A US congressional inspection team set up to monitor reconstruction in Iraq today publishes a scathing report of failures by contractors, mainly from the US, to carry out projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Canadian Record Industry Association (the Canadian version of the RIAA) has released a study in which they conclude that P2P downloaders buy lots of music, and that P2P doesn’t particularly harm their industry.
Particularly noteworthy findings in the 144 page study report include:
* The survey asked for the sources of music on people’s computers. Among those who download music from P2P services, the top source of music was ripping copies of their own CDs (36.4%), followed by P2P downloads (32.6%), paid downloads (20.1%), shared music from friends (8.8%), downloads from artist sites (5.6%), and other sources (2.9%). In other words, even among those who download music from P2P services, the music acquired on those services account for only one-third of the music on their computers as store-bought CDs remain the single largest source of music for downloaders (page 53).
* For all the emphasis on the teenage downloaders, it is interesting that the 35 to 44 age group had the largest spread between CDs and P2P as the source of music. Among that demographic, 31 percent of their music comes from P2P services and 27 percent from ripping their own CDs (page 69).
* Consistent with many other studies, people who download music from P2P services frequently buy that same music. The study found that only 25% of respondents said they never bought music after listening to it as a P2P downloaded track. That obviously leaves nearly 75% as future purchasers, including 21% who have bought music ten times or more. Note that demographically, the lowest percentage of non-buyers actually belonged to the 13 to 17 year old demographic (page 70).
Also see this bashing of the MPAA for pulling chinanigans.
Today, Al Gore delivered one of the great speeches in American history, in which, in decrying the dire Constitutional crisis created in the US by President George W. Bush, he often quoted the founders of our country.
One day, we will all look back to Mr. Gore’s speech, and either be proud that we listened and understood and fought for the sanctity of the US Constitution…..or be embarrassed and shocked that we didn’t comprehend the utter seriousness of the predicament of the United States of America in 2006.
Al Gore’s lengthy, blunt-spoken plea for our American democracy was orated in the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall in Washington DC, before a standing-room-only crowd that gave Mr. Gore numerous standing ovations. It was attended by both Democrats and Republicans, and was specifically endorsed by Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), who was quoted in Gore’s speech.
In his speech, Mr. Gore articulated to thunderous applause and cheering, ”...the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and presistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government….Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows.”
Mr. Gore continued, ”...the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and… the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.
The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.”
Mr. Gore concluded by calling for six immediate reform steps to be taken, including comprehensive “hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President.”
Video on c-span
With transcript below.
The BBC is reporting on a European Union threat to fine Microsoft up to $2.4m a day for their non-compliance with the European Commission’s demand that Windows be opened up. Back in March 2004 Microsoft was ordered to open up its Windows operating system by way of making documentation available that would assist work on interoperability with other systems, specifically: ‘non-Microsoft work group servers [should be able to] achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers’. According to the article, Brussels has found MS to have not complied with the ruling, and, sounding somewhat exasperated, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has given MS a 5 week deadline before the $2.4m/a day fines begin.
The cereal aisle at your local supermarket may soon resemble the Las Vegas strip. Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios.
In less than two years, Siemens says, the technology could transform consumer-goods packaging from the fixed, ink-printed images of today to a digital medium of flashing graphics and text that displays prices, special offers or alluring photos, all blinking on miniature flat screens.
Leading Internet companies are gearing up for a clash with the phone and cable giants early next year as Congress begins to redraft the telecom laws for the broadband era, concerned that the network operators will soon be able to put a chokehold on the Web by blocking consumers from popular sites in favor of their own. Or they could degrade delivery of Web pages whose providers don’t pay extra.
That could result in an Internet of haves, who can afford to pay the network operators more to ensure smooth service, and have-nots.
Corporations carry out some of the most horrific human rights abuses of modern times, but it is increasingly difficult to hold them to account. Economic globalization and the rise of transnational corporate power have created a favorable climate for corporate human rights abusers, which are governed principally by the codes of supply and demand and show genuine loyalty only to their stockholders.
Several of the companies below are being sued under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law that allows citizens of any nationality to sue in US federal courts for violations of international rights or treaties. When corporations act like criminals, we have the right and the power to stop them, holding leaders and multinational corporations alike to the accords they have signed. Around the world—in Venezuela, Argentina, India, and right here in the United States—citizens are stepping up to create democracy and hold corporations accountable to international law.
Caterpillar
Chevron
Coca-Cola
Dow Chemical
DynCorp
Ford Motor Company
KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root): A Subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation
Lockheed Martin
Monsanto
Nestle USA
Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International (a.k.a. The Altria Group Inc.)
Pfizer
Wal-Mart
A new study shows that 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.
The study, which is reported this week in the journal Science, is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome.
Researchers can patent genes because they are potentially valuable research tools, useful in diagnostic tests or to discover and produce new drugs.
“It might come as a surprise to many people that in the U.S. patent system human DNA is treated like other natural chemical products,” said Fiona Murray, a business and science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author of the study.
“An isolated DNA sequence can be patented in the same manner that a new medicine, purified from a plant, could be patented if an inventor identifies a [new] application.”
John Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. The Pentagon secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. He is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management,” manipulating information—and, by extension, the news media.
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up, they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest military company, based in Bethesda, Maryland.
One lawsuit has been filed and more are planned against record company Sony BMG after several of its music CDs were found to covertly install controversial anti-piracy software on computers.
Experts say the software places customers at risk because it secretly installs a sophisticated cloaking technique to hide its presence and activity on a computer. Once installed, the same cloaking technique could be hijacked to hide other, more malicious programs such as computer viruses. These fears have proven well founded after a malicious “Trojan horse” program that uses the CD software to hide itself was discovered on 10 November.
Jing Soliman left his family in the Philippines for what sounded like a sure thing—a job as a warehouse worker at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. His new employer, Prime Projects International (PPI) of Dubai, is a major, but low-profile, subcontractor to Halliburton’s multi-billion-dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide support services to U.S. forces.
But Soliman wouldn?t be making anything near the salaries—starting $80,000 a year and often topping $100,000—that Halliburton’s engineering and construction unit, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other laborers it recruits from the United States. Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated $615 a month ? including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that would be just over $3 an hour. But for the 12-hour day, seven-day week that Soliman says was standard for him and many contractor employees in Iraq, he actually earned $1.56 an hour.
A group of black workers is suing the world’s largest poultry meat producer, accusing it of tolerating a racist workplace where African Americans were routinely abused and a “whites only” sign was pinned to the lavatory door.
Tyson Foods is accused by 13 workers of maintaining a segregated system in a break area at one of its plants in Ashland, Alabama, that was “reminiscent of the Jim Crow era”.
In addition to the posting of the “whites only” sign, the workers allege that the lavatory was padlocked and only white workers were given a key, that workers hung a noose in one of the recreation rooms and annotated a picture of monkeys with the names of black staff. When the workers complained, they say the plant manager told them the facilities had been locked because they were “nasty, dirty [and] behaved like children”.
In the crop department, Monsanto is well on their way to dictating what consumers will eat, what farmers will grow, and how much Monsanto will get paid for seeds. In some cases those seeds are designed not to reproduce sowable offspring. In others, a flock of lawyers stand ready to swoop down on farmers who illegally, or even unknowingly, end up with Monsanto’s private property growing in their fields.
GreenPeace.org (prolly not the most un-bias of sources, but its still true and ill)