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 as squirrels, goaded them into it. Still…) This may be one reason: Enron and its ilk made it look like there was a demand for all that bandwidth.

It’s stuff like this that gives capitalism a bad name.

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 a business it might be, they’ll never ever sell all the information that Passport collects.

Good to know that we can trust Microsoft’s intentions, isn’t it?

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 of the process. But it’s not like this has been tested in court or anything.

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 not entirely accurate. At about 2,400 square feet (fairly roomy, actually), the average apartment in TriBeCa is roughly twice the size of the average place on the Upper East Side. On the Upper East, the average apartment costs $856 per square foot — and that’s assuming that the listed square footage is accurate, which it isn’t.

The bottom line: the real estate market in Manhattan is nucking futs.

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.

Cats learn to manipulate people? Stop the frickin’ presses.

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 a whiz-bang success.

The thing is, Ziff is good at selling inexpensive magazines (the newsstand model) and it’s good finding the right people to give them away to (the controlled circulation model). For a while, it was in the business of selling expensive trade show admissions. But what it’s never shown itself to be good at is selling big-ticket newsletters.

I speak from some experience here. I worked on a project at Ziff that consisted of a series of one-price-fits-all newsletters/websites/seminars. Our price out of the gate was $1000. Ziff tried to sell our product, at first, solely through e-mail with a respond-to website that cost thousands to develop. It didn’t really work. Then they tried a card mailing — about the cheapest and fastest way possible to get into the mail. That didn’t work either.

After a few months, they killed the project. It’s not that the product wasn’t good; it’s that no one ever found out. When’s the last time you spent $1000 on the basis of a couple of e-mails and a website?

I’ve actually been doing this for a while. I published my first newsletter online in 1985. That same year, Esther Dyson launched one backed by Bill Ziff. They charged $1000. I charged by the article; I don’re remember how much,  but it was lots less. Neither of us lasted, but I bet I made more money than they did.

The newsletter business is different than the magazine business, which doesn’t mean that Ziff won’t make a buck or two. It just means that it’ll be harder and more expensive than they probably think. And as good as Mary Jo is, it’s going to be hard to demonstrate in these tough times that she can provide better and faster information than what can be had floating around for free — including what her own company is producing.

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 if I recall correctly, it was this kind of crowding that led to the disastrous day recounted in Into Thin Air.

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: human faces, Nelson said. But at the same time, they lose the ability to detect differences in things they don’t see a lot.”

As the dad of 5-month-old twins, this comes as a relief. Not that the kids seem to be having any trouble as it is…

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. Someone could have come in and posted really offensive or off-topic stuff and I’d have had no way to manage it. That’s a Bad Thing, and something that Userland really ought to fix.

YACCS gives me much more control over the entire comments process — control I doubt I’ll ever need, but have to have it in case it ever comes to that.