The latest email bomb goes like this:

Don’t pump gas on May 15th.

In April, 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest of gas prices. Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight. On May 15th, 2007 all internet users are asked to not go to a gas station and pump gas in protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.

There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the internet network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up. If all users did not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000,000.00 (that’s almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companies pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the middle eastern oil industry for at least one day.

If you agree, re-send this to everyone on your contact list with it saying ‘’Don’t pump gas on May 15th”.

The problem, of course, is that even if every driver in American actually did stay away from the pumps on May 15, all they would do is give the station owners a free vacation day. As Snopes reasonably explains, the “gas out” day does not actually reduce gasoline sales because drivers still drive their normal miles that day. The people who would have bought fuel on May 15 will instead buy fuel on the 14th or 16th.

Nor was there a gas out in April 1997 that caused gas prices to drop 30 cents overnight. Sam Cook explains,

David Emery, author of Urban Legends and Folklore, debunks the claim of a 1997 Gas Out on his Web site.

“There was one in 1999, but it didn’t cause gas prices to drop 30 cents per gallon overnight,'’ he says. “In fact, it didn’t cause them to drop at all. Despite the popularity of the e-mail campaign, the event itself attracted scant participation and was completely ineffectual.'’

Now, my wife will sign up for dinner out on May 15 - or any other day of the year - but we’ll let the “gas out” roll on by.

What happens when a six-year-old girls sings a song written by her mother for her son who is serving in Iraq? It gets posted on Youtube and gets more than 1.7 million downloads, that’s what.

Tom Nankervis has details.

CACHE, Okla. (UMNS) - Six-year-old Heather Martin, accompanied only by her mother on piano, has become an overnight Internet sensation for a song performed at their rural Oklahoma church.

Written for her brother Shaun serving in Iraq, the song became one of YouTube’s most requested videos of all time in December after a member at Cache First United Methodist Church recorded and posted Heather’s performance on the video-sharing Web site. The video had received 1.7 million hits as of early February.

“My friend called me Christmas Eve and she says, ‘They’ve featured your video and the numbers are just going up and up,’” Cindy Martin said of her daughter’s video. “She said, ‘It’s going to snowball.’ And sure enough, she was right. It’s snowballed.”

Since then, the song has aired on radio station KMGZ-FM in nearby Lawton, Okla., and has become a hit among soldiers overseas.

“I’ve seen an incredible outpouring from the community and from the church,” said the Rev. Jennifer Long, the family’s pastor, who in 2003 lost a family member in a grenade attack in Iraq. “It’s opened a lot of hearts to let out some things that people have been holding in.”

Cindy wrote “When Are You Coming Home?” after learning that 22-year-old Shaun would not be home for Christmas. She and Heather performed the song to give Shaun as a Christmas gift.

“When I had told (Heather) that he wasn’t going to be home for Christmas, she reacted so sadly,” Cindy said. “When I was writing the words, I thought it just really made sense that … it should be written from her point of view.”

The video was recorded during a church service.

More at the link. A TV news report of the family is also onYoutube.

Well, not exactly - only papers made of, well, paper can fold. But it seems that New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years… .” He went on to say that the news outlet will likely move entirely onto the internet. James Joyner has details, including this rejoinder to Pinch’s declaration that the Times’ web site will charge readers to read: “Then the New York Times will exist only as a niche paper. Slate, Salon, and others have tried and failed going the subscription-only route.”

What I’ve not seen anyone point out - a scoop coming here, folks! - is that it simply takes longer to scan and read a newspaper online than on paper. You can flip pages, snapshot headlines printed thereon and quickly read the lead paragraph of a paper edition than you can click and wait for a page to load for an online edition - and then you’re seeing only one story at a time, even if the headlines (and only the headlines) for a section are visible on an index page. I don’t think people will pay to go slower.

But Amazon’s download service is excellent, just slow

Admittedly, Wal-Mart’s video download service is still in beta, which W-M does not disguise, but my experience with it shows it has a long way to go to alpha.

I signed up out of curiousity more than anything else. I have an All-In-Wonder TV card in my computer with cable TV running into it and from time to time I’ll record a movie onto my hard drive. I don’t record “keepers” that way; movies I want for my permanent library I get on DVD, and that’s not very many. The movies I record to hard drive I usually record to VCD resolution, just under 600MB per hour. Sometimes I’ll record a show to timeshift for my wife, and VCD resolution makes it convenient to write it to CD. Furthermore, I watch these shows while I do other work on the computer, with the media player shrunk to a box in the upper-right corner of the screen.

That’s why the W-M video download service appealed to the geeky side of me. It costs more than renting the DVD from Blockbuster (downloads range from $7.50-$9.88, with “hot” movies ranging up to $14.88), but I own the movie as long as I want. That price is also less money than buying the DVD, which I’d do for only a small number of movies anyway, and just as permanent.

But I haven’t able to make the download service work. It seems a simple process, though not a short one. You have to register, of course, and after that you must permit an Active-X control to be loaded, then download and install a series of propietary software control programs, one of which is the actual “Wal-Mart Video Download Manager.” Then you have to give your computer a name on another setup page, then, presumably, you can proceed. This page advises,

By naming you’re computer, you are authorizing it to play the videos you buy on our site. You can also transfer and watch videos on as many as three portable players.

Keep in mind: You can install the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on as many computers as you like. But, the computer you use to download a video is the only computer you can use to view that video.

“Presumably,” I say, because that’s as far as W-M’s pages will let me go. Their servers refuse to accept any name I try to give my computer on the site, so that’s where it sits as of now. I’ve tried several times as I’ve been writing this, and not only did it refuse to accept any name it also zeroed out my shopping cart.

Although I have not yet been able to download or watch one of the movies, I have learned that you can copy the movie to other media such as a writable DVD, but cannot convert it into actual DVD format. If you want to watch one of the movies on a real TV, you need to download it to a computer that is equipped for TV output, such as a notebook computer. I do not know how large the files are, W-M only claims that they download in a surprisingly short time.

Not only movies can be downloaded. TV shows can, too. For example, you can buy a whole season of Fox’s “24″ for $36.25; single episodes are $1.96. Episodes of the current season are available up to Feb. 5’s show.

Wal-Mart, of course, isn’t the only game in town for this kind of service (and pffft to it, anyway). Amazon.com also has just started a service called Amazon Unbox. Unlike Wally World, Amazon emphasizes downloads of TV shows, charging $1.99 per episode, and also claims DVD quality.

Some of the most popular shows on TV (24, Prison Break, CSI and more) are available for download from Amazon Unbox. Which means you can enjoy them without commercials, and in DVD quality — before they come out on DVD.

It does offer movies, too. Unlike W-M, you can rent a movie by downloading it.

Your rental video can be stored on your PC for 30 days. Once you press play, you have 24 hours to watch the video before it expires.

Rentals seem to average $3.99 each. Download purchases pretty much track W-M’s pricing, with a twist. While both services allow transfer of the movie from PC to portable viewer (can you say iPod, boys and girls?), Amazon says, “you can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time.” Like W-M, you have to download and install propietary Amazon software.

Both W-M and Amazon offer shopping by movie genre, studio and TV channel. It appears to me that Amazon’s TV offerings are far greater and just as current for this season as Wal-Mart’s. I never got W-M to download, but Amazon claimed a DL time of 2.5 minutes for a 6MBPS connection, twice that for a 3MBPS connection, and 52 minutes for a 1.5 MBPS connection; this for a 1.93GB movie file. Well, it took almost an hour to finish downloading to my desktop machine. I ran the speed download speed test at PC Pitstop just afterward, which said that my connection is 3.3MBPS. What gives? I dunno.

Picture and sound quality:

This applies to the mandatory-install Amazon video player: Neither the sound nor the picture approach DVD quality. Heck, the sound isn’t even CD quality. It’s a low-power FM station kind of sound. The video quality is absolutely horrid. The image is extremely low resolution, much, much worse than the VCD video I can record off cable. There is an enormous amount of ghosting and fading with extremely poor color reproduction, all overdrawn with jigglies and swaths of lost detail.

But using Windows media player gives you an altogether different picture. The file is WMV format. I can’t honestly say the video is actual DVD quality, but it is excellent. The sound, however, is stereo and reasonably clear, and that’s it.

Will this kind of service take with the public? No question, I think. It’s convenient and not priced very high. Media storage costs and capacities are low and high, respectively, and I imagine there are a lot of folks like me who are content to keep an eyeball on a movie in the corner or the screen, instantly accessible on a hard drive, for a few dollars, rather than peel bills for a DVD that has to be shelved, located and loaded.

Both services can use a lot more titles, but that will come quickly, I would think. The main market may be the TV shows, though, for people who want to time-shift their favorite programs but don’t have a DVR and are put off by the price of getting one. I think the ability to watch shows on a personal media device will find favor with airline flyers. Amazon even features a way to buy a show on one computer and download it to another. My only complaint is that download speeds are still way too slow, but I am saying that after only one test, I admit.

Try it out! Buy link on the left; rent link on the right:

Update: I learned how Amazon enforces the 24-hours-to view rule. After 24 hours, the video file self-destructs and does not wind up in the recycle bin. Crude but effective.

Bebo, MySpace, World Cup, Metacafe, Radioblog, Wikipedia, Video, Rebelde, Mininova, Wiki. Thus saith FNC.

War porn and First Amendment rights

Andi’s World reports that “war porn” is all over Youtube.com. Citing the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

The wildly popular video-sharing Web site YouTube.com has dozens of videos purporting to show individual American soldiers being killed in Iraq, in what amounts to snuff films, overlaid with music and insurgent slogans.

Some of the videos, including ones of American soldiers purportedly being picked off by snipers or being blown up by improvised explosive devices, have been viewed tens of thousands of times each in the past few months. Some are posted in YouTube’s “news and blogs” category, but others are listed under “entertainment” and even “comedy.”

One shows what appears to be three U.S. soldiers in desert fatigues questioning Iraqi men in a street or alley as young boys mingle around. Suddenly, one soldier slumps to the ground, felled by a single bullet, as the children scatter. In another, a U.S. soldier is standing through the top hatch of a Humvee, then slumps over as the sniper strikes.

There are also “violent videos that claim to show U.S. soldiers killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The appearance on Youtube of jihadist propaganda video,

… shows that insurgent propaganda — including genuine footage — already available on more obscure Web sites has seeped in the mainstream of American popular culture, said Eben Kaplan, assistant editor of CFR.org, the Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank headquartered in New York.

As disgusting as war porn is, fairness impels me to point out that US troops have been making personal videos in Iraq from the beginning. I have seen several examples, via military officers I know well. Some video scenes are extremely graphic and show, unblinkingly, extremely violent combat sequences. One such sequence that I can’t seem to forget is of a fairly close-up scene wounded jihadist in Fallujah attempting to climb to his knees and aim his weapon. He’s cut down by a burst of machine gun fire to his head.

Whether any of the troops post that kind of video to Youtube I have no idea. Possibly the videos of American troops killing Iraqis or Afghanis the article says are on Youtube were posted by private soldiers. (The volume of videos posted to the site boggles - 65,000 per day.) But our troops are posting other in-theater video for certain, including combat footage. For example, the video below is of a foot-infantry firefight in Afghanistan. The enemy is never seen and there’s no blood, but the action is intense. (Warning: some “soldier” language.)

On the whole, the advent of internet citizens’ media has been more than positive, but not an unalloyed good. There is a line between a video such as this one and those that show the graphic scenes the Star-Bulletin describes. Which videos are clearly on one side or the other are easy to identify. But others aren’t so clearly identified.

A man told me this week in conversation that “it’s time to set some limits on the First Amendment.” I disagreed and think that we already have too many limits (cough, McCain-Feingold, cough). I have written before that, “The only good answer to free speech with which you don’t agree is more free speech. ”

Yet (to move off the topic of videos) there are justifiable limits to First Amendment rights of speech. The famous USSC opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes - in which he referred to falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater - is actually germane to a point made yesterday by Harvard Prof. Harvey Mansfield. Holmes, reports Wikipedia, was writing on whether Congress could forbid the distribution of fliers opposing the draft during World War I. The USSC said yes:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. […] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

The case’s legal point was later reversed in another case by the Supreme Court of 1969, which held the test was different than what Holmes said it was.

Now Prof. Mansfield has written,

The preaching of radical Islam is in fact “a clear and present danger,” and we need to suppress it. This sort of speech is not just blowing off steam or keeping us honest or puncturing our complacency. Here is a new task to occupy the anxious minds of civil libertarians in universities: how to distinguish truly dangerous speech and how to defeat it?

I think that such “preaching” falls under the category of inciting insurrection, which has never been protected speech since Washington’s day. But the good professor is right: we have to recognize that there is such a thing a dangerous speech before we can overcome it it at all, and there are an awful lot of elites in America who won’t confront that fundamental task.

I posted on Aug. 2 that I had bought a Slingbox, a device that integrates your incoming television signal with your broadband internet connection to enable you to watch your own television service on any computer, anywhere, connected to the internet. I noted that the “picture and sound quality are excellent, just take into account that resolution drops if you make the picture full screen.”

Sony produces a similar device called LocationFree, that lists for $1,500 or so, including a 12.1-inch television with wireless receptivity. The unit without the TV is about $200. Unlike Slingbox, LocationFree has 802.11a, b, or g protocols built in for wireless communication with your computer’s wireless router; sending a receiving units for ZSlingbox are extra cost.

Now, “AT&T Launches Live Broadband TV Service.”

AT&T Inc. is launching an Internet TV service where subscribers can watch live cable channels such as Fox News on any computer with a broadband connection for $20 per month.

The AT&T Broadband TV service announced Tuesday features about 20 channels of live and made-for-broadband content. The channel lineup includes the History Channel, the Weather Channel, the Food Network, Bloomberg and Oxygen. Additional channels will be added soon, the company said without elaborating.

The content is being provided by MobiTV Inc., a company that has specialized in delivering live cable channels to cell phones through wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) and Cingular Wireless, which is majority owned by AT&T.

As compared with many Internet-based video services, where the viewing window is considerably smaller than most computer monitors, the new AT&T offering will allow users to expand the picture to full screen. The service requires Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s Windows Media Player for playback.

IMO, traditional box televisions are going buh-bye. Internet speeds for consumers will increase a lot in coming years, as will wireless connection speeds for home networks. I think Sony’s model will become the next phase: a home-broadcaster unit receives the cable signal and then transmits it to viewers and computers on a home network, no computer necessary to set up just using viewing units. Will that will drive the price of viewing units down from present TVs? Too early to say - it depends whether consumers will want a screen in almost every room or whether they won’t think twice about picking up a unit and taking it with them. Handheld viewers, integrated with Palm-type PDAs, will also receive television.

(In fact, they already do. In addition to the monthly-subscription MobiTV service, Slingmedia, maker of the Slingbox, offers software for Windows Mobile Smartphone devices that, coupled with a wireless-carrier data plan, enables the Smartphone to receive TV over wireless internet. One advantage of SlingMedia’s offerings is that there is no monthly fee because you’re viewing your own home cable service. I do not use handheld TV, so I can’t report on its efficacy. I do know that the quality of the Slingbox’s reception is highly dependent on the speed and quality of the internet connection, which stands to reason. If you don’t have at least a 3MBPS connection, you’ll probably be very frustrated.)

AT&T’s service may well augur the post-Sony-scheme of things. In fact, I can see how it could displace the Sony scheme altogether. Wide-area wireless connectivity will become more pervasive than today. If AT&T’s promise of full-screen quality (on a computer,m not a TV set) bears out then it will be a big plus for them. But its severest competition will still be from companies such as SlingMedia that charge the consumer only once, for hardware. A Slingbox’s purchase price is paid back in only 10 months of AT&T fees.

In any event, I think the days of every TV being fully equipped to receive cable or broadcast will come to an end. One way or another, we’ll move to homes featuring a master data reception station, serving television viewers and internet for very-high-speed, home multimedia networks.

Update: Apple computer is on it, announcing iTV, to be released next year. iTV will send television sound and audio from a computer to a television set. But there’s a catch that The Guardian summarizes well: “… why [do] we need an extra intermediary to get films to our television sets …”? As I said, unless there is a consumer cost benefit to any of these setups, they won’t fly. By itself, the iTV holds no attraction for me. But suppose Apple released also a (relatively) low-cost, 42-inch iTV viewing screen along with it?

As things stand now, iTV is intended to be part of a system whereby users download a full-length movie from Apple’s newly announced movie download service. Then customers use iTV “to watch those movies on their TV screen.” Well, maybe. But why couldn’t I save the $299 cost of the iTV box, since I already have a notebook computer that will drive my TV’s screen and sound? And since Apple’s movie downloads will cost $10-$15, it’s certainly no cheaper than Netflix, although it is quite a bit quicker. Apple’s price is competitive with buying a new DVD, but ISTM that DVDs remain more flexible for the user.

The market will sort all this out.

DHS warns of critical Windows operating system vulnerability. I’ve updated my computer, update yours.