Unemployed people don’t have any money, so they don’t pay mortgages. It’s as simple as that.

Ivy Zelman: “Home prices are going back down” « naked capitalism

In 1990, MTV aired a groundbreaking TV documentary series called Buzz. Created and directed by Mark Pellington (Mothman Prophecies, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video) in partnership with MTV Europe, Buzz was a fantastic experiment in non-linearity and cut-up that drew heavily from -- and presented -- avant-garde art, underground cinema, early cyberpunk, industrial culture, appropriation/sampling, and postmodern literature. Experientially, it feels like what Mondo 2000 would have looked like as a television show, and in fact Mondo founder RU Sirius was interviewed on the first episode. Other notable contributors/subjects included William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Genesis P-Orridge, Syd Mead, and many other happy mutants.

MTV's Buzz: fantastically forward-thinking TV from 1990 - Boing Boing

What do ya'll think?

Frankly, this feels about right, even through I haven't looked at this carefully:

Instead Android will be the Linux of the phone market. Very slick tool, open, full of technical goodness, philosophically correct, the geek choice. And since it’s the geeks who write about technology, you’ll see as many Android-is-taking-over articles as we see Linux-is-taking-over articles. But it will never actually happen because most of the marketplace is not made up of geeks.

The droid is huge - clunky. Feature rich but not sexy. Its a Lynx, not a Gameboy.

Apple: Can it stop the Android menace? « naked capitalism

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high... it must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.

"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon.

It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.

Really? I think its a forecast. Here is why.

Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.

I view retesting march lows as a near certainty.

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for 'global collapse' - Telegraph

"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, a senior special agent at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

This story is very light on technical details but I don't think I have ever heard the news media describe a federal government encryption cracking technology before, so its interesting in that respect. The story emphasizes the fourth amendment and the use of warrants to seize computer systems, but of course its quite likely that this same infrastructure is used in some cases where computer systems are seized at border crossings without a warrant or any reasonable suspicion. Understanding what sort of forensic analysis is used when computers are seized without suspicion helps us ascertain the privacy impact of those seizures. This is a relevant datapoint.

Federal officers use video game console to catch child pornographers

The international legal community has been quite vocal in condemning American treatment of POWs after 9/11, but it hasn’t evolved international law, even theoretically, to cope with this.

Whatever. The Bush administration intentionally blew off the international legal establishment. He blew off the Geneva conventions, he blew off the UN, hell, he even blew off our Constitution in the context of wiretapping and Habeas Corpus. Can you imagine the howls from the right wing if France and Germany had gotten together and come up with a set of rules for how the United States should deal with captured Al Queda? There is not a chance in hell that the Bush administration would have embraced such a thing. Blaming the "international legal community" for the situation is simply nonsensical.

Obama, for his part, continues to engage in a series of actions that seem designed to suit the prejudices of the dumbest of his supporters. There was no reason to close Gitmo, for example. The issue is not about where the physical prison is but what rules apply to people imprisoned there. Supreme Court decisions reached during the Bush years created a process for military trials of Al Queda suspects with a requirement for Habeas that applied to Gitmo. That process is mostly reasonable under the circumstances and mostly put an end to the Bush Administration's horrific attempt to ignore centuries old legal doctrine. Closing the prison is a really risky and expensive publicity stunt. So is trying a person like Mohammed in New York City. I'm not worried about these people escaping. I'm worried that an American might blow up the prison or blow up the court house.

I don't understand what the point is. Closing Gitmo doesn't actually matter. Trying Mohammed in New York doesn't actually matter either.

If Obama want to be seen as "doing something" there are all kinds of things that he could do. He could end suspicionless searches of laptops at the border. He could come clean on illegal wiretapping. He could work with members of Congress to reverse the stupid legal amnesty offered the telecoms and renew America's commitment to the rule of law. He could work with Congress to right cases of illegal rendition like Maher Arar. He could engage the international legal community in a long term process to establish norms for handling terrorist suspects.

There are all kinds of things that could be done that have actual substance. Unfortunately, this guy appears to prefer theater, which is not something that I expected from a law professor, but something that we'll have to live with, I guess. But if one of these theatrical stunts goes sideways it'll be mincemeat for the left, and we'll go back to being governed by people who have absolutely no respect for the ancient foundations of western democracy.

Deciphering the Mohammed Trial | STRATFOR

"It is scandalous that the company continues to send its improper demands," Ms. Granick says.

These Hobbyists Add to Calculators, Multiplying Their Fun - WSJ.com

Tom Cross, a security technology researcher in Atlanta, received a cease-and-desist letter from TI after merely posting about the hackers on his blog, Memestreams.net. "I didn't include the key in my post," he says. "I linked to a discussion forum where this was being talked about." Cross took down his link, but not without feeling burned. "It's incumbent on Texas Instruments to be responsible with its power," he says, "and I don't think they were responsible."

IEEE Spectrum: For Texas Instruments, Calculator Hackers Don't Add Up

Jubilant NASA scientists announced Friday that they have found the telltale signature of significant quantities of water, in the form of ice and vapor, in a shadowed crater at the moon's south pole.

It worked!

Crashed satellite detects water at moon's pole - washingtonpost.com

Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas...

Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."

1491 - The Atlantic