Does Big Music have its head in the cloud(s)?

Amazon’s move into the cloud music storage and streaming game is nothing if not controversial. Apple and Google have been promising this service for months, if not years.
The labels are trying to figure out what action to take — if any — against Amazon for doing this without their permission. Of these, Sony seems the most annoyed and likely to act. The labels have done a great job over the years negotiating comical terms of usage that you agree to without even realizing it. And that may include the ability to store your music on a remote server and stream it. Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/amazon-cloud-music/
If the record labels don’t come to a licensing agreement with Amazon soon, they will either be forced to take legal action or implicitly allow other music companies to ditch cloud licenses too.
With Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, U.S. customers can get free online storage from Amazon to use for whatever they please. Once the music is copied to the remote drive, users can then use the Cloud Player Android or Web app to stream the music to any compatible device or browser.
Read more: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/04/music-industry-cloud-player/

Return With Me to 2003

August 23, 2003 - Julie Tamaki, Jia-Rui Chong and Mitchell Landsberg - LA Times Staff Writers

Vandals acting in the name of radical environmentalism struck four car dealerships and several individual car owners in the San Gabriel Valley early Friday, setting fire to one Chevrolet dealership and destroying or defacing dozens of Hummers and other SUVs, many painted with the word "polluter."

The Earth Liberation Front, a loose association of militant environmentalists, claimed responsibility for the attacks. The ELF also claimed responsibility recently for a $50-million arson fire that destroyed an apartment construction site in San Diego.                                                                                      By far the most serious attack was on the Clippinger Chevrolet dealership in West Covina, which sustained an estimated $1 million in damage after two fires were set in the car lot and one in a warehouse where service parts were kept. The areas of the lot that were set ablaze contained new cars, mostly H2 Hummers. In Duarte, vandals painted on 30 sport utility vehicles at a Mitsubishi dealership and 20 vehicles at the Ford Advantage Lincoln Mercury dealership across the street. Nine SUVs were similarly vandalized in Arcadia. Read more: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/23/local/me-hummers23



WHO YA GONNA BELIEVE?

Legendary investor Warren Buffett is bullish on the country's economic future, exuberantly telling shareholders in his annual letter that the country's "best days lie ahead."

The Oracle of Omaha, who is one of the most widely followed and influential financiers, predicted current hardships are merely a hiccup in the country's long tradition of innovation and growth.

"Money will always flow towards opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America," he wrote in the 26-page report.

See the full article here:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/oracle_of_omaha_sees_bright_us_future_t0cjmH9uEoLidsRakqbSSI#ixzz1F9g9v6eK

At the beginning of 2011, USA Today reported a forecast by Ned Davis Research which said the S&P 500 will make a run at the 2007 high of 1,565, but hit a "midyear peak." Then it will crash as interest rates rise.

The Wall Street Journal says, "Inflation jitters spread through emerging markets, prompting China’s central bank to raise interest rate for the third time in four months amid worries that a drought threatening the country’s wheat crop will put further pressure on global food prices."

With commodity prices rising rapidly, all the rationalizations Wall Street uses to keep the Federal Reserve’s interest rates low are rapidly vaporizing.

Jeremy Grantham, whose firm manages $107 billion: "... you should pull back from the market as it advances into dangerously overpriced territory ... by October 1 you should probably be thinking much more conservatively."

Translation: Get the heck out of Wall Street’s stock market casino soon, maybe as early as July 4th, and definitely get out by Christmas.

See the full article here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/market-crash-2011-it-will-hit-by-christmas-2011-02-22?pagenumber=1

Magnetic Polar Shifts Causing Massive Global Superstorms

Terrence Aym - Salem-News.com


NASA has been warning about it, scientific papers have been written about it, geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples.

Now "it" is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world's weather.

Forget about global warming, man-made or natural, what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun's magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet's own magnetic field.

When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose.

See the complete article here:http://www.salem-news.com/articles/february042011/globaltemp.php

EZRA KLEIN: CONSTITUTION ‘HAS NO BINDING POWER ON ANYTHING’

See the video here:
http://www.mrc.org/biasalert/2010/20101230024648.aspx

Ezra Klein is proof that even cosmic-sized ignorance can find an audience. Recently on MSNBC, he incredibly announced that  the Constitution “has no binding power on anything” and continued to assert that the Constitution is confusing because it’s over 100 years old. Wow! It’s hard to believe that even MSNBC could lend any credence to such a view. 


Bill Maher and so many others on the left like to blanket the American populace with stupidity. Then apparently Ezra Klein represents high intellect on the left, huh?


Ezra Klein would be confused by the following quote, since it was made over 100 years ago, but Patrick Henry in 1775 wrote “…give me liberty or give me death.” It’s doubtful Ezra Klein would ever possess the passion to die for anything, but I’d like to “de-confuse” it for him. Passionate people prefer freedom over governmental tyranny, even if the alternative is death. 


Oh, maybe that’s still confusing for you, Ezra. Well, let’s see…
let me put it this way:  I will be free, even if it kills me! Or as the state motto of New Hampshire puts it, “Live free or die.”
               

SECRET (?…not anymore!) MINI-SHUTTLE LANDS IN CALIFORNIA

Did you know the US has a Mini-Shuttle? Now you do. The Orbital Test Vehicle, also known as the X-37B, touched down recently at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, becoming the first U.S. vehicle to make an autonomous runway landing from space.


The military won't say what the X-37B was doing during its seven-plus months in space, but officials intend to launch a second X-37B vehicle in 2011. The vehicle expected to fly in the spring is a second spacecraft, but the idea is to cut down the time needed for servicing the space planes from months to days -- and at a fraction of the cost NASA pays to get its shuttles ready for flight.


Read more here: 
http://news.discovery.com/space/secret-mini-shuttle-lands-in-california.html

Where Our Responsibility Belongs

I recently received an email soliciting funds to help Palestinian farmers. Now, I’m not a hardhearted person but it seems to me that the oil-rich Arab states should take care of the Palestinians. We (US citizens) need to take care of American farmers. I replied with this article:

Save the farms and feed millions or
save the smelt and kill the farms?

FRESNO, Calif. — A federal judge recently turned down California farmers' emergency request to suspend water pumping restrictions in the state's delta. The restrictions were put in place to protect the smelt, a finger-sized fish.

Farmers across the fertile San Joaquin Valley argued those restrictions have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses as the shortages have forced them to fallow their fields and lay off thousands of farm workers. The farms produce half the nation's fruits and vegetables.

"We can't plant any of our annual crops until we know what kind of water supply we're going to get," said Don Devine, a Fresno farmer who grows organic sweet corn and cantaloupes on the valley's dry west side. "It's a heartbreaker to have to lay people off, but we've had no choice because there's no water."
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Here is another example of government restrictions on landowners:
Rain that falls on private property is not considered to be "owned" by the landholder in all states, making rainwater collection potentially illegal. Several Western states and Alaska have regions that require homeowners to get permits first, and in Utah catchment is prohibited.