] A practical joker has stirred up trouble by publishing a
] Japanese-to-English phrase book with incorrect
] definitions for every phrase!
]
] Now thousands of Japanese tourists who've painstakingly
] studied the bogus dictionary in preparation for trips to
] America are arriving on our shores only to encounter
] blank stares, hysterical laughter or even brutal beatings
] as soon as they open their mouths.
]
] "The man who compiled this dictionary clearly went out of
] his way to wreak havoc," says New York hotel concierge
] Jacqueline Porseman, who arranges tours for many VIP
] guests from Japan.
]
] "For instance, when the Japanese think they're asking
] 'Can you direct me to the rest room?' the book actually
] has them saying, 'Excuse me, may I caress your buttocks?'

Yahoo! Top Stories - Bogus Dictionary Lands Tourists In Trouble!

] Alkermes Inc. Monday said its experimental treatment for
] alcoholism reduced the rate of drinking in men by as much
] as 48 percent in a late-stage clinical trial. It did not
] work in women.

get ready to throw away the Big Book!

Alkermes drug cuts drinking in alcoholic men

] The chief architects of this rising business model are
] the 30,000-odd Indian IT professionals who live and work
] in the Valley.

The first mention of the real driver behind outsourcing to India.

More to the story...

] Diplomats from 191 countries meet this week in Geneva for
] the three-day United Nations World Summit on the
] Information Society. It's the occasion for The Helloworld
] Project to project thousands of 500-foot-high laser-light
] SMS messages onto the Geneva fountain.
]
] Internet users everywhere can post billboard thoughts
] almost instantly onto the fountain -- or onto the
] northern façade of New York's U.N. building, the face of
] a mountain in Rio de Janeiro or the front of a Bombay
] skyscraper.

It's like a sanctioned 2600 hack!

Go Tell It on the Mountain

] Are Southerners mainly people who are trying very hard to
] be old-fashioned Northerners?
]
] The phenomenon seems to go back a long, long way, and it
] may have something to do with how the South got to be the
] Bible Belt. Two centuries ago, when New England was the
] Bible Belt, the South had a reputation as an unchurched
] wilderness populated by godless heathens. Knoxville, in
] particular. In 1810, when it was capital of Tennessee,
] Knoxville was described with horror (by a
] Pennsylvania-churched minister) as the only capital city
] in the world without a single chapel of any denomination.
] But later, in that respect, the South became more
] Northern than the North.
]
] A related native of the North was prohibition. The
] American temperance movement started in Massachusetts in
] the 1820s. The idea gained some advocates in Tennessee,
] but they weren't successful in a big way until after
] Illinois reformer Frances Willard conducted her more than
] one crusade in Knoxville. She sometimes made the South
] seem as if it was behind the times because unlike
] some progressive Northern communities, we didn't yet have
] prohibition.

A very interesting observation on the collective psychology of the South.

The Old North

] Since I was self taught, I didn't find out about
] rudiments until I had already been playing along with
] records for a while and I suspect that's why I formed,
] from the very beginning, a top-down rather than bottom-up
] approach to playing; and why the sound, rather than the
] rudiments, became the centre from which I instinctively
] worked.

chris cutler

check the recommendations list...

Number Ones by Michael Jackson

] High-performance motorcycle maker Ducati has long been
] famous for its well-designed, sexy bikes. Its latest line
] of concept models, styled after some of its classic
] designs from the Seventies, was shown recently for the
] first time at the Tokyo Auto Show. But are they what the
] customer is looking for? That's the question the
] company hopes a new low-cost strategy will answer. For
] the first time, the company is turning to its website,
] www.ducati.com, to gather customer feedback. Ducati hopes
] to both improve on the designs, as well as get detailed
] information on what the customer is looking for - even
] how much they would pay - before the bikes go into
] production. Says Michael Lock, CEO of Ducati North
] America: "Ducati is very much interested in hearing
] what people think before we bring this kind of machines
] to market. And we've got to be open to changing
] things they don't like." On the following
] pages, a closer look at the three SportClassic models:
] The GT 1000, the Sport 1000, and the PaulSmart 1000.

Just for you Scott.

Fortune.com - A New Concept 

] These incarcerated female and male inmates are paying a
] price for crimes they have committed. These inmates are
] very real and are seeking you! Why not give it a try?

Thank God I'm not dating still...

Inmate Penpals.

] But as McAdams nicely puts it (so nicely that we might
] call this the McAdams theorem), you don't monopolize
] yourself.

An essay by Lawrence Lessig on the virtues of muni owned telco.

What Larry misses though is that while this might be a better solution than what the FCC is doing to enable the ILEC's to control telco, it is not the *best* solution.

It is a good point that muni owned telco can be an enabler to the community. However, muni operated _anything_ is usually the lowest of the low. Look at all the other examples: healtcare and human services, education, even garbage collection. All of these muni operated services are pathetic when compared with market operated alternatives. Yes, it doesn't make sense to deploy 4 fiber network taps to every home, just as it doesn't make sense to deploy 4 electricity taps. But where those packets of light and sine waves of electricity come from is another matter alltogether.

If you really want the solution, it's that the US government should mandate that all PLANT be owned by the people. The services which run above layer 1 can be anybody. This is no different than how we manage other key infrastructure (roads, pipelines, spacecraft, etc). It would totally eliminate the grid lock we face with the RBOCs, re-energize competition and consumer choice, and you could have a FTTH network cross country in a few short years rather than waiting decades in playing cat and mouse. Alas, this will never happen.

Fiber to the People