A Map of Languages in the United States

The United States of Texas

U.S. and United Nations Hold Talks on
Iraq's Future (Reuters)

IRIN - United Nations Integrated
Regional Information Networks

United Nations WSIS: Irish Prime
Minister talks about value of IT

United Nations Selects Wavecrest�s Cyfin
Reporter for Web-Use Management

Al Capone shouldn't represent the United
States

Vital Statistics of the United States

Legal gay marriages in the United States

Massachusetts has become the first state in the US to allow same-sex couples to get married. Whether it will last or be crushed under the weight of a Constitutional amendment I don't know, but it's bloody wonderful in the meantime:

Other towns and cities across the state were also prepared to wed large numbers of same-sex couples as the law came into force. The Supreme Court ruling upheld a decision by the state's highest court. It said that denying marriage licences to same-sex couples violated anti-discrimination laws.

The Massachusetts ruling has fuelled heated debate across the country - and the controversy has been particularly intense in an election year. In a statement, President Bush said he had called on the Congress "to pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. The need for that amendment is still urgent, and I repeat that call today." His rival John Kerry - who is a Massachusetts senator - is also opposed to same-sex marriages, but favours a more limited form of legal recognition.

I think the issue of gay marriage only started to matter to me when I realised that many of my gay friends actually wanted to get married. And on the day when a friend of mine showed me a marriage booking form online in San Francisco and I started looking for the section for gay people and there wasn't one - It was all the same form... That affected me too I think - to realise that while it was clearly an issue at the moment, the whole point of this battle was about completely collapsing that difference around relationships. That's a pretty cool goal...

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Historical Statistics of the United
States

People of the United States, why is
everyone yelling at you???

won't end the world's distrust of the
United States

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United Nations Tech Summit Ends With
Internet Expansion Plans

Michael Rubin on Iraq & United Nations
on National Review Online

nationalreview.com/comment/rubin200404141147.asp
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VideoRay Underwater Robot Aids United
Nations in Tsunami Cleanup

Teraserver has the Entire United States
Mapped

Even the president of the United States
sometimes must have to stand naked

Two decades ago I had the odd and daunting experience of defending my undergraduate thesis, on several of Shakespeare's plays, before a panel of scholars. While hardly as rigorous as the real orals a PhD thesis is supposed to be subjected to, this encounter was part of what my department at Harvard required for graduation, and I faced it with some trepidation.

When I walked in, I was introduced to William Alfred, the playwright, poet and English professor. I hadn't studied with Alfred, and had no idea what to expect from the rumpled man. He broke the ice with a simple question: At the start of "King Lear," Cordelia refuses her royal father's demand for a profession of love. There's a foreign phrase that describes her act in legal terms -- what is it?

I'm not sure how many layers of my brain I had to dig through to find it, but somehow I retrieved the desired answer, the medieval label for an injury to the royal office: "Lese majeste!" Alfred's eyes twinkled; my response seemed to satisfy my interrogators' basic requirement of literacy, and from there, all went swimmingly. (Alfred, a brilliant and generous soul with whom, alas, I only had a handful of further conversations, died in 1999.)

Of all things, this distant recollection popped into my head after I finally caught up with Michael Moore's much-debated "Fahrenheit 9/11." Many words have already been flung across the political spectrum about the movie. I will limit my contributions to this one phrase: What Moore has, I think, accomplished, particularly in the movie's more coherent and better-assembled first half, is an outrageous and highly effective act of lese majeste.

George Bush campaigned as an informal man of the people, and he did not carry a very dignified bearing into the Oval Office. (Remember that strange boil on his face during the Florida recount?) But from 9/11 on, his team of handlers began to weave a cocoon of larger-than-life pomp around him. Partly, it was what the nation wanted; it was also smart political opportunism. It has, to be sure, frayed some since the Iraq war and its attendant scandals. The "Henry V"-style bullhorn at ground zero struck a chord with many Americans; the "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier stunt backfired.

But "Fahrenheit 9/11" methodically dismantles this president's carefully manicured dignity: It says to the viewer, "Pay attention to the man behind the curtain -- he's smaller than life." The movie's most indelible sequences are those that show our president as he really was in the face of the great crisis of 9/11: Not, as we were told by Showtime' s "DC 9/11," a stirring take-charge commander, but a passive photo-op participant who sat paralyzed for achingly long minutes of "My Pet Goat" rather than take the initiative to say "excuse me" to the class and leave the room.

My colleague Andrew O'Hehir drew a connection between Moore and Dario Fo, the Italian playwright/performer most famous for his assaults on the dignity of the papacy. To be sure, Moore has none of Fo's skills as a physical clown and only a fraction of his instincts as an entertainer; Fo is an artist, while Moore is chiefly a propagandist. Still, it's a good comparison: The two men share a willingness -- more than that, a ferocious determination -- to strip away the niceties of ceremony from powerful men so that we can see their misdeeds.

That refusal of deference is, after you get past all the various problems with "Fahrenheit 9/11" as documentary and as history, what counts. The TV networks (though they thought nothing of rummaging through the details of Bill Clinton's tawdry sexual escapades) have decided to protect Bush from unflattering images. It falls to Moore to dig up the footage of protesters pelting his inaugural limousine with eggs, and play it for us again.

By the end of "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore has flung his own messy indictment at the presidential portrait, and it won't be easily cleaned up. The filmmaker is deliberately, methodically, overflowingly disrespectful at a moment in our history when there's far too much respect in the land. When the throne holds an ignorant, incompetent, profligate pretender, lese majeste becomes a patriotic duty.

2003 Statistical Abstract of the United
States

"donate to United States Presidental
candidates "

"Bill Clinton, Former President of the
United States"

United States Patent Application:
0050071741

appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p =1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01& s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741
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What's really wrong with the United
States medical system?

Think of it as eBay� for Cigar
Aficionados - CigarAuctioneer.com Lets
Cigar Smokers Get Their Favorite Cigars
at the Price They Want to Pay

Vodafone 3G Coverage in Azores

Close but no cigar

"The Cigar Marine "

Love note to a cigar

Lighting was smooth, though there was a little channelling (caused, I fear, by my own cackhandedness rather than any rolling fault, but easily rectified). Impressively firm ash, with the typical Nicaraguan whiteness to it, and solid to at least two inches. It’s a medium smoke, a good newspaper and coffee smoke, with non sense of bitterness at all. Indeed, once up to cruising speed, it’s rather blissful: it draws very well, doesn’t linger on the palate, but it calls to you from your hand. Fruity, perhaps, with a slight hint of spice, but nothing too post-prandial. The Sumatran wrapper gives some sweetness, and the ligero filler the complexity and the ummmph. In all, bloody nice.

Siebel's SMB Story: Close, But Still No
Cigar

eBay Today: No Cigar? How About The
Bands?

Cigar Review: Cupido Campana

Schwarzenegger's cigar tent flooded
(Reuters)

The explosive device is a foot long and
shaped like a cigar

weeklyworldnews.com/conspiracies/61525
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The Cuban Revolution

Cuban: No wimping out

Cuban vs. Google: It's On!

Cuban on Sweat

Cuban artists

One of our friends has a young Cuban lover and she goes to visit him there periodically.  This situation spurred some reflection:  "Why are there so many artists and musicians in Cuba?"The next thought "Well, why not?"In the U.S. when Johnny decides to ignore his family's advice and take up oil painting or guitar playing instead of investment banking it is a big crisis.Johnny is very likely giving up the opportunity to own real estate, send his kids to private school, and otherwise enjoy the great festival of materialism that is the United States.  In an economy with hardly any opportunity, however, why wouldn't a person choose to do art or music?

Art doesn't require a lot of capital investment.  You really just need a crayon and some paper (or scissors and paper if you were Matisse).  If human ability is equally distributed across the globe you'd therefore expect the best art to come from the poorest countries where people have no competing bourgeois job offers.  Yet paradoxically the art for which people are willing to pay the most money seems to come from advanced economies such as Germany, England, Japan, and the U.S.

For the comment section:  Why?

[I'll start by throwing out a personal opinion:  art can only touch you if the artist shares a similar social and economic environment, which is why Westerners mostly like the art that is produced in Western countries; art produced in poor countries is actually much better but we can't appreciate it because, despite heavy doses of ecotourism, we can't understand the milieu in which it was produced.]

Accusations fly over Cuban Internet

Cuban on Music Retailing

Mark Cuban, Longtailer

1. He's promoting HDTV the right way, by commissioning and distributing content. 
2. He's funding the Grokster defense. 
3. He's a real blogger, warts and all. 
4. He says that he won't use the broadcast flag. 
5. He got the idea of reinventing TV a decade ago, and his work lives on in Yahoo!'s excellent video search and music video services. 
6. He doesn't believe the RIAA. 
7. He sent a team to cover the Iraq elections, live, in high-def. 
8. He has a successful reality TV show. 
9. He really gets the Long Tail: "Popular items are just that, popular. My guess however is that in absolute numbers, the long tail of the download distribution curves, both in terms of number of songs and in number of songs downloaded, overwhelm the number of copyrighted songs illegally being downloaded."

What's at stake is the realm of ideas, sliced and diced a million ways. The peer-to-peer music sites are the closest current approximation to the celestial jukebox we all want. Kazaa, for instance, has 25 million unique tracks, dwarfing iTunes' measly 1 million. BitTorrent has more videos than Blockbuster. Much of it is pirated, to be sure, but a significant portion of it — videogame highlights, say — was never intended to be moneymaking in the first place. The problem is that we don't know how to stop the piracy without chilling the creativity.

The main flaw in the case against Grokster is that the action attempts to criminalize a technology rather than a specific use. It also fails to distinguish between commercial content and noncommercial content. Restricting these powerful new distribution tools to fight piracy would hobble the new emerging creative class too. The potential collateral damage to legitimate users is much higher than in the Betamax case.

Mark Cuban, DVD killer

I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge. No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.

Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment. Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.

Which leads to the question — What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?

"Cuban assures us he's not "The Donald""

Mark Cuban On The Death Of The CD

Three Minutes With Mark Cuban

Two more Cuban dissidents freed

Mark Cuban on the future of HD Media

Interview With Mark Cuban About Grokster

Cuban dissidents held at Gitmo?

No Waste, a booklet about Cuban
recycling

Mamma Slides as Cuban Sells

"Like those who smuggle Cuban goods into
their country."

Mark Cuban to fund Grokster vs. MGM case

Why The United States Just Doesn't Get The United Nations