wednesday, october 29, 2002
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the university daily kansan
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Machines rejecting new $20 bills
The Associated Press
WICHITA - As colorful new $20 bills circulate around the nation, more consumers are finding out that the notes do not work on automated payment machines like those found in self-service checkout counters at grocery stores.
The first calls started coming into the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing two days ago, frustrating government officials who had worked to overcome the vending machine problems that followed the 1998 redesign of the bill.
This time the problem seems to plague mostly automated payment machines — a relatively recent arrival in the industry, the bureau said.
"We learned from our lack of
outreach last time, and we really made an effort to reach out to thousands of business industries and associations so they can start working with their customers and members," said Dawn Haley, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
When the colorful $20 bill was officially introduced into circulation Oct. 9, the first purchase made with it was stamps from a vending machine at a Washington, D.C., post office.
"The postal service wasn't ready last time too, so we worked really hard with them," Haley said. "We definitely wanted to showcase the fact the U.S. Postal Service was ready."
After the problems following the 1998 redesign, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing wanted to
make sure its latest version was technology-friendly.
So more than a year before the new bills were put into circulation, the bureau reached out to the vending machine industry, transit authorities and the gambling industry to help them get ready for the new bills, Haley said.
Vending machine manufacturers received test decks of currency to try out on their software and hardware.
"The self-service group is really new," Haley said.
But nobody thought about the automated payment machines until the first calls started coming in to the bureau after the new currency was put into circulation.
A sign on the automated checkouts at Dillons grocery stores now advises customers to
trade their new $20 bills for older bills before using the machines.A similar sign is posted at payment machines at the 600 Sprint stores nationwide.
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The new $20 bill is the same size as the previous one and still features the image of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, on the front and the White House on the back. Along with the traditional green and black colors, the new notes also include faint touches of peach and blue.
Besides color, the new notes include new features aimed at making the bills harder to fake. Some old anticounterfeiting features, such as watermarks, that were included in the bill's last redesign were kept.
The bureau expects to print 2.7 billion of the new twenties the first year.
Strategies different for Dean, Gephardt
The Associated Press
ELKADER, Iowa — One presidential hopeful relies on the Internet to attract crowds and get followers to practices for the Iowa caucuses. The other prefers the traditional approach, letting rank-and-file labor spread the word from one union hall to the next.
Atop the field in Iowa, Democratic rivals Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt are engaged in more than just a fierce fight for a high-stakes win. Their two campaigns represent a classic contest between new and old, a Web-generation's way of getting out the vote versus a union-tested method that has worked for political veterans since the emergence of the caucuses in the 1970s.
Dean has used the Internet from the start, signing up backers across the country. His campaign brings supporters together once a month for discussions on Dean's effort, for community projects or, more recently, for trial runs for the caucus.
At a recent event at the University of Iowa, Dean drew more than 800 people. More noteworthy was a campaign stop in tiny Elkader in northeast Iowa, where 150 showed up at a local restaurant.
Supplementing the effort to enlist new supporters, the Dean campaign reaches out to Democratic activists through nightly phone banks, or the former Vermont governor makes a few calls.
Challenging Dean is Gephardt, the 27-year House veteran who won Iowa in his unsuccessful White House bid in 1988.
As he did then, the Missouri lawmaker has assembled a traditional voter turnout operation rooted in organized labor. "I think in the end you can't overcome real support with some new technology," Gephardt said. "There's no technological silver bullet to get that done."
Microsoft gives vouchers
The Associated Press
SEATTLE—Microsoft Corp. has agreed to give $200 million worth of computer-gear vouchers to customers to settle class-action antitrust lawsuits in five states and the District of Columbia.
The settlements announced yesterday concern Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee and Washington, D.C.
With similar cases settled earlier in California, Florida, Montana and West Virginia, Microsoft has now agreed to pay a total of $1.55 billion to customers in nine states and Washington, D.C.
Customer class-action suits are still pending in Arizona, Iowa Minnesota, New Mexico and Wisconsin, the company said.
The cases claimed Microsoft violated state antitrust laws and laws against unfair competition. They were filed in the wake of a
1999 federal court ruling that Microsoft abused its power to maintain its monopoly on the Windows operating system.
Under the customer settlements, Microsoft will provide vouchers from various vendors. Half of the unused vouchers will be given to schools to help needy children.
The company said agreements in Kansas and Washington, D.C., have already been approved by the courts. Settlements in four other states _ North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee _ await approval.
The Kansas case was settled for $32 million, Smith said. The state's commissioner of education, Andy Tompkins, said he was pleased the agreement will help some Kansas schools meet technology needs.
Microsoft said it had already set aside adequate reserves for the settlements.
Microsoft hasn't yet cleared the thicket of other suits filed by competitors and the federal and state governments.
still pending are antitrust suits filed by San Jose, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems and Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Burst.com. Those cases are in the early stages, Smith said.
Microsoft previously agreed to pay $750 million to Time Warner Inc., which had seen an erosion in the market share of its Netscape browser as Microsoft's Internet Explorer grew.
The state of Massachusetts continues to appeal the landmark antitrust settlement approved by a federal court last year, with a hearing scheduled next week before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Justice Department, Massachusetts and 18 other states had sued over Microsoft's use of the Windows operating system to muscle out rivals.
Astronauts return, make history
The Associated Press
ASTANA, Kazakhstan—A Russian space capsule delivered an American, a Russian and Spaniard home yesterday from the International Space Station, depositing them safely in Kazakhstan and earning a place in the history books as the first Russian spacecraft to both launch and land an American astronaut.
Its passengers, American Ed Lu, Russian Yuri Malenchenko and Spaniard Pedro Duque, emerged smiling after their 31 1/2-hour descent to Earth.
Lu had planned to ride to the space station onboard the U.S. shuttle Atlantis until the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in February put the American manned spaceflight program on hold.
Lu and Malenchenko blasted off in the same Soyuz capsule last April for a nearly six-month stay in space, while Duque arrived eight days ago along with a U.S.-Russian crew. The capsule he rode up will stay with the station until that crew returns.
In May, the first time that American astronauts returned on the Soyuz, a computer malfunction sent the crew on a dive so steep that the astronauts' tongues rolled back in their mouths. The crew landed so far off-target that more than two gut-wrenching hours passed before rescuers knew the men were safe.
This time, everything went mostly as planned.
The operation was marred only by the inadvertent pushing of a button by one of the space capsule occupants during the undocking, which caused the space station to rotate 25 degrees, and it required a large expenditure of fuel to correct the alignment, Russian media reported. Vladimir Solovoyv, the chief of Mission Control outside Moscow, said in televised remarks that there was "some deviation but we quickly fixed it."
However, hours after touchdown, thick, low-lying clouds enveloped the Kazakh capital Astana, forcing helicopters carrying the crew, officials and journalists to briefly turn back to the landing site near Arkalky.
The astronauts were met in Astana by Kazakh girls adorned in gold-trimmed national costumes and holding bouquets of red roses. Duque walked easily up
the stairs to the Astana airport's VIP lounge, but Malenchenko and Lu — both feeling the effects of gravity after almost half-a-year of weightlessness — leaned on aides for support.
Russian engineers had said there was only a slim chance that this crew would suffer from the same computer malfunction that affected the previous flight, but officials took no chances and altered the usual search operation to cover more ground.
NASA, still getting used to its astronauts landing on foreign ground, also requested a medically equipped U.S. Air Force C-17 to stand by in Astana.
Additionally, this Soyuz was equipped with satellite phones and a global positioning satellite system—courtesy of NASA—so if the crew had landed off-course and communications systems were damaged as happened in May, they would still have been able to phone in their location.
The crew arrived yesterday in Moscow, where Malenchenko's new bride, Lu's fiance and Duque's family awaited them. Malenchenko became the first person to marry in space, holding a wedding by proxy.
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