AOL Time Warner reported its 4Q2002 results today. Cash flow looks pretty good. Revenue’s pretty good. Margins are pretty good.

One thing, though. The company wrote down $44.6 Billion (roughly $10 per share), mostly in goodwill. This is in addition to the $54 Billion it wrote down in 1Q 2002. One hundred Billion dollars in shareholder value evaporated from AOL Time Warner in a year — value that, in truth, wasn’t really there to begin with.

“Fraud” is probably too strong a word to decribe the merger, because AOL was worth what AOL was worth; the Market said so every day by trading its stock where it did.

But wow. $100 Billion gone. (Just so you know, Parker Brothers prints only $50 Billion in Monopoly money a year. Let me repeat that: AOLTW’s writedown this year is two years worth of Monopoly money.)

And Ted Turner’s had enough. Turner, the company’s single biggest stockholder, quit the board today. I’ve got to believe he’s fixing to sue someone. Too much of that $100 Billion was his for him to sit still.

 

The staff of ZDNet’s Tech Update site was laid off not long ago. They apparently liked each other enough to put themselves up for sale on eBay as a working unit.

Unfortunately, this must violate some term or condition or something; because eBay appears to have killed the sale.

Just as well. After 15 bids and with less than 4 days to go, the high bid was $21. Ouch.

Later: maybe they should just buy this. (Thanks to David Hakala for the tip.) Hell — maybe I should buy it….

Later still: One of the editors involved tells me that eBay’s lawyers objected to some of the original post’s wording. The auction’s been reposted here.

And yet later again, the story’s been picked up by the Boston Globe.

 

A bumper crop from Ananova

An Ohio man accused of dialling a sex chat line says he ended up talking dirty to a police chief because he misdialled.

 

There have been a few studies indicating that excessive bicycling can cause male impotence or infertility. Here’s a case where the reverse is true Again, from Ananova:

Indian family planning officials are offering men a ｣20 bicycle if they undergo a vasectomy.

 

From Ananova:

Marijuana seized by police in Chicago last month turned out to be hay from a church Nativity scene.

Angela Gunn reminds me that it’s nearly Valentine’s Day. No, it’s not like that. She’s complaining about this year’s crop of Necco hearts.

There’s a lot to complain about, apparently. Necco says they sell 8 billion candy hearts between January 1 and Valentine’s Day. You want a customized message? You’d better like it a lot, because you’ll need to buy a whole production run: 3500 pounds of hearts. For that money, at least you get to specify up to 80 phrases (two lines of four characters, max, which is a little limiting, but not impossible), or about 43 pounds per phrase.

I think I’ll just get chocolate.

 

The U.S. Senate, in an inexplicable display of sense, yesterday killed funding for the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program. The TIA, you may recall, is a DARPA program that hoped to suck in every piece of electronic information about everyone in the world, then examine it to find evidence of terror plots.

This obvious invasion of Americans’ privacy — ignoring the technological obstacles — turned out to be too much for the Senate to swallow, the NYTimes reports (in a story by that “major-league asshole” Adam Clymer). From Clymer’s dispatch:

… research and development of the system would have to halt within 60 days of enactment of the bill unless the Defense Department submitted a detailed report about the program, including its costs, goals, impact on privacy and civil liberties and prospects for success in stopping terrorists. The research could also continue if President Bush certified to Congress that the report could not be provided or that a halt “would endanger the national security of the United States.”

The limits on deploying, or using, the system are stricter. While it could be used to support lawful military and foreign intelligence operations, it could not be used in this country until Congress had passed new legislation specifically authorizing its use.

The Wyden amendment also included a statement that Congress believed “the Total Information Awareness programs should not be used to develop technologies for use in conducting intelligence activities or law enforcement activities against United States persons without appropriate consultation with Congress or without clear adherence to principle to protect civil liberty and privacy.”

This all sounds well and good, but do recall that the TIA is headed by John Poindexter, a senior alumnus of the Iran-Contra affair. Iran-Contra, of course, is a textbook example of the Executive Branch doing something that Congress had explicity prohibited.

So while I applaud the Senate for its action, I don’t really believe that the TIA will be killed quite so easily.

 

OK, boys and girls. Here’s today’s comic book question:

Are the X-Men human or not? How about the Fantastic Four? Spiderman? Is exposure to gamma rays enough to cause expulsion from the race of Homo Sapiens?  Genetic mutation? Spider bite?

The question’s not from some fanboy bull session at a comixcon. No, it’s from the U.S. Court of International Trade, and there’s a fair amount of money attached. If the characters are human, their dolls — ahem, action figures — are dutiable at 12 percent. If they aren’t, the figures are dutiable at 6.8 percent.

The dispute gives legal weight to the great underlying question that Stan Lee understood underlies all Marvel Comics: at what point do exceptional people with exceptional powers stop being people and become freaks?

Poor Judge Barzilay, that she should have to decide questions of such emotional weight. Read her decision. (Hint: if you really want to cut to the chase, start reading at page 20 of 32.)

 

Isaac Asimov once said that the sound of science isn’t “Eureka.” It’s “That’s interesting…” Same’s true of journalism.

An article floated across my screen yesterday to the effect that T-Mobile is rolling out “wireless priority service” in 15 markets, as part of its contract with the federal goverment. WPS was described as “priority cell telephone service to national security and emergency service personnel during emergencies.”

That’s interesting. You mean there’s a system in place to prioritize telecommunications?

Actually, yes. Googling “wireless priority service” yields some very interesting documents. This one describes the service, which development of which was accellerated after September 11. To get priority attention on the T-Mobile system, one apparently needs to dial *272 before one’s call. However, this page indicates that either (a) you maybe shouldn’t know that, or (b) you maybe shouldn’t use it if you do know — unless you’re one of these people. (I can’t tell you whether any of this works. It’s not that I can’t tell you — it’s that I don’t know. Haven’t tried it.) If you’re looking for a secure GSM phone, anyway, look here. The system is live in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

There is a similar wireline program called GETS — Government Emergency Telecommunications Service. GETS does require prior registration, and those who are authorized to use the system get a wallet card with an access code. No, I’ve never seen one but I’ve heard of this. This is the first I’ve ever seen that raises the system beyond the realm of Urban Legend. According to this document, the access numbers involve the 710 area code. This document says  70,535 GETS PINs have been issued by year-end 2002.

This whole thing is administered by an office called the National Communications System, the mission of which is:

Assist the President, the National Security Council, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in (1) the exercise of the telecommunications functions and responsibilities, and (2) the coordination of the planning for and provision for national security and emergency preparedness communications for the Federal government under all circumstances, including crisis or emergency, attack, recovery and reconstitution.

Poking around these links, like so much of the Net, is edifying. And a little scary.

Jose Luis Betancourt hit the Texas Lotto before Christmas. Won $7.5 million. But if Texas works like a lot of other states, that’s before taxes and payable over something like 20 years. The cash value today — what the Lottery Commission would cut a check for — was probably something south of $2 million. Not bad. Not Bill Gates money, but a nice little grubstake.

So, the federal government says, Jose Luis Betancourt went out and bought some cocaine. About 3.5 pounds of it. The feds found it hidden in his dishwasher and pantry. Presumably he was out to sell the stuff — at a profit — because that’s more cocaine than one would normally consume at one sitting, even for a big party.

Betancourt was found to be a flight risk, and is being held without bail.