NewsScan Daily, 11 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 11 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       Special Internet Address Proposed for Mobile Devices
       Powell Warns of Phone Disruptions
       Hitachi's 400-Gigabyte Hard Drive for Digital Media
       Brainstorming Software
       Mother of Internet Stalker's Victim Gets $85,000 From Docusearch
       Nanotech Fans: Take This Advice To Heart, If You Understand It

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: Witty Messages From Dead Ideas

SPECIAL INTERNET ADDRESS PROPOSED FOR MOBILE DEVICES
     Nokia, Vodafone, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and five other companies
are proposing creation of a new Internet domain for mobile Web access,
probably with a name such as .mobile or .phone. Wireless ApplicaTion
Protocol, a protocol created to reformat Web pages for handheld devices, has
been submitted to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN); it calls for a new for-profit joint venture set up by the companies
to manage the mobile registry. A Vodafone spokesman says that a special site
for mobile devices "could be organized for speed of download, ease of use
and simplicity."(New York Times 11 Mar 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/03/11/technology/11wire.html

POWELL WARNS OF PHONE DISRUPTIONS
     Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael K. Powell is warning
that there could be major disruptions in local phone service as the result
of a federal court decision that threw out the FCC's phone competition
rules. The major regional phone companies opposed the rules, arguing that
they unfairly required them to make their networks available to competitors
at deeply discounted rates. The federal court panel in the District agreed,
and ruled that the FCC had failed to justify the requirement. (Washington
Post 10 Mar 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48235-2004Mar10.html

HITACHI'S 400-GIGABYTE DRIVE FOR DIGITAL MEDIA
     Hitachi has begun marketing a 400-gigabyte hard drive that can store up
to 400 hours of standard TV programming, 45 hours of HDTV programming, or
more than 6,500 hours of digital music. The company says it has designed the
drive for audio/video products such as digital video recorders (DVRs), a
market category which The Yankee Group research firm predicts will increase
from 3 million today to 25 million by 2007. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 10 Mar
2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8154359.htm

BRAINSTORMING SOFTWARE
     New software called "Solutions Genie" from the Indian company DSS
Systems & Software Technologies offers tools for brainstorming and allows a
facilitator to group, sort, export, import ideas, etc. The software also
provides idea ranking/decision making tools, multiple level implementation
tools, and network brainstorming and idea filtering, where the facilitator
and the team may carry out these exercises from their remote machines on an
intranet or the Internet. http://www.brainstormingdss.com

MOTHER OF INTERNET STALKER'S VICTIM GETS $85,000 FROM DOCUSEARCH
     Docusearch, an Internet information broker which provided information
used to stalk and murder a young woman with whom he was obsessed, has agreed
to pay $85,000 to the victim's mother. Although Docusearch insists that none
of the information it provided was private, the victim's mother says the
company invaded her daughter's privacy and broke other laws in helping the
obsessed stalker to find her. The woman's lawyer warned that information
brokers such as Docusearch "will have to pay attention to whom they are
providing people's private information," and he accused Docusearch of having
"laid a red carpet" for the stalker which led him to the victim's place of
employment. (AP/USA Today 10 Mar 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2004-03-10-boyer-suit-sett
led_x.htm

NANOTECH FANS: TAKE THIS ADVICE TO HEART, IF YOU UNDERSTAND IT
     Investors, place your bets on nanotechnology! At this week's
Nanotechnology 2004 conference in Boston, industry advisor Lynn Foster
offered the following prognostication about nanotech's future: "I'm a
near-term optimist and a long-term optimist but a mid-term pessimist. It's
not the next big thing. It's several of the next things after the next big
thing." Memorize that. You might make a bundle. And remember that timing is
everything. (AP/Los Angeles Times 11 Mar 2004)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/ats-ap_technology11mar11,1,4676339.story?c
oll=sns-ap-toptechnology

*****

FLASH CARD
     "The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false
idea occupying that niche." (Robert Heinlein)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WITTY MESSAGES FROM DEAD IDEAS
     Science writer Fred Hapgood says:
     "Engineering can be seen as a family of paths crossing a solution space
-- in this case a space defined by all the possible arrangements and
combinations of geometry, time, and material properties that might satisfy
the particular specifications of a design. Filtering a good design out of
these possibilities by simple, direct calculation is impossible both because
of the enormous number of variables and because there are always elements in
the specifications -- like aesthetics or ergonomics or compatibility with
the corporate image -- that can't be reduced to a number or folded into a
common denominator. What humans do in these cases is: think up a completely
wrong (but sincerely felt) approach to the problem, jump in, fail, and then
do an autopsy. Each failure contains encrypted somewhere on its body
directions for the next jump: 'strengthen this part,' 'tie this down next
time,' 'buy a better battery.' Good engineering is not a matter of
creativity or centering or grounding or inspiration or lateral thinking, as
useful as those might be, but of decoding the clever, even witty, messages
solution space carves on the corpses of the ideas in which you believed with
all your heart, and then building the road to the next message."
                        ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201082934/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for Fred Hapgood's "Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and Technical
Imagination" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all
revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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