October 2000
Tuesday, 31 October 2000
Conservationists, pro wrestlers battle over trademark
School Suspends Girl for Casting Spell: “It’s hard for me to believe that in the year 2000 I am walking into court to defend my daughter against charges of witchcraft”
Napster, BMG ink music pact: “An RIAA spokeswoman was not immediately available to comment on the development.”
Monday, 30 October 2000
Four rockets accidentally launched from Siberia: “Officials were still trying to determine where the fourth rocket landed.”
Nader, Gore backers using Web to swap votes: “On Monday, however, Republicans are set to begin airing pro-Nader ads in Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon in hopes that Gore voters will choose Nader and tip the balance to Bush.”
Friday, 27 October 2000
Copyright Office Backs Right To Limit Net Access: “In making its decision, the copyright office took a narrow view of its powers and rejected a recommendation from the federal Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration for a far broader exception. In a letter, the administration urged that the Copyright Office ensure that ‘lawfully acquired’ copies of works could be used in ways that didn’t infringe traditional copyright laws.”
Uncovering the Dark Side of the world wide web: “The porn-viewing public - which forms just 2.5 per cent of the database - cannot keep up: the number of sites is growing exponentially but the number of visitors to them only linearly, says Whitelaw. Child porno- graphy, much of it now originating in eastern Europe, is a big growth industry, he adds.”
Thursday, 26 October 2000
Note reveals Kursk crew’s final hours
Barnes & Noble To Mesh Online, Offline Stores: “The ability to return books to our stores is the No. 1 request from our Internet customers”
Storm hits Nessie ‘fishing’ plan: “If there is a monster and it is netted then it would become a captive animal and would be protected against any cruel activity, but since it has not been proved that the Loch Ness Monster exists it is a fine legal point whether Mr Sundberg would actually be breaking any laws by simply trying to catch her with a net.”
IRS Considers Regulating Internet Speech
Wednesday, 25 October 2000
Earth hails newfound sibling: EB173: “The reddish surface of the sphere, which orbits 39.2 times farther from the sun than Earth does (about 3.6 billion miles away), may have a tarlike covering baked by radiation over billions of years.”
The Editorial They: “In my own case, as some know, I no longer exercise my right to vote.”
Tuesday, 24 October 2000
Monkeys genetically modified in the womb: “Bunnell injected 14 macaque foetuses with a light-emitting marker gene derived from jellyfish.”
New Recruiting Model: Job Candidates Charge for the Interview
Monday, 23 October 2000
Teens Before Their Time: “Yet this acceleration of growing up comes precisely at a time when life should be less about Eminem and more about M&M’s.”
Critics: Kids suffering from computer overkill: “Anyone who thinks computer are going to solve educational problems or accelerate intellectual development, the evidence is just not there”
Clinton signs tougher drunken driving law: “31 states don’t meet new standard”
Wall Street Meets Pornography: “The General Motors Corporation, the world’s largest company, now sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire.”
Heresy in the Hood: Teen Witchcraft in America: um
Study: Government Web Sites Track Users: “In addition, the U.S. Forest Service’s International Programs site was found to be using so-called ‘third-party cookies’ that transmit the visitors’ activities to a private company which had been hired to compile reports for the agency. Such a practice is not mentioned in the Forest Service site’s privacy policy.”
On the Sidelines/H-1B leaves minority workers on sidelines, groups say: “Kramer isn’t sure what made the offers start pouring in, but he has a theory: Shortly before the calls started, the year’s supply of 115,000 H-1B visas was used up.”
Sunday, 22 October 2000
Hit the road, Jack? Not GE’s Welch, post-Honeywell: “This tells two things about Jack Welch. First of all, he feels he’s built an organisation which is more than up to the challenge of integrating another fairly sizable, multi-industry, global, industrial and service conglomerate. Secondly, it says everything about how GE does anything – very quickly.”
Friday, 20 October 2000
Workers flee start-ups for corporate refuge: “A lot of people confuse sitting on a plastic medicine ball and drinking cappuccinos as a company culture”
Is NSI hoarding domain names?: “If successful, the suit, which also seeks unspecified damages, would force NSI to make the names available to be registered through its public pool of names, rather than being sold off to the highest bidder.”
Keep the customer dissatisfied: “Friction, it turns out, is the parent of the profit margin. The more you move toward a perfect market mechanism the fewer opportunities there are for anyone to make money. ”
InternetWeek > Leading Off > Deliver On Time, Or Else: “For retailers that lack the financial backing of a Nordstrom.com or big-time partners like Amazon.com, the secret to fulfillment success might just be a matter of decreasing shoppers’ expectations. Nielsen/NetRatings analyst Kaldor said he expects smaller e-retailers to cut back on their inventory levels and make fewer free shipment offers and other promotions. The rationale? It’s better to offer less and succeed than to offer more and fail.”
Alive…after 250 million years: “The bacterium, known as Bacillus strain 2-9-3, resembles modern-day Bacillus organisms found in the Dead Sea.”
Gates: Poor Need Meds, not PCs: “The percent of growth that an IT firm like Hewlett-Packard will get from people who make less than a dollar a day is minimal. Do people have any concept of what it means to live on less than a dollar a day? There’s no electricity. Do they have PCs that don’t use electricity?”
Why 3D Shopping Makes No Sense: “the failure rate in this year’s tests was HIGHER than it was last year. The e-commerce industry is making the same mistakes again and again. Where’s that straitjacket?”
F.D.A. Ban Sought on Chemical Used for Cold Remedies: “The typical stroke victim in these cases … was an otherwise healthy young person, most often a woman or a first-time user of phenylpropanolamine. Within a few days, with no warning, the patient would suffer a hemorrhagic stroke, leading to either permanent disability or death.”
Thursday, 19 October 2000
Xerox Putting PARC on the Auction Block?: “The computer revolution can almost entirely be placed at the feet of one company. What’s that you say? Microsoft? No, though that’s a good guess.”
Understanding What the Heck Designers Are Talking About
Ignore the undecided: “They’re a little like the O.J. jury – anyone who hadn’t heard about the case probably wasn’t sentient enough to be trusted with such a crucial decision.”
Wednesday, 18 October 2000
High-Tech Festival Takes High-Anxiety Turn
What WebMD Can Teach Us: “All that big talk about Clark or young Arnold taking over the medical industry was just that. Quietly, old Marty was simply executing”
Reality checks dampen wireless optimism
SDMI was cracked, and is doomed: count on it: “We at The Register continue to note with dismay the creeping misuse of ‘off the record.’ If somebody tells you off the record that something is true, then you can be more sure than before that it is true, but you can’t actually mention them. Even if you don’t saying who they are. If they say the information is ‘non-attributable,’ then you can say what they said, but you can’t say who they are.”
Tuesday, 17 October 2000
Fallen Idols: “These days even the VCs will admit they made mistakes. In the end, they were every bit as fallible and human as the rest of us. The ultimate proof? They’re making the same mistakes again.”
Double or quit: “If he’s right, quantum physics is dead.”
Boo.com Prepares for a Rebirth: “Even Ms. Boo, the computerized arbiter of cool, has suffered a humbling dressing down. Now that she has squandered all her money, she has to work for a living, is on a strict budget and meets regularly with a financial adviser”
Monday, 16 October 2000
ISPs ordered to reveal customers’ identities: “It’s not a defeat for all the other John Does in the pipeline”
How Scient helped Verde.com go from launch to bankruptcy in less than 60 days: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong fast”
Dot-Coms: What Have We Learned?: “it is true that the Internet will change everything. It is not true that everything will change.”
M (For Misguided?)-Commerce: “Over and over again, we heard about how easy it would be for the modern housewife to plan a meal if she could just punch in a list of all the ingredients she had around the house and call up a scrumptious recipe. It wasn’t convincing then, either.”
Sunday, 15 October 2000
The Times: “The skin is so effective at repelling outside substances that a normal vaccine cannot be absorbed, but Professor Tang discovered a virus which, linked with the vaccine, safely acts as a ‘carrier’, allowing the vaccine to penetrate the skin.”
Judge Backs Nader’s Parody of Mastercard Ad: “we are talking about the highest form of protected speech”
Saturday, 14 October 2000
Prosecutors Cancel First Appointment to Debrief Wen Ho Lee: “a number of top Clinton administration officials, including Attorney General Janet Reno and the F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh, have insisted that they got what they wanted out of the plea deal: immediate answers to their questions about the missing tapes. The government has yet to ask its first question, however, and it is not clear when it will.”
Friday, 13 October 2000
The Red Herring interview: E-Gore: “the United States is unique in its ability to absorb this creative dynamic because we were the first nation to adapt to distributed intelligence. Because of our trust in the people, our trust in representative democracy, our trust in distributed intelligence if you will, we have an inherent capacity to absorb and draw out the energy from these kinds of revolutions. In the United States we are the only nation bound together not by some common ethnicity or national heritage, but by a unifying vision, a set of goals, a set of values. ‘We believe these truths to be self-evident.’”
Shaken up by the Shakeout?: “You will be able to steal more good ideas - more commonsense, time-tested ideas - from your local magazine rack than you will from a month of online surfing.”
A friend writes to inform me of fun with recruiters.
Ann Pasternak Slater - A Bergen-Belsen Correspondence: “People who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages. … And it is literary theory, of course, which has made us see writers as fallible, blinkered creatures, unaware of what they write. The critic’s job is to expose their blind spots and expound their contradictions.”
Thursday, 12 October 2000
Gazoontite goes from clicks to bricks: “The Web site piled up losses from the beginning, while the S.F. shop turned a profit as soon as its doors opened”
The wireless gamble: “simply reciting such mantras as ‘you can never have too much bandwidth’, or ‘if you build it, they will come’, is no substitute for a credible business plan.”
Brewery chief questions age-21 drinking laws: “‘Bottom line: Instead of pretending that prohibition on college campuses is realistic, we should be investing in helping those young people learn to make healthy and responsible choices.’ No one from the brewery would provide the Post-Dispatch with a copy of the speech or even talk about it.”
Zinc gel may curb common cold: “The patients who received Zicam were free of cold symptoms an average of 2.3 days after starting the regimen, while the placebo recipients weren’t cold-free for nine days.”
SDMI cracked!: “These are serious businessmen who called for this malicious attack testing. When you call for that, one of the things you build into your schedule is the concept that it may all get broken. There are backup plans in place to discover new paradigms.”
Wednesday, 11 October 2000
Weighty Implications: NASA Funds Controversial Gravity Shield: “To say this is highly speculative is probably putting it mildly”
Store Clerk Killer Executed in Va.: “Tuesday, when asked for a final statement before his execution, Ramdass said: ‘Redskins are going to the Super Bowl’”
Tuesday, 10 October 2000
As Homework Load Grows, One District Says ‘Enough’: “The National PTA and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, encourage limits similar to the ones imposed here; on the other hand, in 1998, the rural community of Akron, N.Y., outraged some parents by imposing minimum daily requirements that are about the same as what Piscataway sets as a maximum.”
U.S. Companies Tangled in Web of Drug Dollars: “The dollars are then delivered to the broker, who promises to deliver pesos to the trafficker’s bank account after the dollars are sold to Colombian businesses. The dealer’s insurance is the broker’s knowledge that to do otherwise would almost surely mean death.”
Higher Fuel Prices Do Little to Alter Motorists’ Habits: “Through the first seven months of the year, sales of midgrade and premium gas together have fallen 21 percent, the Energy Department reported. By contrast, sales of regular gasoline - which is typically about 10 percent cheaper - grew by 5 percent, and it now accounts for more than three out of every four gallons sold.”
NEC Proton Polymer Battery Offers Capacitor Properties: “The firms are apparently having considerable difficulty in actually selling it, however, and NEC will face the same problem unless the price is close to that of existing batteries.”
Monday, 9 October 2000
Amazon.com: buying info: Hampsterdance: The Album: Customers who bought titles by Hampton The Hamster also bought titles by these artists:
- Bill Engvall
- James Brown
- Baja Men
- Madonna
- Pokemon
Cisco eludes the taxman: “Despite its $23 billion in sales, $2.7 billion in net income and almost $400 billion market value last year, networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO) paid no federal income taxes for fiscal 2000,”
Boo.com Rises from Dot-Com Graveyard: “Fashionmall itself has had trouble reaching the break-even point.”
Fear of a Pay-Per-Use World: “The librarian should exempt from (the DMCA’s access provisions) ‘works embodied in copies which have been lawfully acquired by users who subsequently seek to make non-infringing uses thereof.’”
AT&T mulls Web charges: “Their primary (long-distance) product is 5 cents away from being free, so they need to find a new growth engine”
Saturday, 7 October 2000
Winners of the Foil the Filters Contest: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of sXXXch, or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances.”
Friday, 6 October 2000
Sega wants to silence advice on hacker sites
Don’t Worry, Be Happy!: “Apple does get flack. This is, I think, because Apple still markets against Intel and Microsoft, or at least we perceive them as doing so. It is also because stupid stock analysts can’t get their slide rules around the idea that maybe Apple isn’t really competing with Microsoft and Intel. Does Porsche target Chevrolet? Nope, not even the Corvette. They couldn’t care less.”
Nice Guys Finish First - Customer Relationship Management: “QVC has also changed the job descriptions of customer service reps to make it clear that they are ‘customer advocates’ who are rewarded for uncovering glitches and suggesting new processes – not just ‘complaint handlers’ who respond to one gripe and move unthinkingly on to the next. It was fairly easy to get the reps to make the shift. Call center managers were another story and had to be encouraged to listen to reps. ‘Unfortunately, some people had to leave,’ Hunter says. ‘They didn’t get it.’”
CPA: Winners and Losers: “Make sure the link on the ad goes directly to the action page and not to a home page. It’s all about making the process simple for the audience.”
How Credit Card Companies Aid and Abet Criminals: “If you want to rip off a small online business, look no further than the credit card companies themselves.”
Hot technology of the future? Paper: “BT’s own chief technologist Peter Cochrane believes the telco’s days are numbered. He sees the future in personal networks – ‘blue boxes’ installed in homes, cars and shops which communicate wirelessly and intelligently with each other. ‘Then it is goodnight Vienna for the network companies,’ he said.”
Thursday, 5 October 2000
David Boies: The Wired Interview: “Here you have a new technology - in terms of peer-to-peer sharing of information - and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. Somebody’s got to maintain those indexes. I mean, it’s just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads. You’ve got to have a place where people can go who want to participate in that kind of activity. And if you, in effect, impose on the directory-service provider liability to investigate, monitor, and control what the users are doing, it is very difficult to see how that kind of technology is ever going to work.”
Court skeptical of Amazon’s claim: “The notion of cutting out steps doesn’t seem to me to be very new”
Jungle that time forgot: “The WCU says speed of extinction since 1800 is 50 times higher than the natural rate. The warning comes 48 hours after top ape experts said chimps, gorillas, orangutans and pygmy chimps face extinction within 10 years unless action is taken.”
Utah Worst In Software Piracy Rate: “BSA determined its state-by-state piracy rates by comparing the number of computers purchased in each state in 1999 with the number of licensed software programs purchased, said David Fay of International Planning & Research Group, which conducted the study for BSA. Comparing actual computer and software sales to industry norms is really the only way to gauge the extent of the problem, Fay said. ‘You can’t really survey people and ask them how much of the software they use is illegal,’ he said.”
Napster Me: “If you’re unknown, Napster holds the promise of making you known. If you’re already well known, Napster may keep you from making all the money you might earn from being known.”
ASP shakeout anticipated: “The good news is that the ASP market is too important to go away; the bad news is much needs to change for ASPs to be successful.”
First official Bluetooth product unveiled
Wednesday, 4 October 2000
Did Gore invent the Internet?: “That’s what you’ll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor ‘a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement.’”
Giant wave could threaten US: “‘If the Cumbre Vieja were to collapse as one single block, it would lead to a giant mega-tsunami with an initial wave height of 650 metres. It would have a wavelength of 30 to 40 kilometres (18 to 25 miles) travelling westwards across the Atlantic at speeds up to 720 km/h (450 mph) towards America.’ But researchers caution that such a catastrophe may not occur for many decades.”
Change the System!: “I think there is a larger point to be made about this limitation: It showcases where the Sgt. Pepper analogy falls apart. New operating systems are, in the last analysis, a potential cultural experience, not a fully realized one. A new album, movie, or novel arrives in the world as a complete product: You can interpret it any way you choose, but its core components are all in place when it shows up on the shelves.”
The Failure of Linux: Credibility and Responsibility: “Linux seems to have bred an entire class of programmers who believe that programming is first and foremost about self-expression and community involvement. While these things are clearly important, they undermine the essential component of good software: design.”
The Core Truth on Apple: “He would make personal computers cool and stylish again - he would turn them into fashion. And he did just that, sparking a renaissance in product design throughout American industry. But he who lives by fashion dies by it as well. In making computers into couture, Jobs also made them more ephemeral than they already were. Cool people, Apple’s market, are already bored with the iMac.”
The write stuff: Hospitals resort to penmanship classes for doctors: “up to 25 percent of medication errors may be related to illegible handwriting”
A House for the Teacher: With employee retention and its future workforce at stake, Intel has partnered with a California school system to help teachers buy homes in Silicon Valley.: “After five years, participants are expected to refinance the homes they’ve purchased and repay the lump sum to the district, which will then recycle the funds for the same purpose. That’s news to Holmberg.”
‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ Oracle’s Ellison asks: “Ellison later upped the ante by saying he’d give $10 million to anyone who can match Microsoft’s published test results running a piece of software, such as an SAP human resources application, on Microsoft’s database software.”
Adweek Online: “Based on industry estimates, the strike is costing union actors more than $10 million a week. Even if the unions finally prevail and win jurisdiction over Internet commercials, it might be years before actors who work on Internet commercials will recoup even a single week’s losses.”
FBI releases first Carnivore data: “more than half of the 750 pages were blacked out and hundreds more were withheld.”
Tuesday, 3 October 2000
The Breast Cancer Society of Canada’s new “Cam Exam” ad is probably the best TV advertisement ever created.
Graphic Designer’s Judgment Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-In: “If he goes deeper into the Volume 3 digital collection, there’s going to be real trouble”
Astronauts vs. fungus: “The history books will never record it, but life in outer space was discovered about 12 years ago by a Russian cosmonaut as he was gazing out a window of the space station Mir.”
Venture capital not for every start-up Entrepreneurs may find price of investment is lost dreams: “Stewart Alsop, general partner with Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates, agrees. ‘You have to look into your soul and decide why you’re doing the business,’ he says. ‘If you’re trying to make history, you need venture capital.’ If not, then, ‘find anybody other than a venture capitalist to finance your business.’”
ASP stands for awful stock pick: “It is really difficult for these companies to make money, and the financial community is starting to understand that every time they add a customer, it costs them money”
Monday, 2 October 2000
The Pol and the Professor Debate How Free the Internet Should Be: “The next man asked: Should fair use be subverted for the benefit of the entertainment industry? Valenti evaded both questions. Despite his easy manner and jokes, Valenti never answered many of the questions Lessig and the audience posed”
Copyrights Rule: “in America’s judiciary, it is obvious that Hollywood gets to control distribution and pornographers get to freely distribute porn. But the notion that these views are obvious is itself just bizarre.”
Napster’s Still Breathing: “Barry indicated he would consider morphing Napster into a subscription-based service. The plan could include some sort of payment to the record companies.”
Latest hot trend tests usability of Web sites: “It struck us as odd that companies spend millions on testing products, but in the Internet world–in the quest to be fast and first–sites were being put up without a thought to the strategic focus of the brand.”
Microsoft to Invest $135 Million in Corel, Maker of WordPerfect
Drug Tests Are Multiple Choice at Tech Firms: “Two economics professors at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1999 looked at a sample of 63 computer equipment and software firms and found that those with drug-testing programs had lower levels of productivity than those that didn’t.”
The Death Factory: “The death penalty, as applied in Texas, is often little more than a legal lynching.”
CNN.com - U.S. Supreme Court upholds Exxon Valdez award: “Lawyers for Exxon Mobil had argued that the award should have been set aside because of misconduct by bailiff Don Warrick, who escorted the jury and served food to its members during five months of deliberations. ”
The times of our lives: “For more than a century it has been known that animals with higher metabolic rates often have shorter lifespans. Although this ‘live fast, die young’ hypothesis seems true in a very general way – short-lived shrews have higher metabolisms than long-lived elephants – it breaks down when examined more closely.”