Airplane Arrivals

Information you can use: www.flightarrivals.com lets you know which planes are arriving when!

Internet access in your area

Want to know what options you have for Internet access in your area or in an area you'll be visiting? Visit http://www.thelist.com/ and enter the telephone area code or zip code. You will then see a display of all the providers.

Cell Phones set for Subway!

This appeared on the Reuters News Wire on Febuary 3, 2006:

Welcome or not, cell phones set for subway, by Ellen Wulfhorst

One of life's ironic oases of solitude – the peace people find amid the roar of a New York City subway – could soon be gone. As New York plans to make cell phones work in subway stations, experts say Americans eventually could be connected everywhere, underground or in the air.

"It's technically feasible, both for airplanes and subways," said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "It's the social aspect that's really the most intractable."

People fall into two camps, one that defends the right to make calls no matter the inconvenience to others and the other that likes an undisturbed atmosphere, he said. Business people tend to belong to first camp, and leisure travelers to the second, he added.

Language and Economy

According to the New York Times, only about half of China's population can speak its national language, which is Mandarin. China’s 55 ethnic minorities, and the majority Han population, converse in a total of 1,599 dialects, most of them incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.

With the bewildering array of information that cannot easily be conveyed, it might be a while before China’s economy becomes all it could be.