Could we really be about to see what the West Wing foresaw? A real convention, or better yet, two of them?! Where neither party has a candidate with a clear majority by convention time? Where a third place candidate gets to play kingmaker (or not!) with his or her supporters?

How exciting would THAT be?! Damn, I'd sure watch the conventions then!

Don't let the reporters programme the elections!!

He quit too soon!

Until a true front-runner appeared, he had a chance to drain delegates and play a true {King|Queen}maker...and he threw that chance away for what?!

He's now forced Democrats into a straight up & down choice and limited his and their leverage going forward.

A unbelievable mistake and a sad day for Democracy.

Surely Dobbs ain't talkin' about us!

No longer a brick, better quality sound than Kirk's (though I still envy his signal being able to reach orbit!)

But whatever you do, don't try crossing the US Border with one!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/06/AR2008020604763_pf.html

When did you guys cross the line and turn into the Soviet Union? Paranoia will destroy ya.

So Blu-Ray has "won", but I predict a Pyrrhic victory. Who needs another spinning disc in the budding era of high-capacity solid-state memory?

As the NY Times notes in it's article "Toshiba Concedes Defeat in the DVD Wars": (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/technology/20disc.html)

"On Tuesday, [Toshiba’s chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida] announced that Toshiba and an American partner, SanDisk, would spend at least $16 billion to build two flash memory plants in Japan."

The spinning disc is a legacy of Edison and his wax-cylinder sound recording technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Already, companies like Nokia are shipping films like "Spiderman 3" on flash memory with their leading mobile phone offerings here in the UK. Samsung are already offering 64GB flash memory laptop SATA drives. And a company called BitMicro has announced an 832GB flash drive at CES last month.

A movie (HD or otherwise) on disc is just bits and it makes no difference to the film where it's stored, on a DVD, Blu-Ray, flash drive or hard drive...you just need capacity to store it.

The future is, once again, Star Trek. Think Spock, or Uhuru, and of the brightly coloured data units they plugged into the Enterprise computers.

In a few years time, you'll be buying your movies on what looks like a credit card and you'll plug it into your computer or your TV, or your dedicated player and storage for your films won't take bookshelves.

And THAT will be a worthwhile reason to upgrade. And I'll bet Toshiba will be making the chips and a lot more money than Sony will ever make off of Blu-Ray.

Bah, we'll kick your butt like the last time and burn your White House to the ground...again!

In the meantime, Go Canada Go! :) .../One Happy Canuck

Just watching Paulson on Bloomberg here in London...is it just me or does he look and sound nervous, scared and uncertain? Or is this his normal demeanour... :-/

I once bought a pocket sized book of Ukrainian folk songs and recipes from a drunken merchant in a small bazaar next to the L'viv opera in Ukraine. He didn't want to sell it to me initially but eventually acquiesced when I promised to pass it onto my wife when I got married (these things aren't for men, you see!)

Anyway, the book contains recipes for Borshch with Mushrooms and Black Plums, Borshch with Meat Dumplings, Kievan Meatless Borshch, Volynian Borshch, Chernihivian Borshch, Galician Borshch, L'vivian Borshch, Red Borshch, Tomato Borshch, Polissian Borshch, Feast Day Borshch with Dumplings, Cold Summer Borshch, Borshch with Leftovers, Green Ukrainian Borshch, Green Borshch with Caraway Seed and Hetman's Borshch.

And there's more than just those!

Travel into the Ukrainian countryside (and I think back to visits to my aunts and cousins in West Ukraine) and you can find as many variants as you can find cooks.

I count three separate varieties of borscht in my own personal repertoire.

Your link to the Time article is incorrect:

ttp://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/04/the_first_starbucks_recession.html?xid=rss-curious

I wonder exactly how many protesters are well read on China and Tibet, understand the issues and are carrying well-formed opinions into the protests?

I suspect the percentage is dismally low.

I'm more of a political junkie the vast majority of people I know and I know enough about Tibet & China to know I don't know enough to have an opinion. But hey, a day out at the protests is a lot of fun, eh?

The Canadian and the Ukrainian in me, having grown up with a double dose of Neighbour-as-Goliath syndrome what with the US and Russia, sympathizes naturally with the Tibetans.

However, I can't see how throwing yourself in front of the torch does anything more than give you a fun memory to recount down the pub. It's not going to change China, that's for sure!

Then again, maybe I'm just annoyed Canada's perfect record in the World Curling Championship's round robin stage was ruined by an upstart Chinese rink in their first Championship. ;)

If there's one thing that I can think of that's worse than daily doses of Lou Dobbs' outrage, it's lawmakers telling journalists that they're "overstepping" their bounds.

And we thought only the realm of economics needed regulation. Where are all the ombudsmen when you need them?