Is Steve Jobs About To Move His Cheese?. People were surprised last year when Disney head Michael Eisner publicly trashed Steve Jobs and Apple for their "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign, saying that it was promoting theft. Since Disney has been relying on Steve Jobs' Pixar to make many of its hit movies, it didn't seem wise to upset Jobs. Now that the Disney-Pixar contract is nearing its end, Jobs is apparently doing his best to freak people at Disney out by meeting with execs from other studios and hinting that he's going to leave Disney high and dry. As if to tweak them a bit more, Pixar has apparently started working on a movie that has a mouse as the lead character. This movie wouldn't be completed until after the Disney deal was over... meaning it could be put out by some other studio (just imagine if the Eldred decision had gone the other way, and Mickey was public domain...). Many people think that Disney and Pixar will renew their agreement, but that this "posturing" is designed to squeeze some extra cash out of Disney. I wonder how much of it, though, is simply "payback" for Eisner's comments? [Techdirt]

Egos. Egos.Egos. But as long as Jobs keeps his creative talent (which he has shown an ability to do) and Disney is bereft of new creative directions (i.e. Treasue Planet, 101 Dalmations part 2), Pixar will hold all the cards.  12:16:04 PM    

Is the Bioinformaticist an Endangered Species? [GenomeWeb]

An interesting take on Lincoln's talk. Like I said earlier, what we call bioinformatics will cahnge also and the creative minds will move with it. The people who were creating molecular biology 15 years ago are not doing the same thing today. The same will happen here. I did love this comment:

Attendee reactions to Stein's outlook ranged from inspired to disturbed, but for those paying attention, perhaps the writing was literally on the wall: Resumes on the job postings board outside the conference room outnumbered available bioinformatics positions two to one.

12:08:41 PM    

Public Release: 5-Feb-2003
£2 Million of yeast to triple available drug treatments
Researchers are to employ the humble yeast cell to greatly increase [^] perhaps even triple - the number of drug treatments for common diseases such as allergies, asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes, schizophrenia, heart disease, osteoporosis and cancer.
UK Government[base ']s DTI LINK Applied Genomics Programme

Contact: Professor John Davey
j.davey@warwick.ac.uk
44-247-652-4204
University of Warwick

[Eurekalert - Biology]

I have always liked yeast. I hope this system has been adequately vetted to make sure that these human proteins act similarly when expressed in yeast membranes. It should speed up screening though which is something that big pharma are really good at.   10:10:40 AM    

Cord blood claims questioned. Nature Feb 4 2003 8:07PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Stem cells from cord blood are not yet ready for prime time but freezing a vial away may not be a bad idea. It is better than freezing an entire body (i.e. DIsney).  9:41:13 AM    

Research sheds light on why protein-rich diets aid weight loss [EurekAlert!]

Very nice science. Leucine, which we can not make ourselves, is an amino acid that is very important for building muscle. Two groups were put on a 1700 calorie a day diet. The difference was how much high quality protein they consumed. They both lost the same amount of weight in 10 weeks, 16 pounds. The protein diet group (not really a high protein diet. more a moderate level.) lost more fat and retained more muscle than the control group. This provides some real insight and hard data regarding protein in oir diet.  9:25:42 AM    

German Patent Office Wants "Copyright Fee" On Every PC. Well, this is clearly going in the wrong direction. Apparently, folks in the German patent office think they can solve the issue of downloadable music by having computer makers charge a 12 euro per computer "copyright fee" to reimburse copyright holders who may have had their works shared. This is basically taking the surcharge that some countries charge on recordable media and applying it to computers as well. Intel very quickly came out with the expected statment saying that they felt this was a terrible idea. [Techdirt]

  9:17:10 AM    

Freak Pigs Sold At Market; May Have Been Genetically Engineered. USA Today via Drudge Report Feb 6 2003 8:50AM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

While the university proably violated an agreement with the FDA, there is actually no evidence that these pigs are ANY different than any other pigs. When you create transgenic, genetically engineered pigs, the new genes do not breed true. Not all the sex cells of the transgenic pig contain the changes. Often a very high percentage of the off-spring are normal with no hint of the novel DNA present in their cells. To get a purebreed strain of engineered animal, you usually have to do several rounds of breeding using only pigs that have demonstrated they contain the novel DNA. So, these stories are somewhat misleading. The pigs that were sold were not engineered in a strict sense. Their genome had no evidence that they contained any thing other than the normal complement of pig genes. If the pigs had altered DNA, they were not sold. This is no something for people to be worried about.  9:15:13 AM    

Major Dot-Com Retailers Begin Levying Sales Tax. theodp writes "Some of the nation's largest retailers this week started voluntarily collecting taxes on all of their online sales--not just shoppers who live in the states where the companies maintain actual stores or distribution centers. Wal-Mart, Marshall Fields, Target, Toys R Us and Mervyn's each posted new sales tax notices on their web sites in the past week, possibly as part of an agreement reached with 38 states and the District of Columbia to absolve retailers from any liability for taxes not previously collected on Internet sales. Looks like we'll find out soon if it's no big deal! " [Techdirt]

well, I guess the states won't have to do this themselves. They got the online stores to do this for them. But smaller businesses will have to keep track of the sales tax for every state and deal with the distribution. This could have a huge impact on the ability of smaller companies to do this. And when will cities decide they need to get involved, adding another layer of complexity that smaller companies must use profits for? With the economy so bad, I am not surprised but it will be damaging to many companies that are just barely making it. You can not collect a tax when there is no company.  9:09:11 AM    

States Mining Data To Boost Tax Revenue. Found over at Politech is this news article about how local governments, amazignly desperate for tax revenue are turning to data mining tools to find out where people cheated them out of tax dough. As an example, they talk about a guy who was "caught" after LA officials sorted through 324,000 documents to discover that he owed (wait for it...) $100 in a tax he didn't even know existed. Apparently, the same sort of systems are being used to track down people who buy things in sales-tax free states and ship it into other states. So, for those of you who have been buying things online via merchants who don't charge sales tax, you may suddenly discover a tax bill on your doorstep from your money hungry state government. [Techdirt]

Hum. I wonder how the states hope to collect. Is California going to try to extradite someone from Washington for a $100 tax bill? There will have to be something else going on. It seems to me that the hassles of dealing with tax payers who call to just question the bill will cost more than the presumptive bill.  9:02:16 AM