As part of the grand hoopla-fest building up to the release of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan this month, the agency hosted a Digital Inclusion Summit at Washington, DC’s Newseum on Tuesday. Co-sponsored with the Knight Foundation, during the course of the event the FCC disclosed more components of The Plan. These include recommending the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps “to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption,” and tapping into the agency’s Universal Service Fund to subsidize broadband for low income people.

But what really got our attention was this: the NBP will ask the government to “consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.”

That’s odd, we thought, since the FCC and Congress have been considering such an idea for years.

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Government and industry bureaucrats addicted to spewing out mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, be very afraid; Edward Tufte is coming to Washington, DC. The Obama administration has appointed Tufte to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will suggest ways that the $787 billion stimulus program’s watchdog accountability board can do its job.

“I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service,” Tufte explained on his website on Sunday. “And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do.”

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Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch claims that the company’s ubiquitous Flash plug-in doesn’t ship with any known crash bugs. One can only assume that he has never used the software. As Adobe representatives exhibit an increasingly dismissive attitude about Flash’s technical deficiencies, the browser vendors have stepped up to address the problems and are finding ways to insulate their users from Flash’s poor security and lack of stability.

Several mainstream browsers isolate Flash and other plug-ins in separate processes in order to prevent an unstable plug-in from crashing the entire browser. Mozilla is preparing to introduce a similar feature in the next version of Firefox. A developer preview that was recently made available to users offers an early look at the new plugin crash protection.

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By now most Ars readers have been saturated with statistical data about broadband adoption in the United States: who has access, who doesn’t, where, why, and how we compare with the rest of the world. One of the conundrums with which all these surveys grapple is that allegedly stubborn portion of the population—mostly poor, rural, and older—who don’t use the Internet at all, because they supposedly don’t care to do so.

But a new study suggests that this community of broadband outsiders is rapidly disappearing from the landscape, particularly among low income Americans.

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“Buying your groceries online? What is this, 1996?” That’s what someone said to me recently when they found out I do the majority of my grocery shopping through the Internet—yes, produce and all. Sure, online grocery shopping was one of those things that people envisioned to be common in “The Future™” but many of the original efforts fizzled out during the first bursting of the dot-com bubble. Shopping for groceries and household items via the Internet is making a huge comeback, however, thanks in part to some major players who have taken it outside of the typical niche markets.

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Activision Blizzard has become an immensely successful company with three large franchises under its belt. So what’s the only thing to do? Begin burning one down! The drama between Activision and Infinity Ward has lead to lawsuits, stories in the press, and rampant speculation about what’s really going on. What’s clear is that the people who were the driving force behind the series have left the company, and Activision is looking to release as many Call of Duty games in as short of time as possible.

What else happened this week? We play God of War 3, we review Bad Company 2, we give some thoughts on the DSi XL, and we look at the glitch that caused older models of the PlayStation 3 to fail. What a week!

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Apple’s lawsuit against HTC may have been the talk of the Internet for most of the week, but Valve’s teasers for Steam coming to the Mac took the prize for most exciting news. MacHeist also released a new software bundle and the rumor mill gossipped about HDMI on the next Mac mini. Need to catch up?

Valve creates fake Apple ads, teases Steam on OS X: Valve has begun sending images to gaming sites showing its properties tarted up in Mac colors and images. Is Steam coming to OS X? We should know very soon.

Apple vs HTC: proxy fight over Android could last years: Apple’s lawsuits against HTC could be the start of a multi-year legal battle, or the start of a proxy fight against Google’s Android. Either way, it may become the poster child for the ills of the US patent system.

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Those of you who are regular readers of Ars’ science content are probably aware of our use of Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, which act as online reference information, taking readers directly to the papers being discussed. Readers almost never comment about that feature, except when it fails, in which case we invariably hear about it—and it fails at least once a month. We’ve tried explaining both our reasons for using them and the reasons they break in the forums, and have recently linked to Ed Yong’s excellent discussion of the system and its problems. Within a week, we were dealing with complaints due to a broken DOI. So, this is an attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the DOI system, why we use it, and why it doesn’t always work smoothly.

Referencing, effort, and reward

For most of our readership, reading an Ars science article is the beginning and end of their exposure to a topic. But we also have a notable population of scientists who read, and they may find themselves interested in reading the academic paper that led to our coverage. There are any number of good reasons for doing that: the paper may be relevant to their work, they may want details we did not provide in our coverage, they suspect we might have gotten something wrong and want to correct us, etc. As a result, some form of reference to the paper is a definite good—it’s a benefit for some of our readership, and may help correct errors that are read by the rest of our audience.

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Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!)

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Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

At the AAAS meeting, there’s evidence that physicists are thinking seriously about the arrow of time, but biologists may be well ahead of them when it comes to understanding it.

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