Kodak's new Zooms: the 12 megapixel Z1275 and ZD710 with 10x zoom

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Egads, Kodak just busted out two new members of their Zoom series: the 12 megapixel Z1275 and 7 megapixel ZD710. That's right, 12 freakin' megapixels packed into a tiny 1/1.72-inch CCD -- thanks a lot Sharp. The Z1275 brings a 5x Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon optical zoom lens and 2.5-inch LCD powered by 2x AA batteries. As for that "HD" on the front? Well, that's due its ability to record 1280 x 720 video in MPEG-4 format. Meanwhile, the ZD710 cranks the zoom up to 10X while dialing the LCD back to 2-inches. Both shooters lack any kind of optical or mechanical image stabilization which, amongst other shortcomings keeps the price down to $249 when they ship starting August 2007. [Via Photography Blog]

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Peonies from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

In Blogger/Blogspot, BE SURE to go into Settings -> Formatting and make sure "Convert Line Breaks" is set to NO. Otherwise it will add < br / >'s to every line and break the javascript.

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Ztail, online listings made easy

from GigaOM by Om Malik

It has been a weekend of relative quiet and peace – where most of the time was spent cleaning up the apartment, and discovering that I had more digital device clutter than any sane person should have. In other words, time to head on over to eBay and list some old stuff to make room for the new gee-gaws. Apparently I am not alone: a recent survey released by eBay shows that the average US household has approximately $3,000 of unused things in their home

Call is serendipity, but right after watching Roger Clemens right the New York Yankees' ship, I met with Bill Hudak, cofounder and CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ztail, that has come up with web service that allows you to easily create "classifieds" and then publish them to not only eBay, but to other sites such as Edgeio, Facebook, MySpace, TypePad and WordPress blogs, and of course the Ztail listings site.

The company launched earlier this week has been bootstrapped by Hudak and Dave Keefer, and the duo have lot of online commerce experience, having worked at companies such as Google, Shopping.com and Epinions.

Ztail is a dead simple and easy to use. Once you go to their site, Ztail starts you off by asking you the question, what do you want to sell today? You type in, say, Nokia E61 – and Ztail gives you all options, including photos and technical specifications that you might have to otherwise type out. You personalize this information, describe the condition of the item; add your eBay ID (or Facebook ID or your blog credentials) and hit publish. That's it! You are done.

Being someone who is flummoxed by the eBay listings process, I found Ztail a time saving utility. Of course there is the added bonus of listing my stuff in many different places and thus increasing the chances of selling makes Ztail worth giving a whirl. Okay, time for me to go make listings, create a special blog for listing the items, and then have a massive virtual garage sale!

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Vietnamese fishermen mistakenly swipe miles of fiber-optic wire

from Engadget by Darren Murph

While this mishap may not look as if it would cost Vietnam nearly as much as the Alaskan vaporization, losing 27-miles of critical fiber-optic cabling connecting the underdeveloped nation to Thailand and Hong Kong is fairly serious (and pricey). As it turns out, hordes of Vietnamese fishermen were given permission to salvage war-era undersea copper lines to fetch whatever price they could on local markets, but things got out of hand when vital telecommunication pipelines began getting swiped instead of antiquated cabling. The country has since disallowed the removal of any underwater wire until things pan out, but it looks like Vietnam will be relying on a single cable to the outside world until it can pony up the $5.8 million in replacement costs.

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Publisher steals laptops, misundertands copyright

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Richard Charkin, the CEO of Macmillan USA Chief Executive of Macmillan and owner of Nature Publishing Group -- a division of Holtzbrinck, the same company that owns my publisher, Tor -- disgraced himself this week at BookExpo America in NYC. He walked up to Google's booth and stole two of their laptops, then later returned them, saying that he'd done it because there wasn't any sign telling him not to steal them.

This was intended as trenchant commentary on Google's book-scanning project, a generally laudable effort to scan and index all the books ever published, including huge dark-matter of books that are out-of-print with no clear rightsholders.

Pat Schroeder and the American Association of Publishers have sued Google over this, saying that Google shouldn't be allowed to index these out-of-print books (the majority of books published) unless they take on the Sisyphean task of figuring out who controls the copyright to all of them and then get permission to make an index.

Google makes indexes of every page on the Internet without ascertaining who their copyright belongs to, without asking permission. If your page is on the public Internet, Google will index it. The publishers argue that books shouldn't be indexable without explicit permission.

Larry Lessig has posted a great rebuttal to the idea that stealing laptops is the moral equivalent of indexing books -- a must-read if you want to understand exactly why Charkin's stunt was so mind-numbingly wrong-headed.

(3) If the computer was not sitting at a market booth, but instead was in a trash dump (like, for example, the publishers out of print book list), or on a field, lost to everyone, then that fits the category of property that Google is dealing with. But again, Google doesn’t take possession of the property in any way that interferes with anyone else taking possession of the property. The publisher, for example, is perfectly free to decide to publish the book again. Instead, in this case, what Google does is more like posting an advertisement — “lost computer, here it is, is it yours?”

(4) Or again, imagine the computer was left after the conference. No easy way to identify who the owner was. No number to call. In that case, what would the “head honcho’s,” or anyone’s rights be? Well depending upon local law, the basic rule is finders keepers, loser weepers. There might be an obligation to advertise. There might be an obligation to turn the property over to some entity that holds it for some period of time. But after that time, the property would go to the “head honcho” — totally free of any obligation to Google. Compare copyright law: where the property can be lost for almost a century, and no one (according to the publishers at least) has any right to do anything with it. Once an orphan, the law of copyright says, you must be an orphan. No one is permitted to even help advertise your status through a technique like search engine.

(5) Or again, imagine the computer was a bank account in New York. And imagine, the bank lost track of the owner of the account. After 5 years, the money is forfeited to the state. Compare copyright: in New York state, a sound recording could be 100 years old, but no one has any freedom with respect to that sound recording unless the copyright owner can be discovered.

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