it's a small thing, but ITYM covered calls.

That would be awesome, but let's standardize to the 60Hz, not 50 as it's in the eastern part.

Have you been to Japan in the past 30 years? Most residences have air conditioning as it's frequently > 35C with tonnes of humidity during the summers.

What's staring me in the face? A fucking TGI Fridays.

You tellin' me they don't have knives in the kitchen?

To be fair, the last time I was in O'Hare in the American Airlines terminal, the Wolfgang Puck restaurant's kitchen knives appeared to have been affixed to the workstation with fairly heavy-duty steel cables.

This is not to say getting knives and explosives into the "secure" areas aren't trivial. Security theater indeed.

I'm assuming this is for electing Board of Directors of a corporation. Therefore, someone who has invested more into the company has a bigger say.

Sweet, do you know if they ship to the US, or will I have to get a friend in Japan?

I've also seen the most elegant solutions to complicated problems in banks and hedge funds. Trying to predict which way a given security will move given past patterns is a very hard problem, yet I've seen systems that do just that and do it correctly 75% of the time.

Fair enough -- I don't claim AT&T is perfect, and far from it. My friend's Blackberry on AT&T will randomly drop calls or refuse data connections in Manhattan, even though he'd have full signal. I'd be sitting across from him in the same restaurant, and my iPhone would be fully functional.

All that says, though, is that his particular Blackberry model + revision has worse radio implementation compared to my particular iPhone model + revision for that exact situation.

As for AT&T refusing service, back when I lived in St. Louis, before they merged with BellSouth's wireless, Southwestern Bell's wireless refused wireless service to me citing their inability to find my address. Since I lived in St. Louis County but in an unincorporated area between Creve Coeur and Maryland Heights, I was not entirely surprised. We ended up going with Voicestream (now T-Mobile), and their GSM coverage was abysmal too, especially outside town. I'm sure things have changed in the 10 years since I've moved out of the area though.

It's similar in Japan, too, or was in 2003 or thereabouts. The #2 mobile carrier, KDDI's Au, had issues with servicing my grandmother's place in a medium-sized city. DoCoMo had no issues, and everyone in town used DoCoMo. Back in Tokyo, Au had completed their 3G rollout, and had far superiour 3G coverage to DoCoMo, who had coverage on paper but their towers were too far apart to penetrate far into buildings. Again, I hear things are very different now that they have ditched PDC and are releasing W-CDMA phones exclusively.

Outside of cities? Which cities are you generalizing about? I'm regularly in NYC, and my vanilla iPhone 3G doesn't skip a beat. However, in Westchester and Putnam counties, I've had issues where my phone will drop out of 3G and stay on EDGE. Up here in Connecticut, it doesn't skip a beat either.

In Chicago, it was much the same. I'd go out to the exurbs, and things sometimes got a little wonky, but then I'd return the next day, and I'm in solid 3G, with solid signal strength.

The entire world is filled with average people. My point in my original post was that most people, for whatever reason, when writing cursive, tend to come out with seriously illegible scrawl. This has nothing to do with their lack of desire -- I have yet to come across people who pride themselves on illegible penmanship -- but the inherent lack of legibility built into the cursive system they've been taught.

So instead of starting from the illegible scrawl, they propose to the reader they start from something more legible. It's like instead of shoehorning functional programming concepts into Java, they start with ocaml.

I'm not discounting the artistic side of this entire endeavour. As a former professional musician, I do not believe everything should be useful. However, if given a choice between teaching my hypothetical children how to write cursive and print, so they can communicate, I'd much rather they were taught to print legiblly than scrawl. If they wanted to take up calligraphy, more power to them, but I do not believe in shoving art down their throats.