iamlucky13 writes "A minor academic debate among astronomers is the final fate of the earth. As the sun ages and enters the red giant stage of its life, it will heat up, making the earth inhospitable. It will also expand, driven by helium fusion so that its outer layers reach past the earth's current orbit. Previously it had been believed that the sun would lose enough mass to allow earth to escape to a more distant orbit, lifeless but intact. However, new calculations, which take into account tidal forces and drag from mass shed by the sun, suggest that the earth will have sufficiently slowed in that time to be dragged down to its utter destruction in 7.6 billion years. "

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Over the last few years, it's been great to see more people realize that capitalism and philanthropy are not mutually exclusive concepts. When Google launched its philanthropic foundation, the biggest news was the fact that it was designed as a for profit entity, rather than the typical non-profit. The NY Times is now writing about this trend for new philanthropic organizations to also be for-profit organizations, recognizing that many of them have found they can do much more "good" by also focusing on a way to make a profit. As we pointed out when Bill Gates called for "kinder capitalism," a full understanding of capitalism would suggest that there's plenty of kindness baked in. There is benefit in doing good, and just because there's a profit motive behind some things, that doesn't mean it's at odds with doing good. It's great to see that more philanthropic organizations are recognizing that as well.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Websense is reporting that Gmail's CAPTCHA has been broken, and that bots are beginning to sign up with a one in five success rate. More interestingly, they have a lot of technical details about how the botnet members coordinate with two different computers during the process. They believe that the second host is either trying to learn to crack the CAPTCHA or that it's a quality check of some sort. Curiously, the bots pretend to read the help information while breaking the CAPTCHA, probably to prevent Google from giving them a timeout message."

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Microsoft has been fighting for years against a Guatemalan patent holder, Carlos Amado, who claims to hold a patent on the concept of linking a database to a spreadsheet. The patent itself has been thoroughly debunked. Even the patent itself admits that it's merely taken a bunch of concepts that were widely used before and combining them -- which is exactly the type of thing that the Supreme Court has said should not be patentable. Microsoft has appealed the ruling, but the Supreme Court turned it down. However, it then appealed the amount of damages, and the appeals court has now thrown out the lower court's damages based on the fact that it appeared to pick the damages number out of thin air. It seems likely that Microsoft will still have to pay damages for infringement (though, the court also admits that new Supreme Court rulings may impact the amount as well), but the lower court is going to at least have to justify how much Microsoft needs to pay Amado for basically putting such an obvious idea on paper and filing a patent.

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nweaver writes "In a response to the LA Times editorial on copyright which we discussed a week ago, the paper published a response arguing: 'If Intellectual Property is actually property, why isn't it covered by a property tax?' If copyright maintenance involved paying a fee and registration, this would keep Mickey Mouse safely protected by copyright, while ensuring that works that are no longer economically relevant to the copyright holder pass into the public domain, where the residual social value can serve the real purpose of copyright: to enhance the progress of science and useful arts. Disclaimer: the author is my father."

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Late last year, the European University at St. Petersburg in Russia launched a project to study how elections in Russia could be protected from rigging. That line of inquiry pissed off Russian President Vladimir Putin. Feeling the Kremlin's thumb, the university's academic council killed the project on January 31. Yet just two weeks later, the St. Petersburg court shut down the school as a "fire risk." Coincidence? Unlikely. And now today, it's come out that the university has lost its license to operate. The Rector of the school says that if it isn't granted a new license within a month, the institution will be closed for good. A dear friend of mine, who emigrated from Russia in the 1980s, comments that this whole situation "is becoming so reminiscent of the old Soviet Union." From a February 11 article in The Guardian:

"It's clear this was politically motivated. We are observing a change in the political regime in Russia from authoritarianism to totalitarianism. What happened here is one example among many," Maxim Reznik, leader of St Petersburg's opposition Yabloko party told the Guardian.

He added: "This hasn't got anything to do with fire risk. The university was carrying out important work in connection with election monitoring. Now it's being punished for it."

Putin has launched frequent attacks on non-governmental organisations, human rights groups and Russia's small reformist opposition - accusing them of being tools of the west and traitors to their own country.

But the Kremlin has largely ignored the higher education sector, allowing Russian academics a relative degree of freedom and autonomy over teaching, student selection and research. Universities no longer appear to be an exception.

Link to "Save the European University at St. Petersburg" blog
Link to The Guardian article
Link and Link to Jeff Weintraub's posts about the situation

One of the recurring trends in high-tech markets is that as information goods get cheaper, they're increasingly sold as all-you-can-eat bundles rather than as individual units. This has been true of land-line telephone service for decades. In the late 1990s, we saw the same transition occur in Internet access. In this decade, we've seen the explosive growth of Netflix, which is an all-you-can-eat plan for video. Now it appears that cell phone companies are inching in that direction too, as Mike discussed last week. For $99/month, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile will let you talk on your cell phone as much as you want. Sprint is apparently considering adopting a similar plan. This isn't actually all that new.

There are two fundamental economic forces at work here. First, metering imposes costs, both on consumers and on carriers. For carriers, there are the obvious expenses of keeping track of billing information, as well as the attendant support costs when an angry customer calls to complain about unexpected charges. For the customer, metering imposes the mental overhead of having to keep track of whether it's currently "peak" or "off peak" time, how many minutes are in his plan, whether he's currently "roaming," etc. A lot of customers are happy to pay a little bit extra for the peace of mind of knowing exactly how much they're going to pay each month without having to keep track of their calling activity. Second, the wireless market, like the phone, Internet, and DVD markets, is capital-intensive. Unless the network is already fully loaded, the marginal user costs wireless carriers close to nothing. As a result, metered pricing often causes under-utilization of the network because minutes are priced far above their marginal cost. Switching to a flat-rate plan can be economically efficient because it encourages greater utilization of the network without undermining the carriers' ability to recover their fixed costs. That has always been the rationale behind the free night and weekend minutes offered by a lot of cell phone companies over the last few years. They're just expanding it so it applies 24/7.

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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grassy_knoll asks, "So how fragile is the electrical grid, and just what technical problems could shut down five reactors?" "Five reactors at a nuclear power plant in Florida had gone down on Tuesday and two were now back online amid a massive power outage in the southern state, CNN reported. The report on the Turkey Point nuclear plant came as four million people had lost electricity in Miami and elsewhere in Florida, with traffic signals out and major delays on roads, authorities and media said."

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Mike says,

I created this website as a parody of the famous Million Dollar Homepage. The Zimbabwe dollar just crashed again last week and, on the black market, you can now get Z$20,000,000 for USD$1 (the official exchange rate is USD$1 = Z$33,000).

I cut prices from 3 cents per 900 pixels to 1 cent per 900 pixels because of the recent collapse. Unfortunately I have to charge an additional Z$1million (US$0.35) per purchase to cover paypal fees.

We pretty much ignored yesterday's FCC hearing concerning Comcast's traffic shaping activities, as the whole thing seemed like a bit of grandstanding. However, it's fairly stunning to find out that Comcast has admitted to hiring people off the street to fill seats at the hearing, blocking out many Comcast critics who were turned away once the room was full. Comcast claims that they hired the people merely to act as placeholders for Comcast employees (since, apparently, Comcast employees are too important to actually show up on time and wait in line like everyone else). However, as the picture at that first link shows many of the "paid" sitters stayed throughout the event and either slept or cheered on Comcast.

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alphadogg notes a story over at portfolio.com claiming, and presenting evidence, that Comcast paid people off the street to take up room at yesterday's FCC hearing in Massachusetts. Comcast acknowledges that it paid people to hold places in line for its employees. But Save The Internet claims that people were bussed in by Comcast and then took up almost all available seats in the meeting room 90 minutes before the meeting opened, blocking scores of interested people from attending. Such tactics are not unheard of in Washington DC, but how appropriate are they in a regional meeting on a college campus?

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Prof. Johan Pouwelse of Delft University — one of the world's foremost experts on the science of P2P file sharing and the very same Prof. Pouwelse who stopped the RIAA's Netherlands counterpart in its tracks back in 2005 — has submitted an expert witness report characterizing the work of the RIAA's expert, Dr. Doug Jacobson, as 'borderline incompetence.' The report (PDF), filed in UMG v. Lindor, pointed out, among other things, that the steps needed to be taken in a copyright infringement investigation were not taken, that Jacobson's work lacked 'in-depth analysis' and 'proper scientific scrutiny,' that Jacobson's reports were 'factually erroneous,' and that they were contradicted by his own deposition testimony. This is the first expert witness report of which we are aware since the Free Software Foundation announced that it would be coming to the aid of RIAA defendants."

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The Shibuya Center-Gai Patrol is a volunteer group of people who patrol the streets of Tokyo wearing police-like uniforms and yelling and blowing whistles at loiterers, smokers, and other people who don't behave like salarymen or shoppers. The bring German Shepards (also in uniform) on their patrols with them.

Japan Probe has a number of videos and commentary.

Video Clip 1 Summary

* The patrolman yells at some young people sitting along the side of the street, telling them to stand up because they are being a nuisance.

* Another patrolman goes after a couple young men who are leaning on a guard rail, telling them what they are doing is dangerous and inappropriate. When the men insist they are doing nothing wrong, the patrolman shouts at them until they leave.

* The patrolmen force other young people who are sitting or crouching in areas of the street to stand up, yelling at them and using whistles.

Link

It seems that everyone is jumping on the "free" bandwagon. Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about Kevin Kelly's take on the subject. On Monday, Chris Anderson's manifesto published in Wired Magazine, and at about the same time, the consumer trend research firm Trend Watching published its only monthly trend report highlighting the growing importance of "free" in business models. It's worth reading, as it lays out not just a variety of business models that include free, but a large set of examples showing how each one works. It's neat to see all of these different things come out at the same time -- once again highlighting the concept that ideas generally aren't formed in a vacuum. The trends that resulted in so many people recognizing the same thing at once are all around us. Yet, if we believed in the world where artificial scarcity rules, then we'd be focused on who "owned" this concept and who got the rights every time someone else mentioned it. That, of course, would be silly. By allowing so many different people to express these concepts, not only do we all get to see different perspectives on the same concept, but we get to learn from each other and build on these ideas.

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So… We’ve managed to build a really successful business through word of mouth. We’ve dabbled in text ads here, and a couple display ads there, but it’s our customers who are responsible for spreading our word far and wide. In four years we’ve probably spent less than $25,000 on advertising.

Let’s try something new

We love that we’re a word of mouth business. We plan on remaining a strong word of mouth business. Trusted recommendations are gold.

But we’d also like to begin experimenting with other forms of advertising. More “traditional” forms, but in a non-traditional way. If that makes sense we’ll probably get along great.

We’re interested in significantly broadening the awareness of the 37signals brand, our unique take on software, and our products. We have a story to tell and products to sell.

Get in touch

If you’re an ad agency that’s up to the challenge of working with us, we’d love to hear from you. Our standards are high. We want great work. Innovative work. Memorable work. But above all, effective work. We love great advertising and loathe bad advertising. We’re prepared to take this seriously.

Please shoot me an email if you think you could be the ones. Send to svn at 37signals dot com and include [ad pitch] in the subject line. Thanks.

Gaboogie is organizing a contest for developers to mashup their voice-application Lypp with Highrise. There are some cool prizes up for grabs including a $3,000 Apple gift certificate for number #1 and free service from Lypp and Highrise.

They got some cool ideas to get you going, like “Integrated Conference Calling within Highrise, Scheduled Calls, Click to Call Contacts in Highrise, Call-back Task links, just to name a few”. Get programming!

A 39-year-old man was arrested in Tokyo when he tried to enter a high school wearing a long wig and a girl's school uniform.

When students standing outside the gates started to scream at the sight of him, he dashed inside the school grounds, hoping to blend in with the crowds of teenagers, the paper said.

They also screamed, forcing the man to flee, losing his wig in the process. A school clerk pursued him and stopped him at a nearby riverbank, the paper said.

Link