“I can smell the sea from here,” says the prisoner. That seems a wild improbability coming from a man in a soundproof cell in northern Malaysia, several miles as the gull flies from the closest salt water. All I can smell in this humid, whitewashed prison is the faint tang of ammonia used to clean the floors.

It is hard to know what to believe of the prisoner’s claims. At times he has declared his innocence and then later confessed to being a willing criminal. He mentions he has three children, later the number is four. His passport lists his name as Johan Ariffin, but Malaysian authorities doubt that’s his real name. His age is noted as 44 (streaks of gray in his black hair make that plausible) and his residence as Batam, an Indonesian island just south of Singapore. Men like him often come from Batam, a guard says.

Though his jailers remain unsure who he is, they know exactly what he is: lanun (pronounced la-noon). When asked for a direct English equivalent, an interpreter explains that there is none, that it is a word freighted with many layers of culture and history. The short, imperfect answer is: The prisoner is a pirate.

Dark Passage: The Malacca Strait

There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.

It's so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. And if the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.

...

Instead of going to venture capitalists with a business plan and trying to convince them to fund it, you can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a working company instead of a plan for one. Then instead of having to seem smooth and confident, you can just point them to MemeStreams.

This way of convincing investors is better suited to hackers, who often went into technology precisely because they felt uncomfortable with the amount of fakeness required in other fields.

... if you hear someone saying "we don't need to be in Silicon Valley," that use of the word "need" is a sign they're not even thinking about the question right.

If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who didn't have the energy to move.

This is not a nationalistic idea, incidentally. It's cities that compete, not countries. Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich.

There's something about big companies that just sucks the energy out of you.

The Future of Web Startups

Google is planning to expand its staff by a third, with most of the new hirings in Europe, as the internet search company tries to avoid being seen as an aggressive American multinational.

“We are not seen correctly in Europe,” Mr Mattos said. “My impression is that Google is seen as a big US company that is here to make money."

Well, now they'll be seen as a big US company that either doesn't understand itself or can't tell the truth.

Would they rather be seen as a company that is "here to lose money"?

Presumably the logic is, we want to do great things, and if the money shows up, well, that's just gravy.

Google sets sights on Europe growth

I don’t know anyone who’s really satisfied with the quality of the mobile Net experience. Surely there’s something more interesting than Blackberry-style mail?

Here’s one problem: fixed-rate data plans.

The conventional wisdom is that businesses ought to focus on their core competences. For mobile network operators, those would be bandwidth and billing. So, here’s a recipe for blowing up the mobile-network business and making the world better and also a whole lot of money.

I am a fan of flat rate access to content, but this is an interesting perspective.

Flat Rate Considered Harmful

If you liked Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent, you may also like this.

Most meetings drive us crazy. They drive productive people especially crazy. But most meetings aren't as wasteful as they seem.

Meetings publicize information about status. They bestow social intelligence.

Meetings, like Facebook, are a kind of running social theater.

If you simply try to make meetings shorter or less frustrating, you don't get what meetings are about.

In Favor of Face Time, by Tyler Cowen | Forbes

A spectre is haunting global capitalism, the spectre of Naomi Klein. Wherever globalists wander, they find her standing in their way, sternly shaking her finger like a schoolteacher handing out bad marks.

Her new book, The Shock Doctrine, requires that we hack through a thicket of self-contradictions and wild overstatements. For her, hyperbole is not a literary device, it's a way of life.

If you can manage to read Klein, you need read no more. Learn her way of thinking and you'll not be required to think again.

A friend to Hezbollah, an enemy of logic

Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation, called back to clarify what "excessive usage" means and why the company's actions to end its relationship with these customers is good for gamers. First, Douglas defines Comcast's "excessive use" as any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.

So if you have two channels of Internet radio running all the time, you are going to get dropped from Comcast. If you listen to Internet radio during the day, and you use your Netflix WatchNow subscription in the evening, you are going to get dropped from Comcast.

What will non-technical customers think of this? People will relate it to other media delivery mechanisms. Can you imagine your satellite TV provider calling up to complain about your "excessive use" of the television? Can you imagine your NPR affiliate calling to ask you to turn off the radio more often? You know, when you're not "really", seriously, listening to the program?

This plays right into the DSL propaganda about "dedicated" bandwidth.

Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy

Just today, workers placed the last steel beam atop the Shanghai World Financial Center, the world's third-tallest building. Sure, it doesn't soar quite as high as Taipei 101. But at 492 meters, it's pretty darn tall.

For sheer absurdity, though, nothing tops Burj Dubai, already the world's tallest building at an estimated 545.7 meters. Check out this photo, which was taken last Friday:

Something huge is growing in the desert

If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup.

If you move to San Francisco, the peer pressure ... will [keep you alive].

When startups die, ... I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized.

Startups almost never get it right the first time. But don't sit around doing nothing. Iterate.

As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track.

The number one thing not to do is other things.

If you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

How Not to Die

The tools that modern central banks possess to address liquidity problems can only directly address such runs inside the traditional banking sector, and do not directly touch the non-bank financial sector, which has been hardest hit by the current credit crisis.

James Hamilton, a professor at the University of California, warned that – as in old-fashioned bank runs – sudden demand for liquidity can lead to a firesale of assets that depresses their price, making otherwise solvent institutions insolvent.

Paul McCulley, managing director of Pimco, said there was a “run on the shadow banking system”.

Credit turmoil ‘has hallmarks of bank run’ | Financial Times