I’m not quite sure how I would fit this into my life, my pockets aren’t big enough, but I do know that I want one. All the apps like on an iPhone is great but I wonder if it runs Photoshop or any of those kinds of work software applications that I need? For $500 probably not, but it sure makes me want take a trip and watch some movies and read some books while sitting on a plane or a train.
“Professor Watson writes
Hi friends,
I am always being asked to grade Obama’s presidency. In place of offering him a grade, I put together a list of his accomplishments thus far. I think you would agree that it is very impressive. His first six months have been even more active than FDRs or LBJs the two standards for such assessments. Yet, there is little media attention given to much of what he has done. Of late, the media is focusing almost exclusively on Obama’s critics, without holding them responsible for the uncivil, unconstructive tone of their disagreements or without holding the previous administration responsible for getting us in such a deep hole. The misinformation and venom that now passes for political reporting and civic debate is beyond description.
HD » If you can name 5 things or more on this list of 90 of Obama’s accomplishments and initiatives then I will be very impressed.
It is a sad statement of the state of our society but I think I know a lot more about what the critics of Obama are saying than about what he has actually done.
Sometimes you just have to be glad that you don’t live in a place where you can light your tap water on fire.
This dude is taking a holiday to drop some NYC as John Popper of Blues Traveler once sang. See you in a week or so. And no I won’t be blogging about my experience in NYC, I think I will have other things to do that don’t involve computers. Enjoy.
The Swedish Pirate Party, already the third largest political party in Sweden, took 7.1 percent of the Swedish vote and won at least one seat in the European Parliament.
-> www.salon.com/…
HD » Either the Swede’s really like their peer-to-peer networks or they have a helluva sense of humour. In Canada the Green Party, who are engaging in the serious battle for our environment, could only muster 6.8%, but in Sweden 7.1% of people vote for a party whose main platform is to reform copyright law:
All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.
Gotta like Sweden. (And they like hockey too.)
Is this the future of music? Okay, probably not but you gotta love what this guy has done. Hot tunes!
A friend of mine, well actually more of a relative, brother-in-law even, who lives in Southern Ontario, happened to be visiting a buddy who lives in Detroit and they wandered down to the stadium after the game (for some reason which eludes me), and they found it was free to go inside the stadium (or perhaps just unmonitored) at this juncture and thus they came across Sidney Crosby, captain of the Stanley Cup winning Pittsburgh Penguins (they beat Detroit 2-1 in game 7), hoisting the Cup for the benefit of a bunch of media-types.
Many of us believe that Aid helps poor countries develop and lift its citizens out of poverty. But not African economist Dambisa Moyo. She grew up in Zambia, was educated at Harvard and worked at the World bank.
This year, Time magazine has named her among the 100 most influential people in the world. She’s in the spot light for her controversial new book “Dead Aid” in which she argues for stopping Aid to Africa.
-> www.cbc.ca/…
-> www.dambisamoyo.com
HD » Is this the woman with the brains, credentials, ideas and the intentions to finally solve the Africa problem that no one else in the world has been able to do? Getting a Starbucks on every third street corner in Africa would hardly be solving anything, but would it not be cool if Africa could participate in the global economy as an exporter of their products rather than an importer of aid money?
It’s an exciting time for professional hockey in Southern Ontario and it has nothing to do with the playoffs. Jim Balsillie has made an offer to purchase the Phoenix Coyotes and relocate them to Southern Ontario. Jim stated, “I am excited to move closer to bringing an NHL franchise to what I believe is one of the best un-served hockey markets in the world”. Read the full release statement here.
We are building an exciting online community to help promote bringing Canada its seventh franchise. Sign up here for updates and alerts as we build this site and show the hockey world that we are ready!
Together, we can make it seven!
HD » Bring the Phoenix Jets back home, Balsillie. Well, almost home. After 15 years (or whatever it has been since the Jets of Winnipeg were ignominiously relocated to Arizona) of dehydrating in the desert it is time for the Jets to come back to Canada where hockey matters. It is too bad it won’t be to Winnipeg, Balsillie is from Hamilton, but overall it is a good move to get the teams back to Canada and out of the southern United States where they don’t give a shiite about hockey, even with Gretzky on the bench.
Progressive economists are rethinking markets
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But if today’s headlines have displaced slower-moving ecological catastrophes, like shrinking freshwater supplies and runaway climate change, we need to remember how tightly our environmental, economic, and social crises are connected. Our global eco-nomic system, which balances market fundamentalism for most with corporate welfare for the few, is threatening human life on a massive scale.
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Yet for all these ironic twists, when you listen carefully to talk of the economy during this Canadian and US election season, whether it’s Stéphane Dion, Jack Layton, or Stephen Harper, Barack Obama or John McCain, the scope of reforms being proposed is incredibly narrow. Partial nationalization, credit injections, an orgy of tax credits: though dazzling in their variety and technical complexity, their goal is to save, not transform, the fundamental economic structures we already have — the very system that continues to exacerbate climate change, water wars, and hunger, while stymying our capacity to adapt when we need it most.
Beyond North America, progressive thinkers are reinterpreting how economies work in greater depth while moving toward a vision that neither surrenders to markets nor pretends to avoid them. These thinkers insist that we can imagine organizing our economy in ways that are fair for everyone. Just as important, in the face of a web of global crises, they show how dramatically different public policies can foster a climate of innovation. Still, while they’re grounded in a solid reassessment of history, the authors’ prescriptions remain largely speculative.
HD » Darn right it is time for economists and politicians to start thinking outside the box to make significant changes to how we organize our civilizations. But first it is time to think outside the box and find a new cliche for that tired old cliche, think outside the box. Any fresh new ideas?
My website is finally back online after about a two year hiatus. It has been my pet-project for many years now and has gone through several incarnations. This is the first one that uses a proper content management system, WordPress in this case. This is also the first one to be Canuck-inspired in its design style, but with the playoffs about to start how could I help myself. The focus of the content is also dominated by the Canucks these days, I will eventually broaden the scope of the content, but hopefully not for two months.
It has been a long, long time since a team in Vancouver has hoisted the Stanley Cup. Of course my bias is to always predict that the Canucks will win the Cup, but this time, the first in how many years, since 2003, or maybe 1995 or maybe never, the Canucks are a legitimate contender and predicting them to win is not just an unrealistic pipe dream.
There is an awful lot of hockey to be played between now and June when the Cup is hoisted, but with Luongo in goal, a healthy, committed defense and two, possibly even three lines that can score, the potential is there in a big way for us long-suffering Canucks fans.
Here is how I see it breaking down:
Western Conference Round 1
1.San Jose loses to 8.Anaheim
2.Detroit beats 7.Columbus
3.Vancouver beats 6.St Louis
4.Chicago beats 5.Calgary
Eastern Conference Round 1
1.Boston beats 8.Montreal
2.Washington beats 7.New York
3.New Jersey loses to 6.Carolina
4.Pittsburgh beats 5.Philadelphia
Western Conference Round 2
2.Detroit loses to 8.Anaheim
3.Vancouver beats 4.Chicago
Eastern Conference Round 2
1.Boston beats 6.Carolina
2.Washington beats 4.Pittsburgh
Western Conference Final
3.Vancouver beats 8.Anaheim
Eastern Conference Final
1.Boston loses to 2.Washington
Stanley Cup
Washington loses to Vancouver in 6 games.
This is the year of the subway series. The New York Mets now have a bullpen so they will stop blowing games in September and the Yankees are pissed at not being part of the World Series for the last few years so they went out and spent a billion dollars or something on pitching to rectify this situation.
And if I can make a long shot prediction of a series I would actually want to see, unless there was brawling in the subways between Mets and Yanks fans, it would be the Cubs and the Blue Jays, but I don’t think I will be putting my money down on that one. Crazier things have happened … maybe. Do you think the Cubs will ever break the jinx? Nah. They should suck for 5 years and stockpile top draft picks if they ever want to build a winner instead of aspiring to mediocrity every year.
Hacked web sites. Angry ABBA singers. Charges of media bias. Hundreds of flower bouquets for an expert who testified on behalf of the defense. The Swedish Pirate Bay trial has largely been an entertaining spectacle, especially for anyone who doesn’t speak Swedish. Both sides have been playing to the media, telling us that they’re winning and that their respective enemies are making a fool of themselves.
The Definitive Primer to the Pirate Bay Trial
The trial against the Pirate Bay will start in Sweden on Monday, and file sharers and P2P journalists alike can hardly contain themselves. The Times of London has dubbed it the “Internet piracy trial of the decade,” and the Pirate Bay’s staff and supporters have planed an ongoing spectacle in front of the courthouse, involving, among other things, a brass band, rallies and an old bus that will be used as a press center.
-> www.newteevee.com
HD » I don’t know about all the legal semantics and wranglings and what not regarding this case, but I hope The Pirate Bay’s lawyers are adept enough with the law and the technology to be victorious. I do know that the producers of content need to figure out that some downloading and file sharing is not only necessary but beneficial (call it marketing). And I do know that unless the producers figure out a way to sell their content how and where people are now wanting it (and for a realistic price: ie. a few cents for a song, a dollar for a movie) then torrent tracking sites like The Pirate Bay will always be in existence. It is now part of the global cultural dissemination process so if you can’t beat them you will need to find a way to join them. The producers of content need the people and the people want, need even, the producers of content, given that symbiosis there has to be a way for it to work for both sides. If the producers act greedy it makes the people cheap. The people have shown what being cheap means so it is time for the producers to show what not being greedy is like. Your move producers, until then I need to check the status of my torrents.
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
My only literary prediction for 2009 is that we’re all going to be reading a lot more books about what was formerly known as The Economy, and is currently variously called The Crisis, The Collapse, Things Are Going to Get Worse Before They Get Better, The Brink of Great Depression II, and “A Spectre Is Haunting…” The spectre is haunting not just Europe, as the opening line of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto of 1848 had it, but the entire globe, though it’s unlikely that it’s the “spectre of Communism” that’s doing the haunting, as the mid-19th century revolutionaries claimed. What to call the spectre will no doubt be the subject of many of this year’s forthcoming books.
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My own favourite Virgil-like guide to our present economic Hell is Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics. He’s also a Princeton professor, a New York Times columnist, and a self-declared liberal economist, author of The Conscience of a Liberal. It was Krugman who asked in a recent column (”The Madoff Economy,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 2008), “How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?” But before contemplating the possibility that much of capitalism is itself a Ponzi swindle writ large, we need a little background.
HD » This article explains why I intrinsically feel that this recession/depression is not my problem; it is the problem of the idiots who were part of the situation that created the mess in the first place. Ultimately I will probably be affected by it because websites will be lower on the priority list for my clients and potential clients but for now I say to the financial, banking, credit, investment and real estate industries, “fuck you and your fucking economic crises, this is not my business, sort your shit out and stop bothering me.”Ultimately I feel like this is going to be good for the world, it is an important learning experience after Bush and the rise of the neo-cons and the unfettered capitalist proponents and will help clean up the overall ’system’.
