Not safe if you do not like anthropomorphic violence of cute fluffy animals to other cute fluffy animals. Plus, no English subtitles yet but you can get gist of the scene without subtitles. Also known as Apocalypse Meow in the US, but clearly the original title is preferred.

Story: Packy, Botasky and Rats are special operations experts working in a private military company. Every day they are embroiled in combat somewhere around the world. In the first episode, they intend to come to the assistance of a hostage captured by guerrillas demanding the withdrawal of the US Army, but instead become surrounded by a large number of guerrillas.

Wonderful news!

Susan Crawford (wikipedia, her blog), is rumored to be joining the Obama administration. What's important about this is Susan is both someone who understands the Internet at a fundamental level (via her time as a board member of ICANN) and also understands the web at a fundamental level. She is also a strong proponent of network neutrality, which I believe to be critically important for the future of the Internet.

OneWebDay Founder Tapped By Obama

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. Worth reading.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

Not with a whisper...

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

I first met Chenggang Rui at the 2006 Asia Society Young Leaders Summit in Seoul. I had no idea he was younger than me as he had a self-confidence of years beyond his actual age.

The NY Times has a long profile of Chenggang: Capitalism Finds Voice in China TV. It's a good read and covers a the Starbucks in the Forbidden City issue that became a hot topic right after I had met him in late 2006.

What's more interesting about Chenggang for me is that he has very thoughtful views on Japan, which is not that common in China (at least on the Chinese Internet.) ESWN has a great translation of a post from Chenggang's blog from September 2006 where he discusses his views on Japan.

Japan is a country that is closest to us but one about which we least understand. Most of our young people know much more about the European and American countries than Japan. Of course, Japan is not an easy country to understand, and there are two sides to the Japanese people. But from the viewpoint of a third person, Japan is no more difficult to understand than China. The problem is not that Japan cannot be understood. Instead, the issue is whether we are willing to try to understand. (Ruth Benedict's <The Chrysanthemum and The Sword> and Lai Xiao'er's are excellent books).

Those foreign friends who have visited China told me almost without exception that China was more splendid and better than they imagined. A trip to China often corrected their bad or mistaken ideas through reading too many novels. If you genuinely want to know Japan, a trip to Japan can often change many things. With this purpose, I went to visit Japan and it changed many of my previous over-simplified and subjective views.

EastSouthWestNorth: Rui Chenggang On Japan

Ricky Gervais and Elmo on Sesame Street.

I just about died laughing.

This is a few months late but JP Morgan's Imran Khan has a lengthy 2009 Internet Investment Guide (or here) out that is worth reading for it's coverage of China, Korea and Russia.

Ken Cuiker at The Economist interviews Jake Adelstein, an expert on the Yakuza, Japan's mafia.

The Washington Post has a profile of Adelstein that provides perspective on how he became an expert on this topic: This Mob Is Big in Japan

I really enjoyed Benjamin's newest presentation on Asian Internet businesses in comparison to Western ones.

Presentation at eComm in San Francisco in March 2009 about Asian mobile ecosystem, especially Japan, and comparisons with Apple's iPhone and Facebook. Some extra like mobile SNS, mobile novels and various other considerations of interest.

To Brian Chen of Wired.com: the polite thing to do, after mis-representing two sources (Nobi Hayashi and Daiji Hirata) whom you have never met, would be to APOLOGIZE and fix the mess.

This "Here's why I didn't 'screw up' and nothing is 'inaccurate':" stuff on your Tumblelog is a bunch of spin trying to justify piss-poor reporting.

If you think anyone in technology in Japan will take any questions from you in the future after this kind of bridge-burning, you're sadly mistaken.

Turning off comments on that particular Wired.com article was also weak, not to mention the fact that your tumblelog has no comments either.