FOLLOWING in the footsteps of Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear power
station, the tobacco, food and brewing giant Philip Morris Companies Inc has
just announced a new name for itself—Altria Group Inc.
Why the change? Well, the company says that market research has demonstrated
that the public feels it is “changing for the better and becoming a more
responsible corporate citizen”.
We’re glad to hear this, although why it should mean the company needs a new
name is not entirely clear. But what interests Feedback even more is the way
Altria has been registered on the Internet. If you go to register.com (the
domain-name registering company) you will find not only the obvious
www.altria.com, altria-companiesinc.com, altria.net and more, but also a whole
raft of rather less obvious domain names. These include altriakills.com,
altriastinks.com and altriasucks.net.
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Who could possibly have registered these names? Well, altria.com was
registered by someone called Andre Russotti, who represents Philip Morris. But
as for the rest, there’s no immediate way of knowing. Use the “whois” search
tool to ask who owns the names, and all you get is “account masking”, the
registration option at register.com for those who don’t want the details of
their registration revealed.
We can only guess that either these names have been registered by someone
who’s got it in for Philip Morris and wants to cause the company grief, or
they’ve been registered by Philips Morris itself or one of its associates in
order to stop anyone else doing so.
It just goes to show what hard work it is being a responsible corporate
citizen.
AN UNUSUAL invitation has arrived from the European Broadcasting Union.
DigiTAG, the digital TV division of the EBU, has announced it is updating its
database of contact details. “Please bare with us if you receive this e-mail
more than once,” says the EBU’s press release.
FOR SCIENCE reporters who gain entry to MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, an audience with its famous humanoid robot Cog is something akin
to a movie buff meeting Tom Cruise. Imagine, then, the horror of Information
Week’s columnist Wendy Wolfson when she went into the lab last week to find
that Cog had been decapitated and his head replaced by a tiny mechanical
insect.
In her brief visit, Wolfson was unable to find out what had happened to Cog’s
head, though she did learn that there is no plan at present to put it back
again. Doubtless there is a good reason for the change, but we do wonder whether
Cog’s reputation as the world’s most impressive humanoid robot can survive this
transformation.
Meanwhile, we are a little perplexed by Wolfson’s final comment. “I thought
his ant head was quite debonair,” she said. Really?
A FULL-PAGE colour advertisement in leading Italian newspaper Corriere
della Sera had this to say one day last month: “Sponsored by the House of
Representatives and the Senate of The Republic of Italy, we are proud to present
this splendid gold medallion celebrating 150 years of United Italy. In 20
different regional versions.”
IN MILITARY matters, security is more important than ever these days.
European space company Astrium is clearly very pleased to have won the
contract to supply satellite communication equipment to British naval destroyers
and warships. But Feedback hopes the system Astrium is supplying is more secure
than its automated fax system. This has just sent out a publicity boast about
the naval contract, complete with a three-page header that lists the private
numbers of all its recipients—many of whom are most unlikely to be best
pleased to have their numbers published.
YOU WON’T find them making slips like that at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, the nuclear weapons research facility near San Francisco, where the
world’s fastest computer was recently unveiled. The computer can carry out a
whopping 12.3 trillion operations per second and is so powerful that it has its
own 10-megawatt power station to provide power, mostly for cooling.
The lab has released a picture of the computer, which fills a huge room as
far as the eye can see with boring black boxes the size of filing
cabinets—computers, after all, look much the same regardless of the
information they are crunching.
Nonetheless, security is still to the fore. The computer’s visitor viewing
gallery has liquid-crystal windows that can be made opaque to stop anyone
looking at the boxes during classified calculations.
THIS WEEK’S most puzzling product claim comes from a container of Johnson
& Johnson’s shower mousse, which tells purchasers that it has “60+ uses”.
What could they possibly be? And why would anyone want to use the mousse for
anything other than showering anyway?
On second thoughts, please don’t answer that question.
POSTGRADUATE student Ross Rounsevell was excited to receive a brand new
Casio fx-992S calculator recently, but was puzzled by a feature of its
power-management system. “The Casio two-way power system,” he read, “makes it
possible to operate calculators even in complete darkness.”
Rounsevell says that perhaps he is not taking his PhD as seriously as he
should, or maybe he isn’t thinking out of the box enough, but at no point during
his studies does he foresee the need to perform a calculation in complete
darkness.
SHADES OF the French Revolution. The New Zealand Herald recently ran
a grisly job advertisement for a “head storeman and guillotine operator”.
Readers of the paper were much relieved when they discovered the ad was from
a sheet metal company.
THE KOLJA circular mirror sold until recently by furniture store Ikea carries
the instruction: “Can be hung horizontally or vertically”
