Oyo

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10440943-260.html

Yes, it's ok for you to feel slightly aroused by it. I won't be jealous LOL

But seriously... this could be a huge game changer. Microsoft has been trying this for years and has had no luck penetrating the market. Google believes in the concept so much they are developing as OS just for tablets and smartphones. Apple is the only tech company out there that has control of the hardware and software and has an aesthetic that guides their product decisions. That means they can execute this and make it mainstream. They did it with MP3 players so well that all established players in that space are now judged by how well they match the iPod's capabilities. They did it with smartphone so well that anything that doesn't match an iPhone's specs is considered a failed product. Now they're going to clean the chronometers of anyone manufacturing tablets and netbooks.

A few questions come to mind...

• How will I be able to use this to perform music / art / whatever?
• Will companies like Ableton, Native Instruments, etc start trying to develop toward this platform?
• How durable is this thing?
• Will this device help fuel the use of apps and data storage in the cloud?
• Will it become such a lust object that anyone carrying one is begging to be robbed?
• How competitive will Android devices be against the jesuspad, er, I mean iPad? Notice I'm not even going to ask how competitive Microsoft will be because we already know that answer - they won't be competitive at all! Microsoft and their co-conspirators/captives have had 10 years to pull this off with the various iterations of tablets, convertable and netbooks with zero success. In fact, the only success they've had is with netbooks and that only happened because they installed Linux on them until Microsoft somehow "convinced" them to stop.
• Should I wait until the next generation iPad or get one in 60 days? You know the next version will have some amazing feature that anyone buying it at launch will be pissed they didn't have access to. no, I'm not gonna predict what that will be. Knowing Apple, it could be anything from a teleportation device to a computer-to-brain interface...

One last thing... I was hugely disappointed when the iPod Touch originally launched. I wanted an Apple tablet then. But they have gone in a better direction. I'm a big time user of the cloud now. This is the way tech is going and Apple, like Google, has figured out that a lightweight, relatively inexpensive client is what consumers want and need. I don't need to carry a 5-7 lbs. gaming rig in my backpack and I don't need a huge battery devouring hard drive. Apple has delivered on my expectations and they are going to get my hard earned money in return. Thanks Apple! You guys rock, as always.

Ok Google... now it's your turn. Give these guys some competition so that I have more choices. You folks are no slouches, either so I'll be looking out for more of that Google-y goodness.

What am I listening to?

• Fischerspooner - Money Can't Dance
• Fischerspooner - Danse en France (D.I.M. remix)
• Kanye West - Paranoid
• Boyz Noize vs Daft Punk - Feel Good 909 (Johnatron Edit)
• N.A.S.A feat. iCatching, Spankrock, MIA and Santagold - Whatchadoin? (David Starfire remix)
• Lady Sovereign - Jigsaw
• Mos Def - Life In Marvelous Times
• Shearwater - The Snow Leopard
• Camea - Wiretap
• Junior Boys - Work
• George Kranz - Din Daa Daa
• Shiela E - A Love Bizarre
• The Field - Over The Ice
• Death By Panda - American
• Nicole Williams and the Soul Investigators - Feeling Free
• The Spinners - I'll Be Around
• Betty Davis - He Was A Big Freak
• 4 Hero - Superwoman
• Oyo - Corruption (audioFawx remix)
• Audiosymmetry - Saint Serene
• TRS-80 - The New You
• TRS-80 - Lie On The Floor
• Aubrey - D 8
• MGMT - Electric Feel
• MSTRKFT feat. N.O.R.E - Bounce
• Au Revoir Simone - The Lucky One
• This Will Destroy You - Threads
• RATATAT - Black Heroes
• Afternoon Coffee Boys - Dark Blend (Camea remix)
• Guilty Simpson - The American Dream
• Earth People - Dance (Club Mix)
• Air - Surfing On A Rocket
• Alphawezen - Electricity Drive
• And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Isis Unveiled
• Jeff Buckley - Dream Brother
• Nicola Conte - Bossa Per Due

I don't remember what I was doing when Walter Cronkite retired from the CBS Evening News on February 14, 1980 - 3 days before my 4th birthday. My earliest memories of that news program revolve around Dan Rather, the man who succeeded him in fantastic fashion. But I do have the benefit of the historical record and the relatively short time I've been able to enjoy his more recent work to form an opinion of one of the last great journalists of the United States. That opinion is best summed up in what follows - my goodbye to a total stranger who many of us here saw as a close confidant.

Thank you, Walter, for having put yourself on the line to shine the light of truth on our world. You are among those who inspired me to express myself, even if that inspiration had to come from the historical record rather than experiencing you first hand like those of the generation before me did. I salute your courage and unwavering journalistic integrity. Unlike the pundits of today who are often "embedded" with the very people they are expected to critique, you were a true patriot and loyal member of the Fourth Estate. Whatever else you may have done in your private life, you were highly professional in your public one. Your great service to us - the people of America and the people of the world - will never be forgotten.

If I could accomplish a tenth of what you did, Walter, I would be twice the man I am today. May others aspire to at least such a meager goal and may we all achieve it.

Yesterday, Google blogged about the new Android Scripting Environment. This is fairly revolutionary because I don't know of any other cell phone that will allow you to write a computer program for your phone on your phone. Even if you're not able to develop anything flashy you can still do quite a bit. One example Google provides on their blog is a script that will silence your ringer when you place the phone face down and turn the ringer back on when face up. I would need a copy of Visual Studio to do that on my T-Mobile Dash. You'd need a copy of XCode to do that on an iPhone. We'd both need USB cables and our laptops. Anyone with a T-Mobile G1 can write it while heading to work on the train in the morning if they have 15 minutes to spare with nothing more than the onscreen keyboard.

@drdigipol retweeted a post originally from @jayrosen_nyu. It was a Matt Yglesias piece on ThinkProgress about how organizations that aren't driven by maximizing profits have an advantage over those which are. The author cites Craigslist's pwning of the classified ad market and the effect it has had on the revenue of the newspaper industry.

Competing Against Free on ThinkProgress

I have mixed feelings about this. I agree that nothing beats free, provided there is a reasonable expectation of quality. However, I think Craigslist's success is due to the fact they are able to operate with lower operating costs. They are using a disruptive technology - the internet - to provide their service for cheap or free. Rational actors in the market will favor a lower priced service that is equal in perceived quality to a higher priced one. If you have to pay for buildings and printing presses you are at a disadvantage to a competitor that doesn't have expenses related to that kind of capital. In addition, the absence of profit maximization as a motivator means they can be content with breaking even or having just enough to save / reinvest. Hardly any traditional business model can cope with the market pressure a competitor like that can bring to bear once they gain traction.

On the other hand, for-profit entities typically have to factor operating costs into their prices. The ones who spend time planning know that they can afford to sell 100 widgets at $x, but would have to sell the widgets at $y is they sold less than 50. This allows them to scale the operation based on how well sales go. A traditional non-profit either doesn't charge for services or charges very little and their income is based on donations and grants. Such a circumstance only scales well when you have lots of donors or ones with deep pockets. To use the dry cleaner as an example, if you need $5 per incoming item to serve 2000 customers but you only get about $2 per item in donations then your non-profit is going to have to start turning customers away or go bankrupt. In the absence of Bill Gates' $5 billion check a non-profit playing by those rules wouldn't last about as long as a snowball on a Midwest summer day.

Why isn't Craigslist affected by this? Because bandwidth and servers are cheap. Scaling to meet customer demand means spending another $1000 at the most. Ok maybe $2000. If the Seattle Times needed to print more newspapers than their current facilities can handle they'd need to buy new presses at the least or build a brand new facility. They'd pay at least $2000 for the analysis necessary to decided what solution to pursue. A dry cleaner would be in the same situation as the newspapers, regardless of whether they are for or non profit.

All that said, I think it is totally possible for any entity that can use disruptive technology and operating models to forego profit maximization as a motivator, non-profit or otherwise. And thrive. But before we see it become a trend that threatens the existence to for-profit entities we'll need a cultural sea change where entrepreneurs can find reward in something other than profit. We'll also need a way to drive down operating costs in the brick and mortar world.

I get a kick out of idioms from other languages. When I discover one, usually by accident, I often spend some time trying to learn what the literal translation is so that I can divine something about the culture of origin. Like that は じ め ま し て translates literally to "shame to be first", which makes me wonder what role shame plays in Japanese culture. Is it a shame to be the first person to give their name? Or that this is the first time you met?And what does that mean about how their language frames the world?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-klein7-2009apr07,0,3092824.sto...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124234365947221489.html
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/05/health-care-cave-in.html
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/opinion/27krugman.html?hp
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l143nw3320560r63/

...and yes, health care is an investment in human capital.
http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/global/glossary.html#41

President Obama just laid out what's up with Guantanamo Bay. And Emperor Palpatine, er I mean Dick Cheney has emerged from his undisclosed location to argue about it. Even one of the Storm Troopers decided to get in on the action.

Former President George W. Bush is completely silent about the issue. I guess he's more interested in walking his dog and shopping at the local hardware store in Dallas. Funny that everyone defends his policies but him. Kinda puts me in the mindset that even Bush knows what he did was wrong. Why isn't he wearing an orange jumpsuit and being led away to a cell? Have we no prisons? Have we no workhouses? C'mon and lock the guy up already! We don't wanna wait until he's senile like Reagan was.

I bet you'd never guess I want Gitmo closed. After all, most of my posts are so obviously rightwing oriented. Ok I'll come clean. I want the place shut down and obliterated with large amounts of semtex. It is a blight. It is a stain on our national conscious.

I don't agree with President Obama's decision to withhold the Iraqi prisoner abuse pictures. But, based on his speech, I'm willing to let it go for now. Why? First of all, I already have a bunch of JPEGs of Iraqi prisoner abuse I downloaded. I keep them so that I never forget how barbaric our country can be and why we need a change we can believe in. The worst thing that can happen is that those of us who lived through these times develop a collective amnesia about how we got to this point. We Americans tend to sweep unpleasant facts under the carpet and teach our children highly romanticized notions about history. As long as those pictures are in circulation it will be very hard for anyone to pretend we didn't do something morally and ethically reprehensible. Nor can we pretend we didn't violate human rights and the Geneva Conventions. The day may come when, as with all unfortunate parts of US history - like slavery, white flight, the oppression of the Chinese in the West and genocide against Native Americans - the US tries to pretend this stuff didn't happen or wasn't really that bad. Anyone who has the pics can make sure nobody forgets and history doesn't repeat itself. That said, I really don't need to see any more. The images I have are plenty and I can't even look at them without getting angry. How many more photos of naked Arabs of various nationalities simulating anal sex and smeared with feces do I need to see to be convinced we were engaged in questionable activities? Please spare me any more. I can't take it.

Second, I bet the ones Obama isn't releasing are worse than what we've already seen. Obama is on a mission to improve our image. If the new pictures are worse - and remember that the last ones really made us look like sexually repressed sadistic maniacs - then nobody in their right mind is going to work with us or negotiate with us because they'll be too busy being pissed off. President Obama is trying to distance himself from the questionable decision making of the past 8 years and can't very well do that if everyone in the world is watching some GI's homemade version of Slumdog Millionaire starring the US Army and some random guy picked up off the street in Baghdad (if you don't get the "joke", go watch the first 20 minutes of the movie and you'll understand).

I think eventually the pics are gonna get out and, as a result, there will be much crying and gnashing of teeth. Maybe President Obama is gambling that he can make nice with everyone before that happens so that he won't have to deal with all that appropriately targeted anger. Whatever. If his decision helps improve our image while not pretending something really, really didn't bad happened and the perpetrators are sitting in a military prison or have been appropriately humiliated then fine. Are their names and punishment a matter of public record? If not, can they be made public? Are these the same idiots we already punished because of the Abu Gharib thing? Or are these new sadists who needed to be taught a lesson? The public needs to know so we can make an example out of them. They deserve to be stigmatized, at the least. By their actions they have made America much less safe and given Al Qaeda something to rally the troops to. I'm not suggesting our soldiers need to be paragons of virtue. That will never happen since that's a standard nobody can live up to. It is, however, reasonable to expect them to abide by our treaties, disobey illegal orders and conduct themselves in a way that represents some subset of our values as a culture.

Unless, of course, torturing and killing people are American values.

OMG I have finally found the pants which replace my arsenal of skinny jeans. Behold the power of the Zubaz pants!!!

The true potential of these pants cannot be realized unless combined with Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt!

I am sooooooooo adding these to my Wish List...