"All 74 films reviewed contained at least 1 act of violence (mean duration, 9.5 minutes per film; range, 6 seconds–24 minutes). Analysis of time trends showed a statistically significant increase in the duration of violence in the films with time (P=.001). The study found a total of 125 injuries (including 62 fatal injuries) in 46 (62%) of the films. Characters portrayed as "bad" were much more likely to die of an injury than other characters (odds ratio, 23.2; 95% confidence interval, 8.5-63.4). A majority of the violence (55%) was associated with good or neutral characters dueling with bad characters (ie, using violence as a means of reaching resolution of conflict), and characters used a wide range of weapons in violent acts."

"Our content analysis suggests that a significant amount of violence exists in animated G-rated feature films. Physicians and parents should not overlook videocassettes as a source of exposure to violence for children."

"The original ideals of the band -- that's what Klaus, D.H. and myself were fighting for,'' said East Bay Ray (born Ray Pepperell) after the decision.

Biafra (born Eric Boucher) claimed the suit was brought in part because he refused to license ``Holiday in Cambodia'' to Levi's for an advertisement.

"They're punishing me for sticking to the principles of the band and underground, independent culture,'' he said."

"ActiveState, a leading supplier of products and services supporting open source software, announced today that the company will use Mozilla software code as a cross platform development framework for Komodo, its Perl and Python integrated development environment (IDE)."

"ActiveState is building a Perl, Python and JavaScript integrated development environment (IDE) called Komodo. Komodo will use the Mozilla application framework and thus will have the benefit of being cross-platform and fully supportive of Windows and Linux amongst others. The IDE will offer features familiar to users of any modern IDE such as a rich language-aware editor, an interactive debugger and an interactive shell. The Komodo IDE source code will be freely available and will leverage Internet standards such as XML, CSS, RDF, FTP, WebDAV, and HTTP. This will make it easy for users to extend the IDE as well as learn how a complex Mozilla application is built."

"The "Terms and Conditions" you must accept to use the "free" NetZero service include giving up your privacy among other "minor" things:

1) obligation on your part to fill out with real information all questionnaires and survey forms they send;

2) allowing NetZero to learn your browsing habits by tracking all the websites you visit and compile, sell and USE that information. They say personal identifying info won't be disclosed but just the simple fact that they store it on their system where is available to anybody who could lawfully or not access it, is a problem. Let alone they don't exclude themselves from using it so it is possible for them to target you directly.

3) you cannot disable cookies, bypass their ad program (meaning that you can't install firewalling software that would block the ad stream)

4) you allow them to alter your e-mail messages by adding advertising which you cannot remove or obscure (not unusual);

5) the most ridiculous note is that the whole agreement can be changed at any time by posting them on their website, and require you to check them every time before you "use the service", and not use it if you don't agree. Let alone the impossibility of this (how can you browse their website without already being connected, thus using the service), it puts an unreasonable burden on the user. How many will remember the original contract and check the new one for differences, I doubt they would post a "diff" file there :-)"

"Government and local authorities are wrong to think that improved access to the web for those who cannot afford to surf from home will end social exclusion, said Professor Steve Woolgar, a sociologist from Brunel University and director of the Virtual Society research project.

Preliminary results from the Virtual Society studies show that internet-connected kiosks put in libraries and shopping centres to get net novices using the web were being used more by those already online."

"Kiosks and public net access points only attract a broader range of people when novices are given help and training during their first few forays online. "

"There is something, I think, about the Internet -- with its microtargeted discussion groups and virtual celebrities who are famous to 15 people -- that ramps up the possibilities of personal hype. The padded résumé is probably as old as the résumé itself, but with one's own Web site, it is easy to showcase not just your padded resume but also complimentary blurbs from friends and colleagues, thoughtful sound bites, photographs of you with friends, etc. These little self-marketing monuments exist now by the thousands. Two years ago, it was rare for a serious author to have such a site, but now even New Yorker writers have them, successfully creating viral marketing campaigns that were not possible in, say, J.D. Salinger's time. Of course, the strategy isn't limited to published authors. I recently stumbled across a Web site that advised chat-room denizens on how to establish their personal on-screen brand. For starters: "Develop a catch phrase."

It is all part of the "Brand Called You," a sort of life-as-company philosophy articulated by the management guru Tom Peters -- and long since swallowed whole by the career-advice wing of the business press."

"Canadian scientists have implanted spider genes in a herd of goats, resulting in the production of silky strands in goat milk that can be used for sutures and other applications."

"Both the U.S. and Canadian military have expressed interest in using it for making anti-ballistic defense systems, he said."

"Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster's developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority."

"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

"Napster's huge underground success has unleashed the maverick concept of creating a shared online library of free songs.

Now, a new program called Scour Exchange takes the Napster concept and extends it to photos, videos and feature-length films."

"Programs we forbid:

Anything, which uses the Xing codec to compress so AudioCatalyst is definitely out for compressing WAVs. Also Virtuoso Gold tends to make the MP3s screwy (?!?) or Real Player Real Jukebox (uses the Xing codec). Why is this? Simple, because Xing has a nasty habit of killing off the ambiance of your source recording, therefore making the end MP3s horrible to listen to. In a sense, it makes your high/low ends washed or warble, thereby it doesn't sound as clean on a typical high-end stereo system. Also, apparently MusicMatch Jukebox does use a form of the Fraunhoffer codec, but it also tends to ruin the MP3s when it compresses. User beware! "

> I was delighted to read this article by Joel Brodsky
> (http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$113). It had some
> great stuff about what kind of business you want to be in.
>
> It definitely captured a lot of things that have been true of O'Reilly.

It also captured a lot of things that were true of Netscape as well (which was definitely a company on the Amazon.com model):
"When you are growing faster than about 100% per year, it is simply impossible for mentors to transmit corporate values to new hires. ...Netscape is the most egregious example of this, growing from 5 to about 2000 programmers in one year. As a result, their culture was a mishmash of different people with different values about the company, all tugging in different directions."
"I'm a firm believer in the importance of corporate culture as promoted in books like "Built to Last" (which is why I was one of the instigators of the values stuff at Netscape), so it's interesting to speculate how this dynamic would play out in the current era. At first glance it seems as if no one has any time anymore to wait around for a business to grow organically, so it's difficult to see how any "dot-com" today could in fact build a coherent and enduring culture."

"Building a company? You've got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you're in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you're going to have a disaster on your hands.

The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital."

"With the Ben and Jerry's model, if you're even reasonably smart, you're going to succeed. It may be a bit of a struggle, there may be good years and bad years, but unless we have another depression, you're certainly not going to lost too much money, because you didn't put in too much to begin with.

The trouble with the Amazon model is that all anybody thinks about is Amazon. And there's only one Amazon. You have to think of the other 95% of companies which spend an astonishing amount of venture capital and then simply fail because nobody wants to buy their product. At least, if you follow the Ben and Jerry's model, you'll know that nobody wants your product long before you spend more than one MasterCard's worth of credit limit on it.

"So far, the file-sharing software program and others like it have been used primarily to download digital music. However, as the Net overcomes today's size and speed barriers, these technologies could be used to trade everything from full-length movies to computer operating systems--basically, anything that can take a digital form."

"Already transcending music, Napster's wildfire popularity is forcing whole industries to reconsider their business models. Companies are realizing that the last shelter for the digital economy may be imaginative strategies that make use of widespread file-sharing rather than fight it, just as most content companies abandoned online subscriptions for free Web sites years ago."

"Gnutella is gaining popularity quickly and has already been featured in several mass media outlets. As it stands now it provides an almost ideal environment for the spread of self-replicating malicious agents with the additional bonus of providing anonymous control. With full source available, parties previously unable to craft a worm of their own now have a robust framework to build on."

"For the Philippines, on the other hand, the "Love Bug" and the hacker subculture that it exposed are an embarrassing advertisement of the country's programming talent and infant dot-com scene. They also raised the issue of the cost of Internet access for developing countries struggling to close a daunting technology gap with richer countries.

While maintaining that he meant no harm, de Guzman said that Internet access should be free and that charging for its use was immoral. In his thesis, which his college rejected, he introduced his program by saying it would help many people "spend more time on the Internet without paying."

"Jabber is an instant messaging System, similar to ICQ or AIM, yet far different. It is open source, absolutely free, simple, fast, extensible, modularized, cross platform, and created with the future in mind. Jabber has been designed from the ground up to serve the needs of the end user, satisfy business demands, and maintain compatibility with other messaging systems."

"These images, generated with M.R.I. and PET scans, show the way different thoughts affect the flow of blood to the brains of research subjects. Each of the four groups above represents one averaged, composite brain from different views. The upper left corner shows a brain thinking pleasant thoughts and the upper right brain is thinking depressing thoughts; the lower left, anxiety-inducing thoughts; the lower right, irritating thoughts. Areas in red indicate intense brain activity; areas in purple, reduced brain activity. (Images from Dr. Hanna Damasio, University of Iowa College of Medicine.) "

"Some brain-injury victims who lose the ability to understand speech develop a talent that could come in handy during an election year: an uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying."

""You have your 'isa' hierarchy all thought out - let's say you have a "mammals" class and a "reptiles" class and so on - and you start to implement it, and along comes a platypus, a fur-bearing, egg-laying, duck-billed creature, which doesn't appear to fit in any of the classifications you've created. So what you often end up having to do is rethink your entire hierarchy, refactoring into a different set of basic categories, or maintaining several categorizations along different axes. A lot of your thinking ends up getting thrown out, as well as any implementation you've done up to that point.""

"The dynamism of our information spaces are what makes megalithic hierarchies so fundamentally limiting. Not only does information change, but my relationship to that information changes, and trying to catalog it typically forces it into a lowest-common-denominator structure that serves no one by trying to serve everyone. This is why I go on about basic-level categories and heaps of metadata--by reducing information to its most basic level, we can build it back up on-the-fly depending on the user's context."

"They may have their differences but Jews and Arabs share a common genetic heritage that stretches back thousands of years."

"Everyone in Europe is descended from just seven women.

Arriving at different times during the last 45,000 years, they survived wolves, bears and ice ages to form different clans that eventually became today's population."

"Imagine you have some kind of system that you administer through a web GUI, such as HotMail, your Netscape Admin server or a site like Zope.org. You get in to work and use this service for a while (check your mail, manage your servers, whatever). For our example, lets say you were using the netscape admin server.

Later in the day someone sends you an email asking you to look at a web page. You go the page using the browser session where earlier you had logged in to the admin server. However, the page does a redirect to a url of your admin server that causes your main web server to be deleted! The redirect will succeed, as you've already logged in to the admin server earlier with sufficient privileges to delete your server.

There are a few variations on this theme, involving JavaScript that can silently submit a hidden form to do the same sort of thing. It appears that most web applications involving authentication are vulnerable to this sort of attack.

Web clients will cache your credentials and send them automatically to a realm that you have visited earlier in the session, which in a stateless system is a reasonable behavior. The problem is that the client is also willing to let almost any page on the Web take actions automatically on your behalf through the use of things like redirects or javascript code. "

"In one recent study of 150 teenagers who weighed 2 pounds or less at birth, nearly one-third had significant physical disorders, including cerebral palsy, blindness and deafness. Nearly half were receiving special education assistance, compared with 10 percent in a control group. But the study, February in the journal Pediatrics, also found that even those children with minor physical problems scored significantly lower on achievement tests than those in the control group."

"When the Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, went to press on Monday, it became the first printed paper to include hyperlinks in its stories.

These are not just printed URLs, but rather tiny barcodes embedded within news stories and advertisements. Readers scan the barcodes, which contain URLs, with a Post and Courier-provided laser pen attached to a PC with Internet access and they are taken directly to the specific websites."

"The survey by Princeton Research Associates for the Web content distributor Screaming Media, found that 89 percent of the 1,232 respondents had never paid for news or information on the Web, and 83 percent were not willing to pay."