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There are the $30-a-month data plans on their BlackBerry Tour cellphones. The Roanoke, Va., couple’s teenage sons, Seth and Isaac, each have $50 subscriptions for Xbox Live and send thousands of texts each month on their cellphones, requiring their own data plans.

DirecTV satellite service, high-speed Internet access and Netflix for movie nights add more.

“We try to be aware of it so it doesn’t get out of control,” said Mr. Anderson, who with his wife founded an advertising agency. “But, yeah, I would say we’re pretty wired.”

It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.

And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.

For many people, the subscriptions and services for entertainment and communications, which are more often now one and the same, have become indispensable necessities of life, on par with electricity, water and groceries. And for every new device, there seems to be yet another fee. Buyers of the more advanced Apple iPad, to cite the latest example, can buy unlimited data access for $30 a month from AT&T even if they already have a data plan from the carrier.

“You don’t really lump these expenses into a discretionary category,” said Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. “As the expectation of connectedness increases, it’s what is expected for people to be functional in society.”

Americans are transforming their homes into entertainment hubs, which is driving up the amount of money they spend, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Brennan writes that, “Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill.”

In the oped, titled “‘We need no lectures’: Administration disrupts terrorists’ plots, takes fight to them abroad,” Brennan writes that politics “should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe.”

The administration op-ed is in response to a USA Today editorial entitled “National security team fails to inspire confidence; Officials’ handling of Christmas Day attack looks like amateur hour.”

Brennan provides a detailed defense of the administration’s handling of failed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab whom, he says, was “thoroughly interrogated and provided important information.”

The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China’s National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency.

The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday.

A decision to grant permanent name suppression to a prominent Manawatu man who downloaded more than 300,000 pornographic images, many of young girls, has come under fire by child advocacy group Stop Demand Foundation.

The man’s prolific offending took place between 2007 and 2009 and ended with his arrest following an FBI investigation. The 25 charges of possession and one of distribution attracted respective prison terms of up to five and ten years.

Instead, Judge Grant Fraser imposed a paltry sentence of four months home detention and granted the “prominent” man permanent name suppression on Friday, in the Palmerston North District Court.

Stop Demand’s founder, Denise Ritchie, says “this man’s sexual interest in young girls and his prolific appetite for more and more images contributed directly to market forces of demand and supply, leading to more children being violated and degraded. Yet Judge Fraser’s decision suggests that if you participate in and fuel the global sexual exploitation of children but you are a prominent member of the New Zealand community, the Courts will protect your interests. This is a disappointing and unacceptable message from our Courts.”

“Naming offenders removes the shroud of secrecy under which they lurk, and increases their future accountability. It acts as a deterrent to others. The public, particularly caregivers and children, are entitled to know who these offenders are. The fact that the Court places more weight on the personal circumstances of ‘prominent’ offenders, than on the serious issue of child sexual exploitation and its long-term impact on victims, is disturbing. Four months home detention and anonymity is an insult to his victims, all of whom will live the rest of their lives without anonymity, fully identifiable to sexually aroused predators.”

The order affects thousands of herbal treatments, multi-vitamins and other products, most of them waiting for approval from Health Canada under a backlogged, five-year-old program to regulate natural-health goods.

The National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA) says pharmacists cannot be assured the products are safe until they are granted a government licence, and should not sell them in those circumstances. “Pharmacists are obliged to hold the health and safety of the public or patient as their first and foremost consideration,” said the association’s recently issued position statement.

Representatives of the natural health industry, however, have reacted angrily to the directive issued last month, predicting it will have little impact on patient safety, while triggering an economic “crisis” for their members.

“We are talking about job loss, we are talking about a lot of income loss, we are talking about product stuck in warehouses that cannot be sold,” Jean-Yves Dionne, a spokesman for the Canadian Health Food Association, said in an interview.

A statement issued by the association calls the directive self-serving and contrary to federal government policy.

“It has taken a sledge hammer to a finishing nail,” the group said. “It will create confusion for consumers. It is the wrong thing to do.”

NAPRA is comprised of representatives of the provincial colleges of pharmacy that regulate the profession. It is now up to the individual provinces to implement the statement. The Ontario and Quebec colleges have already done so, with Ontario pressing pharmacists to not buy or order any more of the affected products, and its neighbour pushing for druggists to also remove unlicensed product already on their shelves, Mr. Dionne said.

Pharmacies, as surprised by the directive as anyone, are caught in the middle, said Jeff Poston of the Canadian Pharmacists Association.

“One of the questions that everybody is asking in the pharmacy world is, ‘Why now?’ As far as people can determine, nothing has significantly changed.”

So when is a box-office record really a record? And should “Avatar,” like so many modern-day movies that have benefited from the steep rise in ticket prices, especially in the new 3-D era, carry an asterisk next to their name? After all, if we were writing about the all-time box-office champ in terms of actual ticket admissions, it would still be “Gone With the Wind,” David O. Selznick’s 1939 sweeping historical romance that has riveted moviegoers for generations. If you put together an all-time box-office chart, adjusted for inflation, “Gone With the Wind” remains the undefeated, unrivaled champion, having earned an astounding $1.45 billion in ticket sales over the years. As box-office guru, Hollywood.com’s Paul Dergarabedian, told me yesterday: “You never want to say never, but that’s a record that I don’t think will ever be broken.”

In an adjusted for inflation all-time box-office Top 10 (compiled by Dergarabedian), “Gone With the Wind” is the easy winner, with George Lucas’ 1977 “Star Wars” in the No. 2 slot, with $1.26 billion in grosses, followed by 1965’s “Sound of Music,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 1956’s “The Ten Commandments.”

Using off-the-shelf chemicals, Tarnovsky soaked chips in acid to dissolve their hard outer shells. Then he applied rust remover to help take off layers of mesh wiring, to expose the chips’ cores. From there, he had to find the right communication channels to tap into using a very small needle.

Even once he had done all that, he said he still had to crack the “huge problem” of figuring out how to avoid traps programmed into the chip’s software as an extra layer of defense.

“This chip is mean, man — it’s like a ticking time bomb if you don’t do something right,” Tarnovsky said.

Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and president of product- and security-research firm Grand Idea Studio Inc., saw Tarnovsky’s presentation and said it represented a huge advancement that chip companies should take seriously, because it shows that presumptions about security ought to be reconsidered.

China’s currency reserves grew by more than the gross domestic product of Norway in 2009. Its $2.4 trillion of reserves is a bubble all its own, one growing before our eyes with nary a peep out of those searching for the next big one.

The reserve bubble is actually an Asia-wide phenomenon. And we should stop viewing this monetary arms race as a source of strength. Here are three reasons why it’s fast becoming a bigger liability than policy makers say publicly.

One, it’s a massive and growing pyramid scheme. The issue has reached new levels of absurdity with traders buzzing about crisis-plagued Greece seeking a Chinese bailout. After all, if economies were for sale, China could use the $453 billion of reserves it amassed last year to buy Greece and Vietnam and have enough left over for Mongolia.

Mr Palmer says the $69 billion, 20-year offtake deal was signed last Friday with China Power International.