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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: October 1999 (page 1 of 11)

Today, Salon is running Carol Lloyd’s counterpoint to Paulina Borsook’s obituary for San Francisco that I linked to yesterday. This article is just as interesting as the previous one.

More on the Amazon vs. Amazon lawsuit today. I went to the little Amazon’s Web site to see what they’re up to, and found out that they’re soliciting donations to the “Amazon Bookstore Legal Defense Fund.” That’s kind of an interesting name when you consider that Amazon Bookstore is the plaintiff in the case, not the defendant. It seems apparent to me that the Amazon Bookstore is trying to make money or political hay by suing Amazon.com, even though they really don’t have much of a case (in my opinion as a non-lawyer). Yes, the Amazon Bookstore has been doing business under that name for a long time, but they never bothered to register a trademark with the government. Was it Amazon.com’s duty to search every phone book in America before they chose a name for their company?

The Washington Post has a fascinating article about the new dollar coin and the marketing of currency. My impression as I read through the article was that paying tax dollars to buy commercials for new currency was a ridiculous waste of money. It wasn’t until the end that I learned that the U.S. Mint is actually a profit-making machine. The Mint’s annual revenue is 2.5 billion dollars, and 1.1 billion of that is profit. Go, Sacagawea, go.

Coca-Cola is working on a new vending machine that adjusts its prices based on the current temperature.

Salon has a long article today lamenting the demise of San Francisco, which has been overrun with newcomers flush with .com dollars. No matter what you think about this overall, it’s still sad to see people abandoned by the place they chose to live. It’s the curse of modern times.

Here’s a link to a post from the perl-xml mailing list giving the developer’s eye view of what Microsoft’s BizTalk project is all about.

Salon is running a short story about the embarrassing line of questioning pursued by Amazon.com’s lawyers during the course of their defense in a trademark lawsuit with the feminist Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis. The article points out that Amazon.com has damaged the Amazon Bookstore’s business through name confusion, but fails to point out that Amazon.com has done all the legal groundwork necessary to stake a claim on the trademarks that the feminist Amazons are suing them over. Amazon.com’s tactics in taking depositions are repugnant, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Amazon Bookstore saw the opportunity to go after a deep pocketed corporation and went for it.

News flash: Java isn’t the end all and be all of programming languages. However, it will probably be the next language I learn. I write almost everything in Perl or one of various Web-specific scripting languages, but I’d like to get into languages that are more suited for large-scale application development. I haven’t written much C at all since college.

GeoCities has used some pretty annoying techniques over the years to fund the free home pages that they offer. Finally, they’ve come up with a decent one, the ad square. It doesn’t pop up a new browser window, instead it displays a small square ad in the upper right corner of the browser. You can even close it. Nice work.

Yes, the government tried to spy on rock bands in the Sixties.

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