According to an article in the International Herald Tribune the Japanese government (or should I say Sony and Warner) are trying to establish a tax on music players.
According to several sources including the Washington Post tourists to Florida are being warned not to offend Florida residents because a new law on the books, as of October, makes it easier to claim self-defense in a shooting. Residents can even apply the same criteria to shooting someone in their car as they would to someone invading their home - a change intended to thwart car jackers.
According to the New York Times Home Depot is having troubles with day workers hanging out in front of their stores. Some arrests have been made. It seems that the day workers think that the parking lot of Home Depot is the best place to hang out in order to find work.
Where are the honest pirates when you need them? All we have is George Bush. Jean Lafitte could save us again at the Battle of New Orleans.
This country is in poor health. I know because I am one of the ones who regularly visits a doctor. I was searching the web for some health information and found a relevant article at Forbes. But search engines sometimes turn up strange results. In the “Health” section at Forbes.com I found another article (from the AP wire) about our unhealthy credit card debt. The increase in debt is just a symptom of our underlying sickness. Too many americans are out-of-work. The so-called statistics about employment tell us nothing because they only reflect people still on unemployment. And people who can’t make a living can’t pay their debts. The latest natural disaster has only made the situation worse. But while the American people continue the downward spiral, the cedit card companies have been converted to “drug-addicts”.
Almost no one would deny that Steve Jobs pretty much single-handedly saved the record industry from piracy (and from themselves). But the time is approaching when Apple will need to renew the license from which the whole iTunes price structure has been based. So wouldn’t you know we get this news on the wire:
Record executives, however, are seeking some flexibility in prices, including the ability to charge more for some songs and less for others, the way they do in the traditional retail world.
“There’s no content in the world that has doesn’t have some price flexibility,” said Warner Music Group Corp. chief executive Edgar Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference here. “Not all songs are created equal. Not all albums are created equal.
“That’s not to say we want to raise prices across the board or that we don’t believe in a 99-cent price point for most music,” he said. “But there are some songs for which consumers would be willing to pay more. And some we’d be willing to sell for less.”
Apple’s Jobs blasted the record industry for mulling higher prices. “If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy,” he said at a press conference, adding that if the price goes up, the industry faces a higher risk of piracy.
I was reading an article in the SF Chronicle about the Bush Administration’s approval of the new plans for NASA and the eventual replacement of the aged shuttle. And it struck me that like most things the administration has done, it is a return to the past. The Bush republican conservatism is not conservative at all. It is just nostalgia.
If any of you watch “The Daily Show” with Jon Stuart then you’ve probably seen a better criticism of the handling of the hurricane then anything that I could write in 10,000 words or less. If you get your news from network television instead of getting it (and your laughs) from Jon Stewart then you are probably sadly misinformed.
I’ve heard the news media calling parishes in Louisiana counties. It seems to me that if you are going to claim that your profession is “journalist” then you should at least do your homework. But then again, expecting due diligence from journalists is really asking a lot, isn’t it? No, let me rephrase that. Can we expect journalists to make any sense at all?
