Viva La Vida - Coldplay's new web site

Has anyone noticed the new design on Colplay's website after the launch of Viva La Vida...The site simply rocks.. Nice design and it doesnt play coldplay music automatically when you load the page which is good for opening in office:)

The pages have the latest album covers and other wallpapers as backgrounds. All UI controls -scroll bar, links,buttons are hand drawn.Very neat!!!

The future belongs to us

"Derivatives are the financial weapons of mass destruction" - Warren Buffett

I cannot think of anything else to say on readin this about speculators playing havoc with oil futures and other exotic instruments to cause oil and other commodities prices to rise. See this excerpt from the article.

Last August, the price of oil was $70 (€45) a barrel, in early March it surpassed the $100 (€64) mark, and then the new record high on June 6. What's next?
Ernst Tanner is asking himself the same question, but he is thinking about cocoa, not oil. Tanner is the CEO of Swiss fine chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli. He has had to look on as the price of cocoa beans jumped by 40 percent since early 2007, despite abundant supply. "It hardly has anything to do with supply and demand anymore," says Tanner.

Come to think of it,futures and forwards were created to protect producers from the vagaries of price movements and be able to sell their produce at a fixd price thus insulating them from risk.
A far cry from how it is used today by Wall street and hedge funds to speculate prices.

Regardless of whether prices go up or down, speculation results in preposterous exaggerations, with real consequences for the economy.Once again, it is the excesses of modern financial markets that are sending the world economy into convulsions. Indeed, German President Horst Köhler may have been right when he recently said, in an interview with the German magazine Stern, that the financial markets have developed into a "monster" that needs to be tamed.

Is this a new form of imperialism? Cash rich pension funds and other pools of money in the developing countries are finding their ways into commodity futures driving up prices.Inflation affects the poor much more than the rich.

Globalization, a success story for many until now, has stalled. After initially helping hundreds of millions of people escape from poverty, it is now showing its ugly side. As profits grow on one side of the world, hunger is on the rise once again on the other.

It's a completely different story on the computer screens of Wall Street analysts, where commodities are the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. Vast sums of money are being invested in the markets for food commodities and energy

Help!

One of my friends is suffering from a rare form of leukemia.Treatment costs are heavy and he seeks help.
Go to http://helpmishra.blogspot.com/ .
Any ideas on how this can be promoted to seek more donations are welcome(No, don't suggest I spam on orkut!)