Spencer
Wolfe

You think Americans are into fiber for their cereal? Where fiber really counts is in the streets. In the US, the majority of consumers use internet access via a cable television company. The most predominant must be Comcast. Of course there is a lot of DSL as well as it allows broadband over a standard telephone.In Japan, we've got DSL but what we really have is fiber. Commonly known as FTTH (or fiber to the home). It is in the streets as you can see by the picture above. It is commonly available to both the consumer and to the office. With speeds of 100 mbps. Great!An expert recently said that Japan and Korea have the best broadband in the world right now. Japan actually has the cheapest broadband to top that on a per packet basis.

When eBay announced 2 years ago that they were going to buy Skype for billions of dollars, the first reaction from this technology person was that they overpaid. Evidently, that has been confirmed now. Very unfortunate.

Check out the article here.

Sepo land, brilliant!

Time once again to review the winners of the Annual "Stella Awards."

The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot
coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's (in USA). That case
inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful
lawsuits in the United States. Here are this year's winners (from 5th to 1st
place)

5th Place (tie):
Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her
peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running
inside a furniture store.

The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict,
considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson's son.

5th Place (tie):
19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when
his neighbour ran over his hand with a Honda Accord.

Mr Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car
when he was trying to steal his neighbour's hubcaps.

5th Place (tie):
Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just
finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage
door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning.
He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and
garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr.
Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a
case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the
homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental
anguish. The jury agreed, to the tune of $500,000. In my opinion this is so
outrageous that it should have been 2nd Place!

4th Place:
Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical
expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbour's
beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was
less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little
provoked at the time by Mr Williams who had climbed over the fence into the
yard and was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3rd Place:
A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her
coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms Carson had
thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

2nd Place:
Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night
club in a neighbouring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the
floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms Walton was
trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the
$3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.

1st Place:
This year's runaway winner was Mrs Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma. Mrs Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago (RV) motor
home. On her first trip home, having driven onto the freeway, she set the
cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go into the
back & make herself a sandwich.

Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mrs
Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising her in the owner's manual that she
couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded her $1,750,000 plus a new motor
home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit,
just in case there were any other complete morons around.

Mr Abe's stunning resignation has shocked Japan both with its timing and with its meaning. Unpopular and unimpressive in office, there is almost a sense of relief that this disastrous administration is over. But as Japan experienced in the 1990s one Prime Minister leaving does not guarantee that a better one will take his place. The principal candidates - Messrs Aso, Tanigaki, Fukuda, Yosano and Nakagawa, as well as outsider Ms Koike - are all LDP insiders who will have to face the challenge of achieving electoral popularity with a party platform of traditional values. Those traditional values were espoused by Mr Abe, and look what they did for him, but the LDP is not quick to accept changes in direction. The party might decide that a quick and clean decision is necessary, in which case one of the favourites such as Mr Aso gets the job, or it might decide that it has to face reality and accept more voter-friendly policies, in which case we have a battle on our hands and a less obvious candidate may get it. It will be an interesting week.

The policy implications are vast. The Abe administration did not have a great economic agenda and for the last 12 months the economy has largely been on autopilot, with few major reform initiatives. This has resulted in greater bureaucratic influence over policy making, which while not necessarily a bad thing in the short term, in the long run would result in less market-oriented small government policies. Does the next Prime Minister look at the election results and think that the LDP needs to reconnect with the regions - resulting in some unwelcome pork barrel projects and spending? Or does the next Prime Minister look at the fiscal position and make Japan face up to the awful inevitability of tax rises? And will we have a government which is business friendly and agnostic about the nationality of business? These are important issues; in an environment where the LDP has to court popularity, and where few of the candidates have what one might call an Economist type of policy platform, we cannot be optimistic.

Quoted from the Economist Tokyo

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."

- Barry Goldwater

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow."

- Lawrence Clark Powell

"I've never seen a monument erected to a pessimist."

- Paul Harvey

I really don't know this gentleman, but from what I can see I am impressed. It is nice to see an American Senator who is willing to buck the system and serve the US government with his heart.

It seems that John Warner will be retiring. Although, he doesn't seem to have the smoothest personal life, from articles commenting about his retirement it seems that he is a man who was not forced to stick to party decisions. He is known for looking at each issue and really try to represent the people of his districts/state.

With all the lobbyists, peer pressure from the parties, and other pressures associated with leadership of a country (usually gold, gals, and glory are the issues) I am sure it is really hard for senators, representatives, judges, and the executive branch to represent the people who voted them into office. The idea of going off your own heart is great. I hope all the US government civil servants will take note.

This is certainly surprising news. We never felt the Taiwanese manufacturer Acer has the financials to buy Gateway computer however there are two factors that one should be thinking about.

Nobody really buys Gateway computers. Secondly, Acer was an outsourced manufacturer for many brands in North America. This is another example of how getting someone to build products for you will eventually eat you up if you don't do it right. The other example of this is Lenovo purchasing IBM's Thinkpad and IBM desktop business. Lenevo was a little unknown Chinese company that IBM had selected to build their desktop and notebook computer lines.

Our prediction is that the people who bought Thinkpads because they were IBM will migrate to other brands. Once the master who designed the Notebook computer in Japan either retires or gets fed up, Lenevo will have to work even harder to keep their market share. Thanks to the Japan-based Thinkpad research and development team, Lenevo still has the best notebook in the world. However, domestically Panasonic (Matsushita) is really catching up with their "Let's Note" notebook computer line. The durable, light-weight PCs from Matsushita are really hard to resist. Panasonic has already displaced Toshiba as the leading notebook computer ("laptop" computer for the Americans among us) in Japan.

Lets, watch and see.

Below article quote from here.

LOS ANGELES - Taiwan-based Acer Inc. will acquire Gateway Inc. for $710 million in a deal designed to give the long-struggling U.S. computer maker the size it needs to compete against larger players, the companies announced Monday.

The deal will push the combined company past China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. to become the world’s third-largest vendor of personal computers, behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc.

With the acquisition, Acer will absorb a company that made a splash when it was founded in 1985 in an Iowa farmhouse.

Gateway’s made-to-order philosophy for selling computers made it a formidable player early on, and the brand became known for the cow-spotted boxes used to ship its products.

Now based in Irvine, Gateway struggled in recent years amid fierce competition.

It branched out into consumer electronics — selling televisions, music players and other items — but the strategy didn’t work. Neither did its retail stores, which shuttered in 2004.

“Having tried for several years to grow their way back up through various strategies, it seems a reasonable step to consider joining forces with another company,” said Tom Smith, a computer hardware analyst with Standard & Poor’s Equity Research.

Acer said it was offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 a share — representing a premium of 57 percent to Gateway’s Friday closing price of $1.21 but only 2 percent of Gateway’s all-time high of $82.50 in late 1999.

Gateway shares climbed 61 cents, or about 50 percent, to $1.82 Monday.

“Joining with Acer will enable us to bring even more value to the consumer segments we serve and capitalize on Acer’s highly regarded supply chain operations and global reach,” Gateway Chief Executive Ed Coleman said in a joint statement by the two companies.

Acer and Gateway have discussed merging in the past but intensified those talks during the past six weeks, Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said during a conference call with analysts.

Acer estimated that acquiring Gateway would create operating savings of more than $150 million a year and immediately add to its earnings.

Gateway also said it is in talks to sell its professional business, which markets computers to business customers, and is exercising its right to purchase the remaining shares of the parent company of Packard Bell BV, a European PC vendor based in France.

Smith said selling the professional unit makes sense for Gateway so it can focus on gaining share in just one market.

Acer is committed to buying Gateway whether the company succeeds in selling its professional division or not, Wang said.

Gateway gained the right to buy Packard Bell when it acquired eMachines for $235 million in cash and stock in 2004 from Lap Shun Hui, who now owns all the shares of PB Holding Co., the parent company of Packard Bell.

In 2006, Gateway rejected Hui’s offer to buy Gateway’s consumer business for $450 million.

Previously, Packard Bell had said it was in exclusive talks with Lenovo. Gateway’s move to buy Packard Bell was seen by analysts as a move to keep the company out of Lenovo’s hands.

The Acer-Gateway deal will create a multibranded computer company with more than $15 billion in revenue and shipments in excess of 20 million units per year, Acer said in a statement.

“This will be an excellent addition to Acer’s already strong positions in Europe and Asia,” Wang said in the statement.

Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said the acquisition will allow Acer to implement an “effective multibrand strategy and cover all the major market segments.”

The takeover will result in reductions in per unit procurement and component costs while creating opportunities for the cross-selling of product portfolios, he added.

In the second quarter, Acer was the world’s fourth-largest PC maker behind top-ranked Hewlett-Packard, No. 2 Dell, and third-ranked Lenovo, according to research company Gartner Inc.

Gateway is the third-largest PC vendor in the U.S. by market share after Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

Citigroup Inc. is the financial adviser for Acer, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is acting as the financial adviser for Gateway.

29 August 2007