Email badly needs some extras - a way to send money (which paypal has) and a client that prioritises mail based on the money included...
Also, a client that incorporates PGP properly, and prioritises signed mail above unsigned, and mail using your public key higher still.
Until then, there'll be lots more doomy articles like this one.

Fascinating piece on ebay, and how they realise they must listen to their customers or vanish.

Marc Canter steps up to defend fair use. He does it in a particularly strong form. The new terms the music biz is trying to impose go further than preventing you sharing music with friends, by making it hard or impossible to copy or play the music yourself. Defending the right to copy music for friends is harder than defending my right to play it myself on more than one device, in the order I want.

In the name of Digital Rights Management, corporations prevent you from editing or saving stuff they have published to you. This is odd, and at at odds with the spirit of Copyright.
No-one can tell you how much of their book to read, or the order you can read it in. Why do they presume to do so with sound or video? Why must I look at a green FBI notice for 15 seconds at the start of a DVD?

It is the act of re-publishing where the potential copyright violation occurs, not the act of viewing or editing.

Reject uneditable content and say why. Rights are for people, not digits or management.

Dan Gillmor is complaining about that old chestnut, the discrepancy between Hard Drive sizes as sold based on 1 GB=10⁹ bytes and computers that report sized based on 1 GB = 2³⁰ bytes. This is explained by the NIST in this helpful note that defines the SI prefixes of kibi, mebi and gibi for 2¹⁰, 2²⁰ and 2³⁰ respectively.

I therefore propose that complaining about this issue henceforth be known as 'kibibitzing'

Winer and Locke are having a spat about memes, and the 'meme' meme. Those of us who actually read about evolution rather than using it as a trope, realise the Richard Dawkins invented the term in The Selfish Gene, and returned to the meme theme in The Extended Phenotype. In the latter he describes:
"... a completely non-genetic type of replicator, which flourishes only in the environment provided by complex, communicating brains. I called it the 'meme'.[...]
"I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself as replicator on the one hand and its 'phenotypic effects' or 'meme products' on the other. A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain.[...]
"The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques.[...]"

Dawkins later quotes correspondence between Wallace and Darwin, wherein Wallace suggests that Spencer's term 'survival of the fittest' is clearer and less question-begging than Darwin's 'Natural Selection'. Darwin liked this new phenotypic expression for his meme, but he said:
"the term Natural Selection has now been so largely used abroad and at home that I doubt whether it could be given up, and with all its faults I should be sorry to see the attempt made. Whether it will be rejected must now depend on the 'survival of the fittest'..."
Dawkins parenthetically notes "Darwin clearly understood the meme principle".

I can sympathise or at least empathise with Winer though. Too often the best storyteller for a particular audience can win out over someone who is constrained to telling the truth. A current example is the DRM debacle. Any competent engineer knows that the notion of locking up content from those who purchase it and view it on their own computers is technically impossible (setting aside the moral bankruptcy for a minute). The 'content owners' so much want this to be true that they are creating a market for snake-oil that appears to give them what they dream of. Which I suppose is poetic justice of a sort.