The Industry Standard Amazon.com Patents Enemy-Making Process
"Question: When did the media stop seeing Amazon.com (AMZN) as an e-commerce hero and start seeing it as a corporate bully for which, in the words of San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor, "arrogance and greed seem limitless"?""

LA Times Lifestyle Choices to Blunt Health Strides, Study Finds
"Medicine will get better and keep people alive longer in the next 10 years, but the behavior of Americans will worsen as they exercise less, put on more weight and fall victim to preventable chronic diseases, according to an authoritative forecast of national health released Wednesday.

"The factors that determine whether an individual is healthy are heavily weighted toward personal habits, the report said: 50% for lifestyle, 20% for environment, 20% for genetics and 10% for access to medical care."

"The report delivered a harsh message: Americans' inability or unwillingness to take care of themselves can overshadow the advances science and technology offer in health care."

Discover Isn't She Lovely?
"She's cute, no question. Symmetrical features, flawless skin, looks to be 22 years old-entering any meat-market bar, a woman lucky enough to have this face would turn enough heads to stir a breeze. But when Victor Johnston points and clicks, the face on his computer screen morphs into what a mesmerized physicist might call a discontinuous state of superheated, crystallized beauty.

"You can see it. It's just so extraordinary," says Johnston, a professor of biopsychology at New Mexico State University who sounds a little in love with his creation."

News.Com Amazon patents affiliate programs technology
""Are they going to patent air next?" said John Segrich, an analyst with CIBC World Markets, who follows Amazon.com."

redux [07.09.99]
Seattle Times Would-be Web giants go a little patent-happy
""It is a mad rush to get as many dumb patents as possible," said Gregg Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent Service, a Web site that conducts patent searches."

noamazon.com
"You may not think Amazon.com's lawsuit is a big deal, but it's about to ruin the Internet for everyone.

Amazon.com managed to bluff their way into a patent on one-click ordering, a technology used by every Internet commerce site. It is a simplistic, obvious technology that no one should've been allowed to patent. If we permit them to continue suing Barnes & Noble and their other competitors, they will achieve a technology monopoly across all Internet commerce sites. Not only is this unscrupulous and immoral, but it will mean higher prices everywhere.

To put this patent in perspective, it is as if someone were allowed to patent the process of taking a credit card order over the phone."

Yahoo! News Priceline.com to Sell Name-Your-Own Price Gasoline
"You'll be able to come to the priceline.com Web site and name your own price for gasoline and get it at your local gas station,'' he said. Customers will be able to click in their price offers and their choices of three local gas stations. Walker said they would save 10 to 20 cents a gallon off the pump price if their bids were accepted."

redux [05.04.99]
PC World My Agent Will Call Your Agent
""This world that we are moving into of agent-mediated commerce is going to fundamentally change interactions between buyers and sellers," says Jeff Kephart, manager of the Agents and Emergent Phenomena Group at [IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center]. "I don't think it's more than a couple of years off.""

Salon Technology Linux in every lap
"It's an enticingly chaotic scene that the Eazel founders have acted out before -- several as seminal members of the original Apple Macintosh development team. This time around, these ace programmers and business folks are set on a new "Let's change the world" course: to build a user-friendly desktop for Linux-based operating systems and to make managing the notoriously tricky Linux a breeze."

redux [02.16.00]
News.Com Apple, AOL veterans making Linux easy

Feed Magazine Blurring The Work/Home Boundaries
"As the internet continues to blur the distinction between being at work and away from work, with personal email accessible at your desk and work email accessible from everywhere else, the workers of the world may find themselves in a Faustian bargain. Their subsidized home computer use may keep the economy growing, but they cannot protest against the demands an "always on" economy places on an "always connected" workforce."

redux [02.04.00]
The New York Times Ford Offers Workers PC's and Internet Service for $5 a Month
[requires 'free' registration]
"The Ford Motor Company said today that each of its 350,000 employees worldwide, from factory workers in India to car designers in Michigan, would be offered a high-speed desktop computer, a color printer and unlimited Internet access for just $5 a month. "

"The Ford offer, which executives said was intended to promote computer literacy, includes color monitors, speakers, technical support and ample capacity for workers and their families to create their own Web sites. "

Wired News AOL Ups German Access Ante
"AOL Europe announced Tuesday that it plans to give all German primary and secondary schools and 900,000 German schoolteachers free access to the Internet."

"It can never be too early to start communicating the necessary skills," [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder said.

Yahoo! News Europe Patent Covering Human Cloning Was 'Mistake'
"The European Patent Office said Monday it made a mistake in recently granting a patent to a process that could include the cloning of humans."

"...the process described in the patent referred to the alteration of cells such as those in human eggs and sperm and to the growing of human organ such as livers and hearts in other animals for transplantation later."

redux [02.04.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Recycled Generation
[requires 'free' registration]
"After stuffing every cow egg with its little spud of human DNA, Sawyer prepares the next step. She gives the cells a zap of 120 volts. The jolt of electricity effectively fuses man and beast into a single biological fate. After one final step, this . . . this thing will believe it has been fertilized and, if all goes well, begin cleaving, or dividing, in the bubbling, momentous arithmetic of life lifting off the pad: 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells, 16 cells, 32 cells --"

Salon.com A "Peanuts" virtual quilt
"Weeks before the death of Charles M. Schulz on Saturday, Internet cartoonists began piecing together an online tribute to the creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang. The ongoing project is a virtual quilt, which knits together panels drawn by professional cartoonists, amateur comic artists and "Peanuts" fans."

"It's a very grass-roots affair," Plume notes, "and its existence has mainly been spread by word of mouth, through newsgroups, message boards and mailing lists."

A Tribute To Charles Schultz Good Grief! The Peanuts Quilt

Alertbox Does the Internet Make Us Lonely?
"In assessing the impact of the Internet, the question is not whether it replaces (fully or partly) some other forms of communication and social contact. Because the Internet adds its own new forms of communication and social contact. For example, people may well attend fewer meetings and events outside the house and yet feel connected to a community of others who "meet" on a much more regular basis online.

The question is whether the new lifestyle is enjoyable and whether it nourishes humans or causes them damage. There is certainly a risk that some people get overly caught up in chat rooms and role playing, but a different kind of study is needed to assess this problem."

Wired News Study: Humans Do Many Things
"An obscure university study, but a study nonetheless, reveals that Americans who have dogs spend the time with their dogs instead of said time watching TV, visiting with friends, sleeping, going to movies, surfing the Internet, and doing nothing.

They walk their dogs, play with them, train them, speak gibberish to them, comparison-shop for dog food, and read up on them to the point that it detracts from actually interacting with other human beings, obscure researchers have concluded."

Mercury Center Genetic research pioneers take on new threat
"The genetic research pioneers who a quarter century ago warned of public health and environmental catastrophes if their science went awry are debating a new threat: rampant commercialization and carelessness. "

Wired News Science + Business: A Bad Mix?
"Despite the conflict-of-issue problems, there are those who insist the status quo is the only practical way to go. If scientists were prevented from straddling the fence between research and profit, they reason, there would be few of them left to do the work. "

ABCNews.com Clinton Takes Web Questions - While Cyber Pranksters Flood the Boards
"President Clinton took part in his first online news interview today, answering questions about issues from mega media mergers to Social Security. His foray into new media provedtoo tempting an opportunity for cyberjokesters to pass up, however.

One even managed to evade the filtering software set up to screen out potentially sticky questions or inappropriate comments during the chat and — using the president’s name — posted the comment, “Personally, I would like to see more porn on the Internet.”"

Salon How much for that doggie in the dot-com ad?
"What's a singing dog worth? Well, $20,100 if an auction held last week on Amazon.com is any measure. Pets.com put its mascot, a sock puppet masquerading as a pooch, on the block to raise money for its charity, Pets.commitment. The allure of the furless critter attracted dozens of bidders, including at least one member of the pet supply site's staff."

The Register Home truths: Bionic man takes the Metal Mickey
"The cover of this month's Wired features "cybernetics pioneer" Kevin Warwick explaining how he is pushing the boundaries of science and humanity by turning himself into a cyborg -- part man, part machine. A small implant into his arm will allow a computer to decide its movements, paving the way for a future where humans and machines are inexorably linked.

An intriguing story, except that it is unproven, untenable and little more than the latest PR puff piece collected in an interesting academic career."

LA Times Clinton Urges Public Access to Genetic Code
"President Clinton said Thursday that researchers and the public--not just a small group of drug and biotech companies--should have ready access to the human genetic code, which is widely considered the key to a whole new generation of drugs and medical treatments.

"We've got to get the basic information out to everybody who might find some particular use for it," the president said in an Oval Office interview with three news organizations. "To me, it's pretty clear what the policy ought to be.""

ZDNet Author of Web attack tool speaks
"While chatting online with ZDNet about this week's spate of Web attacks, "Mixter" -- a self-proclaimed "white-hat hacker" who created the Tribal Flood Network denial-of-service tool some believe is responsible for several of those attacks -- was knocked offline by a flood of data similar to those very same attacks.

"It's quite easy," Mixter said of the data-flood technique used against Yahoo!, eBay, Buy.com, Amazon.com, CNN, E*Trade, MSN.com and ZDNet. And the tool allegedly created by the 20-year-old German-based hacker makes it even easier."

News.Com Move to Windows 2000 may not be smooth for all
"One in four corporations making the move to Microsoft's Windows 2000 will run into problems getting the operating system to work with existing software and systems, according to an industry research firm.

The warning from Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group comes less than a week before Microsoft's official debut of Windows 2000, and could make the operating system much harder to sell to big corporations. "

ZDnet.com Bugfest! Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'
""Our customers do not want us to sell them products with over 63,000 potential known defects. They want these defects corrected," stated one of Microsoft's Windows development leaders, Marc Lucovsky, in the memo. "How many of you would spend $500 on a piece of software with over 63,000 potential known defects?""

Government Computer News Senior Navy officer has harsh words for Microsoft
"The Navy’s No. 2 civilian official yesterday launched a surprise attack on Microsoft Corp., threatening to take the service’s business elsewhere if the company does not improve its products.

"There are shareware products that have better groupware features than those of Microsoft products", he said, drawing applause from the audience"

Washington Post AOL Ends Lobbying for Open Access
"For more than a year, America Online, the nation's most favored on-ramp to the Internet, led a pitched battle in statehouses and city halls around the country, mobilizing lobbyists and proposing rules to force cable television companies to share their links into homes with rivals.

Without such rules, AOL warned, cable operators offering high-speed Internet access could seize control of the gateway to the global computer network. The free nature of the Web was at risk.

Then, last month, AOL essentially became a cable company: It agreed to buy Time Warner, securing a route into 20 million homes via the company's cable links. Now, AOL has pulled back from its "open access" crusade.

Salon.com Mozilla dreams
"The next showdown between the browsers will be a face-off between two different philosophies. Microsoft will try to please the consumer; Netscape will try to become one with the deep structure of the Web. Of course, one should never discount the huge advantage Microsoft still has, antitrust suit notwithstanding, because of its built-in advantages as the defaultb operating system on consumer desktop computers. But at the same time, one shouldn't ignore the potential of the open-source software development model just because Mozilla has been taking its own sweet time. The browser wars aren't over, yet."

Upside Linux's Consolidation Wave
"Like pet owners watching a baby boa constrictor devour its first mouse, open-source proponents witnessing the latest Corel-Inprise, VA Linux-Andover, Red Hat-Cygnus feeding frenzy don't know whether to shed tears of pride or start sleeping with the lights on."

news.com Linux sales surge past competitors
""Linux is moving much more rapidly than we thought," IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said. "We had projected it would be No. 2 in 2002 or 2003. It happened in 1999." But sales of Linux brought in only $32 million for the whole year, less than 1 percent of the $5.7 billion market. Windows NT, by comparison, brought in $1.7 billion.

"Microsoft makes more money before the morning coffee break every day of the year" than all the purveyors of Linux made in the entire year, Kusnetzky said."

Nature Science Update Of Goethe, genomes and how babies are made
"This fusion of experimental biology with the almost poetic 'nature philosophy' of Goethe seems like a bizarre meeting of modern and archaic; like something out of Star Wars, in which the Jedi Knights discuss their ancient codes of ethics while piloting their ships into hyperspace."

LA Times Patent Office Now at Heart of Gene Debate
"With the feat of deciphering the human genetic code only months from completion, medical science appears to be on the verge of a new golden age in which diseases that long defied treatment may suddenly prove curable. But amid the grand hopes lurk doubts about who will get to own and profit from the new genetic discoveries--and whether sweeping private ownership could slow, rather than speed, innovation.

"...the government's chief arbiter of ownership, the Patent and Trademark Office, has quietly proposed two rules changes that are intended to narrow what drug-makers and biotech companies can claim of the genetic code. Patent officials say the new rules, if adopted after a public comment period that ends in late March, could lead to the rejection of 500 to 1,000 cases in a backlog of about 10,000 patent applications for human genetic material."

celera.com [01.10.00] CELERA COMPILES DNA SEQUENCE COVERING 90% OF THE HUMAN GENOME
"Celera Genomics (NYSE: CRA), a PE Corporation business, announced today that the company has DNA sequence in the Celera database that covers 90 percent of the human genome. As a result of the extensive sequence coverage of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes and based on statistical analysis, Celera believes that greater than 97 percent of all human genes are now represented in the Celera database."

The National Academies Intellectual Property Rights in a Knowledge-Based Economy
"The conference will bring together economists, legal scholars, inventors, corporate representatives, legal practitioners, members of the Federal branch, and policymakers to begin to assess the benefits and costs of national policy which, for two decades with few exceptions, has been to extend patent, copyright and trade secret protection. Registration is free."

Hacker News Network The Day the Internet Melted
"A source close to one of the effected companies has told HNN that they have been able to trace the attack back to one end node where they found a list of up to ten thousand possibly compromised systems.”

The Jargon Dictionary hacker vs cracker

abcnews.com Clinton Acts to Bar Genetic Discrimination
"Responding to fears that advances in medical research could be abused by employers and others, President Clinton is barring federal agencies from discriminating against workers on the basis of genetic tests."

The New York Times Scientists Do the Math to Fight Breast Cancer
[requires 'free' registration]
"For women who are facing difficult decisions because they carry a gene that heightens their risk of breast cancer, doctors have developed a bracingly rational, cut-to-the chase method of helping them weigh the pros and cons of various strategies for reducing risk. The new method, based on statistics and mathematical modeling, looks at dfferent options for cancer prevention and gives approximate answers to one crucial question: how much time will each option add to a woman's life?"

news.com How a basic attack crippled Yahoo
"Lesson of the day: If they can shut down Yahoo, they can shut down anybody.

'Our engineers had just not seen anything like this before," said Laurie Priddy, executive vice president of systems and applications for GlobalCenter, Yahoo's Web hosting service, which bore the brunt of the attack. "It would take a concerted effort, a group of people or some sophisticated software to generate that level of traffic.' "

Wired Yahoo Outage Was an Attack?
"An engineer at another company that receives Internet access from the same provider, Global Center, told Wired News the outage was due to misconfigured equipment.

The person, who asked to remain anonymous, said that his firm also lost connectivity through Global Center's Sunnyvale, California, facility during the same time period due to apparent router problems, not hacker attacks."

Salon.com Revenge of the "early adopters"
"What's happening with Divx suggests that the Internet may help the consumer fight back -- by elevating word-of-mouth from the quaint status of over-the-fence gossip into a powerful market force. Early adopters just happen to be the kind of people most likely to set up Web pages and be active in Internet discussion forums -- they get extra leverage from the Net. Just try surfing the Web searching for information on Divx: Aside from the official Divx site, the Net swarms with anti-Divx hatred. It's hard to imagine a more effective disincentive to pulling out your credit card and buying a brand new piece of technology." "

The Cluetrain Manifesto - Thesis #32: Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language. .

The New York Times Critics Press Legal Assault on Tracking of Web Users
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"When a computer user views an ad on a DoubleClick network site for the first time, DoubleClick assigns an identifying number to the user's hard drive in a file known as a cookie. Each subsequent time that computer shows up on another DoubleClick network Web site, the network recognizes the visitor and notes his activities, including what type of content he is viewing.

"A majority of consumers want targeted ads," said Jonathan Shapiro, DoubleClick's senior vice president. While acknowledging that 50,000 people had opted out of DoubleClick's tracking system in the last four years, most do not, he said, because the ads they end up receiving are "much more relevant" to their interests and needs. "

DoubleClick Opt-Out Page

The New York Review of Books The Panic of Influence
"This story is the most brilliant dissection I have seen of what Christopher Lasch once called "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness." And there is probably no writer whose work makes a stronger case, twenty years after Lasch wrote the book on it, that we still inhabit a culture of narcissism. Does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both."

BBC News Iceland sells its genetic history
"It has never been done before and no-one really knows how successful it will be, but it has already divided the country and now the whole world is watching and waiting."

"The Icelandic Government has given a licence to a US-funded corporation to study the medical records, family trees and genetic information of each and everyone of the country's 270,000 citizens."

Icelandic Healthcare Database Overview
"A centralised database is an idea that requires this form of temporary protection in order to flourish, just as the author of a book requires copyright and, for a fixed period, exclusive right to sell the work. Without a special or exclusive licence of some form, it is impossible to establish a privately-run database."

Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

Slashdot Thread: Reason Magazine on Copyright Legislation

Slate Is Natural Selection the Result of Design?
Steven Pinker: "Warm rooms are a goal of thermostats, thermostats a goal of people, people a goal of their genes. Darwin, and then Dawkins, made it scientifically respectable to talk about genes as having goals, because natural selection makes them act as if they do. But natural selection itself, being a product not of a teleological process but of the physics and mathematics of replicating systems, has no right to have a goal in the way that genes or people or thermostats do."

Robert Wright: " A system can be entirely mechanical, complying with the laws of physics and mathematics, yet be teleological, designed to realize a purpose. In fact, that seems to be true of all teleological systems I know of, including genes and people and thermostats."

The Guardian Online Why content isn't king
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

The Cluetrain Manifesto - Thesis #1: Markets are conversations.

The New York Times Magazine The Recycled Generation
[requires 'free' registration]
"After stuffing every cow egg with its little spud of human DNA, Sawyer prepares the next step. She gives the cells a zap of 120 volts. The jolt of electricity effectively fuses man and beast into a single biological fate. After one final step, this . . . this thing will believe it has been fertilized and, if all goes well, begin cleaving, or dividing, in the bubbling, momentous arithmetic of life lifting off the pad: 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells, 16 cells, 32 cells --"

salon The shape of open source to come
"VA Linux, a vendor of computer hardware preinstalled with the Linux-based operating system, announced that it is spending around $1 billion in cash and stock to purchase Andover.net, a collection of Web sites that includes Slashdot, the Net's premier source for news and rumors about open-source software..”

"Malda is a delightfully ornery soul who surely will not take kindly to being told what he can or cannot do. Slashdot readers can count on that. But isn't this a case in which Caesar's wife must be above suspicion? Malda declined to be purchased by VA Linux last year because he wanted to avoid even the perception that Slashdot might not be its own editorial master.

Too bad. That perception exists now, and there's little that Malda can do to change it. The world of free software is all the poorer."

NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

First Monday Interactive Features of Online Papers
"According to McAdams, who helped create the Washington Post's online service, "A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service and things that are good to read, but a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connection, organization, movement within and among sets of information and communication among different people". Journalists today must choose. As gatekeepers they can transfer lots of information, or they can make users a smarter, more active and questioning audience for news events and issues. Making users smarter means involving them in a collaborative experience; i.e. interaction ”

"...being able to judge a looming or translating object had consequences for people throughout our evolution. It was critical, for example, to know whether the animal you were hunting was coming at you or retreating. But, there were no similar instances that made a memory mechanism for rotating objects important...because rotations held no evolutionary significance for us, the brain simply developed to ignore them at highly cognitive levels.”
Humans Remember Objects Poorly -- Inability May Have Evolutionary Roots

"Robo-monkey has 14 motors controlling a fully-articulated body and a computer brain to direct all its movements.

The human instructors have told it some equations for swinging and the distance between the rungs - it must do the rest. ”
Thinking is robot's play

"James Schrager, a professor at the University of Chicago's business school, is among the most blunt at summarizing the e-tailers' outlook. "Amazon's model doesn't work, the same with most e-commerce companies," Schrager said. "Amazon has discovered that the more they sell, the more they lose. All the numbers are going backwards."”
Stellar IPO prices fall despite e-commerce boom

"If ever there was a concept seeking an audience desperate to believe, it is "clicks and mortar." It's an answer to the incumbent's prayer. At last, something for the old-line corporation to bring to the Internet party.”
Hold the Mortar

"If somebody has this predisposition and nothing bad ever happens to them, it may never be expressed,” says study co-author David Bakish, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa and head of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital. “But if they lose their job or whatever, then it may come into play.”

People often come into emergency rooms with suicidal thoughts, he says. “With a test, you could say, ‘You have this mutation, you are at higher risk. Maybe you’d benefit from long-term treatment.’”
Suicide Gene?

"Reports of 691 serious adverse events in gene therapy experiments swamped the NIH as a result of the agency's reminders, which officials hope will shed light on the mysterious September death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger in a University of Pennsylvania trial.

Federal rules demand that such reports be filed "immediately" as problems arise. But 652 of the 691 had never before been seen by the NIH, according to an agency summary requested by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). That means less than 6 percent were filed on time. "
Gene Test Deaths Not Reported Promptly

"While issues of privacy have been far more debated in this day and age then environmental concerns were in Carson's era (for instance, polls consistently show that the public does care very much about privacy, both online and off), Garfinkel's work is the first time a writer has decisively and persuasively marshaled all the information together to show how our right to privacy is under constant attack, often by people who claim to have our best interests at heart. "
Database Nation

"...Are they being derived from the constant spin control that internet speed companies have to put on their insane valuations? Or is it symbolizing the way technology drains away our time from family and the more important things in life?"
swirling memes

"As a friend of ours once said, information architecture is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome. We often don't know what's wrong or how to fix it, so we endure."
An Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville

getting closer. need to let the design sink in.

first-post!