So who had the worst week? Was it our Lord Jesus? Or was it NAPSTER, now caught in crossover court cases with Metallica *and* Dr Dre. Good to see someone whose early career was marked by a disrespect for authority and heavy reliance on sampled works (as well as a love for words ending with "z") taking out the Napsters with Attitude. And even better to see that, while heavy metal and rap still have artistic differences, they can unite under one ne attorney - LA's Howard King, who is leading both court cases. And we're sure that if the music industy mows Napster, Inc down in a legal bloodbath, absolutely no-one will step in to take over the server duties in an illegit manner. For that would be wrong.

"Few companies fit the role of poster boys for the stock market roller coaster of the last six months better than Linux start-ups Red Hat and VA Linux. Acclaimed as Wall Street's darlings after their stunning 1999 public offerings, both companies have of late been plagued with an unremitting stream of bad press as their share prices have declined. VA Linux is currently trading at $39, down from a high of $320. Red Hat is at $26 -- call it $52 to account for a split, but that's still down significantly from a pre-split high of $151.

Both companies also lumber under the additional burden of being treated as canaries in the Linux gold mine. Red Hat's IPO was widely considered a validation of the commercial potential of Linux. But its stock price slide is now hailed as proof that there is no money to be made in the entire Linux sector.

One might expect the load of responsibility to get a bit tiresome. The day VA Linux went public was a day of great celebration at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. But it can't be a whole lot of fun these days to check into Slashdot -- the "news for nerds" Web site that VA Linux owns -- and read another couple of hundred slams against the company every time the share price drops another notch."

"I used Andover myself long before the site hit most investors' radar screens, and I was floored by the bloated price tag. It's a great resource, but somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that VA Linux got hoodwinked by the hoopla. After all, fair's fair. But, this one looked like highway robbery.

Well, in a curious turn of events Wednesday, VA Linux announced plans to amend the terms of its deal with Andover. In addition to the lucrative stock swap, the original courtship called for $60 million in cold hard cash to be hand-delivered to the blushing bride-to-be. But, faster than a New York minute, all the leaves have fallen off the money tree; and in this latest market downturn, it's time for VA Linux to circle the wagons.

The company lopped off the cash payment, and not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Andover graciously accepted. "

"The good news is that Linux players are finding a bottom, and there's probably never been a better time to buy the leaders. Big fish will continue to gobble up the guppies, and the open source OS has a future so bright, it's got to wear shades. Pundits are already penning Linux' last chapter, but I'm betting its best days are ahead. Just a bit more grounded in cyber-reality."

"Andrew Everett, a 31-year-old physical therapist in Los Angeles, wears a full-wrap Yahoo ad with pride on his Jeep Cherokee, one of the premium $400 per month winners. He now washes and drives his SUV all the more carefully, feeling almost like he's working for Yahoo.

"I love it. It doesn't bother me at all, really. I definitely wash my car more than I used to in the past, and not just because they want you to keep (your) car clean.""

"The most substantial portion of the PEAR program examines anomalies arising in human/machine interactions. In these experiments human operators attempt to influence the behavior of a variety of mechanical, electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to conform to pre-stated intentions, without recourse to any known physical processes. In unattended calibrations these sophisticated machines all produce strictly random outputs, yet the experimental results display increases in information content that can only be attributed to the influence of the consciousness of the human operator. "

"A method and apparatus of generating values and detecting whether the values fall outside chance probabilities. In one embodiment, a random-noise source provides a signal that is amplified, conditioned, and sampled to provide a series of random numbers. In one embodiment, conditioning includes inverting some of the values according to a pseudo-random sequence mask in order to remove certain first-order bias. Another aspect of this invention is to perform a statistical analysis of the values generated, and to control an output based in whether or not a chance expectation has been exceeded, or by the probability of a certain result obtained. Yet another aspect is to control a toy, game, appliance, or computer display based on whether or not a chance expectation has been exceeded by a measured sequence of values."

"But the new photos can't make what Reno did right, just like the brutal pictures of the raid didn't make her wrong. (If imagery was ever enough to justify federal action, the home videos of Elián defying his father would have been grounds for his removal by any means necessary.) The attorney general had the law on her side, even if the early war of images went against her. I admit I flinched Saturday morning, but I'm glad that this time Janet Reno did not. "

"This pen is chock full of electronics, and uses an unusual method of capturing handwriting. If you write on paper that is preprinted with a very special information-carrying grid (it looks to us humans like a slightly off-white tint of about 3% gray), the camera behind that transparent window uses the grid to track exactly where the ink is going. In fact, the pen also tracks its angle, it's velocity, and the pressure applied at any instant, all of which can be very useful for signature capture and validation. But this gets even more interesting -- the invisible grid is not just a standard grid, but one whose pattern allows the pen to recognize where in a half-continent-wide virtual sheet of paper it's currently writing. "

"IF YOU need a poster child for the volatility of the market this year, you might choose VA Linux Systems Inc. (LNUX), the Sunnyvale company that produces workstations and servers embedded with the open-source code first developed by Linus Torvalds.

VA Linux Systems' great success might have been its greatest curse. Four months ago, it was labeled the most successful IPO in history, soaring 700 percent above its offering price of $30. Its first-day close was $239.25.

The stock has slipped relentlessly since, finishing at $38 Wednesday after dipping below its IPO price Friday. A child prodigy has become an ordinary teenager. A Mozart suddenly is churning out Muzak."

"Consider this whole drama from the standpoint of the established players. What looks like something supremely irrational -- how can VA Linux Systems be worth $10 billion in December and $1.6 billion in April? -- suddenly begins to assume a vulgar rationality."

Remember, the fund managers and institutional buyers who participated in the IPO got the stock at $30. And they were able to ``flip'' it for a big profit on the first day. Because supply was kept low -- only 4.4 million shares were allowed to float initially -- the demand insured a steep opening price. The stock cost $299 per share the first time the public could buy it. And many did, simply on the belief that it would go higher."

For that matter, at least some of the institutional players and investment bankers were in a position to sell the stock short, which means they could make money as the shares declined in value. With more information about who was buying and who intended to flip, they could make better judgments than the average investor. The identity of short-sellers isn't public, but the latest reports show that 1.6 million shares of LNUX are being held in a short position."

"In fact, the only people who don't benefit from this cozy arrangement were the investors who bought VA Linux during its first four months on the market. And as I say, it's hard ordinarily to feel that sorry for people who swallow the hype. I just wish there wasn't such a cottage industry producing it."

"Human beings, as it turns out, have too much faith in themselves. The detection of falsehood is scarcely the only domain where they overestimate their abilities. A survey of British motorists not long ago revealed that 95 percent thought they were better-than-average drivers. Similarly, most people think they are likely to live longer than the mean. In a classic 1977 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and Sarah Lichtenstein reported that people often pronounce themselves absolutely certain of beliefs that are untrue. Subjects would declare themselves 100 percent sure that, say, the potato originated in Ireland, when it actually came from Peru.

Overconfidence is nearly universal. In fact, a study some years ago found that the only group of people free from it--the only group with a realistic view of their own capacities--were the clinically depressed. But is overconfidence distributed equally? Not according to a widely publicized paper in last December's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The authors, David A. Dunning of Cornell and his graduate student Justin Kruger, drew a poignant conclusion from their research: The most incompetent people have the most inflated notion of their abilities. "Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices," the two psychologists wrote, "but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.""

"Napster employees "neither protect, nor crack down on their user base, and therefore they have gotten away with being the cozy middleman for almost a year now," he wrote. "In doing so, Napster is giving the MP3 format a bad name." Paulson insists that the company's goal should be to promote new artists, not make it easy for people to pirate copyrighted recordings."

"A new model is emerging from the Internet. It represents the culmination of years of incremental evolution in the structure of the network and the clients that feed upon it. It is based upon the same principles upon which the Internet was founded. It is this: the client is the server."

"The purpose of the Bubble Monitor was to point out the absurdity of the valuations given to Internet stocks. This was an amusing activity until this week. Now, it feels more like piling on.

This does not mean that I think we have reached bottom. Consider:

Each of the stocks on the Bubble Monitor is higher than it was 6 months ago. (WEBM only went IPO two months ago, of course.)

None of the stocks is in any danger of being "cheap" relative to earnings or sales. Yahoo's P/E ratio still is well over 500, and the others have no earnings."

" Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

"We're here to introduce you to something incredibly cool - an online assistant that can help you out with whatever you're doing, wherever you go on the Web. Deepleap is a free, Web-based application that provides simple, immediate access to content and services related

"When you're looking at a word or a phrase on a Web page, or a Web site in general, you can use Deepleap to get additional relevant information, or save or email that information, without visiting dozens of other sites or launching multiple applications. Plus, you can do all sorts of fun and useful things like save items to a universal Wishlist, keep track of your Bookmarks from anywhere on the Web, do price comparisons, search any site... and of course there's more - why would we stop there?"

"...the reality, right now, is that we've built Deepleap as a *platform* for doing this sort of contextual relating between sites, and what we're demonstrating with the beta is more the general concept. So if you pop up Deepleap on an Amazon.com product page, for example, it will give you a set of tools based around buying a product -- comparison shopping, reading reviews, etc. Or if you highlight the name of a movie, and activate it, that will bring up a series of movie-related options, like getting movie times for your neighborhood, or checking for the soundtrack at Reel.com. Find a selection of text that you like -- an interesting quote, maybe? Highlight it, save it to the Deepleap web site. Useful tools, when you need them."

"Most Internet retailers will go out of business by the end of next year because of funding problems and competitive pressures, said Forrester Research, a well-respected electronic-commerce research company."

""I think there are probably not going to be more than three leaders in each online-retail category," said Forrester senior analyst Joe Sawyer."

"a.No person may
1.Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
i.To any emergency telephone line, including any 911 line and any emergency line of a hospital, medical physician or service office, health care facility, poison control center, or fire protection or law enforcement agency;
ii.To the telephone line of any guest room or patient room of a hospital, health care facility, elderly home, or similar establishment; or
iii.To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call; "

""We believe that the vast majority -- perhaps 95 to 98 percent -- of all dot-com companies will fail over the next 24 months," said Michael Fleisher, president and CEO of GartnerGroup, in his keynote speech kicking off the market research company's annual Spring Symposium/ITxpo on Monday at the San Diego convention center.

Conversely, "virtually no traditional companies will be able to survive without a significant Internet component as part of its business model," Fleisher said. "

"According to a new survey by Tamkang University's Department of Mass Communications, the three million Taiwanese people who use WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) facilities on their cellular phones are dissatisfied with the cost, speed and range of services available.

Some 86.5 percent of respondents said that WAP services were too slow, while 85.5 percent complained about the price."

"Mike Malarkey, a business-development manager for the District-based educational Web developer Blackboard Inc., was in the middle of a meeting last Thursday when his Nokia cell phone chirped, sounding a bit like the low-battery warning.

When he checked it after the meeting, he saw that the battery was fine, but he'd just received a text message on the phone's screen--an advertisement for a Web site selling cell-phone accessories. "

"...most importantly, it sucks bandwidth. I can easily see how network admins will want to outlaw this beast, if they can. For my evening of experimentation, I downloaded a total of 65 MBytes of files, while my total incoming consumed bandwidth was 365 MBytes, and my upstream bandwidth was 755 MBytes. Yes, really -- all that, in a measly five hours."

"...aims to assemble the open-source programming community's work on Gnutella, a popular piece of file-swapping software capable of turning anyone with a computer into a music pirate.

Gnutella is similar to online music-sharing program Napster but allows anything in a digital format to be traded--from pirated MP3 music files to grandmothers' secret pie recipes.

Started by a group of programmers at the America Online-owned Nullsoft, the Gnutella project was shut down after AOL discovered the "unauthorized" development effort. But before AOL's action, the software escaped into the wild, and programmers around the Net quickly began developing their own sets of "clones" that worked like the original."

""Skins" are a recent product of the hyper-democratization of code. The computer equivalent of back-ally chin tucks, skins allow a growing number of applications to change their looks in a growing number of ways, almost all of them bad. In a scenario that undoubtedly leaves DeTocqueville twitching uncomfortably in his grave, an unthinking Jolt- and marketing-fueled push towards visual freedom — is leaving 15 years of common-sense progress in user-interface design bleeding in a ditch."

" In 1999, police officers searched for individuals in the National Crime Information Center database 2 million times daily, up from the 600,000 daily transactions averaged in 1988. Likewise, wiretaps are expected to rise more than 300 percent in the next 10 years, according to the 2001 FBI budget request. The trends will only get worse, as technology lowers the barriers that face law enforcement surveillance, said Thomas M. Cecil, a superior court judge for the county of Sacramento, Calif. “In reality, most of what we have is the illusion of openness. Today, we have de facto privacy policy because we are inefficient; probing and gathering are time consuming and expensive. That protects our privacy,” he said. "

"Stephenson challenged the more than 1,000 people who had gathered from around the world to focus their attention less on installing encryption software against the vague threat of snooping by Big Brother, a reassuringly simple fantasy of a totalitarian state, and more on the very real pattern of injustice brought to bear on people through employers and other institutions.

Stephenson said he was less worried these days about broad, theoretical privacy issues than about a recent incident in which a stray bullet crashed through a window at a friend's house and narrowly missed a sleeping child."

"Stephenson's speech was a lot more subtle and textured than the discussion of it here would lead you to believe. In fact, he said that he greatly admired people like Phil who have brought encryption to the world, and believes in fighting oppression in all its forms. The underscored point, however, was the "in all its forms" part. He referred back to our hominid ancestors and showed a pie chart of what their threat model might have been. It was about 98 percent HYENAS and about 2 percent OTHER. Once early man developed some good spears, he said, the hyena problem was less pressing--but early man didn't move on to try to conquer threats like intestinal parisites. His point, then, was that we need to update our threat models more often, and more subtly, than humans usually do. He then showed another pie chart. 98 percent was BIG BROTHER. 2 percent was OTHER. It got a big laugh from the crowd, because a lot of people recognized themselves. Stephenson again said that it was important ot expose and fight the bad things that "domination systems" to, but said that we should open the pie chart up to include and focus on other threats as well. In fact, he conceded, his pie chart of the threat model with lots of slices still could have the largest slice devoted to worrying about Big Brother. I hope that this gives a more full description of what Stephenson said in his talk. I wrote the story for the Washington Post, and tried to get as much of that flavor into it as I could. "

""Tomorrow we're sending someone to cut firewood," McGarvey said flatly. "We've been asked to pick up dog poop, and even to provide escort service--that one we turned down. We'll do anything that's legal."

On Mylackey.com, consumers can find someone to detail their car ($75), repair their snowboard ($30) or walk their dog--individually or with a pack--($18-$38 for up to 2 hours). Among its most popular offerings are lackeys who run errands for $40 for a 2-hour period. "

"I'm convinced that most people think about software companies in an upside-down way. The common belief is that when you're building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn't been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We'll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works. If you understand this, its easier to make the right strategic decisions."

"Imagine that the goal of your software company is not to solve some specific problem, but to be able to convert money to code through programmers. That's a little bit strange, but bear with me. A software company has to think of recruiting the right people as its number one problem. If you are successful, this can solve any other problem. Hire smart people, and they will produce good stuff that you can sell and make money off."

"Microsoft has a great recruiting strategy. They hire inexperienced, smart people right out of college... people that haven't learned from dysfunctional corporate cultures elsewhere. These kids get to Seattle, not really knowing anybody, work their asses off, and absorb the Microsoft way of doing things like a sponge. By the time they are ready to get disgruntled, their stock options start to kick in and their effective salary for staying around goes up into the stratosphere, where it is unlikely that anybody else will be able to lure them away. A five year Microsoft veteran could be making $500K a year including stock options -- care to match that?"

1. Remove hat and glasses.

2. Peer into MentalPlex circle. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HEAD.

3. Project mental image of what you want to find.

4. Click or visualize clicking within the MentalPlex circle