EBay Drop-Off Stores Balk at Regulation

Daniel Brady of Tallahassee, Fla., was arrested on charges of violating a state law on secondhand stores. The case was later dismissed.

The pirate statue had 14 days to leave Massapequa, N.Y. And leave it did.

The owner of the six-foot-tall resin figure recently took it to the QuikDrop store on Long Island to have it photographed and put up for auction on eBay for 14 days. An online bidder from Utah paid $750 and the store's workers packed it and were preparing to send it last night.

Next in line were 59 videotapes with several years' worth of "I Love Lucy" episodes, a pile of aluminum wheel rims and a Happy Holidays Special Edition 1988 Barbie.

Such troves of junk are innocent enough. But as more eBay drop-off stores spring up around the nation to help redistribute the accumulated cargo of an acquisitive culture, some public officials worry that they could become unwitting fences for stolen goods. As some states push to regulate the industry, eBay and the stores are joining together to oppose oversight.

States like California and Florida are debating whether drop-off stores like QuikDrop International, AuctionDrop and iSold It should be governed by the laws to prevent the sale of stolen items that currently apply to pawnbrokers, secondhand stores and auctioneers.

The focus on drop-off operations is intensifying because they are multiplying rapidly.

According to eBay, there are more than 7,000 locations listed in the company's directory of independent businesses, or trading assistants, that sell on behalf of others and offer drop-off services. Many of these, including about 3,800 AuctionDrop locations in U.P.S. Stores, are retail-style storefronts. And hundreds more of these stores are expected to open in the next year.

The stores and eBay have no corporate connection, but they are closely linked. EBay's revenue growth is based in part on signing up new eBay sellers; the drop-off stores help bring into the eBay fold people who might be reluctant to hold an online auction themselves.

In California, where the number of drop-off centers has grown quickly, secondhand dealers are required to report transactions, fingerprint people selling items like high-priced jewelry and electronic equipment, and hold onto those items for 30 days.

EBay is lobbying against a proposed law that would set up an electronic database to track stolen goods sold at secondhand stores in California. The state attorney general recently released an opinion that the drop-off stores should be classified as secondhand dealers. EBay asked that the bill exempt the centers from regulation, but such an exemption has not yet been written into the bill.

"We simply cannot see the need for any of this legislation," said Tod Cohen, vice president for government relations at eBay, which is based in San Jose, Calif.

Some law enforcement agencies, however, argue that drop-off centers could well become conduits for stolen items as Internet-based crime rises.

So far, there has been little evidence of stolen goods passing through drop-off stores. But law enforcement officials say that is because there is no easy way to track stolen items in and out of the centers.

"People are using pawnshops less and less," said Danny R. Macagni, chief of police in Santa Maria, Calif. "These eBay drop stores don't have to notify us like a pawnshop, so stolen property could be sold and we'll never even know about it."

The drop-off stores typically take in an item, photograph it and put it up for sale on eBay. If a sale goes through, the store sends the seller a check, minus a store commission that is often as high as 35 percent as well as a fee for eBay and other processing charges. If the item does not sell within a certain number of days (at QuikDrop, it is two weeks), the owner is asked to retrieve it.

Chief Macagni said that as more commerce - and crime - move into the online world, increased monitoring of online sales can only help. State and municipal laws regulating pawnbrokers and secondhand dealers vary, but usually require that dealers report transactions to the police, hold items for a certain period before selling them, and even take fingerprints of customers.

California, Florida and Texas have been considering legislation that would impose regulations on drop-off stores. And in New York City, where secondhand stores must obtain a license and maintain transaction records for police inspection on demand, the Department of Consumer Affairs is considering whether the drop-off stores qualify as secondhand stores, said Dina Improta, a department spokeswoman.

EBay officials and store owners, however, say criminals are not likely to walk into a drop-off store, offer personal information, leave a telephone number and wait for a check to arrive in the mail.

Still, lawmakers say legislation is needed as a deterrent.

"These drop-off stores are now sort of the locus of potential stolen property," said Leland Yee, a California state assemblyman who is sponsoring the bill. "You don't necessarily go through a fence, you go through the Internet, and eventually it lands at these drop-off places."

The regulatory ambiguity surrounding drop-off stores became evident this year, when Daniel Brady, the owner of an eBay drop-off store in Tallahassee, Fla., was arrested for violating a state law governing secondhand stores. The law requires those stores to give transaction records to local police within 24 hours and hold each item for 15 days before selling it.

Mr. Brady, who spent several hours in jail, had his case dismissed when a judge ruled that the law did not apply because the store never owned the merchandise at any time, as secondhand stores do. Florida lawmakers debated updating the existing law to encompass drop-off stores as well, but did not take action in the legislative session that ended this month. The bill is expected to resurface next year.

Mr. Brady disputed the suggestion that his store was anything like a secondhand store, and definitely not a pawnshop, which typically pays cash for the items it receives. "We don't buy anything," Mr. Brady said. "All we do is facilitate the sale of the goods for the customer."

But Robert Verhoeff, president of the Collateral Loan and Second Hand Dealers Association in California, a supporter of the legislation in California, argues that drop-off centers should have to comply with the rules that govern pawnshops and secondhand dealers.

Mr. Verhoeff said "the benefit to law enforcement is clear" in applying regulations to online auction middlemen. Some states have introduced legislation that would require the drop-off stores to register with the state as licensed auctioneers, which often means completing training courses, paying an annual licensing fee, and even placing payments in escrow accounts. Others, such as Louisiana, have no proposed legislation but are considering such a requirement. Intensive lobbying on the part of eBay recently helped win an exemption for drop-off stores as well as individual eBay sellers from legislation in Ohio on auctioneering. Now the company has focused a team of lobbyists on Sacramento to defeat Assemblyman Yee's bill.

"I feel for the pawnshops," said Jack Reynolds, co-founder of QuikDrop, based in Costa Mesa, Calif. "I realize they're in a highly regulated business with a lot of paperwork, but there's a reason for it." He noted that pawnshops offer cash for items and "we don't do that."

Elise Wetzel, the founder of iSold It, which is based in Pasadena, Calif., agreed. "In an online selling format, you don't give the customer money right away, and the item is posted on the world's largest public marketplace for all to see."

Ms. Wetzel's chain has 80 franchises open, with 200 more planning to open by the end of this year. The chain has held more than 160,000 auctions in just over a year.

All the iSold It stores, she said, get information on every customer and mail checks. "They don't get a check until the item sells," she said, "and it gets mailed to their residence. It's very different from what happens through a pawnshop."

But those safeguards may not be sufficient to prevent thieves from using the drop-off middlemen.

Even the high commission that the stores charge, Chief Macagni said, would hardly be a deterrent for a criminal. "When they drop off a full set of wheels and tires from a dealer's lot that's worth $4,000, they can afford to let 35 percent go."

Mr. Cohen of eBay, however, argued that the sale of stolen goods was a "very small subset" of overall fraud on eBay and imposing a paperwork burden on drop-off centers would do little to reduce crime.

Instead, he said, the push by pawnbrokers and auctioneers to have regulations apply to drop-off stores is mostly a tactic to make life harder for new rivals.

"This is in the fraternity hazing category," Mr. Cohen said. "If I got hazed, you're going to be hazed, too."

< These assholes cause *actual* harm *right now* by bothering the shit out of some people on the *chance* of preventing *hypothetical* harm in the future. Do you see what's wrong with this picture? >

Critics take aim at 'Star Wars' meals

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - An entertainment watchdog group is asking Burger King to pull its "Star Wars"-themed children's meals because the latest movie is rated PG-13, according to a published report.

USA Today reported Tuesday that the Dove Foundation is urging Burger King to pull the "Star Wars"-themed Kids Meals from its restaurants because the film is not appropriate for the meals' target market of children ages 4 to 9.

"Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith" is the first of the six "Star Wars" movie to be rated PG-13, meaning it has been judged more appropriate for older children, although younger children are allowed to attend. The film, which opened May 19, pulled in a record $158 million in its first four days in theaters.

The newspaper reports that 13 years ago the same group got Burger King competitor McDonald's to apologize for "confusion" from its promotion of the movie "Batman Returns," which was also rated PG-13, with its Happy Meals.

The Dove Foundation describes itself as a non-profit organization established to encourage and promote wholesome family entertainment. Its Web site gave its Dove Family-Approved seal to the latest "Star Wars" movie, although it warned that more graphic violence made it appropriate for children ages 12 and older.

The chairman of the group told USA Today that it is not appropriate for Burger King to help market the film to younger children.

"When Burger King puts that in a Kids Meal, there's an implicit endorsement of the movie," said Dick Rolfe, chairman of the Dove Foundation.

While terms of the promotion deal between Burger King and the filmmakers are not disclosed, the Kids Meals promotion, dubbed "Choose Your Destiny," is the 50-year-old fast-food chain's first global promotion, according to the newspaper.

A Burger King spokeswoman said the promotion is not specific to the latest "Star Wars" movie, only to the whole series of films, with just four of the 31 Kids Meal toys specific to "Episode III."

The toys "clearly celebrate not just one film but the entire 'Star Wars' saga," said Edna Johnson, a Burger King spokeswoman. "The reception at our restaurants and from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive."

But Rolfe said a survey his group conducted of 889 adults and says 83% felt the promotion was not appropriate for kids.

Another critic told the newspaper that filmmaker George Lucas is as much to blame as Burger King for the inappropriate promotion effort.

"It's irresponsible of George Lucas to OK the marketing around this PG-13 movie to young children," says Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and author of "Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood."

A spokeswoman for Lucas defended the film's marketing efforts.

"'Star Wars' is broader than a single movie," says Lynn Fox, a LucasFilm spokeswoman. "Parents know that 'Star Wars' has been a positive influence."

< Very confusing this is... >

Pentagon reveals rejected chemical weapons

THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.

Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused "severe and lasting halitosis", making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians. There was also the idea of making troops' skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight.

The proposals, from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, date from 1994. The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals". The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organisation that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons.

Spokesman Edward Hammond says it was not known if the proposed $7.5 million, six-year research plan was ever pursued.

Lost. And, Often, Found.

It wasn't the missing camera that Hayato Miwa grieved for; it was the contents.

Mr. Miwa, an assistant chef at the Gramercy New York pastry shop in Osaka, Japan, was touring top-tier New York restaurants with some fellow Japanese chefs to sample their pastries when he realized he had left his digital camera in a cab. It was worth only $200, but gone with it were photos he had taken of desserts concocted at Nobu, the Spice Market, Joseph's, the Park Avenue Cafe and the Gotham Bar & Grill.
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Jerry W. Hoefer for The New York Times

Blair Huber, a lost-and-found specialist for Southwest Airlines at Love Field in Dallas, may just have your cellphone.

Luckily for him, a couple found the camera and it was eventually reunited with its owner. "People had told Hayato New York is a dangerous city, that people here don't even smile," said Toyoko Kametani, a Japanese food company executive who organized the chefs' trip. "Now he thinks New Yorkers are wonderful."

More and more business travelers are finding occasion to gush similar sentiments, not only about New Yorkers, but about finders of lost goods all over the world. It turns out that people are losing more and more things because they are lugging so many additional gadgets and communications devices - and often misplacing them in airplanes and airports, hotel rooms, restaurants, cabs and rented cars.

A study conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a mobile-data protection software company in Chicago, found that the number of laptops abandoned in one London cab company's taxis rose 71 percent in the second half of last year from the same period in 2001, while the number of P.D.A.'s left behind shot up 350 percent.

Pointsec also tracked items left behind in taxis in eight other countries. One cab company in Chicago had the highest numbers: in the final six months of 2004, it found, in its 113 taxis, 387 mobile phones, 97 P.D.A.'s and Pocket P.C.'s and 20 laptops. (It did not have comparable 2001 data.) Extrapolating from those numbers, Pointsec calculated that 85,600 mobile phones, 21,500 P.D.A.'s or Pocket P.C.'s, and 4,425 laptops disappeared into Chicago's 25,000 cabs in those six months.

The plague of forgetfulness has given rise to several services that locate vanished goods. Trackitback (www.trackitback.com), in Winnipeg, Manitoba, uses coded identification labels and a reward system to encourage people to call a toll-free number when they find a lost item with the affixed label. A lifetime fee of $9.99 covers standard shipping costs.

BoomerangIt (www.boomerangit.com) in San Leandro, Calif., provides two labels and two snap-on luggage tags for $14.95. It charges a return fee of $10 for properly registered items, plus shipping and handling. Both companies respond to inquiries 24 hours a day.

Jet lag and fatigue are making road warriors on hectic travel schedules "slower on the uptake and more prone to forgetting stuff," said Doug Herrmann, a psychologist and memory specialist and professor emeritus at Indiana State University in Terre Haute.

Short of praying to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost or stolen things, Mr. Herrmann counsels travelers to "imagine you're going into the jungle and take preventive measures," like keeping a tight grip on your cellphone, decorating your briefcase with bright colors to set it apart and making a paper checklist of all the important belongings you are taking with you.

The travel industry has mobilized its troops to help out. Andrea Torrance, executive director of rooms at Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, says the housekeeping employees at its 44 properties are instructed to check for lost items behind night tables and between sheets. "When guests check out, we open every drawer and closet," she said.

Karen M. Krugel, a senior account supervisor for Lou Hammond & Associates, a New York public relations firm specializing in travel, says such vigilance saved her from the doghouse with her new husband. At the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pa., she left a $5,000 diamond necklace, his wedding present to her, in a spa robe pocket. "I was sobbing like a 6-year-old," she said. Hotel employees, however, rifled through the pockets of every robe in the laundry hampers and found the jewelry.

The method of recovery was not quite so straightforward for Lee Hurley, editor in chief of Executive Traveler magazine, but he got his treasure back, too. He and his wife were celebrating their 16th wedding anniversary at the Westin Buckhead in Atlanta, and he had brought along a $90 Baccarat crystal wine glass, an anniversary gift, to share a toast over dinner in their room. They left the glass on the tray and room service took it away that night. The couple only realized their mistake the next morning.

"At first I thought, 'No problem, I'll call room service and surely they'll find it,' " said Mr. Hurley. "But I found out that a 365-room hotel stocks well over 1,000 glasses. Then I thought I'd go look for it myself. But insurance liability rules restrict nonemployees from kitchen areas." Room service soon called to say the glass could not be found.

Now panicked, Mr. Hurley called the manager on duty and declared his wife would not leave the hotel without it. Eighteen minutes later, they got it back.

Lost items are usually held for about five days at the terminal where they are found, then shipped to a central warehouse. At Dallas Love Field Airport, Southwest Airlines receives close to 11,000 articles each month, said Laura Adams, director of central baggage services for the carrier. Those unclaimed after 60 days are sold to a salvage company or donated to charities.

Airlines consider no lost item too insignificant, as John W. Lampl, a British Airways vice president, found out. He left the novel he was reading on a Continental Airlines flight from Newark to Miami in February. Back at the Miami airport five days later, he asked about the book. "Lo and behold, within 15 minutes a customer service rep was standing there with it," he said. "It had no monetary value but it meant something to me. They made me feel like a somebody. Hats off to them."

< It's pretty rare that we get to post something from the other side. Our hats off to those people who returned other people's stuff. We realize it's your perogative and that your willingness to do so depends on your life situation. Nevertheless, this makes for the best possible outcome and those of you whose life situation might not lead you to return an object of value but do so anyway, you may be foolish but you're certainly good. We particularly applaud good customer service. This is alltogether too rare and is one of the best ways to fight corporate evil. >

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Start the Computer Revolution

LET'S get this straight: Jerry Garcia invented the Internet while he was tripping on acid. No, actually, it was Ken Kesey, who thought computers were the next thing after drugs - which, according to John Markoff, they really were.
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Fred Moore, the founder of the Homebrew Club. Apple Computer's Stephen Wozniak came to the first meeting.

"What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" (Viking, 287 pages) is Mr. Markoff's hymn to the 1960's, and to the social idealists and, well, acid freaks who wanted to use computers to promote an agenda of sharing, openness and personal growth.

His brief is that the longhairs liberated computers from I.B.M. and the military industrial complex and profoundly shaped the technology that is ubiquitous today. Formerly sequestered behind forbidding glass walls, computers went on to become accessible, usable and friendly. The industry had its consciousness raised - became a vehicle of togetherness.

Grant, at least, that computers became cool. During my adolescence, computers were evil. You remember HAL - the electronic demon of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Computers made people powerless. They represented war, capitalism and grownups. Then (I think I was out for coffee) kids took over. So now computers are about freedom. As I explained to my daughter the other night, "Turn the darn thing off." Read a book, for Pete's sake.

According to Mr. Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times and the author of other books on computers, the counterculture made it happen. He demonstrates that a good many of the electronics freaks who were working on inventing the future in the 60's and early 70's were, simultaneously, soaked in drugs, antiwar politics and weird ideas.

At the heart of his story is Doug Engelbart, a Navy veteran trained in radar during World War II who became obsessed with the idea that computers could augment human intelligence. Mr. Engelbart set up a research group at Stanford that, despite its Pentagon funding, became an outpost for young, creative and sometimes radicalized engineers.

In the 1960's, computers were machines for math - for "computing." Mr. Engelbart saw much more. His team invented or envisioned "every significant aspect of today's computing world" - point-and-click screen control, text editing, e-mail and networking. Mr. Kesey, the writer, was shown how Mr. Engelbart's computers worked and declared them to be "the next thing after acid." Even Mr. Engelbart, a white-shirted pied piper, experimented with LSD, encounter groups, Chairman Mao and est. It's a wonder he got anything done.

Actually, he didn't. In 1968, he demonstrated computer interactivity at a conference that wowed everyone and that the author, appropriately, dubs the "computing world's Woodstock." And then - nothing. Too dreamy to part with his technology until perfected, Mr. Engelbart never got around to developing commercial applications. His staff gradually defected to Xerox, which was actually interested in selling products. Xerox ultimately blew its commercial opportunity, but its technology would be widely cloned.

Occasionally, the tale splinters like an acid trip that goes on too long, with side trips and fervent hyperboles that, in a strange way, do put one in mind of the 60's. Engineers show up at Stanford, protest the war and drop out to join communes. One of them will "alter the world's politics"- by which Mr. Markoff means the engineering student staged a fast against the R.O.T.C.

Stewart Brand, one of the most interesting figures in the book, shepherds Mr. Kesey through an acid trip, an event to which Mr. Kesey invited guitarist Jerry Garcia and his band - giving rise to the Grateful Dead. Then, Mr. Brand turns up as the cameraman at Mr. Engelbart's computing Woodstock.

This is the kind of psychedelics-to-circuits connection that Mr. Markoff makes much of - sometimes too much. Anyway, Mr. Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a very hip compendium of random information that was, as I recall, perfectly useless. But Mr. Brand had a singular insight with regard to information - "it wants to be free."

When Whole Earth got to be a drag, Mr. Brand staged a demise party, at which he stunned guests by giving away $20,000, his original investment. There was a debate over how to spend it. Came the sage investment advice, "Give it back to the Indians." It was decided that Fred Moore, an ardent pacifist of anti-R.O.T.C. fame, would safeguard the funds, which meant putting them in a tin can and burying them. Did this have anything to do with computers? Actually, it did.

Money made Mr. Moore unhappy. Computers excited him, as did a sense of community. In 1975, he founded an enthusiasts' society, the Homebrew Computer Club. Hundreds of hobbyists came to the first meeting, including Stephen Wozniak, who went on to co-found Apple Computer. The idea was that everyone would share information. Mr. Moore believed that his club "should have nothing to do with making money."

But it did. Twenty-three entrepreneurial seedlings, including Apple, would trace their roots to the club. Mr. Markoff writes, "The deep irony is that Fred Moore lit the spark . . . toward the creation of powerful information tools." This is hyperbole. Lit a spark would be fair.

The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800, had been developed - in New Mexico, 1,000 miles away - before Homebrew ever assembled. But the attendants did, excitedly, pass around a copy of software written for the Altair, which had been developed by the infant Micro-Soft, as it was then known. Bill Gates, its 20-year-old tycoon-to-be, sarcastically objected to the pirating of his product. "Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." Needless to say, Mr. Moore's view of sharing was not endorsed by Mr. Gates. At this point, Marx and the history of the software industry diverged.

IN Mr. Markoff's view, the PC era, which placed each user in charge of an isolated box, was a long detour from the higher aim of information sharing conceived by Mr. Engelbart. This purpose was vindicated by the Internet. The tension still persists between profit-seeking publishers and, ahem, idealists who would love to share what belongs to others - music rights, for instance. According to the author, this is today "the bitterest conflict facing the world's economy."

Such overwrought claims aside, at the core of "Dormouse" lies a valid and original historical point. Computer technology did turn out to be creative, spirited and even freeing. Most of this was a result of the fabulous advances in the power of the microchip. But perhaps, also, in the tactile clicking of the mouse, you can hear the faint strumming of a guitar.

Public schools, private billions and the best of intentions

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- Bill Gates raised some hackles with his withering assessment of American high schools, but at least the billionaire founder of Microsoft is putting his money where his mouth is.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $2.3 billion since 2000 in new visions of education, with smaller schools and more personalized instruction to prepare young people for the working world and post-high school learning.

The foundation has programs in 42 states and the District of Columbia; it supports more than 1,500 high schools -- about half totally new and the others redesigned. Its three scholarship programs, designed to fill tuition gaps left by other grants and aid, have assisted more than 10,000 students.

At one of its schools, the Truman Center in Federal Way, about 20 miles south of Seattle, 12 teacher/advisers tend 208 students -- helping them figure out what they care about and how to pursue it. Two days a week are set aside for job-shadowing and internships in the real world.

Shawn Dube was going nowhere in 2001 when he transferred to Truman, one of 16 schools in the state being transformed with a five-year grant and scholarships from the Gates Foundation's Achiever program.

"It was kind of a last-resort thing that I was there," recalls Dube, now 18.

An internship at an upscale local restaurant put Dube on his path. He found a mentor, eagerly honed his skills and is now a first-year student at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He plans a stint in France and dreams of a restaurant of his own.

Shawn's mom, Kim Dube, credits the Gates program with giving Shawn the confidence to chase his dream and scholarships to finance it.

"My husband and I didn't go to college," Kim says. "It just got him past that fear."

Since 2000, the education branch of the Gates Foundation has been working to upgrade the nation's high schools, which Gates characterized as "obsolete" in a February speech to the National Governors Association.
Rigor, relevance, relationships

In that speech, he spelled out his "new three R's" for building better high schools:

Rigor: Making sure all students are given a challenging curriculum that prepares them for college or work.

Relevance: Making sure kids have courses and projects that relate to their lives and their goals.

Relationships: Making sure kids have adults who know them, look out for them, and push them to achieve.

"The idea is that every district should have a rigorous academic alternative for kids who do not succeed in the traditional high school setting," said Gates Foundation spokeswoman Marie Groark.

Such alternatives don't come cheap. And with states struggling to pay for basic education and keep up federal accountability requirements -- what happens when the five-year grants expire?

"If you don't get a commitment from the school district to continue, it's just an exercise you go through," said Leon Horne, a middle-school teacher and former union leader in Tacoma.

The foundation's intent with the grants is to get the ball rolling by demonstrating alternatives that work, Groark said. "Our goal for all our work is sustainability -- that we can disappear."

Followup and monitoring will be essential, said Shirley Malcom, head of education and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

"The big question is the learning goals," Malcom said. "What is it we want these children to know? ... Are they going to be job-ready, and are they going to be college-ready?"

New tests, mandated by federal law, are designed to help assess student progress.
Innovation from the inside

The sustainability of the foundation's work will depend on whether it fosters innovation from inside or tries to impose it from outside, Malcom said. School districts will be more likely to support -- and help spread -- innovations developed within schools and communities.

That's a belief the foundation shares.

"When we give a grant, we give it because the community wants it and asks for it," Groark said. "It's not the Gates Foundation telling the community to do something. It's the Gates Foundation supporting work that's already begun."

There's no question that most high schools don't work, Malcom said. But the structure is very difficult to break down for various reasons, including the often massive size of the buildings themselves.

Creating small schools, usually schools within schools, has been a fundamental part of the foundation's approach.

The Truman Center, for example, has just six classrooms -- crammed with projects, art, words of wisdom. "Quiet rooms" are set aside for those who need to concentrate. The only doors are on the bathrooms and to the outdoors.

"Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age," Gates told the governors in February.

"Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting -- even ruining -- the lives of millions of Americans every year," said Gates, himself a product of the rigorous standards and hands-on instruction at Seattle's private Lakeside School.

"Only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship," he said. "The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won't ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job, no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach."
Hands-on approach

Despite his position atop one of the world's biggest technology companies, high-tech education reforms have been a small part of the foundation's work. Online schools are the subject of just two grants, totaling less than $3 million.

The foundation's education wing has a staff of about three dozen, eight or nine of whom monitor grant recipients.

At Truman, school officials write frequent reports to keep the foundation up to date, and foundation officials make yearly visits, said Principal Judy Kraft.

The foundation gets points from educators and observers for its hands-on approach.

"Their staffers are engaged in ways other funders are not engaged, in part because their staff comes from the education field. They're not heavy-handed at all," says Patricia Sullivan at the Center for Education Policy in Washington, D.C., which receives some funding from the Gates Foundation.

That's not to say all goes smoothly on foundation projects. In Tacoma, teacher Horne said, it took three years to work out union concerns and get teachers set up for foundation programs at three of the city's five high schools, a year longer than the usual training phase.

"I don't think they'd really thought the whole thing through," said Horne, who suggested the program's test run in Tacoma might have been more effectively conducted at a single school.

He also noted that the foundation's vision -- of one teacher/adviser overseeing a small class throughout high school while teaching most subjects -- seems to clash with the federal No Child Left Behind law, which calls for teachers with high expertise in specific subjects.

Still, across Washington state, where the foundation is based, it is generally acknowledged as a positive force, said Charles Hasse, president of the teachers union, the Washington Education Association.

Although teachers sometimes bristle at guidance from outsiders, he said, "the people at the foundation are seen as partners at improving education and essentially allies of classroom teachers."

Kiss your old SSN goodbye

Some good might actually come out of all of these recent data mishaps.

Politicians are starting to realize that permitting data brokers like Acxiom and ChoicePoint to buy and sell your Social Security number like a raffle ticket may not be that wise after all.

Some members of Congress, like Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, have been warning about the dangers of SSN misuse for years. The surprise now is that some key congressional figures are agreeing.

Rep. Joe Barton, another Texas Republican who happens to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said last week that he plans to "outlaw the use of Social Security numbers for any purposes other than government purposes."
Purloining someone's SSN can permit a criminal to empty the bank accounts and run up the credit cards of the hapless victim.

The politics go something like this: Some type of legislation is likely to be enacted this year in response to the string of security snafus involving companies like ChoicePoint, Bank of America, payroll provider PayMaxx, and Reed Elsevier Group's LexisNexis service.

The big question is what the details of that law will look like. Barton, a conservative but idiosyncratic Republican who represents the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, could have the final say in that process.

"The time has come to tip the balance in favor of individual privacy and find another way to help businesses determine the identity of the people they want to give credit to," Barton said at last week's hearing.

This would represent a new campaign for Barton, first elected to the House in 1984, whose other top causes have been an unsuccessful attempt to preserve the Superconductor Supercollider that was to have been built in Waxahachie, Texas, and enacting a balanced budget amendment. He's also known for being sympathetic to oil and gas companies and for holding hearings that investigated the fund-raising and travel practices of the Clinton administration.

Relentless expansion
The history of the SSN is the history of a government program run amok, creating what has become a national ID number.

In 1935, Congress enacted the Social Security Act, which authorized only the creation of some record-keeping scheme and not the SSN itself. But the Treasury Department decided SSNs were the best way to create those records, and things have gone downhill ever since.

By executive order, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt required all federal agencies to use the SSN "exclusively" to identify individuals, and the IRS began to employ it as a tax ID number in the early 1960s. Later that decade, divulging your SSN became necessary to buy Treasury bonds, obtain Medicare benefits, and join the military. The Social Security Amendments of 1972 slapped SSNs on school children and foreign workers with visas, and a 1983 law required banks to obtain SSNs for savings accounts.

Nowadays, the SSN has mercilessly extruded its way into the private sector. Many corporations and universities use the SSN as a unique identifier, as does everyone from physicians to insurance companies to mutual funds.

That's why the SSN has become so valuable for identity thieves. Even though the SSN was never intended as a password--it lacks an important feature of a password, which is an ability to change it--companies and government agencies routinely use it that way. Purloining someone's SSN can permit a criminal to empty the bank accounts and run up the credit cards of the hapless victim.

Support for some type of SSN reform this year seems to be growing in a thoroughly bipartisan way.

It's true that Barton's proposal, if enacted into law, would inconvenience companies that have inadvisably come to rely on SSNs to identify records in a database. But it's possible for them to generate random, custom IDs for the identification purposes. Quite a few universities and corporations already do.

Support for some type of SSN reform this year seems to be growing in a thoroughly bipartisan way. There's the Social Security Number Privacy and Identity Theft Prevention Act, the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act, the Social Security Number Protection Act, Social Security On-line Privacy Protection Act for starters, and that's not even counting what Barton plans to do.

One way to accomplish his goal would be to eliminate the public SSN in nearly all cases. The Social Security Administration would still generate the numbers and use them internally--but generally would not release them even to the person associated with each SSN.

Here's how it could work: The only legitimate use for an SSN is to match an individual with his or her supposed "retirement account." As long as the Social Security Administration can find a match and allocate payroll taxes accurately based on information like name, birth date, address, birth location and employment history, there's no need for someone to know what their SSN actually is.

A more radical reform would be to permit younger Americans to opt out of the Social Security system entirely. Perhaps they'd still be required to fork over half of their current payroll taxes to fund today's retirees, but the rest would be returned to them to invest freely. No SSN would be attached and no long-term tracking would be necessary.

That would take more flexible thinking, true, and it would certainly outrage defenders of the status quo. But today's SSN system is so diseased that radical therapy may be the only cure.

Hugging Ban Sparks Dispute at Ore. School

BEND, Ore. - A 14-year-old girl received detention over a lingering hug she gave her boyfriend at school, infuriating her mother and putting school officials on the defensive.

School officials said they had warned Cazz Altomare that lingering hugging was unacceptable, but she continued to disobey the rule when she received the detention earlier this year.

Rules at Sky View Middle School in Bend permit "quick hello and goodbye hugs," but administrators said some students have been taking advantage of it.

"It's not like we are the hug Nazis," Laurie Gould, spokeswoman for the Bend-La Pine School District, said Monday. "Kids hug, they hug hello and they hug goodbye, but if you take it farther, you make people uncomfortable."

Cazz got detention after giving her boyfriend a protracted hug in the hallway at Sky View Middle School in Bend.

Her mother, Leslee Swanson, was infuriated by the punishment. When she went to pick her daughter up from detention, she gave her a good, hard hug.

"I'm trying to understand what's wrong with a hug," Swanson, 42, said in a story Sunday in The Bulletin of Bend. People should not "blindly accept these fundamental rights being taken away from them," she said.

Gould said "usually kids don't get detention just for hugging."

All middle schools in the Bend-La Pine district restrict hugging to some degree, as well as hand-holding and some other forms of physical affection.

"Really, all we're trying to do is create an environment that's focused on learning, and learning proper manners is part of that," said Dave Haack, the principal of Cascade Middle School, also in Bend.

Students only end up with detention after repeated warnings earlier this year, he said.

Outside Pilot Butte Middle School on a recent lunch break, two seventh-grade girls said they disagreed with the policies.

"I think we should be able to hold hands or hug at least," said Annie Wilson, 12. "Because it's not doing anything bad."

Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs

The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.

The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.

A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts.

Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.

A presidential directive is expected within weeks, said the senior administration official, who is involved with space policy and insisted that he not be identified because the directive is still under final review and the White House has not disclosed its details.

Air Force officials said yesterday that the directive, which is still in draft form, did not call for militarizing space. "The focus of the process is not putting weapons in space," said Maj. Karen Finn, an Air Force spokeswoman, who said that the White House, not the Air Force, makes national policy. "The focus is having free access in space."

With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.

"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."

In January 2001, a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended that the military should "ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space."

It said that "explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space."

The effort to develop a new policy directive reflects three years of work prompted by the report. The White House would not say if all the report's recommendations would be adopted.

In 2002, after weighing the report of the Rumsfeld space commission, President Bush withdrew from the 30-year-old Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based weapons.

Ever since then, the Air Force has sought a new presidential policy officially ratifying the concept of seeking American space superiority.

The Air Force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.

The mission will require new weapons, new space satellites, new ways of doing battle and, by some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars. It faces enormous technological obstacles. And many of the nation's allies object to the idea that space is an American frontier.

Yet "there seems little doubt that space-basing of weapons is an accepted aspect of the Air Force" and its plans for the future, Capt. David C. Hardesty of the Naval War College faculty says in a new study.

A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."

Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," General Lord said.

The Air Force's drive into space has been accelerated by the Pentagon's failure to build a missile defense on earth. After spending 22 years and nearly $100 billion, Pentagon officials say they cannot reliably detect and destroy a threat today.

"Are we out of the woods? No," Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, who directs the Missile Defense Agency, said in an interview. "We've got a long way to go, a lot of testing to do."

While the Missile Defense Agency struggles with new technology for a space-based laser, the Air Force already has a potential weapon in space.

In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.

Another Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.

A third program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world. A fourth seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast," in the words of an Air Force plan.

Captain Hardesty, in the new issue of the Naval War College Review, calls for "a thorough military analysis" of these plans, followed by "a larger public debate."

"To proceed with space-based weapons on any other foundation would be the height of folly," he concludes, warning that other nations not necessarily allies would follow America's lead into space.

Despite objections from members of Congress who thought "space should be sanctified and no weapons ever put in space," Mr. Teets, then the Air Force under secretary, told the space-warfare symposium last June that "that policy needs to be pushed forward."

Last month, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who leads the United States Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services nuclear forces subcommittee that the goal of developing space weaponry was to allow the nation to deliver an attack "very quickly, with very short time lines on the planning and delivery, any place on the face of the earth."

Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who is chairman of the subcommittee, worried that the common aero vehicle might be used in ways that would "be mistaken as some sort of attack on, for example, Russia."

"They might think it would be a launch against them of maybe a nuclear warhead," Senator Sessions said. "We want to be sure that there could be no misunderstanding in that before we authorize going forward with this vehicle."

General Cartwright said that the military would "provide every opportunity to ensure that it's not misunderstood" and that Global Strike simply aimed to "expand the choices that we might be able to offer to the president in crisis."

Senior military and space officials of the European Union, Canada, China and Russia have objected publicly to the notion of American space superiority.

They think that "the United States doesn't own space - nobody owns space," said Teresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a policy analysis group in Washington that tends to be critical of the Pentagon. "Space is a global commons under international treaty and international law."

No nation will "accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star," Ms. Hitchens told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting last month. "I don't think the United States would find it very comforting if China were to develop a death star, a 24/7 on-orbit weapon that could strike at targets on the ground anywhere in 90 minutes."

International objections aside, Randy Correll, an Air Force veteran and military consultant, told the council, "the big problem now is it's too expensive."

The Air Force does not put a price tag on space superiority. Published studies by leading weapons scientists, physicists and engineers say the cost of a space-based system that could defend the nation against an attack by a handful of missiles could be anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion.

Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering, that "a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile."

"The psychological impact of such a blow might rival that of such devastating attacks as Hiroshima," they wrote. "But just as the unleashing of nuclear weapons had unforeseen consequences, so, too, would the weaponization of space."

Surveillance and reconnaissance satellites are a crucial component of space superiority. But the biggest new spy satellite program, Future Imagery Architecture, has tripled in price to about $25 billion while producing less than promised, military contractors say. A new space technology for detecting enemy launchings has risen to more than $10 billion from a promised $4 billion, Mr. Teets told Congress last month.

But General Lord said such problems should not stand in the way of the Air Force's plans to move into space.

"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," he told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."

< Power-tripping US Govt. Now available in a country near you. >

School Boards Want to 'Teach the Controversy.' What Controversy?

The recent so-called debates on the teaching of evolution in Kansas have me thinking about different theological reactions to the teaching of evolution.

The Roman Catholic Church, which stands on common ground with conservative Christians in opposition to abortion, and which is doctrinally committed to notions like the Virgin Birth, apparently has no problem with the notion of evolution as it is currently studied by biologists, including supposedly "controversial" ideas like common ancestry of all life forms.

Popes from Pius XII to John Paul II have reaffirmed that the process of evolution in no way violates the teachings of the church. Pope Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, presided over the church's International Theological Commission, which stated that "since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism."

At the same time, those who wish to include "intelligent design" in the science curriculum insist that if we leave the creator out of discussions of the origin and evolution of life, then such "naturalism" must be incomplete - and that it opens the door to moral relativism and many of the other ills that go along with it.

The ultimate extension of this position may be Representative Tom DeLay's comment that the tragedy at Columbine happened "because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." Evolutionary biology is not the only science that appears to raise theological issues.

As a cosmologist, I am reminded of a controversy that arose from the development of a consistent mathematical solution of Einstein's equations, devised in 1931 by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and physicist.

The solution required what today we call the Big Bang. By confronting the conventional scientific wisdom that the universe was eternal, and instead demonstrating that it was likely to have had a beginning in the finite past - indeed, one that could certainly be said to be born in light - Lemaître was hailed by many, including 20 years later by Pope Pius XII himself, as having scientifically proved Genesis.

Lemaître, however, became convinced that it was inappropriate to use the Big Bang as a basis for theological pronouncements. He initially inserted, then ultimately removed, a paragraph in the draft of his 1931 paper on the Big Bang remarking on the possible theological consequences of his discovery. In the end, he said, "As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside of any metaphysical or religious question."

While this argument may seem strange, Lemaître was grasping something that is missed in the current public debates about evolution. The Big Bang is not a metaphysical theory, but a scientific one: namely one that derives from equations that have been measured to describe the universe, and that makes predictions that one can test.

It is certainly true that one can reflect on the existence of the Big Bang to validate the notion of creation, and with that the notion of God. But such a metaphysical speculation lies outside of the theory itself.

This is why the Catholic Church can confidently believe that God created humans, and at the same time accept the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of common evolutionary ancestry of life on earth.

One can choose to view chance selection as obvious evidence that there is no God, as Dr. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and uncompromising atheist, might argue, or to conclude instead that God chooses to work through natural means. In the latter case, the overwhelming evidence that natural selection has determined the evolution of life on earth would simply imply that God is "the cause of causes," as Cardinal Ratzinger's document describes it.

The very fact that two such diametrically opposed views can be applied to the same scientific theory demonstrates that the fact of evolution need not dictate theology. In other words, the apparently contentious questions are not scientific ones. It is possible for profoundly atheist evolutionary biologists like Dr. Dawkins and deeply spiritual ones like Dr. Kenneth Miller of Brown University, who writes extensively on evolution, to be in complete agreement about the scientific mechanism governing biological evolution, and the fact that life has evolved via natural selection.

Students are completely free to make up their own minds, in any case. What is at issue is whether they will be taught the science that should allow them to make an informed judgment. But impugning the substance of the science, or requiring the introduction of essentially theological ideas like "intelligent design" into the curriculum, merely muddies the water by imposing theological speculations on a scientific theory. Evolution, like Lemaître's Big Bang, is itself "entirely outside of any metaphysical or religious question."

The Discovery Institute, which promotes "intelligent design," a newer version of creationism, argues that schools should "Teach the Controversy." But there is no scientific controversy.

State school board science standards would do better to include a statement like this: While well-tested theories like evolution and the Big Bang have provided remarkable new insights and predictions about nature, questions of purpose that may underlie these discoveries are outside the scope of science, and scientists themselves have many different views in this regard.

Or one might simply quote Lemaître, who said of the limitations of science and of his own effort to reconcile his scientific discoveries with his parallel religious beliefs: "To search thoroughly for the truth involves a searching of souls as well as of spectra."

Evolution Dominates Campaign in Pa. Town

DOVER, Pa. May 13, 2005 ? On opposite sides of town, two billboards for competing slates of school board candidates illustrate the deep divide here over the teaching of evolution and the origin of life.

One sign shouts, "It's time for a new school board in Dover!" The other describes the seven sitting board members as "the INTELLIGENT choice" a reference to the board's decision last fall to require the mention of "intelligent design" in class.

In what is believed to be a first in the United States, the school board voted 6-3 in October to require that ninth-grade students be told about intelligent design when they learn about evolution in biology class. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex, it must have been created by some kind of guiding force.

Tuesday's primary election promises to be a battle royal among 18 candidates evenly divided over the intelligent-design mandate in this 3,400-student school system about 20 miles from Harrisburg.

"We would have no interest this year if not for the intelligent-design issue. It is the overriding concern," said school board president Sheila Harkins, who is up for re-election.

The intelligent-policy is being challenged in a federal lawsuit scheduled to go to trial in September. The plaintiffs are eight families who claim that intelligent design is merely biblical creationism disguised in secular language, and has no place in a science classroom.

The school board has defended the intelligent-design mandate, saying it merely wants students to know about weaknesses in Charles Darwin's theory.

The controversy in Dover is among several recent battles over the teaching of evolution. Kansas' state education board is considering adding intelligent design to is science standards six years after it drew international ridicule for deleting most references to evolution. The references were restored in 2001.

Retired English teacher Sheila Webb, who opposes the intelligent-design policy, said she rescheduled a trip to Canada so that she could take part in the election.

"I'm staying home just to be able to make my vote count for the ones who should be seated," the 68-year-old Webb said.

Seven of the board's nine seats are open. The field of candidates includes two board members who resigned during the furor that followed the vote.

Another candidate, Bryan Rehm, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"If you believe evolution is wrong, then so be it," Rehm said. But he said intelligent design should be discussed "somewhere else in a psychology, philosophy or world-cultures class."

But Melinda Jones, whose 12-year-old son is enrolled in the district, plans to vote for the current board. Jones, a private tutor, said intelligent design is not really being "taught" in class. "They're reading a statement about it," she said.

< It's like this: The side of science, evolution, etc. Is made up of theories based on every single piece of evidence ever gathered. The side of creationism, intelligent design, etc. is made up of "we don't know so we're going to make an answer out of that". Which is really the intelligent choice? We've always been on the side of science for that reason but now we feel compelled to be blatant about it. Creationists and their ilk (yes, this includes you Intelligent Design people, even if you say it doesn't), are fucking stupid. Did you get that? You wanna quote us? Let's say it again. Fucking Stupid! How in the hell can you go with a complete LACK of evidence, a neccesary admittance of ignorance as your cornerstone? You're beyond stupid. You're anti-smart.>

Scientists Boycott Kansas Evolution Hearings

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- Scientists have refused to participate in state Board of Education hearings this past week on how the theory of evolution should be treated in public schools, but they haven't exactly been silent.

About a dozen scientists, most from Kansas universities, spoke each day at news conferences after evolution critics testified before a board subcommittee. They expect to continue speaking out as the hearings wrap up on Thursday.

"They're in, they do their shtick, and they're out," said Keith Miller, a Kansas State University geologist. "I'm going to be here, and I'm not going to be quiet. We'll have the rest of our lives to make our points."

The scientists' boycott was led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Kansas Citizens for Science, which believe the hearings are rigged against the teaching of evolution.

Scientists said they don't see the need to cram their arguments into a few days of testimony, like out-of-state witnesses who were called by advocates of the "intelligent design" theory.

But the boycott has frustrated board members who viewed their hearings as an educational forum.

"I am profoundly disappointed that they've chosen to present their case in the shadows," board member Connie Morris said. "I would have enjoyed hearing what they have to say in a professional, ethical manner."

The theory of evolution says that changes in species can lead to new species, and that different species, including man and apes, have common ancestors. Intelligent design advocates contend the universe is so complex it must have been created by a higher power.

In 1999, the board deleted most references to evolution in the science standards. But standards were adopted later to include evolution as a key education concept.

The state board's standards determine what is on statewide tests, but local school boards decide what is actually taught and which textbooks are used. The state board plans to consider changes to its standards this summer.

Leaders of the science groups said the three subcommittee members already have decided to support language backed by intelligent design advocates. All three are part of a conservative board majority receptive to criticism of evolution.

Put (Almost) Anything on a Stamp

CONSUMERS will be able to print customized stamps again starting next week, but this time they won't be able to peel and paste Monica Lewinsky's image onto a letter.

On May 17, the U.S. Postal Service will begin the second stage of a test that started last fall in which customers can print personalized postage from their computers, using their own photos.

In the earlier test, the Postal Service's vendor for the project, Stamps.com, failed to reject a handful of postage images sent to it, including photos of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the man called the Unabomber; and Nicolae Ceausescu, the former Romanian dictator.

Now that Stamps.com has tightened its screening process, investors appear to be again warming to the idea of personalized stamps, perhaps giving the online postage industry an entry into a market that has proved much more elusive than executives had once hoped.

On news in late April of the Postal Service's impending test, shares of Stamps.com jumped from around $16 a share to nearly $20 - their highest level since early 2001. They continued to rise through early May. On Friday, the stock rose 11 cents, to $21.97, on the Nasdaq.

Justin Cable, an analyst with B. Riley & Company, an investment firm, said revenues from customized stamps might not justify that enthusiasm in the short term.

"Some investors are speculating that this will be a very huge opportunity, but it's still too early to tell," Mr. Cable said.

Stamps.com, which had about $2.3 million in sales of personalized postage as the sole vendor for last year's test, may eventually face other competition in the market. Pitney Bowes, which, among other things, provides postage meters to businesses, has a Web-based postage service that complies with the Postal Service's "PC Postage" requirements for authentication, security and payment.

Pitney Bowes would not say whether it would enter the next one-year trial. Endicia Internet Postage, a privately held company based in Palo Alto, Calif., also sells PC postage services and said it would likely start a consumer-oriented service.

The Postal Service handled about 97 billion pieces of first-class mail last year, according to Gerry McKiernan, a Postal Service spokesman.

That is down from 99 billion pieces in 2003 and 102 billion in 2002. The declines are a result, Mr. McKiernan said, of the rise in faxes and, particularly, e-mail messages.

"We don't see personalized postage as the savior," Mr. McKiernan said. "But if it gives it a little bump, that's all to the good."

Ken McBride, the chief executive of Stamps.com, whose core business is selling online postage services to small business and home-office customers, recently told investors that the company projected that it could record an additional $5 million in sales this year from the customized postage effort, bringing the company's projected fiscal year 2005 sales to $56 million, up from $38 million last year.

"Our core product doesn't appeal to the consumer, but this gives us an additional revenue stream and market that we don't currently tap into," Mr. McBride said.

For a subscription fee, customers receive a digital scale, shipping supplies and software that allows them to print postage and shipping labels from their computer.

(The postage is bar coded so it can be read and verified by Postal Service employees.)

After largely turning away from the consumer market after the dot-com bust, the first Postal Service test of customized stamps brought Stamps.com once again into the market, albeit with measured expectations. Mr. McBride said consumers were willing to pay the $16 fee to print customized postage, particularly for holiday greeting card mailings and invitations to weddings and other events.

Last year, Stamps.com charged $12 to $17 for a sheet of 20 stamps, depending on volume.

That is a steep premium above the $7.40 cents customers pay for the same number of 37-cent stamps at the post office. But for that fee, consumers can use any image they desire for postage, provided it does not feature a publicly known person or offensive or obscene imagery and cannot be construed as business advertising.

Stamps.com will also bar black-and-white images, in an effort to make it easier for screeners to weed out offensive images. (The Theodore Kaczynski stamp was made from a black-and-white picture taken when he was in college.)

Mr. McBride said the company "felt pretty good about" how it screened the 83,000 images it processed for last fall's trial. It will continue to rely on a team of employees to scan every image that comes into the company, but that team has been bolstered by employees who, he said, have enough expertise in world history and culture to identify more obscure public figures.

"It's part of why the product is a little more expensive," Mr. McBride said. "It's definitely a challenging aspect of this business."

Perhaps that is why, so far at least, no technology company has emerged with a lower-priced plan to take advantage of what would likely be huge consumer demand. Given the meteoric growth in picture-taking in the United States since inexpensive digital cameras and cellphone cameras hit the market, there is no shortage of people willing to share their likeness, or that of their loved ones.

But for now, at least, consumers will have to pay a premium to inflict their photos on others via the mail.

< This is disturbing. At first glance it's a great thing but consider the implications of letting the govt. determine what's OK. Why is a photo of Ted Kazinski banned? What if it was a relative trying to get his sentence commuted? You can bet they'll allow a cross but ban an upside down one. No matter how neat this is, it should have been axed from the get-go since they're unwilling to not censor. >

Jesus Christ in Legal Battle in W.Va.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Even Jesus Christ can't circumvent the rules for getting a driver's license in West Virginia.

Attempts to prove his name really is Christ have led the man born as Peter Robert Phillips Jr. through a lengthy legal battle and a recent victory in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

"This all started with him expressing his faith and his respect and love for Jesus Christ," attorney A.P. Pishevar told The Associated Press. "Now he needs to document it for legal reasons."

Described by his attorney as a white-haired businessman in his mid-50s, Christ is moving to West Virginia to enjoy a slower lifestyle. He bought property near Lost River, about 100 miles west of Washington, and has a U.S. passport,
Social Security card and Washington driver's license bearing the name Jesus Christ.

But he still falls short of West Virginia title and license transfer requirements because his Florida birth certificate has his original name on it and he has been unable to obtain an official name change in Washington.

"We just need official documentation that that's his name," said Doug Stump, commissioner of the West Virginia Division of Motor Vehicles. "He will be treated no different than anybody else."

Christ applied for the legal name change in May 2003, but it was denied by District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Tim Murphy because "taking the name of Jesus Christ may provoke a violent reaction or may significantly offend people."

In his appeal, Christ's attorney argued that Phillips had changed his name to Jesus Christ 15 years earlier, and "has been using the name since then without incident."

The appeals court last month sent the name-change proposal back to the lower court, saying some required hearings in the case had not been held.

Any comment from the man in the middle of this legal tussle?

"Christ is not speaking to the press at this time," Pishevar said.

< For those of you who don't know, as long as there is no intent to defraud, the name doesn't interfere with trademark, and is not "inflamitory", it is legal for any purpose to use any name you wish. Furthermore, a social security card and driver's license from another state are as "official" as it gets. The judge in DC may or may not have done the right thing based on that third part, but West Virgina was certainly wrong. >

Jesus Christ In Legal Battle For W.Va. Driver's License

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Jesus Christ is hoping to move to West Virginia, but he's having trouble getting a driver's license.

The man is described as a white-haired businessman who's been using that name for 15 years without a problem. He has a U.S. passport, Social Security card and Washington driver's license -- all bearing the name Jesus Christ.

But he still falls short of West Virginia title and license requirements, since his Florida birth certificate bears his original name. The man born as Peter Robert Phillips Jr. still hasn't had an official name change approved in Washington.

A District of Columbia judge denied the legal change two years ago, saying the name could provoke "a violent reaction" or "significantly" offend people. An appeals court ruling last month, however, will start that process anew.

Christ's attorney says the name change was an effort to express his faith.

Texas Lawmakers OK Ban On Sexually Suggestive Cheerleading

AUSTIN, Texas -- If some Texas lawmakers have their way, "overtly sexually suggestive" cheerleading will be banned.

The Texas House has approved a bill that would give the state education commissioner authority to request that school districts review high school performances.

State Rep. Al Edwards, of Houston, who sponsored the legislation, contends that bawdy performances are a distraction for students resulting in pregnancies, dropouts and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Edwards is outraged by the way cheerleaders are "shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down."

"And then we say to them, 'don't get involved in sex unless it's marriage or love, it's dangerous out there' and yet the teachers and directors are helping them go through those kind of gyrations."

He said it's hypocritical for educators to teach sexual abstinence, while condoning all sorts of bumping and grinding on the sidelines.

Banned performances are not defined in the bill, which now heads to the Senate.

Under the Houston Democrat's bill, the state education commissioner could reduce a school district's state funding if it knowingly permits sexy cheerleading.

FDA: Gay Men Can No Longer Be Anonymous Sperm Donors

NEW YORK -- To the dismay of gay-rights activists, the Food and Drug Administration is about to implement new rules recommending that any man who has engaged in homosexual sex in the previous five years be barred from serving as an anonymous sperm donor.

The FDA has rejected calls to scrap the provision, insisting that gay men collectively pose a higher-than-average risk of carrying the AIDS virus. Critics accuse the FDA of stigmatizing all gay men rather than adopting a screening process that focuses on high-risk sexual behavior by any would-be donor, gay or straight.

"Under these rules, a heterosexual man who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive prostitutes would be OK as a donor one year later, but a gay man in a monogamous, safe-sex relationship is not OK unless he's been celibate for five years," said Leland Traiman, director of a clinic in Alameda, Calif., that seeks gay sperm donors.

Traiman said adequate safety assurances can be provided by testing a sperm donor at the time of the initial donation, then freezing the sperm for a six-month quarantine and testing the donor again to be sure there is no new sign of HIV or other infectious diseases.

Although there is disagreement over whether the FDA guideline regarding gay men will have the force of law, most doctors and clinics are expected to observe it.

The practical effect of the provision -- part of a broader set of cell and tissue donation regulations that take effect May 25 -- is hard to gauge. It is likely to affect some lesbian couples who want a child and prefer to use a gay man's sperm for artificial insemination.

"The part I find most offensive -- and a little frightening -- is that it isn't based on good science."
- Kevin Cathcart,
Lambda Legal executive director

But it is the provision's symbolic aspect that particularly troubles gay-rights groups. Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, has called it "policy based on bigotry."

"The part I find most offensive -- and a little frightening -- is that it isn't based on good science," Cathcart said. "There's a steadily increasing trend of heterosexual transmission of HIV, and yet the FDA still has this notion that you protect people by putting gay men out of the pool."

In a letter to the FDA, Lambda Legal has suggested a screening procedure based on sexual behavior, not sexual orientation. Prospective donors -- gay or straight -- would be rejected if they had engaged in unprotected sex in the previous 12 months with an HIV-positive person, an illegal drug user, or "an individual of unknown HIV status outside of a monogamous relationship."

But an FDA spokeswoman cited FDA documents suggesting that officials felt the broader exclusion was prudent even if it affected gay men who practice safe sex.

"The FDA is very much aware that strict exclusion policies eliminate some safe donors," said one document.

Many doctors and fertility clinics already have been rejecting gay sperm donors, citing the pending FDA rules or existing regulations of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

"With an anonymous sperm donor, you can't be too careful," said a society spokeswoman, Eleanor Nicoll. "Our concern is for the health of the recipient, not to let more and more people be sperm donors."

However, some sperm banks, notably in California, have welcomed gay donors. The director of one of them, Alice Ruby of the Oakland-based Sperm Bank of California, said her staff had developed procedures for identifying gay men with an acceptably low risk of HIV.

Gay men are a major donor source at Traiman's Rainbow Flag sperm bank, and he said that practice would continue despite the new rules.

"We're going to continue to follow judicious, careful testing procedures for our clients that even experts within the FDA say is safe," said Traiman, referring to the six-month quarantine.

The FDA rules do not prohibit gay men from serving as "directed" sperm donors. If a woman wishing to become pregnant knows a gay man and asks that he provide sperm for artificial insemination, a clinic could provide that service even if the man had engaged in sex with other men within five years.

However, Traiman said some lesbian couples do not have a gay friend they know and trust well enough to be the biological father of their child, and would thus prefer an anonymous donor.

Dr. Deborah Cohan, an obstetrics and gynecology instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, said some lesbians prefer to receive sperm from a gay donor because they feel such a man would be more receptive to the concept of a family headed by a same-sex couple.

"This rule will make things legally more difficult for them," she said. "I can't think of a scientifically valid reason -- it has to be an issue of discrimination."

Boy Suspended After Talking To Mom In Iraq During Lunch Break

COLUMBUS, Ga. -- A high school junior has been suspended for the rest of the school year for refusing to end a cell phone call to his mother who is a soldier in Iraq.

Kevin Francois, a 17-year-old at Spencer High School in Columbus, was suspended for disorderly conduct Wednesday after a confrontation that began when he was told to give up his cell phone at lunch during the call, he said.

His mother, Sgt. 1st Class Monique Bates, left in January for a one-year tour and serves with the 203rd Forward Support Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division.

"This is our first time separated like this," said Francois, whose father was killed when he was 5 years old. Since her deployment overseas, Francois has been living with a guardian in Columbus.

Francois got the call from his mother at 12:30 p.m., which he said was his lunch break. He said he went outside the school building to get a better reception. A teacher who saw Francois on his phone told him to hang up. He refused.

According to the Muscogee County School District Board of Education's policy, students are allowed to have cell phones in school, but cannot use them during school hours.

"They're not supposed to use them for conversing back and forth during school because if they were allowed to do that, they could be text messaging each other for test questions," said Alfred Parham, assistant principal at Spencer.

Francois said he told the teacher, "This is my mom in Iraq. I'm not about to hang up on my mom."

Parham said the teen's suspension was based on his reaction when he was asked to give up the cell phone.

"Kevin got defiant and disorderly," Parham said. "When a kid becomes out of control like that they can either be arrested or suspended for 10 days. Now being that his mother is in Iraq, we're not trying to cause her any undue hardship; he was suspended for 10 days."

According to the Ledger-Enquirer, Francois said the teacher tried to take the phone, causing it to hang up. The paper said the student told them he then went with the teacher to the school's office to surrender his phone. His mother reportedly called again at 12:37 p.m. and left a message scolding her son about hanging up and telling him to answer the phone when she calls, the Ledger-Enquirer reported.

< Whowever could even CONCEIVE of MENTIONING that he be arrested, should be arrested. No wait, I meant to say shot. >

Virgin Mary Image Restored on Underpass

CHICAGO May 7, 2005 ? A stain on the wall of an expressway underpass that some believe resembles the Virgin Mary is again attracting visitors after two car wash employees cleaned graffiti and brown paint off the image.

Rosa Diaz and Anna Reczek used a degreaser to clean the wall Friday on their lunch break.

Onlookers said they again could see the Virgin Mary. The Illinois Department of Transportation has said the stain was likely the result of salt runoff on the emergency turnoff area under the Kennedy Expressway.

A man had scrawled the words "Big Lie" in shoe polish on the image Thursday night, and authorities charged Victor Gonzalez of Chicago with criminal damage to state-supported property, a misdemeanor.

Gonzalez, 37, told relatives he believed visitors were worshipping a graven image in violation of the Second Commandment, said Mandy Gonzalez, who identified herself as Gonzalez's niece.

On Friday, Chicago police directed transportation workers to paint over the image with brown paint for safety reasons.

Hundreds of people have flocked to the underpass since last month to see the image. Some leave devotional candles, take snapshots or kneel in prayer before the wall. Others approach the image, touch it and make the sign of the cross.

< We live in a world where people worship salt-runoff, and the people who oppose them are criminals. >

Computers Now Grading Students' Writing

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same sorts of flaws. So sociology professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off ? to a computer.
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Students in Brent's Introduction to Sociology course at the University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include and analyzes how well concepts are explained.

And within seconds, students have a score.

It used to be the students who looked for shortcuts, shopping for papers online or pilfering parts of an assignment with a simple Google search. Now, teachers and professors are realizing that they, too, can tap technology for a facet of academia long reserved for a teacher alone with a red pen.

Software now scores everything from routine assignments in high school English classes to an essay on the GMAT, the standardized test for business school admission. (The essay section just added to the Scholastic Aptitude Test for the college-bound is graded by humans).

Though Brent and his two teaching assistants still handle final papers ? and grades ? students are encouraged to use SAGrader for a better shot at an "A."

"I don't think we want to replace humans," Brent said. "But we want to do the fun stuff, the challenging stuff. And the computer can do the tedious but necessary stuff."

Developed with National Science Foundation funding, SAGrader is so far used only in Brent's classroom. Like other essay-grading software, it analyzes sentences and paragraphs, looking for keywords as well as the relationship between terms.

Other programs compare a student's paper with a database of already-scored papers, seeking to assign it a score based on what other similar-quality assignments have received.

Educational Testing Service sells Criterion, which includes the "e-Rater" used to score GMAT essays. Vantage Learning has IntelliMetric, Maplesoft sells Maple T.A., and numerous other programs are used on a smaller scale.

Most companies are private and offer no sales figures, but educators say use of such technology is growing.

Consider the reach of e-Rater: 400,000 GMAT test-takers annually, a half-million U.S. K-12 students and 46 international schools and districts. ETS says an additional 2,000 teachers begin using its technology each month.

But it's tough to tout a product that tinkers with something many educators believe only a human can do.

"That's the biggest obstacle for this technology," said Frank Catalano, a senior vice president for Pearson Assessments and Testing, whose Intelligent Essay Assessor is used in middle schools and the military alike. "It's not its accuracy. It's not its suitability. It's the believability that it can do the things it already can do."

South Dakota is one of several states that has tested essay-grading software. Officials there decided against using it widely, saying feedback was negative.

Not all districts had the same experience. Watertown, S.D., students are among those who now have their writing-assessment tests scored by computer.

Lesli Hanson, an assistant superintendent in Watertown, said students like taking the test by computer and teachers are relieved to end an annual ritual that kept two dozen people holed up for three days to score 1,500 tests.

"It almost got to be torture," she said.

Some 80 percent of Indiana's 60,000 11th-graders have their English assessment scored by computer, and another 10,000 ninth-graders are taking part in a trial in which computers assess some routine written assignments.

Stan Jones, Indiana's commissioner of higher education, said the technology isn't as good as a teacher but cuts turnaround time, trims costs and allows overworked teachers to give written assignments without fearing the workload.

"This (allows) them to require more essays, more writing, and have it graded very painlessly," Jones said.

Software can also remove a degree of subjectivity.

"It's fairly consistent. Different teachers grade different papers differently." ? Keith Kelly, 21, of Cleveland, one of Brent's sociology students.

The software is not flawless, even its most ardent supporters admit.

When the University of California at Davis tried out such technology a couple years back, lecturer Andy Jones decided to try to trick e-Rater.

Prompted to write on workplace injuries, Jones instead input a letter of recommendation, substituting "risk of personal injury" for the student's name.

"My thinking was, 'This is ridiculous, I'm sure it will get a zero,'" he said.

He got a five out of six.

A second time around, Jones scattered "chimpanzee" throughout the essay, guessing unusual words would yield him a higher score.

He got a six.

In Brent's class, sophomore Brady Didion submitted drafts of his papers numerous times to ensure his final version included everything the computer wanted.

"What you're learning, really, is how to cheat the program," he said.

Work to automate analysis of the written word dates back to the 1950s, when such technology was used largely to adjust the grade level of textbooks, said Henry Lieberman, a research scientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Before long, researchers aimed to use such applications to evaluate student writing.

SAGrader, like other programs, needs significant prep work by teachers. For each of the four papers Brent assigns during his semester-long course, he must essentially enter all the components he wants an assignment to include and take into account the hundreds of ways a student might say them.

Part of one assignment for Brent's class was for students to pick a crime and explain how it fit into sociologists' categories. Brent had to key in dozens of words in order to ensure all types of transgressions would be identified.

What a writer gets back is quite detailed.

A criminology paper resulted in a nuanced evaluation offering feedback such as this: "This paper does not do a good job of relating white-collar crime to various concepts in labeling theory of deviance."

Brent ? who earned a postdoctoral degree in artificial intelligence and is also an adjunct professor in the computer science department ? said the software may have limitations, but allows teachers to do things they weren't able to do before.

Before Brent wrote SAGrader, a part of his broader data-analysis program Qualrus, he only gave students multiple-choice tests.

"Now we can focus more," he said. "Are they making a good argument? Do they seem to understand? Are they being creative?"

Calif. advances bill on violent video games

California lawmakers have reconsidered and approved a bill in committee that would ban the sale of violent video games to minors.

The California Assembly's arts committee on Thursday passed the bill by Democratic Assembly Member Leland Yee on a 6-4 vote after taking it up for reconsideration.

The bill had failed to pass the committee on Tuesday when it fell a vote short of the necessary six votes. The bill now goes to the full Assembly. If approved, it would go the state Senate for review.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose Hollywood film career includes violent movies, has not taken a position on the bill, which allows for $1,000 fines for violators and requires violent video games to be labeled.

"For the same reason we don't allow kids to buy pornography, cigarettes, or alcohol, we shouldn't allow them to go to stores and buy video games that teach them to do the very things we put people in jail for--abusing women, joining street gangs, killing police officers, or even assassinating President Kennedy," said Yee, a child psychologist, referring to scenarios in some video games.

Game developers and console makers say laws restricting game sales are unnecessary because their industry is doing a good job stopping minors from buying "Mature"-rated games.

However, the $10 billion industry expects bills restricting game sales to pass this year in Illinois, Michigan and North Carolina.

Two federal appellate courts have already ruled such laws violate the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment.

< Let's review. Sex is as natural as eating, sleeping and breathing. Pornography is a reflection of the actual sex, or fantasies thereof, which occour in real people's lives and minds. Pornography is in no way unnatural, immoral, or bad. Cigarettes are bad but they're not as bad as marijuana which is banned outright. And like alcohol, they are only bad when overdone, like any vice. In places where alcohol is allowed for kids, particularly where it's a completely natural thing to have with your meals, it is not a problem. And videogames are an outlet. Life is fucked up, life makes you mad. Life makes you want to kill things because there's just no other way to get justice or revenge. Life is fucked up. Let's ban life. Let's keep kids from having to experience the daily pain of losing their innocence to have a chance of success in this world. Most of what you "kill" in videogames is aliens, zombies, corrupt people. ALL of what you kill is pixels. Yee needs to STFU. >

Rossi sues the MPAA

p2pnet.net News:- Michael Jay Rossi is back. And this time he?s suing the movie industry cartel.

That was his New Year?s resolution and he?s followed through by filing a writ with the US Supreme Court to review his case, Rossi vs Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), for the wrongful shutdown of his Website, http://www.InternetMovies.com in 2001.

The MPAA?s legal heavies had him pirating Lord of the Rings - Return of the King, basing their claims on ?information received? ? that?s to say they acted on data dredged up by 'Ranger' detection software which ?proved? Rossi had made Return of the King available for ?illegal download?.

So the MPAA has his site shut down under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act ) for alleged piracy and copyright violation.

The trouble was, as incredible as it may seem, all this happened nine months before the first in the Ring series had even been completed.

The MPAA in effect says even though it was wrong, it was acting in good faith so it was OK to shut Rossi down.

Rossi, however, is arguing, ?The Ninth Circuit Court's subjective interpretation of good faith belief stated in the DMCA is unconstitutional, allowing copyright holders to abuse people's rights without conducting proper investigation on alleged violations."

In the Ninth Circuit ruling, Judge Johnnie B. Rawlinson also states, "The record reflects that the MPAA's actions were certainly not beyond all bounds of decency in communicating with Rossi and Rossi's ISP,? says Rossi.

And his question to the Supreme Court now is, "How can the MPAA's communication that I was distributing a movie from 3 years in the future not be beyond all bounds of decency in communicating with me and my ISP?" Rossi believes, "The Ninth Circuit had to have overlooked my attorneys opening brief, which pointed out my alleged time travel abilities!"

"My fear,? he says, ?is that if the Ninth Circuit court's ruling that the DMCA Good Faith standard is subjective is not overturned, is that copyright owners will continue to abuse the law unjustly shutting down online publications like mine giving them an unfair advantage in the marketplace and abridging free speech. Also in danger is the right given by the Fifth Amendment to due process in cases of lost life, liberty or property. The freedom to defend oneself is being curtailed by the 'shoot now, ask later' style of shutting people down when offenses may not be occurring. Any industry or person should not have the power to curb the rights of another under the protection of the DMCA's subjective interpretation of good faith belief."

Illicit downloading is now tantamount to domestic terrorism

Interesting battle lines were drawn with the family entertainment and copyright bill, 2005, signed into law by President Bush last week. American drafters habitually smuggle in tough regulation under the skirts of something beguilingly innocent. On the face of it, the "Family Movie Act" (which the new measure incorporates) is all motherhood and apple pie.

Specifically, the act opens the way for companies like ClearPlay legally to sell their product. The firm operates out of Utah (the most straitlaced state in the union). You get a DVD, from Blockbusters or wherever, and ClearPlay's little black box, sitting like a benign leech on your DVD player, sucks out "objectionable" material of a violent or sexual nature.

Fourteen levels of filter are available. Teams of "movie professionals" have pre-identified questionable scenes and dialogue which are duly muted or skipped. ClearPlay monitors all the latest releases and most in-stock titles. The black box can be fitted, like a chastity belt, on junior's bedroom TV. It can be programmed to peremptorily block anything certified PG13 or harder. The package costs a mere $80 a year.

There was anxiety that the bill might open the way to ad-skipping - something that Congress (at the behest of commercial lobbyists) dislikes. The last thing lawmakers want is to keep the honest salesman from getting his foot in the door.

That settled, the act was passed with acclaim. What congressman was going to oppose family values? ClearPlay's stock soared. Senator Orrin G Hatch (Republican, Utah), the moral dinosaur who had introduced the measure, hailed it as a mighty "shield" for the American home. The Brady Bunch could sit down of a night and watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mysteriously, of course, the movie might only last half an hour - but, early to bed, early to rise.

Hatch noted in passing that there were, attached to his family bill, some piddling "intellectual property" provisions relating to "rampant piracy" from the internet. In fact, tagged-on clauses now make illicit downloading and file-sharing tantamount to domestic terrorism.

It is now a federal crime to use a video camera to record films in cinemas, punishable by up to three years in prison for the first offence. It is 10 years for sharing a movie or a song prior to its commercial release. These draconian penalties were clearly the result of lobbying by the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America. Without the smokescreen of family protection, such excessive penalties would never have passed into law - at least not without opposition.

One breach in the copyright dam is staunched. Another, even more gaping, opens up.

Technological advances in music-delivery systems have developed at bewildering speed over the last five years: from Walkman, through MiniDisc player, to iPod. Apple's device is itself increasing in power by 20 gigabytes a year. The latest models can hold nigh on 10,000 tracks: all instantly retrieved, shuffled, and playlisted.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Where can you get a thousand albums' worth of music to fill the iPod's vast archival capacity? Commercial downloading will cost five grand. And there is all that time and hassle involved in the loading procedure.

Students simply swap archives. One loaded Apple laptop in a college dorm will stock any number of iPods in neighbouring bedrooms. Crossloading of this kind, without charge, is, I think, not illegal. But it is not merely the latest hits one wants. Nor does one want someone else's preferences. I am fond of 1950s jazz. My iPod could contain the whole of the Vogue, Blue Note, Vanguard, and Verve catalogues. But where would I find those gems? Not in a student dorm.

Three solutions are emerging. Last month www.jayci.com launched its range of "pre-populated" Super iPods. Jayci will preload music of your choice at $1.29 a track. Alternatively, they'll customise your iPod with a package of 100 tracks in some preferred style (blues, classical or whatever) for $119. The Jayci concierge service is convenient but pricey.

For the more freebootingly inclined, pre-owned and pre-populated iPods are appearing on eBay. How long before "faux" pre-owned iPods appear, artfully customised for a whole spectrum of tastes, at budget prices? Not long. Nor will it be long before the lawmakers realise that copyright is being massively evaded. Before the legal chopper comes down, perhaps I'll get my 50s jazz archive. Any help in that direction appreciated.

< Censorship, destroying artistic integrity, and criminalizing hundreds of thousands of their own constituants. Remember, the government is on your side. >