Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

The Enron-ing of Telecom

From the NYTimes: Traders Also Swapped Broadband, Data Show. Big energy trading companies created the appearance of activity as they tried to build a market for trading high-speed communications capacity. I never quite understood why telecom companies so badly overbuilt transmission capacity. (I know, I know — venture capitalists, who as a group are as dumb […]

Is Microsoft Gearing Up To Sell Passport Info?

From The Register: Microsoft opts Passport holders into spam hell. Trusted Computing at work. Passport is Microsoft’s bid to authenticate users no matter where they go on the Net. (I wrote an in-depth article about how Passport works earlier this year for PC Magazine.) Microsoft has said over and over that no matter how attractive […]

Your Heart May Belong to Daddy, But Your Ass May Belong to the U of M

From Wired News: A Patent That Owns Humans?. A patent watchdog group discovers that the University of Missouri holds a U.S. patent not only on cloning technology, but on any product of the process — including, potentially, a human being. By Kristen Philipkoski. Some lawywers say that the patent covers the process, not the product […]

$856 Per Square Foot.

From the NYTimes: TriBeCa Is Priciest Neighborhood. A ZIP-code by ZIP-code analysis of the New York real estate market shows that TriBeCa was the highest priced residential neighborhood in Manhattan last year. This will probably not be true next year, given that the World Trade Center was in TriBeCa. As it turns out, “priciest” is […]

Replay Gets Stay of Spyware Order

Just to keep you updated: SONICblue Wins Stay of Tracking Order. Electronic device maker SONICblue said on Wednesday it won a stay of a court order that would have forced it to track the television viewing habits of people using its ReplayTV digital video recorder. By Reuters.

Ziff to Re-enter the Newsletter Biz?

The Silicon Alley Reporter (much as I hate to plug it) carries a story today saying that Ziff Davis is planning to create a $400 newsletter tracking Microsoft. It’ll be written by Mary Jo Foley, one of the best Microsoft reporters around and an editor at Ziff’s new Baseline magazine. Editorially, I’m sure it’ll be […]

Top of the World Ahead. Please Stand to the Right.

From the AP: Record Crowd Reaches Top of Everest. The top of the world was crowded Thursday, with a record 54 people making it to the summit of Mount Everest, including the grandson of one of the first two men to conquer it in 1953. This makes me nervous. Not in any personal sense, but […]

Tuning In To Faces

A new study indicates that 6-month-old babies are better at face recognition than 9-month-olds — if the face in question is a monkey. After that, kids apparently realize that it’s human faces that count. “As people get older, they get better and better at detecting the subtle differences in the faces they see a lot: […]

New Comments Engine Installed

Not that so many of you were using it, but I’ve just installed the YACCS commenting software. Please feel free to play with it. Previously, I was using Radio’s built-in engine, which is based on Userland’s Manila site-management tool. Trouble is, the built-in software didn’t give me any control over comments posted on the log. […]