Outis

Sheryl Swoopes has very big ones.

(see earlier, Balls)

Pensé que iba ser un momento pero parece que va ser un moviemiento. Lo siguiente aparece en El País, versión digital:

Se le ocurrió el pasado 5 de septiembre, mientras paseaba en bicicleta por la Sierra de Madrid. Había que acabar con el oligopolio de las operadoras de telefonía móvil, crear un “país wifi”, y Martin Varsavsky (padre de Jazztel y Yacom) se puso a ello ese mismo día en su blog. La idea verá la luz definitivamente a primeros de noviembre. Ha nacido FON, “un movimiento de gente harta de que le timen con el móvil” y que quiere tener acceso a la red vía WiFi allá dónde vaya…

Si le interesa la idea debe plantearse cómo desea participar, pues Varsarvsky ha pensado en tres tipos de personas. A aquellos que simplemente quieren poner a disposición de otros su conexión a Internet a través de FON y poder acceder a éste servicio los llama los ‘Linus’, que serán los primeros en poder disfrutar del servicio.

Los ‘Bills’ son aquellos que no se conforman con compartir su ancho de banda sobrante, y quieren sacar algún beneficio. Éstos obtendrán un 50% de los ingresos que se generen por el acceso a FON de un tercer tipo de participantes, los ‘Guiris’, personas que mediante la adquisición de una tarjera prepago, por ejemplo, accederían a FON de forma temporal, sin tener que aportar si conexión a Internet a cambio. Entre estos últimos sitúa Varsavsky a los millones de turistas que cada año visitan España y que podrían dejar en el bolsillo de los miembros de FON una buena cantidad de dinero.

Si se da sería un gran, gran avance para este país y el mundo hispanófono.

El contexto:

“Google offers S.F. Wi-Fi –for free,” San Francisco Chronicle

Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee

The race to put a man on the moon, in 2005, is the race to put a city (or a nation) on the web.

The other day I read a post on Joi Ito’s site that struck me as off. Posted by Thomas Crampton, the entry relates news of a sociological study of online shoppers and then muses:

The US is way behind Europe in the amount of online shopping (ranking 11 worldwide), perhaps because mall shopping is so much easier than shopping in a European city. This encourages Europeans to shop online.

Having just moved to Europe from San Francisco, and having repeatedly rammed my head into an artificial wall of poor service, a dearth of options and uncompetitive prices — while attempting to continue on with my online shopping habits — this strikes me as a bad argument for what are, at best, dubious findings.

Today, I happened upon this headline:

Las operadoras de telefonía e internet ya tienen más quejas que vivienda, which is about 40,000 complaints filed last year along against Spanish ISPs and telephone companies.

Now, either Spain is very different or the above cited report uses some very progressive math.

How can online shopping be going swimmingly if people can’t even get online?

Via Juan Cole I stumbled on this fascinating story about the “Mehlis Report investigating who was behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.”

As a colleague who emailed me the report explained, “Go to the top of p. 29, parag. 96. Do you see it?” “See what?” I asked. “You can’t see it? You need to turn on… what’s that called? The, umm… go to View, Mark-up, and…” “Do you mean ‘track changes?’” I interjected. “What’s that? No, just click on mark up…”

So I clicked on track changes and, voila, right at the second sentence of parag. 96, where the text reads “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials decided to assassinate Rafik Hariri…” an edit box popped up in the right margin that revealed that the phrase “Senior Lebanese officials” had in fact replaced the actual names of these officials, which were deleted before publication of the final draft. Fortunately for the world, however, they were deleted using Microsoft Word’s “track changes” tool, because of which they remained visible to anyone who happened to have it turned on when he or she opened the file.

From Wikipedia:

Kangaroo soon became adopted into standard English where it has come to mean any member of the family of kangaroos and wallabies. The belief that it means “I don’t understand” is a popular myth that is also applied to any number of other Aboriginal-sounding Australian words. Male kangaroos are called bucks, boomers or jacks; females are does, flyers, or jills and the young are joeys. The collective noun for kangaroos is a mob.

Isn’t that awesome? There’s a popular myth that “kangaroo” is Aborigine for “I don’t understand.”

Who made that up? The Aborigines? Or the British settlers? Comments are open and much appreciated.