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December 20, 2006
No Fly Zone for Darfur
It's no match for boots on the ground, but it's something.
U.K.'s Blair would support Darfur no-fly zone
LONDON, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Britain's Tony Blair would support a no-fly zone in Sudan's Darfur region as part of a U.N.-sanctioned "Plan B" to halt the violence, an aide said on Wednesday, as the U.S. also mulled options to ease the crisis.Blair's spokesman quoted the prime minister as saying during a visit to Washington last week that the option of a no-fly zone in Darfur should be considered as part of possible sanctions against Sudan's government if it did not agree to a U.N. peace plan.
"If, in the next weeks and next couple of months or so the Sudanese government are not prepared to agree to the U.N. plan, then we've got to move to sanctions and we've got to move to tougher action," he quoted Blair as saying.
"I think we should certainly consider the option of a no-fly zone to help people in Darfur, because it's a very, very serious situation and it's now spilling into other countries next door."
Of course, the US is less specific. Defenders of freedom and all:
The United States is also growing increasingly frustrated with Sudan's refusal to accept an international force in Darfur and U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said while diplomacy was the focus, other options were being explored."The (U.S.) president's going to consider what options he thinks are necessary in order to address the grave situation there," McCormack told reporters.
Another State Department official said while a no-fly zone was an option, the focus would likely be on economic sanctions, travel bans on Sudanese officials and other measures.
"There are a lot of ideas floating around out there," said the official, who asked not to be named.
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December 19, 2006
Is it just me or is something very wrong
With this sentence: "Trump to announce fate of Miss USA"
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December 18, 2006
Copyright Tool Will Scan Web For Violations
When I saw this article I knew I had to post it online:
To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and other content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon Valley executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for unauthorized uses.Privately held Attributor Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., has begun testing a system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients' audio, video, images and text -- potentially making it easier for owners to request that Web sites take content down or provide payment for its use.
The start-up, which was founded last year and has been in "stealth" mode, is emerging into the public eye today, at a time when some media and entertainment companies' frustration with difficulties identifying infringing uses of their content online is increasing. The problem has intensified with the proliferation and increasing usage of sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube, which lets consumers post video clips.
Media and entertainment companies have so far relied on a combination of technology and their own scanning to protect their content online -- but with mixed results. Media companies have used digital-rights management technology designed to make it hard to copy or transfer files. But such measures have often proved to be clumsy, despised by consumers or quickly thwarted. That's the case for DRM technology built into DVDs to prevent them from being ripped onto computers, for example. Entertainment and media companies have also relied on their own staff to scan Web sites for infringing content. But even when such content is spotted and taken down, the companies often see the content pop up in the same places or elsewhere soon after.
"We all know that as soon as somebody comes up with a way to secure a piece of property, somebody else will come within days and crack it," says Lawrence Iser, a partner at law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert in Santa Monica, Calif., who represents musical artists and other entertainment industry clients.
Though its service isn't out yet, Attributor appears to go further than existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online. While companies are tackling parts of the same problem -- Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd., based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that analyzes a Web page and then uses Google's search engine to see whether the text is duplicated elsewhere on the Web -- Attributor's approach is seemingly more comprehensive.
Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.
"If it works, it's a fantastic invention," Mr. Iser says.
It's unclear whether such a service will be welcomed by Internet companies that allow users to post content. YouTube, News Corp.'s MySpace and others already face copyright lawsuits. In some cases, they're building systems to identify pirated materials consumers upload to their sites, and say they're open to sharing revenue with content owners.
Attributor plans to announce today that it has received about $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.
Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as "digital fingerprinting," which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.
The content owners can then try to negotiate revenue from whoever is using it or request that it be taken down. In some cases, they may decide the content is being used fairly or to acceptable promotional ends. Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to specify how.
Company executives believe its system will provide transparency and accountability to encourage more owners to put their content online with confidence they'll be able to police its use, and share in any profits.
"We believe that we can provide an infrastructure that will support all kinds of outcomes and remedies, which will align the interests of content owners, content hosts and search engines around legitimate syndication and monetization," says Mr. Brock, Attributor's chief executive.
"We see this as a way to take us out of the course we've been on, which is more litigation," says Mr. Pitkow, who is chief technology officer.
Attributor has begun testing the system, and won't release it officially until the first quarter of next year. The co-founders' track records, however, lend credibility to their claims. As Yahoo's first outside counsel, Mr. Brock tackled Internet copyright issues for the Internet company as far back as 1994 and later oversaw some of its core businesses as a senior vice president. Mr. Pitkow is a computer science Ph.D. who worked at Xerox's legendary PARC research facility. In 2001, he helped to sell the intellectual property of Outride Inc., where he was president and chairman, to Google. Last year, he sold Moreover Technologies, where he was CEO and chairman, to VeriSign.
"They're real guys who have solved hard-core problems," says Ali Aydar, chief operating officer of Snocap Inc., a digital-music registry start-up. Snocap and Attributor share a backer in Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway. "Content owners I've talked to outside of the music business would love a system which tells them where their content is being utilized," Mr. Aydar adds.
Attributor executives decline to say how frequently they will update their Web index, a key factor in their ability to stay on top of postings. They also say they won't at least initially monitor peer-to-peer file swapping systems, where large amounts of pirated music, movies, TV shows and software are traded.
Posted by Mike at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 12, 2006
Health insurance costs top median income
$44,000 is higher than the median national income!
Real median household income remained unchanged between 2002 and 2003 at $43,318, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the same time, the nation’s official poverty rate rose from 12.1 percent in 2002 to 12.5 percent in 2003. The number of people with health insurance increased by 1.0 million to 243.3 million between 2002 and 2003, and the number without such coverage rose by 1.4 million to 45.0 million. The percentage of the nation’s population without coverage grew from 15.2 percent in 2002 to 15.6 percent in 2003.
$44,000 a year for health insurance?
By Julie Appleby, USA TODAYWed Dec 6, 6:59 AM ET
Hundreds of entertainment industry workers in California and New Jersey who buy health insurance as a group are being hit with a rate increase that will raise some family-plan premiums to more than $44,000 a year.
Insurer Cigna will raise rates for members of the group, which includes some in the Screen Actors Guild, an average of 82% in California and 65% in New Jersey next year.Under the new rates, the most expensive plan in California will cost a family $3,685 a month, $44,220 a year. Less-expensive HMO plans will cost families $24,624. In New Jersey, an HMO will cost $10,260 a year for a single person and $30,372 for a family.
The rates illustrate the tremendous range of price increases that can hit a business, association or individual, even when the average national premium increase is just over 6%.
"Sadly, this happens to medium-sized businesses all the time, but they don't make the news," says Peter Lee, head of the Pacific Business Group on Health, a coalition of large employers.
Affected by the Cigna rate increase are about 1,100 members of 30 different guilds and associations who buy insurance through the Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust, a Clifton Park, N.Y.-based multiple-employer insurance broker. The trust offers the group insurance policies to association members, a mix of small businesses and sole proprietors.
"It seems very clear that the aim of such a large increase is not to get more money out of us, but to eliminate us," says Steve Rosen in Los Angeles, whose wife, Victoria, gets coverage through the program.
Cigna spokeswoman Gwyn Dilday says the insurer recently discovered it had been charging the group incorrectly for the past 10 years. She says the rate increase is needed because the group's costs are double that of similar-size groups, and Cigna has lost money on it during the past few years.
"These rates that we're offering are market competitive," Dilday says.
Health insurers are generally free to set prices as high as the market allows, although most states limit increases for policies covering small groups, those of two to 50 people. There are no limits for larger groups.
"This shows there are inadequate mechanisms in place around the country to review rate increases and protect the public from extreme rate increases," says Drew Altman, head of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan research group. The average cost nationally for a family plan offered by employers was $11,480 this year, the foundation says.
State regulators concluded that the trust members do not qualify under the state's small-group rules, says Denise Schmidt, spokeswoman for the California Department of Managed Health Care. Nor does the increase appear aimed solely at causing members to terminate their policies, she says.
"In looking at those rates, they don't appear to be outside the norm, given the average age of the group, the (generous) benefit structure and the group's claims history," Schmidt says.
David Rubin, who along with his wife, Alice, oversees the trust, says many members won't be able to afford the policies. "We are getting people who are dropping out, and we're getting people who are telling me they wish they could drop out but know they cannot get (other) insurance," Rubin says.
Siri Feeney, a children's textbook artist in Ventura, Calif., says her $425-a-month rate is set to nearly double: "This is really hard for me. Some years, I only make that much a month."
Posted by Mike at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 06, 2006
Braveheart it's not
When they trailer has no dialogue, that's usually not a good sign.
Maya say Gibson movie portrays them as savages
GUATEMALA CITY - Much like his bloody epic about the death of Christ, a new Mel Gibson production about the collapse of the Mayan civilization is angering members of the culture it depicts even before it hits the screen.
The "Passion of Christ" was accused by some of being anti-Semitic -- long before Gibson's career-damaging outbursts against a Jewish policeman in Malibu this year.Now indigenous activists in Guatemala, once home to a large part of the Mayan empire that built elaborate jungle cities in southern Mexico and northern Central America centuries ago, say his film "Apocalypto" is racist.
Gibson's representatives were not immediately available for comment.
Only trailers for "Apocalypto," which will be released on Friday, have been shown in Guatemala, but leaders say scenes of scary-looking Mayans with bone piercings and scarred faces hurling spears and sacrificing humans promote stereotypes about their culture.
"Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue," said Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture.
At their height, the Maya built monumental cities in the Peten region of Guatemala, but the civilization went into decline after the 8th century, some say because of overuse of natural resources.
The culture is not thought to have been as blood-thirsty as the neighboring Aztec empire, but some archeologists say human sacrifice was common in the final years before the Spanish conquest.
More than half of Guatemala's population is descended from the original Maya. They face frequent discrimination and most live in poverty with little access to education and social services.
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