How religion and science intersect, or whether they can, is a subject worthy of a conference like Pop!Tech, a venue for dangerous topics.

Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, he of the Selfish Gene and Memetics, doesn't have much use for religion. He sees it as unscientific and dogmatic. The current attack on evolution – a theory accepted by most scientists as extremely well-grounded – by some religious groups has highlighted differences. The cover story in the November issue of Wired magazine ("The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the crusade against religion.") lays out his position.

But neither technology nor religion is going away, says Martin Marty, a religious scholar and ordained Lutheran minister. We have to find ways to have them live together, he says.

After hearing their presentations, I wonder if Dawkins may have had more in common with Marty than it seems.

Marty spoke of religion exploring mysteries, not with the idea that they are unanswerable, but in the sense that as one answer is obtained it only leads to more questions, more mysteries to unravel.

That seemed to be close to Dawkins's view of the scientist as humble explorer, always ready to give up positions outgrown when new evidence suggests new truths.

We live in a "middle world," Dawkins says, in which we experience only a limited part of reality. We see a rock as a solid object, not as mostly empty space with atoms whizzing around, because it has been a useful way for us to see it. We may have trouble getting our heads around quantum mechanics, the quite different set of laws that govern the world of the extremely small, because – as he puts it – our brains haven't had to evolve to confront those ideas.

In other words, he explains. if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. The universe is "queerer" than we can imagine.

What we call science and religion may be different paths to unlocking these truths that, for now, seem beyond comprehension.

Kevin Kelly is a big thinker on technology and culture, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Marianne Weems is artistic director of The Builders Association, a New York-based theatrical group. Hasan Elahi is a performance artist. What were they all doing on stage together at Pop!Tech Thursday morning?

Each, I think, was telling us in his or her own way how we live within a cloud of technology all around us. It's up to us to decide what use to make of it, and we'd better understand what it's doing if we're going to do that.

Try getting your head around a few of these ideas from Kelly: The basic computing power of the Web is going to exceed that of all 6 billion or 8 billion humans sometime between the years 2020 and 2040. Technology wants some of the same things evolution wants: to be everywhere, to become more complex, to become interdependent with other technologies. There are no bad technologies, Kelly says, only bad human parents who don't teach them the right rules of behavior (cue Asimov's three laws of robotics.) "Our job as humans is to parent our mind children."

With technology everywhere, we're more defined by what technologies we choose not to use. We have extraordinary choice and freedom in that way.

While Kelly cogitates, Weems is looking at how our encounters with technology can be expressed in theater. One video clip from a stage performance shows call center answerers in India, who learn American accents and cultural references by watching US television. But that makes for a strange life in which they develop two personae, one Indian and one American. Simple fiber optic phone lines have made them electronic American immigrants – sort of.

Elahi lives to embrace technology. An American citizen who was grilled by the FBI after 9/11, he struck back by making his life an open book. He wears an ankle bracelet that lets viewers see where he is at any moment. He records his airplane flights, his meals, even the restrooms he visits. And, just for fun, he sometimes flies to a country and then stays in the waiting area for several days, never actually passing through customs. What a puzzle that must present to anyone watching and trying to figure out what he's up to!

Airports are like the Guantánamo Bay holding area for American detainees, he says. Nowhere. A limbo land without a country. His reaction as a "technology artist" to the issue of privacy in a world with more and more electronic eyes and ears is to let them watch and listen all they want – perhaps the flood of banal information will make its own statement about watchers and watching.

That's a pretty provocative group to end the first morning at Pop!Tech. And all of them well worth learning more about and following their future projects.

What is Pop!Tech? We’ll let the institute's website toot its own horn.

Suffice it to say, if you’re interested in how science and technology are changing the world, hiking up to Camden, Maine, in October (this year Oct. 19-21) for the three-day conference is akin to Christmas coming two months early. Many of the presentations dazzle and delight, others are merely intensely interesting! And as always there are plenty of surprises – nearly all of them pleasant! Last year I headed home energized with lots of topics I wanted to learn more about.

This year Andrew Zolli, the conference organizer, has put together a lineup of presenters that includes some big names, including Tom Friedman of the New York Times, whose book on 21st century global economics, “The World Is Flat,” is extraordinarily popular and influential. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, has popularized one of the fundamental concepts of Web commerce, the “long tail” that allows myriad tiny niche markets to prosper. It’ll be interesting to see whether they rehash their ideas or share new insights. I’m guessing the latter.

Other big names include genetics pioneer Craig Venter and Silicon Valley's John Sculley. But many presenters are less famous. I’m looking forward to hearing from Losang Ragbey, “who is leading a one-woman educational revolution in Tibet,” and Fatima Gailani, “who helped coauthor the Afghan constitution and runs the Red Crescent Society in that country,” according to preview materials.

This year’s theme is “Dangerous Minds,” and, if last year is representative, one or two speakers will make attendees squirm in their seats. Last year Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" painted all religions and religious believers as antiscientific and basically responsible for what ails the world. A Christian woman sitting next to me was troubled that no one was presenting a counter-perspective. This year Mr. Harris’s mentor, Sir Richard Dawkins, he of the "selfish gene" theory, will speak. But I see that Martin Marty, a respected theologian, is also on the bill, so perhaps calls for more balance were heeded.

This is only my second visit to the Pop!Tech conference, so I’m a newbie. It is also a first: My initial blogging experience as a Monitor journalist (readers are urged to be kind and patient!). Attending last year led to several stories I wrote for the Monitor. But I also realized that much more happened that was pretty darn interesting, the kind of “notebook items” that don't fit easily into the paper's print edition.

Once the meetings start, Pop!Tech plans to make nearly everything that happens available free on video (if you have a broadband connection) at live.poptech.org. So if you can't be one of the few hundred crowded into the beautiful Camden Opera House Oct. 19-21, you can still experience a lot of what happens. There’ll be plenty of bloggers weighing in, too, and maybe even some print coverage. I'll point you to any that catches my eye. And I hope you’ll drop back here for my take on the action starting Thursday.

Apple opened its latest retail store last week, on New York's Fifth Avenue, and I was there.

I should clarify: I traveled five hours by bus from Boston and waited in line for 18 hours (much of it in unrelenting wind and rain) for the chance to be one of the first inside the sparkling Manhattan store. I wasn't alone. In fact, when I arrived at 12:30 a.m. Friday to line up in front of the 32-foot glass cube, there were already 12 people ahead of me. They'd come from Germany, Scotland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere to be there for the store's opening.

Not long after I plopped down my stuff to claim my spot as number 13, I couldn't help feeling a bit foolish. What was I doing, having just worked a full day and spent five hours on the Fung Wah bus, camping out on a New York street corner? Was it really worth it? I came to question my sanity even more about two hours after I arrived, with my cellphone battery dead (after assuring friend after friend on my phone that I was not, in fact, crazy), the urge to sleep started to creep in, and raindrops dampened my plan to snooze.

But I'd come prepared – or so I thought. My overnight bag had a pair of waterproof pants and a jacket, two changes of warm clothes, a pillow, a book, my Apple iBook computer, and a Crazy Creek-style camping chair. If I had it to do over, I would've traded the pillow, book, and camping chair for my yellow rain boots, as the rain made it impossible to sit or recline and stay dry – even with an umbrella. So I stood. For 18 hours.

It was miserable. But even at 3:00 a.m., with rain pouring down, when a few members of our newly-bonded crew toyed with the idea of paying $375 for a Fifth Avenue hotel room, we never really thought of giving up. We were squirming in discomfort, yes, but we weren't giving up.

As day broke after the long, wet night, a renewed spirit of "we can do this" pulsed through our ranks, even as the rain continued to fall. Passersby on their way to work would stop and ask us what we were doing. The CBS Morning Show brought excitement and activity (and free coffee and pastries) to the plaza where we were stationed. A few reporters and camera crews stopped by to interview some of us, though notably missing in the early morning and overnight hours was the ironically named Stormy Shippy, the "first person in line." He'd spent the night in a hotel, only to come back in the morning looking rested and refreshed to claim his place in line. Those of us that had spent the night braced against the elements in line weren't so thrilled about that, but there was enough of a consensus that it wasn't that big a deal that no one told him to beat it.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed up in the morning too, to check out the sparkling cube with a group of executives. His presence was even more of a morale booster, as most in the group of overnighters rank him somewhere between rock star and prophet. The sight of him brought out cameras all around, even from behind the cube, shooting through, to get a glimpse of him. This shot is my favorite. I'm the guy in the background wearing the Red Sox hat.

As the 6:00 p.m. opening hour drew nearer, more people started to show up – a lot more. Apple doesn't release attendence numbers, but one person estimated the line to be .45 miles long at the height of the opening frenzy.

What were we thinking? Isn't it just a computer store? I don't know that there's a definitive answer to those questions, but what I can tell you is that I decided to make the trip just to be a part of the experience. It wasn't so much about being first into the store, or about snagging one of 2,500 nifty T-shirts. It wasn't really even about the prospect of bringing home a "Lucky Bag" filled with Apple swag (which Apple for some reason decided not to offer at this opening). Call it crazy, a waste of time, or foolish, but what motivated most in line was just their fondness for Apple, and I think that's OK.

What is it about Apple that inspires me and the complete strangers I bonded with that night to go to such lengths for their favorite brand? Borrowing from Apple's popular "Think Different" ad campaign of a few years back, I think it's our "differentness." In a world of Windows users, where Apple's meager market share means its fans are often the odd ones out, events like the store opening are a chance to band together to celebrate our choice to be different. For this Red Sox fan, the parallels are obvious. Like Red Sox Nation circa 1918-2004, Apple fans stay faithful because they know they've got the best thing going, no matter what everyone else is saying. Last week's glitzy Apple store opening – in New York, the home of "The Evil Empire," no less – was an Apple fan's 2004 World Series.

We're seeing them much more these days – gadgets and gizmos squished and mashed together to form new supergadgets. From the cameraphone, once considered cutting edge and now the favorite of celebrity stalkers everywhere, we've gotten to the all-in-one cellphone-camera-PDA-e-mail-Web device. But are some manufacturers taking things a bit too far?

The Swiss Army knife, perhaps the original all-in-one gadget, went high tech in 2004 with the introduction of the Victorinox SwissMemory, a little red pocketknife with a gigabyte of flash memory storage built in. The SwissBit S.beat goes further down the path to digital domination with the introduction of a line MP3 player-equipped knives in capacities of up to four gigabytes. Talk about a bummer if you forget to put that one in your checked baggage!

If you prefer driving to flying, the gadgetmakers have you more than covered. Motorola's v325 with VZ Navigator is one of what are sure to be many cellphones with GPS navigation capabilities built in. I can see the appeal here: You're talking on your phone in the car already, so why not stare at it for directions, too? What? Driving? Focusing on the road? No problem....

The iPod is spawning its own kind of gadget convergence. As it has evolved, it has gone from storing and playing just five gigabytes of music, to holding 60 gigs of music, photos, movies, and whatever else one needs to tote around town. Car integration is big in this category too. FM transmitters broadcast your tunes to your car radio, sometimes charging your player at the same time. Whole companies base their businesses around accessories for the iPod and portable devices like it.

A host of major automakers are playing nice with the iPod, too, offering factory-installed hookups for the popular music player. That makes sense to me, as do developments like the new Infiniti G35's built-in hard drive. What doesn't make sense are the car- and computermakers trying to go the other way: Enter the Ferrari and Lamborghini-themed laptops (complete with engine-noise start-up sounds!) What!?

The home has seen even more gadget convergence. First we saw the combination VCR/TV. Then the DVD/TV and DVD/VCR launched. Now you can get a refrigerator with a TV or even a blender with an integrated recipe database and LCD. Home-theater seating comes with built-in speakers or a high-tech rumble function. TVs have long been in more rooms than just the den, but they're now in the bathroom, too. And of course, there's the multifunction remote, which has gone from simply controlling a TV and VCR to being the central command center of one's entire house.

Do people really want these things? I mean, is there really someone out there saying, "Gee, if only I had a combination flashlight/toothbrush/garlic press"? Of course not. A lot of these "innovative" devices are the answer to questions never asked. Who needs a TV on their refrigerator? 

But some of this gadget convergence is really cool. Take, for instance, SanDisk's new Secure Digital flash memory cards that have a built-in USB connector. No more searching for your digital camera's cable, or fumbling with a card reader! Or, how 'bout Kidde's combination smoke and carbon monoxide detector? Brilliant! Better still, DuPont's new smoke detector that integrates with a common light socket, so you never have to replace the batteries.

Innovations like these provide convenience and convergence that people can really use. Here's hoping there are more combo gadgets out there like them, and fewer like these.

No more heading out to the movie store in that blinding snowstorm for that must-have new release. No more cursing your postman when your titles don't arrive on time. No more "I'll wait til it's on cable." For the first time, major movie studios have signed deals with websites that allow people to buy movies online and download them directly to their PCs, as soon as they're released on DVD.

The two sites, Movielink and Cinemanow, have partnered with studios such as MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Miramax, NBC Universal, Sony, and Lions Gate Entertainment, ensuring that just about all popular new releases will be available online. The sites have been around since around 2000, but until this point, had only offered movies on an "on demand" or pay-per-view basis - for about $3 for a 24-hour viewing period - and had released them long after they arrived on movie store shelves.

This new development has been hailed by some as a revolution in home entertainment, but the complaints have already started pouring in.

The obvious question, "How much?" has become a sore spot on online message boards: $20 to $30 is considerably more than consumers pay for a new DVD at discount retailers or at online stores like Amazon.com. Besides, when they're downloaded from the Internet, movies don't include all the packaged extras that come with a DVD - documentaries, booklets, and other special features. And the complaints don't stop there.

The movies' format annoys some. The 1.4 gigabyte or so movie files (dial-up users proceed at your own peril) downloaded from the sites have digital rights management (DRM) software embedded in them that limits what users can do with them. That puts a damper on copying the films to recordable DVDs, sharing them with friends, or playing them on more than three different computers. Also out of the game are Mac users. The DRM technology is Windows-only, meaning "switchers" will have to wait it out until the iTunes store makes the transition to selling movies, whenever that is.

I don't think these services will catch on, but price, lack of extras, or Mac compatability aren't to blame. At this point, the "PC as digital hub" vision hasn't quite caught on enough for people to be comfortable making their computer their primary source of entertainment. Those who invest thousands in home theater systems just don't (for some reason) want to watch movies on a computer monitor (at $30 a pop, no less). Perhaps less important to the average viewer, but even more critical in principle, is that when you buy a DVD, no one follows you home and tells you where you can watch it. You're not told what brand player to use, or that you're not allowed to share it with a neighbor – imagine the revolt that would happen if that were the case. But that's exactly what this DRM technology purports to do.

Until the movie companies find a way to deliver films in a format as portable, universally adaptable, and transparent as DVD, the polycarbonate discs, however "90s" they may seem, will reign supreme – even if that means trips to the video store in a snowstorm to get them.

I consider myself a pretty technologically "with it" guy. I read technology magazines, contribute to online tech bulletin boards, and keep up with a slew of tech blogs. I even find myself drooling over the latest-greatest product releases from time to time. People who know about my ... oh, I guess I can say it ... obsession, often come to me for advice on what to buy. They know I track product releases and troll the rumor mills enough to give them an answer, or at least point them toward someone who can. So when a friend asked whether I was going to upgrade my iPod when Apple released a rumored 3.5-inch touch screen model, she was shocked at my response. "What, you don't have an iPod?"

Now, there are lots of reasons out there that people have for not having one of the personal music/video players – disdain for Apple being chief among them. But I don't hate Apple – in fact, I'm a big fan of their products. I love the clean, smooth, efficient design of their computers, OS X operating system, and yes, iPod.

The other common dig on the iPod (and personal audio players in general) is the isolating effect they have on their owners and the people around them. I'm not a social crusader – you won't see me yank out someone's 'buds just to say hi – but look around you the next time you ride public transportation, walk down a city street, or even take an elevator. Those ubiquitous white earbuds are everywhere. And the ears they're plugged into belong to people completely unaware of (and utterly unconcerned with) their surroundings and the people who fill them.

I also don't subscribe to the school of thought that rallies against Apple for its exclusive online music store. You see, Apple's iTunes music store is the Web's largest and most popular, but the songs one downloads from it are protected by Fairplay, Apple's proprietary digital rights management technology. As such, they are not playable on portable music players other than Apple's iPod. Methods for converting songs purchased on iTunes have arisen, but doing so may be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This may be an unpopular view, but I think Apple has gone through the work to gather the licenses and music label partnerships necessary to sell music online, so it should accordingly be able to govern – to an extent – how its customers listen to its music.

So why my reluctance to purchase an iPod? Most of all, it's a lifestyle choice. I can't really think of a time during my day when I'd use one. My commute is by bicycle, so listening to music then is out of the question (biking to work in Boston is an exciting enough proposition that I need all of my senses engaged). What about listening at home? My stereo is plugged into my laptop computer (where all of my music is stored), so an iPod wouldn't bring any new benefits. Work? No. Grocery shopping? Please. I know I'm in a small minority, but I just can't justify bringing a digital audio player into my life.

Also, I can't say I understand the inclusion of a video capability in the latest iPod. I watch movies on the plane when I travel, but on my laptop, whose 14-inch screen I consider to be more than adequate. But a 2.5-inch display? It reminds me of the original Nintendo Game Boy, whose screen, to be nitpicky, measured 2.6 inches diagonally. Now, I know the new iPod's screen is supposed to be vibrant, bright, and engaging, but I just don't see the appeal of watching a movie - or TV shows at $1.99 an episode - on it. Is this a feature people were asking for?

There's also the argument that the iPod doubles as a great portable hard drive. While that's true – iPods come in capacities up to 60 gigabytes – I've had success finding other portable storage for far fewer dollars per-gigabyte than the iPod's $299 for 30, $399 for 60.

Now, I don't mean for this column to discourage people from buying an iPod – I think they're a great product for people who will use them. But I'd encourage potential buyers to question their reasons for wanting one – just because Steve Jobs pulls an iPod out of his jeans pocket doesn't mean you'll be able to make room for it in your life. While each of the arguments against owning an iPod – their ubiquity, tendency to isolate, high cost, and questionable usefulness of their features – has its merits, the one way to know whether an iPod or other portable music player is right for you is to think about how – or whether – you'll use it. Plenty of people will be able to fill lists with numerous uses for one. Just not me, not now.

You've seen the ads, read the reviews, heard the hype. Personal biases aside, the question remains: Is it time to switch from a Microsoft Windows-based computer to an Apple running Mac OS X? Unfortunately, the answer to that question has grown more complex and nuanced than ever before. Here's why.

Intel Macs

On June 6, 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that his company's Macintosh computers would be pulling a 180 and switching from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel processors over the following two years. Fast-forward to January 10, 2006, when Jobs introduced the first two Mac systems to make use of Intel dual core processors.

The revised iMac and new MacBook Pro were touted for their speed boosts, but the switch to Intel processors hasn't been easy. Apple spent years constructing a universal (IBM and Intel processor-compatible) version of its OS X operating system, and has designed iLife, its proprietary suite of video, picture, and music lifestyle programs, to work on both processors. But to run on the new Intel Macs, other companies' software must be converted to what are called Universal Binaries. The process involves anything from minor tweaks to major overhauls, depending on how a program is written.

Now, Apple wouldn't introduce a new computer that supported such a small amount of software on its first day, so in the meantime, older software can still run, but through a special transcoding program called Rosetta, which runs behind the scenes. Though it enables users to use their old software, Rosetta is a considerable performance sapper. In the first user tests, performance, which Jobs had claimed would be four to five times as fast as Apple's older systems, wasn't much faster at all.

This doesn't mean the new Macs aren't worth switching to; it just means that it will take some time before the real performance benefits of the Intel switch kick in. Besides, they're great computers. Even before the Intel switch, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg proclaimed the iMac G5 (the new Intel iMac's predecessor) the "gold standard of desktop PCs." When the software catches up with it, that standard will only be raised.

Mac security issues?

Part of the reason Apple users are so proud of their computers is that there has never been a confirmed worm or virus on the OS X operating system. Never, until now. Last week a worm that infects Mac applications was discovered. It has since been shown to be relatively benign - infecting computers only if users download a file, decompress it, open it, and is logged in on their computer's Administrator account, as Andrew Welch of Ambrosia Software describes it. Even if a user succeeds in getting his computer infected, the only thing the worm does is try to replicate by sending itself to people on the user's local iChat buddy list. It's not a big threat, and users have to be ignoring some pretty basic computer security rules for it to affect them at all.

Another piece of OS X malware discovered this week is more serious. Rather than relying on user error (or carelessness), it exploits a default feature of the Safari Web browser and requires no user interaction. Safari will automatically open "safe" and commonly used files like movies, images, or ZIP archives after downloading, which is convenient. Now, the operating system won't launch a file automatically if it determines that there is "active" content in it - an executable file, for instance. Sounds good, right? As Heise online reports, the problem arises when a line of code that identifies the active content is removed. "If this line is omitted, Safari no longer recognizes the content as potentially dangerous," and executes it, per the default setting's instructions. This exploit is scarier than the one last week, because it doesn't require the user to do anything but visit a site with Safari in its default setting.

Though the exploit hasn't been abused by any websites yet, it wouldn't take much to disguise a malicious script in this method, potentially erasing data or damaging programs. The easiest work-around is to use an alternate browser like Mozilla's Firefox, which doesn't support the automatic opening of files. Or, if you're using Safari, deactivating the "Open safe files after downloading" preference works, too.

Windows Vista

All potential Mac switchers have probably had experience with Windows, and the next generation of the operating system is right around the corner. Not content to let its mammoth market share slip away, Microsoft has been hard at work developing Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP. The new Windows, set to ship either later this year or early in 2007, promises beefed-up security, a better default Web browser to compete with Firefox, snazzy integrated graphics, and a host of other new improvements.

But the news on Vista hasn't all been positive. Reports surfaced last week that the new OS will come in eight - count 'em - eight, versions. Choosing among them could be a tough task in itself. Also, to experience the full scope of Vista's features, users must be running some pretty high-end hardware: the graphic interface alone would prove too taxing to tussle with on many of today's systems.

So what's a home computer user to do? As backwards as it may sound in today's latest-greatest world: wait. Jumping in on the ground floor of any new product release just because it's "faster," "better," or any other superlative found in marketing copy, isn't the smartest move. If you're itching for an Intel Mac, it's best to wait until more programs can run natively on it. If you're on the fence about Windows vs. Mac OS X, wait until Vista launches (at which point the Intel Macs will run much more software natively) and do a comparison then.

This may be a stretch, but it really feels as if Google just added its googol-th feature. It's an instant messaging add-in to the wildly popular Gmail e-mail service, and it blurs the line between the two popular Web communication mediums. I was an early adopter of Gmail, and in the past few days have experimented with the chat feature, trading instant messages with friends. It's pretty slick, but using it, I can't help wondering: Have we grown too complacent trusting Google with so much of our lives?

Now, I want to make clear off the bat, there's nothing about Gmail's IM feature that makes it particularly alarming. One difference between it and other popular messaging services like AIM and MSN Messenger is that they run in a standalone program, and it launches right in a Web browser, which is convenient. But the main thing that sets Google's apart is that it is by default set to save a record of IM conversations in users' e-mail inboxes. That may sound helpful, but it sends up a red flag to a privacy expert.

To understand the privacy issues, it's important to grasp how Gmail works. It's like pretty much every other free Web e-mail program, except that Gmail scans users' in-box messages and cross-checks the data collected with a database of paid advertisements. When a content match is found, text ads are inserted to the right of messages. They aren't invasive – most of the time I don't even see them – and occasionally I find one of interest and even (gasp) click on it. For example, if your friend has written to you about her new car, you're likely to see a listing for buying used cars, displayed to the right of her e-mail. It's no big deal – even helpful, maybe – to have contextual ads, but things start to sour when you think about the methods used to implement them.

Where does that data go?

When e-mails are scanned (which Google insists is done only by machine), are they stored? Nowadays it's not just e-mails (which people tend to write with a measure more discretion), but instant messages that are being scanned – and stored – by Google. How long does that data stick around? That question becomes even more important when one takes into account the recent efforts of the US government to subpoena queries from Google's bread-and-butter search engine. Though the company declined to cooperate in that case (and those were only searches), what's to say they'll continue this tack in the future?

Now, many out there will say that Google has prided itself in protecting its users' privacy - just look at its refusal to bow to the government's request for data. One of the company's lauded and oft-quoted "Ten things Google has found to be true" is that it's possible to make money without doing evil. That may seem comforting - and to be fair, the company treats its users very well – but the honest truth is that Google is a business, plain and simple. However great their services are, the company is still out to turn a profit, data you submit is being collected, and your definition of evil may not match theirs.

This is not meant to be a Google bashing session. "Free" has become the dictum of the Internet. From e-mail to blogs, photo storage to newspapers, Web users expect increasingly more handouts when surfing. Whether you're using search, e-mail, instant messaging, social networking, blog publishing, photo hosting, news aggregating, direction finding, video sharing, or using other gratis Web services, know that the companies that offer them are collecting data. Now, personally, I won't be dropping my Gmail account anytime soon, but it's important to realize that, as with lunches, there's no such thing as a free Web service.

I heard Carly Fiorina speak at an Comdex convention in Las Vegas about 18 months ago. She was in the midst of shepherding a rough merger of her company, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq. Yet she seemed to relish talking about the future of HP. She showed us many of the then-unseen commercials that have become familiar: the crook who is seemingly picked up by a mouse and deposited in a police van, etc. Her performance, given in the midst of a pressure-packed situation at her company, was impressive.

Now, a year and half later, after HP increased net income in its last quarter by 34 percent on a record total revenue of $20 billion (a 12 percent increase over the same period last year), Charles Cooper of CNet.com wonders why "Carly keeps getting the big dis." (Meanwhile, Ms. Fiorina has decided to pick a fight with Dell computers. HP's strategy for challenging Dell: "selling PCs without worrying about profit.")

Fiorina still catches an awful lot of flak--some of it deserved; much of it not--for her handling of the job. But I don't think that any of the talk has dented her sense of self-esteem. After all, this is someone with a pretty large ego--and much ambition. If the HP-Compaq combination proves itself, Fiorina will be written up in history books as the executive who rescued HP from a rendezvous with mediocrity.

So why do so many people tend to dismiss the job Fiorina has done? Mr. Cooper has an idea - would she be looked on differently if her name was Charlie instead of Carly? In the testosterone world of technology and business, it seems Fiorina's gender might be a problem for some of the old guard in the industry.

Thanks for the feedback on my original Gmail piece. (That posting is just below this one.) Most of the feedback deals with my comment about the US Department of Justice. Many of you said sure, Justice could ask Google to snoop on Gmail clients, but heck, they could do that now with Yahoo!, MSN, etc. All e-mail, for that matter can be looked at with the right search warrant.

True enough. All e-mail is public in a way ... and yet it isn't. In fact, I always tell people that they should understand that any e-mail they send could end up on the front page of the New York Times (just ask Bill Gates), if the circumstances are right.

But it's the idea of my e-mail being searched regularly that bothers me, and, I believe, most other privacy advocates. Even with the fact that e-mail can be looked at with the right search warrant in a specific situation, most e-mail users have a reasonable expectation that their e-mail is free from intrusion under regular circumstances. And while all e-mail accounts could be searched, the reality is that they aren't. (For instance, I don't believe the Monitor's sysadmin spends his time flipping through our e-mail messages. He's got too much other work to do.)

Which goes to my point about the government letting Google do the heavy lifting. Since the searching of your personal e-mail would literally be happening all the time in order to create ads for you, Google becomes a "kindler, gentler" Carnivore, which raises all kinds of interesting privacy issues.

I just don't like the idea.

As as one reader suggested, if you don't like it, don't use it.

I intend to take his advice. (by Tom Regan)

Now I almost wish it had been an April Fool's joke.

Yesterday, I raved about how Google was going to offer a new e-mail service (called Gmail) that would give users, for free, an e-mail account with an entire gigabyte of storage space. Google would also offer its unique searching technology to allow users to search for a particular e-mail in all that storage space.

Today, I read the fine print.

The San Jose Mercury News notes that Google will also be searching your private e-mails in order to see what ads it might want to push your way. Thursday Google officials tried to calm the firestorm of criticism that arose about the proposed practice, saying the e-mails would be scanned by a machine and not a person, but online users aren't buying it.

"So, not satisfied with indexing all public content, they want to index the private content too and make it searchable?'' one unidentified person posted on the WebmasterWorld website, geared to website operators. "Man, and they wonder why there are conspiracy theories!''

Here's my concern. What's to stop our good ol'buddy John Ashcroft down at the US Justice Department from dropping by Google headquarters with a quiet little Patriot Act subpoena, or something similar, that would instruct Google to add a few extra features to its machine that reads e-mails, creating 'special' searches to "help with the war on terror." No, I am not being paranoid. We all know the FBI would do something like this in a heartbeat.

So while I will continue to use Google for my searches, my brief flirtation with their e-mail service just ended on a very sour note. To quote Charles Cooper at CNet, Gmail give me the "creeps." (by Tom Regan)

by Tom Regan

Now, folks, we've been through this before. Here, at the Monitor, we have tried very hard over the years to warn you against answering any e-mail that comes from anybody in Africa that offers you a chance to get rich very quickly in exchange for a little skulldugggery on your part.

Better known as the Nigerian Bank scam (although these days it can come from lots of different countries, as in the example below), it's also called 419 scam, after the section in the Nigerian criminal code that covers these situations

Because here's the important part. Are you paying attention?

IT'S A SCAM, A RIPOFF, A CON, A LOAD OF ANIMAL BY-PRODUCTS.

Here's how it works. You mysteriously receive an e-mail asking for help, usually from a deposed African ruler, leader of a failed coup, or one of their close relatives. They've got to get a lot of money out of their home country, fast. And if you help them, you can make millions.

If you bite, the con artists play you along, until the point arrives when suddenly, they ask you to send them a little money to help expedite the process (bribes for local officials, etc.) You send them the money, and then you never hear from them again. (In fact, the 419 Coalition site says that the bad guys have taken in more than $5 billion US world wide using this scam.)

While it's hard to believe anyone actually falls for this con –Remember Regan's Ist Paradox: If it looks too good to be true, it inevitably is too good to be true – people do. Very smart people in fact. A good friend of mine, a seasoned journalist, almost got fooled. He smelled something funny at the last second and backed off.

Even academics from Harvard get fleeced. Here's a piece from Wednesday's Boston Herald about a Harvard Professor who allegedly scammed $600,000 from 35 friends and pals (one even mortagaged his house) by telling them the money was for a SARS project in China. He then sent the money to the 419ers, believing he would soon be a multi-millionaire and could pay them back easily. Now it seems he may do a little hard time, while the con artists laugh all the way to the bank.

What do these e-mails look like? Well, lo and behold, I received one not an hour ago. I reprint it below for your edification:

CONFIDENTIAL LETTER
Tel: 234-1-472-2080, Fax: 234-1-4401176
DEAR SIR,
MY NAME IS CHARLES -TAYLOR. I AM THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF
LIBERIA. I WAS FORCED TO RESIGN AS THE PRESIDENT OF LIBERIA IN WEST-
AFRICA BY THE UNITED NATIONS / INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITIES
WHICH WAS SPEARHEADED BY THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, MR. GEORGE
- BUSH.
PRESENTLY I AM IN EXILE IN CALABAR - NIGERIA WHERE I AM
STAYING UNDER CLOSE WATCH BY THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT WHO
KINDLY OFFERED ME ASYLUM.
I NEED TO TRANSFER WHAT I CALL, MY FUTURE HOPE, THE SUM OF
FIFTY TWO MILLION DOLLARS [USD 52,000,000,00] WHICH IS WITH
A SECURITY/FINANCE COMPANY INTO YOUR ACCOUNT OR ANY THAT YOU
CAN GET FOR ME.
I AM BEING MONITORED AND I DO NOT WANT TO TAKE CHANCES. FOR
YOUR INFORMATION, MY COMMUNICATION AND MOVEMENTS ARE UNDER
STRICT SURVEILLANCE THEREFORE MAKE ALL YOUR COMMUNICATIONS
TO ME THROUGH MY ATTORNEY, BARRISTER. [BARR.OLUWANI JOHN]
TEL NO: 234- 80-334-48597 Fax:234-1-759 8673.
(oluwani@mail.com) MY LAWYER WHO IS ALSO MY CLOSE CONFIDANT
WOULD BE ALBE TO ESTABLISH AN INVESTMENT WITH YOUR
ASSISTANCE ON MY BEHALF UNTIL I COME OUT OF MY TRAVAIL AND
TORMENTORS.
THIS IS TO ENSURE MAXIMUM CONFIDENTIALITY AND SECRECY.
PLEASE I AM PROMISING TO SHARE THE FUNDS 50/50 IF YOU CAN
QUITELY GET THIS FUND OUT INTO YOUR ACCOUNT.
I WAIT PATIENTLY FOR YOUR RESPONSE.
YOURS TRULY.
CHARLES TAYLOR.
EX- PRESIDENT OF LIBERIA

The ex-president of Liberia! I feel deeply honored. Why, if this e-mail were made of organic material, I could use it to fertilize my garden.

Here are a couple of pieces we've run on this scam in the past, one by me (written three years ago). Our International editor, David Scott, wrote about it 11 years ago when he was the Latin America correspondent for the Monitor (which tells you how long this scam has been in operation).

My colleague Jim Bencivenga always replies: "Ha Ha Ha Ha," when he receives one of these messages. Sometimes he makes a counter offer for a time share on a bridge he knows of in Brooklyn, offering them the best times - 4pm to 6pm. Remember, if it seems too good to be true...

By Sheera Frenkel

After centuries of looking for love in all the wrong places, people are finally turning to technology.

According to marketing firm ComScore Networks Inc., consumers spent $300 million on online personals, and estimates for 2003 are well above $400 million. Meanwhile, Internet dating behemoth Match.com reports having more than 8 million members, 200,000 of whom claim to have "found who they were seeking" last year alone. That's a lot of love.

But does the love promised by Match.com truly work? According to a recent study, 11 percent of the couples who married from Match.com were in love before they met face-to-face, and on average they dated for a shorter period than couples who did not meet online.

But Match.com and other cyber cupids - eHarmony.com, Matchmaker.com, Yahoo personals, Love @AOL, Matchnet.com, Udate.com, JDate.com, Kiss.com - are only the beginning for the 21st century lover.

What about sunglasses that change colors to discern whether you, or the person you are talking to, are in love?

At the 2004 International CES in Las Vegas earlier this month, Nemesysco showed plain sunglasses outfitted to detect emotion. The system used green, yellow, and red color codes to indicate a "true," "maybe," or "false" response.

The Eetimes reports that Dave Watson, chief operating officer of parent company V LLC said the technology "can also measure for other emotions like anxiety, fear, or even love."

V Entertainment offers a Pocket PC version that can attach to a phone line or work from recorded tapes. Instead of color-coded LEDs, a bar graph on the display indicates how much the caller "loves" you. V Entertainment claims it has demonstrated 96 percent accuracy.

This month a PC version, dubbed the "Love Detector," was released. It relies on a simplified form of the technology that applies 8,000 algorithms to 129 parameters of a speaking voice to assess levels of emotion, embarrassment, and concentration, as well as whether what is being said reflects certainty, uncertainty, or outright lies, reports the NY Times.

Once you think you’ve found love, there is even technology to test whether that love will last, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

A psychologist, a mathematician, and a pathologist have devised what they call a proven mathematical formula for detecting which relationships will go sour - thereby holding out hope that such couples can overcome their problems and avoid divorce.

They claim that this formula is 94 percent effective and will help couples realize ways in which they need to change their behavior to make the relationship work.

It appears that in the 21st century love doesn’t hurt anymore - love bytes.

By Sheera Frenkel

For those who think that dot-matrix printers and analog watches are still as good as it gets, Technology Review has some good news for you. You are not alone.

In an article this week, Eric Scigliano lists the top ten technologies that refuse to die, and the people that keep them.

Number one on the list is analog watches for people who still believe a watch's function is to tell time. In the new generation of stylized Bond-esque watches that can tell temperature, take your pulse, and communicate watch-to-watch via syncro-beat, there are still those who cling to analog watches.

While these old beauties won't be able to web-surf, many consider their elegance the only alternative. Is there anything more aesthetically functional than the the sweeping hand of a Rolex?

And for those who still think a mouse is something you exterminate, and a blog is best kept out of the kitchen — consider humankind's first migration from pen and pencil — the typewriter. It was, and remains, love at first impact. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 434,000 word processors and typewriters were sold in the US in 2002. Johnny Depp still uses them, as do people wanting to avoid the world of viruses, spyware, and constant upgrades.

Also topping Scigliano’s list were dot-matrix printers.

Dot-matrix — er, impact — printing still works. Small wonder: today’s impact rigs can print up to 2,000 lines a minute, over 500,000 pages a month, for less than a fifth of a cent per page—versus one cent per page and up for ink-jet and laser printers.

Then there are pagers. The “it” thing a short decade ago, they are now given away free with bank accounts. Or fax machines, which have survived the coming of email and scanners to sell two-million in 2002.

These Darwinian gadgets have survived the onslaught of technological evolution. All that’s left now is the top ten technologies that deserve to die.

By Tom Regan

In case you blinked, you may have missed it. At the 59th second of the 59th minute of the 11th hour, the two warring parties in the contest over who will control the Internet (sort of) decided to ... study the problem before the real fisticuffs begin.

The agreement meant the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) would happen without open "warfare," for now. New Scientist reports member states agreed only to create a working group of industry, government, and public sector experts to discuss the issue and make recommendations at the next WSIS meeting in 2005. Things didn't look promising last Friday when Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) president Paul Twomey was excluded from a meeting of government representatives discussing the future of the Internet.

Here's the meat of the issue as it stands.

Standards, technology, and regulations for the Internet are set by a group of private organizations, including ICANN. Under a 1988 agreement with the US government, ICANN controls the global domain name system. That means they are the ultimate decision-making body when it comes to deciding who gets an Internet address.

But this system of international governance is largely run by US companies, and that has the rest of the world more than a tad upset. They would like to see authority rest with an international organization, like the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In essence, this struggle mirrors the ones taking place in many other arenas. Who gets to call the shots - the US or the rest of the world?

Sonia Arrison argues in CNET that ICANN needs to be "reined in." Eliot Noss takes the other side of the issue, writing in CircleID that the nations at WSIS are better off with an ICANN-like structure.

Meanwhile, the Straits Times reports on other issues that the WSIS will tackle, including spam and pornography. About 90 percent of the world is still not connected to the Internet (think of the spamming possibilities!). Reuters reports that poorer countries, particularly from Africa, have been pressing for the launch of a "Digital Solidarity Fund" to help finance the infrastructure they say is needed to close the Web access gap. But rich countries hesitated, and this issue will now also be studied. Lots of studying going on here, eh?

The summit is a great idea. But getting dozens of nations to agree on the future of the Internet will be like trying to get a newsroom full of journalists to agree on what kind of food to order out for take-out. I fear that the declaration at the end of the summit will be one of "those" kind of declarations - where everybody loves everybody else, but from which no concrete direction can be taken.

Isn't that what this kind of gathering is all about?

Tom Regan

Now that I'm back in Beantown, I just wanted to pass along a note of congratulations to the organizers of the most recent Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. It's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to exercise my brain in such an enjoyable fashion. What makes Pop!Tech so special is that it give you the chance to see the connections and underlying themes in a broad range of sciences and human endeavors that are not immediately apparent when examining them individually.

More important, it has given me, as a journalist, a lot to chew on. The ideas and scenarios presented at Pop!Tech hold many opportunities for humanity. But like flowers growing in a mine field, we've got to be very careful where we step when we approach them.

As for writing about them ... well, good thing I brought my mine detector with me.

By Elizabeth Armstrong

When it comes to ubiquitous computing systems, the more power you want, the more privacy you sacrifice. It's a general rule, and it's come up from time to time since the earliest discussions of artificial intelligence. But not until recently, with the rapid introduction of ubiquitous computing technologies (i.e. video monitors, wireless hot spots, radio tags), have we been forced to look at what, exactly, we'd be willing to reveal about ourselves for the sake of comfort and convenience.

Many computing engineers want to create networks of tiny little wireless devices that can tell you, say, that you're late for a movie or the oven is still on. Useful little reminders. Designers envision invisible (imagine that) sensors and transmitters in public and private places, watching and recording all sorts of activities. Among the first devices envisioned for such a technology: your cell phone.

Aside from the obvious "what about my privacy?" argument, the most impressive backlash raises the question: What might this do to human memory? No human act, after all, can escape the cold, unforgiving, binary recording of an artificially intelligent computer. So, just as I no longer memorize telephone numbers because they're all plugged so handily into my cell phone (a small act of sacrificing my privacy, I suppose), we humans may some day prefer to rely on the recollection of machines over our own flexible, fallible, emotional memories.

One engineer, who himself prefers anonymity, summed it up pretty well last week at UbiComp 2003, a ubiquitous computing conference in Seattle. "The more awareness you have in the system," he told Wired News, "the less privacy you're going to have. That's the trade-off."

Not only will something else know my business, but it will remember it, too.

Tom Regan

The final morning at the Pop!Tech conference.

Two speakers so far: ecologist Michael Rosenzweig on the win-win solution to save the world's ecology, and Dr. Sally Stanfield, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, talking about global health care.

There's a great deal to say about their presentations, especially Dr. Stanfield's rather pointed remarks about how the market-driven economy has ignored most of the world's more serious health care issues because there is "no money" to be made in finding solutions.

After three days, I am finally seeing the thread running through the conference: We really do live in a global community, and if we're going to solve the various problems that the world faces, we can't do them country by country. Almost all the issues raised in the past few days – global warming, health care, environment, the communities we live in, peace, digital journalism, the uses of wi-fi for communication, exploring the heavens and the seas, etc.  – require global cooperation. No nation, the speakers are saying, can be an island anymore, regardless of how wealthy or powerful it is. Even the wealthiest and most powerful nation ... guess who?

Looking at the current political and cultural landscape in the US, it's not hard to see that many of the most powerful men and women in the country want us to drop global ties and international cooperation, and focus on US interests, for what they consider valid reasons. It's going to be interesting to see how the challenges brought forth by many of the people at Pop!Tech (often the top researchers in their field) will be met by an administration for whom the idea of international problem solving is an oxymoron.

Tom Regan

The only problem in trying to blog the conference is finding time to write down the best parts of each session. I don't like to blog during the actual presentations because they are so darn interesting, I just want to listen.

So far today ...

After Clay Shirky talked about the blogosphere (all the blogs on the Web taken as a single entity), Xeni Jardin talked about the experience of freelance videojournalist and photographer Kevin Sites writing a blog from Iraq during the war. (Sites, you may remember, was eventually asked to stop doing his very popular blog by CNN because they saw it as competitive to the work he was doing for them ... at least that's what they said.) Jardin tried to contact Sites, who was on sat phone in Tikrit, but it didn't happen. (After spending many hours each night during the war trying to contact Ben Arnoldy's sat phone when he was writing for csmonitor.com in Iraq, this did not surprise me.)

Author James Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere (about the decline of the American landscape), gave a very funny, but pointed, talk about the "parking lot nation." He argued strongly in favor of a new form of urban design that would help create a "hopeful present." Right now, he said, most urban and suburban spaces exist in the "asteroid belt of architectural disaster." Kunstler was particularly outspoken about the I.M. Pei-designed Boston City Hall, which he thought represented "entropy made visible." Kunstler said that the urban and suburban environment we have created in the late 20th century send out a message that "there's no hope here."

Kunstler was followed by Virginia Postrel, who looked at how the desire for things of aesthetic value has become common place in American life. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this session. Postrel is absolutely right when she said that Americans want an aesthetic experience in all aspects of their lives these days, and that "there is no such thing as an undesigned graphic object anymore." But when she said Starbucks has become the urban commerical environment that every business wants to emulate, I didn't know whether to scream or to cry. It's not just about coffee, said Postrel, but about the "whole multisensory aesthetic experience." The new motto is "the best surprise is no surprise."

Facts and figures: 71 percent of US women aged 45-54 dye their hair, while 13 percent of American men are doing the Grecian forumla thing. Sales of hair color to young men are up 25 percent in the past five years. Teen boys spend five percent of their income on hair color. And the number of nail salons nearly doubled in ten years.

Tom Regan

A cornucopia of ideas at Pop!Tech, the Camden, Maine conference on how technology is changing our lives now and in the future. The decison to move the conference away from pure technology to a broad agenda of the intersection of technology and life was a good one.

Right now, Clay Shirky is talking about "social software" – in other words, blogging.

Friday afternoon the predominating theme was bioengineering, and what that discipline holds for the future of humanity.

Michael West spoke about cloning, while Aubrey de Grey discussed life extension. And  while one was taking about the microlevel (stem cell research for West) and the other about the macrolevel (de Gray on life extension), they both came to the same place; they both say science is only a few decades away (at most) from being able to stop the aging process.

DeGrey, who is a professor at Cambridge University in England, made the amazing claim that once we reach the point where we can double the age of a 60 year old to 120, we have "escaped terminal velocity." Or, the rate of scientific research being what it is, if you can keep a human alive to 120, by the time they reach 120, the science would exist to help them live much longer after that. He predicted that in the future, people could live to the age of 5000.

How is this possible? West and DeGray say that researchers now understand why people die. There are two kinds of cells, they say, mortal cells and immortal cells. But researchers have determined how to keep those mortal cells from dying, and are only a few years away from being able to produce results in a lab.

The final speaker of the day was Andrew Zolli, the conference organizer. Zolli gave a thoughtful talk about the "Second Axial Age." The first Axial Age took place between 800 and 200 BCE, when rural cultures became urban cultures, when the tribal became the individual, when the notion of religion when from the "mainframe" idea of the statue of the god that stood in the middle of the town and "ran" the community, to one of a "client-Server" model where great religious leaders like Christ, Buddha and Mohammed lead people to a more personal relationship with God.

But now, says Zolli, our culture is facing a new paradigm shift, or the second axial age: urban to global, individual to networked, heaven and earth to here and now. And in what might be the most challenging statement I've heard so far, Zolli raised the question can our belief systems "scale up" to this new world, or will they become like the old idol statue that once stood in the middle of the village.

There's a lot to process here. Many people are going to find these ideas troublesome, to say the least. All of these ideas and statements are going to need to be discussed in a much more public way. But in a sense, that's why Pop!Tech is so useful. That's what all the speakers want people to do.

Tom Regan

I just heard microbiologist Juan Enriquez talk at Pop!Tech about codes, and maps, and how we communicate using codes and maps ... and the human genome project, and how it's going to change the world. Enriquez believes that societies go into decline once their "cultural beliefs" become more important that accepting change. For instance, he talked about how the Japanese in the 17th and 18th centuries made gun powder illegal because it threatened the cultural norm of the Samurai. So when Admiral Perry showed up with three gunships, there wasn't much the Japanese could do with all those great swords against all that gun powder.

He also talked about how technology challenges, and changes, religious beliefs. This will become one of the areas of the most contention in th future, he said. Basically, we will need to look very hard at what it means to be a human being. Enriquez also made the point that the difference between technological "have" socities, and the "have not" societies will expand dramatically in the next century.

by Tom Regan

For the past few years, I've been attending Pop!Tech in Camden, Maine. And let me say here and now that, of the many conferences I attend each year, Pop!Tech offers the most interesting, useful, thought-provoking sessions.

I could wax poetic about the speakers I've heard (listening to John Perry Barlow, former guitarist and songwriter for the Grateful Dead, a few weeks after 9/11 talk about how the battle for the future of humanity would be one between "open source" and "closed" systems was one of many highlights). Or I could expound on the people I've met and interviewed. But a quick trip to Pop!Tech's site (which offers video of all past speeches) far surpasses any of my meager musings.

In operation since 1997, I asked Anthony Citrano (one of Pop!Tech's main organizers) about this year's offering – entitled Sea!Change –, and he told me he thinks that it's going to be really interesting, because it's not quite as "tech" oriented as past conferences.

"We want to look at how technology touches us in ways we don't expect, and how we, our communities, our societies are going to have to deal with these changes," Anthony said. The conference press blurb describes it this way:

Every one of these dramatic sea-changes challenges us intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, and spiritually. In each of these areas, a select group of human beings are pressing forward – expanding the limits of human knowledge, developing agendas for change, and creating works of great artfulness and imagination.

Anthony said this year's program chair Andrew Zolli has put together an amazing array of speakers who include researchers like: Constance Adams, one of the first architects hired by NASA to design a "liveable" environment for space; Aubrey de Gray, a life extension researcher from Cambridge University in London (who feels that by the turn of the 22nd century, we'll have the means to help people live to the ripe old age of 5000 – won't that be an interesting discussion to hear); Graham Hawkes, the inventor of deep sea submersibles, and a man who wants to go to the bottom of the Marianis Trench in the Atlantic Ocean (Why? Because it's there, of course). And those are just a few of the folks speaking over the weekend. (Andrew Zolli told me that putting together this group of speakers is the "most fun I've ever had in my whole life.")

I know that the conference organizers feel somewhat puzzled by the lack of media coverage the gathering generates. I am, too. Honestly, if you've only got so much money to spend on a tech conference, and you want something our of the ordinary (not a booth babe in sight!), this is your ticket.

But when Anthony and I were talking earlier this week, we came up with two reasons for this "invisibility." First, only 500 people are allowed to attend each year (because that's how many the community hall in Camden will hold). And second, the conference is like that great vacation spot you don't want to tell your friends about. If you tell too many people about it, it will become (to quote Yogie Berra) "so popular no one goes there any more."

If you want to keep up with the conference, I'll be blogging it this weekend.

By Elizabeth Armstrong

And it begins. Napster, the pioneering file-swap service that hooked almost 80 million registered users up with music free-of-charge in its heyday in 1999, is going to start charging (aptly) 99 cents a track and $9.95 an album. It streamed its Napster 2.0 Beta Launch event live from New York on Oct. 9, though just how many former Napster users are going to get all warm and fuzzy inside when they learn of the new price tag remains unclear.

The new costs, by the way, may be comparable with other online music retailers (i.e. MusicMatch and iTunes), but labels like Universal, even with its new slashing of prices, just can't compete (albums now cost $13 instead of $18). Which renders CDs not only low-tech, but too expensive. Before long, the sole reason to have CDs will be to burn tracks from our hard drives onto discs so that we can listen out of the best speakers in the house, which still belong to our stereos.

Chris Gorog, Roxio's chairman and chief executive and the mastermind behind Napster's new pricing scheme, told The Associated Press this week that "our company's passion for what we're doing will really be felt by consumers, and I think it's also very consistent with the original vision for Napster."

Just how many "consumers" (think teens whose hard drives, not shelves, are crammed with music they haven't had to pay for) are going to make the switch from KaZaA, or Grokster, or Morpheus (all of which continue to charge nothing) to Napster and suddenly feel the "company's passion" also remains unclear. But rest assured: The RIAA and MPAA will be watching closely, not to mention your faithful newsies, as the world adjusts, as slowly as can be expected, to a system dictated by the machinations of the smartest 14-year-olds around. (OK, Shawn Fanning was a college freshman at Northeastern University when he thought up Napster, but you get my point.)

This is an interesting, well-balanced Newsweek piece about the war that the RIAA has declared on file-swappers. Lots of angry quotes from the parents of the "261" - the first group to be sued by the RIAA - who now find themselves facing billions (yes, billions) of dollars in lawsuits. In fact, most claims are being settled for $3000 - $5000 dollars.

But Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota is making big noises about the way the RIAA is dealing with the lawsuits, and is promising hearings, soon. Meanwhile, here's something I didn't know. According to the Newsweek article, all you have to do is turn off the file sharing part of the Kazaa or Grokster software and you can't be traced when you download.

I'm no fan of the RIAA but no matter how you cut it, illegally downloading files is still taking something that doesn't belong to you. Still, whacking people with a lawsuit for $150,000 person seems a tad, well, overdone, and designed not to win you any friends or supporters.

Here is a cool piece from the Guardian News Service in England about NASA's plans to make Arthur C. Clarke's vision of a space elevator come to life. The "elevator" would deliver satellites, spacecraft and even people thousands of kilometres into space along a vertical track.