The Science Of Star Wars

For 30 years, moviegoers have thrilled to the sight of space-going swashbucklers slashing at each other with laser swords as they rocket from star to star.

The last movie in George Lucas' epic Star Wars series may have come and gone, yet the franchise lives on in books and games, and soon on television. But could any exploits of these warriors of a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away have actually happened? Are the fantastical sights--the speeding spaceships, the chattering robots, lightsabers in every imaginable color--even physically possible?

It's not as silly as it sounds. Science fiction has always played a role as a diviner of future trends. Sci-fi writers of the 1930s described moonshots and nuclear bombs, and Arthur C. Clarke was famously the first to conjure up the communications satellite. With the exception of warp drive and transporters, a lot of the technology in the 1960s Star Trek now looks antiquated. (Why, after all, is that guy with the pointy ears carrying such a clunky cellphone?)

Star Wars is, of course, a mishmash of B-movie and sci-fi conventions: laser pistols, hyperdrive ships and funny little men. But could it too, have some prophetic power? Forbes.com contacted scientists to find out.

The Dangers of Internet Drugs

hose pills offered via spam mail in your inbox each day? Don't buy them.

"Regulators and drug industry executives are pulling their hair out trying to stem a rising tide of fake or low-quality medicines being sold online," we wrote two years ago. "A Web site based in Canada may get its products from India or China, or may traffic in counterfeits."

At the time, Pfizer executive Jeff Kindler -- now the drug giant's chief executive -- complained that it was impossible to track where these medicines came from. "All you get is a plain brown envelope," he said.

The problem seems to be getting worse. China just executed its former head drug regulator for taking bribes in a crackdown on fake medicines. Tainted batches of pet food and toothpaste of Chinese origin are a reminder of how easy it is for poisonous products to make their way stateside.

Now, a death has been linked to poison pills from an online pharmacy, according to the Globe and Mail. Marcia Bergeron, 58, of Vancouver Island, Canada, bought drugs containing the active ingredients in Ambien, Xanax, and Tylenol. But the medicines also contained high levels of metals that built up in her system and caused an arrythmia that killed her.

Bergeron reportedly ordered the drugs from a Web site that claimed to be Canadian and had previously been flagged by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for selling counterfeits.

The FDA recently put out a warning on the dangers of Internet medicines. Peter Rost, a former Pfizer executive whose blog is an annoyance to drug execs, notes an "irony" in the situation: that the first victim of drug reimportation lives in Canada, and got a drug that is not approved there but is available to the rest of the world.

As for the spammers who sell this stuff, they can be nearly impossible to track, as this Forbes story details.

Orac, the pseudynomous surgeon at ScienceBlogs, reports that he's seen particularly scary spam. "Did you know that spammers are claiming to be selling chemotherapeutic agents from India?" he writes.

You Can't Fight The FDA

This morning, shares in GPC Biotech and Spectrum Pharmaceuticals are plummeting after a panel of experts advised the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to delay approving their prostate cancer pill, satraplatin.

Shares in GPC, the German biotech that would have sold the drug, dropped 33% to $13.54. Spectrum, which would have received a royalty on sales, dropped 12% to $4.19. (For previous doubts on satraplatin, see "Cancer Drug Winners And Losers.")

There were big hopes for the pill because a clinical trial showed that it reduced the nearly constant pain of patients whose prostate cancer had spread to the bone and had failed other treatments. Better yet, it slowed the cancer's spread, according to a measure devised by the company. Those results were highly statistically significant.

But both the way pain was measured in the trial and the way that progression of the cancer was gauged were deemed unreliable by the 12-member FDA panel. There was a spectacle at the event, watched via a Webcast. It basically came down to a debate between the company and the FDA in which the FDA insisted, fairly strenuously, that it had let the biotech know that its measures of disease progression and pain were not valid.

Biotech companies are run by brilliant, somewhat stubborn people who have great faith in their opinions. Somehow, it sometimes seems, executives can forget that, whatever happens, you can't fight the FDA. If you come up with a brilliant way of proving your drug works but you can't convince the FDA that it's brilliant, you need to come up with another approach.

The meeting was vaguely reminiscent of the story earlier this year of Encysive Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: ENCY - news - people ), which saw its drug for a rare lung disease rejected even as a rival from Gilead was approved. On a conference call, Chief Executive Bruce Given basically blamed the FDA for his troubles, saying he had thought that the agency had been convinced by existing data after several go-arounds. Encysive's drug might well have made it if Encysive had run another clinical trial earlier in the process. Given has since left the company.

GPC's case is less onerous. But either the FDA failed to give good guidance or GPC failed to listen. If it had used a more validated measure of patients' pain, the panel might very well have voted to approve its drug. Instead, Otis Brawley, the Emory University oncologist who is the incoming chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, answered the question of whether satraplatin had been proved to reduce pain with one of the most painful words in biotech: "almost."

Still, one has to wonder if the stock market is overdoing its punishment of GPC today. Certainly, the company won't win any prizes for wisdom or foresight. And at the meeting, it revealed that it would take much longer for final data, which it hopes will prove satraplatin increases survival, to become available. Patients in its study are simply living longer than expected, whether they got satraplatin or a placebo.

Now, those data won't be available until next year; they were expected at the end of this year. Megan Murphy, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, who covers Spectrum, has removed all satraplatin royalties from her model of that company, which she still rates a "buy." And there is also the problem that it's not clear whether the study will really prove to oncologists that they need to use this drug. It could get approved, and then not sell.

But this appears to be a medicine that works, although GPC hasn't proved that yet, and the proof could come next year. Not everyone is so confident. In a note to investors, Matthew Osborne, a biotech analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, said the odds of a survival benefit were only 50/50.

Given all the lousy bets out there in biotech, investors might want to watch the stock closely as a potential value play.

Ten Environmentally Friendly Luxury Cars

High gas prices, the war in Iraq and concerns about global warming are fueling interest in cars and trucks with alternative powertrains, like gasoline-electric hybrids, clean diesels, ethanol and farther in the future, fuel cells that run on hydrogen.

But if you're a lover of luxury, don't expect too much choice when visiting the showroom. There are relatively few truly eco-friendly options for luxury-brand car and truck shoppers.

Or, rather, "there aren't any," says Jim Motovalli, the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine, and the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build the Car of the Future. "Luxury cars are too big to be eco-friendly."
In Pictures: Ten Environmentally Friendly Luxury Cars

Hyperbole aside, if you do your homework, you'll find a limited number of high-end, eco-friendly cars available now or set to roll out soon. They include the Lexus RX400h, an SULEV, which stands for Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, with a hybrid gasoline and electric drive system; the Mini Cooper Convertible, which gets an estimated 26 miles per gallon city/35 mpg highway; and the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, set to hit floors in 2009.

"The sentiment in the country is so strong behind the 'green' movement that no matter what your income level, no matter what your class in society," says Wes Brown, a principal of Iceology Inc., a Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm, "you want to project that you're cognizant that we all have to do something about the environment."

Not Your Father's Diesel
For European luxury brands, that means clean diesels, which already dominate the car market there.

Diesels are a quick route to better fuel efficiency. They get about 30% more miles to the gallon than gasoline engines of the same size.


Today's diesel engines are nearly the opposite of the ones many American drivers remember from the mid-1980s, following two Mideast oil crises. Those old engines were smoky, noisy and underpowered. You didn't want to get behind an old Mercedes diesel on the highway, struggling up a hill. They were easy to identify, because they always had a sooty rear end.

On the contrary, the diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz E320 Bluetec is more likely to blow your doors off as it passes you up the hill, with no visible exhaust.

Better fuel economy is the one thing modern diesels have in common with the old ones. So why haven't clean diesels taken the U.S. market by storm, as they have in fuel-conscious Europe?


For one thing, diesel fuel was cheaper than gasoline 20 years ago. Today, it's about the same.

Tough U.S. emissions rules are an even bigger factor. Before 2006, even modern diesels couldn't pass U.S. emissions tests, mostly because the diesel fuel sold in the United States contained more sulfur than diesel fuel sold in Europe. Since 2006, the U.S. government mandated low-sulfur diesel, and diesels are starting to make a comeback.

But another hurdle is that California, New York, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont have even tougher emissions rules than the federal laws. Even with low-sulfur fuel, the newer diesels can't be sold in those states.

That will change, too, starting next year, when Mercedes will offer "50-state" diesels with improved emissions-control technology. Other German luxury brands will soon follow, including Audi and BMW.

Hot For Hybrids
Diesels may be the wave of the future, but hybrids are what people want right now.

A so-called hybrid-drive system is actually more of a "dual drive," with two engines instead of one: a conventional gasoline engine and an electric motor.

The car runs on the electric motor at low speeds. The conventional motor kicks in when accelerating, driving at highway speeds or sometimes simply when running the air conditioning. Unlike conventional cars, hybrids get better mileage around town than they do on the highway.

Toyota's (nyse: TM - news - people ) Lexus luxury division offers several hybrids. The RX400h SUV and the GS450h sedan were among 30 cars and trucks recognized by J.D. Power and Associates as "2007 Automotive Environmental Index Top Models," based on their fuel economy.

Plug-N-Go
Another "eco-friendly" choice, the Tesla Roadster, is the only car on our list that is 100% battery powered. Electric motors offer higher torque than gasoline motors. Torque is the twisting power that provides a quick takeoff, overcoming inertia from a standing start.

High torque in a small package means the Tesla Roadster can sprint to 60 mph in about four seconds, according to spokesman David Vesprimi. The $98,000 Roadster, which is built in England, is expected to debut this fall.

A car that offers a mix of comfort, speed and cleanliness? "You can have your cake and eat it too," says Vesprimi.

That should be appealing to luxury-brand shoppers, who want to show their concern for the environment without giving up the finer things.

Venter Takes Step Toward Synthetic Cells

A team led by Craig Venter, the maverick geneticist best known for his fight to sequence the human genome, has moved a step closer to making cells from scratch. But huge hurdles remain to making practical use of this new technology.

The team at the J. Craig Venter Institute took all of the genes from one species of bacteria, Mycoplasma mycoides, and transferred them into another, Mycoplasma capricolum. The result: The genes from the mycoides took over, changing the cells from one species to another simply by moving around DNA.

However, experts say it will be very difficult to apply the technique to other types of bacteria, and for now its use may be limited to the fragile and tiny mycoplasma germs.

This research, published in the new issue of Science magazine, is part of a larger quest by Venter and his team to create a cell with a genome designed from scratch. The idea is that researchers could chemically synthesize the DNA they wanted outside the cell--something companies like Codon Devices of Cambridge, Mass., or Blue Heron Biotechnology of Bothell, Wash., can already do relatively cheaply--and implant it into bacteria, effectively creating a new species that did not exist before.

"With this new bacterial genome transplantation technique, we are now one step away from taking a newly constructed genome and transplanting it into a recipient cell," says Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at MIT who did not work with the Venter team.

Jay Keasling, a synthetic biologist at University of California-Berkeley, calls the work "an indication that it will one day, perhaps soon, be possible to create an organism with a completely synthetic genome."

Researchers hope that custom-engineered cells could be useful in producing new types of medicines, including bacteria designed to help the body attack disease, or to produce biofuels that could help ease the world's reliance on oil. Such applications are far off, and no fully synthetic organism has yet been created.

Companies are already being started to take advantage of new technology that makes it easier to bioengineer organisms. Codon, of which Endy is a director, is looking to sell synthetic biology tech to other firms. Venter's own firm, Synthetic Genomics, is aiming to solve problems related to energy and recently signed a deal with British Petroleum (nyse: BP - news - people ). Amyris Biotechnologies, founded by Keasling, is looking to solve both health-related and energy problems. A company called LS9 is looking to use synthetic bacteria to make fuels.

Only the Venter team has married its approach so closely to creating life from scratch. Other researchers are marveling at the potential to do genetic engineering by modifying multiple machines at once, allowing them to work with cells as if they were machines. Amyris, for instance, has worked to solve a key production problem needed to make cheap malaria drugs.

But the Venter approach is more audacious and more costly. On a conference call with the press, he said that ideally, someday, he'd like to have all the components for a living cell in a chemical soup and then see them assemble. Now he has shown that it is possible to take a genome from one organism and move it to a similar one. The next step would be to manufacture a genome and transplant that.

Other synthetic biologists are taking existing cells and making hot rods; Venter wants to make one from scratch. But there are big drawbacks to his approach. His researchers are working with mycoplasma, a bacteria that has only 500 genes, close to the minimum number necessary. Mycoplasma is fragile, especially compared to the E. coli and yeast other synthetic biologists work with.

It also may be costly, with the estimated cost to reach the first synthetic organism being at least $10 million, according to a slide presented at a recent scientific conference by Hamilton Smith, the Nobel laureate who is heading the Venter Institute's synthetic biology effort. Venter's spokeswoman did not return an e-mail checking the accuracy of that figure.

George Church, a Harvard biologist who is a co-founder of LS9 and Codon Devices, argued that it was "not clear" that creating a wholly engineered cell, especially a fragile mycoplasma, would be more cost effective than just inserting or changing a few genes.

However, he says a related charge, that Venter is restricting biology and setting up a potential monopoly by patenting some of his institute's earlier work with Mycoplasma, is a "tempest in a teapot." Other researchers will still have plenty of room to invent their own work, and the patent does not, as some have asserted, cover the creation of any synthetic organism.

Out-Gagging Google

Outsmarting Google isn't easy. So on the issue of user privacy, Google's competitors are trying a different tactic: knowing less.

Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) announced Monday that it's introducing new measures on its Live Search application that would erase identifying data from search logs 18 months after it's recorded and will allow users to surf sites with Microsoft-provided ads without having their behavior tracked.

Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) plans to make all search data anonymous after 13 months, according to a spokesman, and InterActiveCorp's (nasdaq: IACI - news - people ) Ask.com announced last week that it will be launching AskEraser, a search option that erases all history of Ask searches. Microsoft and Ask.com issued a joint statement over the weekend calling on members of the search industry to meet and discuss ways they can work together to define privacy principles and protect user information.

The wave of privacy announcements comes a month after Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) was lambasted in a report from Privacy International, which placed the search engine at the very bottom of its rankings for protection of private user information and labeled the company "hostile to privacy."

Google's plans to acquire the ad-serving company DoubleClick--which would combine an unprecedented volume of information about Web users' surfing behavior with Google's search data--have also drawn protests from a wide range of privacy groups in the U.S. and the European Union. E.U. government investigators and the Federal Trade Commission are both examining the consequences of a Google-DoubleClick deal, and the acquisition will be reviewed by Congress in the coming months.

All this spotlighting of privacy offers Google's competitors a chance to shorten Google's lead in the search industry, says Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. "Competing search engines struggle to figure out what they can offer users that Google can't," he says. "With Google's limited efforts to protect privacy, that's a clear area where other search engines can flex their muscles."

Peter Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy strategist, says that Google's troubles were just one factor in the timing of their new privacy campaign. "We surveyed the landscape over the past couple of months relating to privacy search and ads, including the debate regarding Google and the E.U.," he says. "We decided it was time for us to provide a much more comprehensive package."

Ask.com would have the most to gain from competition with Google: In June, Ask had 5% of U.S. search market share, compared with Google's 49.5%, according to comScore Media Metrix. Yahoo! accounted for 25.1% of all searches, and Microsoft had 13.2%.

Despite criticisms over its privacy policies, Google is one of the few search engines that has yet to leak user data. In August 2006, AOL released the search records of 650,000 of its users--the data from a total of 20 million searches-- to the U.S. Department of Justice. And in January 2007, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL offered up millions of search queries as part of an ACLU lawsuit seeking to overturn a federal pornography law. Google, by contrast, fought the subpoena on grounds of trade secrecy and avoided revealing user data.

But Google's increasing array of services creates an unprecedented collection of intertwined personal information, says Ben Edelman. Those applications now include online payment, video, mapping, e-mail, social networking, search and soon, DoubleClick's behavior-tracking advertising data. "They've built more and more services with increasingly fundamental privacy consequences," Edelman says. "The more attention these issues get, the more users will look at them and start to think it's a bit scary."

In response to Monday's announcement from Microsoft, Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer offered a statement pointing out Google's decision in June to make user data anonymous after 18 months. "We hoped it would stimulate debate across the industry, and we're delighted that is has," he writes. "Debate and discussion are good for users. That's why we've made improvements to our policies over the last few months. We'll continue to do so in the future, and [we] look forward to working with other companies, regulators and others."

Ari Schwartz, a spokesman for the Center for Democracy and Technology, agreed that competition on privacy matters will likely benefit users. "The proof will be when the products actually roll out," says Schwartz, "But I think this has the potential to teach the industry that they're limited by consumer expectations about how their data will be collected. We haven't seen this kind of attention to privacy in a long time."

SCOTTEVEST Solar Panels

he solar panels enable you to recharge your USB compatible devices on the go, either while wearing the jacket or with the panels removed. When attached, the solar panels compliment the jacket’s design. The solar panels charge a small battery - about the size of a deck of cards. The battery powers your device almost immediately after the solar panels are exposed to sunlight. Once the battery is fully charged, the panels can be removed and your portable electronic device can tap into the stored power.

Typical charge times in direct sunlight range from 2-3 hours, but direct sunlight is not required. The battery pack can charge any device compatible with Universal Serial Bus (USB) chargers, including cell phones, PDAs, Game Boys, MP3 players, and other mobile devices. (NOTE: USB cables are not included, but are readily available from numerous sources, including www.ziplinq.com, www.belkin.com, and Radio Shack). Also, check out our latest accessory, the Zipcord Retractable Mobile Phone USB Charger.

Oracle Of Gloom

Call it the most important software release no one will notice. Oracle is set to launch a new version of its database software, dubbed 11g, Wednesday.

While database software remains obscure the business is a money spigot for Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ). The Redwood City, Calif.-based software company has been the largest vendor of heavy-duty database software for decades. It owns 47.1% of the market compared with just 21.1% for IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), its closest rival. And it's a lucrative racket: Factor out expenses and Oracle's software business cranked out $2.5 billion in profits for the quarter ending Feb. 28.

The problem, of course, is that after a surge in demand in the 1980s and another in the late 1990s, the market for big-time database software is saturated. More troubling still, a host of free and cheap alternatives, such as MySQL, have stalled demand for pricey database software among less demanding customers.

The fix, then, has been for Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison to steer Oracle into other businesses. Ellison has gone on a three-year, $20 billion acquisition campaign to break out of the database business and build Oracle into a business applications powerhouse, snapping up Siebel, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and a raft of lesser-known vendors.

The results have been good. Last month, Oracle reported quarterly net earnings had risen more than 20% to $1.6 billion over the year-ago period. Oracle shares are up more 35% over the past year.

It seems obvious now. But if Ellison hadn't done it, Oracle would be in the same fix as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), another one-time growth star that updated its franchise-building product, Windows, earlier this year with the release of Vista.

But while Ellison decided to buy his way out of trouble, Gates decided to sink billions into an effort to build fast-growing new businesses in everything from online search to console gaming. The result: Oracle's shares are up 98.3% over the past five years. By contrast, Microsoft's shares are up just 7.7% over the same period.

The Top Countries For Cybercrime

Cybercrime, like every digital industry, is outsourcing. Though the U.S. still produces more malware, spam and viruses than any country in the world, illicit IT jobs are increasingly scattered across an anarchic and international Internet, where labor is cheap, legitimate IT jobs are scarce and scammers are insulated from the laws that protect their victims by thousands of miles. As Thomas Friedman might say, the criminal underworld is flat.

According to a Symantec (nasdaq: SYMC - news - people ) report at the end of 2006, Beijing is now home to the world's largest collection of malware-infected computers, nearly 5% of the world's total. Research by the security company Sophos in April showed that China has overtaken the U.S. in hosting Web pages that secretly install malicious programs on computers to steal private information or send spam e-mails. And another report from Sophos earlier that month showed that Europe produces more spam than any other continent; one Polish Internet service provider alone produces fully 5% of the world's spam.

Cybercrime this geographically diverse isn't just hard to stop; it's hard to track. Common tactics like phishing and spam are usually achieved with "botnets," herds of PCs hijacked with malware unbeknownst to their owners. Botnet attacks can usually be traced only to the zombie computers, not to their original source. That means the majority of studies mapping botnet attacks point to every place in the world that has vulnerable PCs, with no real sense of where the attacks begin.

In Pictures: The Cybercriminals' Map Of The World

Researchers at Sophos Labs say they have a solution: They can roughly identify the host country of malicious software by tracing the default language of the computer on which it was programmed. According to their analysis of the default language linked with about 19,000 samples at the end of last year, Americans and other non-British English speakers still produce the most malware, more than a third of the world’s total. Close behind is China, producing 30%, followed by Brazil, with 14.2%. Russia places fourth with 4.1% of the world’s malware.

Bill Pennington of White Hat Security attributes these developing countries' bad behavior to an overabundance of technologically trained young people with low-paying jobs. "If you’re in Russia or China and you have a computer science degree," he says, "You can either go work for nothing or you can make money using your skills for nefarious purposes."

Cybercrime isn't merely spreading to certain foreign countries, it's becoming cosmopolitan, says James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. As crime syndicates in Europe and Asia move into online scams, Lewis says that a single cybercrime operation can now be distributed among many different groups in several countries. One may create a "botnet" while another rents those computers to send credit scam e-mails and a third party transfers funds using the fraudulently obtained banking information. Sometimes each operation is on a different continent.

"The big problem here is political. It’s sovereignty," Lewis says. "The FBI cannot go enforce American law without the consent of the country where cybercrime is being carried out. So even if U.S. laws were perfect, it wouldn’t be enough to protect you." He describes a "Bonnie and Clyde" situation, where police stop at the edge of their jurisdiction rather than pursue criminals to their hideouts.

The growth areas of the malware industry aren't easily predicted. India, for instance, is one of the world’s most technologically booming developing countries, but ranks surprisingly low on Sophos' list. The U.K. and India together contribute only 1.3% of the world's malware--both use British English as a default language, so their samples couldn't be separated--and Sophos researchers say the majority of that criminal activity comes from the U.K. Eugene Kaspersky, Russian security guru and head of Kaspersky Labs, can only explain India’s lack of cybercrime as a "cultural difference."

Nandkumar Saravade, director of cyber security for India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, says that India has so far avoided a cybercrime epidemic thanks to the success of its legitimate IT industry. "Today, it is a fact that any person in India with marketable computer skills has a few job offers in hand," he says.

But Saravade and Kaspersky both warn that security professionals should expect the subcontinent’s malware contribution to grow in coming years. When it does, India likely won't be ready to contain the problem: The country's last major cybercrime law was created in 2000, long before botnets became an issue.

India isn't alone in being unprepared: Kaspersky says that the growing industry of malware professionals around the world hasn't been fully recognized by international legal bodies or the software industry, which continues to build vulnerable programs.

"We in the security industry need to attract the attention of government authorities, educate users and encourage changes in basic operating systems," he says. "Alone, we don’t have a chance."

Veterans agency missing millions in IT equipment

A government audit of four U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) centers found $6.4 million worth of missing or misplaced IT equipment, according to a report released Tuesday.

Inventories in fiscal years 2005 and 2006 found about 2,400 missing IT devices at the four VA locations, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said. Among the missing items were dozens of computers that could have stored personal information.

The GAO also found computer hard drives being disposed containing the names, Social Security numbers, or medical histories of hundreds of U.S. military veterans.

About 28 percent of the IT equipment at the VA medical center in Washington, D.C., was missing or misplaced, the GAO said.

The missing equipment in the new GAO report is in addition to an earlier audit showing more than 8,600 missing IT items, with a combined original cost of $13.2 million, from five other VA centers, the GAO said.

There is an "overall lack of accountability" for IT equipment at the VA locations, said McCoy Williams, director of financial management and assurance at GAO. The GAO found a "pervasive" lack of personal accountability at all four locations, he told the U.S. House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

"Missing IT items were not reported for several months and, in some cases, for several years," Williams told the subcommittee.

In some cases, hard drives scheduled to be disposed of sat around for several years without being wiped clean, "creating an unnecessary risk that sensitive personal and medical information could be compromised," Williams added.

The VA's IT practices have been the target of frequent criticism by U.S. lawmakers in recent years. The agency, in May 2006, reported that a laptop and hard drive containing the personal records of 26.5 million military veterans and family members was stolen from an employee's home. Police later recovered the equipment, and the VA said the records did not appear to be compromised.

Subcommittee members called on the VA to improve its inventory management. "We know that VA has serious problems keeping track of its IT inventory," said Rep. Harry Mitchell, subcommittee chairman and Arizona Democrat. "This is not just a dollar issue. It is also a security and privacy issue."

The VA is implementing new IT equipment management procedures and, after a three-month process, has found about 90 percent of the missing equipment, said Robert Howard, the VA's assistant secretary for information and technology.

"The lack of accountability was clearly evident," said Howard, who became the agency's CIO in September 2006. "You shouldn't have to go through that to find your equipment."

The VA has issued a new equipment handbook, and employees now have to sign for equipment in their control, Howard said. The VA has concurred on all 12 GAO recommendations for inventory management, VA officials said.

The VA is also deploying network monitoring software that can scan for devices, Howard said.

"This is a critically important issue," Howard said. "This is a situation of utmost importance. It is a situation we are working hard to remedy."

Mozilla: Firefox is flawed just like IE

In a public mea culpa, Mozilla's chief security officer acknowledged Monday that Firefox includes the same flaw that the company called a "critical vulnerability" in Internet Explorer during a two-week ruckus over responsibility for a Windows zero-day bug.

"Over the weekend, we learned about a new scenario that identifies ways that Firefox could also be used as the entry point," said Window Snyder of Mozilla. "While browsing with Firefox, a specially crafted URL could potentially be used to send bad data to another application.

"We thought this was just a problem with Internet Explorer," Snyder continued. "It turns out, it is a problem with Firefox as well."

The argument over responsibility for a flaw that involved both Internet Explorer and Firefox began two weeks ago when Danish researcher Thor Larholm argued that Internet Explorer contained an input validation bug that passes potentially malicious URLs to other applications. Larholm called out Firefox's "firefoxurl://" protocol as one that Internet Explorer mishandled. He staked out the position that Internet Explorer was to blame, while other security experts said it was Firefox's fault.

As fingers pointed, Mozilla patched the Internet Explorer-Firefox interaction bug by releasing an update, Version 2.0.0.5. Even so, Snyder and others continued to argue that Internet Explorer was the problem. "Microsoft needs to patch Internet Explorer," Snyder said last Wednesday. That same day, Asa Dotzler, director of community development, contrasted what he said were the differences between Microsoft and Mozilla on the bug. "We think it's Firefox's job to ensure that users are protected from malicious Web sites when they're surfing the Web in Firefox. Apparently, Microsoft doesn't think the same for Internet Explorer," Dotzler said then.

Friday, Jesper Johansson, a former Microsoft security strategist but now a security program manager at Amazon.com, spelled out how Firefox was as guilty as Internet Explorer of failing to validate input. In a post that leaned on the metaphor of "glass houses," Johansson showed how Firefox passes potentially malicious URLs to other applications, including the multiple-service instant messaging client Trillian. "Firefox is subject to the exact same flaw that they blame on Internet Explorer. Firefox also does not escape quotes in URLs before it passes them on to protocol handlers," he said.

Snyder did not credit Johansson by name for alerting Mozilla to the Firefox bug, but she admitted that the flaw should have been spotted. "We should have caught this scenario when we fixed the related problem in 2.0.0.5," she said.

She did not specify when a patch would be issued, but one is in the works, according to an entry in Bugzilla.

You're never alone with Plone

Ask Plone users what they like best about the open source content management software and chances are a key feature they'll list along with ease of use and multilingual support is the community of experts that's grown around the product.

Having access to knowledgeable people is of particular importance to Plone users right now as the software, which is based on the open source Zope Web application framework, continues to incorporate more and more Zope 3 functionality. There's a sizable skills gap among users who are familiar only with earlier versions of the application server and not the most recent release. The community is also putting the finishing touches on version 3.0 of Plone itself due out next month.

Plone, named after a British electronica band, began life in 2000 as an attempt by the project's co-founders Alexander Limi in Norway and Alan Runyan in the United States to create a more user-friendly interface or skin for Zope 2. Plone helps users manage documents, files, and images through a Web interface and also lets them publish that content to the Internet or to an intranet. Earlier this month, Limi announced that more than 1 million copies of Plone had been downloaded so far from the Plone.org Web site.

One way of getting Plone users together is a sprint, a three- to five-day meeting where participants work in small groups to develop, test, and document new functionality for the software. The latest sprint took place in Boston and focused on improving the handling of audio and video files and images in the Plone4Artists software bundle used for creating portal Web sites.

Aaron VanDerlip, from nonprofit relief agency Oxfam America, was among the participants. The organization's Web site is based on Plone. He said the site's mettle was tested and proved strong and stable when donors flocked to make online contributions to Oxfam to help the survivors of the terrible tsunami that rocked South Asia on Dec. 26, 2004.

Looking to the future, Oxfam would like to add audio and video to its Web site both as a way to attract more donations for its relief work and to show donors how their money has been spent. VanDerlip is also keen to see a lower-bandwidth version of the site accessible to those with limited connectivity options as well as catering to the needs of people visiting the site from their mobile phones.

The Nature Conservancy, a conservation organization that works worldwide to protect ecologically important lands and waterways, uses Plone to power the ConserveOnline open forum where environment groups, government agencies, and private landowners can come to exchange views. The site also makes a variety of conservation resources available, including documents and maps and enables users to create small Web sites or workspaces to flag particular environmental problems they're working on to solicit both feedback and assistance.

The Nature Conservancy is a longtime Zope user, and that's how it discovered Plone about three years ago, according to Sally Kleinfeldt, senior technology architect, technology and information systems, at the organization. Previously, the charity had developed its own custom content management applications based on Zope and a small raft of these legacy applications are still in use. Although no decision has been made, over time The Nature Conservancy would look to rewrite or replace those applications using Plone.

In terms of Plone4Artists, the Conservancy is particularly interested in how the software handles content that contains embedded GIS (geographic information system) data. Web services are another important Plone feature, Kleinfeldt said, as the Conservancy looks for ways to enhance information sharing across different environmental organizations and enable mashups.

David Siedband is a Plone developer who's been working with environmental groups at the grassroots level. While a large entity such as The Nature Conservancy may move slowly in adopting new technologies, state and local groups can respond much more quickly and may not be subject to the same legal restrictions in terms of sharing land data. Those groups are moving ahead with embracing audio and video and when new forays into technology prove successful, those moves can "bubble up from the field" and later be taken on by the likes of The Nature Conservancy, Siedband and Kleinfeldt noted.
Utah State University is using Plone as the content management system for its eduCommons OpenCourseWare management system. EduCommons helps universities develop and manage educational material from their undergraduate and graduate courses that they've decided to make available to everyone for free online. The university has done a lot of work around dealing with copyright issues and is donating that effort back to Plone.

Universities in Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States are already using eduCommons and Utah State is in discussions with universities in China, said David Ray, developer at the University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. Software vendor Novell's global training services unit is also a fan of eduCommons, using it to make educational material available for its Novell authorized courses and other customer training information.

Novell also uses Plone to power its novell.com Web site. The company turned to Plone after finding Web content management software from Vignette didn't provide the functionality the software vendor was looking for in terms of support for multiple languages and different types of content.

Nathan Sandland, an independent consultant, has been helping Novell adopt Plone and notes two other teams within the vendor are also using the open source content management software.

As Plone users get to grips with Zope 3 and start becoming familiar with Plone 3, there's another issue to consider: when the open source software will move to the latest version of the GNU general public license (GPL). Plone is currently made available under GPLv2, while GPLv3 debuted at the end of June. The topic's likely to be on the agenda at the annual Plone Conference due to take place in Naples, Italy, in October

World's first high-speed all-electric sport utility truck to be launched by Phoenix Motorcars

Earth-friendly, energy-efficient vehicles that produce zero emissions seem to be from a dream of the future. But several companies are already well on their way to introducing such vehicles in North America and around the world. Recently, more than 400 environmentalists, investors and celebrities gathered for the unveiling and induction of the only five-passenger, all-electric, freeway-speed sport utility trucks at Los Angeles' famed Peterson Automotive Museum, and there, they nabbed a sneak peak at the newest electric automobile soon to be launched: The Phoenix Motorcars "SUT" or sport-utility truck.

These new SUT vehicles will be made available by Phoenix Motorcars (www.phoenixmotorcars.com) for full release in 2008, but if you are lucky enough to live in California, a limited number of vehicles will be released to selected consumers in late 2007.

Phoenix Motorcars' SUT is an all-electric, sport-utility truck with a top speed of 95 miles per hour. It's a zero-emissions vehicle with no tailpipe or evaporative emissions, no emissions from gasoline refining or sales, and no onboard emission-control systems. Like other electric cars under development, this model can accelerate with great speed, from 0-60 mph in 10 seconds. However, performance electric cars from other companies like Tesla Motors can go from 0-60 mph in a whiplash-inducing 4 seconds.

According to the website for Phoenix Motorcars, the company "manufactures zero-emission, freeway-speed fleet vehicles. It is an early leader in the mass production of full-function, green electric trucks and SUVs for commercial fleet use." The trucks can drive roughly 130 miles before needing to recharge, but the company is currently working on an expansion pack that would extend the range to 250 miles.

Charge me up!

The question on everyone's mind about this vehicle is: how do you charge the battery? It's accomplished with an onboard 6.6kW charger that plugs into a 220V wall socket. The battery operates in cold and hot weather and is expected to last more than 12 years. It only costs about a $3.00 to charge the battery, and it takes about six hours to charge. (A range of 130 miles for $3.00 worth of electricity is quite a bargain, considering it would cost about $30.00 or more in gasoline to go the same distance...)

The six hour charging time is typical for electric vehicles. The power is supplied through your household current, so the electricity could be generated by coal, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear sources, depending on what your electric utility company uses. Off-board charging can be accomplished with a special charger in as little as 10 minutes, and a company called GreenIt is planning the construction of rapid-charging stations for electric cars.

Phoenix Motors is generating a lot of interest from consumers, and may start selling vehicles to the general public in the next two years. Actor and environmental activist Ed Begley, Jr., has recently purchased one and sees it as the car of the future. "This electric vehicle is rising from the ashes of the failed electric car industry," said Ed Begley, Jr. "This is a cool vehicle. It is fast, green and attractive."

Phoenix Motors acknowledged their supporter, saying they were "so appreciative to Ed Begley for his tireless efforts in helping to create awareness, not only of this vehicle, but of the larger environmental issues that all of us face," said Dan Elliott, CEO of Phoenix Motorcars. "We're equally as excited to be working with a team of brilliant partners, Altairnano Technologies, Boshart Engineering and UQM Technologies."

The cars will sell for about $45,000 -- not a bad price when compared to around $85,000 from some other electric car competitors.

The Phoenix Motorcars vision

Phoenix Motorcars started out as an alternative fuel research company that planned to design commercial products. They hope to eventually produce 20,000 electric vehicles a year, but for now will have to settle with the 500 currently slated for the first production run. The Ontario, California vehicle manufacturer hopes to expand production to more than 6,000 in 2008.

According to Byron Bliss, Vice-President of Sales, Phoenix Motorcars plans to sell fleets of vehicles to school districts and businesses, government agencies and companies with large groups of outside representatives.

The 2007 market strategy of Phoenix Motorcars targets operators of fleet vehicles, such as public utilities, public transportation providers, and delivery services. This market presents a significant opportunity for an increasing number of fleet operators now seeking freeway-capable, zero-emission, all-electric vehicles. Some government agencies
currently use plug-in hybrids.

The car company is planning to follow up the truck model next year with a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) that can go 250 miles on a single charge. The price to consumers will remain about the same. The cost to the environment, however, represents a substantial improvement over any vehicle using a combustion engine. Clearly, if we are going to sustainably live on this planet while still retaining the luxury of personal transportation, we are going to have to shift to clean, green and energy-efficient vehicles. Phoenix Motorcars hopes to play a significant role in that future, and should they succeed, we will all share in the benefits.

'Potter' power rules box office

Harry Potter remains a box-office charmer. "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" conjured up a $77.4 million debut to lead the weekend box office, according to estimates Sunday.

That raised the movie's domestic gross to $140 million since Wednesday.

"Order of the Phoenix" also has taken in an additional $190.3 million in 44 other countries.

"Transformers," the sci-fi tale that was the previous weekend's No. 1 movie, slipped to second with $36 million.

The fifth chapter in the movie series based on J.K. Rowling's novels, "Order of the Phoenix" has Harry leading a secret society of students to prepare for the coming showdown with the evil Lord Voldemort.

The previous four "Harry Potter" flicks all had bigger first weekends, ranging from $88.4 million to $102.7 million, but those all debuted Friday. "Order of the Phoenix" was the first to open on Wednesday.

The rest of top 10 (with dollars in millions): 3. "Ratatouille," $18; 4. "Live Free or Die Hard," $10.9; 5. "License to Wed," $7.4; 6. "1408," $5.01; 7. "Evan Almighty," $5; 8. "Knocked Up," $3.7; 9. "Sicko," $2.65; 10. "Ocean's Thirteen," $1.9.

Two sisters are in the midst of an 11-day vigil in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the latest Harry Potter novel.

Chloe and Sydney Bostian started camping out Tuesday in front of Gulliver's Books to be among the first Alaskans to find out their hero's fate in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

The seventh and final installment in the series will be released at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

"It's just so addicting. You think you have it all figured out and then everything switches up on you," said Chloe, 18. "It's the big finale, and all the questions are going to be answered."

The girls are living out of their parent's camper, parked in the bookstore's parking lot. During the day their parents - who are taking turns staying with them - move it to the customer parking area, but at night it comes right up to the store entrance - the front of the line.

To help pass time, they browse the bookstore and friends bring them food so they don't have to leave the line.

"It's just really fun and people come by and talk to you," said Sydney, 11. "The excitement just builds as it gets closer."

Grammy-nominated rapper Remy Ma pleaded not guilty to attempted murder Sunday in the shooting of a woman in New York. The rapper was jailed on $250,000 bail.

Police found a woman with a gunshot wound to her lower torso early Saturday. Three blocks away, officers discovered an SUV owned by Remy Ma involved in a single-car crash and abandoned.

The victim, Makeda Barnes-Joseph, 23, was hospitalized in stable condition Sunday. Prosecutors said she and the rapper knew each other. Remy Ma turned herself. She was charged with attempted murder, assault and weapon possession.

Snoop Dogg's home and work lives will be on display in a new reality series from E! Entertainment Television. The series will show the hip-hop heavyweight trying to balance his different worlds.

"The juggling act that Snoop faces day-in, day-out between career and family is certain to resonate with our viewers," said network president Ted Harbert.

The rapper has three children, is active in community causes and is involved in a youth football league he founded. He also has court-ordered obligations on his plate. In April, he was sentenced to five years' probation and 800 hours of community service after he pleaded no contest to felony gun and drug charges.

'Transformers' power US box office

Transformers, a special-effects movie extravaganza based on popular toys, earned US$27.5 million ($32 million) during its first full day of release and appears on track to dominate the weekend box office, according to estimates on Wednesday by distributor Paramount Pictures.

After earning US$8.8 million from Monday night screenings across the United States and Canada, the movie pulled in US$27.5 million the next day - a sum billed by Paramount as the biggest Tuesday haul for a movie.

Directed by Michael Bay, a filmmaker known for such spectacles such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, Transformers is based on the Hasbro Inc. toys that turn into alien robots.

In the film, relative unknowns Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox star as youngsters befriended by Autobots, the good aliens who are being battled by the evil Decepticons.

Despite its success, Transformers' take falls considerably short of the one-day record of US$59.8 million set by Spider-Man 3 two months ago, on a Friday.

The previous record for a Tuesday was set last month, when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest earned US$15.7 million, according to Paramount.

Last weekend's champion, Walt Disney Co.'s Ratatouille, earned US$7.9 million on Tuesday, according to data supplied by a rival studio. A Disney official was not immediately available for comment. Because of the July 4 holiday in the United States, most studios did not report midweek figures.

The only other new Tuesday release was License To Wed. Data for the critically maligned Robin Williams comedy will be issued on Sunday, according to the film's distributor, Warner Bros.

Qflix technology for burning movie DVDs supported by major studios

Concerns about piracy have hampered consumers' ability to buy and burn to DVD digital versions of movies from the internet, but a new Hollywood-backed technology and licensing arrangement from Sonic Solutions Inc. could change that.

Sonic Solutions' Qflix ads a standard digital lock -- called a content scrambling system -- to writable or rewriteable DVDs. DVD players have the digital "key" to unlock the content, although it will require consumers to purchase DVDs and compatible DVD burners compliant with the system.

Currently, Verbatim Corp. is working with Sonic Solutions to provide compatible discs, Movielink will have compatible movies for download, and Walgreens is just one of a number of retail kiosks that can burn DVDs for customers. With the Qflix system, customers can have an entire season's worth of a TV show or their favorite movie burned to DVD while they shop. Wal-Mart has also discussed the possibility of providing their own online downloading service or movie-burning kiosks.

This is not the first time a CSS system has been tried. A similar system was tested at the movie downloading service CinemaNow, but a limited library and playback problems plagued the trial.

Although it is backed by Hollywood, studios have shied away from CSS in the past because they feared that making DVD burning too easy would contribute to piracy. Sonic Solutions has been trying to get studios to authorize a "download to burn" option for movies for the past three years. With Qflix, moviemakers could place restrictions on consumers such as using the Microsoft Windows Media system to limit the maximum number of times a movie can be burned.

"We are pleased and encouraged to see efforts like Sonic's creation of Qflix that addresses the need for industry standard protection," Warner Bros. chief technology officer Chris Cookson said in a statement.

All that remains now is for studios to establish costs for the service that will protect their profits without deterring customers.

San Francisco startup unveils device able to create a broadband hot spot in your car

When Autonet Mobile Inc. releases it's new Wi-Fi/3G cellular device in March, you'll no longer have to hunt for broadband hotspots in order to use your computer's wireless broadband connection.

According to spokespersons for the San Francisco-based startup, the device plugs into a car's cigarette lighter adapter and turns the whole vehicle into a wireless internet hot spot and is as reliable as a home router.

"Our thought was to turn the car into a hot spot so people could have the same experience in their car as in their home or office," said Autonet Mobile CEO Sterling Pratz.

The system will probably be available in rental cars before going on the market. Avis recently told the New York Times that it plans to offer the system for about $11 extra a day as soon as it becomes available. Pratz said he couldn't confirm that, but said the device should go on sale to the public sometime in the spring. Pratz said corporate IT divisions would probably get the most use out of the device, because it would mean mobile workers would not need to hunt down Wi-Fi hotspots in order to keep in contact with their home office.

Cost for the device is projected at about $399, and will work on either Sprint or Verizon wireless services, automatically choosing the best available connection. Service will cost about $49 a month.

According to Pratz, users will be able to gain access on about 95 percent of U.S. roads, but he admitted that consumers' Wi-Fi-ready gadgets -- which include most laptops and other mobile devices such as smart phones -- wouldn't always get the best possible connection. Ideally, consumers will be able to access EV-DO connections at speeds of about 500 kilobits per second to 1 megabit per second, but in some areas the devices will quickly fall back on 1xRTT connections with speeds closer to 128 kilobits per second.

Pratz also said the system is able to avoid interference from other Wi-Fi networks since the device is never more than five feet away, he said, the intensity of the Wi-Fi in the car prevents it from jumping networks. It also has built-in security. The link between the system and Autonets' network operation center is encrypted using a system akin to a virtual private network, and Pratz said it was also compatible with corporate VPNs. Traveling speeds are unlikely to be an issue, said Pratz, as he claimed the system had been tested at highway speeds and much higher.

"I was with a partner and we were going 120 miles per hour and it worked just fine," said Pratz, who is a former racecar driver. "(My partner) didn't like it too much, though. He was running a network test and looked up and saw that it was working well but let me know he didn't like going that fast."

Power of 10, BMW M5 v Lamborghini Gallardo

Twelve used to be the magic number. Still
is for those of us with long memories. But while there remains something very special about driving a V12-engined car, the tortured howl of a modern F1 engine has fostered an unrivalled fascination for the V10, and endowed ten-cylinder road cars with a unique cachet. No wonder that despite it being almost a year since we first drove the BMW M5, and more than two since Lamborghini first handed us the keys to a Gallardo, both cars continue to hold us in their thrall.

Parked side-by-side, the M5 and Gallardo make an impressive if rather odd couple, but it's the incongruity that cements the spectacle. That it's the bulky German saloon and not the athletic Italian supercar that has the heftier punch and the (theoretically) greater v-max only serves to ladle a little lunacy over this already improbable, intriguing pair.

Spend enough time with either car and the V10's mystique leads even complete strangers to request that you pop the bonnet. Lift the lid on the M5 and, aside from the sheer size of the motor crammed into the engine bay, it's a bit of a disappointment. It's all too clinical: big, plastic shrouds hide all the interesting bits away, creating an air more suited to a domestic appliance than one of the mightiest normally aspirated production engines ever built.

The noise isn't that special either when you start it up: a dry, busy chatter, half-way between a big-capacity turbo-diesel and a petrol engine running a bit low on lubricant. A blip of the throttle hints at pleasures to come, but it still leaves you wondering where the passion and drama is hiding.

You only need look under the Gallardo's engine cover to find it. A lesson in the aesthetics of black crackle finish and crisp machining, the Lamborghini's V10 is what a proper engine should look like. Pipe runs, cables and hoses are proudly on display and add to the sense that this is a living, breathing machine that needs feeding with fluids and air to function.

Twist it into life and the Italian V10 clears its throat with an exuberant snort before finding a fast, blaring idle that hits you right in the guts. Of course, a supercar can get away with these kind of aural histrionics, in fact such a glorious cacophony at tickover is compulsory. And, while you don't expect the M5 to vibrate windowpanes at 50 paces, you can't help thinking BMW has missed a trick by neutering the first few moments of the M5 experience.

Cut to the fast, challenging moorland roads of Lancashire's Trough of Bowland, and the M5 finds its forum. The roads are more suited to an Impreza STi, but the BMW is pulverizingly quick, steam-rollering gradients and piling on speed with utter disdain. The engine has found its voice too, building to a uniquely strident, visceral wail as it pulls to 8000rpm and beyond. At full-chat the M5's V10 is fearsome.

Such raw aggression comes as quite a shock, especially after the sedate, refined manner in which the M5 dispatched the M6 motorway earlier in the day, but the speed and ferocity of the monster M Power saloon is a double-edged sword. Having Roger Green in the Gallardo up front is an excellent incentive, but as our speed increases and the road begins to duck and dive, you get an increasingly insistent feeling that while the V10's up for anything, there's massive momentum at work, and it takes far more out of the M5 than you'd think simply to stop it running away with itself.

While there's an impressive sense of grip and traction when driving the M5 in isolation, following in close company with the Lamborghini is a stark illustration of just how much restraint you have to practise in normal driving, and how little of the V10's 501bhp and 383lb ft you're able to use before cracks start showing in the M5's impressive dynamic facade. At what feels like 7/10ths the M5 has a reassuringly composed feel, but it needs to dig a lot deeper than that when Green squeezes on the Gallardo's throttle with a little more insistence, or pushes just that little bit harder and deeper into a corner on the brakes. Do so and the M5's limits suddenly don't feel so lofty.

Jumping out of the M5 and into the Gallardo is to step into another world. Stripped of the M5's space and well appointed but overwhelmingly normal interior, the Lamborghini is a much more intimate machine. Slung low and squeezed tight between door and transmission tunnel, you feel every buzz and tingle, while the added weight of the steering and the increased interaction of a manual transmission immediately define your role as that of driver rather than awed passenger.

Attacking the same stretch of road, Lamborghini leading, Green now following in the M5, it's easy to see how the Gallardo can toy with the BMW. Its engine, so vocal and energetic, summons greater low-rev and mid-range torque, something that feels all the more impressive in a car that weighs a third of a ton less than the M5.

When old electronics meet their end, much ends up becoming toxic waste in China

Old computers and other used-up appliances are creating polluted environments in Asia, the final resting place for much of the world's electronic goods, reports the China Daily newspaper.

Known as "e-waste," more than 75 percent of televisions, computers and other home electronics discarded by the developed world end up bound for Asia. Up to 90 percent of the old electronics goes to China, according to the Beijing-based Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology.

However, only 10 percent of the electronics that go to China are recycled for reuse. The rest gets burned, destroyed or otherwise reduced to poisonous end-products.

Inside computers and other electronics are gold, copper and other reusable precious metals. This makes the 90 percent of discarded electronics not recycled a viable enterprise for people looking to extract those precious metals. However, many of these "electronics harvesters" use simple and environmentally unfriendly processes to get the metals out, such as putting the machines through acid baths.

The result is that lead, mercury and other chemicals are released into the atmosphere – through toxic gasses – and put into lakes and rivers through wastewater systems. The harvesters are burning the plastic cases, melting lead-based monitor glass and simply tossing out the undesirable by-products of precious metal extraction.

In some cities that are hotspots for the metal extraction business, pollution levels are much higher than American or European standards.

In the Guiyu area, an agricultural sector in south China that many e-processers have set up shop, the groundwater became so contaminated that drinking water had to be brought in from an area 18 miles away, according to a 2001 report from the Seattle-based toxic trade watchdog Basel Action Network.

Sediment samples from the area showed that the groundwater had so much lead in it that it would have been considered 212 times more toxified than acceptable standards if it came from Europe's Rhine River.

"Tin was found at levels 152 times the EPA threshold. Chromium in one sample was at levels 1,338 times the EPA threshold level," the report added.

A major source of this e-waste are unsuspecting good Samaritans in America thinking they are helping the environment: Much of the old electronics donated by people and businesses for recycling in the U.S. instead gets exported into the world market.

"Informed recycling industry sources estimate that between 50 to 80 percent of the e-waste collected for recycling in the western U.S. are not recycled domestically," according to the BAN report.

From there, the supply market takes over, and often metal extraction companies win.

The supply market of old electronics sways in favor of these shops because they often offer higher prices for the goods than recycling outfits can.

The supply is good, too: the volume of e-waste from the United States is "estimated at 5 to 7 million tons," the report said.

In China alone – excluding the e-waste that is brought into the country – "about 150 million television sets, washing machines, refrigerators, air-conditioners and computers are discarded every year in China," the China Daily reported, using statistics from the China Home Electronics Association.

For the American market, the BAN report from 2001 posited that e-waste numbers would rise by 2006 thanks to the proliferation of High-Definition Television – flat-screen TVs – obsolescing old television technology, and the fact that most computers bought today are replacements for an old one that must be thrown out.

The world market for e-waste is one that is mostly unregulated, but a limited number of other countries are involved. Outside of China, other countries in the metal extraction business include India and Pakistan. The Middle Eastern country of Dubai is another major collector of discarded electronics, but it acts as a middleman: most of what it receives is re-exported out to China and other countries.

New LED lighting technology embraced by consumers, Total Cost of Ownership saves money over incandescent, fluorescent bulbs

he launch of our new LED lights from EcoLEDs (www.EcoLEDs.com) is already proven to be a huge success. Thank you to all the customers who have purchased our new LED light bulbs from BetterLifeGoods (www.BetterLifeGoods.com). In the first 24 hours, the sales of these lights greatly exceeded our expectations.

The primary question that has emerged from conversations with potential customers concerns the perception that LED lights are very expensive. This article attempts to answer that question, as well as providing additional details on where these new LED lights can be successfully used around the home or office.

First, the price issue: LED lights are, indeed, far more expensive up front than incandescent lights or fluorescent lights. Our high-end 10-watt LED light bulb, for example, currently costs just under $100. It replaces an incandescent 100-watt light bulb that typically costs around $1. So at first, the 10-watt LED light seems to be $99 more expensive.

However, lights do not actually work unless they also consume electricity, and thus the real question about the cost of light bulbs must take into account the Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO. What is the TCO for producing 50,000 hours of light with a 100-watt incandescent bulb?

As it turns out, a 100-watt light bulb actually uses 101.5 watts of electricity. Over 50,000 hours (which would require replacing it 50 times with a new bulb), it will use 5,075 kilowatt-hours of electricity, costing approximately $500 (based on ten cents per kilowatt-hour). So a 100-watt light bulb actually costs you $500 to operate over 50,000 hours. On top of that, it produces a whopping 10,150 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions which directly promote global warming and climate change. Mercury is also released into the atmosphere from all the energy usage, thanks to the fact that much of the electricity consumed in the world comes from coal-fired power plants that emit toxic mercury into the air.

So the Total Cost of Ownership for a 100-watt light bulb is well over $500 for producing 50,000 hours of light.

In contrast, what is the Total Cost of Ownership for our 10-watt EcoLEDs light bulb? The LED light itself costs about $100 up front. It uses 10.8 watts of electricity, which adds up to 540 kilowatt-hours over 50,000 hours. That's about $54 in electricity, vs. the $500 needed to power the 100-watt bulb mentioned above. Plus, our 10-watt LED light reduces CO2 emissions by 9,000 pounds, producing only about 1,080 pounds of CO2 instead of the 10,150 pounds produced from a 100-watt incandescent bulb.

The Total Cost of Ownership for a 10-watt LED light bulb is $100 for the light, and $54 in electricity for producing 50,000 hours of light.

Thus, the LED light is $154 vs. $550 or so (electricity + the cost of replacement bulbs) for incandescent lights.

Which brings us to the question: How much would you rather pay for 50,000 hours of light? $154 or $550? It makes obvious financial sense to pay only $154, especially when you're also protecting the environment at the same time.

Why LED lights cost more up front

Overall, LED lights are far less expensive to own and operate than incandescent lights. Still, many consumers are frustrated at the up-front cost. It's tough to fit a $100 light bulb into a tight budget. I share that concern, and I wish these lights were a lot less expensive to manufacture, but the fact is that quality LED components cost more. The copper, aluminum alloys and lenses that go into our LED lights are quality components, not cheap disposable parts like you normally find in an incandescent light. Building a quality LED light costs a lot more money than building a cheap light that you toss into landfill after a thousand hours of wasting electricity before burning out.

LED component prices are falling each year, however, and the future will no doubt bring more affordable LED lights to the marketplace. We anticipate that retail prices will fall 10 percent per year for quality LED lights, and we will of course work to bring down the prices of our own LED lights as quickly as we can. A less expensive light means increased affordability by a greater number of consumers, and that means a greater impact on saving energy and halting global warming. If we could sell these lights for one dollar and not go broke doing so, you can bet we'd be selling them for that dollar!

LED lights will never be as cheap as incandescent light bulbs. However, they will always pay you back in significant savings over time. And as electricity costs continue to rise, LED lighting makes even more economic sense.

As a consumer, you see, you're really buying hours of light, not just the bulbs that produce the light. The cost of the bulb is the smallest part of the equation. You'll find a similar situation with inkjet printers and inkjet cartridges. The printer might only cost $49 up front, but you might spend several hundred dollars in ink cartridges in a single year in order to operate the printer. Thus, the Total Cost of Ownership of the inkjet printer must take into the account the cost of the ink.

Uses for LED lights

Many consumers are wondering where they can use LED lights around their homes or businesses. Can they replace lights in room lamps? Ceiling fans? Desk lamps? Recessed lights?

To answer this question, remember that LED lights are really spotlights. They shine light in a specific direction with a certain beam angle. A wide beam angle shines light wider from side to side, while a narrow beam angle shines light in a narrow cone with extreme brightness. Thus, LED lights do NOT shine light in all directions like a typical incandescent light. This makes them the wrong choice for room lamps with lampshades or any light socket requiring "ambient" light in all directions.

What LED lights are great at is shining light straight down onto a surface or straight up to bounce off a ceiling (like a Torchiere light setup). Our high-end LED lights are fantastic in desk lamps, as they offer extreme brightness and outstanding light clarity that's useful for any work or study situation. They're also perfect for recessed lighting and down lights. I'm actually writing this article with the help of a 10-watt LED light in a small desk lamp that's aimed at my wall. It bounces white light across the entire room, illuminating my keyboard and computer. (It also stays cool enough to touch, since it doesn't waste much electricity as excess heat.)

LED lights are also great for porch lights, garages, sheds or any application where you need to leave the light on all night. That's because LED lights will use only 1/10th the electricity of incandescent bulbs, saving you big dollars on electricity. Even our 3-watt LED light is sufficient for nighttime use where you just want to "leave the light on" around your property.

All of our LED lights produce no UV radiation or IR radiation, making them perfect for use in museums, hospitals, offices or areas where UV radiation might degrade the surroundings (such as illuminating valuable artwork or photographs). The fact that they run remarkably cool also means they greatly reduce the fire hazard normally associated with the use of lights.

LED lights will make incandescent and fluorescent lights obsolete

I will offer a prediction right here: LED lights will render both incandescent light bulbs AND compact fluorescent lights obsolete. Many countries are already banning incandescent lights, and four U.S. states are considering their ban. Compact fluorescent lights will eventually be abandoned as the public learns the truth about their mercury content. Only LED lights offer energy efficiency and environmental friendliness at the same time. That's why LED lighting technology represents the future for both residential and commercial lighting.

Philips says it will even stop manufacturing incandescent lights by 2016, but most consumers will have switched long before then. Within a few years, only the most financially-ignorant consumers will even consider using incandescent light bulbs. Burning a light that wastes 95% of the electricity it consumes is sort of like driving a car that gets a fuel economy of one mile per gallon. No consumer in their right mind would continue to throw away their cash (and destroy the environment) when a sensible, efficient alternative is readily available.

And LED lights will get even brighter, better and less expensive in the coming years. Through EcoLEDs.com, I'm making an effort to bring these lights to eco-conscious consumers around the world. Within a few years, we hope to have lights exceeding 500 lumens of light output that will cost under $50 at retail. The trends are already in place, and U.S. LED component manufacturers are gearing up their factories for higher volumes.

LED components will follow price trends of PC components

The LED light industry today is much like the PC industry was in the 1980's. Remember what it cost you to buy a lousy 4.77mHz PC with a floppy disk drive and 64k of RAM in 1981? It was about four thousand dollars -- and it didn't even have color! I remember the first hard drives for Apple computers cost about five thousand dollars... and they only stored only 10 megabytes!

By comparison, you can now by a 4 gigabyte SD memory card for under a hundred bucks at retail! That's a massive reduction in cost as these electronics became cheaper to manufacture and widely accepted by consumers. LED components have been following a similar path. A single component that cost $10 today would have cost $1000 just a few years ago. And a few years from now, it might only cost 10 cents. Prices are falling by 50% a year on LED components, which means LED light bulbs will get increasingly affordable with each passing year.

Even right now, buying LED lights makes great economic sense. They pay you back in 1-2 years in electricity costs alone (depending on how much you pay for electricity), not to mention the benefits of protecting the environment from more CO2 and mercury emissions. That's an environmental cost that consumers rarely factor into their monthly electricity bill, but it's a very real cost associated with wasting electricity.

What is the value of preventing the release of 10,000 pounds of CO2 into the air? What is the value of preventing the release of a kilogram of mercury from a power plant? You see, nobody has really put a price figure on these things because polluting the environment continues to be seen by most American consumers and politicians as a revenue-neutral event when, in reality, it is a huge hidden cost against future economic productivity. Every gram of mercury and every pound of carbon dioxide released into the air places an unknown future cost on the national economy. With this in mind, consider the REAL cost of burning incandescent lights. It's not just what you waste in paying for electricity, it's also what future costs you indirectly impose upon the environment.

Do you get the big picture?

Understanding all this requires "big picture thinking," and sadly, the ability to see the big picture is sorely lacking among many consumers, businesses and lawmakers. Americans seem to be primarily focused on the short-term picture: How much can I save right now? Can I get this cheaper today at the expense of some future hidden burden that will have to be paid by someone else?

Canadians tend to be very well informed about the long-term implications of their present consumption decisions. In fact, many of the customers ordering our EcoLEDs lights are located in Canada. They understand the big picture and realize that paying more money right now for a technology that will save them hundreds of dollars in the long run (while saving the environment at the same time) makes instant sense.

Many Americans understand this, too, but due to our crumbling education system, even the ability to do the basic math calculations required to even understand the Total Cost of Ownership seems to be a rare skill. The vast majority of high school graduates in the United States cannot calculate a 15 percent restaurant tip in their heads. How on earth will they ever understand the Total Cost of Ownership concept for energy-efficient lighting?

I don't have an answer for that. Not everybody will get this. The big picture will only be grasped by some. The others will have to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming about the government banning their incandescent light bulbs. But the smarter, better-informed consumers out there (like NewsTarget readers) get this right now, and they understand that LED lights make instant sense in terms of personal economics and planetary impact.

(Full disclosure: I am the founder of www.EcoLEDs.com which manufactures and sells LED light bulbs, and I have a financial stake in the commercial success of EcoLEDs. A portion of every sale provides financial support to the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center, where I volunteer as the executive director.)

Media giants want to criminalize personal copying of movie DVDs to portable electronic devices

With so many portable video devices emerging on the market these days, there's a growing question about intellectual property and whether or not it's appropriate to rip video to formats that will play on these devices. One question is, for example, is it appropriate for you to rip your DVDs to a format that will play on a portable video device such as the iPod or the PSP? The manufacturers who make these devices and the companies that own video content would much prefer that you never rip these movies into any other format. There's a profit motive behind that stance. They want you to buy every movie two, three or four times, once for every format. For example, you've probably purchased many videos in VHS format back in the days when VHS tapes were the only things available. You probably purchased some of those same movies again on DVD. So why do you have to buy the same movie twice?

Forcing customers to upgrade their movie collections to new media formats is a great revenue model for the movie studios because they have opportunities to sell the same content to viewers over and over again. As a consumer, I don't want to be caught in that. I think that if you buy a movie once, you should be able to view it on different devices. You are still the only person that has possession of that content, and as long as you don't pirate that content and sell it or give it to friends, it's fine. If it's just for personal use, I see absolutely nothing wrong with ripping the same movie to multiple devices.

I also think the same should be true with books. If you bought a book at a bookstore and you want to read it on your laptop computer, I see nothing wrong with scanning the book, digitizing the pages and loading them on your computer so you can read it on the road. In fact, I've done this many times. Of course I've never shared these files with anyone, and I would never think of selling them, so I am actually protecting the intellectual property by keeping it to myself.

Yet publishers think that is breaking the law, and movie property owners also think it's breaking the law if you rip movies to other formats. With the legislative influence of the RIAA and the MPAA, it may turn out that if you ever record a movie you'll be arrested as a movie pirate and charged with a felony. It goes back to the classic Sony VHS recorder lawsuits decades ago. In fact, if Sony had won those lawsuits, then all VHS recorders would have been outlawed and people recording TV shows on VHS tapes would have been charged with piracy.

In my opinion you are doing nothing wrong if you own a movie on DVD and rip it to other player formats such as PlayStation portable, iPod video, cell phone video, or any other video format. Of course, if you go out and rent movies, and then rip them, then you are in fact doing something wrong, because you don't own that movie, you're just renting it. When you return the movie for rental, you should delete the files. In other words, you should only have those alternate files for as long as you have paid for the right to be in possession of the DVD. I think it's also unethical to buy a DVD, rip it, and then sell the DVD, because that shows your only purpose in buying the DVD was to borrow the movie so you could rip it. To be consistent, if you sell a DVD that you've ripped to a file, you should delete the file once the DVD leaves your possession.

Personally, I have a DVD collection that is always growing. I both own and rip that content, so I can watch the movies I own on other electronic devices. That way I can buy movies like "Oceans Eleven," which I think is a great film, and I can watch "Oceans Eleven" on my home DVD player or take it with me on a PSP or an iRiver, PMP, or other portable media device. If I ever sell that movie on DVD, I will delete those files. That's the honest way to handle it as a consumer. I'm supporting the movie studios by buying the DVDs, but I'm also allowing myself to be able to watch that DVD on a number of different devices that I own.

If you want to rip movies to other devices, you'd better do it now, because movie studios are pressuring Congress to pass laws outlawing any analog recording devices. In other words, you could be a felon just for pressing record on your VCR. That's what movie studios actually want and that's what they're proposing in current legislation. They don't want you to be able to record anything. A tape recorder will turn you into a felon if those laws become reality, and of course, you'll never be able to rip video to anything without breaking the law.

The intellectual property philosophies of organizations like Sony BMG are not only wrong, but dangerous. They are big brother intellectual property policies, where these companies would even install secret spyware on your computer, which is what Sony BMG did to millions of users without their knowledge, to prevent you from copying their music, meanwhile exposing your computer to hacker attacks. That's history, that's already been done. That's the way Sony BMG treats customers, and if we leave intellectual property laws up to the media giants like Sony, we'll all be branded criminals sooner or later.

So bottom line: Rip all the movies you want. Just make sure you own the DVD first, and don't share those movie rips with friends. But to protect your rights, fight against DRM (Digital Rights Management) schemes that force consumers to buy the same content over and over again for every new device or media format that comes along.

Want to stay informed about the fight against DRM? See DefectiveByDesign.org.

More software companies embracing the open source model

Software companies are just beginning to realize that miserly protection of software code is not always as lucrative as giving it away and participating in certain open-source software practices instead.

Open-source software -- code that is available for use or modification at no charge -- is growing in popularity among software companies. IBM, Sun Microsystems and other big names in the software niche all have some sort of open-source product offering. Even Microsoft has adopted some open-source elements. One company, Aras, will be releasing the code for its design application, which was written exclusively with Microsoft technology and will be hosted on the software giant's CodePlex code-sharing site. Aras' code makes up a product lifecycle management program, and is designed to structure the service and design of manufactured products.

Since open-source code is given away for free, the monetary return of open-source content comes from charging for technical and other support, software updates or a more feature-intensive, upgraded version of the free software.

But open-source content is not just another, more popular way to make money. It is also a way to get your product noticed when it ordinarily would just be one of many. PLM programs such as Aras' are usually quite costly, but the company hopes the gamble of giving the content away for free will allow them to break into a market that is currently dominated by big names such as Dassault Systemes and Parametric Technology. Irish company Iona Technologies has recently been facing financial difficulties, but the company hopes that its implementation of some open-source elements will show it can keep up with industry trends and give it visibility, although the move has not brought in any money just yet.

Not all companies subscribe to open-source content 100 percent like Aras does. Some companies pick and choose the aspects of open-source that work best for them. OpenMFG regularly gets requests from venture capitalists to offer 100 percent open-source content, but the company has not seen any reason to yet. Their customers are not clamoring for it and the current hybrid model -- some is open-source content, some is closed-source -- is working for them. Also, OpenMFG CEO Ned Lilly said in a C-Net interview that many companies make the mistake of using open-source to bring back programs that didn't sell in the past. He said that, when the programs fail again, companies would think that open source didn't work instead of looking to traditional problems such as program errors or insufficient customer support.

According to a C-Net interview with analyst Raven Zachary of the 451 Group, the long-term financial success of open-source products is not yet certain, but the software market's interest in the content is strong, and it hadn't failed a business yet.

Breakthrough anti-reflection coating could mean advances in optics, LED lighting and lenses

A team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has created a new optical coating that enables greater control over the basic properties of light. The world's first material that reflects virtually no light can eliminate unwanted reflections, and has been an active technological goal of scientists for years.

What you need to know - Conventional View

• Most surfaces, from a puddle of water to a mirror, reflect some light.

• One type of optical coating is an anti-reflection coating, which reduces unwanted reflections from surfaces, and is commonly used on spectacles and photographic lenses.

• Conventional anti-reflection coatings, although widely used, work only at a single wavelength and only when the light source is positioned directly perpendicular to the material.

• A technique called oblique angle deposition strongly reduces or eliminates reflection at all wavelengths and incoming angles of light.

• The oblique angle evaporation technique is already widely used in the industry, and the design can be applied to any type of substrate -- not just an expensive semiconductor such as aluminum nitride.

• This is material with a refractive index of 1.05, which is extremely close to the refractive index of air and the lowest ever reported. Window glass, in comparison, has a refractive index of about 1.45.

• The refractive index is a fundamental property that governs the amount of light a material reflects, as well as other optical properties such as diffraction, refraction, and the speed of light inside the material.

• The new optical coating could find use in just about any application where light travels into or out of a material, such as more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, "smart" lighting, high-reflectance mirrors, and black body radiation.

Intense video gaming actually strengthens your eyesight

Playing video games with high levels of action, like Halo and Unreal Tournament, can improve your eyesight, researchers at the University of Rochester have found.

The improvement was remarkable: among a study group of non-gamers that were told to play action video games for a few hours a day, they improved their eyesight by 20 percent within one month.

The important factor was the type of gaming you do: Pac Man, Zelda and Mario aren't going to improve your eyesight; searching for fast-moving targets onscreen in a gaming environment with dark and light areas, like in Halo, will.

This is because action gaming has a different effect on our brains, Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, said in the study.

"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," she said. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

To see if there was any improvement, the researchers used test subjects who rarely play video games. The study had one set of players play Tetris and the other set play Unreal Tournament, a shooting game.

In comparative eye chart tests, only the players who played Unreal showed visual improvement. The shoot-'em-up players also could correctly identify objects faster than the Tetris players.

"These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life," Bavelier said in a press release.

The research suggests that action gaming can help improve the eyesight of people with visual defects.

The team is now going to research further into how the brain responds to other visual stimuli. They will be using a massive 360-degree enclosed gaming environment for their next study.

The Unreal/Tetris study will appear in next week in the journal Psychological Science.

Roomba maker launches programmable robot for hobbyists, students

The robot-maker iRobot, perhaps best known for its Roomba autonomous vacuum, is giving students and hobbyists the chance to order around their own robots with the programmable "Create."

The Create is based on the aforementioned Roomba -- and its floor-mopping cousin Scooba -- and thus comes equipped with the wheels, motors and proximity sensors that keep the cleaner bot from getting stuck in corners or careening down stairs. Absent, though, are the brushes and fluid tanks used for cleaning, which leaves room for amateur robot-makers to attach arms, cameras or anything else they can imagine. While iRobot plans to sell attachments for the Create, the company expects most users will build their own add-ons.

"This isn't a toy or a plug-and-chug thing," said iRobot co-founder Helen Grenier. "It is a programmable robot for students and robot enthusiasts."

The Create is set to ship with a $129.99 price tag, and a command module with an 8-bit processor will be available separately for $59.99, according to iRobot product manager John Billington.

Even prior to its official release, iRobot engineers and university students have put the Create through its paces. Some students from the University of California, Davis have programmed their Create to pickup socks, and another Create has been programmed to open the fridge and fetch beverages. One group even found a way to turn their Create into a vehicle, albeit only for rodents. Their robot is attached to a plastic hamster ball, and when a rodent moves inside the ball, it sends navigation commands to the Create.

Grenier said of the rodent-controlled robot, "I think it was particularly creative in an ironic way."