| Andy Oram Reports
All other content (originating from sites such as this one, the American Reporter) will receive poorer service. And if the phone companies can do it, cable companies (the other major providers of Internet service to end-users) could very well start doing it too. Those who hail the open Internet cringe at this initiative, which exploits the Internet to build and market private, premium content. But this is is by no means the first time companies have tried to bend technology to favor their services. In fact, it's an old story. As I'll show in this article, companies have been trying to position themselves at choke holds and manipulate the Internet since it became commercialized in the early 1990s. Such shenanigans are simply an exercise of market power. Up to now they have failed to change the essential nature of the Internet.
Al Gore, Sienna Miller, Happy Feet Green with Honors
Al Gore may be the most esteemed also-ran of all time. The newly minted Nobel Peace Prize winner and upcoming 30 Rock guest star had to make room on the mantelpiece Wednesday for yet another honor for his work on climate-change awareness, this time an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Environmental Media Association, which he shared with Live Earth producer Kevin Wall. All proceeds from Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, the 24-hour, seven-continent spinfest that played host to some of music's heaviest hitters in July, went to Gore's nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection and like-minded U.S. and international organizations. Happy Feet, in which cuddly dancing-and-singing penguins mixed it up with greedy corporate fisheries and marine-life theme parks, was named Best Feature Film for its ecologically uplifting and informative message, while the episode "Wear," part of Sundance Channel's Big Ideas for a Small Planet series, took Best Documentary honors.
Fighting rough
This is a recent review of one of my buildings, this shows that we're the number one private company in New York." He has several copies of each and I get the impression that he hands them to his guests as a matter of course. For the first minute, Trump asks all the questions: "This is not about the guy with the land, I guess, is it? Is that a big story? Not particularly, right? You know he's not in our way; do people understand that?" And like that, we're off, into the Michael Forbes as Local Hero story that fairly or unfairly casts Trump as Burt Lancaster playing Felix Happer, the unscrupulous American businessman trying to buy a chunk of Scotland. For the fictional fishing village of Ferness, read Menie Links. For oil, read golf. Trump plans to build a resort by the North Sea, but as he only trades in superlatives it will be "the greatest golf course in the world.
Bush is shrinking nuclear program
Today's nuclear-weapons complex needs to move from the outdated, Cold War complex into one that is smaller, safer and less expensive," said Thomas D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. He also said President Bush approved a new reduction of 15 percent in active U.S. nuclear weapons that is scheduled to be completed by 2012. Several independent experts said that roughly 4,600 warheads will remain in the U.S. arsenal, down from some 16,000 at the end of the Cold War and 10,500 when Bush came into office. Los Angeles Kimmel show to return Jan. 2 ABC's Jimmy Kimmel will join NBC's late-night hosts in returning with new shows Jan. 2 amid the Hollywood writers strike, ABC said Tuesday. Kimmel, along with Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and other hosts, had honored the strike that began Nov.
It’s a Whopper
"All men are equal before fish," wrote former President Herbert Hoover in his book on fly fishing. No Izaak Walton can argue that. It’s a given; be at the right place at the right time with the right bait, and it makes no difference to the fish who is at the other end of the rod. King or peasant. Or Fred Barnes of Chesapeake, Va., a regular 63-year-old guy who last week lost all measure of anonymity. To fellow anglers, his has become a name up there with the revered Zane Gray and Ike Walton who never caught a fish anywhere near the size of the one Barnes reeled in at the 4A buoy off Cape Henry near the mouth of the Bay on Jan. 23. It was a rockfish, the most prized of all species from Maine to North Carolina. It was a big fish, an awesome fish at 73 pounds.
Posing As Girl, Retired Cop Nabs Prey
DIAMOND, Mo. (AP) - No one will ever confuse Jim Murray with a teenager. His tall frame, broad shoulders and clipped gray hair give him away for the grandfather he is. But the 69-year-old retired police chief of this small Missouri town cuts a credible figure as a 13-year-old girl surfing the Web, looking for friends. He knows all the instant-messaging shorthand, the emoticons. Murray's retirement job from a rural home office has netted 20 arrests since he started in 2002. His latest catch was the biggest: four felony enticement charges against a town mayor, who after his arrest called Murray up and begged him to make the case go away. Nineteen other defendants have included a Missouri furniture company executive, an Arkansas professor and a Tulsa, Okla., school security guard.
A tour of Google's new Experimental Search. Verdict: awesome
The bottom portion offers keywords in real time whether you refine your original search, click through to other results pages, or click on a keyword to hone your search further. This is a great way to help users better understand the topic they're searching for and to find other topical avenues with a real-time, unobtrusive UI assistant. The Right-hand search navigation experiment is just like its left-handed brother, aside from obviously being positioned at the top right of search results. It also offers fewer related searches and keywords, probably to prevent it from cutting too much into Google's coveted Sponsored Links sidebar. Altogether, these experiments are all successes in their own right, and we don't see much of a reason not to include them all in a future update.
3 file complaint on Xbox outage
Microsoft's Xbox Live network suffered some outages over the holidays, and the company offered subscribers a free arcade download as an apology. But that wasn't enough for three Texans, who filed a class-action lawsuit Friday against the company, alleging breach of contract. The complaint describes the December outages that kept people from "accessing online play for several weeks. ... Xbox Live continues to deny subscribers access and has even issued apologies for their failure to correct server problems." A Microsoft spokesman said via e-mail that the company "only recently learned of the lawsuit, so we are not in a position to comment at this time." The complaint alleges that Microsoft's increased holiday Xbox sales would lead to a bump in Xbox Live subscriptions and game-play on its servers, but the company "failed to provide adequate access and service to Xbox Live and its subscribers." Xbox Live users pay $30 to $50 a year for access to the gaming network.
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