If you have a Touchpad from HP, I strongly suggest to install cyanogenmod 9. Yuou will be able to put your 99$ hardware to some use :-)

If you wish to blame Wall Street, here’s where that comes in, but it isn’t what you think. Yes, they invented some really clever and complex financial tools to provide capital to the housing market. These were actually pretty good financial structures but for the fact that the whole enterprise was built on a house of sand and the system wasn’t set up for the collapse of the housing market.

via Message To Guevaristas Occupying Wall St. | The Daily Capitalist.

And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else’s income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

via Why the Rich Are Getting Richer | Foreign Affairs.

via Obama, Cantor spar over Occupy Wall Street – Oct. 7, 2011.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-did-the-gop-turn-against-stimulus-ask-a-psychologist/2011/08/25/gIQADugV6J_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein

Remember Paul Ryan, circa 2001:

Around the same time, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) held a hearing in which he invited Kevin Hassett, a conservative economist based at the American Enterprise Institute, to make the case for a fiscal stimulus. “The economists who studied this were quite surprised to find that fiscal policy in recessions was reasonably effective,” Hassett testified. “It is just that folks tried a first punch that was too light and that generally we didn’t get big measures until well into the recession.”

Ryan was delighted by his answer. “That is precisely my point,” he replied. “That is why I like my porridge hot. I think we ought to have this income tax cut fast, deeper, retroactive to January 1st, to make sure we get a good punch into the economy, juice the economy to make sure that we can avoid a hard landing.”

Surprisingly, to be a dead platform, it still retains a good user experience and in some areas far outperforms competitors (multitasking, ease of development).

Here the alternatives:

• iOS: good user interface, seamless integration with Apple services, but then the price to pay is the Apple rule.
• Android: more open and less control, but fragmented and inconsistent in the user interface. Less than optimal experience.
• Windows 7 phone: here you have good ux… and not much else to say (I do not have any direct experience).
• Blackberry OS: I used to develop for it, it really reminds me of the first days of java, with hairy user interfaces and unpredictable behaviour.