The bottom line

WORLD REVIEW

Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Inc did not appear at the grandiosely named World Wide Developers' Conference, not that he's seriously sick or anything. Apple Inc dropped the price of its top-class iPhone 3G S to $99, and then introduced two better ones for $199 (16 gigabytes of internal memory) and $299 (32GB); catch one is that you have to sign a two-year subscription with a phone provider to get that price; catch two, there's no sense even telling you the equivalent in real money because if you aren't in the United States you are far too foreign to get an iPhone for that money.

The CIA introduced a new-look web page for its famed World Factbook, one of the best free sources on the Internet. Facts are easier to find and to copy and print, and there are dozens of tourist-type photos, free to use without obligation. It’s at (tinyurl.com/ciabook).

Iranian authorities banned blogs, barred foreign election observers and beat the heck out of journalists, but still couldn't stop the stain; Twitter, of all things, broke through the censorship and repression after the contested election, and informed the world of what was going on; tweets with linked photos simply crashed through the terrible censors of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and boosted the image of the opposition; here's an example: (twitter.com/persiankiwi).

A media person asked Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz about reports her company plans to merge with AOL and her answer was: "Not any time in the forever future."

Europeans can go fish for a browser when they buy or upgrade to Windows 7, said Microsoft; tired of being used as a cash machine by the European Commission, the world's only court-designated abusive monopoly said that Windows for Europeans will have no browser at all; if you thought that would make anyone happy, you know little about the dying continent; browser-maker Opera of Norway says taking out Internet Explorer is not enough, and Microsoft should offer more browsers, maybe IE and one other one, such as Opera; the European Commission, which serves raw lemons to suck at its parties, said Microsoft was taking a step backward and should be making more browsers and choices.

Microsoft surrendered, capitulated, gave up - to Quicken; MS Money is officially dead, and the Intuit program now has a clear field to become what Microsoft longed to be but could never become, an actual monopoly.

The quiet, soft-spoken Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer explained that if US President Barack Obama went ahead to tax the foreign profits of "unpatriotic" companies such as his, it would be a boon to foreigners; Microsoft, he said, would immediately shut down many US jobs and move them offshore; the new taxes would "make US jobs more expensive," he said, and companies don't do that; Obama figures companies like Microsoft, which operate in the US and abroad, owe him, oh, say $19 billion a year for the tax breaks they get overseas; it's a complicated business, but the bottom line is that Microsoft and allies don't plan to get involved in Obama's new protectionist policies.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued an order that, effective immediately, every computer sold in China must have a censorship filter built and sold by Jinhui Computer System Engineering; the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, is only to Protect the Children, understand, and the government will only inscribe pornography and such dangerous websites in the mandatory monthly updates; western companies, which always agonise and go through tremendous ethical arguments in such cases, were frantically inventing new morally correct reasons to go along with censorship so long as there's a few yuan in it.

On the tail of the most successful product launch in the firm's history, Palm eased out chairman and CEO Ed Colligan; it's a new era in Palm history, said the company, which is why they brought in a shopworn executive Apple no longer needed for its iPod programme; Jon Rubinstein, said Palm in a press statement, will "bring innovation back to the company" - the company that just launched its most innovative product since the collapse of the stegosaurus trap market. Stores across America sold out of the Palm Pre; and while that was exactly the company strategy, to gear supply just a bit below carefully measured demand, the new phone got terrific reviews, many of them from the "is this an iPhone killer?" school of alleged journalism; you're pretty much too foreign to have one, but they're selling well at the US Sprint mobile phone network stores, at $199 plus a two-year contract for at least $70 per month; then there is the very Applesque deal of $549 for an unlocked Pre, or about 18,750 baht in real money.

The French Constitutional Council rejected a new law where the government would remove Internet access from any surfer even so much as accused of downloading or uploading copyright material three times during her lifetime.

Around the world, new parents put off naming their new babies until they found what Facebook URLs were available; the social network switched from a system of "id=1234567" to real names, such as (http://www.facebook.com/somchai) and geeks were elbowing in the first-come line hours before the starting flag dropped. Even more geeky: The institute running the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence began running a survey of what we should say back in case SETI actually finds an alien that calls us up; let out your own inner geek at (earthspeaks.seti.org).

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