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Since I began radio broadcasting 27 years ago, I have tried to come up with ideas for New Year's resolutions for myself and my listeners. Virtually each time, I have advocated one resolution in particular: For every couple of letters of complaint or oral complaints we communicate about someone or about some company, we should write a letter or make a call to commend someone or some company. Did you complain about an airline or about a flight attendant in the past year? No problem. But if you have never cited an airline or a flight attendant for stellar performance,...

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies--including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia--took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas. Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif., and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:45 p.m....

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia. The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story."It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the...

November 24, 2009 Price War Brews Between Amazon and Wal-Mart By BRAD STONE and STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM Ali had Frazier. Coke has Pepsi. The Yankees have the Red Sox. Now Wal-Mart, the mightiest retail giant in history, may have met its own worthy adversary: Amazon.com. In what is emerging as one of the main story lines of the 2009 post-recession shopping season, the two heavyweight retailers are waging an online price war that is spreading through product areas like books, movies, toys and electronics. The tussle began last month as a relatively trivial but highly public back-and-forth over which company had...

Swine flu has hit an isolated tribe of Indians in the Amazon jungle, with seven dying in the last two weeks, Survival International said on Wednesday. A further 1,000 members of the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela are believed to have caught the flu, the indigenous peoples rights group said. It is feared the flu could sweep through the area and kill many more Yanomami as the Indians have little resistance to introduced diseases. About 32,000 Yanomami live in the Venezuela-Brazil border region and form the largest relatively isolated tribe in the Amazon. Survival director Stephen Corry said the situation was...

For sale on Amazon.com for only $39.00 Teleprompters and Nobel Peace Prize not included

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, is on course to break sales records following its launch today. The online retailer Amazon said that it was the “biggest grossing pre-order product of all time�, having overtaken the likes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Nintendo’s Wii. Speaking at the launch of Windows 7 yesterday, Jeremy Fennell, Category Director at DSGi, which owns Dixons, Currys and PC World, said: “We have sold more copies of Windows 7 in three weeks on pre-order than Vista sold in its first year.� At midnight, queues could be seen outside stores as computers users...

A new book by pro-family activist and attorney Matt Barber, who famously was fired from Allstate for writing – on his own time and on his own computer – about his beliefs about marriage, has been attracting all sorts of negative attention on Amazon.com. But his publisher says the critics are writing their comments without having access to the book, since he's kept tight control of the select few advance copies made available to reviewers and no one else has seen it. "The Right Hook: From the Ring to the Culture War" by Barber, a pro boxer, insurance investigator, lawyer...

NEW YORK – An online book special offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is turning into a full-fledged price war with Amazon.com. Wal-Mart got things started Thursday, offering $10 prices on such upcoming hardcover releases as Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" and John Grisham's "Ford County," a cut of 60 percent or more from the regular cost. Wal-Mart will also offer free shipping. Amazon.com, the largest online bookseller, matched the $10 price, prompting Wal-Mart to take its offer to $9. By Friday morning, Amazon.com also had priced the books at $9. The price cuts come at a time when Seattle-based Amazon.com and...

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched a brash price war against Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday, saying it would sell 10 hotly anticipated new books for just $10 apiece through its online site, Walmart.com. That was just the beginning.

WSJ: "Walmart launched a brash price war against Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday, saying it would sell 10 hotly anticipated new books for just $10 apiece through its online site. That was just the beginning. Hours later, Amazon matched the $10 price, squaring off in a battle for low-price and e-commerce leadership heading into the crucial holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart soon fired back with a promise to drop its prices to $9 by Friday morning -- and made good on that vow by early evening Thursday." Wal-Mart: The splashy move to discount pre-orders of popular books such as Stephen King's "Under...

One year ago, Sarah Palin burst onto the national political stage like a comet. Yet even now, few Americans know who this remarkable woman really is. On September 3, 2008 Alaska Governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that electrified the nation and instantly made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

Book seller Barnes & Noble is expected to announce its own e-reader next week, and a new report states the device will sport both black-and-white e-ink and a multi-touch, iPhone-like color display. New information and photos of the device were provided to Gizmodo, which revealed that a majority of the device will have a traditional e-ink display, much like the Amazon Kindle, which provides superior battery life. It will be a 6-inch screen with an 800x600 pixel resolution. But the bottom portion of the device will have an LCD color display sporting multi-touch technology. It will be used to browse...

Commentary: Behemoth cuts prices on its Kindle e-book reader SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Amazon.com Inc. cut prices on its Kindle electronic book reader for the second time in three months, gearing up to stave off the looming competition from a host of new e-readers about to descend on the market.

The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average. One of the Web's little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five.

I am trying to upload, via Amazon DTP, a document that has Chinese characters. If I upload a Word document, I get a message saying that the upload failed because of Unicode conversion problems. If i convert the Word document to a PDF, the upload happens, but instead of seeing characters, I see question marks. Can I upload Chinese characters via DTP? Thanks.

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I am using the Digital Text Publishing tool of amazon.com. I would like to upload, as a test, a short Word document that has a single image, along with text. I save the Word document as filtered html, and see that both image and text appear in the result. I then upload it, using DTP. However, when I preview, I find only the text. The image is missing. What is going on, and how can I upload the image? Thanks.

One superb innovation of recent times is the readers' review section on Amazon.com. Here ordinary people get to voice their opinions, acting as cultural watchdogs to shield their fellow book lovers from duds. Certain individuals have built quite a reputation for themselves online, their aperçus vying with the phoned-in ruminations of the snooty, burned-out hacks who masquerade as professionals at our top magazines and papers. Of course, some reviewers can get a bit coarse and personal in the rough-and-tumble world of Internet interfacials, but for the most part these gifted amateurs inject a much-needed breath of fresh air into the...

A deadly tropical plant called the Devil's Snare, which is usually found in the Amazon, has grown in a couple's Suffolk garden to the bemusement of experts. Phyllis Abbott, 79, spotted the first unusual shoots in her border flowerbed in spring, which has now grown into a five foot tall Datura Stramonium. It is used by South American Indians to poison their hunting spears, arrows and fishing hooks and in sacred ceremonies by Hindu monks for its hallucinogenic qualities. ts poison causes dry mouth, blurred vision, heart irregularities, hallucinations, and eventually coma and death in severe cases. She and husband...

Owners of Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader have received a nasty surprise, after discovering that copies of books by George Orwell had been deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge. The books - downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users - were remotely deleted after what the US company says was a request by the publisher, MobileReference.com. Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were "no longer available for purchase". "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store," a...

For those with a strong stomach, take a look at accused pedophile, Duke Professor Frank M. Lombard's book wish list for Amazon.com. His choice in reading material tells it all! I hope Amazon has checked out these books to make sure the "boys" pictured in them are of legal age. http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1CP5PE0OHRG4G?tag=section_wishlist-20

Retailer Amazon.com has cut off its relationship with affiliates in North Carolina effective today, report people who have been involved in the company’s marketing program. Affiliates helped Amazon sell by advertising books, music and other goods on their Web sites. If a customer clicked through those links and bought something on the Web site, the affiliate received a share of that sale. “We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009,” reads and e-mail Amazon sent to its affiliates today. “This is a direct result of...

Henry Ford didn't just want to be a maker of cars — he wanted to be a maker of men. He thought he could perfect society by building model factories and pristine villages to go with them. And he was pretty successful at it in Michigan. But in the jungles of Brazil, he would ultimately be defeated. It was 1927. Ford wanted his own supply of rubber — and he decided to get it by carving a plantation and a miniature Midwest factory town out of the Amazon jungle. It was called "Fordlandia." Leonor Weeks DeCeco was 8 years old...

Companies are likely to challenge the Amazon Kindle by unveiling cheaper, more versatile e-readers, moving beyond books, and striking better deals with publishers, according to a report released Monday by Forrester Research. "Amazon.com, leveraging its position as a dominant book retailer, has catalyzed the market for eBooks, but that's just the beginning of the eReader revolution," writes Forrester media and technology analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in the report. "Competitors will attack Amazon's market position by launching new features, expanding content beyond books, dominating markets outside the U.S., reducing costs, and improving relationships with publishers."The eReader market has been hot, notes...

Amazon.com on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter. Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said. Amazon has worked out a...

I've spoken to an Amazon.com employee who works closely with the systems involved in the glitch. The employee asked me not to share his name because of company policies on talking with the media. On Sunday afternoon at least 20 Amazon.com employees were paged alerting them that items, possibly many, were incorrectly being flagged as adult. The employees also received links to the Twitter discussion AmazonFail. Thousands of people were angry that gay-themed books had disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings and search algorithms. The number of Tweets on Sunday afternoon that had the term "AmazonFail" surpassed even those with the...

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove "adult" titles from its sales rankings. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a "glitch" had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new policy regarding "adult" titles. As of Monday morning, a number of titles affected by the glitch were still without sales rankings. No one at Amazon was available this morning to...

After the disasterous weekend, with the internet abuzz over a new policy to remove sales rankings from books deemed "adult," a new theory is developing that Seattle-based Amazon was the victim of conservative cyber-vandals. It was discovered that Amazon has been removing the sales rank from certain books (which identifies how popular the book is in total sales), effectively removing the book from most of the general searches people would do. If it doesn't show up in the search, most people won't find the book, and won't buy it. Most of the books identified as "adult" and removed from the...

Archaeologists have discovered about 10,000 cave paintings dating back to more than 6,000 years, a pre-Incan cemetery and a citadel in Peru’s Amazon region. 6,000 year old cave paintings Quirino Olivera, a Peruvian archaeologist working for the Andean country’s jungle department of Amazons, has discovered about 10,000 cave paintings that are said to date back more that 6,000 years. The paintings were discovered in caves near the village of Tambolic, in the district of Jamalca, province of Utcubamba, writes Peruvian Times. Olivera said that most of the drawings show hunting scenes and were painted using red, brown, yellow and black...

The Amazon basin is well known for its wide variety of species, but the rainforest might owe some credit to the mountains as a source for that rich diversity. A new study found that populations of poison frogs made their way from the Andes to the Amazon about a dozen times over the last 10 million years. Scientists suspect that the mountains have long been supplying the jungle with other species of plants and animals, too.

Obama made the crack Saturday in the Oval Office after a meeting with Brazil's president.

While meeting with the Brazilian President yesterday at the White House, President Barack Obama could not resist taking a shot at Republicans by making a joke during a brief joint-press briefing. Obama was asked when he would visit Brazil and if he would visit the Amazon, and he replied he would love to visit the Amazon, and he suspects Republicans would love for him to "travel through the Amazon and get lost." Obama again shows how to treat a visiting head of state with dignity and honor! As usual, it's all about the big "O" and his crusade against the...

Seattle, WA (LifeNews.com) -- Massive online retailer Amazon.com has dropped its listing for a controversial Japanese video game called Rapelay that involves raping women and forcing them to have abortions. The so-called "rape simulator" game was sold on the web site and included a graphic description of the gameplay. Although a listing for the product is available through online searches, the link to it on Amazon's web page no longer functions. Gaming web sites that have reviewed the simulation describe the "tears glistening in the young girl's eyes" as the player attacks her in graphic detail.

Amazon.com Inc., pushing further into the digital distribution of books, unveiled a thinner and faster version of its Kindle electronic-book reader but raised controversy among publishers and others with a new text-reading feature. "Our vision is every book ever printed in any language all available in 60 seconds," said Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos at a Monday press conference in a New York library. The Seattle company also said it has a new work by best-selling novelist Stephen King, called "Ur," which will be available exclusively on Kindle. Originally launched in November 2007, Kindle has been so popular that it...

On Monday Amazon is expected to announce the second version of the Kindle, its powerful electronic book. Most gadget freaks expect some significant improvements, including a better keyboard layout and less intrusive navigation controls. The most interesting question about the device almost certainly will not get answered, however. That is: Can the Kindle save the publishing business? The blogs already say the new Kindle will still be an oyster white, with an easy-on-the-eye gray screen slightly smaller than a mass-market paperback. The blog Boy Genius Report last week had purported pictures of the new device. Unlike the first Kindle, the...

Forgive my vanity but I want to post the review of Guilty by Ann Coulter that I posted on Amazon.com. I finished reading it last night and thought it excellent. I knew about B. Hussien Obama's ploy against Jack Ryan to gain the Senate seat but did not know/realize he pulled the same trick earlier against a primary opponent.

New Jersey's most popular beach town is about to make a decision that has been unpopular with environmentalists around the world -- using wood cut from the Amazon rainforests to repair a section of its boardwalk. Wildwood, voted the state's best beach last summer by vacationers and others, will become the latest of several New Jersey communities opting to use the more durable rainforest wood to build or fix boardwalks. Environmental groups contend the world's tropical rainforests are being wiped out by logging to satisfy demand for this kind of wood. Mayor Ernest Troiano Jr. said Wildwood reluctantly turned to...

Funny (in a pathetic way) how Ann's book is being reviewed by the hate-spammers on A.com, who haven't read it. Or haven't seen her lately, either, since a few of them think she still has her jaw wired shut. By the pattern of reviews, it's clear that reviewers either love or hate her, with most reviews falling on the extremes of the spectrum, either 1-star or 5-star. And the reviews and discussion threads read like FR. Except. Those who hate tend toward the highly intellectual insights such as . . . "I am no Liberal, but ann is an A...

SEATTLE (AP) -- Amazon.com Inc. said Friday that the 2008 holiday season was the online retailer's "best ever," with more than 6.3 million items ordered and 5.6 million units shipped during its peak day on Dec. 15. Amazon's upbeat take on the holiday season bucked the drumbeat of generally dismal news from retailers. Holiday sales typically account for 30 percent to 50 percent of a retailer's annual total, but rising unemployment, home foreclosures, the stock market decline and other economic worries led many shoppers to slash their shopping budgets this year.

Chevron faces potential $27 billion bill in Amazon pollution lawsuit When the sun beats particularly hot on this land in the middle of the jungle, the roads sweat petroleum. A Rhode Island-sized expanse of what was once pristine Amazon rainforest is crisscrossed with oil wells and pipeline grids built by Texaco Inc. a generation ago. And for the past 15 years, a class-action lawsuit has been winding its way through the courts on behalf of the more than 125,000 people who drink, bathe, fish and wash their clothes in tainted headwaters of the Amazon River. Now a single judge is...

Amazon, Britain’s most popular website for Christmas shopping, is making its staff work seven days a week and threatening them with the sack if they take time off sick. The company charges among the lowest prices for products ranging from books and CDs to sofas and lawnmowers, but those who use Amazon.co.uk or its US counterpart Amazon.com this Christmas may be unaware of the harsh conditions it imposes on staff. Last year the company achieved global profits topping £2.2 billion. Behind the scenes Amazon, which can expect its busiest day of the year tomorrow, is employing thousands of casual workers...

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization. But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

Recent photos of an "uncontacted tribe" of Indians near the Brazil-Peru border have sparked media reports of a hoax, but the organization that released the images defends its claims and actions. The photographs, which showed men painted red and black and aiming arrows skyward, were released in late May by Survival International, a London-based organization that advocates for tribal people worldwide. The release stated that "members of one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air,"

From the front page of Amazon.com. Republican books are outselling Democrat books by a wide margin. Updated hourly. If sales are any prediction, the GOP is doing better than the media is reporting. Which Party Do You Support?Which is selling more? Updated hourly Republican 64%   36% Democrat › Find out more about this meter Discuss

Amazon.com has found a way to capitalize on one of the most interesting presidential elections in U.S. history. The Seattle-based retailer introduced an interactive map of the U.S. showing which states are "red" or "blue" based on their online book purchases. Although it's not meant to predict the next president, it suggests that the right's slant on the Obama-McCain matchup is more widely read than the left's. For now, 36 states are pink or red. Six are blue. And eight, including Washington and Oregon, are purple, meaning residents are virtually split in their political book purchases between Republican and Democratic...

One of South America's few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru. The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land. The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows. More than half the world's 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. Stephen Corry, the director of the group - which supports tribal people around the world - said such tribes would "soon be made extinct" if their land was not protected. 'Monumental...

Dramatic photographs ofpreviously unfound Amazon Indians have highlighted theprecariousness of the few remaining "lost" tribes and thedangers they face from contact with outsiders. The bow-and-arrow wielding Indians in the pictures releasedon Thursday are likely the remnants of a larger tribe who wereforced deeper into the forest by encroaching settlement,experts said. Rather than being "lost", they have likely had plenty ofcontact with other indigenous groups over the years, saidThomas Lovejoy, an Amazon expert who is president of The HeinzCenter in Washington. "I think there is an ethical question whether you can inthe end keep them from any contact and I think...

Perhaps it is nothing more than a legend, as skeptics say. Or maybe it is real, as those who claim to have seen it avow. But the mere mention of the mapinguary, the giant slothlike monster of the Amazon, is enough to send shivers down the spines of almost all who dwell in the world’s largest rain forest. In some areas, the creature is said to have two eyes, while in other accounts it has only one, like the Cyclops of Greek mythology. It's said to be more than seven feet tall and covered in thick, matted fur. The folklore...