New York Ban 'Has Cost 2,600 Jobs'source:
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3741556 3:18pm (UK) Nov. 10, 2004
New York bar owners have denied the city’s smoking ban has been an unqualified success.
Tom McCabe, former health minister in the Scottish Parliament and now finance minister, has been told that nothing could be further from the truth.
In a letter to Mr McCabe, made public today, the Empire State and Tavern Association, the New York Nightlife Association and the United Restaurant and Tavern Owners said the latest available statistics are damning in terms of the economic effect the ban has had on the city’s hospitality industry.
New York’s bars and taverns and their suppliers have lost 2,600 jobs, 50 million dollars in wages and 70 million dollars in production, it was claimed.
“For months, bars across New York have felt the pain of a total smoking ban, only to be accused by the anti-smoking supporters of misrepresenting the impact,” the letter said.
They claim that another important knock-on effect has been the loss of tips.
“Many bartenders are losing upwards of 50% of their nightly tips and as they are only paid 3.35 dollars per hour, this is having a major impact on their salary.”
The letter said that disgruntled city residents are unhappy about the noise caused by smokers, who are forced to congregate on the street outside bars.
“In some cases this has even led to violent behaviour towards smokers in the street.”
The letter continued: “As if this isn’t enough to contend with, there is the major issue of how the smoking ban is enforced.
“The burden of imposing the ban is on the bar owner, not the customer who is actually breaking the law. If customers were fined, as legally they are supposed to be, we really would have seen a riot here.
“The real solution is to put smokers back inside the bars where they belong.”
Pioneer ultraviolet laser promises 500GB disksWow, I can't wait to see products like this at CESsource: The Inquirer
JAPANESE HARDWARE maker Pioneer has developed a technique which will allow optical drives to store 500GB of data. Thats according to the Nikkei Business Daily, which reported that the technique will use ultraviolet lasers, which emit shorter wavelength rays than blue lasers. The paper reported that Pioneer uses the beam to write data holes in a master disk, each separated by 70 nanometres. That gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk. While there are technical problems creating data cavities so small, Pioneer has, apparently, solved problems associated with scattering of the laser by developing a carbon mask using photosensitive resin.
Hollywood lawsuits to target illegal file sharingsource: cnet
Trade group representing studios expected to say Thursday it will file up to 230 lawsuits against individuals.
The trade group that represents Hollywood's major motion picture studios is expected to announce Thursday that it intends to file as many as 230 lawsuits in coming weeks against individuals who have illegally shared copyrighted movie files over the Internet, according to two people involved in the proceedings.
It would be the first time that the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major studios, including Warner Brothers Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, has sued individuals for sharing files, one of the people said. Potential targets of the lawsuits have not received warnings, the people said.
Some studios hope to settle the disputes before they become public.
By putting Internet users on notice that they face fines or other stiff penalties for offering movies for others to download, the industry hopes to thwart the same problems that plagued the recording industry three years ago when executives did not respond quickly enough to the threat of piracy.
Then music companies saw sales decline as people swapped music over the Internet, openly defying calls from the industry to stop. The Recording Industry Association of America later filed suit against thousands of individuals, setting off something of a backlash among consumers.
Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the MPAA, declined to comment on any action against file sharing that the organization might be considering. But the movie studios have tried to be more proactive recently in discouraging piracy, sponsoring classes in grade schools and running antipiracy messages in movie theaters.
According to one of the people involved in the suits, the association has been collecting evidence for some time in an effort to build strong legal cases. Still, one studio executive who asked not be identified said the industry "has not moved quickly enough."
The association has planned a news conference Thursday at which the association's new chief executive, Dan Glickman, will disclose the movie industry's plans, according to a news release distributed on Wednesday.
Several executives, educators and labor leaders are expected to attend.
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