Northman's Fury

Whatever else you can say about it, the Tata Nano is a significant achievement. Manufacturing a car for sale at $2,500.00 has huge implications, particularly when you take into consideration the populations of India, China, and the rest of the developing world.

Of course, there is the question of whether or not they'll be able to afford even the small amount of gas it needs once there's enough of them out there to drive demand even higher than it is now.

They should also consider some street lights.

Some good news,

The Federal Court of Appeal has rejected a controversial levy that would have raised the price of MP3 players, cellphones and computers.

The FCA, which released its decision Thursday, said the Copyright Board — a regulatory body that determines royalties for copyrighted works — did not have the authority to impose the levy on digital recorders.

The levy, which was slated to be introduced in 2008, would have amounted to an additional $5 to $75 depending on the storage capacity of the recorder.

I first read about this in July, and what I said then is still much how I feel now.

this certainly isn't about protecting the artists, because you can be quite certain that none of the artists are going to see a penny of a this kind of broad based levy. This is simple greed by the big labels, possibly linked to the move to DRM-free music downloads. After all, if you can no longer force people to buy multiple copies of the same music, you have to find some other way to squeeze more money out their pockets. Finding a way that cuts out the artists' take as well is just gravy.

You don't have to look much further than the Writer's Guild strike to see the truth in that. The studios don't want to pay the writers proper royalties for copies of their shows being sold on the internet or DVD. From that, you can be sure they wouldn't be sending them a cut of a levy being charged on all digital storage media regardless of what's being stored on it.

I'm all for the proper compensation of the people who create works like music and movies, but I'm very much against shelling out cash just to line the pockets of corporate executives, which is exactly what this levy would have done.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. is selling the division that developed the distinctive Canadarm space shuttle technology to a U.S. firm as part of a $1.325 billion cash deal.

Apparently the technologies that went into the Canadarm will have better growth potential in the US.

The Journal reported that MDA management had long been frustrated by the difficulty of accessing the U.S. defence market. With U.S. owners, that will no longer be the case.

Well, that's certainly a growth market the way the US runs its foreign policy. I bet we'll be seeing a name change on the arm in the not-too-distant future, though.

The little comment at the end is probably the most depressingly accurate of the skit.