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While expected to pass in the Senate next week, the White House-backed bill could have a harder time in that chamber, where a small minority is better able to block legislation from proceeding. Time is of the essence, as Congress nears a planned July 4th-week recess.

The House of Representatives on Friday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a “compromise” spy law that would shield AT&T and other companies from pending lawsuits accusing them of opening their networks to the government in violation of wiretap laws.

Touted by Republicans as a “compromise,” the bill, passed on a 293-129 vote, would not provide retroactive immunity, per se. It would, however, shift the debate behind closed doors, allowing U.S. district courts to dismiss lawsuits if there was written documentation that the White House asked a company to participate and assured it the surveillance was legal.

The major sticking point in the contentious rewrite of a 1978 electronic-surveillance law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was whether to grant so-called retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies being sued for their participation in the warrantless surveillance program secretly begun by President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.

In any case, 15 years ago, a consultant taught me his version of the rules for effective meetings. I’ve adapted those rules to my own style and used them to help management teams work together effectively ever since. And let me tell you, they really work.

Listening is good. Gratuitous speech is bad. Silence means consent. Don’t chime in just to hear your own voice.

Key decisions that are reached during the meeting regarding strategies, plans or objectives should be published by whoever ran the meeting within one day. That also goes for follow-up or action required and an owner for each item.

Stay on topic, but don’t beat a dead horse. Save other subjects for other meetings. Use a “parking lot” for important issues that may need to be revisited at a later date.

Every meeting is run by someone who is responsible for every aspect of the meeting including agenda, attendance, punctuality, and documentation. That person keeps everyone on topic and moves the meeting along using the methods described below.

Three rules of meeting etiquette

In my experience technology managers and executives are so inept at conducting effective meetings you’d think it’s rocket science or a rare genetic trait. I have no idea why that is.

All I do know is, for companies to operate effectively, executives, managers, and key employees need to know how to run effective meetings. Meetings are how conflicts are resolved and plans are agreed upon. They are how critical strategic and operating processes are developed, managed, and to some extent, executed.

Presenting new ideas or brainstorming is good. Knocking down another’s idea is bad. There’s a time for reaching consensus.

What is it about meetings that brings out the worst in otherwise reasonable and intelligent people? Is it an opportunity to childishly engage and disrupt others? Or perhaps it’s a chance to demonstrate animalistic dominance. Who knows.

Five rules of engagement for effective meetings

Conversely, ineffective meetings result in lost productivity and frustration. They can also be a sign of a dysfunctional workplace, which can result in operating failure.

Be open, honest, and forthcoming. Don’t hold back, bullshit, or sugar-coat issues. This is especially critical in meetings where key decisions are based on the information presented.

So here they are in two parts: The three rules of meeting etiquette and the five rules of engagement for effective meetings.

Every meeting has a start time and an end time. That means it starts on time and ends on time. If someone is chronically late to meetings, the others must bring peer pressure to bear on that individual. If most of a company’s executives exhibit this trait, then find another company. It’s a sign of immaturity and disrespect for others.

Attack the problem or issue, not the person you disagree with. “I don’t agree with you” is okay, but “I think you’re an idiot” isn’t.

Happy meetings.

Don’t just follow these rules yourself; teach them to others. Present them at meetings you conduct. Make work life easier and less frustrating for all your fellow employees and help to make your company more successful. It’ll pay off big-time in the long run.

“When it comes to crime fighting, a picture is worth more than a thousand words,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement. “This is just one more tool to help the public help the police in our powerful partnership.”

The image software cost about $250,000 and took about 18 months to develop, city officials told the Associated Press. In preparation for the upgrade, more than 12,000 new computers were reportedly installed in precincts around the city and police operators received special training on how to handle emergency calls that contained images or video.

“By upgrading 911 and 311 to accept photos and video, we are bringing government accountability–and crime-fighting–to a whole new level,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “If your cell phone is equipped with a camera–and many are these days–you might be able to get a picture of something that will help the police solve a crime.”

While many cities’ emergency systems are equipped to accept text messages, this is believed to be the first system that also is able to process photos and video.

New York City is touting a new weapon in its war on crime: cell phone cameras.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised the technology’s ability to deliver information instantaneously to the city’s 911 operators, who handle 11 million calls annually.

When 911 callers tell police operators that photos or video related to their complaint are available, a detective with the New York Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center will call back to receive the images.

Depending on the case, the images may be shared widely with the public, with police officers on patrol, individual detectives or other law enforcement agencies, according to city officials. The images may also be used to help in assessing and responding to emergencies.

Tipsters in New York City can now send photos and video from computers and Web-enabled cell phones and PDAs to the city’s 911 and non-emergency hot lines to report crimes and quality-of-life issues such as potholes, officials announced Tuesday.

Kelly said all images would be welcomed, including videos like the one posted to YouTube in July that showed a New York police officer body-checking a bicyclist who was taking part in a protest ride.

The updated PDF viewer in Gmail is now powered by Google Docs.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Gone with the transition is the option to open up PDFs as HTML pages straight from the message, which still remains as a viewing option once you’re in the new PDF view and in search results from Google.com. Presumably Google.com results will get the updated viewer next. This would be a huge benefit to Google Search users without access to a PDF viewer (like on public or shared computers) as Google’s current HTML conversion wipes out much of the formatting that can keep fonts and image placement intact, which can make things like brochures and newsletters unreadable.

Gmail’s integrated software-free PDF viewer has received a nice upgrade courtesy of Google Docs. Now opening up a PDF in Gmail won’t fire up your native PDF viewer (like the slow-to-load Adobe Acrobat), and instead will send you to the document reader built into Google Docs.

There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.

SAN FRANCISCO–The blogosphere is likely exploding with feedback to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address Monday, including his introduction of the new iPhone 3G with GPS and a low-end price of $199.

Geek on the Street: Steve Jobs keynote
What WWDC attendees thought of the Apple CEO’s
iPhone announcements.

Download mp3 (2.37MB)

No one was surprised by Jobs’ announcements, but they were plenty excited, especially about the lower iPhone pricing, which they say will help get the device into more consumers’ hands. They were also excited about Apple’s new iteration of its .Mac service, MobileMe–although the name certainly didn’t roll off their tongues.

AUDIO

But we thought we’d go old-school and get some real-life response from real-life developers outside Moscone West, where the conference is taking place this week.

Click the link below to hear interviews with Scott Klauminzer of Seattle, Ralf Mandt-Rauch of Germany, Guy Horrocks and Layton Duncan of New Zealand, Stefan Seiz of Germany, and Claudine Beaumont, who works for The Daily Telegraph in London.

The iTunes Store offers more than 1,500 films, including 200 in high-definition format, Apple said.

Starting this week, iTunes customers will be able to purchase movies just now being released on DVD, including American Gangster and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. New releases are priced at $14.99, while most catalog titles are $9.99.

In January, Apple announced a deal with top film studios for an iTunes Movie Rentals service that brings first-run movies to iTunes a month after their release on DVD. iTunes movie rentals cost $3.99 for new releases and $2.99 for catalog titles.

New movie releases from a number of major and independent studios will be available on iTunes the same day they’re offered on DVD, Apple announced Thursday.

Other titles now on sale at the iTunes Store include Juno, Cloverfield, and There Will Be Blood.

The studios making available the new movie releases and catalog titles are 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Lionsgate, Image Entertainment, and First Look Studios.

A Google representative said the company had no comment on letter. A Yahoo spokeswoman provided this comment: “We believe strongly that this agreement will strengthen Yahoo’s competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher quality Yahoo marketplace for our advertisers, publishers and users.”

The letter, dated September 26, is signed by 11 people, including Reps. Anna Eshoo, Ellen Tauscher, Zoe Lofgren, and George Miller.

“Similar agreements are commonplace in many industries and standard among Internet companies,” the letter says. “In fact, Microsoft had a similar agreement with Yahoo and Google has similar arrangements with tens of thousands of companies.”

Under the deal signed in June, Google will provide Yahoo with ads that will run on Yahoo’s search site.

In a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the lawmakers point out that the agreement is not exclusive and warned that blocking it with a lawsuit as the DOJ is considering could stifle online ad market growth and innovation.

“We believe that robust competition serves the public interest but if the DOJ blocks this agreement we fear that the threat of additional scrutiny may chill future agreements,” the letter says.

A group of Democratic congressional members from California have sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department urging officials not to block the proposed online advertising agreement reached between Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo has stepped up its efforts to defend the deal with a blog post from President Sue Decker following opposition from a newspaper group and news that European anti-competition officials are investigating the deal.

One of the updates is for Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista. The other update covers those systems, as well as Server 2008.

Microsoft issued two critical security bulletin revisions on Wednesday related to vulnerabilities in Microsoft DirectX.

The revisions relate to holes that could allow an attacker to run code remotely on the machine or take control of it if a user opened a malicious media file.

The bulletins were revised to add DirectX 9.0a as affected software, Microsoft said.

Squirrel away tons of files in different formats with SmugVault.

However, the real appeal of putting all your files in SmugVault may be that it uses the same visual file browser found in SmugMug. This means you can sort through your photos and videos in a familiar interface. There’s also a built-in system to keep you from downloading duplicate files (even if they’re different formats) by putting them together by file type.

SmugMug, a photo host geared toward prosumer and professional photographers, launched a new service Monday called SmugVault.

(Credit:
SmugMug)

As the name would suggest it’s all about storage, but not just for the standard slew of files you’ll see supported on sites like Flickr or Google’s Picasa. Instead, SmugVault is all about the files professional or advanced users end up with, like the RAW and TIFF files from high-end digital SLRs, and the PDF and PSD files from post-processing.

(Via FriendFeed)

The only upside I can see is that I’d rather Amazon have my billing information than yet another start-up, even if it is one that’s been profitable since launch.

One thing to note is that potential SmugVault users must have both a SmugMug and Amazon account. SmugMug is only serving as the front end to Amazon’s S3, so all of the billing will be done by Amazon. As Allen over at CenterNetworks notes, this is likely going to end up confusing folks who want to keep their paying Web accounts consolidated.

The service is tapping into Amazon.com’s S3 cloud storage to serve up all that space, and offering users an unlimited amount of it as long as they’re willing to pay. There’s a re-occurring $1 charge per month, alongside 22 cents per gigabyte and charges every time you transfer data in and out. In consumer products like Box.net this fee is usually eaten by the start-up or subsidized through a premium plan. Smugmug’s hope is that the a la carte model will appeal to the folks who don’t fit into segmented plans from other providers.

“Consumers need to know who are the legitimate recyclers that will not simply take their money and ship their old electronic materials for processing in developing countries or dispose of them in a landfill,” said Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network.

WM Recycle America announced Wednesday it is committing to the Basel Action Network e-Stewards Pledge. Along with committing signatories to the statutes of the Basel Convention about exporting e-waste, the pledge also requires organizations to prevent hazardous e-waste from entering municipal incinerators or landfills.

Neither Congress nor the Bush administration is moving quickly to adopt international electronic-waste standards, but some technology companies are.

The United States is the only developed nation that has not ratified the Basel convention. The Government Accountability Office told Congress last week that should be remedied, so that recycling companies stop sending hazardous e-waste to developing countries.

Both Sony and LG Electronics have partnerships with Waste Management Recycle America, the largest residential recycler in the U.S., letting consumers drop off for free their old Sony, LG, Zenith, and GoldStar products at designated recycling centers. Now consumers making use of the service can be assured their e-waste is being handled according to the guidelines in the Basel Convention, an international treaty that sets standards for transboundary hazardous waste disposal.