Leo Bogart, a media research expert, said "Many of those who go online believe that this has cut into the time they spend with newspapers and TV news, but the typical Internet user checks the news only once a day for a total of an hour a week. When a big story is breaking and people are eager to learn the latest developments, they'll get the bulletins fast on the Internet. That may make them all the more interested in the full details they can check out elsewhere."

"In the reformatting of the show, they wanted and we wanted a faster-paced, hipper TV show, in keeping with today’s demands," [interim Miss America Organization CEO Art] McMaster said. "The three-hour show, honestly, dragged a little bit. We feel we can put on a better show in two hours."

"No company ever downsized its way to greatness".

The parents of the GI Generation had it rough. They were the "Lost Generation" of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis - generally, people born from 1883 to 1900. Few in that generation went beyond the eighth grade, and it showed.

"As a group they demonstrated no measurable improvement in educational performance over preceding generations," said William Strauss, co-author of Generations.

They were adults in the Roaring '20s, a time of prosperity but also of urban blight, sweat shops and massive immigration. They came home from World War I not to heroes' welcomes but to crackdowns on drinking and crime.

"There were issues of child health and safety," Strauss said. "The Lost Generation was not raising its children well."

All that would change for their kids, the GI Generation.

There were improvements in nutrition laws and vaccines. Vitamins became widely available. From 1900 to 1924 infant mortality fell by 50 percent.

The Volstead Act of 1920, which created Prohibition, failed as a social experiment but had an important benefit for the GI Generation.

"It reduced alcohol consumption in the home. The parents of the GI Generation spent less time drunk, on the whole," said Strauss.

Education improved dramatically. The GI Generation produced the "largest one-generational jump in education achievement ever," he said. "It was a generation of joiners, of team players."

The GI Generation grew up in youth clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H and a host of similar organizations, helping build a strong sense of community.

"They wore uniforms from the time they were young - they were the most uniformed generation in American history," Howe said.

Home from war, they went to school on the GI Bill. As adults they built well-scrubbed suburbs and won flocks of Nobel Prizes. They took mankind into space.

In return they fully enjoyed the American Dream. Social Security and Medicare were constructed with the GI Generation in mind.

"There has been no generation in history with better access to affordable housing," Strauss said, "especially considering what today's young people have to deal with.

"The Lost Generation was poor; the GI Generation was not."

The core values that made the GI Generation good citizens were formed during the first 20 or so years of their lives, said Underwood, the TGI consultant.

"They had their early childhood during the Roaring '20s, generally a time of prosperity," he said. "But they were hit hard by the molding effects of the Depression and the war."

From the Depression, he said, the youthful GI Generation learned humility, "a rejection of wealth as a status symbol."

"This broke down the mystique of wealth, even for those who would later have it," he said.

From the war came a respect for teamwork, an understanding that "we're all in this together," he said.

We represent the people, not the powerful.

We represent the people, not the privileged.

I am doing this to prove to myself that the blogosphere has reached a critical juncture. My theory is that there are enough really smart, influential individuals out there who will essentially filter "all the news that's fit to blog." All I need to know about life I can learn from blogs...

My self-imposed info-hunger strike, however, does not mean that mass media is going away anytime soon. In fact, it will only become more relevant as blogs act like a media magnifying glass and perform essential "checks and balances" on news reported by the pros.

I will also not click any blog links to journalist-written stories or browse non-blog RSS feeds.

The man with the Maybach asked me what I’d been up to.

I threw my head back and giggled. "Blogging," I said.

He smiled. "You kids and Harry Potter," he said. "How old are you anyways?"

Most importantly, the research concludes that DVRs "recapture" TV commercial exposures that otherwise would have been "zapped" by non-DVR viewers. The study estimated that 51 percent of non-DVR viewers zap TV commercials, usually by using their remote control to change the channel when they come on. However, 96 percent of those viewers actually watch TV commercials when they become DVR subscribers, albeit in fast-forward mode.

While such fast-forwarding clearly diminishes the communications effectiveness of TV commercials, the study found that most fast-fowarders "notice" TV commercials either "always" (15 percent) or "sometimes" (52 percent) while zipping through the spots.

Just like a VCR, when you play back a previously recorded program on a Tivo, you can fast-forward through the commercials-- carefully watching of course, for the return of the program. Even then you still see the commercials-- they just go by faster. But since you have already previously seen each commercial at least 100 time before-- you know exactly what they are promoting even at the higher speed. Or, just like a regular television set, you can hit the MUTE button during the commercial. In our household, even with our dual-tuner DirecTV/Tivo unit, 99% of our television viewing is still in "real time" complete with all the commercials. Even when my wife watches a Tivo recorded show she rarely fast-forwards through the commercials. (italics mine)

"What Khaled [Fattal, chairman of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium] says is true, because if you only speak Arabic, why would you be interested in the Internet?" said Paul Verhoef, a vice president at the International Corporation for Internet Names and Numbers (ICANN), which runs the .com register.

But in the case of Arabic, an alphabetic script which conveys at least four major languages and is widely used in more than 30 countries, a long-term solution could take another five years to implement, according to Charles Sha'ban, a member of the MINC board and an expert on the subject.

Sha'ban agreed that coordination between so many players has been a problem and that commercial companies with a stake in pushing their own systems have complicated the process.

"You have 22 Arab countries, all of which would like a say. At the same time there are other countries who use the same Arabic script--Farsi, Urdu and Pashtun. So it does need more cooperation between them," he said.

Bozo The Capitol Clown had red mop hair and spoke with a drawl. Harmon's Bozo had bright orange-red yak hair and spoke faster and made up an entirely new vocabulary, like "wowie-kazowie." The laugh was also different.

Rhea, the youngest of three girls, remains close to her family and credits the gene pool, especially her mother, for her career.

"I have just a hilarious mother, so I talk about my mother a lot," she said. "My mother doesn't say someone is homosexual. She says, 'His name is Gary and I think the r is silent.' "

Using the short-range technology for long-range networks is like "using a hammer to drive in a screw," said Derek Kerton of the Curtain Group, a Silicon Valley wireless-technology consulting firm. "You can do it, but wouldn't it be better if you found a better tool?"

Such tools include wireless technologies such as EvDO and EDGE now being used by the likes of Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless to offer citywide service around the country. Wi-Fi, in contrast, is designed to be a "wireless local-area network" technology, with an emphasis on the "local," Kerton argued.

While praising Tropos' ingenuity, Kerton warned that the firm's city networks could be subjected to interference from other Wi-Fi networks as well as from cordless phones, microwave ovens and other devices that use the same wireless spectrum.

Ron Pequette, a Tropos sales director who appeared with Mayer at a Tuesday press conference, said the firm has the interference problem licked.