Jared McAteer’s Blag - jaredmcateer.com

Forgive my use of Fox/CNNs favourite copout but it looks at thought this may be a significant step towards more sane times. At least in regards to buying music. EMI and Apple have announced that they will be making music available through the iTunes store free of DRM.

For those that aren’t familiar with DRM or don’t really understand that the ramifications of this decision are I will explain. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, it is encompasses many means that content providers use to restrict how you, the customer, use digital content. In music, this is most often used to prevent you from making a copy and “lending” it to your friends. But as a result also prevents you from lending music to yourself, if you have music that plays on your iPod, it won’t play on your Zune (hypothetical situation, you lose your iPod and decided to try the Zune, or more likely vice versa.) Nor can you play it in your MP3 enabled car. There are ways around DRM but if you live in the United States or another country with similar laws to the DMCA you are committing a crime when you do this. In Canada we have no such laws but it is an annoyance and a slap in the face. Now that you have a little background let’s get back to the story.

Certainly this is cause for celebration but some of you may be wondering, “What’s the catch?” You’d be certainly warranted in your caution, but it’s not so bad, the price of the music goes from $0.99 (USD) per song to $1.29 (USD). While this may seem bad wait a minute before you protest. In order to appease the masses that will definitely be upset with a 30 cent increase in price they’d also thrown in an additional 128 bit… rates… (ok that doesn’t quite work.) Apple has increased the sound quality two fold, from 128 Kbit/s to 256 Kbit/s. In audio terms this is from “eh” quality to almost no difference from CD quality, good enough for all but the most serious audiophiles. You’ll experience the rumbling lows and the piercing highs on your stereo equipment (be it in your home or your car) that you may have found previous songs form the iTunes store to be lacking.

The only real downside I can see is that EMI will not be replacing their DRM enabled music, rather the new DRM free and slightly more expensive but higher quality music will be sold along side with the lower quality, less expensive, crippled music. I can understand their position in this decision in that they are testing the waters, they are after all the first large music label in States to be doing this. I suspect they will eventually move over all the way once they see their sales increasing (personal prediction based on the truthiness)

Technorati Tags: DRM, Apple, EMI, iTunes, Music, AAC

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I’ve watch some pretty disturbing things in my time. Curiosity got me to actually watch the beheading of a civilian by terrorists, it is something you can never “unsee” and from time to time I shudder just at the horror of it. I came across a very similar experience however this time it is by American soldiers. They enter a building, find a room with wounded people and as the photographer is filming a marine executes one laying on the floor. It’s not nearly as graphic at the beheading I saw but it shook me to the core the very same way. Reading the comments you see many ignorant people posting how the Marine is practically a hero for keeping the world safe from the scary Iraqi “terrorist” that is terrorising the world while laying on the floor bleeding to death.

It sickens me to see this kind of conduct by our allies and sickens me even worse that there are people that support the actions taken. How far we’ve regressed to actually allow this sort of behavior to continue. I urge you to watch this video, it’s not graphic, but it is disturbing.

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Edit: Doh I posted it as a Google video and not YouTube, should be fixed now. Thx Evan.

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The tubes are a buzz of Boston’s latest “terrorist scare.” The creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force put out what are essentially a bunch of lite brights of their cartoon characters, 38 of them scattered around Boston. They dilligently did their duty blinking away for three weeks before the Boston PD took notice and called in the bomb squad.

Yes they brought in the bomb squad, why? you might ask. Well Johnny because there were blinking lights and exposed wires and anyone who has seen a movie in the last 30+ years knows that ALL bombs have blinking lights and exposed wires, it’s how you know it’s a bomb. So anyways the Boston PD essentially shut down the city while they removed this threat to security. As soon as the creators heard their viral ad campaign was being treated as a threat to national security they told the city where to find all the devices.

Once the city of Boston learned that they had over-reacted to an obvious non-threat they turned on the spin machine. Instead of calling it what it was, a viral marketing campaign, they are calling it a “Hoax.” Yep, that’s how they are trying to save face, by pretending that instead of a marking campaign they are saying that the creators of the cartoon were infact trying to scare the general public rather than get word out of their work.

To the creators I imagine this is a win regardless, infact I would wager this is more than they had hoped for. Everyone in Boston and then some now know about the cartoon, as far as viral marketing goes this one is definitely in the success category. To me it is another reason I get to sit on my fine Canadian high horse, point and laugh.

To further illustrate my point:

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I came across a website with a bunch of American WWII propeganda posters, at the end of bunch there was this beauty:

I find it particularly chilling in that it looks very similar to that of the Aru Gharib of the man forced to stand on a box with electrodes attached to his hands (and getting electrocuted if he can’t stay standing on the box.)

This is American brutality.

Technorati Tags: Nazi, America, Iraq, Facism, Brutality, Torture, Propeganda, War Poster, Abu Gharib

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This is simply an amazing, well spoken and long overdue address to the American president. All I have to say is wow and I wish more reporters had these balls.

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Technorati Tags: Olbermann, September 11, 9/11, president, War on Terror, iraq, WTC, World Trade Center, Saddam

Popularity: 35% [?]