PC Movies!

COMING TO A SCREEN NEAR YOU: full-length movies. Soon you may be able to download and watch mainstream movies on your PC -- especially if you have a fast DSL, cable or TI connection. 

Of course, downloadable movies already exist, but they tend to be old, short and less than stellar productions. 

If you're a college student with a taxpayer-subsidized T1 line into your dorm, time to burn and a habit of MP3 copyright violation, you may be already downloading bootleg copies of The Matrix and watching it with the guys. 

Heck, if you really enjoy punishment, you can even watch movies on your Palm organizer. 

I'm not talking about unwatchable movies, but legal, full-length, mainstream movies. Sony Pictures, for example, plans to roll out a service this summer called MovieFly, through which viewers can download big movie files, and play them on their PCs. Other studios are planning similar moves. 

The big studios are motivated by a fear of widespread MP3-style mass rip-offs. But I think their fears are unfounded. Who (besides our college friends) wants to sit around a PC watching movies? Sure, playing movies on a laptop during long flights is great. But even if every business traveler suddenly dumped high-quality, low-cost DVDs, it would barely dent the rental market. 

The best thing going in movies right now is a service called NetFlix. The DVD rental company charges you about $25 per month to rent all the movies you want. They send you four at a time. When you finish watching one, you send it back in the self-addressed, postage-paid envelope they provide, and they send you another one. You keep a running list of all the movies you want to see, and when they get one movie back, they grab the next one on your list and ship it out to you. No late fees. No Blockbuster lines. 

With services like NetFlix around, I just don't see a huge market for downloadable movies. What do you think?  

Sewer Robots Lay Fiber Optics
It turns out that sewers are a great place to lay high-performance fiber optic cable. It's cheap, easy and non-disruptive because you don't have to dig new ditches. But who wants to breast-stroke through the sewers installing cable? Enter CityNet Telecommunications. The company bought robots from the Swiss Ka-Te sewer robot company, and plans to use them to lay miles of high-tech telecom cabling in Albuquerque, Omaha and Indianapolis. The remote-controlled robots, which have mounted video cameras, roll on wheels down a sewer pipe, installing steel rings every few feet, stringing them with telecommunications conduit. 

World's First Rumor Robot
Meanwhile, another Swiss robot is wading through a different kind of muck: Internet gossip. The Geneva-based company Agence Virtuelle has created RumorBot, which is software that tracks rumor postings using 44 autonomous software agents. Its purpose is to track both the origin and the path of Internet-spread rumors by monitoring newsgroups, chat rooms, list servers and web sites for words and phrases associated with a specific rumor. 

How to Call In Sick
A CD-ROM that tells you how to fake illness is selling like hotcakes in Germany. The software profiles 15 medical conditions, with symptom details and instructions on how to fake them.

Looking For (But Not Finding) a Few Good Men
The Marine Corps plans to roll out this summer new camouflage uniforms that are decidedly high-tech. Designed with the help of sophisticated software, the camouflage patterns look like computer-display pixels up close, but blend much better into natural backgrounds than existing camouflage when viewed from a distance. The Marines plan to patent the design, then deny permission to any other military -- including other branches of the U.S. military -- to use the same camouflage-generating technique. 

Robot Controlled by Cell Phone
The Takara Company has created a robot that can be controlled over the Internet via a Java-enabled mobile phone, according to AsiaBizTech. The robot, called "Dream Force 01," sports a camera that enables you to see what it sees, either over the Internet or using an optional head-mounted display system. 

Anthropologists Brave Silicon Valley
A group of anthropologists have bravely descended into the most savage regions of Silicon Valley to live with and study the natives for fifteen years. I've reported on this before. But recently I've learned that the anthropologists, Jan English-Lueck and Charles Darrah, plan to finish two books about the project later this year. The books will be called "Cultures@Silicon Valley" and "Remaking Everyday Life: The Hidden Innovations in Silicon Valley."

Sony to Launch Bank
In the game of Monopoly, it's always advantageous to be the banker. At least, that's what Sony seems to think. The company filed papers with Japanese financial authorities last week to launch an online bank in June called the Sony Bank Corp. The company and its partners reportedly plan to invest $322 million in the venture. 

Reader Web Site of the Week
Check out DraganFly, a site that sells cool, remote-control blimps and other toys because, according to the owner, "The toys I had as a kid sucked." 

(Want YOUR site to be considered as a Reader Web Site of the Week? Click here.) 

Mike's List o' Crazy Gadgets
The AlphaGrip, a Jack-of-all-input-devices, replaces a mouse and keyboard, joystick and anything else you might plug into your PC. It's perfect for people who are tired of comfortable, familiar and standard input devices like keyboards and mice, and want to learn something new. 

New $100 vibrating Timex watches display real-time stock quotes, sports scores, news alerts and weather forecasts, as well as up to 16 SMS messages at a time. 

Mike's List o' Wacky Web Sites
Welcome to the crunchy world of snack foods! You'll gain weight just visiting this site. 

It's pimples of the rich and famous! Skinema.com: Where celebrity and dermatology collide!

Mike's List o' Numbers
$9 billion - Amount of money spent worldwide for connection charges to receive spam last year. (European Commission study)

$1 trillion - Eventual market value of AOL Time Warner, according to a prediction by Chairman Steve Case. 

Mike's List o' Required Reading
'Flaky' has Its Place in Silicon Valley Siege
By Stefan Dubowski
CanadaComputes.com

Dead Ringers
By Richard M. Smith 
Privacy Foundation

The Marquee's Dark Side 
By Cory Johnson
The Standard

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