Report: Gaither has movement in arms, legs

By Scevenson

(NECN: Foxborough, Mass.) - Baltimore Ravens left tackle Jared Gaither was taken off the field on a stretcher during Sunday's game against the New England Patriots.

Gaither, 6-foot-9 and 330 pounds, was injured after a freak collision in the backfield, in which quarterback Joe Flacco was driven into the helmet of Gaither by defensive end Ty Warren. Both Ravens went down to the ground, but Flacco quickly returned to his feet.

CBS Sports play-by-play man Jim Nantz said just before halftime of the broadcast that Gaither was being brought to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He also said that Gaither had movement in all of his extremities.

Material from The Associated Press used in this report.
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letterman issue

By Scevenson

“Do you feel like a little story?” David Letterman asked the studio audience last night. He was sitting at his desk. He’d already done his monologue, which included a joking aside about “takin’ a ride on the Appalachian trail.”

And then for ten minutes, he told the story that had broken only a couple of hours before: that he’d been the object of an extortion attempt, and that “I have had sex with women who work on the show.” But before he said that he put it in the context of an odd, often humorously phrased anecdote, almost a folksy shaggy-dog story.


He told us about the “little package in the back of my car” that he found, which contained a threat from a man who wrote that he knew “some terrible, terrible things” about Letterman. The audience laughed heartily. He said “the guy said [he was] going to write a screenplay about me,” and that Dave’s first thought was, “that’s a little hinky” — “hinky” being a favorite bit of Letterman-language for odd things. The demand was for two million dollars.

He said it was a “terrifying moment,” “quite scary,” and that “I felt menaced.” He said he decided to take the threat to the authorities and “I had to tell them all the creepy things I had done.” Again, he got laughs from this.

“Now of course we get to, what was all the creepy stuff?… The creepy stuff was, I have had sex with women who work on the show.” There was silence mingled with gasps — for the first time, no laughs then. “My answer to that was, yes, I have.” He got applause and laughter from this, but it seemed a bit more nervous. “Would [this news] prove embarrassing?” he asked rhetorically. “Yes it would — especially for the women.” And the audience laughed quite loudly.

Here’s the thing about that reaction: If you’ve ever been in a studio audience before, you know you’re almost hypnotized into giddy good humor. You’ve been standing on a line for hours, you’ve had a warm-up guy come out and joke and tell you what to expect (Letterman usually comes out and does his own warm-up bit, to the best of my knowledge). And we no longer live in a culture where, upon hearing something disturbing, people feel comfortable saying (not shouting), “For shame!” or quietly walking out. In any case, I’m sure everyone was just pretty stunned, and that some of the laughter was of the nervous sort.

In a sense, Letterman had a captive audience with which to frame his admission. But that said, this was an extraordinary piece of television. He took what could be a damaging scandal, a tale of blackmail and workplace relationships, and turned it into a story that was at least in part about what he termed his “towering, Midwestern mass of guilt.”

Letterman even managed to get in a few more mild jokes about it. “I know what you’re sayin’: ‘Oh, Dave had sex!’” — a reference to his age (62). And though he said he would not have more to say about it, when he came back from a commercial, he said he’d taken questions from the audience during the break and “a guy said, ‘I’d like to see that movie.’” More laughs. On with the show.

This is going to play out in ways that you or I or Letterman cannot predict. There are going to be a lot of talks about consensual versus coerced sexual relationships, about Letterman’s history of making jokes about straying politicians. We’ll hear debates and conjectures about his long-term relationship and marriage since March to Regina Lasko, the mother of his son, Harry. Letterman will be mocked and he’ll be defended.

As it stands right now, though, what Letterman did last night was a striking, unique, and — for all the laughter it provoked — dramatic example of how a celebrity deals with both a threat and a scandal.

by Ken Tucker

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What the Google Phone Needs to Beat the iPhone

By Scevenson
Although rumors of a possible Google Phone have been making the rounds really hard lately, any such phone will have to be amazing to grab enough end-user and media attention. Expectations are high, but since we're dreaming, here's our wishlist:Tight integration with Google Apps:• Picasa: A 2MP camera with decent color and low light performance should take a shot, and upload it directly to your Picasa web storage as a mirror. Likewise for YouTube uploads.• Google Talk: Both IM and VoIP makes this a fancy web communicator. The carriers may not like this, but we've got a feeling Google will sell this sans carrier. Oh, and other IM client support.• Google Video and YouTube: To at least match the iPhone, they have to have their video sites ready for mobile usage. Uploading• Google Earth: Google Earth for 3D maps, with GPS and app integration.• Google Docs support with full read like the ones for iPhones, Windows Mobiles and BlackBerries, but real with full editing right on the phone, and support for multiuser editing.• Google reader for RSS.• Product Search, including camera phone barcode reading for quick price comparisons.• Google Transit, Google Ride finder (taxis, limos and shuttles) integrated into maps.• Third-party Support: Allow an open platform for other people to develop for. Even a company as big as Goog can't do everything by itself, and with niche apps developed by end-users, you can service minor target segments that wouldn't otherwise be cost-effective for you to cover.• Those apps should be native, or at least widgetized for performance reasons. Native apps just run faster. We don't mean Java apps either, because those are even worse in terms of battery usage.• This thing is going to be a data transfer hog while it swaps info with all Google's online services. A 3G connection that toggles on for heavy downloads and uploads, but reverts to Wi-Fi or 2G for background email checking, etc. (To save battery.)• Push GMail and exchange server support.• A music player that doesn't suck: It's not going to be an iPod, but it's gotta have something in terms of media features that can top Windows Mobile phones. Try Rhapsody support. Stay away from WMPlayer as a load program, please.• Search from the home screen: Bring Google's search-centric features to your phone, letting you search contacts, the web, your emails, and every other bit of data right from your home screen, much like the Helio Ocean does.• Hardware Keyboard: The iPhone's virtual keyboard is passable, but we still love the solid feel of a key clicking. Our favorite is HTC's slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which is great because HTC is the rumored contractor for the Google Phone's hardware.• Touchscreen: Since it's probably going to be an HTC-made phone, a 3-inch touchscreen on par with Windows Mobile phones is the least they can do. While it would be nice to have multi-touch gestures, it's not completely necessary.• Long Battery life: We don't mind sacrificing some portability for a battery that can last an entire day, even with heavy screen and 3G usage. Nokia's are known for optimizing battery life without sacrificing too many features, but the Google apps may be too processor intensive—especially when combined with 3G.• Form-factor: We love the slide-out form factor that HTC usually uses, which gives us a spacious keyboard as well as a big screen on top. A Treo-like shape with keys on the front wouldn't be too bad either, but would sacrifice screen space.Funny thing is, Helio's Ocean and Nokia's N series phones do a lot of this. The UI needs to be slicker than what either of those companies have done so far, though. (Maybe they should hire some ex-Apple software people.) Anyhow, we don't even know if this phone is real, for certain, so I'm not sweating it.

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Why Hard Drives are Here to Stay, and SDD is just a FLASH in the Pan

By Scevenson
Sure, they’re taking place on a subatomic level that just won the Nobel Prize for physics. But overlooked innovations in hard-drive capacity, as PM’s senior tech editor sermonizes in his trend column, aren’t just letting you record TV shows and save massive amounts of music. They’re pushing us into a new era of computing. Reports of the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded for Giant Magnetoresistance dumbed down the science to the foundations of the iPod. But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics.For the record, Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) is not a band of 15-ft.-tall mutants who have joined together to save the world from a diabolical villain with the power to influence metal. But you could be forgiven for thinking so, since the term is about as arcane as any that the dual disciplines of physics and computer science have produced. Despite its gargantuan-sounding proportions, the GMR principle is all about the infinitesimally small bits of information squeezed onto hard drives—and how to read them.Most people in the geekosphere are familiar with Moore’s Law, which observes that the number of transistors on a CPU will double every two years, but not everyone has heard of the corresponding law in the field of data storage. Named Kryder’s Law, after Carnegie Mellon professor Mark Kryder, it predicts regular exponential growth in hard-drive capacity Since the introduction of the hard drive in 1956, when the 1-ton IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) included 5MB of storage, drives have experienced a 50-million-fold increase in capacity. In the early 90s, desktop drives started surging into the 1GB range, and now drives max out at around 1TB (terabyte). On Monday, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers, who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots.Unfair, I say! Hard drives are the most underappreciated technology in the world of computing. It takes some pretty sophisticated tricks at the microscopic—and even the subatomic—level to pack all those bits onto the spinning platters that hold everything from our music collections to pictures to PowerPoint presentations. Every time it seems that those disks are carrying as much information as is allowed by the laws of physics, engineers find a fascinating new method to squeeze out more capacity. In 2005, when the horizontally aligned bits on high-capacity drives were becoming crowded, Toshiba (followed by pretty much every drive manufacturer) upended the bits to a perpendicular orientation to the surface of the platter, aligning them like standing dominoes to squeeze in more per square inch.Hitachi’s announcement about drive heads was a good deal more esoteric than that: Hard-drive engineers have essentially found a way to redesign and shrink the read/write head (the official name for the technology is "Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistive," or CPP-GMR, drive heads) to allow for smaller perpendicular bits. And the GMR effect is not new. In fact, this year’s Nobel Prize for physics went to France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Grunberg, whose research into GMR in the late 1980s brought about the first real-world application of nanotechnology.In short, GMR is a quantum-level effect that allows hard-drive manufacturers to use magnetic fields to exploit the subatomic spin of particles. The discovery of GMR launched an entirely new field of applied physics known as spin-based electronics, or "spintronics." Given the complexity and difficulty of the subject, I imagine the reason Hitachi GST is making announcements about technologies two to four years down the pipeline is to piggyback on the Nobel and take advantage of the only public attention that GMR is ever likely to get.But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics. Over the past few years, CPUs from Intel and AMD have rolled into the world of gigahertz calculations and split into multiple cores. Consequently, computer users are now buying PCs with awesome processing power that doesn’t always translate into improved real-world performance in tasks such as surfing the Internet, looking at pictures and playing music and movies. But the advent of 100-plus-gigabyte computers has had a huge effect on the way we use our machines, moving them into the realm of entertainment devices, swallowing huge quantities of music, movies and family videos and photos.Whenever people come to me looking for guidance on purchasing a new computer, my advice is this: Buy as much processor as you think you need, but be sure to buy more hard drive than you’d ever imagine. That’s because once you get into consuming and producing music and video, you’ll start to see those gigabytes fill up awfully quick. Plus, it doesn’t cost much to overestimate—going from a 320GB drive to a 500GB drive on a standard Dell desktop computer only adds about $80. And modern operating systems and software are veritable hard-drive hogs—a Microsoft Windows Vista install requires 15GB of free disk space.Still, despite their massive capacities and apparently unlimited room for improvement, there is reason to question the future relevance of our spinning platter workhorses in home PCs. On the bottom end, flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are chasing HDDs up the capacity ladder—current SSDs have capacities of up to 128GB. On the top end, online storage providers will start to seem like reasonable alternatives as offerings approach infinite capacity and super-high-bandwidth fiberoptic connections to the home become the norm. Meanwhile, if our Breakthrough Award-winning $99 Zonbu laptop is any indication, we may be on the verge of a new era of slim-client computing.Nevertheless, hard-disk drives have maintained their primacy in the PC thus far because they have routinely kept pace with computer users’ needs and they are relatively cheap solutions for storing tons of data. Current 1TB drives sell for less than $350 and can hold up to 200 DVD-quality movies (far more if you compress them). And as we step gingerly into the world of downloading hi-def, that sort of localized capacity will become even more important.So even though the rest of the world may not get too excited about the soldierly progress of the hard-disk drive, I’m willing to give it a column’s-worth of respect. Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistance may seem like a hopelessly impenetrable piece of computer science (except to the people who hand out Nobel Prizes), but it’s advances like this that are enabling our DVRs to record Heroes for us while we’re out with friends, and that allow a computer to act as the repository for a collection of music and movies. Because there’s no such thing as too much room for your stuff.

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BitLet Bookmarklet: Directly Download Torrents in your Browser

By Scevenson
BitLet, the web-based BitTorrent client recently added a bookmarklet. This new feature makes it possible to download .torrent files in your browser, without navigating away from the torrent site. The bookmarklet works on The Pirate Bay, mininova, Demonoid and all other sites that use the .torrent extension.

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PS3 price cut in UK has led to a 178% sales increase!

By Scevenson
PlayStation 3 hardware sales jumped 178 per cent last week with the introduction of two new SKUs, helping the system record its third highest week since launch in the UK.Supplied data reveals that although Sony's console enjoyed a considerable sales boost, Nintendo's DS was still the best-selling hardware system in the UK, followed by the Wii and then the PS3, with the Xbox 360 behind its home console rival.Two new PS3 models were introduced to market last Wednesday. A 40GB model with less functions has gone on sale for GBP 299, and the 60GB model has been reduced to GBP 349, bundled with two free first-party games.PS3 software has also enjoyed a resurgence, with Resistance: Fall of Man climbing the all-formats charts from 22 to eight, Heavenly Sword re-entering the top 40 at number 14, MotorStorm moving from 22 to 18, and Formula 1: Championship Edition also back in the official charts at number 24.by gamesindustry.biz

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Fearless Digital Pirates Don’t Care About Lawsuits

By Scevenson

The year 2005 saw the first person sentenced to prison for sharing a movie. In 2007, the possibility of being fined huge amounts became a reality as a music sharer snared by the RIAA picks up a $222,000 bill. So presumably file-sharers are in hiding? Hardly. This fearless internet breed never stops sharing.

Once it became clear that the ‘Grokster Decision’ was actually a win for file-sharing and not the golden bullet against sharers that the industry had hoped for, it became increasingly clear - sharing was simply not going to go away. Today, if one visits the Grokster site, you’re greeted by this message:

Apart from the fact that I am anonymous (the IP is owned by the anonymous Relakks service), this message is typical of the type of useless scare tactics employed by the industry. Time and again the message is “Don’t think you can’t get caught” and “You are not anonymous” or “You can click but you can’t hide”

Millions upon millions of file sharers are responding to these slogans, not with words, but with actions. They ARE clicking and the vast majority simply don’t care about hiding. It’s true that when you use a standard connection on the internet you aren’t anonymous and of course, it’s certainly possible to ‘get caught’. However, as ever more serious headline-grabbing events come and go, file-sharers are getting wise and making their own risk assessments, probably based on: “I’m clicking every day, they never find me. Or any of my friends. Or their friends.”

When Scott McCausland and a handful of other people went to jail for uploading a pre-release movie in 2005, the industry put out the message: You will go to jail for sharing. Well, it’s 2007 now and surprise, surprise - no one else did. It was a special case, it doesn’t apply to 99.99% of file-sharers and it’s useless in the battle against them.

Today in 2007, we hear about Jammie Thomas, the most famous of the 26,000 recipients of legal action at the hands of the RIAA. Sure, she really got hammered with that huge fine and it will deter some from sharing, but the overwhelming majority either haven’t heard about the case or don’t think they’ll be caught - and they could be forgiven for thinking that.

Even if we super over-compensate and say that 100,000 people worldwide had legal action taken against them (it’s nowhere near), this number pales into insignificance when put alongside the conservative estimate of 100 million worldwide file-sharers. Furthermore, take away the legal actions in the United States and the chances of being ‘caught’ edge ever closer to zero. The odds of being ‘caught’ in the rest of the world aren’t quite zero but they’re substantially slimmer than in the States.

Whatever the reality, it’s the perception that really matters and the perception among file-sharers is that while they’re downloading the latest blockbuster movies or millions of TV shows every single week, the chances of being ‘caught’ are close to zero. Therefore the chances of paying a ‘fine’ are close to zero and the chance of going to jail, closer still.

So maybe digital pirates aren’t fearless, brave or even reckless. Maybe they just like to gamble when the odds are hugely - massively - tipped in their favor.

By TorrentFreak

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