Hello friends. I'm writing you due to a really sad and unpleasant experience. Someone has stolen my pride and joy 1997 Land Rover Defender 90 right out of my back yard while I slept! The larceny occurred around 4am early Sunday morning, December 10, 2006 in the Hillsboro Village area of Nashville, TN. She was unlocked and parked in my back yard, but behind a double locked gate. If you see her, please phone me immediately! 615.429.4502. I'm offering $500 for information that leads me to her, and $1000 for information that leads to the arrest of the scum that took her from me! If you forwarded this email/message to someone who gets either of those rewards, I'll give you $100. The VIN is SALDV3243VA122379.

As I'm sure some of you know, these are extremely rare and pricey vehicles, so even if the insurance company gives me everything that I've put into her over the years, I can't exactly go up to the local dealer and buy a new one. So recovering her is the best I can hope for. Here's some pictures. These pictures were taken awhile ago, but she essentially looks the same. You enthusiasts know that you've always got at least one or two projects going on at any given time but this is basically the last state she was in.

She's a NAS D90 SW #2342, Arles blue with Alpine top, auto trans, with air conditioning and the 4.0L petrol engine with two of the four jump seats installed. She has about 97K miles on her and is due for an oil change. The front windshield has a large spidered crack on the passenger side that's about a foot wide. Of note are that she has black diamond plating armor on the hood wings, side sills under the doors, and rear wings above the rear wheels. The trail lights are IPF, both on the bull bar and the light rack. Of particular note is that she has a custom installed Pioneer AVIC Z1 GPS/Audio/Video system that sits in the center console where the switches for rear defrost and such used to reside. The cigar lighter is relocated into the top of the console next to the shifter and there are several more located inside the console under the hatch. She also has a duel battery kit, with the switch on the bottom left of the drivers dash. She still has my vanity plate, "OLD PUNK", with expired tags (Sept 05) using the old style plates, NOT the new green Tennessee hills plates. She also has the spare tire off the rear carrier and a lighted skull in the rear hitch socket. She's got an OME suspension kit, but if you're looking underneath her, then something even worse has happened! Again, if you see her, phone immediately! 615.429.4502.

CASH REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO HER RECOVERY AND/OR PROSECUTION!!!!

Thanks!

Cheers,
Scott

In the go-go late 1990s, Ford went to similar lengths to recruit new talent. Now, its survival hinges on cutting its work force to match dramatically reduced demand for its cars and trucks.

WOW! Talk about a hard job to do. This goes against every grain of your body as a business person.

How 38,000 were enticed to leave Ford

The Global Orgasm for Peace was conceived by Donna Sheehan, 76, and Paul Reffell, 55, whose immodest goal is for everyone in the world to have an orgasm Dec. 22 while focusing on world peace.

Make your plans!

Calif. couple calls for orgasm for peace

Apple put software on cassettes in its early days, but lacked automated tape duplication machines which required Apple employees to conjure up a system with a rack of Panasonic tape machines linked together with an Apple II. The team had to simultaneously press play and record on all the tape machines and hit the return key on the Apple II to begin the process of duplicating as many tapes at a time as possible. "Any time someone would come in and talk about something like a $25 million Bank of America credit line," Espinosa recalled, one Apple employee might have to "stop the meeting and go over and switch out the cassettes and put in new ones and then come back and say, 'So what were we talking about?' That's the kind of place it was."

Garage days revisited. =)

Woz details 'Apple in the garage'

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice cleared the roughly $80 billion deal on Oct. 11, declaring that there were no competitive concerns and opting not to require the combined company to divest assets or make other concessions.

Of course this is the biggest sham of the entire process, since the entire reason why this merger is a bad idea IS the fact that it will reduce competition and consolidate power in the telecom monopolies. Prices will go up. Innovation will continue to be shackled. And if net neutrality gets the boot, then you'll also have this hegemony spreading into other industries.

It will be supremely interesting to see what the standout committee members actually get in the discussion. They seem to be pointing towards pricing and service concessions, which to me feels like a 'too little too late' compromise.

As usual, when it comes to politics, they are completely missing the point. Both of these organizations should be charged with manipulating the market, robbing the public, and committing shareholder fraud.

FCC splits on ATT-BellSouth terms; merger vote put off

This film is a documentary about the recent elections and how various tactics and methods were used to skew election results (one way or the other). Ian Inaba, the film's director, is heading up a movement to monitor the midterm elections next week with a cadre of volunteers using video cameras, camera phones, and the Internet - in an effort to not only document voting indescrepencies, but also to prevent them through detente.

American Blackout - Official Site.

This webpage will produce a boarding pass good enough to get anyone past TSA, and thus, into the "secure" gate areas of the airport terminal.

Chris's NWA Boarding Pass Generator

The 20 smartest companies to start now. Or alternatively, what businesses VC's think they can find a 3 year exit strategy for.

Here ya go brain trust at Memestreams...

This weekend I had a hole drilled through my skull. I read that this increased one’s consciousness permanently. I read about the supposed de-conditioning properties. I read about more parts of the brain working simultaneously as there would be more blood up there to help this happen. The arguments for it all seemed to be quite lengthy, quite detailed, thought out and researched, and very intelligent. The arguments against it were based solely on the opinion that it is ‘crazy’ and talk like, "What’s more conscious than conscious?". I heard from an acquaintance on telephone that she was glad she had done it, felt more mental energy, and had days of brilliance. I came to believe that the key to a permanent consciousness increase was a hole in the skull, to restore the full brain pulsation of infancy. After several months of research, discussion, speculation, watching surgical videos and trepanation documentaries, and even an actual viewing of a trepanation, I decided I certainly did want to be trepanned, and sought a way to do it.

I'm reminded of the great line from Ghostbusters:
Vinkman: "Remember that time you tried to drill a hole in your head?"
Egon: "That would've worked had you not stopped me."

Trepanation

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.

Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.

MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world’s financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream--chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot’s model of “wild” randomness. MacKenzie’s pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America’s financial markets have grown into their current form.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets