Archive for May 3rd, 2008
Says Comcast’s equipment didn’t distinguish between a network that needed management and one that didn’t
Testifying before Congress, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin presented a damning contrast (PDF) to Comcast’s claims that it blocked traffic only when needed.
“Contrary to some claims, it does not appear that [Comcast’s BitTorrent technique] was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time,” said Martin. Basing his statements on testimony received, he added that Comcast’s blocking equipment is “typically deployed over a wider geographic or system area and would therefore have impacted numerous [regions] within a system simultaneously.”
Martin further accuses Comcast of not using “content agnostic” management equipment, a point that violates FCC policy and inadvertently conceded by Comcast, who recently announced a switch to “content agnostic” network management techniques.
Comcast says it expects to have its network switched over by either the end of this year or early 2009 – a timetable that many, including the FCC, have found unsatisfactory. Comcast claims that it can’t implement a change instantly as such a tactic would overwhelm its network.
Regardless of Comcast’s stated intentions – and prior praise for the change, taken entirely on Comcast’s own initiative – Martin expressed doubts on Comcast’s commitment: “Indeed, the question is not when they will begin using a new approach but if and when they are committing to stop using the old one,” he said.
However, the seemingly adversarial relationship between ISPs and the FCC enjoys at least one common ground: Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, urged Congress not to regulate (PDF) ISPs’ management of their networks – a point that Martin agrees with.
Who Should Collect The Amazon Tax?
Posted on: May 3, 2008
A fight is brewing between Amazon and the State of New York over who is responsible for collecting state sales taxes on online purchases. Up until now, online retailers have only had to collect state sales taxes in states where they have physical locations—the same way that catalog retailers are treated. Otherwise, it is up to consumers to declare goods bought over the Internet as out-of-state purchases. (Right. I’ll go find those receipts).
Since most people don’t bother to declare online purchases on their tax forms, the State of New York recently passed some legislation (tucked into last month’s budget bill) known as the “Amazon Tax”
. This new law conveniently redefines any Amazon affiliate as part of the retailer, and since there are plenty of Amazon affiliates in New York State, puts the burden of collecting the state sales tax onto Amazon. Clearly, this ridiculously stretches the boundaries of what constitutes Amazon and what does not. So Amazon is suing New York State to overturn he law.
Amazon argues that the law is “overly broad and vague” in its attempt to place the company physically inside the state, and also complains that the law unfairly targets Amazon as opposed to online retailers in general. (Although it does apply to all online sales, not just Amazon’s).
The law, as written, is just a bad law. And it would set a dangerous precedent. Not because New York State shouldn’t try to collect the $50 million in estimated uncollected sales taxes owed to it. But because the law is tortuous in the way it attempts to do that.
A marketing affiliate is not part of Amazon. If I put some Amazon book recommendations on the side of TechCrunch , set up an affiliate account, and readers click through and buy those books, that does not make TechCrunch part of Amazon. It is a marketing arrangement. Just like someone who sets up an AdSense account does not work for Google.
Who Should Collect The Amazon Tax?
Posted on: May 3, 2008
A fight is brewing between Amazon and the State of New York over who is responsible for collecting state sales taxes on online purchases. Up until now, online retailers have only had to collect state sales taxes in states where they have physical locations—the same way that catalog retailers are treated. Otherwise, it is up to consumers to declare goods bought over the Internet as out-of-state purchases. (Right. I’ll go find those receipts).
Since most people don’t bother to declare online purchases on their tax forms, the State of New York recently passed some legislation (tucked into last month’s budget bill) known as the “Amazon Tax”. This new law conveniently redefines any Amazon affiliate as part of the retailer, and since there are plenty of Amazon affiliates in New York State, puts the burden of collecting the state sales tax onto Amazon. Clearly, this ridiculously stretches the boundaries of what constitutes Amazon and what does not. So Amazon is suing New York State to overturn he law.
Amazon argues that the law is “overly broad and vague” in its attempt to place the company physically inside the state, and also complains that the law unfairly targets Amazon as opposed to online retailers in general. (Although it does apply to all online sales, not just Amazon’s).
The law, as written, is just a bad law. And it would set a dangerous precedent. Not because New York State shouldn’t try to collect the $50 million in estimated uncollected sales taxes owed to it. But because the law is tortuous in the way it attempts to do that.
A marketing affiliate is not part of Amazon. If I put some Amazon book recommendations on the side of TechCrunch , set up an affiliate account, and readers click through and buy those books, that does not make TechCrunch part of Amazon. It is a marketing arrangement. Just like someone who sets up an AdSense account does not work for Google.
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Vanity Fair
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The cover of the June issue of Vanity Fair and the photograph of Miley Cyrus, inset.
Fifteen years old and suggestively wrapped in what appears to be a satin bedsheet in the June issue of Vanity Fair. Did Miley Cyrus, with the help of a controversy-courting magazine, just deliver a blow to the Walt Disney Company’s billion-dollar “Hannah Montana” franchise?
Some parents reacted with outrage over the weekend when the television program “Entertainment Tonight” began showing commercials promoting a scoop: Ms. Cyrus, the star of the wholesome Disney Channel blockbuster “Hannah Montana,” had posed topless, albeit with her chest covered, for the Vanity Fair photographer, Annie Leibovitz.
Screen grabs of the photo quickly popped up online, sparking a blogosphere debate. “Bonfire anyone?” wrote Lin Burress on her marriage and parenting blog, Telling It Like It Is, referring to the mountain of Hannah Montana retail items — makeup, shoes, clothes — in the marketplace. “Parents should be extremely concerned,” Ms. Burress said in an interview. “Very young girls look up to Miley Cyrus as a role model.”
It is doubtful that one photograph — especially one that is tame in the context of an Internet awash in nude photographs of other starlets — could dent the Hannah Montana machine, said several Wall Street analysts. Retail sales for the franchise are expected to total about $1 billion in 2008. A motion picture is in the works for 2009 and Ms. Cyrus signed a seven-figure book deal with the Disney Book Group last week.
But keeping a teenage entertainment franchise on track in an age when stars are monitored around the clock by bloggers and paparazzi is extremely difficult, even for a company with the experience of Disney. Executives are constantly battling to keep minor slipups from growing into full-blown controversies.
Last week, the public relations problem du jour was a green bra; photos online showing Ms. Cyrus pulling away her tank top to flash her underwear.
Ms. Cyrus and the “Hannah Montana” series have been championed as one of the few entertainment sanctuaries for children, complicating matters. Last month, Ms. Cyrus was chosen favorite television actress at Nickelodeon’s “Kids’ Choice Awards.”
Dave Strom of South Boston, Va., bought a Smart ForTwo Passion Coupe, which he says is getting 45 miles a gallon.
Soaring gas prices have turned the steady migration by Americans to smaller cars into a stampede.
In what industry analysts are calling a first, about one in five vehicles sold in the United States was a compact or subcompact car during April, based on monthly sales data released Thursday. Almost a decade ago, when sport utility vehicles were at their peak of popularity, only one in every eight vehicles sold was a small car.
The switch to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles has been building in recent years, but has accelerated recently with the advent of $3.50-a-gallon gas. At the same time, sales of pickup trucks and large sport utility vehicles have dropped sharply.
In another first, fuel-sipping four-cylinder engines surpassed six-cylinder models in popularity in April.
“It’s easily the most dramatic segment shift I have witnessed in the market in my 31 years here,” said George Pipas, chief sales analyst for the Ford Motor Company.
The trend toward smaller and lighter vehicles with better mileage is a blow to Detroit automakers, which offer fewer such models than Asian carmakers like Toyota and Honda. Moreover, the decline of S.U.V.’s and pickups has curtailed the biggest source of profits for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
Once considered an unattractive and cheap alternative to large cars and S.U.V.’s, compacts have become the new star of the showroom at a time when overall industry sales are falling.
Sales of Toyota’s subcompact Yaris increased 46 percent, and Honda’s tiny Fit had a record month. Ford’s compact Focus model jumped 32 percent in April from a year earlier. All those models are rated at more than 30 miles per gallon for highway driving.
Dave Strom of South Boston, Va., recently bought a tiny Smart ForTwo Passion Coupe, made by Daimler, the German automaker.
Mr. Strom also owns a pickup truck, which he uses mainly to haul his boat. When he runs errands, he drives his Smart, which he says is getting 45 miles a gallon.
“I had to smile the other day when I filled my tank for $18 and the guy next to me had a Ford Explorer and the pump was clicking past $80,” said Mr. Strom, a 66-year-old retired manager of a Chevrolet dealership.
Previous spikes in sales of smaller cars were often a result of consumers trading down during tough economic conditions or gas-price increases. When the economy improved or fuel prices dropped again — as they did after the oil-price shocks in the 1970s eased — buyers invariably went back to bigger vehicles.
But with oil prices expected to remain high for years, auto industry executives are seeing a turning point.
The recently opened Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport was designed and completed in record time for the Summer Olympics. It can handle 50 million passengers a year. More Photos >
BEIJING — Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 — twice the size of the Pentagon — is the largest building in the world.
Adorned with the colors of imperial China and a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the renowned British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year. The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.
It opened in late February with little fanfare, but also without the kind of glitches that plagued the new $8.7 billion terminal at Heathrow in London, a project that took six years to complete.
This is the image China would like to project as it hosts the Olympic Games this summer — a confident rising power constructing dazzling monuments exemplifying its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.
While much of the world has focused on protests trailing the Olympic torch, China’s poor human rights record, its pollution, product safety and child labor scandals, workers here have been putting the finishing touches on one of the biggest building programs the world has ever seen.
Beijing hopes to overcome these negatives, and the dark sides of its roaring economy, by emphasizing its ability to upgrade and modernize, at least when it comes to buildings and infrastructure projects. The main Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, is already widely admired for its striking appearance and its use of an unusual steel mesh exterior. The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, is a translucent blue bubble that glows in the dark.
And east of the main Olympic arenas, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country’s main state television network, China Central Television, or CCTV.
That $700 million building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, consists of two interlocking Z-shaped towers that rise 767 feet and may be the world’s largest and most expensive media headquarters.
New York has the Chrysler Building, Grand Central and the Guggenheim Museum; Paris has the Louvre and the Pompidou Center; now Beijing is determined to build its own architectural icons.
The American economy lost 20,000 jobs in April, the fourth consecutive month of decline, in what many economists took as powerful evidence that the United States is almost certainly now ensnared in a recession.
But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared.
“It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as businesses hold the line on their layoffs, the economy will weaken, but it won’t unravel.”
On Wall Street, investors bought into that thinking, bidding stocks up sharply in morning trading before pulling back in the afternoon, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average up 0.4 percent for the day, to close at 13,058.40, a new high for 2008.
But economists emphasized that a substantial pullback in consumer spending could yet force American companies to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers in coming months if business prospects do not improve swiftly.
The Federal Reserve increased its direct lending to financial institutions on Friday, in an effort to overcome the banks’ reluctance to lend money.
Despite the comparatively modest number of jobs lost last month, economists found clear signs of widening distress for millions of American workers.
Companies are cutting working hours, even as many avoid layoffs. The number of people working part time because of slack business or because they could not find full-time work swelled to 5.2 million in April from 4.9 million in March. In percentage terms, employees working part time involuntarily were the most since 1995.
The average weekly pay for rank-and-file workers — about 80 percent of the American work force — has risen by a mere 3 percent over the last year, to $602.56. But that increase has failed to keep pace with the rise in the cost of living, driven primarily by the soaring costs of food and energy. In inflation-adjusted terms, these weekly wages have slipped by 1.3 percent since late 2006.
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Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.
On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.
Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.
Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.
“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.
The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”
The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.
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Modern tech life teems with longstanding quandaries, questions that never seem to go away. Mac or Windows? Turn off the computer every night or let it sleep? Plasma or L.C.D.?
Fortunately, that last question will soon have an answer. There’s a new TV on the block, and its picture is so amazing, it makes plasma and L.C.D. look like cave drawings.
It’s called organic light emitting diode, or O.L.E.D. This technology has been happily lighting up the screens of certain cellphone and music-player models for a couple of years now, but Sony is the first company to offer it in a TV screen. It’s called the XEL-1, and it’s available only from SonyStyle stores. Its picture is so incredible, Sony should include a jaw cushion.
At a cooperative Best Buy store, I did a little test. I set the XEL-1 up next to state-of-the-art plasmas and L.C.D. sets — all hooked up to the same video signal for easy comparison — and recorded the reactions of shoppers and employees. Their adjectives for this picture included “astonishing,” “astounding,” “incredible” (twice) and “amazing” (five times).
They were right. The XEL-1’s picture is so colorful, vibrant, rich, lifelike and high in contrast, you catch your breath. It’s like looking out a window. With the glass missing.
Name a drawback of plasma or L.C.D. — motion blur, uneven lighting across the panel, blacks that aren’t quite black, whites that aren’t quite white, limited viewing angle, color that isn’t quite true, brightness that washes out in bright rooms, screen-door effect up close — and this TV overcomes it.
Plasma is supposed to offer darker blacks than L.C.D., but O.L.E.D. trumps both of them. Next to this TV, even the blacks on the critically adored Pioneer Kuro plasma screen look very dark gray. Blacks on Sony’s O.L.E.D. TV are jet black. Absolute black. Black-hole black — and kuro even means black in Japanese.
(If you’re a TV-technology geek and you’re getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu, congratulations. All of this does sound exactly like the descriptions of S.E.D. television prototypes demonstrated years ago by Toshiba and Canon. Unfortunately, that equally impressive picture technology never made it out of the lab.)
To make this thing even more drool-worthy, the XEL-1’s screen is only three millimeters thick — shirt-cardboard thick. If they could build a laptop with a screen this thin, it would make the MacBook Air look like a suitcase.
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When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank as he was filling out the forms.
“I couldn’t remember my address,” said Mr. Bunnell, 60, with a measure of horror in his voice. “I knew where I lived, and I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know what the address was.”
Mr. Bunnell is among tens of millions of baby boomers who are encountering the signs, by turns amusing and disconcerting, that accompany the decline of the brain’s acuity: a good friend’s name suddenly vanishing from memory; a frantic search for eyeglasses only to find them atop the head; milk taken from the refrigerator then put away in a cupboard.
“It’s probably one of the most frightening aspects of the changes we undergo as we age,” said Nancy Ceridwyn, director of educational initiatives at the American Society on Aging. “Our memories are who we are. And if we lose our memories we lose that groundedness of who we are.”
At the same time, boomers are seizing on a mounting body of evidence that suggests that brains contain more plasticity than previously thought, and many people are taking matters into their own hands, doing brain fitness exercises with the same intensity with which they attack a treadmill.
Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products — not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain products as well.
Nintendo’s $19.99 Brain Age 2, a popular video game of simple math and memory exercises, is one. Posit Science’s $395 computer-based “cognitive behavioral training” exercises are another. MindFit, a $149 software-based program, combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized training regimen based on that assessment. And for about $10 a month, worried boomers can subscribe to Web sites like Lumosity.com and Happy-Neuron.com, which offer a variety of cognitive training exercises.
Alvaro Fernandez, whose brain fitness and consulting company, SharpBrains, has a Web site focused on brain fitness research. He estimates that in 2007 the market in the United States for so-called neurosoftware was $225 million.
Mr. Fernandez pointed out that compared with, say, the physical fitness industry, which brings in $16 billion a year in health club memberships alone, the brain fitness software industry is still in its infancy. Yet it is growing at a 50 percent annual rate, he said, and he expects it to reach $2 billion by 2015.
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