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Also under discussion is whether Apple can sell songs from its iTunes store directly to iPhones over the cell-phone broadband network. With the next generation of phone expected to use much faster 3G technology, this is technically feasible. Here too, music labels argue that they should be paid more for an over-the-air download than a standard track bought over the internet, where the wholesale price is about 70 cents.

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So let’s get this straight. The music labels think we should pay more for a song downloaded from a server that isn’t theirs, over a network that isn’t theirs, because, well, just because. One gets the feeling that, if given the chance, music executives would just hire thugs to mug anyone on the street wearing white earbuds.

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Sun-kissed plantations ring this village, renowned in recent years for growing the rich arabica beans brewed and served in some of the world’s finest coffee houses. But the secret to success here has had far less to do with the idyllic climate and volcanic soil than with a group of people who have emerged as Maraba’s — and Rwanda’s — most potent economic force: women.

In the 14 years since the genocide, when 800,000 people died during three months of violence, this country has become perhaps the world’s leading example of how empowering women can fundamentally transform post-conflict economies and fight the cycle of poverty.

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Microsoft has acknowledged that Windows Media Centers will block users from recording TV shows at the request of a broadcaster.

“Microsoft included technologies in Windows based on rules set forth by the (Federal Communications Commission),” a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. “As part of these regulations, Windows Media Center fully adheres to the flags used by broadcasters and content owners to determine how their content is distributed and consumed.”

Except that these FCC rules were struck down by the courts back in 2005.

You are not the customer, as far as Microsoft cares. You are the product. Delivered to the advertiser, on their terms.

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It said thousands of firms in the city will be targeted in the group’s latest campaign to clamp down on counterfeit software in Blighty, which it claims costs the economy nearly £1bn a year.

The anti-piracy outfit, which represents the interests of the computer software industry, has already fired off letters to some 5,000 businesses in the Manchester area warning them against punting and using dodgy software. As if last week’s working over by Rangers fans wasn’t enough.

[..]

However, the BSA revealed in February this year, after stuffing letterboxes of Glaswegian businesses with threatening letters in the run-up to Christmas, that the campaign in Scotland hadn’t exactly proved to a be a trailblazing moment for the BSA to chase pesky pirates from its shores.

Only a few hundred firms actually took heed of the warnings and got their software copyright house in order by the deadline, it claimed. The vast majority of companies targeted in that campaign simply ignored the warnings.

That’s undoubtedly an unsettling result for the BSA to stomach. Especially given that the 7,000 or so companies harassed by the group it subsequently pinpointed just 41 unnamed businesses for “flouting” copyright law following the campaign. This seems to suggest that most firms were operating perfectly legit.

I wonder if these letters open with:

“Say, nice company you have there…. shame if something happened to it…”

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Back in 2006, on July 13, I covered the outcome of approaching two years of legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts: “Major leaders of the American religious right made predictions that same sex marriage would cause the decline or destruction of the traditional family and the institution of marriage. Some warned of the destruction of Western Civilization or of a sinister conspiracy against Christianity. Some warned of the impending end of the world.” Almost four years after the alleged civilization-destroying event, MA is second in the US with the lowest rate of divorce, second to Pennsylvania (the MA rate is 2.27 per 1,000, the PA rate is 2.2 per 1,000) and MA rates of teen pregnancy, already close to the lowest in the US, continue to drop, down over 2% in 2006. By contrast, gay marriage-unfriendly, abstinence-only sex-ed reliant Texas now leads the nation in both teen pregnancy and repeat teen pregnancy, and Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Chlamydia in Texas have continued a multi-year rise according to official TX 2007 statistics.

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Sen. Barack Obama has seen his share of large crowds over the last 15 months, but his campaign said they have not approached the numbers gathered along the waterfront here right now.

The campaign, citing figures from Duane Bray, battalion chief of Portland Fire & Rescue, estimated that 75,000 people are watching him speak.

The food an American family throws away each month.

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You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste.

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Amy Chase started feeding Similac Organic infant formula to her second son, Amos, as soon as he was born in November 2006.

“When I saw the organic at Publix, I bought it, no questions asked,” said Ms. Chase, a self-described “yoga mom” in Atlanta.

Like Ms. Chase, many American parents have rushed to embrace Similac Organic formula, even though it sells for as much as 30 percent more than regular Similac. In 2007, its first full year on sale, it captured 36 percent of the organic formula market, with sales of more than $10 million, according to Kalorama Information, a pharmaceutical-industry research firm. (Similac’s parent company, Abbott Laboratories, does not release sales figures for individual products.)

Parents may be buying it because they believe that organic is healthier, but babies may have a reason of their own for preferring Similac Organic: it is significantly sweeter than other formulas. It is the only major brand of organic formula that is sweetened with cane sugar, or sucrose, which is much sweeter than sugars used in other formulas.

No health problems in babies have been associated with Similac Organic. But to pediatricians, there are risks in giving babies cane sugar: Sucrose can harm tooth enamel faster than other sugars; once babies get used to its sweeter taste, they might resist less sweet formulas or solid foods; and some studies suggest that they might overeat, leading to rapid weight gain in the first year, which is often a statistical predictor of childhood obesity.

How nice of companies, to make babies fit in with the rest of society as soon as possible…