Links for Wednesday March 23th, 2011
How to feed 9 billion people: the future of food and farming: A sobering read:
"Facing a convergence of threats, the global food system is failing. Each month, the global population grows by another 6 million, and an ever-wealthier world means one with more purchasing power, which drives up prices. Currently, with the global population at 7 billion and change, more than a billion of those go to bed hungry, and another billion suffer from malnutrition. And trends suggest that things will get worse. 2010 was the first year when more people lived in urban rather than rural environments; by 2050, we're going to need 30 percent more food and 40 percent more water than is currently available. "
Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no:
"There's no question that recorded music sales have declined over the last decade—down from over $26 billion in 2000 to under $16 billion last year. But the relentless focus on P2P sharing ignores other factors, these scholars contend. The most important of these is the gradual weakening of the consumer economy over the last decade, particularly over the last two years of global recession. And it's going to get worse."
Some rational, economic analysis that indicates that the war on filesharing might ultimately be counter-productive.
Celebrating Betrand Serlet and Craig Federighi: Wil Shipley on today's announcement that Bertrand Serlet is leaving Apple. Some nice inside baseball from the old NeXT days.
The MacBook Air / iPhone 4 connection: Interesting find from Mattias Östergren. This can't be a coincidence.
Amazon Tablets: How Amazon Could Quietly Become A Huge Player: This is something of a far-out theory, but I think that if Amazon stepped into the Android game, they could absolutely kill it. Based upon my time with the Xoom, a lot of Androids problems revolve around content — discovering content, paying for it, downloading it, and viewing it properly. All areas of core competence for Amazon. They wouldn't even need to make their own hardware, they could just partner up with one of the OEMs (HTC, for example), and kick out some software optimized for that OEMs devices. This is interesting to speculate about. (via Daring Fireball)