WASHINGTON – At the adult entertainment industry’s equivalent of the Oscars in Las Vegas this month, comedian-host Greg Fitzsimmons zeroed in on the entrenched relationship between the Internet and pornography. “The Internet was completely funded by porn,” he said from the stage of the 23rd annual AVN Awards show. And if it wasn’t for the Internet, he added, “you guys would be completely out of business.” The audience, packed with porn actors and adult entertainment moguls like Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt, roared with laughter. This week, the Justice Department said it subpoenaed four major Internet companies in an effort to crack down on children’s access to porn. The government asked Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to turn over every query typed into its popular search engine over the course of one week. Google has said it will resist the demand. The standoff has resonated in the online world not only because of its privacy implications, but because it goes to the heart of what has spurred the Internet to such prodigious growth. Online pornography, a $2.5 billion business and growing rapidly, pioneered such now-commonplace practices as streaming video, trading files and making online purchases. By comparison, sales […]
Convergence is back, but it is not what it used to be. Following its release after about five years in the halfway house for overblown business ideas, it has been swiftly rehabilitated in the form of various online-offline business ventures. This time around, though, some fairly radical wrinkles on the theme are in the works. One notable example is Google’s deal last week to acquire dMarc Broadcasting for up to $1.24 billion. DMarc uses software to help place ads on radio, and it could conceivably do the same for Google’s armada of Web ads. The deal, along with other experiments by Google to reproduce its advertisers’ notices in newspapers and other print outlets, suggests that Convergence 2.0 is moving in interesting and previously undeveloped directions. Here are two more: What would it mean if TV shows viewed or downloaded over the Internet could be watched only by people in certain geographic areas, mimicking the network affiliate model of over-the-air television? And what if it were as easy and inexpensive for local pizza parlors to buy cable television spots as it is for them to put ads on the Internet through portals like Google and Yahoo? The […]
JERUSALEM — At least two dozen Israelis were wounded Thursday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives he was carrying in a commercial section of Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. Israeli officials said only the 22-year-old bomber died in the blast, which occurred just before 4 p.m. local time inside a restaurant popular with immigrant workers near the city’s old bus station. Israeli police said only a portion of the bomber’s explosives detonated, likely sparing lives. The radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad asserted responsibility for the bombing in a video tape released to media outlets soon after the attack, the first in Tel Aviv since February of last year. “Suddenly we heard a loud boom and I ran over and saw bodies everywhere on the floor,” said Shlomo Alayeb, 46, who sells cigarettes and newspapers from a nearby kiosk. Alayeb, who was playing backgammon at the time of the blast, said the bomber detonated himself near the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant, whose name roughly translates to Mayor Shawarma. At the front, the counter displaying salads and the rotating lamb skewer remained intact. “His body was split in two and all of his inside […]
The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying ‘intelligent design’ is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion. The article in Tuesday’s editions of L’Osservatore Romano was the latest in a series of interventions by Vatican officials – including the pope – on the issue that has dominated headlines in the United States. The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution ‘represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.’ He lamented that certain American ‘creationists’ had brought the debate back to the ‘dogmatic’ 1800s, and said their arguments weren’t science but ideology. ‘This isn’t how science is done,’ he wrote. ‘If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.’ Intelligent design ‘doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified,’ he wrote. […]
NEW YORK – While the national abortion debate is now focused on the Supreme Court, both sides expect crucial battles to unfold this year on the state level. Lawmakers in two states are proposing broad abortion bans they hope will eventually win approval from a reconfigured, more conservative high court. Legislators elsewhere are seeking to tighten a range of abortion restrictions; one leading liberal advocacy group gave 19 states a failing grade on reproductive rights in a national status report issued Wednesday. It’s a picking away at our freedom and privacy, legislature by legislature, law by law, with the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Among the states getting F’s in NARAL’s report are Indiana and Ohio, where conservative lawmakers are introducing bills to ban abortion outright. They hope their measures become law and then face legal challenges that lead to a Supreme Court reconsideration of the 1973 Roe ruling that established abortion rights nationwide. It is time to return the abortion issue to the states, said Mark Harrington, executive director of the Center for Bio Ethical Reform Midwest and a supporter of the proposed Ohio ban. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
