One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Friday, 11 June 2004

.< 10:00:37 PM >
CBC News: Arts groups call on politicians to speak up on culture
Though the Conservative party has also steered away from laying out comprehensive cultural plans, party leader Stephen Harper recently said he wants to review the CRTC, Canada's federal broadcast regulator. At a press conference, he also mused about privatizing CBC-TV's main English channel and commercializing CBC Radio Two.

As Election Day approaches, the country's arts and culture community is calling on voters to demand clarification from politicians about their plans for the arts. Ignoring a party's cultural platform could eventually damage Canada's artistic future, said rock musician Simon Wilcox.

.< 9:58:37 PM >
CBC News: Conservative plans alarm domestic film, TV industry
Though the official Conservative platform recently released to the public doesn't go into detail about cultural issues, the briefing notes are more expansive, including promises to open up the country's direct-to-home satellite market to American companies and a relaxation of foreign ownership limits in Canadian media and telecommunications. [snip] The recommendations include reducing the CRTC's role to that of a registrar, removing its power to set Canadian content rules or to hold broadcasters to their licence obligations.

.< 9:20:10 PM >
Canada's Conservatives Now Election Front-Runners

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's opposition Conservatives became the front-runners in a major poll for the first time in more than a decade on Friday in what commentators said was a catastrophic development for Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin. [Reuters: World]

Chatting with a friend the other day I said 'It's kind of fun to see the Liberals get slapped around a bit but . . .' He cut me off and finished the sentence 'Yeah. But not too much!'

< 9:19:30 PM >

LONDON (Reuters) - Britons, angered over Iraq, have handed Prime Minister Tony Blair a drubbing in local government elections but the prime minister won a little respite on Friday as his Labor Party retained the London mayoralty. [Reuters: World]

< 9:15:04 PM >

Recently, I needed a plaintext list of all emails in my Address Book. Although Address Book has exporting capabilities, it exports all contact information. Needing only email addresses, I did the following:

In Mail.app creat... [macosxhints]

Beautiful. A ridiculously simple solution.

< 9:11:37 PM >

Brad DeLong posted an email message he received from someone who saw Seymor Hersch speak at the University of Chicago a couple of nights ago.

[Hersch] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

Link [Boing Boing]

< 9:05:26 PM >

< 9:00:47 PM >

News.Com: Big music stores squelch download plan. But mounting development costs, a glut of rivals offering bargain-rate services, and smaller-than-hoped-for sales across the online-music spectrum, even at Apple's successful store, have led the big retailers to pull funding for the project, its founders say. [Tomalak's Realm] "Right now, we're not forecasting the death of the CD anytime soon," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "I don't see (the retailers) as being overly concerned at this point that they're missing out."

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, $11.2 billion worth of CDs were shipped to retailers in 2003. By contrast, estimates for sales of music downloads optimistically top out at $245 million for this year, or just 2 percent of CD sales and only a little more than double 2003's sales figures for cassette tapes.

Put another way, a little more than seven average days of CD buying would equal the revenue of one year of digital downloads at today's peak rates. While those figures will certainly change over time, they are sobering to giant corporations.'

< 12:32:53 PM >

< 11:14:52 AM >

Canadian developer Broadcast Unifying Gears (BUG) announced on Thursday the release of ListPlayer Express, an application that turns any G4 or G5 Mac into a closed caption TV (CCTV) video server for use in a school, business, store or similar environment. It's a stripped-down version of the ListPlayer application that comes with BUG's CLASS-1 1U rack mountable video server. You can drag and drop Final Cut Pro/Express or iMovie files onto the software and play them without conversion; any file format supported by QuickTime is also supported. ListPlayer Express can play videos according to a schedule or when you manually direct it to play them. [MacCentral]

< 11:03:33 AM >

I just did my first audio Morning Coffee Notes. [Scripting News]

Cool. I've been reading Dave for many years and this is my first chance to hear his voice. I hit the link immediately. Hearing a person's voice shift's one's perception of that person immediately. I was afraid I'd be turned off the way I was when I first heard Adam's audio post. But not so with Dave! I like his voice a lot. You can hear him thinking. He sounds laid back (in this post) and it's fun to hear him chuckle. I have to confess that the other thing that gives me a positive reaction is that his voice and manner remind me of myself!

< 10:54:16 AM >

Washington's ties with the Kurds have reached a bitter new phase, with some Kurdish leaders charging that they have been betrayed. [New York Times: International]

< 10:53:58 AM >

US: State department admits a rise in the number of terrorist attacks. [Guardian Unlimited] 'The US state department today retracted a report that claimed terrorist attacks were on the decline, after it turned out they had actually increased.

The Bush administration hailed the initial annual assessment as proof of the success of the war on terror when it was published in April, but officials have now been forced to concede the revised figures for 2003 will show a sharp upturn in the number of attacks.'

< 10:49:59 AM >

US military dog handlers at a Baghdad jail were ordered to use their animals to scare detainees, reports say. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]