Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. A marketing VP at Samsung, the world's largest memory supplier, is warning of impending memory shortages. He may be right -- I don't follow the memory market closely -- but if I were an electronics company I'd get a second opinion before I ran out and doubled my orders.

"Begin sentences with subjects and verbs," Roy Peter Clark suggests, "letting subordinate elements branch to the right. Even a long, long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early."

Excellent advice. I found it amusing, though, because I'm currently struggling with Japanese. In Japanese, the verb always comes at the end. One tosses the subject, object, and all their modifiers up into the air, where they hover until the verb ties them into a neat bundle.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Rebecca McKinnon explodes the ridiculous suggestion that Chinese citizens don't want free speech.

Jay Rosen has a long discussion of the role of skepticism and bias in journalism. Read the comments, too.

Back in 1995, the new Denver airport opened. The fact that its opening was delayed more than a year by problems with its then state-of-the-art baggage handling system faded into history. Now, ten years later, United is pulling the plug and admits that very same baggage handling system is never going to work. IT consultant Bruce Webster observed, "The best way to build a large, complex system is to evolve it from a small system that works. No one bothered to get a small system up and running in the first place -- they went for the big bang."