Posts

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? ...

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. ...

CNNfn has a special report on the impending changes to the venerable Dow Jones Industrial Average. Out go Sears, Goodyear, Union Carbide, and Chevron. Taking their place are Intel, Microsoft, Home Depot, and SBC Communications. Intel and Microsoft are the first NASDAQ stocks to join the Dow party. Some are portraying this move as an attempt to keep up with the more tech-centric S&P; 500. I created a very rudimentary search application for the archive of items posted to rc3.org daily. It just searches for the phrase you enter, and returns all of the items that contain that phrase. I may make some improvements later. I reshuffled the left nav bar a bit to accommodate the new search engine, and to rearrange the links according to their current priority. I haven’t written an Outraged! piece since February, mainly due to lack of time. I have some other ideas that I may get around to in the future. ...

Jon Carroll has a poetic column today about how the Nature Conservancy hacks the land development system. ZDNet has an article about the sale of in-game stuff from EverQuest on EBay. I find the idea of spending hundreds of dollars for a character in a computer game to be pretty silly. Have any other Today’s Papers readers noticed that the frequency of links to internal Slate pieces has gone up exponentially of late? I wonder if TP is a lot more popular than their other features and they’re trying to mine more traffic from it. ...

The Industry Standard is running a long feature article about univirsities pimping their names by offering courses through “online universities.” One hopes that a Duke MBA obtained through an online course doesn’t count the same as one obtained by actually attending classes and interacting with other students. Actually, what really bothers me about all this is the idea of higher education falling into the hands of for-profit companies. The quickest route to profit is attracting more students, and handing out more degrees. It’s a slippery slope toward turning university degrees (perhaps even from prestigious universities) into worthless pieces of paper. ...

The major networks are mulling over not indicating whether shows are repeats when they release their broadcast schedules for publication, because they think that people aren’t as interested in watching them. Well, duh. This will only come as a surprise to people that don’t already believe networks have utter disdain for their audience. (Why else would they air 15 “news magazines” a week?) People who have to deal with HTML generated by brain damaged Microsoft applications will appreciate the demoroniser, a Perl script for cleaning up the mess these applications leave behind. ...

Dave Farber recently forwarded a Brett Glass email to his Interesting People mailing list about the influence technology companies have over tech journalists. Quoted inside are comments by Wendy Grossman that are also quite interesting. By the way, I was quite glad to find that there’s now a well organized archive for IP now. Wired News has a wrapup of the Jam Echelon Day festivities. This event reminds me of the random messages people used to spew on IRC for the “NSA greppers.” Except, of course, that was a joke and this was a publicity stunt. ...

The Atlantic Monthly has an online article about weblogs. It discusses the history of weblogs (as told by the writer), and the growing number of webloggers writing blurbs for epinions.com. None of these weblog articles ever mention rc3.org, but I’m dealing with it. Oh wait, I forgot the one that said rc3.org is “kind of boring.” Perhaps it’s better that this site goes unmentioned. AOL is pumping 800 million bucks into Gateway in return for taking over their ISP business. As always, there’s more to it than that, but the crux of the deal is the 600,000 gateway.net subscribers. At least they’re not making them all switch to AOL. ...

The Encyclopedia Britannica has stopped charging for access to the online version of their encyclopedia. Unfortunately, the site is broken right now so you can’t get in. If you like epinions.com, you’ll love the Earth edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Actually, I don’t know how closely related the two really are, but they do seem to share the purpose of allowing the common man to publish blurbs.

Recently, a Gartner Group report slamming Linux was publicized. At about the same time, the Microsoft Linux Myths article appeared (I’ve linked to it from this page at least twice). Coincidence? Apparently not. An intreped subscriber to the SVLUG mailing list has followed the paper trail and discovered that the Gartner Group’s analysis was bought and paid for by Microsoft, who then cited the analysis as though it was from an independent source. ...