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Wow, a court that perhaps listens to reason? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, bogus enough as it is, is being used as a shield for everything these days. Glad to see the court struck down upon thee (okay, I’ll take Pulp Fiction out of the DVD player one of these days)... Maybe there is hope for the consumer out there, damn proprietary ink is a pain in the ass!
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On Tuesday, a federal appeals court said printer maker Lexmark cannot prevent Static Control Components from manufacturing printer toner cartridges that operate with its printers. Lexmark had sued the competitor, arguing that Static Control had no right under the DMCA to circumvent electronics that prevented Lexmark printers from using anything other than Lexmark cartridges.

And in August, a U.S. appeals court shot down a similar attempt by garage door manufacturer Chamberlain Group to use the DMCA to stop Skylink Technologies from manufacturing a universal garage door opener.

Wired Link

Ya know, I don’t recall seeing any stringent pre-bidder authentication by Overstock.com in the auction for the Barry Bonds ball at all. $800k seems way overpriced, as it’s not a record breaking ball at all, but then again there are rich weirdos out there, no? I still say it’s bogus and that the bid was a fake bid, something News.com doesn’t address at all. Overstock being new to this online auction thingy, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a goof, and if they did, it’ll be an embarassingly big one… The dude shoulda left it up to Sotheby’s or something, then again he did get the best deal at Overstock, I’m sure.
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Major League Baseball may hand out Gold Glove awards to the league’s finest fielders each season, but the $804,129 that fan Steve Williams landed in an online auction of Barry Bonds’ 700th home run ball still looks pretty lustrous in comparison.

Williams’ online auction of the leather orb on Overstock.com ended Wednesday, after 242 bids were made on the historical piece of playing equipment over the last 10 days. The winning bidder, an individual using the screen name “bomasterj,” must now submit his or her payment to an escrow account controlled by Williams’ lawyers, who will deliver the ball to the winning bidder. In hitting the blast, Bonds joined baseball legends Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as the only players in Major League Baseball to ever crest the 700 homer plateau.

News.com Link

So that’s the 2004 Florida ballot (full pdf ballot link down below) in certain counties. Why can’t they just stick with FILL IN THE BLANK next to the name of your candidate? Florida, Florida, Florida… Complete the arrow? What is this, a coloring book? K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid), is a nice slogan, one which Florida should follow. I can’t wait for the backlash of people being confused and wondering if their vote counts or if they did it right. There’s tons of senior citizens in Florida, I doubt they want to be completing any arrows. Florida is gonna screw shit up again, just you watch. You’ve already done it once, couldn’t you guys figure out a simple ballot 4 years later? Chads, schmads… Might be the first presidential election where we see lawsuits, fitting, eh?

I’m all for any US citizens voting, no matter what their native language, but c’mon, shouldn’t the ballot come in English only? If you can’t
understand English or read it, you shouldn’t be voting. Yes, there are tons of Spanish-speaking folk around, but what about other languages? Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian? Why not them too?

On a side note, Electoral-Vote.com is noting that John Kerry may have enough electoral votes to win the election, based on the latest poll results. According to them, he currently has 271 electoral votes to Bush’s 257, with Minnesota (ya feelin’ Minnesota?) being the only Tied state right now. The great white north may decide the election…

[Thanks lowmazda for the image]

Full pdf of Florida ballot

Crazy that a company as big as eBay can nearly double its net profits over the previous year in this economy. But it continues to grow by leaps and bounds, as no competitors have even made a dent in recent years in the auction foray. Still, how about fixing the site so you don’t need weekly updates on your site and Paypal’s, eBay? Some people are actually up on Friday early morning, wanting to bid and pay for random junk they buy (you know who you are). I’d also like to know what kind of retailers have $1 million in sales per minute, that seems incredibly high, unless you’re talking about Dell having a $750 off $1500 deal again.
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Executives at eBay Inc. apologized to frustrated customers who were frozen out of the online auction giant’s payment transaction service, which experienced at least five days of intermittent outages earlier this month. The mea culpas came as eBay reported sizzling net income, nearly doubling from the previous year, as revenue also soared.

Estimates vary widely, but large online retailers may lose anywhere from $1 million per hour to $1 million per minute when Web sites go down. For instance, a 20-minute outage at Seattle-based Amazon.com in November 2000 deleted roughly 20,000 product orders and $500,000 in revenue, according to investment firm Thomas Weisel Partners.

I think this report is hogwash. Besides, what kinda person would let a marketing research firm analyze the contents of their hard drive? Besides some kind of spyware possibly, that they don’t know about. Granted, there is more AAC and WMA file content than before, but that number was near zero a few years ago. And how the hell do people that rip CDs to WMA and AAC get confused and think they are ripping to MP3? Hello, file extension! Interestingly enough, 7% wanted WMA support when choosing a music player, but yet, I’m not even sure I know anyone that has more than an album full of WMA or AAC tracks. MP3 is still here to stay, mainly because the alternatives, like WMA and AAC, just don’t cut it and aren’t widespread.
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“People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they’re acquiring them,” said Isaac Josephson, a researcher at NPD MusicWatch Digital. “People tend to think that downloads are more disposable than rips (copies from a CD), and currently, the lion’s share (of MP3s) are downloads.”

About 20 percent of people in the study said MP3 support was important to them when selecting a portable media device, while just 7 percent said support for Microsoft’s WMA was important. Close to zero percent said AAC, the file format supported by Apple’s iPod and iTunes, was essential to them.

MSN Link

Congrats to the New York Yankees, who have just blown a 3-0 series lead to the Boston Red Sox tonight, and lost 4 in a row, getting themselves eliminated from the 2004 Playoffs. Incredible series, they really choked in the 9th inning of Game 4, but Boston just kept up that momentum for an incredible final 4 game winning streak. And thus, the Curse of A-Rod begins…

I get a package this afternoon at work from UPS, and I think, what could it be? I looked at the label and it said Office Depot. Great, I did order a hard drive last week, wait, why is it in such a small package? So I open it up, and lo and behold, it’s paper clips! And it’s crushed! I mean, the box is crushed, I think the paper clips are okay, and still usable, but I still thought about returning it or exchanging it, just for giggles. But, naw, that’d require me to take time out of my busy day.

So Office Depot pays UPS, what, at least $3 to ship this item from their warehouse to my work? Oh, did I mention the invoice was for 18 cents? I would think they would charge my credit card only once since I ordered the hard drive and paper clips together, but nope, it looks like it was individually charged. AmEx surely charges more than 18 cents per transaction fee? I don’t see it on my bill yet though, so I’m not sure exactly what went on. I only bought the paper clips to pad an order a little bit so I could use a $20 off $100 coupon. I don’t have some weird paper clip fetish that I know of.

I was just astounded by the absurdity of it all. They could have easily shipped the hard drive and paper clips together. But here they go out of their way to get me my paper clips early and yet they totally destroy my paper clips box and lose money on this transaction. I’m just baffled. My hard drive is still scheduled to be delievered in a few days, so we’ll see…

Maybe it was when Alex Rodriguez decided not to go to the Boston Red Sox, but instead go to the New York Yankees. Maybe it was when he decided to don the number 13, which for most superstituous folks, is unlucky. But if the Yankees lose Game 7, perhaps it’s due to the curse of A-Rod. Much like the often mentioned Curse of the Bambino, where the Red Sox sold George Herman “Babe” Ruth to the Yankees for $125k and a $300k loan in 1920. The Yanks went on to win their first championship just three years later, and many, many more after that, while the Red Sox have never won a championship since they sold the Babe.

So Alex Rodriguez shunned the Red Sox before the 2004 baseball season, instead going to the most hated team in baseball, the Yankees. Of course the Yankees are good, but their payroll is a zillion times higher than any other team. A real fair playing field. He had to give up his position of shortstop as well, going to third base, as Derek Jeter refused to move anywhere. So A-Rod produces decent numbers during his first season in the Bronx, batting .286, 36 HR, and 106 RBI, but it wasn’t exactly jawdropping to Yankees fans, especially considering his $252 million contract, the richest in baseball. A-Rod has never been on a championship team, from the Mariners to the Rangers. So maybe winning is just not in his tarot cards.

Tonight, in Game 6 in the American League Championship Series, A-Rod purposely chops the pitcher’s hand while running to first base, trying to avoid the tag. Initially, he was called safe and it led to Derek Jeter scoring, but the umpires actually confered and ruled that A-Rod’s swipe was illegal (which replays showed clearly was) and called him out, sending Jeter back to first. See A-Rod whine after he doesn’t get his way is what happened after that.

I see it as the beginning of the A-Rod curse. Hey, it gives me a team to root against, seeing as I don’t care about any of the teams left in this playoffs.

You’re a great role model A-Rod, pulling a Razor Ramon and spitting your gum out and swatting it towards the ump after the inning was over. Fox caught you on tape doing it. Did you forget you were on camera?

So remember, when 70 years down the line the NY Yankees still haven’t won a championship, where you heard first about the Curse of A-Rod… The again, the Yankees could win the World Series this year and a certain lowmazda won’t shut up about it for another year.

There’s been big talk of the Google Desktop Search (which is a decent little app, at least for it’s price of FREE), but the buzz lately has been on Google offering Instant Message (IM) services. Well, they sorta already have one. When they bought Picasa (a photo organizing and storing program), they also got Hello, which is an IM that is optimized to easily send pictures to your friends. The slick part is Hello instantly resizes your photos for sending over the Net and it can also upload photos and post them to your blog via BloggerBot. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about Hello and GoogleIM soon, it’s always nice to find a blog with the scoop before it hits the mainstream press.
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Hello is Picasa and Google’s little secret, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be. Picasa is a way of storing and indexing your photos. Hello is about interacting. Hello was created as a way to share those photos Picasa spent so much time indexing, but it does so much more. Do you want an instant messenger from Google? Well, Hello is an instant messenger, complete with buddy lists and bots and smilies and sounds. The difference is that Hello is optimized for sending photos. It can automatically resize a photo so it sends properly. You can jump back and forth from Hello to Picasa to send your photos and share your albums. But most strikingly to most of my readers, it is an instant messenger in a Google product, and its a good bet that as Google integrates Picasa better with the rest of its services, Hello will be its chat client, with full feature support for Gmail and Google Desktop. And if you are worried about security, Google claims it’s more secure than AOL Instant Messenger.

http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/10/hello-whats-this-its-googles-most.html

So it’s been about ten years since the first secure online transaction, but e-commerce sales still only count for about 1.7% of all consumer sales in the second quarter of 2004. It’s just odd, and I’m sure I’m WAY above the norm, but I’d say about 80% of the stuff I buy is done online. Newegg (although not always the lowest price) is a cult or something. I just searched for Newegg in my emails in the past few years, and there’s a ton of orders that I’ve made. I’m always impressed by their fairly cheap shipping (which comes to me in just 2 days here in Seattle) from their CA shipping centers.

The only things that I avoid for the most part are clothes and tools / home improvement stuff. Clothes because some things just don’t look right on the Net, and tools and stuff because I usually need it at that point, and shipping for heavy things are never worth it. It’s interesting to note that there’s still a lot of room to grow in the e-commerce field (even a rise to 10% would be five-fold, , looks like the stocks to buy are UPS/FedEx/Lowe’s/Home Depot, eh?
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“We haven’t even started yet; we’re really in ‘E-commerce 101,’” said Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer of Yahoo. “I think this is going to get really fun in the next 10 years.”

The panelists were enthusiastic on Friday about the prospects of increasing that amount closer to a double-digit figure, despite growing fears over identity theft, fraud, privacy invasion and online nuisances such as viruses, worms and spam that have taken root on the Web right along side online shopping.

News.com Link