Happy Reading For Today.

<Karen>

1)
Math problem solved after 40 years.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-israel-math-riddle,0,1509032,print.story

The AP (3/21, Heller) reports that a "mathematical puzzle that baffled 
the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly 
four decades has been cracked" by Avraham Trahtman, a 63-year-old 
Russian who immigrated to Israel in 1992. Trahtman, "a mathematician 
who also toiled as a laborer after moving to Israel,...succeeded where 
dozens failed, solving the elusive 'Road Coloring Problem.'" The 
problem "was first posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss, an Israeli- American mathematician, and a colleague, Roy Adler, who worked at IBM 
at the time." The AP points out that the "conjecture essentially 
assumed it's possible to create a 'universal map' that can direct 
people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, 
regardless of starting point." According to math and science experts, 
"the proposition could have real-life applications in mapping and 
computer science."


2)
Flu Pandemic

Download all your free info immediately.

Avian Flu Risk & Prevention Booklet
Complete shells or models
Individual parts
Audio version
Avian Flu Leaflet - English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Avian Flu Fact Sheet for Community Field Workers

3)
FCC commish: Net neutrality shouldn't extend to illegal acts

4)
The background story on the UK Governement's plans for "joined-up
government", and hence for aggregating huge databases on the entire
population, is the 2005 Cabinet office Report "Transformational
Government":
http://www.cio.gov.uk/documents/pdf/transgov/transgov-strategy.pdf

And the BCS Survey referred to by Michael Cross is at:
http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/dgs2008.pdf

5)
Americans are so stupid!

Do Americans Care About Big Brother?  (Time  March 14, 2008)
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1722537,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
A quick tally of the record of civil liberties erosion in the United States since 9/11 suggests that the majority of Americans are ready to trade diminished privacy, and protection from search and seizure, in exchange for the promise of increased protection of their physical security. Polling consistently supports that conclusion, and Congress has largely behaved accordingly, granting increased leeway to law enforcement and the intelligence community to spy and collect data on Americans. Even when the White House, the FBI or the intelligence agencies have acted outside of laws protecting those rights.

6)
Copyright is dead - March 20, 2008
<http://www.contentagenda.com/blog/1500000150/post/630023663.html>
No wonder they call Economics the Dismal Science. At the Internet 
Video Policy Symposium in Washington yesterday (co-sponsored by 
Content Agenda), a chorus line of academic economists postulated that 
content owners face a far more difficult challenge than they know in 
monetizing their content on the Internet, and that the odds that we 
can build our way out of the current debate over how to manage scarce 
online capacity are virtually nil.
The most enthusiastically glum was Gerry Faulhaber, a professor at the 
Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the 
former chief economist for the FCC. According to Faulhaber, copyright 
is a dead letter.
"Copyright is a very big issue in the legal world today, but in the 
business world, when you talk to consumers about protecting 
copyrights, it's a dead issue," he said. "It's gone. If you have a 
business model based on copyright, forget it."
According to Faulhaber, the "world of open piracy," created by digital 
technology will always thwart content owners seeking to leverage the 
monopoly granted to them by copyright law.
"The music industry is yet to figure this out," he said. "The current 
iTunes model is probably the best they can do. In both movies and 
music this is likely to result in substantially lower revenue for 
content owners." The movie studios will have an even tougher time than 
the music companies, according to Faulhaber, because some of the 
monetization models that can work for music--such as advertising-- probably won't work for full-length movies.
The likely result? "Content providers will have to hook up with the 
conduit guys," Faulhaber said. "They're the only ones in a position to 
monetize content online because they can control its distribution."
Faulhaber was also gloomy about resolving the current stand-off over 
the allocation of bandwidth.
"Video takes lots and lots of bandwidth, and bandwidth is not cheap," 
he said. "If bandwidth were cheap, the business would be attracting 
new entrants, which clearly it isn't."
[snip]


7)
 Comcast set-top boxes with cameras
http://newteevee.com/2008/03/18/comcast-cameras-to-start-watching-you/
relates that Comcast is experimenting with cameras that will notice who
is watching, and will tailor content and ads appropriately.
(big brother is here)

8)
MSN helping Chinese crack down on dissidents

This has shown up any number of places, for instance:

        http://observers.france24.com/en/content/20080321-yahoo-msn-used-root-out-tibetan-rioters-china
        Yahoo and MSN helping to root out Tibetan rioters

which reads in part:

        Yahoo China pasted a "most wanted" poster across its homepage
        today in aid of the police's witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused
        of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same
        move, although it didn't go as far as publishing the list on
        its homepage.

Shame on MSN and Yahoo - they are bad businesses.