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May 5, 2003
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Michael Robertson of Lindows Responds
Naturally, when answering your questions, he boosted his company. (Wouldn't you?) But I assure you, he wrote these answers himself instead of having them laundered by a PR team. Whether or not you agree with Michael and the way he runs Lindows (and used to run MP3.com) you've got to give him credit for speaking more openly than most other modern American CEOs.
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Space crew reach Kazakh capital
A US-Russian crew stranded in space by the Space Shuttle tragedy reached the Kazakh capital Astana on board a Russian helicopter more than eight hours after landing.
They were found alive and well after losing radio contact on re-entry and landing almost 500km off target in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
The Americans Ken Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russia's Nikolai Budarin had to wait over two hours to be located by anxious rescuers scouring the Central Asian steppes in planes and helicopters. It was not clear why the capsule missed its planned landing site in Kazakhstan.
Officials said Pettit had injured his shoulder. He was laid out on a stretcher in the helicopter and did not greet waiting officials at Astana.
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Apple says its online music sales soar
Apple Computer Inc. said Monday it exceeded record industry expectations by selling more than 1 million songs since the launch of its online music store a week ago.
"Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell 1 million songs in the first month. To do this in one week is an over-the-top success," said Doug Morris, CEO of the Universal Music Group.
The sales affirm what analysts and industry executives have said of the Apple iTunes Music Store - that it's one of the most consumer friendly methods yet of buying songs electronically and legally.
Songs are 99 cents per download, and unlike competitors the Apple service has virtually no copy protection. Customers can keep the songs indefinitely, share them on as many as three Macintosh computers and play them on any number of iPod portable music players. No subscriptions are necessary and buyers can burn unlimited copies of the songs onto CDs.
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Worms Survive Columbia Shuttle Disaster
NASA had selected soil-dwelling nematodes known as C. elegans to fly on the space shuttle because of their remarkable survival abilities. In ground experiments, for instance, they had adjusted well to being spun in a centrifuge for four days at forces as great as 20 times Earth's gravity. And they are known to combat famine conditions by going dormant.
But the worms outran expectations by surviving the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia during reentry on Feb. 1.
Scientific teams are just beginning to study the saga of the pinhead-size roundworms discovered thriving in their petri dishes last week at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.
During their flight, the worms had shared a middeck locker with sensors that recorded the temperature every 28 minutes, NASA payload mission manager Jack Keifenheim said Friday. The highest temperature registered was 80 degrees, he said, but that was "probably while they were sitting in a field in Texas." The catastrophe that killed seven astronauts apparently occurred between readings.
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File-Swapping Students Fined
Four university students have reached settlements in music piracy lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America.
The RIAA sued the four students separately in April. The music industry association accused them of sharing copyright material and operating on-campus, Napster-like file-swapping services designed to search for music on computers connected to school networks.
Under the terms of the settlements this week, the students have agreed to pay fines, the RIAA announced Friday.
Two students are at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Jesse Jordan agreed to pay $12,000 and Aaron Sherman, $17,000. Princeton University's Daniel Peng and Michigan Technological University's Joseph Nievelt will pay the RIAA $15,000 each.
The RIAA will collect those amounts in annual increments between 2003 and 2006. The students are also expected to disable the Web sites that allowed campus users to download songs and files from school network computers.
The RIAA said that the trade group was pleased that the cases, first made public in early April, were settled quickly.
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SuSE Linux sheltered by SCO pact
An agreement with SCO Group protects Linux seller SuSE from legal action stemming from SCO's accusation that Unix software was copied into Linux, SuSE said.
"We have a joint development agreement with them, which includes appropriate cross-licensing arrangements," said SuSE spokesman Joe Eckert on Friday. "Our lawyers feel that covers us from any actions that SCO may take."
SCO on Thursday said it had found cases in which source code underlying the proprietary Unix operating system--the rights to which the Lindon, Utah-based company owns--had been copied into Linux, an open-source clone of Unix. If SCO can prove its allegation, resulting copyright infringement issues could pose a challenge to companies that sell Linux, legal experts have said.
Asked if SCO planned legal action against Red Hat and SuSE, SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride told CNET News.com, "There's a point in time that has to be resolved with those guys, too." However, he said such action isn't currently part of SCO's legal proceedings, which are concentrated on a billion-dollar lawsuit alleging that IBM misappropriated SCO's Unix trade secrets and moved them into Linux.
Proving that code was copied will require that SCO show the instructions aren't just an independent recreation of a particular method, said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice.
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Even U.S. Toddlers Are Obese
Even toddlers in the United States are obese, and they are not only overweight, but are showing early signs of diabetes and other diseases associated with being fat, researchers said on Saturday.
To their alarm, the researchers found that sending such children to a specialist did not seem to help them get to healthier weights.
"Perhaps the epidemic of obesity can be stopped if we intervene very early with an intensive behavioral modification program," Dr. Emily Liu of Kaleida Health's Women's and Children's Hospital in Buffalo, New York, said in a statement.
"Children at risk of obesity must be identified very early, even at the preschool level," said Liu, who led the study. "Obese children often have obese parents, so an effective family-based multi-factor intervention program should begin as soon as obesity is diagnosed."
Liu and colleagues looked at the medical records of 385 children seen by endocrinologists -- hormone specialists -- at the hospital between 1984 and 2002. Most of the children were already obese, defined as being in the 85th percentile for weight
The parents were instructed on proper diet and exercise for their children and were advised to meet with a dietitian. But two years later, the children were, on average, even more overweight, the study found.
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British Scientists Warn of Dangers of Cannabis
Smoking cannabis may be more dangerous than doctors had previously thought and could kill up to 30,000 people in Britain each year, scientists said on Friday.
Although they are inhaled differently and the active ingredients in cannabis are not the same as those in tobacco, both produce harmful chemicals when smoked.
Each year tobacco causes about 120,000 deaths among Britain's 13 million smokers. With about 3.2 million cannabis smokers in the country, Professor John Henry of Imperial College London and colleagues at St Mary's Hospital in the capital calculated the pot death toll could be 30,000.
"If cannabis caused the same number of deaths as tobacco, given the number of smokers, then you would be seeing that number of deaths," Henry told Reuters.
Henry, a toxicologist and emergency room doctor, said there was evidence cannabis had similar harmful effects to smoking cigarettes but actual data was not available because the research had not been done.
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Harry Potter, Rowling, Face Internet Forgery
Cory Hoekstra couldn't believe it.
The Monteverde, Fla., teen was surfing the Web when there it was, like an early birthday present: a copy of the fifth entry in J.K. Rowling's mega-selling Harry Potter series, which won't be published until June 21.
"The title, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, came up, and I thought, 'Great, I can read it now," says Hoekstra, 16. "But as soon as I started reading the download, I could tell it wasn't the real thing."
Bummer.
The fake tale and two subsequent versions Hoekstra found on a shared-file Web site, kazaa.com, have been making the Internet rounds internationally, another indication of the phenomenal appetite for all things Potter. The first four books in the planned seven-book series have sold 200 million copies worldwide and spawned two blockbuster movies, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
That the real Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which at more than 255,000 words will be the longest installment yet, would show up on the Internet two months ahead of publication is impossible, says Kris Moran, director of publicity for Scholastic, Rowling's American publisher.
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