Richtig said Fred!

Please support Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders by posting censored content on your website.

The content will look like this (this is actual censored material):

If you want to give a hand and help disseminate censored information, visit irrepressible.info’s Home Page or give them a hand and help disseminate censored information.

Here is a picture of the 100$ laptop project, there are 3 prototypes on that picture:

If you want to learn more about the 100$ laptop, visit the One Laptop Per Child project.
If you want to see more pictures of the prototypes visit Flickr.com.

An association named “Canadian Music Creators” has just voiced its opinions on different hot subjects, namely they say:

“Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical”

“Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive”

“Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists”

This association has among its members: Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan.

There is also a recent news about 6 independant Canadian music labels leaving Canada’s equivalent of the RIAA (the CRIA) and it seems the group of 6 labels says the CRIA does not represent the interest of Canadian Artists but wants more money for the major labels (read American).

It appears that both Canadian labels and Canadian artists do not share the same views after all as major american labels.

You can visit the “Canadian Music Creators Coalition” to read their views on these topics.
You can read the article “CRIA falling apart” on Slyck News.

You can also read my article on the analysis of CD sale slowdown.

What do you do when you get bad press because your soldiers die in combat? Simple: ban all medias from covering the return of the dead soldier’s coffins from Afghanistan.

It is not the first time Stephen Harper bans media from events, he did it in the first week he was in power at Meech Lake where all medias had to be 2 kilometers away from the meeting place instead of being right on the doorstep interviewing ministers coming in or going out.

And then there is the reporter’s access at the House of Commons where press conference are held, now the government can select which reporters get to ask questions avoiding the more troublesome reporters.

Why not simply pass a law censoring medias alltogether? Wait, maybe that’s part 2 of his plan… …it is definitely a sad day for democracy.

You can read about the ban of media for Soldier’s coffins on the Globe and Mail.
You can read about Stephen Harper’s media ban at Meech Lake on CTV.CA.
You can read about the reporter’s access to the House of Commons on the Ottawa Citizen.

It appears that cellular phone do not cause planes to crash after all, because Air France has announced they will allow SMS (short text messages) as well as DATA calls starting in March 2007 and actual voice calls at a later date… It is expected to be a 6 months trial and it may become permanent (if it is profitable enough).

I guess they will now suggest to turn off the phone when they start the in flight movie only…

You can read more about this on The Register by clicking here.

According to an article just published in International Herald Tribune, the Music Industry is loosing money overall despite strong online music sales and I quote “Music revenue via computers and cellphones globally nearly tripled last year to $1.1 billion, a robust 6 percent of the recording industry’s sales and up from a fraction of 1 percent just two years ago”

The RIAA published some information about sales in america, they have 10 year purchasing trends here, the most interesting report is the 10 year trend published in 1998 which goes back to 1989. Back in 1989 the music industry #1’s revenue stream was selling “Full length cassettes”, it represented 54.8% of total sales of 6.5 billion $ business, while CDs represented only 25.1% of total sales. Let’s do some math:

Ok, so what is happening, are consumers really spending less for entertainment ? Not really according to this statistics page here, while CD pressings went from 5,950 million units in 2002 to 5,378 million units in 2004 (-10 %) the DVD pressings went from 2,200 million units to 4,123 million units increasing those numbers from 8,150 million CDs/DVDs for 2002 to 9,501 million units (+16 %).

And when you think about it, the recording industry and the movie industry is a closely knit business, most of the time they are part of the same company like Sony (Pictures & Music) or Universal (Pictures & Music).

So let’s pretend you’re a CEO of an entertainment giant, your business unit which we’ll call M has 10% less sales and your business unit which we’ll call P has +90% increase in business netting in +16% revenues globally for those 2 business units, are you really desperate? Not at all, and your shareholders will congratulate you too.

Wikipedia has a good article on adoption of new technologies here, you can clearly see that any market works in a bell curve, no market is an exception, once everyone has electricity the companies installing cabling in the streets expect to no longer sell new lines, they mostly maintain the existing network.

The entertainment industry keeps producing content but once you have bought back all those Beatles vinyls in CDs you ain’t buying them again until you get some really new features like 3D vision High Definition DVD version of that same music, until then the new content is the only engine that keep sales from really going down (like a bell curve). But since so many entertainment companies are producing movies now as a new revenue stream for all those persons replacing their aging VHS tapes they can expect several good years ahead, but they cannot expect it to last forever. Other businesses like the print media and the railroads had their golden age too, but they did not adapt in the american market to the Internet (for print) and Airlines (for railroads) and they have been loosing business to these for several years now.

The International Herald Tribune article can be found here

Thanks to recent polls it appears Stephen Harper, the would-be canadian prime minister is ahead. This is some sad news for Canada indeed. Let me explain, in Europe they made some major cleanup in the last few years:

Adolf Hitler (died in 1945)
Benito Mussolini (died in 1945)
Margaret Tatcher (retired in 1990)
Jean-Marie Le Pen (lost in 1992)
Joerg Haider (lost in 2002)

Canada will decide on January 23rd 2006 if we promote right-wing intolerance or grow up and join the world community.

Now I am pissed! I have had yesterday my third motherboard in 2 months that had blown capacitors resulting in early computer death caused by bad electrolyte. The defective motherboards in question are all K7S5A from ECS , a company that produces cheap motherboards. What ECS lacks in quality they offer in consistency, all 3 moterboards have had blow capacitors due to a cheap electrolyte that made the news 2 years ago.

This has been a very costly experience so far, these ECS motherboards were all running on PC133 SDRAM (Memory), the newer model only run on DDR 333 SDRAM, forcing me to buy new motherboards as well as new memory.

But 3 motherboards out of 5 in 2 months ?!?!?!!! That’s not a statistic anyone can be proud of!

You can read an article that explains the problem here

Here are the eBay/PayPal links if you want to donate to various charities that help the victims of the Tsunami.

The link to the eBay Tsunami Disaster Relief is here.
The link to the PayPal UNICEF Tsunami Disaster Relief Effort is here.

You can also read an article on Wikipedia which describes the Humanitarian response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

Thanks to the marketing geniuses at Playboy, they now offer nude pictures to their paying members who own Apple iPods, they even call this feature iBOD…

Read more from the CNN article here or read the article on InternetNews.com here.

On an unrelated note the Mars Rover celebrates its first year on Mars! Go Rover Go Go Go!

The Mars Rover mission status is here.

If you want nudie pics of Mars, you can have the color pictures or the more raw pics.