NewsScan Daily, 15 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        EU Members Back Tough Stance on Microsoft
        Support for Matrix Program Dwindling
        Blogs Go Commercial
        Robot Race Is a Bust
        New Software Merges Searching and Publishing Features

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: George Eliot

EU MEMBERS BACK TOUGH STANCE ON MICROSOFT
      European Union member states are unanimously backing the European 
Commission's plans to force Microsoft to unbundled its Windows Media Player 
software from its Windows operating system and share more information on 
its technical protocols with rivals. The EC is also contemplating levying a 
fine that could run into hundreds of millions of euros. In response to the 
news, a Microsoft spokesman says, "We continue to work actively with the 
Commission toward a settlement," but observers say it would difficult for 
the EC to backpedal at this point on its proposed sanctions. "The 
Commission's already got the opinion of the member states that these are 
the right remedies. To substitute different remedies now would be very 
difficult," says David Wood, an antitrust attorney with a Brussels law 
firm. The company plans to appeal any final decision and request that the 
Commission's ruling be suspended until its case is completed -- a process 
that could take three or four years and be subject to further appeal. The 
EU Court of First Instance can then choose to grant the suspension, deny 
it, or ask the parties' consent to put the case on a one-year fast track, 
and -- if both parties agree -- freeze the remedies in the meantime. 
(Reuters/CNet News.com 15 Mar 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-7343_3-5173057.html?tag=nefd_top

SUPPORT FOR MATRIX PROGRAM DWINDLING
      Matrix -- a controversial multistate data collection program that 
integrates information from a variety of sources and analyzes it for 
suspicious activity patterns -- is losing support, with two of its seven 
participating states withdrawing from the program last week. The departure 
of New York and Wisconsin leaves only Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, 
Connecticut and Ohio actively involved. Critics have called Matrix (derived 
from Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) a state-run version of 
the Total Information Awareness program, a Pentagon project that saw its 
funding frozen last year in response to public outcry over the privacy 
implications of such a comprehensive database. In its current incarnation, 
Matrix pools state-provided records such as arrests and convictions, Social 
Security numbers, driver's license data and birth and marriage records with 
what Matrix-creator Seisint describes as "in excess of 7 billion public 
records from thousands of locations on U.S. individuals and businesses, 
including information about neighbors, relatives and associates." A recent 
ACLU report called Matrix "a body blow to the core American principle that 
the government will leave people alone unless it has good reason to suspect 
them of wrongdoing." (New York Times 15 Mar 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/technology/15matrix.html

BLOGS GO COMMERCIAL
      It didn't take long for advertisers to zero in on the latest Internet 
phenomenon -- a new breed of "bloggerpreneurs" whose weblogs cover the 
gamut from politics to personal poetry. The trend is still in its early 
stages -- blue chip firms like Procter & Gamble aren't yet lining up to buy 
blogger ad space -- but analysts point out that other Internet phenomena 
such as eBay had very modest beginnings as a market space for trading Pez 
dispensers and Beanie Babies. Statistics are sketchy, but most observers 
agree a popular blog can attract more than a million readers a month, with 
one study estimating that roughly 4% of the 126 million adult Internet 
users report visiting blog sites for information. Much of the current 
advertising is connected to the upcoming national election, but a few of 
the more well-known names are beginning to attract mainstream advertisers 
(Xerox on Slashdot and AOL and CNN on the Drudge Report). "They said nobody 
would want to advertise on personal diaries. Even my wife thought I was 
crazy," says Henry Copeland, founder of Pressflex, whose Blogads service 
connects advertisers with a network of bloggers. He's now expanded his 
business and has three programmers working for him in Hungary. (Wall Street 
Journal 15 Mar 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107930372750054907,00.html (sub req'd)

ROBOT RACE IS A BUST
      The highly touted robot race staged by the Pentagon in an effort to 
boost R&D in driverless vehicles has ended with all 15 self-navigating 
devices petering out within a few miles of the starting gate -- victims of 
technical glitches, barbed wire fences and rough terrain. The Defense 
Advanced Research Projects Agency had spent $13 million on its Grand 
Challenge, which offered a $1 million prize to the creators of the vehicle 
that could complete a 150-mile race across the Mojave Desert within 10 
hours. Team members were not allowed to touch or steer the vehicles and 
most of the robots stalled, overturned or ran off the course shortly after 
taking off. Defense officials foresee using such autonomous robotic 
vehicles to ferry supplies in war zones. (AP 15 Mar 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040315/D81AQ3M00.html

NEW SOFTWARE MERGES SEARCHING AND PUBLISHING FEATURES
      A startup called Onfolio is launching a new personal information 
management application that makes it easier for people to use and share 
information that they've discovered online. The Onfolio product installs an 
icon on the toolbar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. When the user 
clicks on the icon, Onfolio opens up a column on the left-hand side of the 
screen, just like the "favorites" button does. The software sucks up 
snippets, pages or whole documents with a single click, deleting 
advertisements and other extraneous information. Material can be annotated 
with notes and forwarded on to other friends or colleagues. "Heavy Internet 
users are searching for and finding dozens, even hundreds of things a day," 
says Onfolio founder and CEO J.J. Allaire. "There are great tools for 
finding stuff. But there are few tools for managing research." Allaire says 
Onfolio respects current and future digital rights protection technologies, 
but that his information-harvesting tool is just that -- a tool -- and that 
issues of fair use and copyright are left up to users. "There is a real 
desire to consume and republish information. It is a classic tradeoff 
between ease of use and copyright protection, which the industry is going 
to have to work out over the next five years." (Reuters 14 Mar 2004)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=4564095

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Beware the Ides of March." (From Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." If 
you are a student reading Shakespeare in new textbooks written by people 
who think that Shakespeare's actual language is not especially important, 
then you may recognize the soothsayer's advice to Caesar as "Beware March 
the 15th." If you don't know what a soothsayer is, we predict a great 
career for you as a modern textbook writer. In any event, today is March 
15th, so beware.)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: GEORGE ELIOT
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Victorian era novelist and 
essayist Mary Anne Evans  (1819-1880), who published under the pseudonym 
George Eliot, the name by which she is customarily identified.
      In her own time Eliot enjoyed a wide readership and at her death in 
1880 was considered by most accounts to be England's greatest novelist then 
writing. She chose a male pseudonym to disassociate her intellectually 
serious novels from the generally frivolous stories then being published by 
women writers.
      Eliot was the third child of Richard Evans, the estate manager of a 
wealthy landowner in Warwickshire, England. The family was close, but 
conflicted, mostly because after her early upbringing as a devout 
evangelical, Eliot became friends with a group of independent thinkers and 
rejected Christianity as speculative myth. After her father's death in 
1849, she moved to London, where she became editor of The Westminster 
Review, once edited by John Stuart Mill. Here she became involved with 
George Henry Lewes, moving into his household and living openly as Mary Ann 
Evans Lewes, despite the fact that Lewes had not divorced. Lewes encouraged 
her to write fiction and managed her relationship with publishers and 
critics. In 1855 she began writing the three short novels that were 
published in 1858 as "Scenes of Clerical Life." Then in 1859 with "Adam 
Bede" she revealed herself as a prescient moral realist with the literary 
talent to describe the weaknesses and strengths of ordinary people living 
under Victorian social traditions. In 1860 she followed up with the semi 
autobiographical "The Mill on the Floss," which was set in a provincial 
community undergoing transformation by modern commerce. In succeeding years 
Eliot also wrote the novels "Silas Marner," "Romola," "Felix Holt," and her 
masterpiece, "Middlemarch."
       Eliot died in 1880. Because of her socially defiant relationship 
with Lewes, she was refused burial in Westminster Abbey, and was buried 
instead in Highgate cemetery. In 1990, however, she was finally honored by 
the placement of a memorial stone in Westminster's poets corner.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0141439548/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Eliot's "Middlemarch" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We 
donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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