Over the Edge

The New York Times has a story today about how the X-10 Nanny-Cam -- widely advertised in a  universally despised "pop-under" web page -- can broadcast its image far beyond the boundaries of your home. Encrypting the image and thereby protecting the privacy of camera owners would easily be possible, but it would create a significantly more expensive product.

There are any number of reasons why this is a depressing story, most of them obvious. What particularly galls me is that the customers most likely to be attracted by the product are the precise ones who are least likely to either understand the problem or be able to fix it.

And by the way, in New York State, where there's a law governing video surveillance, the contention that interception of a video image is allowed by law is, um, questionable. My wife, who knows a thing or five about wiretapping law, says things may not be quite so cut and dried. Casual/accidental interception, like picking up radio waves in your braces, is one thing; purposeful interception could be quite another. The airways are public, so you shouldn't really expect much privacy for anything you send over them. (This is why cordless phones should be -- but frequently aren't -- encrypted.) It is, after all, called "broadcasting."

You know the prayer: "Lord, preserve me from my friends. My enemies I can handle."

It's not like Napster didn't have enough troubles of its own. Now founders and investors are squabbling over the likely carcass.

Reporters live for datelines like this, from the Wall Street Journal of Monday April 15 (I'd put the URL here, but it requires a paid subscription.):

INTERCOURSE, Pa. -- James Spangler pulled up to the door of a prosperous Amish home one recent Friday night as dusk settled over the rolling hills of Lancaster County. The 57-year-old insurance agent expected to pick up a fat deposit check, and he wasn't disappointed.

Seems that the Amish are weathering the economic downturn quite nicely, thank you, with most of their wealth in ever-appreciating real estate. (And, for some reason, it feels necessary to remind you of stories a few years back about an Amish cocaine ring allied with the Pagans motorcycle gang. Stoltzfus, it seems, is not an uncommon last name in that part of the world.)

Maybe they just need more Jews...

The California Department of Fish and Game has decided to shoot fish in a barrel. Sort of. Better than poisoning the reservoir.

"There won't be fish flying through the air, said spokesman Steve Martarano, but "it'll still have pretty good bang for the buck."

The Sun Rises

It's not every day that a new daily hits New York City. Hell, it's not even every decade. The last one was New York Newsday, a laudable attempt to extend Long Island westward; it took a decade (and the sale of its parent company) for the suburban interloper to get beaten back.

Now comes the resurrected Sun, courtesy of Lord Conrad Black, a Canadian press baron with British monarchist pretentions. Black has been looking for a New York foothold for several years; he made a run at buying the Daily News and the liberal-ish weekly The Observer. But even Newsday was a tabloid, though a tabloid of a very high journalistic order. The Sun is a broadsheet; no one can remember the last broadsheet launch in New York.

The Sun is led on the editorial side by Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll. Lipsky was a big deal at the Wall Street Journal, founding its Asian edition. He and Stoll met while working at at The Forward, of all places. The Forward has quite a history of its own: the Yiddish daily was founded in 1897, and now comes out every week in separate English and Yiddish editions. The masthead lists Lipsky as Founding Editor; quite an accomplishment at the dawn of the 21st century for a newspaper that started in the late 19th.

The Sun makes no bones about being a conservative counterbalance to The Times. The question (aside from the fundamental one of how these guys think they can survive) is just how far to the right the Sun will be. A website run by Stoll, www.smartertimes.com, has for the last year or so provided whiny and picky objections to The Times' coverage. There is a long tradition of liberal Republicanism in New York, best represented by the late Sen. Jacob Javits and the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. That both lions of the political philosophy can be referred to as "late" is one indication that it's in trouble; that Republicanism these days seems to be represented by Sens. Tom DeLay and Mitch McConnell closes the argument.

OK, so what about the paper itself? The inaugural issue, Tuesday April 16th, was not encouraging.

It's a seven-column design with spot color. Pretty good color -- way better than what the Daily News had for years, until they learned how their presses work. The design is quite crowded; not a lot of white space, but more than legible. The whole thing was 18 pages, and included two junior-page ads from friends and family of the top editors. Such kvelling. Not too impressive. The back page ad was for the Wall Street Journal.

The paper, on its first day, was way feature-heavy. The front page included an interview with Lech Walesa, who spoke at a local college and who made absolutely no news. On the
other hand, the piece was written by Peggy Noonan -- reason enough for a V1N1 to front it. Other fronted stories included a hookless news analysis about Sen. Clinton's need to appeal to all branches of the Democratic Party, the legal fight over wine distrbution in New York, an interview of a leader of the Iraqi opposition, a pic of the pro-Israel rally in WA, an interview with Mayor Bloomberg, a eulogy for the metal-covered Rolodex (what?), and a piece about the state Assembly bringing up rent control a year before it has to.

Wire stories were from AP, Bloomberg, and the Daily Telegraph.

Several stories looked very much like news, but read like (at best) analysis, and not good analysis, either.

The interview with Bloomberg was entertaining. The questioner floated the idea of a private company building the Second Avenue Subway. The mayor sputtered for a while, and then said, "What are you smoking?" That was the title of the lead editorial, explaining why the owners are bothering with the whole enterprise. Given Bloomberg's reluctant starring role in a current NORML ad campaign, I bet the mayor wishes he had another turn of phrase.

Business coverage was nearly nonexistent. Sports was light. No TV listings. An opera review. Long leaden history of the old Sun.

Super-easy crossword -- Daily News/TV Guide quality. To their credit, they carried the solution to the Sun's last puzzle: Jan 4, 1950. I didn't have time to get to the library to check the microfilm.

The second day was much better. Bloomberg's budget zero-ing out the construction budget for charter schools, a good AP story about the Middle East, the news that recycled glass in the city isn't actually recycled, the possibility of a Brooklyn state senator switching to the Republican Party (particularly important as the Legislature passes redistricting), and a nice roundup of two elections that augur the future of liberal Republicanism. Another story covered a new book with a new theory of who turned in Anne Frank and family. The main picture was of a shirtless Brooklyn Borough President and Vulgarian Marty Markowitz kicking off a badly needed borough-wide diet. Can't say that I want to see a nekkid Markowitz with my corn flakes, but that may be the exact idea.

Four corrections, two of them for omitted cutlines, one for a misspelling.

A full-page public service ad with serious type formatting problems. Someone didn't check the Quark file....

You won't feel informed about the world by reading the Sun. But you may very well learn something new about New York City.

It's good to see the Sun again.

Maybe Microsoft is trying to persuade people that they're not so smart after all...

Some of you probably know that the Microsoft anti-trust trial is still dragging on. There isn't quite enough room here to go into the whys and wherefores of the current proceeding (and it's late and I'm tired), but each side is getting 19 witnesses to persuade a judge just how much dinner Microsoft should be sent to bed without.

Microsoft's first witness was Jerry Sanders, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 chip maker. During his testimony, it emerged that he was testifying at the direct request of Bill Gates, that it was the second favor Gates had ever asked of him -- and the fourth time in 33 years in the business that the two had spoken. It further emerged that Sanders, who was testifying in opposition to punitive remedies requested by nine states, didn't actually know what he was testifying against; he was taking Gates's word for it.

Moreover, it came out that Sanders currently has a request before Microsoft that the software company include support for AMD's new microprocessor architecture. I'm certain that Microsoft would have judged AMD's case on its merits even if Sanders couldn't have made himself available to testify. Don't you think so?

The Yahoo! Yodeler is suing. Says they've been using his voice for years without permission, and only paid him about $500 for the initial session.

I wonder if it was paid as a voiceover session or a music session....

Sometimes it's hard to know who to root for.

Roger Friedman at Fox News has a wonderfully reported piece today on the financial travails of Michael Jackson. There's a fair amount of detailed information about how Jackson has for years been mortgaging this piece of property to pay off that loan, and so forth.

The most interesting stuff at the bottom. Jackson, apparently, got a loan from Sony Music. A big loan. It was secured with the Beatles's song catalog. Sony is also Jackson's record company. There are rumors going around that Sony has been laggard in promoting Jackson's latest record -- to the point of not releasing singles from it -- in hopes that the record will do so badly that the company will be able to foreclose on the song catalog. The Beatles catalog is worth about $200 million.

Paul McCartney has publically been expressing his frustration that he doesn't own his own music anymore; he had tried to buy it back the last time it was on the market, only to be outbid by Jackson. He must be fit to be tied over this last development. John Lennon, on the other hand, is probably laughing, wherever he is.

"A columnist is either in the heating or lighting business. You can heat things up or shed some light -- I fancy myself doing the lighting," -- Tom Friedman, columnist for the New York Times.

An excellent interview from Editor & Publisher magazine with perhaps the best columnist working right now. Think Friedman can figure out the Middle East? Think again.

New Yorkers are used to feeling things rumble underground. It's not usually the ground itself.

At about a quarter to 7 this morning, a 5.1-Richter earthquake hit about 15 miles south of Plattsburgh -- near the Canadian border and roughly 400 miles north of here. Even at that distance, many around here claim to have felt it. Not us, even though we were (mostly) awake.

Low-grade earthquakes in the high 1s are not all that rare in the East; there's even a noted seismological research center -- the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in a geologically significant location just across the Hudson River from New York City. But as Californians know, 5.1 is a serious quake, and this one caused some significant road damage, though no apparent serious injury or loss of life.

I've been through an earthquake. One morning some years ago, I was standing in the office of the Editor-in-Chief of MacUser magazine, on the 17th floor of an office building in Foster City, California, a southern suburb of San Francisco built on landfill. He'd just offered me a job, and as we shook hands, the building did a darling little mambo. "Just the wind," the editor said. Ummm, I don't think so. I've been in office buildings in the wind, and that's not what it felt like. When other editors started running around, it was plain that something untoward had just happened. Someone in the art department, yelled, "The scanner says 5.4!" (Why do art departments always have police scanners?) I caught the 2:10 flight home -- the airport apparently didn't even miss a beat -- and didn't take the job.

As it happens, New York is badly prepared for a significant quake. A seismic building code went into effect in 1995, but the report cited in the previous link notes that a 5.0 quake under Manhattan would cause about $660 million dollars worth of damage to property and business interruption. A 6.0 quake (10 times larger) would cause $8.8 billion of damage; a 7.0 quake -- catastrophic by any measure -- would cause $48 billion in property damage. From a Princeton University study titled Earthquake Loss Estimation Study for the New York City Area:

Come and get it!!!

On April 22, Ben & Jerry's will feed you for free. Show up at any of their stores anywhere in the world between noon and 8pm, and you get a free ice cream cone. No catch -- except you're likely to confront a looooong line.

(And no, this isn't another of those web hoaxes. This is the 24th year they've done it.)

What's all this then, amen?

(--Monty Python, "The Dead Bishop Sketch")

Twice or thrice upon a time, I had a column. I liked having a column. I like writing them. I liked that people read them, and I loved that complete strangers would cite them in the oddest places. Lots of people read the columns. Some, if my mail was any indication, liked what I wrote. Others, if my mail was any indication, didn't -- and, frankly, their e-mails tended to be the more entertaining.

Nominally, the columns were about technology. But in the waning years of the last century, technology and politics became inextricably intertwined. (Actually, they always have been; people just began rediscovering it within the last decade.) More than once, editors would return manuscripts saying, "Well, Dan, this is really interesting. Do you think you could mention a product or two somewhere along the way?"

When the various columns ended, along with the publications in which they appeared, I launched an occasional e-mail newsletter called "Over the Edge." (The name was a spinoff of my late publishing consultancy 3Ships Communications, Inc.) For a variety of excellent and other reasons, the thing was more occassional than not.

This weblog is better. It's vastly closer to real time. Each item is short, so each doesn't take all that much time to produce. (The length of a weekly e-mail was often too high a hurdle to surmount. You'll get lots more content this way, anyhow.) A blog doesn't assault your e-mail box, which means I won't have to deal with the invetiable stacks of bounces that come from any mail blast. It's much prettier than I could design on my own. And as part of the network of weblogs, there's a chance that the stuff here will gain a wider distribution than I would be able to manage on my own.

The log allows you to comment about each item. Please do so. The best thing about online communication is its interactivity. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about what I have to say.

There are (or will be) various ways to provide feedback. One is to comment on a particular entry. Another is to send me a private e-mail directly. You will also be able to ask to be automatically notified when this weblog is updated. And you can subscribe to an XML or Atom newsfeed if you like getting your information through a news aggregator.

If you like something you read here, please let me know -- and let others know. Spread the word; readership and feedback is the only pay here. Give people my home URL, www.danrosenbaum.com, the direct URL for the weblog (www.winletter.com), or just direct people to specific items -- each one has its own unique URL, accessible at the little pound sign at the bottom of each item.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you here soon.

The much-maligned and anemic UPI has this scoop, if that's what it is. de Borchgrave doesn't have the greatest reputation these days, but he's got significant and long-standing contacts in that part of the world. Hope Rumsfeld is reading.

The coming of civil rights to Alabama was one of the most physically dangerous stories that a reporter could cover. We sometimes forget that the right to vote in the United States in the middle of the 20th century was pursued at the cost of lives. A writer who went down to Selma or Montgomery literally took his life into his hands.

The most consistently excellent coverage of those times came from UPI. The AP, which because of its structure as a cooperative, was largely beholden to the local newspapers in the area; its coverage all too often was a step behind. When Rosa Parks wouldn't move, UPI wrote the story. When churches were bombed in Montgomery, UPI was there. When James Meredith went through the doors at Ole Miss, not only was UPI there, but a future UPI reporter was a National Guardsman standing in the door making sure that Meredith got in safely.

Forty years is a long time ago. This past weekend, 13 UPI reporters were guests at a symposium at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery, talking about how they got that story.

The local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, had extensive and excellent coverage of the day. So did the AP. So did UPI.

I'm frequently proud to have started my career at UPI. This is one reason why.

You Are Number Six.

Channel 13 in New York is showing The Prisoner right now. What a trippy show; hard to imagine that it ever got on the air to begin with.

Jayson Stark, of espn.com, is one of my favorite sports writers. Here's one reason why. The first two items are particularly good, but the rest of the piece ain't bad, neither.
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Getting on the same page

It's not quite a bulletin that large companies frequently have trouble making sure that one division doesn't step on another. (This is a major plot point in the movie "The Solid Gold Cadillac.") I saw a particularly egregious example the other day.

On the side of a Manhattan payphone kiosk was an ad for Time Warner Cable's Road Runner cable modem service. Prominent was this piece of benefit-oriented copy: "Download music up to 50x faster!"

It's true, and that's one of the big selling points of broadband Net access. But one does rather wonder how other parts of Time Warner feels about it, parts like Atlantic, Electra, Rhino, and Warner Bros. records. AOLTW is, after all, one of the world's largest record companies, and they can't be thrilled that the cable part of the company is urging people to steal its product.

It's safe to go back to Saratoga Springs.

If you live near Albany, NY (as I used to), you quickly learn to stay away from the charming town of Saratoga Springs while the track is open in August. Way too many tourists wearing clothes you can see from 50 miles away.

If your weirdness tolerance is low, this would have been a good reason to have avoided the town this past weekend.

Good piece in DM News today about the economics of online news publishing.

The WSJ says its revenues are split 60:40 between circulation and advertising. The obvious quote:

"The key to building a sustainable [online news] business is the diversity of revenue," said Michael Zimbalist, president of the Online Publishers Association, New York.

Kinda like the real publishing business, y'know?

Less obvious but more encouraging was this:

Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, the online arm of the Washington Post Co., this year aims to get advertisers to measure washingtonpost.com and newsweek.msnbc.com not merely on clickthroughs, but on the same terms they would radio, television and print.

If it works -- and we all should hope it does -- the WAPost will have successfully weaned clients off the direct marketing world view, where building brand has no value. If you think return on investment is the only way to measure ad effectiveness, try to imagine a world where every TV ad looked like an infomercial.

One nugget at the bottom: USA Today plans to charge $4/month to stream headlines to your screen saver. A company called Pointcast did that starting in 1996, and IT managers did their best to yank Pointcast from their networks before it sucked up every last bit of available bandwidth. Pointcast once turned down a buyout offer of $450 million from News Corp. Bad idea: Pointcast tanked shortly thereafter. making it perhaps the only bad Net idea that News Corp. didn't manage to invest it.

Back on the 19th, we had the story of Wally Gustafson, the man who sang the Yahoo sound tag but only got paid about $590. News comes today that a day or so after he sued Yahoo -- but before the story of the suit hit the press -- the company paid him some significant amount of money, and now Wally's happy. Dunno if he'll be collecting royalties.

Speaking of royalties, you do know that the AOL guy who says "You've Got Mail" doesn't get any, right? He was some friend of someone, and got a (small) one-time payment.

As often, the subways provide another slice of New York color. From the New York Times:

That Screech You Hear Isn't the Shuttle Rolling In. Thousands of subway riders scramble and squeeze in a slightly more civilized manner because of Millie Mendez's voice. By Randy Kennedy.

The fine folks at Disney and Pixar have disclosed what the next three movies are going to be. The line starts on the left.
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Atlanta police will be adopting Dean Kamen's Segway gyroscopic scooter on a trial basis, says the AP. They'll have six of them for a two-month try-out.

The slightly snotty dispatch says purse-snatchers will only have to break into a brisk job to outrun a Segway. Maybe it's me, but 12 miles per hour seems like a pretty snappy pace on foot. Maybe the miscreants will need a bicycle. Or, it being Atlanta, a horse.

The bad news is, he was testifying about Homeland Security, since Director Tom Ridge won't.

Only kidding. He (it?) was in favor of more music in public schools. Me too.

Funny thing is, it's usually only stuffed shirts in Congress.

And at last, here was a witness that George W. could follow.

(Thank you, thank you. Please tip the waiter.)

AOL Time Warner, like so many one-time stock market darlings, has been lagging of late. The company and its investors are on a seemingly endless quest of synergies, looking for ways that a company that owns everything from Wakko to People to CNN to Netscape can work with itself.

As something of an intellectual exercise, Goldman, Sachs put up $20,000 in a competition between teams of MBA students. The task: tell incoming AOLTW CEO Richard Parsons how to maximize return.

The team from Harvard (and note: the team consisted of four women) won, beating finalists from Dartmouth and Yale. Unlike its competition, the Harvard team didn't preach synergy, though. They said that the best way for AOLTW to make money was to let its individual units compete with each other, each unit seeking to maximize its own return without particular regard for how it might affect another unit.

I'd be interested to know where those four women get jobs after graduation.

If it weren't for Jay Chiat, there wouldn't be an Engergizer Bunny, you wouldn't know what a "swoosh" is, and Apple Computer probably wouldn't be alive.

Chait, one of the great ad men of the 80s and 90s, passed away yesterday, apparently of prostate cancer.

With the Apple "1984" ad that introduced the Macintosh, Chiat helped invent "event advertising," and his work with Enegizer added a still-unaccustomed edge of irony to network ads.

Not only did he help change the way commercials looked, his Chiat/Day agency pioneered open "hotel-style" workplaces, where no one had dedicated space and people were forced into interacting with other employees. A lot of people hated it, and with good reason. But it sure knocked people out of routines, and that's usually a good thing for creative types.

What is it about interactive television that so many companies are so willing to spend so much money on it when so few customers seem to care? Time Inc., CBS, IBM, Sears, Comcast -- the list goes on and on.

Add Microsoft. About 200 jobs are vanishing, and Microsoft doesn't usually lay people off. From the WSJ:

Moshe Lichtman, who took charge of all of Microsoft's struggling TV operations in January, ... said Microsoft would now focus on delivering software for simpler "broadcast" services, such as video on demand, and for new "media center" devices, which can offer home networking, DVD playback, and music and photo storage. Microsoft's previous products were less focused on video and home networking, which some cable companies say consumers now want.

...

Indeed, Microsoft's announcement is an admission that the company's previous strategy of building complicated software for expensive set-top boxes, such as Motorola Inc.'s DCT-5000, simply hasn't worked out, and Microsoft hasn't been able to deliver a viable business model for cable companies, analysts say.

From CNN, a lovely bit of news for this new dad of twins:

A study being released at a meeting of the American Heart Association on Wednesday found that men who decide to become househusbands and take care of children at home may be putting their health and hearts in danger.

In fact, researchers conducting the study in Framingham, Massachusetts, for the National Institutes for Health found men who have been stay-at-home dads most of their adult lives have an 82 percent higher risk of death from heart disease than men who work outside the home.

Doesn't say anything about how it compares to working for a boss who acts like a child.

The next time you hear a record company say they want to step on freely distributed online music for the sake of recording artists, think on this.

Also, an article in NetSurfer Digest (edited by fellow Internet Press Guild member Laurie Nyveen) reports on an interesting experiment by Baen Books. Laurie charges for access to NSD, but here's the gist: the Baen author Eric Flint put the text of his books online, and saw sales jump 200 percent. Says Flint:

By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.

Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.

What the Free Library provides-as do traditional libraries, or simply the old familiar phenomenon of friends lending each other books-is a way for people to investigate a new author for free, before they plunk down any money.

And by making their wares freely available, artists can get around a closed distribution channel. I went to buy the new Michelle Shocked album tonight. My HMV store first said it hadn't shipped (once they acknowledged that there was such an artist as Michelle Shocked), then acknowledged that oh, it had shipped but they didn't have it and probably wouldn't get it. Hello, Amazon?

One of the nicer things about living in my neighborhood has always been the fireworks. I live only a few steps from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks the East River and lower Manhattan. Ever other year, we get a front-row seat for the immense Macy's Independence Day display. (Macy's alternates putting its floats in the lower and upper East River; when they're upstream, by Queens, we can't see a damn thing.)

But it's not just Macy's. Any company that's willing to pay the freight and go through an apparently rigorous application process can fire off pyrotechnics in New York Harbor, and a fair number do. On more than a few nights, we can hear rhythmic booming from the harbor. More than sometimes, we run outside to see them.

Since September 11, it should not be a surprise, there have not been any fireworks displays in New York City; the last one was quite enough, thank you. But I was certain that this past Friday -- late in the evening, like 10:45pm or so -- I heard the characteristic booms. I didn't go out to check it out; it had been a long day.

I don't (yet) know what the noise was, but it didn't make the local news so it wasn't awful. But if you believe this link, it wasn't fireworks either, because the next ones in the city will be this July 4, somewhere over the East River -- just as usual. It should be something to see.

Pretty good Amy Harmon piece in this morning's New York Times about Bill Gates's bravura testimony last week in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.

I confess that I was disappointed; I'd so been hoping for something like the last 10 minutes of a classic Perry Mason episode. If we couldn't have that, maybe a replay of his awful taped deposition from the first phase of the trial. But no, for three days we had the Good Strong Gates, who was more than willing to engage the states' lawyers and not give an inch on Windows as Windows.

But if the testimony showed anything, it showed that the phrase "spirit of the agreement" isn't likely to spill freely from Gates's lips. The courts have said that Microsoft's market position is monopolistic, and what they're arguing about now is what everyone should do about it. Any imposed remedy is going to be closely hewed to, and the only people more willing and more able to split hairs than lawyers and 5-year-olds are techies: "But if you didn't want the software to crash the computer, why wasn't that in the spec?" 

There's no contract on Earth that can bind someone who doesn't want to be bound by it, and remedies for bad faith are ugly and expensive. That's why I don't think that anything but a structural remedy -- breaking up Microsoft -- will work. Microsoft doesn't think it's done anything wrong, and insists that any remedy with teeth is unworkable. And its history has amply demonstrated that whatever non-structural remedy is imposed, we'll be back in court again within five years.

The Microsoft witness after Gates, an executive named Paul Jones, told the court that it is well within Microsoft's right to design Windows in such a way that other programs won't work with it. Nothing wrong with cutting out RealAudio or Java or Norton Anti-Virus. It's Microsoft's world, after all, and we're just living in it.

The lack of timeliness in the New York Times's coverage of cultural trends is a long-standing joke. Today, the Paper of Record has discovered that there are Starbucks everywhere:

In New York, said Alan Hilowitz, a regional Starbucks spokesman, "People literally will not cross the street to get coffee."

So Starbucks, like Duane Reade, has concentrated stores in key neighborhoods, even if that meant that new stores took some business away from old stores.

There are, for example, two Starbucks shops in Astor Place. Within a small radius of those stores are five other Starbucks (including two on either side of Union Square), as well as two Barnes & Noble bookstores with cafes licensed by Starbucks.

To be fair, the snappily written story points out the somewhat amazing fact that there are now more Starbucks stores in Manhattan than Duane Reade drug stores.

There's a big lottery mess in New Jersey.

There's this multistate lottery called The Big Game that operates in eight states. On April 16, there was a drawing for a jackpot of $331 million. As happens, even at odds of 71 million to one against, there were three winners of $59 million each, in Georgia, Illinois and New Jersey.

The winner has come forward in Georgia. The Illinois winner hasn't manifested himself. But in New Jersey, it's a little more complicated.

It appears that the winning ticket is held by Angelito Marquez, a 28-year-old nurse's aide from Newark. The trouble is, he'd been deputized to buy tickets for a pool of 19 co-workers. Just who did what to whom is a little murky because Marquez's story -- well, it wiggles a little in the telling. Nothing especially wrong with that: interviews to newspapers are not conducted under oath.

Props, though, to the Star-Ledger reporters, who got an interview with Marquez by staking out the nursing home where he works before his shift started Friday night. The best the Times could do was three words through a car window on Sunday.

Some of you know that there's a company -- E.Ink -- making small quantities of an extremely thin, extremely flexible computer display. The Wall Street Journal carries a story today about the company's prediction that within five years, people will buy a booklet of this stuff and download a copy of the day's newspaper to it.

Color me skeptical. This might be fine (for some small value of "fine") if you're a subscriber to the paper, but it does kind of kill the newsstand purchase. "That'll be 50 cents for today's paper and $1000 for the reader, buddy."

And like most bad ideas of this ilk, the impetus seems to be publishers' desire to cut cost, not reader demand for a new service or gadget. Check this quote:

"Delivery and printing makes up well over half the expenses at any newspaper," says Ken Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media. (Parent Hearst [an investor in E.Ink] publishes the San Francisco Chronicle and other dailies.) "The idea of eliminating that cost, to a degree, is a dream for any company. It's a big, big idea."

Remember: publishers were attracted to the Net because they saw it as a way to cut their distribution costs. No one told them that servers, software and bandwidth were expensive, too. Nice to know they were paying attention...

A couple of years ago, my friend Cia Romano introduced me to Susan Kitchens, whose excellent weblog I check out pretty frequently. Susan has a piece today about the LA Times's coverage of the entertainment industry's lobbying of Congress; in short, the entertainment guys want to put some pretty severe restrictions on how consumers use and view their products. Nothing like treating your customers like criminals, guys.

I just came across this CNN story from January, but I don't think it's gotten the play that it merits.

You probably know that the Internet has its roots in the  Defense Department's old Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA. The guy in charge of information processing for ARPA -- what became known as ARPANet -- was Lawrence Roberts. Roberts said some interesting things in January. Among them:

• Tech slowdown or no tech slowdown, Net traffic has consistently been doubling every year.


• In January, the Net handled 55 petabytes of data. For you English system mavens, that's 55 quadrillion, or 55,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. In one month.


• The pace will continue to grow for another 10 years, at which point growth will slow. But doubling traffic every year for 10 years means that there will be three more zeros at the end of that already very long number above.

My question: will that kind of traffic allow all the dark fiber that was installed in the 1990s to be turned on?