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The Muse

March 14, 2005

Various

I don't really know if this is surprising, but guess who is the world's third richest man...? Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon who became a famous [read notorious] figure after arranging a
$40 million dollar wedding for his daughter that had people grumbling. The International Herald Tribune [IHT] reports he made around $36,000 a
second last year. Well,that's not too bad is it?

Bloomberg has an interesting comment on this and they list some interesting statistics that show India to be surprisingly ahead of China in the list of billionaires. The Asian country leading the pack is Japan, followed by India,Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. China has two billionaires.

While on the IHT, I read this piece that reports on the creation of a well being index that will attempt to quantify how much happiness has been bought to the people. Seems the crazy brits are going to measure happiness, so they can get their ass whooped by making statements like "...in the last four months, the happiness index has shown an increase of 4%, hence we rock and our policies work". I can just imagine poor Tony Blair getting shredded in the House of Commons.

``The willingness to invest in new projects is quite high -- not what it was in the late '90s, but we may never see that again in our lifetime.'' - Bill Gates in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

In a potentially landmark verdict, the US Santa Clara Superior Court ruled that Apple was free to pursue leads and force three bloggers to divulge sources who leaked trade secrets in their blogsites. This case has been getting a lot of attention because bloggers are waiting to see if they are also governed by rights that protect journalists. However, as reported here in BBC, "Judge Kleinberg said the question of whether the bloggers were journalists or not did not apply because laws governing the right to keep trade secrets confidential covered journalists, too".

You must have seen the news about Syria, elections in Baghdad and all that optimism about democracy and peace in the middle east. I read this article in the NY Times [you can get it here if you don't have a registration entry] where the view is that there will not be any democracy till there is an active middle class. And that can be accomplished only with an open economy, free press and export driven trade.

And to give you something useful, here is bugmenot , just type in the name of the website and you will get an user name and password that you can use. It works only for free websites [like the NY Times] that ask you to register before allowing you to read anything. Saves time...

More later, be good!

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