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The public space travel business is picking up suborbital speed thanks to a variety of private rocket groups and their dream machines. Joining the mix is Blue Origin's New Shepard Reusable Launch System. It is financially fueled by an outflow of dollars from the deep pockets of billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. The Bezos-backed Blue Origin, LLC commercial space outfit has recently turned in a draft environmental assessment (EA) for their West Texas launch site to the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (AST) in Washington, D.C. The document is the best glimpse yet of...

SEATTLE - Amazon.com Inc. said Monday it had modified the way its search engine handles queries for the term "abortion" after receiving an e-mail complaint that the results appeared biased. Until the recent change, a user who visited the Seattle Internet retailer and typed in the word "abortion" received a prompt asking, "Did you mean adoption?" followed by search results for "abortion." Spokeswoman Patty Smith said the automated prompt was purely based on technology, and that no human had made the decision to show the question. "Adoption and abortion are the same except for two keystrokes," Smith said. "They also,...

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 26, 2005--Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that the 2005 holiday season finished as its best ever, with the company's Holiday Delight-O-Meter surpassing 108 million items ordered for the first time. The 2005 holiday season also brought another single-day record with the Delight-O-Meter tracking more than 3.6 million items ordered, or 41 items per second, on Dec. 12th. "To our customers around the world--thank you," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "We are grateful to our customers for shopping with us this holiday season and we wish everyone a happy new year." Worldwide 2005 Holiday Facts...

Some of you may remember the review of Rick Santorum's book that I posted a couple weeks ago on this thread: Give the Gift of Santorum this Christmas. Well, some of the usual suspects on the left obviously stood up and took notice, too, and did what comes natural to them--they spam voted the good reviews out of the 'spotlight review' section and voted in two negative reviews, one of which is simply an exercise in name-calling. Note that this is not an Amazon.com-inspired attempt at trashing Rick. It's a coordinated use of the Amazon.com "helpful" buttons by political ideologues...

A STEAMY novel by I Lewis "Scooter" Libby has become a hot item now that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff is under indictment. An inscribed copy of The Apprentice: A Novel, which Libby wrote in 1996 when he was a relative unknown outside Washington, was on sale on online bookseller Amazon.com today for $US2400 ($A3280). Unsigned hardcover copies were going for $US700 ($A956). Now out of print, the novel tells the story of an innkeeper apprentice in a bizarre coming-of-age story set in Japan in 1903. It is littered with edgy sexual material and strong language. "Wow, who...

An Amazon spokesperson said that the online retailer had no plans to post a donation link on its site. "Each case is different," she said. "The Red Cross has essentially given over its entire site to donations. The tsunami came out of the blue, so it was an 'all hands on deck' situation, but the Red Cross has been getting ready for this and getting its message out there for several days."

SEATTLE (AP) - Soon after Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) debuted 10 years ago, Jeff Bezos and his handful of employees spent late summer nights packing books in a tiny warehouse, scrambling to ship a growing gush of orders. Today, the man who has grown accustomed to being hailed the king of Internet commerce runs a global powerhouse that did nearly $7 billion in sales last year, dealing in everything from banjo cases to wild boar baby back ribs. As more businesses beef up their online operations, is the company that helped get it all started in danger of seeing its dominance...

As the Koran-flushing-in-Cuba episode becomes old news, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has helpfully found a way to keep Koran desecration in the public eye. It does so – and I draw on MPAC's two press releases (here and here), plus reports from the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times – by promoting the story of one Azza Basarudin, who bought a copy of the Koran, Oxford University Press edition.A doctoral candidate at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in Middle East studies, Basarudin ordered the volume in early May from Bellwether Books, a used book store...

IN A SINGLE Sunday, the New York Times managed to call iPods unhip and denounce high school theater as a “refuge of nerds and spazzes.” Talk about having one’s finger on the pulse of pop culture. With the media in the doghouse according to mainstream America, is it really wise to insult Broadway and Apple in one day? I think we should all go Times Square and listen to “West Side Story,” freshly downloaded from iTunes, Apple’s online music store. That would send the Great Gray Lady straight “Into the Woods” for sure. We could protest all the way to...

Instead of pitchers and catchers, the opening of baseball's spring training seemed preoccupied by syringes and steroids. One day after stores began selling former American League MVP Jose Canseco's book of doping allegations, the New York Yankees, Washington Nationals, and Cincinnati Reds opened their training camps. In his first press conference, Yankees manager Joe Torre faced a torrent of questions about the proliferation of performance-enhancing drugs in America's pastime, with the subject taking the first half-hour of the 45-minute session: "It doesn't go away, unfortunately." In light of the quick sales of Mr. Canseco's new book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant...

It's happening again--liberals are all over amazon.com giving "reviews" to upcoming books like Ann Coulter's "How to Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)". Just as with the Swift Boat book, they're slamming a work before it's even out...and they clearly haven't read it, of course. I complained to amazon.com about this. For an example, see below: Customer Reviews Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers. 1 of 2 people found the following review helpful: A pile of strawman arguments and distortion of truth, September 2, 2004 Reviewer: Crowsdreamofdeth (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews The...

Please forgive the following vanity... Over the past couple years, I have gotten into the habit of reviewing everything I read on Amazon.com. I read a good bit and have posted about 40 reviews so far both negative and positive. I find that it's also a good way to alert people to books and other products with strong anti-American/anti-Christian themes and laud those with a positive message. Many times have I myself been steered away from certain books because of critical reviews thoughtfully posted by others of like mind on Amazon. I've never had a problem posting a review until...

I rarely notify folks about a scam, but this is the most sophisticated "spoofing" scam that I have seen (where they send you an e-mail saying you need to update your account, faking an e-mail address to try to get you to give them your credit card). It did not get sent to my bulk folder. Instead of only directing you to his website, this scammer has the gall to then redirect you to the REAL Amazon.com site. You do NOT see the referring website in the process, so it looks like you go directly to the Amazon.com page unless...

Pushed by an appearance on C-Span today by author Jack Cashill, an exposé on the mysterious death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown has shot up the best-sellers' charts. "Ron Brown's Body: How One Man's Death Saved the Clinton Presidency and Hillary's Future" cracked the top 100 on Amazon today within hours of Cashill's appearance on television, and has since risen into the top 60s, and No. 7 on the non-fiction list. The book previously reached the No. 5 spot on BestBlackBooks.com's top 100, the definitive best-seller list for black-themed books. Cashill says "credit goes to Book TV for airing a...

(I first submitted the following movie review to Amazon.com on May 20. On May 26, I resubmitted it. At 926 words, it is well under the site’s 1000-word limit, and I “bleeped” all foul language with dashes. And yet, Amazon’s politburo killed the review without explanation.) Waking the Dead is perfectly mediocre: 50 percent wonderful, and 50 percent dreadful. It tells of a man’s reaction to the mid-1970s political murder of the love of his life, a love whom he cannot bid farewell. Set during the early 1980s, we see flashbacks to his love affair, as in the present, while...

RatherBiased.com has received official confirmation from an ad executive at CBSNews.com that the network's Web site is a business partner with Amazon.com. In an interview, CBSNews.com sales director David Ghiraldini verified the existence of the relationship but declined to discuss the partnership or its ethical ramifications for a news organization profiting from the sale of controversial political books. Ghiraldini became defensive after reading our earlier item which first disclosed the partnership, a story which he repeatedly insisted was "incorrect." When asked repeatedly what parts of RatherBiased.com's story were in error, Ghiraldini declined to do so, insisting only that the story...

Earlier I saw a post about a group that was raising money from companies which would donate to their cause. shoptodropbush.com. Their stated goal is to raise funds for the DNC, the eventual Democrat candidate for POTUS, and "movingon.org" Amazingly, among its sponsors listed were Amazon.con, Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, and somewhat ironically the Worldwide Cigar Club. Amazon includes Target and Toys R Us. Unlike the site's sponsors who are of the ilk to continuously condemn our 'greedy corporate culture,' I admire corporate community outreach, but don't appreciate donations of this sort by companies that get a LOT of...

More NAMBLA pubs from your friends at Amazon.com. I wrote them a note a few years back when they started selling this trash and they returned a smarmy note about censorship -- like that was more of an issue than pedophiles. If you buy stuff from amazon.com, you indirectly support this.

(Suppressed amazon.com review) Who'll Stop the Rain? Making Ends Meet:How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Workby Kathryn Edin, Laura LeinRussell Sage Foundation, March 1997$22.00, ISBN: 087154234X 3 1/2 stars out of 5 During the early 1980s, social scientists noticed that welfare mothers were spending three to six times their official incomes. In his exquisitely written foreword, Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks argues persuasively that in a "conspiracy of silence," conservatives didn't want to admit that mothers could not survive on welfare checks alone, while "liberals" didn't want to admit that clients had unreported resources. Jencks and his colleagues asked where...

(Suppressed amazon.com review) Who'll Stop the Rain? Making Ends Meet:How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Workby Kathryn Edin, Laura LeinRussell Sage Foundation, March 1997$22.00, ISBN: 087154234X 3 1/2 stars During the early 1980s, social scientists noticed that welfare mothers were spending three to six times their official incomes. In his exquisitely written foreword, Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks argues persuasively that in a "conspiracy of silence," conservatives didn't want to admit that mothers could not survive on welfare checks alone, while "liberals" didn't want to admit that clients had unreported resources. Jencks and his colleagues asked where the additional money...