NewsScan Daily, 8 February 2005 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 8 February 2005 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Flat-Panel Shakeup
        Ask Jeeves to Buy Bloglines
        Designing Green From the Ground Up
        Holographic Disks Will Store Hundreds of Movies
        Poland's Spies Exposed Online

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
        Mailbag: The World As We Find It

FLAT-PANEL SHAKEUP
      Fierce competition from Korean manufacturers is driving down prices 
of flat panel displays and eroding profits for many of the companies that 
make them. With LCD screen prices down as much as 40% in the last year, 
Fujitsu announced it's selling its LCD operation to Sharp for an 
undisclosed amount. The divestiture comes on the heels of an announcement 
last week that Fujitsu will sell back to Hitachi a large piece of the 50% 
stake it has in the companies' plasma display joint venture. "Fujitsu's 
been planning an exit strategy for flat panels for some time and it's 
finally come to fruition," says an analyst for UFJ Tsubasa Securities in 
Tokyo. Meanwhile, Hitachi and Matsushita are joining forces to develop, 
manufacture and market plasma displays, a market they hope will prove more 
lucrative than LCDs. Matsushita is the world's third-largest maker of 
plasma displays after Samsung and LG Electronics. Hitachi will rank No. 4 
once it's completed its deal with Fujitsu. (New York Times 8 Feb 2005)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/technology/08flat.html>

ASK JEEVES TO BUY BLOGLINES
      Search company Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines, a California startup 
that claims to have more than 200 million blog articles in a searchable 
database, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will enable Ask Jeeves to 
build a specialized blog search engine that it can incorporate into its 
MyJeeves personalization product and its Excite.com portal. Bloglines will 
also survive as a separately branded site. "The primary benefit here is 
gaining the leading doorway to all these [RSS] feeds online," says Ask 
Jeeves senior VP Jim Lanzone. The move reflects the search engine 
community's focus on blog publishing in an increasingly cutthroat market. 
Google in 2003 bought Pyra Labs, creator of Blogger software, and Yahoo 
recently revamped its personalized Web service to rely on RSS to aggregate 
news headlines and blog entries. MSN recently launched MSN Spaces, a 
publishing service for blogs. (CNet News.com 7 Feb 2005)
<http://news.com.com/Ask+Jeeves+to+buy+Bloglines/2100-1025_3-5566828.html>

DESIGNING GREEN FROM THE GROUND UP
      As the movement toward safe disposal and/or recycling of obsolete 
consumer electronics devices gains traction, companies increasingly are 
factoring in their products' demise as they redesign from the ground up. 
For example, Matsushita's Panasonic SD Video Camera contains no lead, no 
mercury and no brominated flame retardants, and it's housed in an aluminum 
casing that's easy to melt down and make into other products. "We wanted to 
eliminate hazardous materials and make it easy to recycle. This is a design 
objective that's being built into all of our products," says Matsushita's 
environmental chief David Thompson. At Panasonic, designers now conduct a 
40-step review that, among other things, looks at the ability to quickly 
dissemble and recycle materials used in their prototypes. The company is 
moving away from plastics, favoring metals that are easier to recycle, and 
is also working toward reducing the number of parts or materials used in 
each product, making it easier to sort and recycle. With increasingly short 
product life cycles, the move comes none too soon: In U.S. landfills, 
electronic devices account less than 4% of total solid waste, but 70% of 
all hazardous waste. (Seattle Times 7 Feb 2005)
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002172843_greendesign07.html>

HOLOGRAPHIC DISKS WILL STORE HUNDREDS OF MOVIES
      With the competition between the next-generation Blu-ray and HD DVD 
technologies still red-hot, technology firms are seeking a cooler solution 
for the third-generation DVD. Six leading companies, including Sony, Fuji 
Photo, CMC Magnetics and Optware, have formed the Holographic Versatile 
Disc (HVD) Alliance in the hope of building a consensus early. The Alliance 
says consumers conceivably could store a terabyte of data -- as much as 200 
standard DVDs -- on a single HVD disc, and transfer data at over one 
gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD. (WebIndia123.com 7 Feb 2005)
<http://www.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=64927&cat=Science>

POLAND'S SPIES EXPOSED ONLINE
      A leaked list containing the names of about 240,000 people who 
allegedly spied for Poland's former communist regime has overtaken sex as 
the hottest search item on the Net in Poland. "This thing is huge. We have 
recorded around 100,000 Internet searches a day for the list, which is 10 
times the number looking for sex," Piotr Tchorzewski, who works at Poland's 
biggest Internet portal Onet, told Rzeczpospolita Daily. The list, which 
contains in alphabetical order the names of alleged agents and 
collaborators of the communist-era secret service, mixed together with the 
names of those who were allegedly spied on, has also been put up for 
auction on the Internet, but its bid price late today -- 2.99 zlotys (about 
$AU1.25) -- was hardly breaking records. (The Australian 7 Feb 2005) rec'd 
from J. Lamp, Deakin U.
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,12172230%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and 
gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a 
second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." 
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the French Jesuit priest and noted man 
of science Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955), whose posthumously 
published speculations on man's evolutionary future made him a cause 
celebré among the world's intelligentsia.
      During his lifetime, Teilhard was known mainly for his seminal 
contributions to the science of paleontology, based largely on his 
scientific fieldwork in China and Africa. He was actively involved in the 
1929 discovery of the skull of Peking man. As a scientist who was also a 
deeply spiritual man, Teilhard was stirred philosophically to blend his 
scientific work with his Christian faith to develop his theory that man is 
evolving, mentally and socially, toward a final spiritual unity. He strived 
with limited success to convince religious believers that the acceptance of 
evolution does not involve the rejection of Christianity.
      Teilhard's own superiors refused him permission to publish his 
evolutionary theories, with the result that he confined himself to writing 
up his strictly scientific investigations, avoiding all mention of his 
philosophical-theological conclusions. Only after his death did friends 
succeed in going to press with "The Phenomenon of Man," the book he wrote 
in the 1920s and '30s containing his controversial insights into the course 
he expected human evolution to take in coming times.
      Teilhard was a gentleman farmer's son, and at age 10 he was sent to 
the Jesuit College of Mongré, where as a boarding student he developed his 
first interest in geology. When he was 18, he joined the Jesuit novitiate 
at Aix-en-Provence to begin his studies for the priesthood that culminated 
in his ordination in 1911. He served with the French Army during World War 
I, as a stretcher-bearer and not as a chaplain, earning the Legion of Honor 
for his courage on the battle lines.
      After the war he taught at the Catholic Institute of Paris, and in 
1923 he made the first of his paleontological and geological missions to 
China. Later in the 1930s he traveled to the Gobi desert, Sinkiang, 
Kashmir, Java, and Burma (Myanmar) to conduct pioneering studies of Asia's 
sedimentary deposits and the dates of its fossils.
      The outbreak of World War II found him in Peking, where he was forced 
to spend the war years from 1939 to 1945. Teilhard returned to France in 
1946, but then moved to the United States when he was denied his wish to 
teach at the Collège de France and publish his philosophical works. He 
spent the remaining years of his life at the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New 
York City. The foundation supported the two paleontological and 
archaeological expeditions he made in South Africa.
      In his theory of cosmic evolution Teilhard sought to reconcile 
Christian thought with modern science and traditional philosophy by 
postulating an evolutionary process that would proceed from its biological 
beginnings to embrace an intellectual and spiritual endpoint Teilhard 
called "the Omega point." Initially greeted with skepticism by both 
scientists and philosophically traditional thinkers, Teilhard's ideas have 
since gained an interested following among a variety of Information Age 
thinkers seeking a conceptual structure and vocabulary to deal with 
evolving cyberspace realities.

[To find a library copy of H. James Birx's "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's 
Philosophy of Evolution" visit RLG's RedLightGreen service at 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=8661634&> 
-- or to purchase a copy of Teilhard's "The Phenomenon of Man" go to: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006090495X/newsscancom/ref=nosim> 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

MORE PODCASTING
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=12045>
      I am a subscriber and enjoy your newsletter very much. I wrote an 
article on podcasting and have attached it. This was part of my PILOTed 
newsletter, which I send out monthly. If you are interested in receiving 
it, let me know. The most recent issue is an interview with Susan Patrick, 
the Director of the Office of Educational Technology of the Dept of Ed. You 
can view it at http://nl.pilotonlinelearning.com/. (Mitchell Weisberg)

OVID IN EXILE
Re: 
<http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=honorary_subscriber&id=886>
      Death in exile should be one aspect of our study:  think of the 
Spaniards who died in exile because of the Civil War, or of the Jews 
because of the Nazis. Their feelings were of nostalgia, bitterness and 
anger. Exiled from Florence, before dying in Ravenna in 1321, Dante said 
bitterly "Ingrata patria, non avrai le mie ossa." (Ronald Hilton)

O SPELLCHECK, WHERE ART THOU?
Re: 
<http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=honorary_subscriber&id=886>
      Ovid's biography refers to his exile to "Tomis (modern Costanza, in 
Romania)", but this misspells the modern name. The city is actually 
Constanza (and many English speaking readers probably know it as 
Constanta). (John M. Astell)

E-MAIL PRIVACY, OR LACK THEREOF
      [This is from a well-known and large company in Southern Ontario.]
      Everybody today would like to have a firewall, but theirs goes even 
further. It actually reads the content of each message and scans for banned 
words. You have recently posted information about newer applications which 
continue this trend towards further loss of privacy by employees, and this 
is just another example. Most privacy issues between determined parties can 
be easily beaten by the use of encryption, even the simplest like the 
famous rot13 encryption. Many tools exist to send .zip files hidden within 
a [previously] small .gif or .jpg file. The system can be easily defeated. 
In fact if anyone wishes to have me challenge their e-mail system, they 
should send e-mail to my junk address [email protected].
      I have read your e-mail notes for a long time, and you are doing a 
good job. Hope you can keep it up. E-mail is still the killer app, and 
Google or whoever takes the lead in search technology in the future is the 
second best thing about the .www part of the net. Remembering that the 
private networks remain a larger part of the Internet than the .www part, I 
understand their desire to prevent illegal access to their private domains 
-- even if they have to stomp on the civil rights of their employees... 
yadda... You may publish edited versions of whatever I write, just don't 
identify it. (Name Withheld, Canada)

JOURNALISTS AND BLOGGERS
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=12035>
      If the letter University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson 
writes to his mom about what he is doing included any information about any 
project considered "classified" or for which he signed a non-disclosure 
agreement, I'm sure he would be deliriously happy that it was protected by 
the free press clause of the Constitution. Why isn't a blog the electronic 
equivalent of a letter? (Michael H. Bell)

APPLE, MICROSOFT, AND NAPSTER DON'T WRITE THE MUSIC RULES Re: 
<http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=12041>
      I find it somewhat amusing that Napster is attacking iTunes and the 
iPod on their website while themselves distributing digital music files in 
a DRM-encumbered proprietary media file format. DRM-encumbered WMV files 
can only be played on Microsoft Windows computers and portable media 
players that support DRM-encumbered WMV files. Despite Napster's claims on 
their website, these files cannot be played on an MP3 player - they can 
only be played on a WMV-compatible media player. Making the claim that you 
can fill your MP3 player with Napster files gives the false impression that 
Napster is selling MP3 files, which it is not. I have two MP3 players, yet 
neither is compatible with Napster's service, because they play MP3 files, 
not WMV files. False advertising at its best!
      Instead of attacking their competition, maybe they should try to 
offer a better service. Work with Apple and support Fairplay, sell 
unencumbered media files, support Macintosh and Linux systems. Frankly I 
would prefer to stick with buying regular CDs from the secondhand store 
around the corner, which I can rip into MP3, OGG or any other format I 
choose so I can play them wherever I want, not where Apple, Microsoft or 
Napster will allow me to. (Amos Bannister)

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