I’ve got a post over at my Rotman blog that has a “we’re all going to die” type of feel to it. I thought I’d promote the kill joy post.

Enjoy!

Just because I love pointing this type of stuff out. There’s a recent study released that’s touting the rise in piracy. From the Globe and Mail:

MR’s fourth annual Digital Music Survey, which polled 1,700 people in the U.K. last month, suggests that illegal music is more popular than ever before, with 43 per cent of respondents claiming that they are illegally downloading tracks, up from 36 per cent last year and from 40 per cent in 2005.

Using their own numbers and a small assumption (that the sample size in 2007 was the same as the sample size in the past), I calculate the standard error on between their 2005 and 2007 numbers to be 3.3% at the 95% confidence level. Given that 43%-40%=3% we now know that there is no statistically significant difference between the number of people claiming to illegaly download tracks between 2005 and 2007.

So the statement “illegal music is more popular than ever” has been debunked. Thank-you and have a good day.

Yes, I cracked and moved to Flickr. If you hadn’t noticed, Gallery broke AGAIN! This time was the the incident that pushed me over the edge. Having been a software developer, I know it isn’t that hard to write software that doesn’t corrupt the database every 6-months without fail. I’m not quite sure why Gallery can’t get it right.

Anyways, update your bookmarks/feeds to point to Flickr. I have updated my sidebar to pull the feed from Flickr now. Watch for me to re-upload a lot of content to Flickr over the next few days. I’m also having fun with the geo location features so check that out too.

Proved by this facebook stupidity that was posted on a wall:

The CRTC really needs to start opening up the market for cellular communications a little bit more. Why? Because simple economics and this example show that increased competition in this realm can only help the consumer.

For some reason the Rogers-Fido acquisition was approved at a time when Fido was aggressively cutting prices to gain market share. Wikipedia excerpt:

As an example, Fido canceled their flat rate data plan shortly after the acquisition, and with the Rogers/Fido GSM monopoly, wireless data access is very expensive in Canada ($100 / 200 MB at the “best” rate).

This left the Canadian market with only 3 major players—a similar thing happened with Clearnet back in the day. I’ve also heard down the grapevine that Rogers has an exclusive contract that locks down GSM until 2012. Way to screw the consumer.

Today is Noodlefest. It’s unfortunate that I can’t attend. I still need to get a FSM t-shirt at some point.

p.s. ILTC (I love this commercial). TB I can’t text my bff since it’s not nbd with rogers.

p.p.s. This credit card is a great way to make sure that if you pay for a first date, you won’t get a second. (Cheers Simon)

…you should not be allowed to copyright a number. It goes against the entire idea of copyright where you are trying to ENCOURAGE creation and innovation. Furthermore, preventing “curcumvention” by claiming you can’t publish a number is equally as absurd*. Therefore, the DMCA causing this is crazy. If you can copyright a number the I claim ‘e,’ ‘i,’ and ‘pi.’ Too bad… NASA can’t do anything now without paying me.

*You know what is really absurd? Giving media giants the legal power to take away the rights and protections granted to the consumer.

Update: This site has an example of why an integer as a circumvention device is absurd.

Talk about your uber scam! I bought a cheap Epson printer. I just needed it to print black and white pages for school. I have NEVER printed a colour page. Today, however, I find that I’m out of ink. I grabbed one of my extra black cartridges and threw it in. The printer still complained that I was out of ink… cyan ink! It won’t let me print a black an white page without all of the colour cartridges!

A little Google searching and I came across this blog post. A few things to pick up from the post and the comments:

• The printer spits out a little ink each time you turn it on so you can run out of ink without ever printing a page
• It defaults to printing in colour mode (I made sure I always switched it to b/w though)
• It won’t let you print w/0 colour cartridges
• There is a chip that prevents refilling

This is when greed starts hurting your business. Sure I could go through all the hoops of buying a refill kit and a chip reset kit but I don’t want to. I just want to print black and white pages and this fracking printer won’t let me!

I’m not sure why businesses feel compelled to give their customers what they don’t want. I’m moving back to HP the first chance I get. They overcharged for their cartridges but at least I could print with just black ink if I wanted to.

p.s. It’s exam time and I can’t print.

Update 11:55AM: Slashdot just posted this related article.

Well done Sony… well done. Sony has implemented a new copy protection scheme (apparently):

YES ! It appears that Sony have done it again.  In their zeal to make their DVD movies copyproof (yeah right) they have in fact made their latest releases unplayable on some DVD players, including my Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player. I recently rented “Stranger than Fiction” (2 copies) and “The Holiday” ( please no comments on my choice of movies) both by Sony Pictures.  Both load up to the splash title screen and then load no further,  then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!  

Of course this is going to help stop piracy and is well worth pissing your customers off. Oh wait… Shit.

Related to my previous post, here’s another example from Newsweek: