NewsScan Daily, 24 December 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 24 December 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       SCO or Linus? Who's Right?
       No Harm, No Foul: U.S. Drops Online Music Probe
       The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are Coming
       Court Okays Those Sweet Cell Phone Deals
       Computer Network to Link U.S., China, Russia

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Holiday Schedule
       Worth Thinking About: The Gospels

SCO OR LINUS? WHO'S RIGHT?
The Utah-based SCO Group, which owns the rights to the Unix operating
system, claims that Linux creator Linus Torvalds violated its intellectual
property rights. To buttress its case, SCO provided the court a list of
Linux files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code
and contributed to Linux." But Torvalds, who created the kernel of Linux
while still a student in Finland, said in a message to a reporter that he
wrote the code in those files all by himself and now feels "a bit ashamed"
because some of the program macros he wrote are "so horribly ugly that I
wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to
have done so ;). I can show, and SCO should have been able to see, that the
list they show clearly shows original work, not copied." But SCO chief
executive Darl C. McBride insists: "As a social revolutionary, Linus
Torvalds is a genius. But at the speed the Linux project has gone forward
something gets lost along the way in terms of care with intellectual
property." (New York Times 24 Dec 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/technology/23linux.html

NO HARM, NO FOUL: U.S. DROPS ONLINE MUSIC PROBE
The U.S. Justice Department has closed its investigation of online music
ventures Pressplay and MusicNet because investigators came to the conclusion
that the two services have not actually hurt consumers. Pressplay is owned
by Roxio Inc., and  MusicNet is owned jointly by subsidiaries of Time Warner
Inc., Bertelsmann AG and EMI Group Plc. Antitrust chief Hewitt Pate said:
"None of the several theories of competitive harm that the Division
considered were ultimately supported by the facts. Consumers now have
available to them an increasing variety of authorized outlets from which
they can purchase digital music, and consumers are using those services in
growing numbers." (Reuters/Washington Post 23 Dec 2003)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25043-2003Dec23.html

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING, THE ROBOTS ARE COMING
"Sometimes you feel like you just want to pet them," says one of the
computer scientists who works at SRI International, speaking of the more
than one hundred little red robots (called Centibots) that wander the
company's halls as part of a military project funded by DARPA, the
Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Centibots are
designed to conduct surveillance in hazardous areas, spot intruders, and so
forth. One of the project's leaders explains: "They autonomously decide
where to go. Nobody is controlling them... A commander could tell the SWAT
team, 'You are looking at this, and here is the guy we want and this is what
he is wearing.'" The Centibots cost about $4,000 and are built from
off-the-shelf components, including ordinary WiFi cards for communicating
with each other and cheap PC cameras that send images humans can interpret.
(San Jose Mercury News 20 Dec 2003) (San Jose Mercury News 20 Dec 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7539292.htm

COURT OKAYS THOSE SWEET CELL PHONE DEALS
A federal appellate court in the District of Columbia has ruled that cell
phone companies are free to offer whatever consumer deals they want, and
rejected a complaint from a woman who had argued that Verizon Wireless
practiced discrimination by offering other customers special deals (such as
free minutes, free voice mail, or a credit) they hadn't offered to her. The
court ruled: "Haggling is a normal feature of many competitive markets. It
allows consumers to get the full benefit of competition by playing
competitors against each other. Here Verizon has adopted the practice as a
competitive marketing strategy." (AP/USA Today 23 Dec 2003)

COMPUTER NETWORK TO LINK U.S., CHINA, RUSSIA
A new high-speed computer network developed by a project called GLORIAD will
establish the first direct computer link across the Russia-China border,
facilitate collaboration among U.S., Chinese, and Russian scientists, and
connect computers in Chicago with machines in Amsterdam, Moscow, Siberia,
Beijing and Hong Kong. Greg Cole of the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) in Illinois, one of the leaders of the project, says
that data speeds will be as high 155 million bytes per second. "This new
network permits us to learn more from each other in areas where we have not
worked together in the past... There's some advantage to having people being
able to talk more regularly. There are fewer misunderstandings. I think
these networks are going to be more important to the more critical issues
that we're all addressing together."(AP/Los Angeles Times 23 Dec 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/ats-ap_technology14dec23,1,1268453.story?c
oll=sns-ap-toptechnology

*****

FLASH CARD
     "God bless us, every one!" (Tiny Tim, in 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles
Dickens)

HOLIDAY SCHEDULE
     NewsScan will not be distributed tomorrow or Friday are holidays. We
will resume publication on Monday. Happy Holidays to all of you!

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE PSALMS
     On Monday we featured the Kuran (alternately spelled Koran or Qur'an),
and  yesterday we called attention to the Hebrew Book of Psalms. Today we
offer an  excerpt from the New Testament Gospels. Although we made
essentially random selections from the Kuran and the Psalms, we'll make a
strictly seasonal choice from the Gospels, and will use Luke 1:26-37:
     "The Angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called
Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of
David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And when the angel had come to her,
he said, 'Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among
women.' When she had heard him she was troubled at his word, and kept
pondering what manner of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her,
'Do not be afraid, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God. Behold, thou
shalt conceive in thy womb and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call
him Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High;
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he shall
be king over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be
no end.'
     "But Mary said to the angel, 'How shall this happen, since I do not
know man?' And the angel answered and said to her, 'The Holy Spirit shall
come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; and
therefore the Holy One to be born shall be called the Son of God. And
behold, Elizabeth thy kinswoman also has conceived a son in her old age, and
she who was called barren is now in her sixth month; for nothing shall be
impossible with God.'
     And Mary said, 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me
according to they word.' And the angel departed from her."
                           ***
See http://www.catholic-pages.com/bvm/annunciation.asp -- or look for the
New Testament in your favorite library.

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We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold"
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to
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