A man jumps in the air from
the top of one of the stones as the sun rises over Stonehenge.
Photograph:
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 1272 in
E flat, performed by the Quartetto Italiano for a 1968 Philips recording:
In good news, slimebucket John Rigas and his reptilian
son Timothy Rigas were sentenced
to 15 and 20-year prison terms for stealing
at least $100 million, looting Adelphia
Communications Corp., hiding $2.3 billion in debt, bank fraud, securities
fraud and conspiracy, bankrupting a billion-dollar company, destroying the
retirement security of investors who trusted them and generally being repulsive water rats with the ethics of corrupt third-world kleptocrats.
First CoffeeSM has absolutely no sympathy
whatsoever for contemptuously dishonest businessmen, and the Rigases are among the worst. The Associated Press
reports that Judge Leonard Sand asked Rigas’s lawyer “Do you see what he
did? What he did to Coudersport, what he did with assets and by means which
were not appropriately his? To be a ‘great philanthropist’ with other people’s
money really is not very persuasive.”
Amen. Look, America works because we’re still basically a culture of trust. First CoffeeSM
lives in a lovely place, the beautiful Turkish Mediterranean coast. The Turkish
coffee’s excellent, climate’s warm, the food’s great and people are nice but
you don’t really trust anyone. You’re surprised when businesses are honest and the
plumber or auto inspector doesn’t screw you or ask for a bribe, because
traditional Turkish culture is not a culture of trust. Turks don’t really trust
anyone not of the same extended family.
You’re nuts to invest in a Turkish company if you’re not
related to management, with the result that Turkey, a land blessed with amazing
natural resources, a self-sufficient food supply, prime geography and
hardworking people is poorer than it should be since most Turks with money
invest it in places they can trust, like America.
America’s a culture of trust, which is why America is the
dominant world economic power. In America you’re surprised and angry when you
get screwed by a business, because you expect businesses to be honest. Here in
Turkey you shrug your shoulders and say you should only do business with those
you know personally.
Cultures where trust runs along family and clan lines
instead of along the rule of law, unless they have oil to sell are almost
always poor because they can never mobilize capital, and the slimy cockroaches
who undermine that trust, the dry rot of American business, the John and
Timothy and Michael Rigas, the Kenneth Lays, Bernie Ebberses, Dennis
Kozlowskis, Mark Swartzes, Franklin C. Browns, Martin Grasses, Jamie Olises and
Richard Scrushys, whose ethics fit squalid third-world kleptocracies deserve
full prosecution of the law.
...
Irving, Texas-based etalk, a quality monitoring software and
services vendor, has announced a
partnership with Call Design, a products and consulting
services vendor for Australian and New Zealand call centers.
Under the terms of the agreement Call Design will market,
distribute, install, and support the full range of etalk products throughout
the Asia/Pacific region.
Call Design will also slog through the two-week, intensive
etalk installation boot camp to become certified on the company’s Qfiniti
platform. It’s the exact same training etalk field service engineers undergo,
covering product installation on the wide range of switches with which etalk
integrates, best practices, troubleshooting, and “training the trainer” –
learning to teach customers how to use and support etalk products.
…
Wilder, Vermont-based AIRS, a vendor of advanced sourcing
products for talent acquisition professionals, announces the launch of AIRS Engage, a contact management and
networking platform for recruiters.
AIRS Engage is being billed by company officials as “the
recruiting industry’s first true ‘CRM’ style contact manager,” offering what
they claim is “a set of features and functionality unavailable in traditional
ATS platforms or generic sales CRM systems.”
Comparing great recruiters to great sales people, Christian Forman, CEO of AIRS
said AIRS Engage is “a networking and prospecting platform, designed
exclusively for recruiters and sourcers that is focused on prospects, not just
job candidates.”
It allows enterprise and workgroup sharing, list and contact
view, database search capability, e-mail, call and activity journaling and
integration with Spoke, a Web-based database of 30 million personal profiles
and corporate data on 500,000 organizations.
If you find such things helpful.
…
The Sydney
Morning Herald is reporting this morning that Aussie Internet broadband
service provider Unwired Ltd “is in talks regarding a potential fund raising.”
Currently operating only in Sydney, it plans to expand to
the rest of Australia based on its roaring success in Australia’s largest city
– it reports 25,000 customers in Sydney after launching just nine months ago at
a cost of $25 million U.S.
It’s already the largest broadband wireless network in
Australia. Expansion would require a network building project costing about $62
million U.S., according to an analyst.
“Research firm investment house UBS says the Australian
broadband subscriber base will increase from around 2.51 million at the end of
calendar 2005 to 4.05 million at end 2008. Most of the growth is expected to
come from dial-up subscribers migrating to broadband,” the Morning Herald reports, and “Australia’s internet household
penetration rate is set to reach 84 per cent at end 2008 and the broadband rate
to hit 51 per cent.”
…
NEServices is announcing the introduction
of two new BlackBerry-based services,
Content Beamer for work server access and its ThinPrint component for printing.
Content Beamer
for BlackBerry software, due to be released this summer, brings the ability to print e-mail and attachments to any BlueTooth
enabled printer. By using either a portable BlueTooth printer or a
Parallel/USB BlueTooth adapter, BlackBerry owners can print at enabled
locations – customer site, hotel, airport, et al.
Content Beamer’s ThinPrint component provides printing capabilities at the
nearest BlueTooth enabled printer from a notebook, PDA, or mobile telephone
with BlueTooth capability, without installing print drivers or other software
components.
Public Printing, currently available in partnership with Hyatt Hotels, lets
customers access a special website of the Public Printing service provider,
select the needed file, and click the upload button to send the file to the
Public Printing server. The customer then receives a code from the website,
goes to the nearest Public Printing kiosk or enabled business center, enters in
the code and gets the print job. “Files can even be requested in one airport
and printed in a second destination, ready for pick up upon arrival,” company
officials claim.
…
Didn’t First CoffeeSM see you with the other
druids at the summer solstice
celebrations at Stonehenge this morning, 4:58 a.m. on this the year’s
longest day?
According to the left-wing English newspaper The
Guardian, before dawn King Arthur Pendragon, 51, the head battle chieftain
of the British Council of Druids, led a troop of “warriors” – college anthropology
students – in a dance honoring mother nature.
“The solstice is about the death and regeneration of nature,”
the king, dressed in a white gown and wearing his sword, said. The bearded
chieftain fought for Stonehenge to be reopened to the public following the
infamous Battle of Beanfield in 1985.
King Arthur said the summer solstice signified the mythical
oak king, who rules the first half of the year, being beaten in battle by the holly
king, the ruler of the second half of the year. “Celebrating the summer
solstice is part of our religion,” he said. “We celebrate the shortest day, the
longest day and the two equal days.”
First CoffeeSM used to date a Holly King. Wonder
if it’s the same one?
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