NewsScan Daily, 5 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 5 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Cycles of Violence in the Music Wars
        Spam Out of Control -- But Law Is Not the Answer
        Schmidt: From White House to House on the Bay
        Robot Hall of Fame
        Electronic Tax-Filing Grows in Popularity
        Sunshine & Moonglow: Sun's Stock Rises on Rumors of Acquisition

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Giorgio Vasari

CYCLES OF VIOLENCE IN THE MUSIC WARS
The record industry's options for fighting illegal music downloads from the 
Internet include some that may be illegal, such as attacking personal 
Internet connections to slow or halt the downloads, or the use of software 
called "freeze" that locks up a computer system for a certain minutes or 
hours and risks the loss of data, as well as software called "silence" that 
would scan a computer's hard drive for pirated music files and attempt to 
delete them, at the risk of deleting legitimate music files as well. 
Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who specializes in Internet 
copyright issues, says: "Some of this stuff is going to be illegal. It 
depends on if they are doing a sufficient amount of damage. The law has 
ways to deal with copyright infringement. Freezing people's computers is 
not within the scope of the copyright laws." (New York Times 3 May 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/business/04MUSI.html

SPAM OUT OF CONTROL -- BUT LAW IS NOT THE ANSWER
Eileen Harrington, the director of the Federal Trade Commission's marketing 
practices, that the problem of spam (bulk unsolicited e-mail) is "worse 
than we imagined. There is consensus that the problem has reached a tipping 
point. If there are not immediate improvements implemented across the board 
by technologists, service providers and perhaps lawmakers, e-mail is at 
risk of being run into the ground.'' Legislators at both federal and state 
levels have been busy enacting or proposing new laws, but FTC Commissioner 
Orson Swindle remains skeptical: "New laws that are unenforceable for 
myriad reasons or that are overtaken by the advances of technology have the 
potential to do more harm than good. No single law, no single new 
technology, no new initiative, no new meetings are going to solve this 
problem alone.'' And John Patrick, chairman of the industry-supported 
Global Internet Project, agrees, saying that the only solution to spam is 
to block it with new technology. (AP/Atlanta Journal-Constitution 3 May 2003)
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/shared/news/technology/ap_story.html/Technology/AP.V5300.AP-FTC-Spam.html

SCHMIDT: FROM WHITE HOUSE TO HOUSE ON THE BAY
Howard Schmidt, who recently resigned as White House cybersecurity adviser, 
is joining online auctioneer eBay as vice president for security. Prior to 
his role in working to help develop a strategy for protecting the nation 
from cyberattacks, Schmidt was chief security officer at Microsoft. 
Earlier, he created the federal government's first dedicated computer 
forensics laboratory. (Information Week 2 May 2003)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4MLD5KNFFDHTIQSNDBCCKH0CJUMEYJVN?articleID=9400339

ROBOT HALL OF FAME
Pittsburgh will soon have a Robot Hall of Fame for both real and fictional 
robots, with two to five inductees to the hall selected each year by a 
ten-member jury that includes MIT robotics expert Rodney Brooks and science 
fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. "Hal," the personable but eventually 
villainous computer featured in "2001: A Space Odyssey," is one of the 
likely first fictional robots selected for membership; robotic spacecraft 
are likely to among the first non-fictional inductees. The new Hall of Fame 
is being created by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science 
and Robotics Institute, the Carnegie Science Center, and several 
Pennsylvania tourist and development agencies. (Globe & Mail 3 May 2003)
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/gtnews/TGAM/20030503/RVROBO

ELECTRONIC TAX-FILING GROWS IN POPULARITY
The IRS says that electronic filing by individuals and paid tax preparers 
jumped 14% over this time last year, with the biggest increase seen among 
those who use used home computers to prepare and send their tax returns 
(including the 2.7 million people who used free tax preparation software 
provided through the IRS Web site). People also seem to be glad to get 
their money back fast (electronically): refunds returned electronically 
increased more than 11%. (San Jose Mercury News 2 May 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5771569.htm

SUNSHINE & MOONGLOW: SUN'S STOCK RISES ON RUMORS OF ACQUISITION
On speculations that Sun Microsystems may be acquired by Dell, IBM, or 
Hewlett-Packard, investors drove the price of Sun's stock up by more than 
12% at last week's end. Giga Information Group industry analyst Rob Enderle 
explains, "Sun is cheap enough, and when a company gets down to that level, 
acquisitions do get increasingly likely. Every time there's a large rumor 
about an acquisition, the stock reacts." In the past three years, Sun's 
stock price has fallen 92%. (Seattle Times 3 May 2003)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134688243_sunblock03.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      ""The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." 
(B.F. Skinner)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: GIORGIO VASARI
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Italian Mannerist painter, 
architect and writer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), whose fame as an artist 
has been overshadowed by the importance of his study of the history of 
Italian Renaissance art. His monumental "Lives of the Most Eminent 
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," provides a thorough history of 
Italian Renaissance art through biographies of its principal practitioners. 
Modeled on the ancient Greek and Roman biographies of famous men, the Lives 
was the first book in Western history to concentrate exclusively on art and 
artists.
      Vasari wrote from the viewpoint that art is an intellectual 
discipline practiced by individualistic geniuses, rather than a craft 
pursued by anonymous workers. He ushered in the modern, as opposed to the 
medieval, view of artistic endeavor, and his Lives remains a primary source 
of information about Italian Renaissance and Mannerist artists, though not 
always without errors in its biographical details.
      As a child, Vasari was the pupil of Guglielmo de Marcillat, but his 
decisive training was in Florence, where he enjoyed the friendship and 
patronage of the Medici family. In his artwork, Vasari was both studious 
and prolific. His artistry is probably best represented by the great fresco 
cycles in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and in scenes from the life of 
Pope Paul III in the Cancelleria, Rome (the so-called 100-days fresco).
      In time, critics would declare Vasari's paintings to be facile, 
superficial, and lacking a sense of color, with the result that today he is 
more highly regarded as an architect than as a painter. His best-known 
works of architecture are the Uffizi (Florence), begun in 1560 for Cosimo I 
de' Medici, and the church, monastery, and palace built for the Cavalieri 
di S. Stefano in Pisa. These designs are outstanding examples of the Tuscan 
Mannerist style of architecture and show the influence of Michelangelo, the 
artist most admired by Vasari and the only living artist mentioned in the 
first edition of his Lives.
      A second extended and revised edition included the biographies of a 
number of artists then living, as well as Vasari's own autobiography.
      Vasari designed, although he did not oversee the construction of, the 
Loggia in Arezzo, a huge office block built as a speculative investment by 
a local guild.  He also modernized and remodeled two important 13th-century 
churches in Florence, Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce.
      Later in his life Vasari was appointed chief architect to St. 
Peter's, in succession to Michelangelo, and the pope awarded him a papal 
knighthood. Upon Vasari's death in 1574, his body was taken to Arezzo where 
he was buried in the tomb he had earlier prepared for his parents.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019283410X/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" -- or look for it in your favorite 
library. [We donate all revenues from our book recommendations to literacy 
programs.]

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