We had the good fortune to go to school with Darlene Lieblich Tipton, who spent three decades as an executive with a couple of television networks and is now spending her time as a film producer. Her website is River City Entertainment; her first film, Heart of the Beholder, is based on the story of a family who stood up to a group of religious zealots over the banning of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

We asked Darlene to take a quick look at a story about a film that will be released as an Internet download shortly after it premieres in theaters. One of the producers of 10 Items or Less, Lori McCreary, says that the strategy of making the film available online will allow more people to see her film.

Darlene's take: "The "10 Items" thing is a total gimmick; however, the future of the film industry is in internet downloads. Blockbuster is nearly defunct; Netflix has a few more years, but why would you bother when the movie of your choice is ALWAYS available for a nominal fee, to be paused, rerun, slo-moed -- in fact, everything that you can do with a DVD player? In some cases you can even burn the film to DVD if you prefer.

"And why is this my take? Our film IS available for download, both for short-term or for DVD burning.

"They predicted the end of the movie theater when television came along. It didn't happen. I don't see it happening now. They also predicted the end of the world with the home video market, which in fact is what has kept Hollywood afloat all these years. This is just the next logical step in the evolution of home video."

Asked what would become of movie theaters -- both the large multiplexes and the smaller ones in rural areas, Darlene expects that many will survive for a number of reasons: "I suspect that, oddly enough, the non-urban theaters will survive -- simply because of the lack of other social amenities. Where can a guy take a girl on a safe date? There aren't a lot of concerts, malls, or other venues [in rural areas] that are available in cities. We've already had a couple of small (i.e, small multiplex) theaters go out of business in our area [the Los Angeles area]. The mega-complexes remain, primarily because they're in malls, theme parks, or other areas where people would congregate anyway, for dining, shopping, and other entertainment. The smaller stand-alones are fading fast.

"In places like rural California, there IS no other entertainment. So IMHO they've got a future, even with downloads."

Take a look at Heart of the Beholder; it's a fine piece of work.

Headline: McClatchy buys Knight-Ridder

California has always been a strong newspaper state, with solid organizations that have always done a good job of covering their local turf -- the hallmark of a paper that is committed to being profitable and good. So it came as a bit of a surprise a few weeks back when the Knight-Ridder company, owners of the San Jose Mercury-News, came under pressure to either raise the price of their stock or sell their newspapers.

What is more of a surprise is that the new owners, the McClatchy chain, will turn around and sell off the Merc to someone else. Not that the Sacramento Bee is a bad paper -- it's actually always been pretty good -- but we can't imagine how unloading the Merc is a good move. It has stronger writers and editors, and it's right in what is arguably the center of California's economic universe.

We also saw, last week, an interesting discussion unfold due to the Associated Press's decision to offer videoclips using Microsoft's MSN video technology. For the news organizations that will be using it, it's an interesting dichotomy, since most of them use Macintosh equipment and software to produce not only their print and television versions, but their online versions as well.

It goes without saying that Microsoft has a vested interest in helping AP; it forces visitors to websites to keep Internet Explorer around, and since it's still the dominant player in the browser market, it also makes sense that AP wouldn't have an objection to using what Microsoft considers to be the technology that would logically dominate in the future. More to the point, the Microsoft system comes with a built-in revenue source, which makes it easier for AP to pass along to its members; its members won't object, because they get their hands wet in the revenue stream as well.

What doesn't make a lot of sense is that AP is telling one out of five viewers (and a lot higher percentage of its clients) that it MUST use a browser made by a company with a long history of paying lip service to web standards. Most people worth their salt in the web design/programming business want their sites to work no matter which browser or which platform is viewing it; news organizations want as many people as possible to see their websites as well.

The $64,000 question is whether one believes (somewhat cynically) that Microsoft's virtual monopoly on both operating systems and browsers can be maintained, or whether open source software and/or web-based applications will eventually become the standard -- and how Microsoft, given its dominant position -- will react.

There were several little items that came across our desk last week that, taken separately, are blips on the radar screen, but taken together, amount to quite a sizeable hill of beans.

The first was Google's acquisition of the company that makes Writely, an online word processing system. Then there were more than a few blog posts about GDrive, Google's plan for online storage. And the Desktop Search, in and of itself, doesn't really bother us that much -- especially if Redmond considers it a threat to its dominance of the world's desktop computers. Of course we use Windows software, but that doesn't mean we like the idea of seeing the Yankees win the World Series every year.

But put all of that into the context of a Department of Justice subpoena, and all of a sudden, the idea of all of one's information being stored where someone else controls access to it doesn't seem like such a good idea. It's all well and good to put legal barriers to the uses and availability of such information; that has never stopped governments (and even companies and private parties) from ignoring those barriers. To be fair, Google isn't fighting the subpoena on privacy grounds, but rather on trade secrets grounds, but still, the matter brings into focus what information is being kept on the web and who has access to it.

We don't trust governments; call it the legacy of a skirmish that started in the latter half of the 18th century. Governments are about control and self-preservation; much of what the US Constitution is about has to do with what government shouldn't be allowed to do. As a species, though, we seem to be genetically encrypted with both the instinct to organize ourselves, and once we've done that, the instinct to see the fruits of our social creations maintained; after all, when was the last time you heard of a government program or office being shut down? (One of our college professors used to insist that somewhere in Washington DC, there is a company that is an official maker-of-Presidential-buggy-whips.)

But we're learning that we can't trust big companies very much either. It's not that we think the people who run Google or Microsoft are evil people; in fact, we'd argue that there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, although the jury is still out on Steve Ballmer. But we do know that the people who ran Enron had no qualms about stealing billions of dollars -- there's something about those zeroes to the left of the decimal point that causes another instinct to kick in.

Of far greater concern, though, is that a big company with a lot of information is a target for someone. Last week, CitiBank blocked transactions in the United Kingdom, Canada and Russia following a breach of security by a third-party company. A story the next day says that the breach is more widespread than had previously been revealed, as it wasn't just the cards that were stolen, but the personal identification numbers as well. That means the thieves didn't even have to go through the exercise of phishing for PINs.

I've been a mom longer than I've been a computer user. Everyone who has read my column over the last few weeks knows I've been concerned about MySpace and some of the stuff that happens to young people who post too much personal information, or who get involved with the wrong kind of people.

Well, there's some good news. A group of boys in Fontana, California, created a MySpace profile to cheer up one of their friends who had recently broken up with his girlfriend. The profile attracted the attention of a man who wanted to meet the "young lady" at a local park; instead, the boys called police, who arrested the man. In a story that made the television news, police charged him with "attempted molestation of a minor" -- which opens a whole new can of worms. Just by showing up, did he really commit a crime? I'm glad I'm not going to be on the jury to have to decide that one.

It's going to get worse for parents before it gets better, though. For one thing, NBC is turning this into what is almost a weekly primetime TV show. I'm not so cynical to suggest that NBC is trying to pick on MySpace, even though the website is owned by one of its rivals: NewsCorp, which owns the Fox TV network. But I will say that I don't know if it's a good idea for Cingular and other wireless companies to be developing mobile communities geared towards young people. It's hard enough to keep track of what they're doing now.

Maybe this will help (make sure your browser allows popups to see this video).