A new Air Taxi company, Linear Air, raised $1mm in funding this week. With commercial air travel so distressing, there is a future in these services.

Daniel Okrent, the public editor at the NYT finally weighs in on the paper's WMD coverage: "Even in the quietest of times, newspaper people live to be first. When a story as momentous as this one comes into view, when caution and doubt could not be more necessary, they can instead be drowned in a flood of adrenalin. One old Times hand recently told me there was a period in the not-too-distant past when editors stressed the maxim 'Don't get it first, get it right.' That soon mutated into 'Get it first and get it right.' The next devolution was an obvious one."

The Pentagon response to the debated "wedding story" out of Iraq: "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said.

Gore quotes Israel's Supreme Court in anti-bush rant: "Listen to the way Israel's highest court dealt with a similar question when, in 1999, it was asked to balance due process rights against dire threats to the security of its people:
'This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they (add to) its strength.' "

The NYT has a long article today on the death of the sitcom, entitled The Laughter Is Fading in Sitcomland.

The article, in essence, blames the demise of the format on structural issues, namely: a) the changing tastes of "...a whole generation now that has been weaned on all kinds of different comedy," and b) the relative cost efficiencies of producing reality TV.

But it is not until the last paragraph of the article that a kernel of the truth is revealed:

"'If somebody comes up with a show that's as well written and smart as `Frasier' or `Raymond,' everything will be all right,' said Ms. Naegle of United Talent Agency."

Oh, right. It's quality content that matters, not all of the shifting demographics hooey.

In case DSBPI readers are not following the Chalabi story, the latest news we are sorting at HQ is that Chalabi, one of the Pentagon's main pre-war intel sources on Iraq, was actually working with Iranian intelligence -- passing fake info to the US and real US info to the Iranians. Holy crap.

Wes Clark in a Washington Monthy article entitled "Broken Engagement": This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck. "

Bill Gates comes out in support of blogging: "What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate,' Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit."

Does this have to do with DSBPI's comments to Steve B?

DSBPI has - for about two years - thought that Tom Friedman has jumped the shark. In writing about the Indian election results today, he shows that he hit his head hard on the way down:

"I think I can explain what happened, but first I have to tell you about this wild typing race I recently had with an 8-year-old Indian girl at a village school."

Who is the ad wizard that came up with this one: Airline to give free tickets for being nice. "We always give away products when people have a problem," Song chief executive John Selvaggio said in an interview. "I'd love to see what happens when you give away a ticket for somebody doing something good."

DSBPI Entrepreneur in Residence has suggested starting a free email service that offers one zillion gigabytes of free storage. He believes he can take this company public in three months at a market cap of $300 trillion.

Another challenge to machines' ability to sort data - this time multimedia - is introduced by HP's research intoalways-on cameras that capture "life's fleeting moments." The description sounds out of Vanilla Sky: "Spontaneous, unguarded, fleeting -- they're often the moments in our lives we most want to photograph. But these moments are also those we frequently miss -- gone before we could reach for a camera. But what if we could easily capture such priceless moments? What wouldn't most of us give to have picture albums full of them?"

I am the CIO of DSBPI and I have decided to junk our Microsoft Exchange server and Outlook in favor of Gmail. Now I won't get those calls from Harlan in the IT department on weekends screaming about some corrupted .PST file or some such nonsense. I won't have to send out those system administrator "Mailbox Over Size Limit" emails and I won't have to keep on adding storage because the bird-brained DSBPI analysts never delete attachments. OK, so GMAIL doesn't have a calendar yet. Use a pen meanwhile. I'll send you a pack of those Pilot Vball Grips in Extra Fine that you love. OK, so you have to look at some ads with your mail. Ninety percent of your email is not work related anyway - I know, I read it.

Oh yeah, since there are no more out-of-office auto-replies, you can reach me in Langkawi if you need a new Blackberry or something.

How relevant is knowledge with turbo-powered search engines on our terminals and in our palms? If all that is known is accessible instantaneously in a companion brain - a 3G Pocket PC or such - connected wirelessly to terabytes upon terabytes of cheap storage, what will we use our most valuable storage resource to hold?

Today, the processing power of our brains is increasingly taxed by all of this cheap, accessible, digital storage -- the burden is still largely on us to find and filter amid an ocean of data. Our search tools, based around keywords, are primitive -- a butter knife not a scalpel. We still need to know enough to ask the right questions of the network.

But as information retrieval becomes smarter, our brains' processing power, along with its storage, will increasingly be free to create; further filling the silicon servers.

Note to future doctors dreaming of standing on the sidelines at Mile High stadium, while counting the benjamins, the NYT reports A New Trend: Team Doctors Pay the Team: "In an upside-down scenario spawned by an increasingly competitive health-care market, hospitals and medical practices � eager for any promotional advantage � have begun bidding to pay pro teams as much as $1.5 million annually for the right to treat their high-salaried players. In addition to the revenue, sports franchises get the services of the provider's physicians either without charge or at severely discounted rates."

The NYT reports that a Panel Urges New Protection on Federal 'Data Mining': "A federal advisory committee says Congress should pass laws to protect the civil liberties of Americans when the government sifts through computer records and data files for information about terrorists."

If you like Clancy, you'll love Hersh: The New Yorker: "Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were completely read into the program,the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. We're not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness, he said. The rules are "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."

Some DSBPI intern decided to futz with the blog layout.  What is this, the IKEA blog?

Google explains what happens when you search for the word Jew. And uses some Matrix-esque language: "Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for 'Jew' brings up one such unexpected result."

"House of Bush, House of Saud" in effect: "6:38AM Saudi oil minister calls on OPEC to increase output : Bloomberg.com reports that Saudi Arabia's oil minister said the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries should increase quotas by 6.4%, causing the biggest drop in crude oil prices in more than a month. Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi said OPEC should boost its output target by 1.5 mln barrels per day, from 23.5 mln now."

From The New York Times Magazine The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines: "Slot machines are in fact for those well into the second half of life. Manufacturers design games primarily for women over 55 with lots of time and disposable income, and casinos near retirement communities in and around places like Phoenix and San Diego operate small fleets of jitneys that shuttle back and forth to assisted-living centers. As a come-on, one casino advertises free oxygen-tank refills for its players, and heart defibrillators are increasingly becoming standard equipment inside casinos. If a good portion of the younger set today is hooked on video games, it seems that the over-60 crowd has its own similarly hypnotic fixation. ''For older people, it's a safe environment,'' Baerlocher says. ''There are cameras and security guards everywhere. You can go to one place and shop and eat and be in a crowd even if you don't know anybody.'' As one old Las Vegas hand put it, the country's casinos are now providing ''day care for the elderly.''

The Guardian races Google against a phone and the library:On your marks, get set, search ...

US interrogators threaten detainees with the prospect of being shipped to the jurisdiction of less law-abiding nations. The Taguba report might obviate the need for that threat.

Using modern technology, it seems that the presidential campaigns are able to not only target the swing states, but the swing counties, and likely the swing voters themselves.

We are constantly told that these swing voters will decide the upcoming presidential election. Perhaps, they really should. Why not have the handful of swing voters in Albuquerque, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Miami just vote and let the rest of the country go on with its life without the bother of all this back-and-forth on Kerry in Vietnam and Bush in Iraq.

Or maybe if Ralph Nader agrees, Bush should just be automatically re-elected.

DSBPI Middle East analyst ran into crazy man Steve Ballmer today in the Tel Aviv Hilton and of course asked him about blogging. While he is not a subscriber to this blog, Ballmer did voice support for Microsoft employees blogging if they had the "time and passion." Ballmer, though, explained that while he may have the latter, he doesn't have the former.

He also said that Bill G. gets on average six million emails each weekend. Some the DSBPI have spoken to doubt the veracity of that claim, unless of course there is a secret "BCC Bill" function in every Outlook that is shipped.

DSBPI returns from a visit to Denmark, appropriately timed with May day, as Scandinavia’s capitalism is probably the globe's closest to socialism.

When you walk the streets of Copenhagen, the homogeneity of the population is striking. And it is this very sameness, the unity of peoplehood, that enables a 60% tax rate (not to mention 150% car tax and progressive property tax). The poor and rich are of the same blood, and likely the same religion. They are not separated by race, birthplace or language -- as is often the case in the U.S. (As an aside, in Denmark, the government pays students $800/month to attend college.) The relatively low tax burden in the US, along with the lack of a real social safety net, reflects the nature of an immigrant nation, where the poles of the socio-economic continuum largely mirror a racial distribution, where the wealthy have little in common with the destitute.

DSBPI postulates that the less diverse a society the greater capacity for progressive tax policy.

Why is the new Audi campaign using William H. Macy as its spokesperson? He should be the rep for the DSBPI's broken down, crapped-out 1985 Volvo station wagon, not some German-engineered roadster.