhouseCoopers study estimates that such thefts cost the l,000 
largest U.S. firms more than $45 billion a year, although few executives 
know when data has been stolen and even fewer are willing to admit it. The 
defendants could face up to 95 years in prison and $3 million in fines if 
convicted. (AP/Los Angeles Times 11 Nov 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-techspy11nov11,1,5440755.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

PC USERS SEEK SOUNDS OF SILENCE
A small but growing niche market is developing for very quiet PCs, fueled 
by consumers who are fed up with the noise pollution caused by ever-louder 
fans cooling ever-more-powerful computer components. "Progressively, PCs 
have been getting louder and louder over the years," says business owner 
Paul Holstein, who recently switched all his company's computers over to 
quiet models. "I just snapped. If you can hear the PC through your walls 
from the bedroom, you've got a problem." Holstein checked with 
Endpcnoise.com, which specializes in building nearly silent PCs. Other 
companies offering very quiet PCs include Tranquil PC in the UK and 
SilentPC in the Netherlands. And while mainstream PC makers such as Dell 
and Hewlett-Packard market some PCs as quieter than others, a lot of 
Endpcnoise's business comes from retrofitting those models with 
noise-stifling accessories. Through the use of a specially designed quiet 
power unit and a slower-spinning CPU fan, combined with a larger PC case 
made of insulated material and specially designed cables to maximize 
airflow, very quiet PCs can achieve noise levels as low as 25 or 26 
decibels (a human's lowest hearing threshold is generally thought to be 
about 20 decibels while a quiet bedroom clocks in at about 30 Db). 
(Reuters/CNN.com 10 Nov 2003)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/10/silent.pc.reut/index.html

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS… MORE SPAM?
While you're decking the halls with boughs of holly, spammongers are 
cooking up their own holiday plans, which (surprise!) involve sending even 
more spam than usual! Net filtering firms report that spammers are already 
altering their messages in an attempt to cash in on the festive season, 
offering more single products and high-tech gadgets such as DVD burners as 
potential gifts. Oh, and of course -- more cheap loans to pay for it all! 
"Not only are spammers developing more and more cunning ways of getting 
around e-mail filtering technology, but their marketing strategy is clearly 
up to scratch, too," says Alyn Hockey, research director at Clearswift, a 
spam filtering firm. Clearswift reports that the number of spam e-mails 
offering cheap loans aimed at Christmas shoppers doubled in October as a 
percentage of overall spam. (BBC News 11 Nov 2003)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3258179.stm

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES…
Having a senior moment when it comes to remembering what it was you were 
supposed to pick up at the grocery store or what time Johnny's soccer 
practice ends? Help is on the way in the form of high-tech specs dubbed 
memory glasses. The eyeglasses feature a tiny television screen embedded 
into one of the lenses and connected to a PDA, which can be programmed to 
send messages or images to the screen. All of the messages are flashed 
before the eye at 1/180th of a second, so the wearer isn't even conscious 
of the event. "The thing that's unique about my work on the memory glasses 
is the use of subliminal messages," says MIT doctoral student and inventor 
Richard DeVaul. "It seems slightly spooky, but all the controversy in the 
'70s about advertising proved to be junk science. It's nothing like the 
movie 'The Manchurian Candidate,' where we will be sending people off to 
shoot the president, nor will it have any effect on your soft-drink 
preference." An especially ingenious feature of the system enables the 
wearer to recall the name of a business associate or other random person 
during a chance encounter, using voice- or face-recognition technologies to 
pull up the name or an image of the last meeting with that person. DeVaul 
says the memory glasses could hit the shelves in two years, priced at about 
$300. (Wired.com 11 Nov 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61076,00.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for." (W.C. Fields)

FAREWELL TO A WONDERFUL FRIEND
      With deep sadness, we report that our friend Bob Heterick died last 
week of cancer after a long illness. A professor at Virginia Tech, Bob was 
for several wonderful years the brilliant leader of Educom, an organization 
with which we were once associated. He was a great man with a keen sense of 
humor and sparkling wit. He was one of a kind, and we will miss him very much.

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WHY POETS DEFY EXTINCTION
      The writer C. Day Lewis once gave this explanation of why anyone is 
still writing poems:
      "Why is it that nowadays, when poetry brings in little prestige and 
less money, people are still found who devote their lives to the apparently 
unrewarding occupation of making poems? Is the poet a quaint anachronism in 
the modern world -- a pathetic shadow of the primitive bard who, unable for 
some reason to take active part in the life of his tribe, won himself an 
honorable place in the community by singing of the exploits of hunters and 
warriors?
      "Certainly a poem is still a cry from solitude, an attempt the poet 
has made to break out of individual isolation and set down his experience 
in such a way that it can be shared by his fellow beings. And he still uses 
the power of incantation, of rhyme, rhythm and repetition, which the 
primitive bard employed to bind the social group together in a common 
emotion. But, while he is writing a poem, he is not aware of a need to 
communicate. He has two conscious motives: to create an object in words, 
and to explore reality and make sense of his own experience.
      "He wishes his object to be both self-contained and elegant-elegant 
in the sense that a mathematician will call an equation 'elegant.' The poem 
must stand up after the poet has got out from underneath it; it must apply 
beyond the individual experience out of which it arose and carry meaning 
beyond the poet's own time and social environment."
                                   ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005VB5P/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for C. Day Lewis, "The Making of a Poem," in "Adventures of the Mind, 2nd 
Series," Richard Thruelsen and John Kobler, eds. -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.)

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