George Takei already had a place among the stars in the minds of millions of "Star Trek" fans. Now he's taking up permanent residence as the namesake of the asteroid formerly known as 1994 GT9.

The asteroid, located between Mars and Jupiter, has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, who is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series.

huzzah -- for Star Trek and gay rights

Group renames asteroid for George Takei - Space News - MSNBC.com

ON Oct. 11, 1991, I testified about my experience as an employee of Clarence Thomas’s at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I stand by my testimony.

The Smear This Time - New York Times

In his address to the nation on Sept. 13, President George W. Bush singled out progress in Anbar Province as the model for U.S. success in Iraq.

The president's claims echoed those made earlier in the week by General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, in his congressional testimony. And they raised a question worth examining: Do U.S. military alliances with Sunni tribal leaders truly reflect a turning of hearts and minds away from Anbar's bitter anti-Americanism?

The data from our latest Iraq poll suggest not.

What they're saying in Anbar - International Herald Tribune

An Apple software update is disabling iPhones that have been unlocked by owners who wanted to choose which mobile network to use.

nasty Apple

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple iPhone warning proves true

I applaud the thousands of people, many of them poor, who traveled from around the country to protest in Jena, La., last week. But what I’d really like to see is a million angry protesters marching on the headquarters of the National Republican Party in Washington.

i've been reading Bob Herbert's OpEds in the NYT for a couple of years now and i've never read one where he's so angry
crikey if you can make someone as fundamentally decent as Bob Herbert this angry then you've really fucked up

The Ugly Side of the G.O.P. - New York Times

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

huzzah

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times

Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Online worlds to be AI incubators

Have you noticed the change in the Iraq debate?

Most American experts and policy makers wasted the past few years assuming that change in Iraq would come from the center and spread outward. They squandered months arguing about the benchmarks that would supposedly induce the Baghdad politicians to make compromises. They quibbled over whether this or that prime minister was up to the job. They unrealistically imagined that peace would come through some grand Sunni-Shiite reconciliation.

Now, at long last, the smartest analysts and policy makers are starting to think like sociologists. They are finally acknowledging that the key Iraqi figures are not in the center but in the provinces and the tribes. Peace will come to the center last, not to the center first. Stability will come not through some grand reconciliation but through the agglomeration of order, tribe by tribe and street by street.

The big change in the debate has come about because the surge failed, and it failed in an unexpected way.

Center First Gives Way to Center Last - New York Times

On a scorching July afternoon, as the temperature creeps toward 118 degrees in a quiet suburb east of Phoenix, Ric Hoogestraat sits at his computer with the blinds drawn, smoking a cigarette. While his wife, Sue, watches television in the living room, Mr. Hoogestraat chats online with what appears on the screen to be a tall, slim redhead.

He's never met the woman outside of the computer world of Second Life, a well-chronicled digital fantasyland with more than eight million registered "residents" who get jobs, attend concerts and date other users. He's never so much as spoken to her on the telephone. But their relationship has taken on curiously real dimensions. They own two dogs, pay a mortgage together and spend hours shopping at the mall and taking long motorcycle rides. This May, when Mr. Hoogestraat, 53, needed real-life surgery, the redhead cheered him up with a private island that cost her $120,000 in the virtual world's currency, or about $480 in real-world dollars. Their bond is so strong that three months ago, Mr. Hoogestraat asked Janet Spielman, the 38-year-old Canadian woman who controls the redhead, to become his virtual wife.

he woman he's legally wed to is not amused. "It's really devastating," says Sue Hoogestraat, 58, an export agent for a shipping company, who has been married to Mr. Hoogestraat for seven months. "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."

Moneyweb - Wall Street Journal - Is this man cheating on his wife?

Cash-strapped ISPs have begun a campaign to use the launch of the BBC's iPlayer on demand service to squeeze more cash from web TV viewers.

The iPlayer is still in beta and due to be fully launched in autumn. It expects to have 500,000 users before the big marketing push.
...
The move is among the first public attempts in the UK by carriers to corral subscribers into this kind of bandwidth protection pen. Traffic shaping hardware makes it possible for ISPs to deprioritise the hybrid peer-to-peer/streaming distribution systems that iPlayer, Joost, 4OD, and other new services rely on to be anywhere near watchable.

where America leads ...
ps nice to see Joost get mentioned

ISPs hijack BBC in tiered services push | The Register