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Monday, April 29, 2002 |
 Wow. The new Zone Alarm with privacy features is great. It lets me turn off all of those new pesky ads (particularly ones that obscure pages). One downside is that it turns off the comment counter on my webpage too.
6:20:31 PM 
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MSNBC. Fox bows out of Movies.com joint venture with Disney. Both Movies.com and Movielink.com, both closed joint ventures by major studios, are being investigated by the DoJ for anti-competitive behavior. Of course, the studio could do what the airlines are doing. Allow competitors to distribute and slowly squeeze their fees to zero. The airlines started this process by cutting distribution fees for travel sites to $10 a ticket from the standard $20 a ticket paid to offline travel agents. Some airlines have recently moved that fee to zero.
10:22:00 AM
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New Scientist. The first complete map of a human genome belongs to Celera's founder Craig Venter. As a result, he found that he had a genetic predisposition for Alzheimers. He is now taking drugs to combat expression of the gene.
10:09:20 AM
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Wired. A long list of reasons not to turn XP's auto-update feature OFF.
9:33:16 AM
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WSJ. Overture, the fee-based search engine, and Yahoo continue their deal. Hey, Overture search returns are a big reason Yahoo's search engine is all but unusable. The real results are pushed "below the fold" on the search return web page by sponsored results. Yuk. Yahoo has the traffic to create products and services people will pay for. They are pissing this opportunity away by adding garbage to core service functionality.
9:27:03 AM
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BBC. Space tourist steps onto space station. The NYT is reporting that people are starting to line up for the $20m price. Get that price down from $20 m to $1 m and you will see people line up out the door. Are there 5 to 10k people in the world that would pay $1 m each to spend a week in space? Yes. That's a $5-10 b market that isn't being serviced. Get the price down to $100 k and that market would probably grow 3-fold to $15-$30b. Could it be done? Can we build a heavy lift system than costs under $160 a pound to orbit (down from $16 k a pound with the shuttle)? Yes.
A space elevator (something NASA is investigating) is the most promising way to reduce costs 100 to 1,000 fold. This is a brainchild of Aurthur C. Clarke. It uses a carbon nanotube that connects a Geosynch satellete with a point on the ground. It would allow individuals to travel up to LEO (low earth orbit) via an elevator where they can be delivered via an OTV (orbital transfer vehicle) to an LEO space station (BTW: those liquid fuel tanks the shuttle uses are great structural material for an expanded space station facility).
9:08:44 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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