BofA online and phone service disrupted

Bank of America Corp. scrambled to restore service late Friday to its enormous customer base — 40 million households — which spent most of the day without access to online, mobile and telephone banking services.

As one prominent consultant called the outage "inexcusable," the bank declined to comment on the causes of the shutdown. A spokesman referred reporters to a bank tweet late Friday saying it was "still working on our technical issue."

It remained unclear whether the bank had fallen victim to another of the hacker attacks that have targeted electronic channels at big banks sporadically since September. The shutdown came as Chief Executive Brian Moynihan has been overhauling operations to better cater to customers' needs.

Mark Pepitone, a spokesman for Bank of America's technology operations, said late Friday that "the situation is improving considerably" for the online, mobile and call-in operations.

"Some customers are now able to access those channels," he said. "They're getting through."

The bank's ATMs were functioning normally, he said.

BofA has invested $500 million in mobile and online banking since 2008, a period in which branch transactions have dropped 35%. Moynihan says Internet banking is more convenient for customers as well as cheaper to operate.

Bank of America was closing in on 12 million mobile customers at the end of 2012, Moynihan boasted to a financial services conference in December. "We average about 8,000 to 10,000 users a day," he said. "By the time I get done talking, 300 more people will have signed up."

Given that strategy, not having backup systems in place for electronic banking and call centers "is absolutely inexcusable," said economist and bank consultant G. Michael Moebs in Lake Bluff, Ill.

"Moynihan is too good for this. He's from the trenches," Moebs said. "Somebody's head is going to roll for this one."

The outage follows cyber attacks by a shadowy hacker group in the Middle East in September that disrupted the electronic operations at the nation's largest banks: BofA, Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial Services.

Those were simple denial-of-service attacks, in which a website is deluged by automated requests for service until it breaks down. But at least one other recent case involved hackers breaching bank security systems and making off with customers' funds.

Federal prosecutors last month charged a Russian, a Latvian and a Romanian with creating a computer virus that infected more than 40,000 U.S. computers in an effort to steal customers' bank-account data and other information.

The so-called Gozi virus led to the theft of unspecified millions of dollars, said U.S. Atty. Preet Bharara in Manhattan.

Customers who tried to sign on to BofA online and mobile services on Friday were greeted with a text message advising them to go to ATMs or branches.

"Our site is temporarily unavailable," it said. "We know your banking is important and appreciate your patience."

Calls to BofA's telephone banking service went unanswered as well.

At sitedown.co, an online tracker of outages at business websites, scores of customers were reporting problems. Some took potshots at the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank.

"Epic, all-points BofA outage," said one.

"Enhancing our experience?" asked another.

"I better not get charged a late fee on my mortgage," griped a third.

scott.reckard@latimes.com

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Hackers target Twitter, access about 250,000 user accounts

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Anonymous hackers have targeted Twitter this week and gained access to roughly 250,000 user accounts though only “limited information” such as email addresses was compromised, the microblog said on Friday.

Twitter has already reset passwords for affected users, and will notify them soon, it said in a blog post. The cyberattacks come days after the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal revealed they had been the target of a well-coordinated hacking effort.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” Twitter said. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Gary Hill)

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CNN's Sanjay Gupta adds fiction to his workload

LOS ANGELES (AP) — When doctors get called on the carpet by other doctors, it's productive but not always pretty, as neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta describes it.

Closed-door meetings in which physicians candidly dissect cases that went awry can verge on "dignified versions of street fights," said CNN's globe-trotting correspondent.

He drew on such sessions — commonplace for hospitals, if little publicly known — for his first novel, "Monday Mornings," and is a writer-producer on a new TNT series based on the 2012 book.

The drama, from veteran producer David E. Kelley ("Boston Legal," ''The Practice") and with a heavyweight cast that includes Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina and Bill Irwin, debuts Monday (10 p.m. EST). That's also the day the show's fictional Chelsea General Hospital holds its weekly reviews.

In the real world, such meetings to scrutinize complications and mistakes in patient care can lead to new guidelines, Gupta said.

"They can be simple, like never sedate a patient until they're strapped in on the table," he said, the outcome of an unrestrained patient having taken a tumble. "Some changes are big, some are small, but they are always important. We are always redefining medicine."

In the first episode of "Monday Mornings," brash but dedicated neurosurgeon Dr. Tyler Wilson (Jamie Bamber, "Battlestar Galactica") is grilled for failing to check a patient's medical history. Gupta said he learned his own "searing" lesson, about carefully reviewing lab results, without any harm to the patient.

Do the forums ever become a stage for office politics?

"People do jockey for position in these situations," Gupta replied. "If someone's at the lectern (under scrutiny), anyone can ask questions, not just the chairperson of the department. So the nature and tone of it can change pretty quickly."

The most disturbing inquiries involve an apparently reckless M.D. with "a disregard for the person on the operating table or in the hospital," he said. "You can imagine your own mother or loved in the position of the patient, and those are the most indelible ones of all."

The meetings make for gripping drama on "Monday Mornings." But is a show that focuses on medicine's failures as well as its triumphs potentially a hard sell for audiences?

"ER," TV's once-reigning hospital drama, aired a powerful first-season episode in which decisions by Dr. Mark Greene, the caring, steady lead character played by Anthony Edwards, cost a pregnant woman her life. The story line was a rarity on the show that routinely focused on medical heroics.

The key to making the TNT series work is the "likability" of its physicians, said Bill D'Elia, a producer on "Monday Mornings."

It's crucial to "understand their motivation, understand how good they are, how much they care. So it's not black-and-white" when a character blows it, D'Elia said.

As is the case with non-TV doctors, Gupta said.

A mistake is made and "you think that's a bad doctor. You may even think that's a bad human being, and in some cases you might be right," he said. "But a lot of times you're not, and I think showing the rest of the story, how it may continue to get discussed" is illuminating.

Besides writing for "Monday Mornings," Gupta, 43, makes sure it depicts surgery and the world of medicine accurately.

How Gupta fits the tasks into his already demanding schedule is a medical mystery. As D'Elia said, he never knows if he's talking to the doctor in Atlanta, where Gupta lives with his family and practices, or in another city, sometimes far-flung, as part of his award-winning work for CNN (which, like TNT, is part of Time Warner subsidiary Turner).

"When I talk to him I have this (mental) picture of him in front of a green screen so he can input wherever he is," D'Elia said. "He's as likely to be in Pakistan as New York."

Since joining CNN in 2001, Gupta has covered events including the quake and tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. In 2003, while embedded with a Navy medical unit, he reported from Iraq and Kuwait and acted as a doctor as well as a reporter, performing brain surgeries in a desert operating room.

That same year, he got a spot on People magazine's list of the "sexiest men alive."

He anchors the weekend medical affairs program, "Sanjay Gupta MD," is on the staff and faculty at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and is an associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital.

In 2009, he was approached for the position of surgeon general in the new Obama administration, a post he says he declined because it would have halted his work as a neurosurgeon. He's said he's a supporter of the Affordable Care Act and wants to see it fully implemented to give more Americans coverage.

Gupta learned his work ethic from his parents, who moved from India in the 1960s to work at a Ford plant in Detroit, where he grew up, and is surprised when people ask how he does it all.

"There's a lot of people who work a lot harder than I do and aren't known," he said.

___

Online:

http://www.tntdrama.com

___

Lynn Elber can be reached at lelber(at)ap.org and on Twitter (at)lynnelber.

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The New Old Age: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently under way in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor,” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said: “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

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BofA online and phone service disrupted

Bank of America Corp. scrambled to restore service late Friday to its enormous customer base — 40 million households — which spent most of the day without access to online, mobile and telephone banking services.

As one prominent consultant called the outage "inexcusable," the bank declined to comment on the causes of the shutdown. A spokesman referred reporters to a bank tweet late Friday saying it was "still working on our technical issue."

It remained unclear whether the bank had fallen victim to another of the hacker attacks that have targeted electronic channels at big banks sporadically since September. The shutdown came as Chief Executive Brian Moynihan has been overhauling operations to better cater to customers' needs.

Mark Pepitone, a spokesman for Bank of America's technology operations, said late Friday that "the situation is improving considerably" for the online, mobile and call-in operations.

"Some customers are now able to access those channels," he said. "They're getting through."

The bank's ATMs were functioning normally, he said.

BofA has invested $500 million in mobile and online banking since 2008, a period in which branch transactions have dropped 35%. Moynihan says Internet banking is more convenient for customers as well as cheaper to operate.

Bank of America was closing in on 12 million mobile customers at the end of 2012, Moynihan boasted to a financial services conference in December. "We average about 8,000 to 10,000 users a day," he said. "By the time I get done talking, 300 more people will have signed up."

Given that strategy, not having backup systems in place for electronic banking and call centers "is absolutely inexcusable," said economist and bank consultant G. Michael Moebs in Lake Bluff, Ill.

"Moynihan is too good for this. He's from the trenches," Moebs said. "Somebody's head is going to roll for this one."

The outage follows cyber attacks by a shadowy hacker group in the Middle East in September that disrupted the electronic operations at the nation's largest banks: BofA, Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial Services.

Those were simple denial-of-service attacks, in which a website is deluged by automated requests for service until it breaks down. But at least one other recent case involved hackers breaching bank security systems and making off with customers' funds.

Federal prosecutors last month charged a Russian, a Latvian and a Romanian with creating a computer virus that infected more than 40,000 U.S. computers in an effort to steal customers' bank-account data and other information.

The so-called Gozi virus led to the theft of unspecified millions of dollars, said U.S. Atty. Preet Bharara in Manhattan.

Customers who tried to sign on to BofA online and mobile services on Friday were greeted with a text message advising them to go to ATMs or branches.

"Our site is temporarily unavailable," it said. "We know your banking is important and appreciate your patience."

Calls to BofA's telephone banking service went unanswered as well.

At sitedown.co, an online tracker of outages at business websites, scores of customers were reporting problems. Some took potshots at the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank.

"Epic, all-points BofA outage," said one.

"Enhancing our experience?" asked another.

"I better not get charged a late fee on my mortgage," griped a third.

scott.reckard@latimes.com

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Senate Democrats huddle on gun measures

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden met Thursday with Senate Democrats to brief the caucus about the rationale behind the administration’s recommendations on guns, arguing that, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, the nation “will not understand if we don’t act.”

Biden seemed intent to emphasize that the most politically challenging of the initiatives he has  recommended – an assault weapons ban – was still a priority for the administration, mentioning it first in remarks to reporters afterward.

“My message was to lay out for my colleagues what our game plan was, what we thought needed to be done,” Biden said after the more than hourlong meeting. “I made the case for not only assault weapons but for the entire set of recommendations the president laid out.”

Biden said he also asked to sit down with the key parties on Capitol Hill to plot strategy going forward.

All 23 of President Obama's gun policy proposals

A day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on guns, the vice president said there has been a “sea change” in public opinion since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, calling it the “straw that broke the camel’s back” to get the public behind gun measures for the first time in decades.

“I’m not saying there’s an absolute consensus on all these things,” he said. “But there is a sea change in attitudes of the American people. And I believe that the American people will not understand – and I know everyone in that caucus agrees with me – will not understand if we don’t act.”

Participants in the meeting said the vice president indicated he will continue to travel to make the administration’s case, as will the president. A week ago Biden traveled to Richmond, Va., to focus on the call for universal background checks, which is seen as the most likely of the slate of proposals to pass.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

At that time, Biden did not mention the assault weapons ban in remarks to reporters afterward, though aides said it did come up in the private discussion with officials present.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Biden told the caucus Thursday that the administration is still behind the ban, a priority of her California colleague, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“He said this is something that they support. And that the reports that he’s seen have shown that it did make a difference,” Boxer said.

That remains a challenge though, even in the Democratic-controlled Senate because the Democrats must defend 21 seats in 2014.

“Until I see the bills and the language, the only thing I’m going to say is I’m a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment. We’ve got to find a balanced approach, and I will take each amendment and bill as it comes,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who will be seeking reelection next year in a deeply Republican state.

Biden maintained that while there is no way to eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting, “there are things that we can do … that have virtually zero impact on your 2nd Amendment right to own a weapon for both self-defense and recreation that can save some lives.”

“I’ve always been confident we can reach a consensus on a broad cross-section of issues that can reduce some of this violence, even knowing it will be imperfect,” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

michael.memoli@latimes.com

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Online bingo shows its worth at Rank

LONDON (Reuters) – It may lack the noisy camaraderie of a trip to the bingo hall, but the online version of the numbers game has proved more profitable for Britain‘s Rank Group than the original.

The merits of the online business were further emphasized when Rank said a snowy January had cost it 3 million pounds ($ 4.7 million) in revenue as Britons opted not to venture out to its bingo halls and casinos.

Operating profit from online bingo was 11.4 million pounds, just beating the 11.1 million earned from the venues themselves.

The company, majority owned by Malaysia’s Guoco, reported a 4 percent decline in pretax profit to 31.3 million pounds in the six months to December, with its loss-making Blue Square betting business proving a drag.

Many parts of Britain have seen heavy snow over the last two weeks and there are fears that the bad weather will hit economic activity and push the country back into recession.

Pub groups Enterprise Inns and Mitchell & Butlers both said the recent cold snap had hit sales.

“Allowing for the slow start to the second half we remain confident in our prospects for the remainder of the year and in our longer-term growth strategy,” Rank Chief Executive Ian Burke said.

Rank’s main activities are in Britain where it runs 35 Grosvenor Casinos and more than 100 Mecca bingo clubs.

Profits growth in its online bingo business mirrors that in the gambling industry as a whole where online betting is the fastest growing part of the market, helped by the popularity of smart phones and tablets.

However, Rank has said it is reviewing the future of its own struggling online betting business Blue Square, a relative minnow in a crowded sector.

“We felt the losses were not losses we could continue to sustain,” said Burke.

Blue Square reported an operating loss of 4.8 million pounds in the six months and Rank has now cut its spending on marketing the business.

“There were 11 or 12 competitors advertising and that spending just wasn’t cutting through,” said Burke.

He declined to comment further on the future of the business pending completion of the review.

Rank is awaiting regulatory clearance for a planned 205 million pound deal to buy the casino business of Gala Coral.

A preliminary report by the Competition Commission said Rank could have to sell six casinos to get the deal approved.

($ 1 = 0.6332 British pounds)

(Editing by Louise Ireland and Brenda Goh)

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Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals panel says California's anti-paparazzi statute appears to be constitutional based on a brief filed by prosecutors.

A preliminary statement by three judges in Los Angeles requires a judge who dismissed charges aimed at a paparazzo who authorities say was driving recklessly to review his order. The judge may stick to his ruling, which would trigger a full appeal, or he could schedule further arguments on the case against freelance photographer Paul Raef.

Raef was the first person charged under the new law after a high-speed chase involving Justin Bieber last year.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed two charges in November, ruling the law is too broad and is unconstitutional.

Raef's attorney David S. Kestenbaum says he is asking Rubinson to stand by his ruling and allow a full appeal.

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Are razor blade makers just ensuring a big cut?

We can put men on the moon. We can make computers small enough to carry around in our pockets. But we can't make a razor blade that stays sharp longer than a week?

It sounds trivial. But the utter lack of progress on the razor front raises fundamental questions about America's industrial might.

Has the sun set on the age of innovation in this country? Is it possible that American ingenuity has met its match in a relatively modest personal-hygiene product used by millions of consumers?

Or are the likes of Gillette and Schick, which account for about 90% of the replacement-blade market, conspiring to keep razor advances off the shelf to deliberately fleece customers and maintain multibillion-dollar revenue streams?

Either way you look at it, it's not a terribly flattering portrayal of U.S. business.

The global market for all shaving products is forecast to top $33 billion by 2015, according to Global Industry Analysts, a market researcher.

Procter & Gamble's Gillette, the market leader, estimates that about two-thirds of American guys age 15 and older shave with a razor, representing a U.S. market for razors and blades worth more than $2.4 billion a year. Worldwide, that market is more than $14 billion.

Schick says most men shave at least three times a week. Razor-Gator.com, a shaving-related website, figures that a man devotes roughly 3,300 hours of his life to shaving.

With those numbers in mind, you'd think teams of engineers would be busy improving the ways and means of a good shave. For example, water causes corrosion on blades, which contributes to making them dull. Isn't there an alloy, or a coating, to address that?

Moore's Law famously predicted that computer chips will double in processing power every couple of years or so. The result has been breakneck advances in the technology field. The first iPhone was introduced just six years ago, for instance, and we're already up to the iPhone 5.

Oh sure, Gillette and Schick keep adding more features. Gillette says its battery-operated Fusion ProGlide razor "delivers soothing micropulses." Schick says its Hydro Power Select boasts "three vibration settings, easy-to-read indicators and a one-touch control button, allowing men to interact with their razor in a new way."

Micropulses, vibration settings — this they can do. But they can't come up with a blade that stays sharp more than a few days?

"Sure they can," said Jeff Grant, president of Coating Services Group, a Lakeside company that makes scalpels for medical use and thus knows a thing or two about sharp edges. "They could make a ceramic blade that maybe costs $100 and lasts for years."

Well, that sounds good. An eight-pack of Gillette Mach3 Turbo shaving cartridges — one of the more popular razors — runs $24 at Walgreens. If you figure on changing the cartridge once a week, that would mean spending $156 each year on razor blades.

So, yeah, I'd spend $100 for a blade that lasts for two, three or more years.

And that, Grant told me, is exactly why we'll never be offered such a chance by Gillette or Schick.

"They'd sell you one blade and they'd be done," he said. "It's a business decision."

Susan Baba, a Gillette spokeswoman, told me she hadn't heard about any research into ceramic razor blades. But she said the company is dedicated to "figuring out the next stage of razors."

As for the longevity of current blades, Baba said you can't generalize. Some people make a blade last a few days, others can go months without changing cartridges.

"It all depends on the length of your hair, how often you shave, how many strokes you use," Baba said.

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