David Stockman interview

The whole interview is rather interesting. I’ve been reading a lot of these doom and gloom stories, I don’t know if I buy into them 100%, but I do get the sense that we are currently in a suspension phase and that more trouble is on the horizon.

I just uninstalled Adobe Reader X. Man that felt good.

Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers.

www.mozilla.org/collusion - go get it.

One thing that isnt clear in the demo, you can grab the little circle web sites and drag them around to better see relationships.

In Windows Developer Preview, Windows Classic theming mode no longer exists, and UX theming mode has been modified to include support for high contrast themes. Also, the system now stores the current visual styles so that they are always available, even when the Themes service is not running. Because of these changes, applications that target only Windows Developer Preview no longer need two separate code paths to support visual styles and high contrast themes.

It’s crazy that the old Windows 95 widget support exists under the hood of every Win OS up to Windows 7. As a developer this presents added work in insuring support, especially in projects like Mozilla, which handle common control theme rendering internally. I can’t believe it’s taken this long for MS to kill Classic off - this is great news. Good F’n riddance!

More here. Nice looking ride.

Based on the current exchange rate, the S model will run around 61K USD. Not bad!

Is Ron Paul really the crackpot paranoid of the group or is he the realist?

Also, what the heck constitutes a “Homeland Security”, how much money does it get, and how much authority did we grant it?

The need for highly specialized labor and custom installations drives up the installed cost of solar to about $7 per watt nationwide, or roughly $35,000 for a 5 kW installation, before government incentives.

Korman wants to bring the cost down to about $21,600 or between $4 – $4.50 per watt. To achieve this goal, GE would offer a standardized kit that includes modules that output low-voltage alternating current (AC) power instead of the high-voltage direct current (DC) power of most modules. Roofers and electricians can safely install these lower voltage systems on standardized mounts, eliminating the high cost of installation.

Link

Wikipedia - Micro-inverters

Latest and greatest - Enphase M215

These in-panel or attached DC-to-AC inverters are relatively new to the market, and should have a huge impact on the cost and improve the reliability of these systems. Awesome!

Wonky political question - If the government susidized a $35,000 installation down to say $20,000, would manufacturers still have strong incentive to bring the cost down on their own?

“If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible.”

Fitting that I found this article by Jonathan Zittrain today, the same day Microsoft released details on the restrictions of thier new software store. I will not be supporting any “software store” that restricts what my software can display or do -

5.1 Your app must not contain adult content

Apps with a rating over PEGI 16, ESRB MATURE, or that contain content that would warrant such a rating, are not allowed.

5.2 Your app must not contain content that advocates discrimination, hatred, or violence based on membership in a particular racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, or other social group, or based on a person’s gender, age, or sexual orientation

5.3 Your app must not contain content or functionality that encourages, facilitates or glamorizes illegal activity

5.4 Your app must not contain or display content that a reasonable person would consider to be obscene

5.5 Your app must not contain content that is defamatory, libelous or slanderous, or threatening

5.6 Your app must not contain content that encourages, facilitates or glamorizes excessive or irresponsible use of alcohol or tobacco products, drugs or weapons

5.7 Your app must not contain content that encourages, facilitates or glamorizes extreme or gratuitous violence, human rights violations, or the creation or use of weapons against a person or animal in the real world

5.8 Your app must not contain excessive or gratuitous profanity

In the software industry individual freedom is slowly dieing.

..it makes no difference that no judge has found you guilty of anything or that the DMCA safe harbors would shelter your conduct if the matter ever went to court. Indeed, services that have been specifically found legal, like Rapidshare, could be economically strangled via SOPA. You can file a counter-notice, but you’ve only got 5 days to do it (good luck getting solid legal advice in time) and the payment processors and ad networks have no obligation to respect it in any event. That’s because there are vigilante provisions that grant them immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement.

At a minimum, this means that any service that hosts user generated content is going to be under enormous pressure to actively monitor and filter that content. That’s a huge burden, and worse for services that are just getting started – the YouTubes of tomorrow that are generating jobs today. And no matter what they do, we’re going to see a flurry of notices anyway – as we’ve learned from the DMCA takedown process, content owners are more than happy to send bogus complaints. What happened to Wikileaks via voluntary censorship will now be systematized and streamlined – as long as someone, somewhere, thinks they’ve got an IP right that’s being harmed.

In essence, Hollywood is tired of those pesky laws that help protect innovation, economic growth, and creativity rather than outmoded business models. So they are trying to rewrite the rules, regulate the Internet, and damn the consequences for the rest of us.

The Stop Online Piracy Act

EFF Link

Link

Historic events playing out right in front of us - most generations only have the chance to read about this stuff. Pretty incredible.

Ludwig von Mises explained that one government intervention leads to an endless succession of interventions to deal with the effects of the first and subsequent interventions. Ultimately, it comes down to two choices. “Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way,” Mises wrote.

Likewise, there is no middle way to solve the housing crisis. For capitalism to work its magic and set underwater homeowners free, mortgage holders must be allowed to fail.

Daily Capitalist post

Best blog post I’ve read in a while summing up why we have an underwater homeowner problem, how we shouln’t fix the problem, and how we could.

Hussman

Greece’s prime minister abandoned his explosive plan to put a European rescue deal to popular vote Thursday, keeping his government alive — but passionate squabbling in Athens left the country’s solvency in doubt and the eurozone in turmoil.

Papandreou sparked a global crisis Monday when he announced he would put the latest European deal to cut Greece’s massive debts — a hard-fought accord that took months of negotiations — to a referendum. The idea horrified other EU nations, Greece’s creditors and financial markets as investors fretted over the prospect of Greece being forced into a disorderly default.

Link

Reminds me of our twice over TARP vote. So much for democracy, the moneyed interests win again, maybe..

The political troubles of Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou mounted on Thursday after his finance minister publicly opposed a plan to tie a referendum to the nation’s membership in the euro zone.

“Greece’s position within the euro area is a historic conquest of the country that cannot be put in doubt … [and this] cannot depend on a referendum,“ said Evangelos Venizelos, Greek finance minister and deputy prime minister, in an early-morning statement issued following his return to Athens from Cannes, France.

Analysts at Danske Bank noted that Papandreou is rapidly losing support, which may open the door for a unity government.

“A unity government passing the austerity package as well as general elections seem plausible outcomes,” they said. ”Both scenarios imply that no referendum will take place.”

Shouldn’t the people of Greece have a say in this? Apparently not, according to some.

These results hold even when adjusted for individual intelligence, social class and their home environments. Kids with low levels of self-control are more likely as adolescents to smoke, leave school early and have unplanned babies. As young adults they’re more likely to have health problems, money issues and criminal records. The study, so far, has only reached their early thirties, so what they’ll look like as old people is as yet unknown: but a good guess is that more of them will die younger than their better controlled cohort.

Leaving aside all of the implications for this it’s worth standing back from the research and thinking quite hard about what this means. That this simple test, applied to your four year old, is strikingly predictive of their future life chances is quite extraordinary when you consider the confusion and lack of coherence in most of the findings of psychology and economics.

The Marshmallow Test - Psy-Fi blog

The internet investing market is transitioning. Social was the driving force for the past three or four years. In the wake of Facebook and Twitter, how could it not be? Mobile has also been a hot theme. Both sectors have consolidated a few winners and a number of additional interesting emerging companies. But how many social platforms of scale will there be? Five, ten, twenty? And mobile is hard because distribution continues to be limited to the app store model where you get on the leaderboard and win or you don’t and you don’t. Investors are moving into new areas like cloud, peer to peer marketplaces, and trying to take what worked in consumer into the enterprise. There is no lack of interest in internet investing, but investors are having to learn new markets and new sectors. And that kind of transition takes the heat out of an overheated market.

Noticed this little blurb in the discussion about venture drying up - it sounds like locked down mobile app stores are hindering innovation.

A VC link

p.s. Steve, fuck you too.