The woman, who goes by the stage name Barbie Cummings, said that at a traffic stop on May 7, trooper James Randy Moss found illegal painkillers in her car, but decided not to bust the Knoxville woman in return for a sexual favor.

Now Moss is on paid administrative leave pending an investigation by the Tennessee Department of Safety.

The incident came to the attention of officials when someone filed an internal complaint against the veteran trooper, according to Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman Mike Browning.

Browning told ABC News that he could add few details beyond a press release issued Friday that announced Moss’ indefinite suspension.

But a blog maintained by the woman, which recounts sordid details of the alleged escapade, has drawn additional attention to the case, and the department is investigating whether Moss may have violated the law while on duty.

Crying Over ‘Happy Pills’
The woman, who in an interview with ABC News would only reveal her actual first name, Justis, posted the entry on May 7, the date of the alleged offense. She said she was pulled over around 1 a.m. on a Tennessee highway for driving 92 mph in a 70 mph zone.

In the blog, Justis writes that after pulling her over, the trooper found her “happy pills” — painkillers — while searching her car. Justis does not specifically name Moss.

The trooper explained that the punishment for the narcotics possession would likely prevent her from leaving the state, at which point Justis said she became upset and started to cry.

“He wanted to know why,” Justis told ABC News.

She said she told him that as a porn star under contract, she must travel from Knoxville to Los Angeles once a month to shoot scenes.

She said the two then moved inside Moss’ cruiser where she said he asked about Web sites on which she might be featured. She gave him the domain name for her blog, and the two of them watched clips from two of her movies on the laptop in his cruiser, she wrote on the blog.

Take the Michelangelo virus, the subject of a media frenzy 15 years ago. March 6, 1992, was the day that the dreaded virus was supposed to strike. Journalists went overboard covering this virus, which had supposedly burrowed itself into hard drives around the world throughout 1991 and was set to start destroying data on March 6, the birthday of the famous artist.

It didn’t happen that way, of course: Damage was minimal. But in honor of Michelangelo’s birthday, we thought we’d track down history’s biggest technology flops.

Here we nominate 21 of our favorite overhyped failures, presented in alphabetical order. At the end of the piece, we’ll ask you to vote on which is the biggest tech flop of them all, or write in a nominee of your own.

Editor’s Note, 4/24/07: See Your Votes Tallied: The Biggest Tech Flop of All Time for voting results and reader comments.

The Top Flops

First we present the biggest flops, in which the hype-to-success ratio was farthest out of whack. The 14 products and technologies listed here weren’t all bad. In fact, some were quite good but were either too far ahead of their time or were victims of overblown expectations. Others, of course, were downright lousy.

Apple Newton

In 1993, Apple hyped its Newton PDA as only Apple can, with clever advertising and relentless word-of-mouth campaigns. While the device’s physical size was gargantuan by today’s standards, it was full of features, such as personal information management and add-on storage slots, that remain essential parts of today’s mobile devices.

So why did Newton flop? One reason was the ridicule heaped on it by talk show comedians and comic strips (most notably “Doonesbury”), which focused on the supposed inaccuracy of the handwriting recognition.

Also, Newton was expensive — about $700 for the first model and as much as $1,000 for later, more advanced models. In addition, Newton was arguably ahead of its time.

Still, before it faded away in 1998, Newton paved the way for PDAs, which led, in turn, to today’s smart phones. In particular, the smaller, cheaper Palm Pilot, which was released in 1995 and became a runaway success.

To clarify, the official name of Apple’s product was the MessagePad; Newton was really the name of the operating system. But Newton captured the public’s imagination, so that’s what the device was popularly called.

Digital audio tape

Take yourself back to the mid-’80s when analog tape cassettes were still a common method of purchasing and transporting music. They were easier to manage than old vinyl LPs but they didn’t sound as good.

So it was logical that digital audio tape (DAT), developed by Sony and Philips, would become a Next Big Thing: It was digital, didn’t use compression and used higher sampling rates than audio CDs. Indeed, a quick office poll found that at least two Computerworld editors put off purchasing CD players because they were waiting for DAT to take off.

Alas, this was another good idea that failed miserably. First, there was the matter of competing formats. Audio CDs, which were introduced around 1983, were starting to be embraced by consumers. Then the recording industry became concerned that DAT would encourage piracy because it could be used to make near-perfect digital copies of recorded music. The industry convinced Congress to pass the Audio Home Recording Act in 1992, which required strong — some might say Draconian — copy protection for DAT. It also required that DAT equipment vendors pay royalties to the recording industry.

That stumbling block cleared the way for audio CDs. DAT survived a while for professional recording applications, but never came close to justifying its early hype.

DIVX

Presaging our current era of Netflix and downloadable movies, DIVX (not to be confused with DiVX, the video codec) flashed brightly in the late ’90s, then flamed out. The idea, hatched by electronics retailer Circuit City, was interesting — you would rent movies on DIVX discs that you could keep and watch for two days. Then you’d toss or recycle the discs, or pay a continuation fee to keep viewing them.

Prices were to be competitive with video store rental fees, with the added benefit of not having to return the disc. All that was required was a DIVX player, which Circuit City would be happy to sell you, and the movie discs, which Circuit City also would be happy to sell you.

Hardware vendors went along for a while but weren’t overly enthusiastic, since the DVD format, for which they also were manufacturing players, was starting to gain traction at the time. And the video-rental industry fought the concept tooth and nail, loudly proclaiming the benefits of the DVD format, which they called “Open DVD,” over DIVX.

Consumers didn’t warm to the scheme either, fearing that DIVX vs. DVD could turn into another costly Betamax vs. VHS debacle. DIVX died a rapid death — it was launched in 1998 and was pretty much sunk by the middle of 1999, leaving some people with worthless equipment — although vendors did offer a $100 refund for those who bought a DIVX player. Still, left behind were lots of bad feelings about yet another bright idea that flopped

Although few have seen or used the gadget, it could draw consumer attention to other pricier, high-end handsets, executives at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit said this week.

“One of the great advantages of iPhone for us is that it will heat up the music [phone] market,” said Denny Strigl, chief operating officer at Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ )

“We’re already seeing an interest in music on cell phones we didn’t see just a quarter ago, and the gearing up the industry is doing in preparation for it,” he said.

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AT&T Inc. (T) will be the only U.S. carrier to sell the device for at least two years. It will compete with phones made by Nokia (NOK), Sony Ericsson, Motorola (MOT), LG Electronics, Samsung and Palm (PALM), and carried by Sprint (S) and Verizon.

While so-called smartphones, which marry music and other media features with data and talk features, have been around for years, their sales remain a fraction of the overall market. Typically, they are larger and cost more than average phones.

“We were one of the first to get into the music business, one-and-a-half years ago, and it has been very difficult to get traction,” Strigl said, adding that Verizon will launch new multimedia phones to take on the iPhone.

At $500 to $600, the iPhone’s price tag has been called spectacularly high, possibly opening the door for handset makers with similar models.

Still, Apple, whose iPod music device and iTunes service dominate the market, expects to sell 10 million of the phones in 2008.

“They [Apple] will bring some things to the table that we have to be responsive to, but we have been investing in this area for some time,” Nokia (NOK) Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson said. “We are leading in multimedia convergence.”

Consumers juggling multiple devices — such as a phone, digital music player and personal information assistant — may warm to combined devices, overlooking their steep price tag.

“People are not uncomfortable plopping down a couple of hundred bucks for a music player or an iPod (and) $100 for a voice phone or a PDA,” said AT&T’s group president for operations support, John Stankey. “If you think about what a customer invests to solve a problem … I might suggest that the price isn’t as substantial as it might look.”

Still, Sling Media Chief Executive Blake Krikorian said the touch-screen iPhone, which has only one button, may not convert users for whom text-based wireless communication is key.

They may stick with keyboard-based devices like Research In Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry, or Palm’s Treo.

“I need a keyboard — I still think e-mail is the ‘killer app’ and [iPhone] ain’t that. For that demographic I don’t see it happening,” said Krikorian.

Regardless of the iPhone’s success, convergent devices are poised to grow in popularity, Sony Ericsson President Miles Flint said.

“The phone is capable of doing many other things,” he said. “People want to have any content, any time, any where on their device and that is leading to the phone being a mobile Internet gateway entry point. the trend is clear.”

Schools and colleges must comply with laws regarding disposal of public assets and must have at least 25 computers for recycling. They must shrink-wrap the products themselves and load them onto their own wooden shipping pallets. The pallets must be available for pickup from a ground floor at an agreed-upon time.

Apple said it will accept monitors and peripherals, unless it suspects contamination by substances that weren’t in the original equipment or aren’t associated with normal household or office environments. The company said it will not pick up hazardous waste, separate batteries, UPS systems, or CRTs that have been removed, cracked, or broken.

Apple said the equipment will be picked up and recycled in the United States, and schools will receive certificates of destruction and recycling. All identifying information will be removed and hard drives will be ground into confetti-sized pieces.

Still, Apple said it won’t take responsibility for the loss of or confidentiality of the data, or for damages resulting from participation. It urged schools and universities to remove diskettes, CDs, and PC cards and to back up or transfer data before deleting it from hard-disk drives and storage devices.

Apple Stores aren’t participating.

More than 50 people have now been killed in two days of street battles, bombings and shelling between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam, a heavily-armed Palestinian splinter group that is believed to have connections with al-Qaeda. The Government appears intent on destroying the group after it launched co-ordinated attacks on army patrols yesterday, killing at least 27 soldiers.

Showing how marginal and dangerous the group is felt to be, the Government today received offers of help from the mainstream Palestinian factions in the country to help wipe out Fatah al-Islam but there fears that its terror campaign presages further attempts to destabilise Lebanon as it attempts to prosecute the killers of Rafik al-Hariri, the former Prime Minister blown up in 2004.

“We are open… to all the demands of the Lebanese state. We hope to cooperate in order to eliminate the Fatah al-Islam phenomenon, on the condition innocent civilians do not pay a high price,” said Abbas Ziki, Lebanon representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Meanwhile, the Hamas representative in Lebanon, Usama Hamdan, stressed that many members of the group, which was formed just six months ago, were not Palestinian and did not share their aims. “The Palestinians are not responsible for what is happening and everyone should help alleviate the suffering of civilians in the camp,” he said.

In some of the most intense internal fighting seen since the country’s civil war, the Lebanese Army has brought M48 tanks, mortars and special forces troops to the perimeter of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp north of Tripoli and started striking buildings inside that are thought to belong to the faction.

Abiding, so far, by its legal agreement not to enter the crowded settlement — one of 12 official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and home to around 40,000 people — the Army was reduced to using snipers and mortars and destroying buildings from the outside, raising the risk of civilian casualties.

Reports from inside the camp said as many as 34 people had been killed and 150 wounded but the number was impossible to verify. Mosques inside the camp could be heard broadcasting appeals for the Government to stop shelling while the Red Cross also demanded a truce.

“We are asking that they stop fighting and establish humanitarian corridors so we can take care of the wounded and the dead,” said a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. An agreement to allow civilians to leave the camp has reportedly been struck but very few people are believed to have accepted the offer.

A spokesman for Fatah al-Islam, which has vowed to strike targets across Lebanon and abroad, told the Associated Press: “It is a life or death battle. Their aim is to wipe out Fatah Islam. We will respond and we know how to respond.”

The siege was mounted after yesterday’s attacks, which saw the Army fighting running street battles with Fatah al-Islam in Tripoli, an ambush at the gates of Nahr al-Bared and a bomb blast in Beirut.

It has focused attention on the lawless state of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps, which are considered hotbeds for unusually violent Islamist militant groups and a means for Syria to destabilise the country.

Fatah al-Islam are precisely the sort of organisation that the Western-backed Government of Fouad Siniora is worried about.

Small, extremist and well-armed, the Sunni group broke off violently from Fatah al-Intifada, a larger pro-Syrian Palestinian movement late last year. It is led by Chaker al-Absi, a Jordanian-born Palestinian thought to be a former comrade of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the brutal former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Illustrating the group’s international reach, among the dead yesterday was Saddam Hajj Dib, a senior militant wanted for his alleged part in a plot to blow up passenger trains in Germany last year. The Lebanese press have reported that fighters from Bangladesh, Yemen and across the Middle East were also among those killed .

The Government describes Fatah al-Islam as a tool of Syria, and its assault yesterday is considered an attempt to unsettle Lebanon as the country is trying to mount a UN tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the assassination of al-Hariri, the former Prime Minister whose death has been blamed on senior Syrian officials.

The Lebanese Cabinet met today to discuss the next stage of its assault against the group. Although it appears to have broad support in this particular fight, the Government of Mr Siniora is locked in a tense political confrontation over its attempt to mount the Hariri tribunal, with many groups, including Hezbollah, saying the prosecution and its expected accusations against Syria and pro-Syrian groups in the country could lead to widespread disorder.

Security vendor Secunia has reported that as per their survey, Mozilla Firefox users are most likely to stay up to date with the latest patches and security updates.

They compared the various browsers used by internet surfers including Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera.

The report was based on more than 350,000 software checks conducted by their free Secunia Software Inspector service over a period of five months.

The company stated in the report that 5.19 percent of all Firefox 2 users had missed security updates. This number was massive for users of Internet Explorer 6. Things were a lot better for the users of Internet Explorer 7 which was just recently launched by the company.

The disappointing news is for Opera users as its installations are least likely to be patched. Secunia found that 11.96 percent of all Opera 9.x browsers were missing updates.

One of the crucial reason behind Firefox’s success is the easy of updating the browser with the latest patches. Users do not have to keep track of the updates as the applications automatically gives them an option to update their installation when a new update is released. The users are also not required to reinstall the application from scratch. The fixes are installed while the browser is running and they are implemented when the user restarts the browser.

Opera in comparison just informs the user periodically if their installations are not up-to-date. Users are required to download the latest version and install them over their previous installation. This is not a very user friendly way and a lot of people decide to skip performing these steps.

Apple had announced Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference in August 2006, touting a number of new and improved features, including the following:

Spaces, a system that will allow users to group applications into different virtual desktops and easily switch among them
Time Machine, an easy-to-use backup application with a radical 3-D interface
A revision of Mac OS X’s Dashboard that will make it easier to create and manage widgets
A new version of iChat AV with support for piping presentations and real-time screenshots to others, along with a number of visual effects that can be added to video chats
A new version of the Spotlight search tool with a technology called Quick Look that gives full-size previews of any document without opening it
These announcements were enough to get eager Mac users drooling, so the delay hit them hard. But while they will have to wait for Leopard, they don’t have to wait to add some Leopard-like features to their Macs. Shareware and commercial tools already make it possible to add many of these features (or something similar) to the current Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger.
Getting the jump on Dashboard

According to Apple’s Leopard Sneak Peek, Dashboard will sport two major new features in Leopard. One is Dashcode, a template-based tool that is supposed to make creating widgets easier. If you want to try it out, you can download the beta version of Dashcode from Apple’s developer site.

(As noted on the Dashcode beta page, the beta is currently designed to generate only Tiger-compatible widgets. Leopard-specific features will likely be included in a public release only after Leopard ships.)

Dashboard’s other new feature in Leopard will be the ability to create widgets from portions of an existing Web page in Safari. If that sounds like something you want to do right away, check out Amnesty Generator from Mesa Dynamics LLC. Amnesty Generator doesn’t allow you to create widgets quite as easily as Safari will in Leopard, but it does enable you to create widgets out of Web content from a number of sites. Google Gadgets, YouTube videos and more can easily be turned into Dashboard widgets without needing to write any code.

Creating a Dashboard widget from existing Web tools using Amnesty Generator.

BitBlasters Software’s Virtual Dashboard and JBear Technologies’ MultiDash don’t add any new features to Dashboard but rather apply the concept of virtual desktops. Both utilities allow you to create multiple sets of widgets in virtual Dashboards and easily switch among them. (Virtual Dashboard also allows you to display widgets on the desktop.)

Both work well and are a huge help if you frequently use a bunch of widgets and want to keep them all activated and available all the time. The shareware Virtual Desktop installs as an application that is managed from the menu bar. MultiDash, on the other hand, is freeware, installs as a Dashboard widget and manages virtual Dashboards from within Dashboard itself.