Lots of chatter today about the arrival of free, realtime stock quotes on major websites. For example, Google, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC have all added realtime quotes to their services.

That's nice. Given that world operates in realtime, it's nice to see that more of the online financial world is too. Other than that, however, realtime quotes are mostly harmless. The days of most sane investors thinking they can do anything meaningful with realtime quotes are blessedly past.

Apparently Adobe (nee Macromedia) is having a Y2J problem. Check the following from its site:

During the month of June 2008, certain product trials that are launched for the first time (regardless of when they were installed) will function for only one day instead of 30 days, due to an error in a line of code that counts down the remaining days in a trial.

As a result, the company has pulled all product trials and won't be offering them again until next month. Bizarre.

The shipping industry may be slowing a little, but it's still been boom times for five years now in that business. Ships are making a $100,000 a day in profits, and oil rigs are being leased out for $600,000 a day, and more. See the following quote from today's FT:

“You cannot retire in a market like we experience today,” [John Frederickson] says, in the sing-song accent of his native Norway. “This is the best time since the Vikings.”

Being "off the grid" is under-rated.  I got to thinking about this while sick recently -- yes, my absence here was a result of a nasty virus and resulting series of opportunistic infections -- and not missing the grid much.

I was reminded of it again over the weekend while reading a piece in the LA Times about the Post Ranch Inn, one of my favorite resorts on the planet. Best thought of as having rustic elegance, it is an unobtrusive place perched on a cliff top in Big Sur, California, and it is wondrous, combining simplicity and nature and luxury in an otherworldly way.

What caught me, in particular, in reading the piece was how the Post Ranch Inn is going solar and "off the grid", and how that was presented as a good thing, not just something you might do as a nutter in rural Montana. It seems being "off the grid" has crossed over from being something done at the fringes to something laudable and desirable.

Here is Google Trends data for "off the grid" since 2005. Other than a bubble in 2006, it is showing a steady trend up and to the right.

Judging by a self-penned essay in Portfolio, corporate ambulance-chaser Bill Lerach meant no harm. Here he is in one of the loopier passages explaining why he plead guilty:

So why did I plead guilty? If you haven’t been a defendant in a federal criminal prosecution, let me tell you, it is not a fair fight. Prosecutors have virtually unlimited discretion to determine which charges to pursue. They structure indictments with multiple counts and money-laundering claims to threaten a defendant with huge financial penalties and the possibility of a long prison sentence. This creates draconian pressure to plead guilty.

The prosecutors hold all the cards. The judge holds the gavel, and from the defendant’s perspective, it might as well be a bazooka. The judge is free to ignore sentencing guidelines and impose an even harsher sentence. And because prosecutors and the judges both work for the government, there is a disturbing synergy in the entire process. Like a nonconformist during China’s Cultural Revolution, a defendant in a federal criminal case is forced to bow and humbly express guilt, regret, a nd contrition. You speak only to affirm your guilt and sorrow. If I hadn’t pleaded guilty, the judge could have sentenced me to seven years instead of the 24 months I now face.

I don’t cite these facts to dispute that prosecutors proved I committed a crime.

Ooooh, now I get it.

With it having been German solar uber alles for some time now, it is hard not to wonder if the cuts to solar subsidies won't make it Germany "unter alles" for a while now. According to Bloomberg, big cuts are coming, and Germany's market presence is fairly daunting: