The Invisible Hand

With all the debate about whether or not music actually requires the use of any Digital Rights Management at all, it's worth getting the collective opinion of the Motion Pictures Association of America on the subject. And if we believe the word of MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman this week, DRM is definitely here to stay when it comes to films and TV.

Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 will include a selection of the security improvements and features Microsoft put into Office 2007.

Oh no you didn't!

AMD's anti-trust trial against Intel hasn't even started yet, and the companies are already pinching, scratching and pulling hair.

Earlier in the week, we noted how difficult it was to come up with "good" internet laws that politicians had enacted. Perhaps we should do that more often, as since then, legislation has been proposed that would overturn the pointless ban on online gambling, while now, two congressmen have introduced a bill that would overturn the recent decision of the Copyright Royalty Board to drastically increase internet radio royalty rates. The CRB rejected webcasters' appeal of those new rates (which were pushed through by the RIAA). The bill sets compromise rates that would be significantly lower for most, if not all, net radio programmers: 7.5 percent of revenues "directly related to" its broadcasts, or 33 cents per hour of recordings transmitted to a single user. The original article says the law would also apply to "satellite and cable radio" broadcasters, but it's not clear if that extends to companies like XM and Sirius, which are locked in fight with RIAA over the level of royalties they pay, with the industry group wanting 30 percent of their revenues. Obviously the bill's a long way from becoming law, and the RIAA is sure to send its lobbyists to visit its friends on Capitol Hill to see what they can do. While it's nice to see these good internet laws, it's too bad they all seem to exist solely to reverse bad ones.

An electrical circuit that should carry enough power to produce the long-sought goal of controlled high-yield nuclear fusion and, equally important, do it every 10 seconds, has undergone extensive preliminary experiments and computer simulations at Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine facility.

A remarkable new core was extracted during the recent Antarctic summer from record-setting drilling depths 4,214 feet below the sea floor beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, the Earth's largest floating ice body. Laced with sediment dating from the present day to about 10 million years ago, the core provides a geologic record of the ice shelf's history in unprecedented detail.