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Microsoft, but this one strikes me as more than a bit stupid. By making their software available in more languages, Microsoft is performing a service. They can choose not to buy it if they don't want it. It's not like native speakers of other languages will be lining up to purchase Office in some obscure language like this.

Same here, I bash MS myself, but in this case I support MS in translating Windows to Mapuzugun. If only MS would do it for more languages. More than 4000 languages, bet most people don't even realize there are that many, are endangered or threatened with extinction.

People with a need to communicate will keep languages conforming to a de facto standard.

But you're right, maybe we should be careful, because - *gasp* - what if there were multiple languages! That would be HORRIBLE!

Languages are disappearing. Because people are increasingly coming into contact with people from a wider variety of places, and it's not because someone sat down and standardized something. It's out of necessity, and it's like IM clients. No one wants to speak Googleese if all their friends and business partners are chattin' in AOLish.

...was, if I recall correctly, the headline on a story that appeared in Whole Earth Review in the 1980s. The article concerned Scitex's image-processing workstations, and their use to move pyramids on the cover of Time Magazine in order to achieve a more pleasing composition, to add or remove people from a picture, and so forth and so on. The cover, as I recall, showed a UFO landing on the street where Whole Earth's offices were located.

Now we can do it with Photoshop Elements on a home computer.

Yes, juries ''should'' be cautious in their approach toward photographic evidence. It was never true that "the camera doesn't lie," but the ease and inexpensiveness with which digital images can be altered certainly ought to alter the jury's Bayesian estimates of the likelihood that tampering could have occurred.

According to 'Parkinson's Law' by C. Northcote Parkinson, in chapter 6 'plans and plants', this marks the start of the decline of the company, lets hope it's a counter example.

Shortly after 9/11, the U.S. government hired some Hollywood types to get together and build some worst-case scenarios to adjust the planning process. Now that the government wants to develop an Open Source scenario process with feedback from real events to distinguish between accurate and innacurate scenarios, people are outraged and are misinterpreting the intent and consequences of the project. Maybe the term "market" is too closely associated with profiteering and market manipulation. Maybe the current government is doing too many other big-brotherish things and people are worried. But that isn't what this futures market exercise is about.

Scenario building is a common process for governments, militaries, corporations, and individuals. I taught scenario building for several years in university social science classes using this Art Kleiner article. The subtitle of the article was "thinking the unthinkable" and it dealt with the Cold War, fossil fuel depletion, global famine, and other pressing problems.

The biggest problem with a scenario 'market' is that the feeback mechanism is likely to favor the mundane, most likely possibilities. This is good for every day progressions, but the really interesting points in history are at discontinuities - times where there were sudden changes that upset the existing order. 9/11 was a 'long shot' according to standard statistics, which are inherently backward looking. Good scenarios are less a way of predicting what will happen than what could happen. Good scenarios don't have to come true to be good scenarios - they just need to help us acknowledge and see past our (otherwise invisible) assumptions. While lots of people pay lip service to "thinking outside of the box," scenario building is one way to actually do some original thinking. Our society should be combining research of what is with imagination of what might happen. It would be reckless not to do so.

Is the poster using a bamboo clock? This artical is from the Whole Earth Winter 2001 Issue ("http://www.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/444.html ) Rigolo

• Russ Kick's Outposts & Outposts 2
• Re/Search Pranks
• From Chocolate to Morphine
• How to Get High Without Drugs
• A gift certificate to Good Vibrations
• Exhibitionism for the Shy by Carol Queen
• Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns
• The Herbal Abortion Handbook
• Electroshock Scorpion 200
• ASP Baton (check local laws)
• The Whole Earth Review
• Hakim Bey's T.A.Z.
• Drawing Down the Moon
• Ain't Nobody's bussiness if you do

There are a number of economists, sociologists, and dynamic systems modelers that have observed 50- to 60-year cycles in economic output, political attitudes, birth rates, tecnological adaptation, and other indicators. The work dates back to the 1920s, when Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff predicted the Great Depression a decade in advance. (He wasn't popular with his communist colleagues, because he also predicted that the capitalist economies would rebound.)

Here's an article [wholeearthmag.com] from 1998 that gives a good overview of Kondratieff's work as well as more recent studies, and a website [1-888.com] with links to several others.

If these people are right, the good news is that things should go uphill over the next few decades.

TheFrood