Gregory Aharonian says that over 200 software patents are now issued every week, with more this year than in the 1960s to 1991 combined. As usual, he's upset about it: this year wasn't that much more productive than previous ones, and most of the patents are or should be invalid. IBM is using its excessively large patent portfolio -- 7K out of the 80K active US software patents -- to extract 1%-5% royalties from other companies. It can sometimes threaten enforcement of a dozen patents, with defense against even one such suit costing more than $100K. Even a preliminary patent search and legal response may cost $10K-$20K. [BW. , PATNEWS, 07May97.] (Aharonian is also upset about IBM's support of the "fraudulent" Software Patent Institute, offering "a database useless for everyone, but giving an opportunity for IBM to discover if its massive prior art archive in Thornwood is missing anything." He would rather see official Patent Office files online, and decent prior-art searches.)

Xerox is suing US Robotics for infringing Patent 5,596,656 for stylized handwriting recognition for portable computing devices. Aharonian says that similar ideas were already in use for OCR and non-portable devices. "I am buying a share of stock in Xerox and US Robotics. If Xerox wins, I file a class action stockholder's suit against USR for not being able to bust this patent. If USR wins, I file a class action suit against Xerox for wasting Xerox resources on filing the patent and not doing a decent search [before filing] and then asserting the patent and not doing a decent search [before litigating]. I can be enough of a nuisance to squeeze out $20,000 or so out of one of the sides :-)". [, PATNEWS, 07May97.]

Sued companies are often choosing to settle out of court rather than search their email archives to satisfy the electronic discovery process. It's partly a privacy matter, but mostly just too much trouble (or too big an expense). "Discovery is being used as a tool of oppression, rather than as a tool of fairness." [Miami Herald, 01May97. EduP.]

Simon Lucas recently published "Rapid Best-First Retrieval from Massive Dictionaries by Lazy Evaluation of a Syntactic Neural Network," in Pattern Recognition Letters, Vol. 17, pp. 1507-1512. (Not available online). His method outperforms a conventional trie-based method for dictionaries of more than 100K entries -- e.g., 1M UK postcodes -- and actually gets faster as dictionary size increases. or , (+44) 1206 872900 Fax. [connectionists, 02May97.]

AltaVista's new Live Topics shows you Web pages clustered by shared subtopics. Some of the displays require a Java-enabled browser. Move your cursor over a category to see the subtopics, for query refinement. You can even start with "+*", which gives you 20 clusters covering most of the Web's 40M pages. . [Internet-on-a-Disk, 20Apr97.]

Autospec Thematics is a free conceptual and "fuzzy filtering" tool. See , or search for AUTospec or +FUZzy +PIDgin on AltaVista, . [Stanley Rice , IRLIST, 07Apr97.]

SemioMap makes a Java applet and a search tool which coordinate to display clusters of topics on the Web (or in any other data collection). . [Matt Neuburg , TidBITS, 31Mar97.]

DataBuster is an Internet engine for "intelligent data mining" or high-relevance searching. When used as a shopping agent, Aptronix, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) claims it will return over 50% useful hits. Try a demo at . [, comp.ai, 14Mar97. David Joslin.]

ReSearch Central lists 150 search/research resources in nine categories. Particularly good for writers. The site has ties to writers.net, the "writer's essential guide to online resources and opportunities." . [Gary Gach , comp.infosystems.www.announce, 24Mar97.]

answers.com is a search process powered by human beings. Ask a question, get an answer backed with citations, references, and links to additional information -- for a small fee. Both internet and traditional reference sources are used. Fast facts, $1.79; moderate research, $5.99; extended research, $11.99. (Somewhat higher if needed in less than 24 hours.) Free trial. . [PRNewswire, 11Dec96. Pat Gantt , microbiz.] (answers.com is one of the idealab! start-ups from Bill Gross. Others include CitySearch, SmartGames, and PeopleLink.)

PriceScan says it will find you the lowest prices in the industry on computer hardware, software, and peripherals, plus comparison price listings at other locations. Then just click to get contact information. Advertiser-supported, so it's free. Unfortunately, the search engine is awkward to use. . [WEBster, 29Apr97.]

Time Warner is ending its interactive TV/banking/shopping experiment in Orlando. The trial with 4K families may have cost $700M. [Washington Post, 02May97. EduP.]

Analyst George Gilder is predicting the death of TV, and faults Microsoft for buying WebTV. He sees this as "regressing toward the competition" (in the words of Kim and Mauborgne) instead of pioneering the future. Old technologies such as TV have problems -- technical, political, social -- that resist solution. We should pursue opportunities, not waste effort on insoluble problems. Bill Gates will soon discover that TV is a "problematic distraction... in an arena where no one has really won in ten years." WebTV "offers inferior Internet services on and inferior interlaced screen." The installed base of 200M homes will hinder TV companies from moving into Internet markets. "All these TV chasers will suffer a bruising fall when TV tumbles over the paradigm cliff." (Ouch. :-) [Gilder Technology Report, May97.]

Seagate CEO Al Shugart says "I think that the Web is a big hype job. I think that the use of the Internet is fairly limited to people in the media. ... If you find somebody who spends four hours a day surfing the Web, they're really not a very balanced person." [SJM, 04May97, 1D.]

A survey by America's Research Group suggests that consumers who have tried buying over the Internet are not eager to do it again. The Internet business explosion may take another decade. [IBD, 30Apr97. EduP.]

The FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection says that surfing the Web for investment scams will now be a regular part of their enforcement activities. [WSJ, 25Apr97. EduP.]

A list circulating on comp.forsale and comp.forsale.computers names two dozen individuals and companies said to have ripped people off via the Internet. The charges range from "ships dead hardware" and "won't honor warranties" to "asks for prepayment, ships nothing" and "pathological thief." I recognize a few of the reports as having been circulating on Usenet for several years. Once on such a list -- even through just one disgruntled customer -- getting off may be difficult. [, 10May97.] (Frontier justice, I guess. Or an electronic picket line. There's a National Fraud Center database to which such cases can be reported, but I don't know if it's effective. The Better Business Bureau is becoming active on the net, but is aware that con men can easily pirate the BBB logo. (If you click on the logo, it's supposed to bring up some info pages about the business and its promise of service. If the click instead takes you to the BBB home page, you've found a pirated symbol.))

On a lighter note, a satirist named "billg40@tiac.net" maintains an apocryphal"Secret Diary of Bill Gates." . There's even a Japanese version of Bill's megalomaniacal musings. [David Plotnikoff, SJM, 04May97, 2E.] (It's so hard to block the rip-offs and yet let the satire through...)

265K laptop computers were stolen in the US last year, with a value of almost $805M. That number is up 27% from 1995. In Canada, one can fight back with CompuTrace: a hidden software program that dials home every two weeks. The call is automatically traced and the computer's location is reported. US companies are not allowed to use AT&T's caller ID to sell services to a customer, even for such a good cause. [IBD, 05May97. EduP.]

Nacomex USA hosts the Stolen Computer Registry, with serial numbers of stolen computers. Free listings. . [26Jul96.]

In Europe, use the Eurregionet Register of European Stolen Computers (ERESC) to check whether a machine is stolen. . [25Jul96.]

Internet Lost and Found is a database of items reported lost or found. . [04Oct96.]

Bertrand 1.1: symbolic logic solver for the Mac.

Generator: genetic-algorithm multivariable optimizer for Excel.

Lily (LIsp LibrarY): C++ class library for LISP-style code.

ILU 2.0 alpha10: free CORBA object request broker (ORB) for C, Java, Python, C++, and Common Lisp.

JAVAR: free restructuring compiler for parallel Java.

DCE 1.2.2: distributed code environment, free for internal use.

TIN (Totally Ignorant Nitwits): Alife engine.

Terrain Map 3.0: terrain modeling, visualization, and mapping.

Raw and ASA-coded EEG data, from Lester Ingber.

CSSA: college-level introductory poetry course with AI/NLP interface.

Arabic software products, from Aramedia Group.

Sonority theory and NN to segment speech, from David Brandt.

Finite-State Language Processing: book ed. by Roche and Schabes.

Solving the Frame Problem: book by Murray Shanahan.

Engineering Intelligent Hybrid Multi-Agent Systems: book by Khosla and Dillon.

Multiple Model Approaches to Modelling and Control: book ed. by Murray-Smith and Johansen.

Computational Learning Theory and Natural Learning Systems, Vol. IV: book ed. by Greiner, Petsche, and Hanson.

Neural Processing Letters, "the international journal for rapid publication of neural network research," is soliciting contributions. . Free issue on request. [, comp.ai.neural-nets, 05May97.]

The Information Society journal is also soliciting refereed papers and proposals for special issues. . [Rob Kling , IRLIST, 05May97.]

Context sensitivity and concept drift; Machine Learning Journal, Summer 1998. 15Sep97; Gerhard Widmer , +43-1-53532810, +43-1-5320652 Fax. . [connectionists, 30Apr97.]

Logic-based heterogeneous information systems; J. of Logic Programming, Spring 1999. 15Sep97; V.S. Subrahmanian , (301) 405-2711, (301) 405-6707 Fax. [dbworld, 01May97.]

Integrating multiple learned models (IMLM) for improving and scaling machine learning algorithms; Machine Learning Journal, Aug98. 01Oct97; Philip Chan , 407-768-8000 x7280, 407-984-8461 Fax. . [connectionists, 10May97.]

Image technology for WWW applications; J. of Visual Communication and Image Representation. 01Dec97; Shih-Fu Chang , 212-854-6894, 212-316-9068 Fax. . [Huitao Luo , comp.multimedia, 12May97.]

Information retrieval on oriental languages; Int. J. on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages (CPOL), Sep98. 02Jan98; Prof. Jong-Hyeok Lee , +82 562 279 2253, +82 562 279 5699 Fax. [comp.ai, 10May97.]

The Priory On-Line Bookshop is offering up to 10% off texts and CD ROMs, with free delivery world-wide, from publishers such as Kluwer and Harcourt Brace. . [Ben Green , sci.med.pharmacy, 31Mar97.]

Amazon is adding a million out-of-print, hard-to-find books to their stock of 1.5M books in print. Useful for bibliographic searches as well as ordering. . [Internet-on-a-Disk, 20Apr97.]

Digital Bindery records your favorite Web pages and delivers them to you by email whenever they change. . [Netsurfer's Digest. Network News, 04Apr97.] (The email may be large if you choose to have images included.)

The DailyQuote brings you an inspirational quotation each day. Send a "subscribe daily-quote-l" message to , or sign up at . [Thomas Leonard , NEW-LIST, 04Mar97.]

Another Quote of the Day service has started up. (I'll call it QOTD3, following QOTD and QotD.) Write to Archie Kregear to be added to the list. (Be sure to include the 'k' in archiek.) [Dan Galvin , TFTD, 06May97.]

-- Ken