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The Buzz
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 21, 2003
A Web site that urged visitors to lower prices for grocery items by substituting bar codes shut itself down after pressure from Wal-Mart Inc.
The site's operators, a group of tech-savvy political activists, decided to close the site last week after contacts between their attorney and those of Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer.
Re-code.com contained a database of bar codes with instructions on how to print them on stickers. It suggested visitors "chose their own prices" by, for instance, sticking a bar code for generic cereal on a name-brand box in the store.
The Web site's creators called it a satirical work intended to create a discussion on how prices are set by corporations. It went online March 20.
A letter from Wal-Mart's attorneys to one of the companies involved in hosting the site said Re-code.com encouraged a modern version of the old scam of taking price tags from a cheap items and putting them on more expensive ones.
"Our concern has always been . . . that any invitation to theft or removing items from stores at prices that are set by individuals certainly flies in the face of doing business," Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams said.
Williams would not comment on whether the company was seeking to sue the site's creators.
The site's legal owner, Mike Bonnano of Loudonville, N.Y., said that switching store bar codes may be illegal but there was nothing illegal about the site itself.
"It's just like publishing a book with instructions," he said. Bonnano, also a political activist, was not part of the group that created the site although he owns it.
Whether you're a private eye, a bird watcher or a baseball fan who likes the upper deck, the new Digital Camera Binoculars from Brookstone can help you focus in and capture the details of the action from afar.
The binoculars have a built-in 1.3-megapixel digital camera that holds up to 40 high-resolution images (or up to 100, using a lower resolution) that can be downloaded to a home computer through a USB port. The included Photo Manager software for Windows allows users to enhance, scale, crop and print the images.
The binoculars can connect to a television, allowing images to be displayed on the screen one at a time or as a slide show. Users also can display what they see through the binoculars on the TV screen or take snapshots of those views.
The binoculars are lightweight and have a magnification that makes objects appear 10 times larger than with the naked eye. They cost $150 at Brookstone stores and online at www.brookstone.com. A version with lower resolution and lesser magnification (about eight times that of the naked eye) is available for $99.
No matter how much 3-D technology evolves, the engineers just cannot seem to ditch those silly glasses. The Extreme 3D System includes a new pair of shades that adds depth to flat video games and movies.
The system, from X3D Technologies, includes a converter that links most PC monitors to a pair of glasses that have timed electronic shutters in place of lenses.
The shutters cause a slightly different picture of a given image to be sent to each eye in much the way that 3-D movies altered images by separating red and blue wavelengths of light. The brain unites the two pictures in a series of rapidly changing stereoscopic images.
The Extreme 3-D System gives games and video a depth of field that makes images appear real, if a bit dark because of the flicker. The glasses work only with cathode ray tube monitors, so they cannot be used with laptops.
The Extreme 3-D System, which costs $100, is also compatible with DVDs and educational slide shows, including a tour of the Louvre that is available free at www.x3dworld.com.
It showed 54 percent of boys between 14 and 18 have gambled compared with 16 percent of girls. The study found 7 percent of adolescents have gambled online, a number up significantly from a previous range of 1 percent to 2.7 percent. In an average month, according to the survey, one in 10 boys reported gambling on the Internet.
"Adolescent boys are usually more likely than girls to engage in risky behavior like Internet gambling, and this study bears that out," said Rachel Volberg, a senior research scientist for the National Opinion Research Center in Washington.
But Volberg also recently completed a study of gambling in Nevada that turned up other results. In that study, she found problem gambling was more prevalent among adults than young people.
The Mac crowd's latest status symbol is fingerless gloves to shield owners of the new aluminum PowerBook G4 laptops from the 102-degree heat emanating from the metal space where a typist's palms rest.
Handeze, like driving gloves from Hades, are sewn from heat-resistant Lycra.
Prime advocates include MacWorld magazine's Adam C. Engst, who also spreads the word in his influential TidBits newsletter for Macoholics (www.tidbits.com). A TidBits test probe tucked inside the glove (www.handeze.com) registered a comfortable 91 degrees while resting atop a hot PowerBook G4.