While Wall Street has had something of a love affair with Apple's stock until very recently, it appears that they're finally catching on that not everything may be as rosy as stated. With Apple and AT&T announcing numbers on iPhone sales and iPhone activations, respectively, there's a 1.7 million phone gap between those numbers. Taking into account the recent launches of iPhones in other countries (estimated at 350,000 to 400,000 iPhones so far) and a 20% estimate on people buying iPhones solely for unlocking, there are still nearly 700,000 iPhones unaccounted for... suggesting that they're sitting on store shelves, piling up as unsold inventory. That number suggests at least some gap between perceived demand and actual demand -- while also raising questions about how much effort it will take to eat through that inventory.

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Czech researchers ran a test on 390 kids with cold or flu-like symptoms, giving them a nasal spray made from seawater. It reduced their cold symptoms and helped prevent relapses. It sounds good, but it must be noted that the study was paid for by a French company that sells a seawater nasal spray.

It may be that the salt water has a simple mechanical effect of clearing mucus, or it could be that trace elements in the water play some more significant role, though the exact reason why such a solution works is not known, said Dr. Ivo Slapak and colleagues at the Teaching Hospital of Brno in the Czech Republic.

The study, published in the January issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology, was paid for by Goemar Laboratoires La Madeleine, Saint-Malo, France, which makes Physiomer, the seawater nasal spray used in the investigation.

Link (Via TDG)

As_I_Please alerts us to the fact that a 20-year-old Estonian student has been fined for participating in DoS attacks against various Estonian political and governmental websites last May. The situation was notable because it escalated tensions between Estonia and Russia when the latter was accused of initiating the 'cyber-attack'. Quoting: "The fact that a single student was able to trigger such events is particularly ominous when you consider just how many potential flashpoints exist between various countries all over the world. The DoS attack against Estonia is an excellent example of how a cyberattack carried out by a 20-year-old student in response to real-life events further exacerbated an existing problem between two nations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over in Japan, a 24-year-old grad student was arrested this week for writing a computer virus. There's just one problem. There's apparently no law in Japan against writing viruses. So, instead, officials had to twist copyright law to use it to arrest the guy. That was possible because the virus itself used popular animation clips as a means of getting people to click on it. Those animation clips violated copyrights. Now, it's nice to see officials cracking down on virus writers, but it's a shame for them to twist copyright law for that purpose. If the problem is that the law doesn't make virus writing illegal, then change the law. Using copyright law for other purposes starts you down a pretty slippery slope. Yes, it's true that the guy was also violating copyrights, but it seems pretty clear from the report that the reason officials went after him was because of the virus. Update: It turns out this story is even more bizarre. TorrentFreak reports that three people were arrested, and the virus itself threatened to kill people for using file sharing systems.

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Christina Valencia points us to a Wired story about scientists who plan to use genetically modified mosquitoes to reduce the population of Dengue-carrying insects. The altered genes cause newly born mosquitoes to die before they are able to breed if they are not supplied with a crucial antibiotic. This is a more aggressive approach than the anti-Malaria work we discussed last year. From Wired: "Mosquitoes pass dengue fever to up to 100 million people each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Up to 5 million die. If the scientists can replicate their results in real field conditions, their technology could kill half of the next generation of dengue mosquitoes, which scientists say would significantly reduce the spread of the disease. If all goes well the company envisions releasing the insects in Malaysia on a large scale in three years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Amy Crehore designed the logo for the Tickler brand ukulele, and you can get it on a T-shirt. I think it's beautiful!

Very nice quality white, heavyweight, unisex t-shirts, 100% cotton, pre-shrunk. This 3-color silkscreen t-shirt was made from an original ink drawing by artist Amy Crehore. For ukulele lovers, cat lovers, girl lovers, little pierrot lovers, & polka-dot shoe lovers.

Link

A couple of TEDsters sent me this tip:

One TED2008 Main Hall Pass has just gone up for auction on ebay. It's the only remaining legal way that someone can get into the event. The auction is being done with the approval of TED, because all the proceeds will go towards the Open Architecture Network, which was created in response to TED Prize Winner Cameron Sinclair's inspiring wish.

The pass, which guarantees coveted access to the main theater where speakers present, includes three special extras:

- a first-day meeting with TED super-connector Sunny Bates

- a coffee at TED with the brilliant founder of ebay Pierre Omidyar

- and a lunch with the charming, insightful and delightful Meg Ryan

TED2008 has been sold out for more than a year, so we suspect this is going to make someone very happy indeed. It won't be cheap, but the successful bidder will be making a philanthropic contribution to an organization that's empowering architects and designers to change the world.

TED2008 is Feb 27-March 1, in Monterey, California on the theme "The Big Questions."

Here's the ebay listing: Link

As part of a research project on the history of government regulation, I'm reading a 1975 book about the history of the telephone industry. One of the most interesting things I've been learning about is the central role of the patent system in the telephone's early development. In 1877, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent that effectively gave him a 17-year monopoly over the entire telephone industry. I found the story particularly interesting because it's strikingly at odds with the standard policy argument for the patent system. It's generally claimed that without patents, inventors wouldn't be able to recoup the costs of their inventions. The story of the Bell patents undermines this argument in two ways. First, it's pretty clear that someone else would have invented the telephone within a few years if Bell hadn't done so. Indeed, inventor Elisha Gray famously submitted a preliminary application for his own telephone design a few hours after Bell. But I think an even more serious difficulty for the pro-patent argument is what happened after the Bell patents expired in 1894. Patent supporters assume that competition will rapidly drive the price of a new invention down to the point where an inventor is unable to recoup his investment. But in fact, despite an explosion of new competitors in the 1890s, the American Bell Company maintained its high rates, and its revenues continued to grow every year from 1894 to 1899. It seems that even in competitive markets, there's plenty of room for innovators to turn a profit.

I suspect that part of what was going on was simply that the United States was a big country, even in the 19th century, and there was plenty of room in the market for a number of companies to grow simultaneously. Also, American Bell was demonstrating that innovation is a process, not a burst of innovation. American Bell stayed ahead of its competitors largely by continuing to improve their technology, including adding new long-distance routes and switching from noisy one-wire circuits to much higher-quality two-wire ones. Once it could no longer rely on its patent monopoly, they were forced to stay ahead of competitors by continuously improving their technology. Obviously, consumers are much better off when companies have to compete for their business, rather than simply resting on the strength of a patent monopoly. I've got more discussion of the Bell patent story, and some quotes from the book, at the Technology Liberation Front.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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background image writes "According to Alan M Gershowitz, the doctrine of "search incident to arrest" may allow devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and laptops to be thoroughly searched without either probable cause or warrants [PDF download below abstract]. Incriminating evidence found in such searches may be used against you whether or not it is germane to the reason for the original arrest. He notes, 'Obviously, the framers of the Fourth Amendment could not have conceived of a handheld technological device like the iPhone, and courts have not yet been called upon to answer most of the difficult questions posed by such devices.' We've discussed similar search issues recently, as well as other privacy concerns related to modern technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iddo Genuth writes "German scientists recently showed what many of us suspected but could not prove — some people just don't learn. The German researchers have found a genetic factor that affects our ability to learn from our errors. The scientists demonstrated that men carrying the A1 mutation are less successful at learning to avoid mistakes than men who do not carry this genetic mutation. This finding has the potential to improve our understanding of the causes of addictive and compulsive behaviors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been seeing more and more examples lately of content creators recognizing how they benefit from giving away their content for free. What's most amusing, however, is that every time we point out an example, people work extra hard explaining why that case is a special case. When we discussed less-well-known musicians giving away music, we were told that it would never work for megastars. When we discussed megastars giving away music, we were told it would never work for indie musicians. The same is true in other areas as well. When we recently wrote about an author giving his book away for free, someone angrily emailed to let us know that this only made sense because no one had ever heard of that author -- so it was purely a promotional effort by a new author.

Yet, apparently, it also works for well-known authors. TorrentFreak points us to the news that Paulo Coelho is such a fan of giving his book away for free that he's even set up his own blog called Pirate Coehlo where he points to where you can download various translations of his best selling book The Alchemist. Coelho explained all of this in a recent talk he gave:
Link: sevenload.com What Coelho quickly discovered was that the more his book was available for free, the more sales of the actual book increased. As an example, he cites the Russian translation of his book, where it went from only 1,000 sales to well over 100,000 in a period of two years, and has only continued to grow since then. It's yet another good example of someone embracing how giving away content for free can help them earn more money. And, it highlights (again) that, whether you're well known or a nobody, you can use these tactics to your advantage.

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A couple of weeks ago I didn't really think Bill Clinton would be a problem if HIllary was elected. I thought he might be a curmudgeonly joke of a First Lady. "There he goes again, he's so funny."

Yeah uh huh. Sure.

I didn't think it was an issue until Bill started throwing the mud so aggressively. Then I noticed that Hillary was talking about the first two terms as a plural accomplishment, as if she were in office then. The more he attacks and the more she takes credit for the first two terms, the more I think they're fucking with the Constitution.

Further, there are good reasons why the first lady (or first spouse) isn't actively involved in running the government, so we don't have to understand how good their marriage is, and they get a tiny bit of privacy. Then we remember how their marriage was in the middle of everything when they were in charge, and god damn we don't need that mess now. We've got so many other things to deal with.

I'm so opposed to them that depending on who the Republicans nominate I could actually see myself voting for a Republican if Hillary is nominated. I can't believe that after listening to her on Meet The Press a couple of weeks ago I was almost ready to vote for her. What a mistake that would have been.

Here's a T-shirt design I came up with based on my Lollipopland characters.

You can get the design printed on any kind of shirt you like at Zazzle.

Random Good Stuff has compiled a bunch of YouTube videos of people smoking a legal and powerful hallucinogenic plant called salvia divinorum. Link

Luke says: "In Lewiston, Maine a 50-to-60-foot doughy mass is clogging a sewer line under the city's main drag, and crews have been unable to budge it and have no idea what it is!"

City crews discovered the clog earlier this month after responding to complaints of blocked sewer lines downtown. Jones said crews opened a manhole at the Bates Street intersection and saw the clog - an oozing, white blob that looks like uncooked dough.

"We've tried punching through it, but each time we do, it just oozes back over the hole," he said. "It really looks like dough."

Link

belmolis writes "If the CIA is right to attribute recent blackouts to cyberwarfare, cyberwarfare is no longer science fiction but reality. In a recent op-ed piece and a detailed scholarly paper, legal scholar Duncan Hollis raises the question of whether existing international law is adequate for regulating cyberwarfare. He concludes that it is not: 'Translating existing rules into the IO context produces extensive uncertainty, risking unintentional escalations of conflict where forces have differing interpretations of what is permissible. Alternatively, such uncertainty may discourage the use of IO even if it might produce less harm than traditional means of warfare. Beyond uncertainty, the existing legal framework is insufficient and overly complex. Existing rules have little to say about the non-state actors that will be at the center of future conflicts. And where the laws of war do not apply, even by analogy, an overwhelmingly complex set of other international and foreign law rules purport to govern IO.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian has a hard-to-believe story about a mother and her two daughters who traveled from the UK to New York for a vacation. The mother caught pneumonia and the teenaged girls were taken to a municipal orphanage, "where they were separated, strip-searched and questioned before being kept under lock and key for the next 30 hours."

The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: "Have you ever been the victim of rape?" and "Do you have homicidal tendencies?"

One question asked "are you in a street gang?" to which Gemma replied: "I'm a member of Appledore library."

Their clothes, money and belongings were taken and they were issued with regulation white T-shirt and jeans. Katie said: "It was like being in a little cage. I tried to go to sleep, but every time I opened my eyes, someone was looking right at me."

Eventually Bray discharged herself, and -- still dressed in hospital pyjamas -- tracked down the girls.

When the family returned home, the US Administration for Children and Families mailed her a letter to let her now that she is now "under investigation." Link (Thanks, PeaceLove!)

Police in Clearwater, Florida arrested 75-year-old Jean Merola because she wouldn't pull her car forward at a McDonald's drive-thru, despite being ordered to do so by an officer. She had ordered coffee and french fries and was waiting for them.

Merola said the McDonald's employees told her to wait there for her food.

Merola was handcuffed behind her back and put in the cruiser.

Another officer arrived and took her to the Pinellas County Jail.

Merola said she was searched, photographed and fingerprinted.

Link (Via Tacky Fabulous)