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mostly showing off their status.

plenty of features and gadgets

hey I have money, I have class, and I have style,

Worldwide sales of music CDs, records and cassettes fell for the third year in a row

rising Internet piracy in the United States,

7 percent drop in global music sales

the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that's shared online.

Griffin's idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers -- something like $5 per user per month -- and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.

"It's cheap to buy used discs. . . . They sound just the same as new ones,"

Amazon.com

The industry worries that the expanding used market is cannibalizing new-CD sales, as well as promoting piracy by allowing consumers to buy, record and sell back discs while retaining their own digitally pristine copies.

They have seized upon a fairly bad situation: a stunning number of defaults and foreclosures in the subprime arena, although just a small part of the total financial picture of the United States. They have then tried — with the collaboration of their advance guards in the press — to make it seem like a total catastrophe so they could make money on their short sales. They sense an opportunity to trick other traders and poor retail slobs like you and me, and they generate data and rumor to support their positions, and to make money. More than that, they trade to support the way they want the market to go. If they are huge traders like some of the major hedge funds, they can sell massively and move the market downward, then suck in other traders who go short, and create a vacuum of fear that sucks down whatever they are selling. [CUT]

Yes, Yahoo is losing share to Google. Yes, Yahoo is barely growing. Yes, it's a tired argument that Yahoo is one of the strongest brands in the media world. Yes, this argument for owning its stock hasn't worked in a long time.

It's cheap. There's always that. Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker figures that given the value of Yahoo's cash and its publicly traded Asian assets (even taking into account the difficulty in selling stakes in other companies), investors value Yahoo's core business at just $6 per share, or eight times Wall Street's estimates of 2009 profits. That's an extraordinarily low multiple for any company with the opportunities in front of it that Yahoo has. Yahoo's management thought Yahoo was cheap at $30, of course. Today, investors would do quite nicely for a fraction of that amount. 

The truth is both of them have their advantages and

The big city is the place where all industrial, cultural and educational centers are situated. In big cities you can find museums, theaters, clubs, cinemas, big shops and hospitals, comfortable modern

digital revenues have overtaken earnings from physical sales.

more digital downloads were sold in the US last year than physical products, they accounted for just a fraction of overall music industry revenues.

Making money from digital recordings has become the music industry's biggest challenge as it faces up to falling CD sales and a persistent piracy problem.

A year after Apple Computer Inc. launched its iTunes Music Service, the online music industry is selling songs by the millions

Customers at three of the leading online services – iTunes, Musicmatch Inc.’s Musicmatch Downloads and RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody – buy about 10 times as many singles as they do albums. Offline, people buy 50 times more CDs than singles.

music lovers buying a few 99-cent singles instead of $15 CDs.

Until the Red Sox swept the Cardinals to win the World Series after beating the Yankees in the greatest postseason collapse in baseball history

ts origins, of course, date to the January, 1920 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees for money that Boston owner Harry Frazee desperately needed to pay the mortgage on Fenway Park

Orville Wright (1871-1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) requested a patent application for a "flying machine" nine months before their successful flight in December 1903, which Orville Wright recorded in his diary. As part of the Wright Brothers' systematic practice of photographing every prototype and test of their various flying machines, they had persuaded an attendant from a nearby lifesaving station to snap Orville Wright in full flight. The craft soared to an altitude of 10 feet, traveled 120 feet, and landed 12 seconds after takeoff. After making two longer flights that day, Orville and Wilbur Wright sent this telegram to their father, instructing him to "inform press."

"flight is possible to man...[and] I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life"

The reasons are partly technical, but the bottom line is that this asset class is perhaps the most compelling investment opportunity in today's marketplace. I expect equitylike returns, well into double digits, over the next year or two. And everyday investors can easily target these bonds with mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.

It's important to remember that this doesn't mean the stock market returns exactly 10% a year, every year. It's actually unusual for the market to return exactly 10% in a given year. The S&P 500 has only posted a return of between 10.0% and 10.9% four times since 1926 and only returned exactly 10% once, in 1966, according to S&P data that includes dividends.

Stock returns are wild and unpredictable. Since 1927, the S&P 500 stock index has gained 10.4% a year on average. But in any given year it could be up 29.9% or down 9.0% or somewhere in between, says IFA.com.

To do that, it's important to understand the power of diversification and the benefits of owning many types of stocks, from large value-priced stocks to small value-priced stocks. Diversification lets you minimize the risk posed by a single stock or type of stock and lets you still get your share of the market's return.