Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 22:31 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Amazon, DRM-free;
Warner Music Group just signed on. DRM is dead, and so is the CD.
Amazon also has variable pricing whereas iTunes doesn’t. Thus iTunes now has no choice. They must go to DRM-free and variable pricing.
Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 21:11 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Dave Winer, Flickr;
Dave Winer is about to release a new product, and just posted the preannoucement.
There’s a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity.
The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways.
Think of it as the networked living room and you’ll understand the vision.
Winer, a visionary software developer, played a major role in the development of blogging, RSS, and podcasting. His new product could easily be quite innovative.
Update: It’s called FlickrFan and is available now for the Mac. ReadWriteWeb says it’s a little clunky but seriously promising.
Hopefully Winer will stick with the app and make it really nice to use - it’s not there yet but the potential is big and you can feel how close it is. Podcasting News says the big picture here is that HDTV is the new platform. That sounds good to me.
Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 13:01 - Category: Credit crisis Tags: CDO;
A CDO called Norma left ‘hairball of risk’;
Tailored by Merrill Lynch
The WSJ details how a CDO called Norma that sold $1.5 billion in securities to investors in March is now worth a fraction of that - assuming buyers existed for their toxic glop, and none do.
The article also has a hugely informative Flash animation detailing how CDOs are structured. Think thousands of mortgages packed into a bond, with one hundred of those bonds comprising a CDO. In the case of Norma, it was comprised mainly of subprime mortgages because they wanted to goose the return.
“It is a tangled hairball of risk,” Janet Tavakoli, a Chicago consultant who specializes in CDOs, says of Norma. “In March of 2007, any savvy investor would have thrown this…in the trash bin.”
Yet bond rating agencies cheerfully gave this toxic waste their approval. They will no doubt be wallpapered with lawsuits for years and maybe some of those involved in this ever-widening sleazy greedfest will go to prison.
Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 10:56 - Category: Politics Tags: Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan;
Some thoughtful, if apocalyptic, views on the assassination from blogs
Many people will point to Musharraf, as being behind the assassination, but according to the BBC, someone shot Bhutto and then blew himself up. Suicide bombing is not the hallmark of the Pakistani military, but of the takfiris.
Bhutto had promised to fight the U.S.’s war of terror against the Taliban and takfiris in the tribal North West Frontier State, certainly reason enough for those folks to kill her.
Then there’s the ISI, the shadowy secret police of Pakistan, considered among the best in the world, with murky ties to Al Qaida, Taliban, and more. In reality, anyone could have done it.
With the death of Benazir Bhutto, we are now entering worst-case-scenario territory. A Pakistan that has devolved into Iraq-style globalguerrilla violence will create a huge node of instability, threatening India and Iran (not that I am losing sleep over that one) and pretty much guaranteeing that Afghanistan will not find stability for decades to come.
A destabilized Iran does no one any good and would simply spread the chaos. Nor does a destabilized Middle East. But we may get that anyway.
It has been easy for us to label all of this “Terror”.
I call it the Messy World.
Where there is a belt of so called states where the system shuts down all hope of social progress and produces millions of angry young men as a result. Where in the west, our huge bureaucracies impede any movement and our new belief system of Political Correctness precludes the development of an appreciation for the threat that is before us.
So here we are on the brink.
When extremists jack religion and use it for purposes of political manipulation and control then much madness can result, especially in the absence of any competing belief systems. Given the repressive nature of those regimes, which too often was backed by the US, political dissent was eliminated or marginalized, leaving the angry now no place to go but to Islamists.
Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 07:38 - Category: Credit crisis ;
From ForeclosureListings, just a few of the foreclosures in zip code 91406, where we used to live. When we moved in Jan 2007, there were few, if any, foreclosures. Now there are 466 when you include preforeclosures. The area is suburban middle class tract homes built in the 50’s on 1/8 to 1/4 acre plots in Van Nuys, which is part of L.A. County.
The green prices are the (fantasyland) Zillow estimates. They look to be what prices were in about Jan 2007. The red is the asking price now, obviously from a distressed buyer or the mortgage holder, but such drastic reductions will drive prices down even more. Ouch.
Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 00:18 - Category: Anti-war, Politics ;
Reader Joe Hartley comments on our The problems on the Left post.
Most American citizens are so wedded to the concept of the United States as the Chosen Land, incapable of doing any wrong, that all anti-war activities will ultimately be meaningless until Americans change their view of themselves in the world. It didn’t happen after Vietnam; if anything, Americans are becoming more and more Wilsonian, imbued with a Protestant ethic of making the world perfect (and, not so coincidentally, in Our image.)
The differences between the Left and the Right on this issue are not because the left (or the Democrats) are weak or cowardly, but because there is no substantial difference once you believe that you have the right to intervene to change history or to rescue people. It will look somewhat different at the margins, but the logical incoherence we see is because neither Left nor Right truly disagree with the concept of American intervention around the world.
That’s precisely why Congressional Democrats don’t oppose the war or much of what Bush does. Most of them are in basic agreement that the US can and should invade countries. American exceptionalism isn’t just the domain of neocons. Yet the economy is wobbling and the wars are going badly - so of course that’s when cognitive dissonance often kicks in the hardest. It reminds me of the current sense of unreality in the stock market now. Uh no. Everything is not fine.
Interesting, isn’t it, that those presidential candidates at the left and right margins, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, are the most opposed to the wars?
I don’t have any magic answers. If Americans could see themselves as other nations do and witness their own heavy-handedness, maybe, but Americans have been so self-congratulatory for so long that no one can image a different reality where we do not go forth looking for dragons to slay. American would have to move beyond its adolescent self-indulgence toward something that approaches political maturity. I don’t see that happening anytime soon since it’s a LOT more fun to believe oneself to be invincible and of spotless morality.
It’s not that we need to speak truth to power and then people will understand. There’s a conscious desire not to understand. The Left will not break through that with angry protests or accusatory tirades. As I’ve mentioned before, we need a better story, a new approach, a way to get people to want to change. The antiwar movement needs to do what The Breakthrough Institute wants to do with the environmental movement. Forget the doomsaying. Make it optimistic. Don’t just preach to the choir, get everyone involved. Think big.
Bob Morris @ Dec 27th 2007 00:08 - Category: Unfiled ;
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