Q: Who wrote this?
“To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.”
A: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve in his book Essays on the Great Depression.
Faith, Freedom and Bling
Lovely NYT column by Maureen Dowd on Dubya’s tour of the Middle East…
Arab TV offered an uncomfortable juxtaposition: Al Arabiya running the wretched saga of Gaza children suffering from a lack of food and medicine during the Israeli blockade, blending into the wretched excess scenes of W. being festooned with rapper-level bling from royal hosts flush with gazillions from gouging us on oil.
W.’s 11th-hour bid to save his legacy from being a shattered Iraq — even as the Iraqi defense minister admitted that American troops would be needed to help with internal security until at least 2012 and border defense until at least 2018 — recalled MTV’s “Cribs.”
At a dinner last night in the king’s tentlike retreat, where the 8-foot flat-screen TV in the middle of the room flashed Arab news, the president and his advisers Elliott Abrams and Josh Bolten went native, lounging in floor-length, fur-lined robes, as if they were Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.
In Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan gave the president — dubbed “the Wolf of the Desert” by a Kuwaiti poet — a gigantic necklace made of gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds, so gaudy and cumbersome that even the Secret Service agent carrying it seemed nonplussed. Here in Saudi Arabia, the king draped W. with an emerald-and-ruby necklace that could have come from Ali Baba’s cave…
Quote of the day
“Due to an extreme surplus (of) withdrawals since the announcement of the Linden Labs new policy regarding inworld banks, we have temporarily disabled the withdraw feature on ATMs until further notice.”
A sign in the lobby of JT Financial, a Second Life bank. A rule change has led to old-fashioned bank runs across the virtual world, costing depositors real-world money. As reported in a story in the Wall Street Journal which begins: “In the real world, banks are reeling from the subprime-mortgage mess. In the online game Second Life, a shutdown of the make-believe banking system is causing real-life havoc for thousands of people…”
Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley.
Are IP addresses personal data?
The EU appears to think so — according to Tech Review:
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said Monday.
Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.
He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address ”then it has to be regarded as personal data.”
His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.
Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.
But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of ”whois” Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.
Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.
Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the time it stored search information to 18 months. It also reduced the time limit on the cookies that collect information on how people use the Internet from a default of 30 years to an automatic expiration in two years.
But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, said it was ”absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the last two figures from the stored IP address made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations.
”It’s one of the things that make computer people giggle,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told The Associated Press. ”The more the companies know about you, the more commercial value is obtained.”
Doing nicely, thank you
From today’s New York Times Blog…
Investors are all in a tizzy that Apple is only promising them a 30 percent growth, year over year, in its first-quarter revenue. But looking at the company’s fourth-quarter 2007 results, it’s clear that the company is doing very, very well.
Of all the blizzard of statistics that get thrown out on an earnings call, here’s the one that cuts through the clutter: $3 billion. That’s the amount of cash Apple stuffed in its bank accounts during the last three months of the year, giving it $18 billion in reserves…
But iPod sales are levelling off in the US. Market reaching saturation?
Quote of the day
“The market in the short run is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”
Benjamin Graham (1894-1976), economist, professional investor and mentor of Warren Buffett.
Looks as though there’s a lot of voting going on just now.
Another side of the Northern Rock fiasco
Interesting stuff from Wikileaks.
In the beginning was the command line…
Interesting personal ad on Craigslist.
There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as “shell users.” We are an old-fashioned bunch, preferring the warm glow of a green screen full of text over the cold blockiness of a graphical interface. We use ssh, scp, and even occassionally ftp. Back in the days before high-speed connections (“broadband”), we would dial up during off-hours to avoid being slammed with huge phone bills. The whole “Microsoft Windows” fad will fade away sooner or later, but in the interim, our kind is facing extinction.
Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix. Our child will be introduced to computers at a young age, and will be setting emacs mode before any other child can even read. I earn a sufficient income to support a family in modest comfort. Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family. We will even go to Disney World and see Mickey Mouse.
So, if you are a woman between the ages of 23 and 43 who is ready to raise a child in the way of the shell, let me know so we can begin the process. (If you are ready to raise more than one child, even better.)
The Diana inquest
Max Hastings says:
The inquest into the death of Princess Diana is providing a circus for the prurient, a dirty-raincoat show for the world, of a kind that makes many of us reach for a waxed bag.
Day after day for almost three months, a procession of charlatans, spivs, fantasists, retired policemen, royal hangers-on and servants who make Iago seem a model of loyalty has occupied the witness box at the law courts in the Strand. They have itemised the princess’s alleged lovers, her supposed opinions of the royal family (and vice versa), her contraceptive practices and her menstrual cycle…
Readers who have laid in a goodly supply of waxed bags may read the daily transcripts here.
Republican make-believe
Great column today by Gary Yonge on the US presidential election. He’s especially good about Republican supporters.
Having warped their understanding of how the world works to suit their ideology, they now have the terrible burden of having to live in it. On the whole, these are personally affable and politically angry people. The targets of their rage are clear: Hillary Clinton, the liberal media, illegal immigrants, Muslims, taxes, the government and nationalised healthcare all take their turns in the crosshairs.
But the source of their rage is a mystery. In George Bush, Conservatives have had almost everything they wanted. Tax cuts, war and conservative supreme court justices have all been forthcoming. For much of the time he has been in the White House the Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress too. To the faithful, that the economy is nosediving, the war has been judged a failure and the president’s approval ratings scrape historic lows are tiresome details. Since they only have themselves to blame, they simply change the subject and hope no one will notice.
When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney declares “Washington is broken” before a cheering crowd in Bluffton, you have to wonder who they think broke it. Romney went on to say, with a straight face, that he drew his inspiration from “Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush”. When a leading presidential contender says he is enthused by the president’s mother but won’t mention the president himself, it becomes clear to what extent those who wish to be head of state must first occupy a state of denial…