Tech Talk

If you're old enough, you'll remember the laughable ads in comic books for eyeglasses that promised to give you X-ray vision, just like Superman. Now, scientists at Brown University, in Providence, R.I., are developing a technology that could really deliver on that far-fetched vow. According to a recent statement to the media, a multi-disciplinary team from the college is hard at work on creating a system that would, for example, enable doctors to study damaged bones and tissue in motion to plan the most effective surgical approach to a patient's treatment.

The researchers from Brown are calling the new technology CTX, as it combines techniques from computerized tomography (CT) and X-ray fluoroscopy. At present, short of exploratory surgery, biomedical scientists have mainly a single advanced approach to studying hidden anatomical features in action. This involves using a procedure known as cinefluoroscopy, in which a fluoroscope and camera record two-dimensional moving images of the interiors of subjects (and which has been exaggerated itself in sci-fi entertainment such as the movie "Total Recall"). CTX, on the other hand, offers the hope of much more robust imaging in three dimensions, with software capable of rendering precise details from multiple perspectives. The Brown scientists say CTX should deliver images that will be able to track 3D skeletal movements with 0.1 millimeter accuracy, offering the equivalent of 1000 CT images per second.

Today's guest blogger is Anders Frick, a technology journalist from Lund, Sweden, who is working at IEEE Spectrum as part of a program sponsored by Vinnova, a Swedish governmental agency that encourages innovation.

Anders Frick

Toys are for kids, but toy fairs are not. Strangely enough, the American International Toy Fair, the biggest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, bars all kids. To get past the guards, even journalists must prove they are at least 18 years old. And so middle-aged men and women are all you see as you go up and down the aisles, here in New York City's Javits Center, a glass-and-steel compound large enough to park airliners in.

A Vancouver startup, D-Wave Systems, claims to have demonstrated the world's first commercially viable quantum computer. They were quite confident of this, considering that their press release trumpeted a success at least ten minutes before the demonstration was scheduled to begin at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

They've certainly reason to be confident. Even though a quantum computer is commonly considered a research affair that's as much as 20 years away from usefulness, D-Wave not only formed a company to develop a unit but also got venture capitalists to fund it. They picked up US $14 million last May.

Today, the company was supposed to show off a quantum computer sporting 16-qubits, the most of any quantum computer, commercial or otherwise, but still way too few to do anything important. What's a qubit? Qubits, or quantum bits, are what make quantum computers different from their digital ancestors. A digital bit can be either a one or a zero but not both at the same time. A qubit can. And that lets it do many calculations at once. So quantum computers should be capable of solving certain horrendous problems faster than conventional computers. Certain types of searches, the "traveling salesman" problem, and finding the factors of large integers fall into this category.

At it's heart the D-Wave computer, called Orion, is a chip of niobium that's been cooled to near absolute zero. It relies on a dark-horse technology known as adiabatic quantum computing. It and D-Wave have many critics.

The computer solves only one type of problem, which mathematicians call a two-dimensional Isling model in a magnetic field, but through some software trickery, other problems can be recast as this problem. At the demonstration, they planned to show off its flexibility with two programs. First, they were to show how Orion runs a pattern-matching application that searches a database of molecules. The second could be called the wedding planner's dilemma, in that it is designed to figure out the best seating arrangement for a group of people according to certain constraints, such as Uncle Sam can't sit next to Aunt Jean but has to be at the same table as Grandpa Harry.

In the second half of this year, according to D-Wave founder Geordie Rose, the company will give free access to an Orion to let people develop applications for it.

Spectrum solicited some feedback on the Orion's development from Lieven Vandersypen, an associate professor at Delft University. Vandersypen's group is working on an alternate quantum computing scheme, and he was part of the team at Isaac Chuang's lab at MIT that did the first demonstration of a quantum computing plan that, if scaled up, could be used to defeat common encryption algorithms.

Here's what Vandersypen thought:

"First, it's quite remarkable that they have persuaded investors to put serious money in their enterprise at such an early stage. It sounds like they have a clear vision of where quantum computing is going, and how to approach it. Whether it is realistic, time will tell.

"Until now, D-Wave hasn't published any major advances or breakthroughs in the scientific literature. With respect to their announcement, there is little detailed information available to support, and thus judge, the validity of the claims (as would be the case in a scientific publication).

"From what I was able to find on the Web about the hardware, it looks impressive to put 16 of these superconducting devices together and wire them up in a special fridge. Still, the level of control appears to be very minimal at the moment—the problems it can solve seem to be hardwired. Of course, one has to start somewhere.

"The 'software' approach is somewhat unconventional (called adiabatic quantum computing). The current understanding is that in principle it can be mapped one-to-one onto the conventional quantum circuit model. For NP-complete problems [Ed.: a complexity theory reference to "non-deterministic polynomial time" complete equations], this means that a quadratic speed-up is possible, but not more. There is, of course, no magic needed to solve a small-scale NP-complete problem (although quantum magic may have been used in their demo—it is not fully clear to me from what was made public). As they say, the proof of the pudding will be the solution of a large-scale problem in a time faster than conventional computers.

"In any case, I'm intrigued by their announcement and curious to see whether something serious will come out. So I guess the bottom line is 'we'll see'."

For today, "we'll see" will have to suffice as the last word on this topic.

By James Oberg

James Oberg
Guest Blogger

Seven months into its open-ended orbital shakedown cruise, Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable test vehicle Genesis-I is performing smoothly, a company official has advised IEEE Spectrum. As previously reported in this month's issue, the mission was to test variations of spacecraft systems for future vehicles leading to the development of an inhabitable orbital outpost for a wide range of functions, potentially including tourism, in the next decade.

"We have been monitoring all of the onboard systems many times a day," says Jay Ingham, deputy program manager at the Bigelow Aerospace plant, in North Las Vegas, Nev. "We have been very pleased with both the initial operational success, as well as the continued reliability of virtually all of the onboard systems," he continued, in a press statement planned for release on February 14.

Placed in a high-inclination orbit by a commercial Russian rocket, the module's altitude has slipped 6 miles (to 340 miles) under the effects of air drag. "At this point we are predicting that the vehicle will maintain its orbit for well over 10 years," Ingham stated.

"Our avionics and communications to and from the vehicle have operated very well," wrote Ingham. "We communicate with Genesis I several times a day." He added that they planned to do so more frequently as the ground sites in Alaska and Hawaii come online. Ingham acknowledged occasional "minor issues" but stated that they were all "resolved with minor software fixes or adjustments." In particular, he continued, "we have had some problems with a computer that controlled several of the cameras."

One externally caused crisis has occurred, he revealed. "There was a very severe radiation event caused by solar activity on or about the 14th of December," an event that also impacted planned spacewalks for the Space Shuttle mission then docked at the International Space Station. "We did suffer some minor communications problems during and after this period which required us to use our backup systems," he disclosed.

"This problem was remedied with a reset of our primary system," he explained. "This was very encouraging to us that we could survive such an event and recover from it gracefully."

Otherwise, the spacecraft's electrical systems are performing well, Ingham detailed. "We have seen no measurable degradation of the power generating capability of all eight solar arrays," he said. "Our battery has not shown any signs of a loss of capacity, but from our use and recharge cycles we are currently calculating a life span of [more than] seven years." All of the interior electrical systems such as the lights and fans, according to Ingham, "remain in perfect working condition."

Genesis-I is now getting a more active than planned workout because of the delay in the launch of its sister-spacecraft, Genesis-II. Although that vehicle is complete and ready to ship to Russia, the launch provider has delayed flight due to a failure of a similar booster in another commercial attempt last summer. Ingham expects Genesis-I's battery life to be extended beyond seven years once the control center's attention is diverted to newer vehicles.

Particularly crucial is the flight validation of the revolutionary hull design, which uses flexible, expandable materials rather than the traditional "hard shell" of every previous human space vehicle. In theory and in ground testing, the thick multi-layered hull should be much stronger than thin metallic shells—but the design (based on NASA work in the 1990's that was later cancelled) had never been exposed to the actual space environment of vacuum, thermal cycles, solar radiation, and space debris.

Ingham reported that the initial results were very good: "Structurally, Genesis I is in tip-top shape. From pressure data, we can determine that the expandable envelope and pressurized structure remains perfectly intact, and from the numerous exterior photographs we download daily, we cannot detect any degradation of the orbital debris shield or discoloration due to the elevated UV exposure we see in space."

In particular, Genesis-I is holding pressure very well—a sensitive issue since the initial pressurization of the spacecraft did not go smoothly due to a fabrication oversight on the pressurization tank nozzles (not discussed by Ingham, this hiccup has been confirmed by Bigelow Aerospace officials). "Our pressure levels internal to the vehicle have maintained exceptionally well," Ingham announced, "achieving lower leak rates than those that we have tested on the ground."

Ingham described how the interior temperature has varied, but it's well within expected bounds—as cold as 40F, as warm as 90F. Genesis-I has no active thermal control system—no heaters, no coolant loops with external radiators, nothing of that complexity. As a result, "The interior air temperature varies with the quantity of electronics we have operational at any point in time and the amount of sun exposure the vehicle sees." Later vehicles will test active temperature control systems.

The station-wagon-size satellite continues to orbit the Earth, visible at dawn and dusk as a fast-moving, dim, starlike dot (stellar magnitude 3 or 4—binoculars are advisable). Predicted visual passes for any location are available at this site (click on "10 day predictions" for Genesis-I). Follow-on vehicles will be bigger and brighter, thanks to the encouraging results of this groundbreaking (or should I say spacebreaking?) technology demonstration.

James Oberg, today's guest blogger, is a lifelong "space nut" who worked 22 years at NASA Mission Control in Houston. He is the NBC News space analyst and a long-time contributor to IEEE Spectrum. In 1999, he published Space Power Theory for the U.S. Space Command. You can learn more about his work at his Web site.

Technology patents are big business. So much so that some firms these days exist only to leverage their patents. Yesterday, the most famous of these, Virginia-based NTP Inc., filed suit against PDA-maker Palm Inc. for infringing on its wireless patents. To keep you briefed on the realm of high-technology patents, we've inaugurated a new annual ranking of the leaders in intellectual innovation. In this month's feature "Patent Power", Senior Editor Harry Goldstein guides us through the results of IEEE Spectrum's first patent portfolio survey. And you'll be surprised to find out who came out on top.

We hired research firm 1790 Analytics, of Mount Laurel, N.J., whose specialty is analyzing patent citations, to review the portfolios of over 1000 enterprises and weigh their significance. Their data, broken into technology industry sectors, is listed in our Patent Portfolio Survey table. In determining the overall strength of an organization's portfolio, 1790 Analytics' methodology went beyond just counting patents granted in the past year to examine how frequently a company's patents are cited by other patents and what they have in the pipeline. The analysts used their findings to create a bottom-line Pipeline Power score to determine the leaders.

The Pipeline Power determination was based on the following criteria:

• Pipeline Growth: shows the trend in an organization's patent activity by dividing the number of patents obtained in 2005 by the annual average for the years 2000 through 2004.

• Pipeline Impact: shows how frequently patents issued in 2005 cite a company's patents issued from 2000 through 2004.

• Pipeline Generality: measures the variety of technologies that build upon an organization's patents.

• Pipeline Originality: measures the variety of technologies upon which an organization's patents build.

So, without further ado, here are the all-sector Top Ten finishers in our first ranking of patent portfolios:

1. Micron Technology Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1569; Pipeline Power: 3396.

2. IBM Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 2972; Pipeline Power: 3084.

3. Hewlett-Packard Co. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1810; Pipeline Power: 2756.

4. Intel Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1553; Pipeline Power: 2364.

5. Broadcom Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 419; Pipeline Power: 1856.

6. Applied Materials Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 371; Pipeline Power: 1832.

7. Microsoft Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 780; Pipeline Power: 1699.

8. Delphi Technologies Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 413; Pipeline Power: 1603.

9. ASM International NV. 2005 U.S. Patents: 109; Pipeline Power: 1492.

10. Hitachi Ltd. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1941; Pipeline Power: 1369.

We said you'd be surprised to see which enterprise finished first.

By Associate Editor Erico Guizzo

Purdue University announced this week that an internal inquiry has cleared nuclear engineering professor Rusi P. Taleyarkhan of allegations of research misconduct made against him nearly a year ago. Taleyarkhan is the leading proponent of what is known as bubble fusion, or sonofusion, which uses high-frequency sound waves to implode bubbles in a liquid, producing thermonuclear fusion. If the method works and can be scaled up, it could yield sizable amounts of energy.

Officials of the university, in West Lafayette, Ind., started the inquiry last March after other nuclear engineering faculty members expressed concerns about Taleyarkhan's work. The faculty members, who were trying to replicate Taleyarkhan's bubble fusion experiment, complained that he was uncooperative and secretive.

The Purdue committee conducting the inquiry said in a statement "that the evidence does not support the allegations of research misconduct and that no further investigation of the allegations is warranted." However, Purdue released no details of the inquiry and said it wouldn't publish the report.

In a brief telephone interview, Taleyarkhan said he had had "a very difficult time, being under these kinds of allegations, with doubts arising in people's minds about the very integrity of a person." He added: "I'm very happy that this is behind us now."

Bubble fusion has been surrounded by controversy since 2002, when Science accepted a paper by Taleyarkhan and colleagues despite objections from some of the paper's reviewers and from other experts familiar with the experiments described.

A team led by Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, reported that they had used high-frequency sound to blast a Pyrex flask filled with a liquid rich in deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, creating pressure oscillations that imploded tiny bubbles. They also argued that the bubbles' violent collapse had caused some of the deuterium to fuse. Thermonuclear fusion is the process that powers the Sun and hydrogen bombs. (In May 2005, IEEE Spectrum published a description of the team's work for the general reader.)

From the beginning, criticism has centered on whether Taleyarkhan's group ruled out all possible sources of error in the tricky business of detecting neutrons, the telltale sign of fusion. The controversy illustrates how science sometimes functions in a messy, non-black-and-white way. One critical question is, how much evidence is enough?

Taleyarkhan's group has since published peer-reviewed papers in other respected journals, and some scientists believe that their data is compelling. Others argue, though, that the group should have performed certain additional control experiments. Since it hasn't, they maintain that the possibility of false positives persists.

Without a doubt, the greatest mark against bubble fusion has been the failure of any group outside Purdue to replicate the experiment using its own equipment. How hard can this be? Again, there's disagreement. Some insist that the slightest variations in how you custom-make the finicky Pyrex flask or fine-tune the bubble-imploding sound waves could determine whether you get fusion. Others, however, say that the experiment is not all that esoteric, and that if it were possible to replicate it, someone would have done so already.

In the meantime, Taleyarkhan says he has allowed some outside groups and individuals to come to his lab to gather their own data using his bubble-fusion setup. Among those was a team at LeTourneau University, in Longview, Tex., which used a liquid scintillation detector as well as plastic fast-neutron detectors and reported positive results. Another visitor was William M. Bugg, an emeritus physics professor at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville; he conducted his own measurements and controls using plastic neutron detectors. He also saw positive results.

But neither such quasi-independent verifications nor the exoneration by the Purdue committee seem likely to satisfy Taleyarkhan's critics. One of them is Seth Putterman, a physics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He led a major effort funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to reproduce Taleyarkhan's results, but found no evidence of fusion.

"Although I still claim that Taleyarkhan's work is wrong, I have always maintained that the best outcome would be if his claims turned out to be true," Putterman said in an email. "Unfortunately, Purdue's expression of faith in Taleyarkhan's work doesn't help independent scientists to duplicate his claims." He added that Purdue should have interviewed Taleyarkhan's critics outside the university and also appointed external members to the review committee. "How do I respond to a secret investigation by a secret internal panel?"

Ross Tessien, president of Impulse Devices Inc., a company in Grass Valley, Calif., that wants to commercialize sonofusion, said in an email that the Purdue inquiry's outcome was "great news." Tessien hopes Taleyarkhan "can now move forward in productive fashion and that he is able to prove his claims to the satisfaction of the scientific community."

Impulse Devices hasn't been able to reproduce Taleyarkhan's results, despite what it calls "painstaking" attempts. Now, it has returned to its original approach of blasting sound waves into a spherical chamber filled with liquid metals containing hydrogen bubbles. The company believes that this setup is better suited to driving sustained thermonuclear fusion reactions.

As for Taleyarkhan, he says he's resuming his experiments and trying to obtain new sources of funding, which because of the Purdue inquiry "have gone down below zero, just like the weather over here in Indiana these days." Taleyarkhan says he wants to scale up his setup so it can eventually produce more energy than it consumes. "We just have to pick up the pieces and see what we can do now."

The question of what to do with all the waste products from nuclear power plants has plagued government officials, industry executives, and scientists and engineers for decades. In the United States, a long-planned repository in Nevada that would store the nation's spent nuclear fuel has been held up for years in legal and political squabbling. Now, as the U.S. considers resuming the licensing of new nuclear facilities to bolster domestic energy production and reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels, the problem of dealing with the radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation is taking on an even greater sense of urgency. Does anyone have an alternative to simply burying the dangerous waste in the biggest, deepest hole we can dig? It turns out one country has been trying an alternative solution all along: France. In this month's feature "Nuclear Wasteland", Contributing Editor Peter Fairley writes that the French practice of reprocessing depleted nuclear fuel may be more successful than critics have made it out to be.

Fairley notes that the French experience clearly shows that nuclear reprocessing need not be the dangerous mess that other countries, including the U.S., have claimed in the past. France, he notes, now reprocesses well over 1000 metric tons of spent fuel every year without incident at the La Hague chemical complex, in Normandy. La Hague receives all the spent fuel rods from the country's 59 reactors. Operated by the state-controlled nuclear giant Areva, the facility has racked up a good, if not unblemished, environmental record.

Moreover, U.S. authorities now believe they have a way of eliminating reprocessing's other major liability: the risk of spreading a supply of raw materials for bomb making. In recent years, Department of Energy engineers have developed an approach, they claim, that is more resistant to terrorist misuse, thereby mitigating concerns about nuclear security. Hence, the government is already supplying recycled fuels to one commercial reactor and planning tests of new proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies. However, there's a catch (as it seems there always is with nuclear power): To do the job of recycling useful material from the spent fuel rods from nuclear plants most efficiently, we would need to construct special breeder reactors to break down the most long-lived elements in atomic waste.

And there, the politics of nuclear technology, at present, brings us to a halt. The French model is good, but it needs to be extended if it is to transform the problem of disposing a massive amount of high-level toxic waste to the problem of disposing a high-level of massively toxic waste. In the U.S., the Bush administration has begun to argue that, despite the technical and economic hurdles, it is time to give this approach another try. Early last year, President Bush singled out France's nuclear program for a rare bit of praise, telling the American people in a radio chat that reprocessing will "allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste."

As one expert that Fairley spoke with notes, "Everybody is in agreement that the right system ultimately results in multiple recycles in fast [breeder] reactors, so that's where things are going." Let's hope that this is a direction we can all follow safely.

Today, Mahera S. Philobos, Director of the Georgia Institute of Technology's Women in Engineering program, joins us as a guest to write about the ongoing efforts of those in the profession to attract young women to engineering. Philobos is a civil and aeronautical engineer who was awarded the Society of Women Engineers Award for Aerospace Engineering in 1995, among many other honors.

Mahera S. Philobos

The recent Associated Press article on women in engineering brought much needed public attention to the ongoing challenge of increasing female participation in engineering majors and careers. Since the release of this article, our Women in Engineering office at the Georgia Institute of Technology has received many interesting comments and inquiries.

This is good news to me, because it says that concern and interest about this issue is no longer confined to the world of academia and engineering-based industries. It is something that has captured—at least for the moment—the attention of a broader audience. The 22 January entry of Tech Talk (see "Getting Women Into Engineering Still Frustrates") points out many of the far-reaching efforts to encourage promising young women to enter engineering, as well as to those programs available at universities such as Georgia Tech to support female students once they select engineering majors.

The National Science Foundation supported a comprehensive evaluation of Women in Engineering programs in 2002—in the Women's Experiences in College Engineering (WECE) Project—which affirmed resoundingly that programmatic interventions that enhance the educational experience contribute to the vital issue of retaining women in engineering once they enter college.

At Georgia Tech, this certainly is the case. The female students in the College of Engineering are examples of success in this regard. Their GPAs remain consistently higher than their male counterparts, in addition to their outstanding leadership and community service efforts. Nearly 87 percent of the female freshmen in the College of Engineering end up with an engineering degree within 5 years, compared to an average national retention rate of about 60 percent. These women, who are our future leaders, leave Georgia Tech with a special feeling of community with the broad population of "women in engineering" everywhere. They are the professional engineers who return to campus to mentor engineering students; and who reach out to middle and high school girls to encourage them to pursue engineering careers.

Further, I would like to comment on the AP article's reference to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 38 percent female enrollment, in contrast to Georgia Tech's 21 percent. We really need to look at the contribution of our finest academic institutions in absolute numbers when we are talking about answering the nation's need for more female engineers. The 38 percent of women engineering students at MIT represent 664 students. At Georgia Tech, our "modest" 21 percent represents over twice the MIT female enrollment—we have nearly 1550 female undergraduate engineering students. And Georgia Tech has produced more women engineers than any other institution in the United States over the last five years.

We are all working to effect a culture change taking place in a subtle yet constant and pervasive way. It is a movement that is as much social as it is economic—a movement that seeks to change the culture of engineering to one that has gender equity. It seeks to impact the profession in a very special way. Not by morphing women into female versions of the stereotypical male engineer but by contributing their unique perspectives and attributes to the profession.

We at Georgia Tech and at many universities nationwide continue in our relentless efforts to achieve diversity and gender equity in the engineering profession. As our programs continue to enjoy ever-growing participation, so will our positive impact. We are resolute to continue the charge until the field of engineering achieves what the fields of law, medicine, and business are accomplishing: proportional representation of women in these once male-dominated professions.

Our February issue centers around the notion of finding a job in the field of engineering that offers professional and personal satisfaction, along with those intangibles that are hard to describe but easy to recognize when they materialize. To get things rolling, we begin with an overview of the people we've profiled in "Dream Jobs 2007", who range from a forensics engineer who spends his days picking apart crime and accident scenes to a former telecom exec who now designs high-performance electric roadsters.

Next, we ask you to get in on the proceedings. First, take a moment to answer our poll question (on the front page of Spectrum Online): "Have you found your dream job yet?" Then drop us a line to tell us a little about your particular "dream job"—or what you wish it could be—at eedreamjobs@ieee.org. At the end of the month, we'll share some of the best descriptions with your colleagues in the engineering field. Spectrum Online is your community resource, so feel free to be an active participant in it.

We look forward to hearing what you have to say about your career. And so do your fellow engineers.

Our Associate Editor Erico Guizzo—a native of Brazil—blogs today on how pirated copies of Microsoft's new operating system are flourishing in his homeland.

Erico Guizzo

So Windows Vista is out. The launch in New York City included acrobatic dancers rappelling off a five-story building, and some folks even crammed into electronics stores to get their hands on the new operating system. But a long way to the south, in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, many people looking for the new Microsoft OS are not heading out to a store—but to the crowded sidewalks of Santa Ifigênia Street, the city's counterfeit computer paradise.

There, you can get a pirated copy of the Vista Ultimate version for US $7, says a story (in Portuguese) in the Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo. At a legitimate retailer in Brazil, the software costs $460.

With such a huge difference in price, it's easy to see why so many people are enticed by the bootleg offerings. The fact is $460 is a lot of money for many in Brazil: a person making the minimum wage there needs to toil for 11 weeks to accumulate that much. And that means not spending with anything else, like food. Just think that with $460 you could feast at a traditional Brazilian all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant over two dozen times. (That's lots of real nice meat.)

Microsoft executives are well aware of the Brazilian pirates. In fact, the Redmond execs have witnessed it all with their own eyes. This past December, Microsoft's top anti-piracy boss, Keith Beeman, whose official title is director of worldwide license compliance, went for a stroll at Santa Ifigênia Street.

One of the vendors around that day was a 20-year-old with long dreadlocks nicknamed "Mouse." At first, he was suspicious of the trim, pasty gringo clad in a button-down shirt, but then promptly offered the Microsoft executive bootleg copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 for $10 each, according to a nice account (in Portuguese) by the daily O Estado de São Paulo.

To avoid being busted by cops, vendors like Mouse hold carton signs with descriptions of their "products"; if a customer wants one, the vendor runs to a store nearby where the pirated disks are hidden. So the street vendors are just the visible end of a large and organized piracy industry that operates in the shadows.

According to one estimate, every job in the counterfeit industry results in a loss of six to 10 jobs in the formal economy. What to do? Experts say Brazil has enough legislation to fight piracy; what's needed is enforcing the law. But perhaps offering products a bit less pricey would help as well. Vista or meat? Hmm.

[Editor's Note: It's not just Brazil, obviously. Last Thursday, the president of Romania, Traian Basescu, unabashedly told Bill Gates that his country's technological revolution had been based on pirated software from firms such as Microsoft.]