
The president's comments come as his administration continues to revitalize an improving but still ailing U.S. economy. They echo statements made often by leaders in the U.S. film, music, video game, and software industries. For a while these sectors have claimed piracy and Internet file sharing mean the loss of U.S. jobs and poison the economy. Critics say that the job losses are more due to poor business decisions made by the studios and music labels.They have cited research that shows intellectual property accounts for 20 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 40 percent of US economic growth The music sector has seen a major decline in jobs over the decade since Napster made file sharing popular The industry has contracted to four major record companies and with EMI Music, the smallest major label, in deep financial trouble, there's a possibility we'll see more shrinkage Sony Pictures, the film studio owned by the giant Japanese consumer electronics company, recently announced its second round of layoffs within the past year.

On the Yankees or Red Sox, Kevin Millwood would make a nice No. 4 starter. On the Orioles, he is a far bigger deal. His acquisition is supposed to give Marylanders hope that their team finally is gaining ground on the division monsters. In reality, Baltimore will be fortunate if the righthander proves to be a top-of-the-rotation innings-eater able to show an up-and-coming staff how it is done. At worst, Millwood should provide an upgrade to a rotation that tied the Brewers for the worst ERA (5.37) in the majors.The Orioles also improved their bullpen by signing closer Mike Gonzalez The only change they have made so far to their lineup is at third base, where Garrett Atkins, nontendered by Colorado, will replace Melvin Mora (unless Atkins moves to first base).

It appears to have been a false alarm, as about 10 minutes later people started filing back in and the official SXSW Twitter account confirmed that there was no emergency. Panels would continue and run late, the festival Twitter account confirmed.CNET is still attempting to learn the exact source of the evacuation. Glitch? Prankster? A sign that it was time for all the pasty nerds to take off their orange-and-lime-green badges and head to happy hour?But if anybody in the Austin Convention Center was going to start a figurative fire, it would be Cuban and Ronen Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, escalated into the billionaire ranks after he sold Broadcastcom to Yahoo in one of the dot-com era's most famous billion-dollar deals that ultimately went nowhere He has since founded the HDNet cable brand and become one of YouTube's (and free online video in general) harshest critics Ronen's Boxee media center software has become one of the digital video industry's foremost enfants terrible, and Ronen's bull-in-a-china-shop attitude has made him a hero among geeks and an object of critique for pundits who say he'll never be able to ink the deals that Boxee needs to succeed.

Manning gave futile chase, but was blocked by a New Orleans defender and fell awkwardly as the cornerback raced by. The four-time NFL MVP forlornly walked to the sideline as the Big Easy celebrations began. Who would have thought the biggest mistake of the game would have come from Manning?"It's time for the Saints to celebrate," he said. "It's their field and it's their championship."An NFL embarrassment for much of their 43 years, the Saints' football renaissance, led by Brees and coach Sean Payton, climaxed with Shockey's touchdown and Lance Moore's 2-point conversion catch The conversion pass originally was ruled incomplete, but Payton challenged the call and won.

Cook's generous bonus clearly demonstrates his value both to Apple and to his boss. Jobs has taken time to praise Cook for the work he did while Jobs was tending to his health last year, thanking him at public product unveilings as well as at the most recent Apple shareholder meeting.While Jobs was out, Apple delivered two back-to-back blow-out quarters, as well as an updated iPhone OS, and new iPhone 3GS hardware. Under Cook, Apple also put the finishing touches on the company's new iPods, MacBooks, and Mac OS, which were released shortly after Jobs' return to the helm in late June.The debate had just begun in a fourth-floor ballroom at the Austin Convention Center between billionaire Mark Cuban and Boxee founder Avner Ronen, where hundreds of people had showed up for their a highly anticipated panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Friday evening Then the emergency lights started flashing and everyone was told by a voice recording to evacuate the room because "an emergency has been reported".

"At least nobody can take it away now," he said, tucking in his No. 34 jersey just so as he looked around at an empty Bright House Networks Field. The six-time All-Star—who went to the Phillies in the blockbuster deal that also sent Cliff Lee to Seattle—spoke with Steve Greenberg for a Sporting News magazine interview. The following are excerpts and outtakes from that interview, which is on newsstands now.Sporting News: When you think about your new teammates, is there a face that always pops into your head? Who are you really excited to get to know?.

To Sony, releasing the Move is an obvious move for the PlayStation, given it believes it started the motion controller era with its Eye Toy. Sony held its press conference during the Game Developers Conference here. Now, the Move, which will be available this fall in a starter kit that begins at under $100 for a Move, a PlayStation eye camera, and a game, is its attempt to jump ahead of Microsoft's Natal and to begin winning over Wii users."Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability," said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla.

CNET is still attempting to learn the exact source of the evacuation. Glitch? Prankster? A sign that it was time for all the pasty nerds to take off their orange-and-lime-green badges and head to happy hour?But if anybody in the Austin Convention Center was going to start a figurative fire, it would be Cuban and Ronen. Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, escalated into the billionaire ranks after he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in one of the dot-com era's most famous billion-dollar deals that ultimately went nowhere. He has since founded the HDNet cable brand and become one of YouTube's (and free online video in general) harshest critics. Ronen's Boxee media center software has become one of the digital video industry's foremost enfants terrible, and Ronen's bull-in-a-china-shop attitude has made him a hero among geeks and an object of critique for pundits who say he'll never be able to ink the deals that Boxee needs to succeed."We have 16 million subscribers who do get HDNet, watch it regularly, and--something I'm sure you haven't heard of--they pay us money!" Cuban retorted "And you know what else, profitable! We make money, you want me to explain that to you?Some companies think you win when you raise money, but that's not how it works" He had a point: Boxee is pre-revenue.

Buzz Bissinger has largely dropped off the sports blogosphere's radar since his blow-up at Deadspin's Will Leitch almost two years ago. Oh, sure, he gave former TSBer Spencer Hall a wonderful interview in the wake of that moment, and has popped up to promote his book with LeBron James and smack Tiger Woods, but he's made waves more for what he's been talking about than what he has written.That might be because his recent output merely matches this piece for The New Republic on Brett Favre -- totally subtle title: "Cheesehead" -- for myopia, cynicism and spleen.The more Favre got whipped, the more you could hear the brains of the sportswriters sifting for the cliches of glory and tragedy that have passed for analysis since the days of Grantland Rice The next day, John Feinstein wrote on the Washington Post website that Favre had “come to embody Hamlet” and described him as “heroic” and “tragic” Larry Canale wrote on a New York Times blog that Favre “was as game as ever, and he would not quit” James Penrice at Catholic Online wrote that it was time to “give Favre his due as a man whose spiritual strength overcomes the weakness of mind and body”.

Clearly, deep-energy retrofits are on the extreme end of cost and effort when it comes to making homes more energy-efficient. But creating a tight seal and insulating can be done whenever there are major renovations to a home, such as replacing a roof or siding, said contractors.It's been four years since laptop computers passed desktop in unit sales in the US But laptop vendors can't rest The Netbook phenomenon swept the tech world in 2009, changing the rules for the category And this year, tablets like the iPad might change the nature of personal computing yet again.

One newer method, appropriately enough called LocalStorage, is supported in Firefox and IE 8. But even as it becomes formally standardized through the W3C as Web Storage, browser makers have recognized its limits for modern browser designs.One problem is that LocalStorage stems from the days when browser computing took place in a single computing process, a design that meant programmers didn't have to worry about one browser task meddling with data that another browser task thought it was controlling. With multi-process browsers arriving--Chrome is an example today, and Firefox is moving in that direction--browsers get the ability to do more things in parallel, and LocalStorage can't keep up."Because more than one [browser] tab can access the same data, you have to make sure that what one tab does is seen by others at the same time," Blizzard said "That's extra-hard with a browser that might have more than one process".

Microsoft's praise is important. For one thing, the company maintains a dominant, though diminishing, share of browser usage, so even Web programmers who've scorned the company's earlier lack of interest in advancing Web technologies should pay attention to what it says. They should pay even more attention when Microsoft and its longtime arch-rival Mozilla agree on something. Microsoft's cooperation makes it more likely Indexed DB will be a real tool for Web programmers, not just an academic concept with little real-world relevance.For another, Microsoft is working hard on the next generation of its browser, with IE 9 getting a starring role at the company's Mix conference next week. Though the company has been mostly mum about what new technologies will arrive in its updated browser, its activity signals that the company is very serious about the market.It may sound perverse, but the ability to store data locally on a computer turns out to be a very important part of the Web application era that's really just getting under way The whole idea behind cloud computing is to put applications on the network, liberating them from being tied to a particular computer, but it turns out that the computer still matters, because the network is neither fast nor ubiquitous.

But you can't feel too good for the Rays. They still reside in the A.L. East and still have financial limitations. Tampa Bay had better enjoy Crawford this season. He is a prime candidate to join the enemy in 2011.Blue Jays. Trading Roy Halladay might be good for the future, depending on the development of the prized prospects (starter Kyle Drabek and third baseman Brett Wallace) they got in return. But for the present, losing Halladay hurts big time. Righthander Brandon Morrow, acquired from the Mariners, isn't likely to make Toronto forget its former ace. The club's other key acquisitions, shortstop Alex Gonzalez and catcher John Buck, are journeymen who were unwanted by their previous teams.They still need a bat and with moving parts at first and third (and possibly DH and left), they don't have to be that picky regarding position Baltimore hasn't yet shown much interest in bringing back Miguel Tejada, who could take over third with Atkins going to first The Orioles could have a choice of "iffy" first basemen: Russell Branyan (back), Carlos Delgado (hip) and Hank Blalock (declining production).

Scouts love Benn's size (6-2, 225), and he showed excellent hands in college. Erratic quarterback play at Illinois contributed to Benn's lack of production last season, and he also played on a sore ankle that he injured early in the season.Benn needs to run well to convince teams he can make an early impact in his pro career If performs well, there are several receiver-needy teams who may consider him in the first round, including the 49ers (No 16), the Ravens (No 25), and the Jets (No 29) A poor showing, however, would almost surely drop Benn into the second round.

In one multiphase project in western Massachusetts, the homeowners anticipate getting a 70 percent reduction in energy use by adding a layer of foam insulation on the roof and outside walls among other enhancements. Slashing energy use means lots of insulation: the roof will have an R-value, or insulating value, of 59, which is two or three times that of a typical New England home.Closer to Boston, a superinsulation project at an 85-year-old, two-family home in Arlington, Mass., was able to reduce the amount of heating oil by about two-thirds in its first year, according to homeowner Alex Cheimets. In that case, homeowners decided to seal and add insulation to the exterior of the home when they had to replace the aging shingles.Another project where only the roof was replaced and extensive air sealing done was able to reduce cut energy usage by 44 percent based on the same average heating days, according to David Joyce, the president of Synergy Companies Construction, who worked on the project.

Favre threw away Minnesota's best chance to win, tossing an interception deep in New Orleans territory in the closing seconds of regulation. Then the Saints won the coin toss and ended it on Hartley's kick 4:45 into OT.Forget the paper bag masks and that long history of losing that started in 1967. Moments after Hartley's kick, they were toasting their hometown winners in the French Quarter and making plans for South Florida.The Saints (15-3) will meet Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts (16-2) in the Super Bowl in two weeks in Miami The Colts opened as 4-point favorites.

But what about creating new experiences for things players have never seen before? Meier's answer to that was simple, in something he calls the "unholy alliance," an unspoken agreement players and developers make with every game they play. "I'm going to pretend certain things exist, and so are you to make this a better experience," he said. Followed shortly by, "this is an idea I should have trademarked."On Thursday the agency launched a new tool that allows consumers to test the download and upload speeds of their broadband connections. The tool, which can be found at www.broadband.gov, tests wireless or landline-based broadband connections. It also allows consumers to see the latency, the time it takes for data to be sent from a computer to the testing server and back, and jitter, the variability in the delay between a computer and the testing server, that's being detected on their connections.The tool was launched just days before the FCC is due to release its national broadband plan to Congress next week that will provide policy suggestions and information about getting all Americans connected to broadband.

Microsoft included workaround information in its initial advisory on the hole, which does not affect IE 8, and on Friday updated Security Advisory 981374 to add more information on workarounds following Ben Abu's work."With today's update, we have added a Microsoft Fix It to automate this workaround for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 customers," Bryant said "As always, customers should test this thoroughly before deploying as certain functionality that depends on the peer factory class, such as printing from Internet Explorer and the use of Web folders, may be affected".

It's been four years since laptop computers passed desktop in unit sales in the U.S. But laptop vendors can't rest. The Netbook phenomenon swept the tech world in 2009, changing the rules for the category. And this year, tablets like the iPad might change the nature of personal computing yet again.To discuss the future of laptops and personal computing, our guests are: from Lenovo, makers of the Thinkpad, Competitive Analyst Matt Kohut; and from HP, which now owns the Voodoo PC line of products founder, Rahul Sood, now CTO of HP global gaming.

They had to withstand yet one more comeback by Favre, who returned to the NFL with the Vikings (13-5) after another brief retirement. He was alternately spectacular and pedestrian Sunday, finally betrayed by his gambling style and, perhaps, an aging body.Porter's pick sent it into overtime, the third time an NFC title game has needed extra time and the second in three seasons. Two years ago, Favre's interception in OT set up a field goal that sent the Giants past the Packers and into the Super Bowl.During the winter meetings, Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein told the Boston media that his club shouldn't be expected to win the World Series every year Epstein looked at 2010 as one of those years when the club probably would not be as good as it has been or will be A "bridge" season, he said Then, Epstein went out and made more substantial changes than any team in the majors.
