News summary for September 21st by Stefan Saroiu. All articles come from
NYT.

1. "Costly, Sure, But It's Nirvana for TiVo Fans"

Summary:
=========

TiVo is coming out with support for HDTV. Its newest box can hold 32 hours
of HDTV (ouch!) or 200 hours of standard TV. It costs $800.

Implication:
============

Time-shifting TV is here to stay. 

Observation:
=============

The reason why YouTube is spending a lot of bandwidth to deliver content is
because it delivers content only when a user requests. A different way to
deliver content on the Internet is to build a broadcast system (something
like Digital Fountains) and to equip clients with large caches (their
TiVo). The amount of bandwidth consumer by YouTube would be constant over
time.

Idea:
======

Build a YouTube system like TV + TiVo.

2. "Effort to Combat Child Pornography on Internet would Close Sites"

Summary: 
========

The US Congress has convinced ISPs to report cases of child
pornography. Several ISPs have already agreed: AOL, Google, Microsoft,
EarthLink. Several financial companies have also agreed to track the child
pornography customers and websites through their use of credit cards.

Observation:
============

There are several reasons why legislative measures to combat technological
problems have traditionally been infective. First, the rate of change in
technology greatly surpasses the rate of change in laws (the law cannot
keep up with technology change). Second, many of these illegal activities,
like child pornography, spyware, phishing have always had a hard time to
define properly ("I don't know what pornography is, but I know it when I
see it".) Third, the Internet is an international network and US's laws
only have limited jurisdiction.

Question:
==========

If child pornography can be addressed by the US Congress, could the
Congress also address phishing? Are these problems similar enough?

3. "Many Theories on Income Inequality, but One Answer Lies in Just a Few
   Places"

Summary:
========

It is well know that income inequality (or the gap between the poor and the
rich) has grown in the '90s. It has been thought that the reasons for this
gap widening are due to declining unionization, outsourcing, immigration,
etc..  A recent study has shown that this growth is due only to four US
counties (out of 3100): Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and King
County (Seattle/Redmond).


Implication:
=============

The IT industry has had an enormous impact on society in the '90s. It
managed to create wealth in a hugely disproportionate way compared to the
rest of the industries. 

Another implication is that income inequality is also accompanied with
geographical inequality. Wealth is not distributed geographically uniform.