I have to say that the next feature(s) I will look for will be WiFi and a real browser. I would say that 90% of the websites I would commonly use with a phone are gibberish with a WAP browser, a good one or a bad one, makes no difference. Hell give me Lynx browser and strip out the graphics. Just something that formats the page the way it was designed. WAP is CRAP.

And after having 'touched' on some of the iPhone 'killers' like the HTC Touch, it's clear that Apple's interface is light years beyond anyone else. The other phones are just touch screens to replace mechanical buttons but they don't do a quarter of what the iPhone interface does. Sorry haters.

And for what it's worth, either the supply or pricing for flash is artificially manipulated. If you're waiting for an affordable 60GB flash iPhone, keep dreaming. The retail price of flash storage laptops is obscene.

Odd that the Iranian government would stress the importance to us they are developing one, it's not a concern of anyone else and the US would suffer some kind of apocalyptic attack if they ever believed anything to the contrary.

Odd, don't you think? I don't think these middle eastern countries fully understand the nature of tugging the tiger's tail. "I dare you!" only works if you think someone else will bail you out.

Corruption saps a country because there is limited recourse to actually enforce contracts and a have a generally reliable court system. The money part is really a side effect. If no one can trust that the court system will uphold agreements then no one will invest at all regardless of the bribes and graft.

Baksheesh. Somewhere between a tip and bribe, depending. In fact corruption and bribery are all over the world. It's fairly rampant in many places, because it's understood to be normal, expected even.

FWIW - you'd be AMAZED what a really good concierge at a top flight hotel can do for you if you 'tip' him.

Vlog is umm awful.

Is Salon officially on a reduced output schedule? Am I the only person who's noticed that the output of Salon and the frequency of new articles has dropped by half? I guess that's what happens when you turn it into a blog that flogs the same 6 people over and over. Give them more espresso, Joan.

Think of banks. They have reserve requirements that are 30%. Think of life insurance. Your probability of dying tomorrow is pretty well known. Think of a lottery. The ticket is cheap the reward is huge the odds are absurd. A run on the banks scenario is fairly unlikely.

And far and few between is the person who suddenly develops an allergic reaction to them in normal concentrations. Moreover it will spoil faster so caveat emptor. Maybe you'd be happier with a rum.

Anyway the real earth mother story is the cork. EU regs will put an end to corks made out of, well, cork, soon. The trees are endangered but the EU is mostly worried about percolation of bacteria and infectious diseases, because you know, for the last 10,000 years of wine making that's been a huge problem.

Asserting that it was an assassination attempt by some misguided dittohead out on a mission from FM Talk Radio?

BTW Arthur Bremer just got out of prison. Ask him how really crazy people try to assassinate people.

This is Lloyd's of London. Brokered shared risk pools, basically an exchange for insurance risk pools just like a stock exchange. Except they're bundling it now and packaging it so that anyone can get in on the action.

Keep in mind that it is still 'risk' aka the probability that a series of events will occur, more or less. If it was certainty wouldn't it be a strip or an annunity?

In fact what would be wrong in converting all the CDO's into a straight exchange in its own right? You could marginalize the purchases and spread the risk even further, plus you could leverage price fluctuations and sell a loss short. You could make money from losing money. Seems like a proposition worth considering.

Is your cable tv ad free? I mean you PAY for it.

It has everything to do with service. The whole like it or lump it approach to everything is why we have such shitty service in the first place. Back in the day, we all learned in MBA school that companies lose enormous amounts of money trying to get new customers to make up for lost one versus investing in keeping those customers. But no one ever learns that. No one cares. So they keep offering you shittier and shittier service and you're convinced that it's really ok because you delude yourselves that you have the option to opt out. Why do you think phone service is so hosed up? Because every carrier is no better than any other. There's no commercial advantage to them in actually being good at their jobs.

I'll give you a weird example. When you watch TV the bug in the corner is now about a third of screen, then it's animated and there's a crawl and another bug on the left corner. Coupled with commerical breaks every 6 minutes and TV is basically unwatchable. Or when you watch any Law and Order the credits continue through the 11th or 12th minute now. OK don't watch. But is that it? Don't like that the grocery store never has more than 2 cashiers open so the lines are 30 minutes long? Don't shop there.