Digital Age

How many lawyers does it take to tell a professor when he can make copies from a digital book? Lots, so far. Digital distribution ought to make scholarship easy to spread, and cheap. Especially at a time when college expenses — most of which don't go for instructors or texts, but for buildings, administration, marketing, and other nonacademic needs — are driving young Americans deep into debt. But textbook publishers are as reluctant as music publishers to give their product away for free, digital or not. So, in the absence of new law from Congress or Supreme Court rulings, university counselors have been urging professors to pay extra licensing fees for anything they copy — boosting the cost and time spent assembling coursework.

CHICAGO - Wrestling with the challenges of documents in the digital age, U.S. officials are destroying millions of paper federal court records to save storage costs. But the effort is raising the ire of some historians, private detectives, and others who rely heavily on the files. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says at least 10 million bankruptcy case files and several million District Court files from between 1970 and 1995 will be shredded, pounded to pulp, and recycled.

What are the values [for the Digital Age]? For me, they are best expressed in a modern idea of community. At the heart of it is the belief in equal worth, which is the central belief that drives my politics - and in our mutual responsibility in creating a society that advances such equal worth. Note: it is equal worth, not equality of income or outcome; or simply equality of opportunity. It affirms our equal right to dignity, liberty and economic opportunity, as well as freedom from discrimination.

In 1985, when the last major revision of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published, it distilled the world into 32 hefty volumes containing 44 million words. But two words were absent from the venerable encyclopedia, words that would soon threaten its existence: CD-ROM and Internet. That same year, the first encyclopedia published on CD-ROM was issued, using text only. Within a few years, the contents of huge encyclopedias of thousands of pages would be contained on small, silvery disks that would come to life with movies and animations and sound.

Oh no, not another cyber-thriller: the urgent clickety-clack of computer keyboards, frantic geeks thumbing their PDAs, evil Web wizards deploying viral downloads, server farms put out of service by a dastardly ring of digital terrorists. And who's going to save the day? John McClane, that two-fisted, old-school New York City cop from a trio of vintage Die Hards , that's who. The guy probably doesn't even own a PC. In Live Free or Die Hard , the fourth installment in Bruce Willis' blow-'em-up blockbuster franchise - and the first in 12 long years - gigabytes and fisticuffs collide.

It sounds like a perfect business world for a store owner. "From my 15 major competitors in town, there is hardly anybody left," Steve Serota said. That would normally make him a happy businessman, except that he had to close Camera Care, his Center City store, last month. After spending almost half his life selling cameras in his Arch Street shop, the 52-year-old merchant was instead stuffing lens filters and other unsold inventory into huge black garbage bags. "It's a tragedy," he said.

A consortium of public and private agencies led by the Urban Affairs Coalition has been awarded $11.8 million to provide Internet access, computers and training to low-income residents and small businesses in Philadelphia. The grant to Philadelphia Freedom Rings: SBA Partnership is stimulus money from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The effort is expected to generate 5,000 new broadband household subscribers and provide more than 210,000 hours of training.

Conditional charity Re: "United Way / A clarion call for giving" (editorial, Sept. 21): If, as you say, "a community is properly judged by its commitment to its children," the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania is putting its political agenda ahead of its core mission in its treatment of one of the city's oldest and largest youth service programs, the Boy Scouts. Using its definition of "non-discrimination" as a pretext, it cut off funding to the Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts because the council has membership standards with which the leadership of United Way disagrees.

Making "Scream 4" for a tech-drenched generation posed obvious problems for Wes Craven, who likes to start his "Screams" with a doomed blonde answering a telephone. In 2011, what teenage girl has a landline? What self-respecting serial killer sends texts? It raises the uncinematic prospect of a lonely girl in an empty house, receiving text message from a taunting killer. (RU alone? OMG, UR! LOL.) Doesn't have the same . . . ring to it. Craven and writer Kevin Williamson know they're updating the franchise for kids who will watch it two months from now on a mobile device, and so they make a few wedged-in references to digital-age innovations.

A "smart card" is one of those progressing-toward-the-millennium ideas that seem almost inevitable, if not necessarily desirable. It's a driver's license that would include a digitized photograph with the usual information, but also a magnetic bar code and computer chip that could store a host of other data, from welfare account numbers to hospital-insurance codes. In other words, a kind of Swiss Army knife for the Digital Age. New Jersey Gov. Whitman likes the bureaucratic efficiency and personal convenience of the idea so much she wants to rush through a law to put so-called AccessNJ smart cards in every New Jersey driver's wallet by 1999.

How many lawyers does it take to tell a professor when he can make copies from a digital book? Lots, so far. Digital distribution ought to make scholarship easy to spread, and cheap. Especially at a time when college expenses — most of which don't go for instructors or texts, but for buildings, administration, marketing, and other nonacademic needs — are driving young Americans deep into debt. But textbook publishers are as reluctant as music publishers to give their product away for free, digital or not. So, in the absence of new law from Congress or Supreme Court rulings, university counselors have been urging professors to pay extra licensing fees for anything they copy — boosting the cost and time spent assembling coursework.

Gus Rubino says he could easily have let time pass him by. It did for many of his colleagues in the TV and stereo repair business. In the '80s and '90s, every town or neighborhood seemed to have one or two men - they were almost always men - who eked out a living fixing TV sets, amplifiers, turntables, and speakers. Some retired. Some could not keep pace with changing technology. Some resigned themselves to a disposable culture in which, as Rubino put it, "people don't even understand the word fix . They think if something isn't working, you throw it away.

Theater Azuka Theatre Spotlight Series: What to Do When You Hate All Your Friends New comedy exploring friendship & romance in today's world. Closes 1/23. First Baptist Church, 123 S. 17th St. www.azukatheatre.org . Free. Body Awareness A visiting artist's nude photographs arouse conflicting feelings in a college professor & her girlfriend. Closes 2/5. Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.; 215-546-7824. $46-$56; $41-$51 seniors; $23-$28 ages 20-29 with ID. Cats Tony-winning musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

CHICAGO - Wrestling with the challenges of documents in the digital age, U.S. officials are destroying millions of paper federal court records to save storage costs. But the effort is raising the ire of some historians, private detectives, and others who rely heavily on the files. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says at least 10 million bankruptcy case files and several million District Court files from between 1970 and 1995 will be shredded, pounded to pulp, and recycled.

There's a certain poetic justice in the fact that On the Road is one of Apple's top-grossing book apps. Released June 18, the iPad app for Jack Kerouac's landmark novel - featuring a variety of enriched content, including commentary, maps, audio recordings, and other ephemera - hit No. 4 on Apple's list June 21, ahead of the Bible and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land . That's a testament to the power of the digital project, but also to...

What do you get when you take an "elephant joke" made popular in the 1960s and fast-forward 50 years? A YouTube clip gone viral. Well, sort of. The joke may be lost to a generation of tweeters and texters who likely don't even know what an "elephant joke" is (until a Wikipedia search, naturally), but can probably recite the words to Rebecca Black's "Friday," a recent YouTube sensation. Today, after all, there seems to be a different dexterity when it comes to transmitting humor - an ability to discover all breeds of comedy online through platforms such as YouTube and then to share it rapidly, making viral everything from "Charlie Bit My Finger" (more than 330 million views)

LOS ANGELES - Suddenly, they're popping up everywhere - those square, futuristic-looking matrixes that appear to be a cross between abstract art and Rorschach tests. You'll find them in the corner of newspaper and magazine ads, in department store aisles, on product displays, price tags and For Sale signs in front of homes. Giant-size versions have shown up on billboards. Called quick response codes, or simply QRs, they're the barcodes for the digital age - but ones that convey far more information, and which can be scanned by consumers with smartphones and tablet computers to open a Web page, play a video or even place a call.

Making "Scream 4" for a tech-drenched generation posed obvious problems for Wes Craven, who likes to start his "Screams" with a doomed blonde answering a telephone. In 2011, what teenage girl has a landline? What self-respecting serial killer sends texts? It raises the uncinematic prospect of a lonely girl in an empty house, receiving text message from a taunting killer. (RU alone? OMG, UR! LOL.) Doesn't have the same . . . ring to it. Craven and writer Kevin Williamson know they're updating the franchise for kids who will watch it two months from now on a mobile device, and so they make a few wedged-in references to digital-age innovations.

Think of estate planning as doing a favor for your family. These sites explain why you need a will, and why that's just the beginning of the paperwork required for entering into the hereafter. Why plan? A mutual fund giant, the Vanguard Group, gives reasons for planning what becomes of your stuff after you die. Among them: to provide for loved ones; to support a favorite charity; to minimize taxes and expenses, and to set expectations for your survivors, so they don't have to argue about money over your dead body.

By Joyce Eisenberg and Ellen Scolnic We're as accustomed to technology as any middle-aged women can be. We friend, text, blog, and Google. But lately AutoCorrect has been getting on our nerves. Even our kids, who grew up in the digital age, are getting sick of being constantly corrected by him and his older brother, SpellCheck. Joyce's daughter, Samantha, discovered that when she was too lazy to capitalize the J, jewish morphed into jewfish . And when we sent a text including the Yiddish word fapitzed (overdressed or all dolled up)