RIAA: CD in DVD Player is scandalous!; Cold; Cherry; PEMS

My creation The PEMS got a mention from another Sask Blogger.

It's a wickedly cold day today, and my car made bad cracking thud noises when I hit potholes or manholes on the way to work this morning. Even though I had plugged in the car, it still had to turn over twice to start, when usually it starts instantly. I'll have to put gasoline in the tank for my trip to Moose Juice tonight and hope that it warms up to the promised -26 instead of hovering at the current -32 at lunch time.

Canada might end up with a silver and a bronze in women's short track speed skating from the other day because the current silver medalist lifted a skate to an angle at the finish line which isn't allowed. I don't like to DQ someone on a technicality when she was clearly faster, but I don't know the sport well and if it's a rule it should be the law. There is video review in the sport, and the judges missed the obvious call for some reason, so a protest is in order. Just today we won two more silvers in skating, and a bronze in women's skeleton.

Also, Don Cherry has made a point that Canada's women's hockey team is not doing themselves a favour by playing hard and running up the score in their lopsided games. By embarrassing the European teams, the IOC will vote women's hockey out of the Olympics after the Vancouver games, like they've done with softball and baseball for London's 2012 games. I agree with his reasoning, which doesn't happen much with me and Grapes.
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RIAA: CD in DVD Player is scandalous!

The RIAA [and by extension the Canadian RIA] wants it to be illegal to use our CDs with our iPods or other MP3 players. That's not surprising since they would like us to buy the songs we hear each time we hear them. They must have cried a river when jukeboxes stopped being popular because that's a business model they can relate to: no music until they see the coin. And really, if owning a CD doesn't give you the legal right to listen to the music now in their opinion, then what will? Do they even want people to play their CDs anymore if the player is a DVD player, since that's another digital format and we haven't paid again to use our music on that format if we use our CD? Why aren't they offering DVD versions of all of our music CDs?

Do you think it's reasonable that Canadians shouldn't be permitted to put a copy of their CDs onto their computer for personal use? You shouldn't have to go out and buy a 50 CD jukebox to have modern access to the songs you've paid for. The RIAA is smoking crack if they think that people will gladly pay for a CD, then pay AGAIN to download the song into iTunes for their iPod portable music player. Anyone from a 12 year old to an 80 year old grandmother could easily figure out how to put their CD music onto an iPod, unless Sony has broken their computer with a DRM rootkit I suppose. The RIAA's greed has passed into the absurd many times before and this time is just yet another attack on their customers.

It will take many millions of customers and forward thinking artists like Steve Page of the Bare Naked Ladies standing up against the CRIA and RIAA copyright amendment , to keep our current freedoms intact. I'll keep you posted with simple ways you can get involved and make sure that Harper's government doesn't cave in to lobby pressure from businesses that would tell you that putting music from your CD onto your MP3 player is an offense that could cost you thousands of dollars in court.
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