Well it looks like Universal will be offering its entire catalog for free at a website called Spiral Frog by the end of the year. One catch though, you have to watch advertisements before downloading.

I like the concept. I think people will use this as it is legal (no guilty feeling) and safer (No viruses, etc.)

It does have DRM though, and won’t be compatible with the iPod. Quite pointless in my opinion, as it seems like almost everyone and their dog has one these days. Those people will just continue with iTunes Music Store or they will just download them illegally.

At least they are sort of embracing the internet.

Edited to add:

It looks like this is even worse than it sounds. The service is not just ad supported but ad enforced:

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads.

Looks like they still can’t get anything right. Just ruining good ideas with more restrictions and less freedom.

Thanks to liberal catnip for bringing this up.

From The Independant:

More than 10,000 Iraqis - the vast majority in Baghdad - have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world.

How true is that? 10,000 dead, this should cause public outcry, but it seems like it can be easily ignored by most people in power. It’s time to wake up the “leaders” of the world to the crisis going on in Iraq.

If this isn’t a civil war, then what is?

I apologize to everyone who could not access this site the past few days due to some server problems. I lost a bunch of my previous posts but I am able to recover the majority of them. So the old posts will be coming back up over the next few days (All comments were lost unfortunately though.) and I will be updating the blog like regular now that I am back from vacation.

That’s all.

Just a heads up for everyone who reads my blog, I will be leaving for vacation on Tuesday night. I will be going back to my hometown of Penticton to soak up the sun with my girlfriend, Kathleen. Hopefully I don’t run into Stockwell Day, he scares me for a guy whose suppose to be looking out for public safety. (Did I ever tell you the time that I hit Stockwell Day with a spit ball in the forehead at a school assembly? That’s for another post if I didn’t.) I hope everyone has an awesome week! I know I will be enjoying it as I will be going back to school on August 28th! It’s already been a year since I was last there, hopefully I didn’t forget how to learn.

Anyways, Ciao!

Last week an independent evaluation was released and it stated that the federal government was not properly implementing the “Species at Risk Act” and a leaked document from Environment Canada shows they are trying to make the act less effective. Here is a press release from the Sierra Club of Canada. (I’ve added emphasis on parts I feel are important.)

Ottawa: An independent evaluation released yesterday reveals rampant federal mismanagement in implementing the Species at Risk Act (SARA). The evaluation by private consulting firm Stratos Inc., points out serious deficiencies in all of the key areas evaluated.

The evaluation was released by Environment Canada’s Audit and Evaluation Branch in response to a request from the federal Treasury Board. It concludes that ‘the species at risk programs and activities are not yet on track to ensure that the Act’s objectives and intended outcomes will be realized.’

“From figuring out which species to protect, to figuring out how to protect them, this report reveals, at best, governmental bungling, and at worst negligence,” said Gwen Barlee, the Policy Director of the Wilderness Committee. “Canada’s endangered species deserve better.”

The number one cause of species’ decline in Canada is habitat loss. The identification of critical habitat is the primary tool under SARA to enable habitat protection. One of the key findings of the evaluation is that critical habitat was not being identified or legally protected. The evaluation also finds that a significant portion of available resources was either re-allocated to other departmental priorities, allowed to lapse, or extensively re-profiled within SARA programs. This means that money that was allocated for such crucial things as recovery planning and critical habitat identification was misspent.

“Worse yet,” added Rachel Plotkin, Sierra Club of Canada’s Director of Forests and Biodiversity, “an Environment Canada document leaked to Sierra Club outlines current federal policy directives that dilute SARA’s potential even further. The draft policy essentially encourages provinces not to identify critical habitat in recovery strategies and to dilute a science-based process with economic considerations. The Conservative government can’t blame the Liberals for this grim new direction!”

The Stratos evaluation also highlights failed cooperation between the federal government and the provinces to protect Canada’s endangered plants and animals. Because the Species at Risk Act doesn’t automatically require protection of species on provincial lands, provincial governments are left in charge, even though many do not have laws to protect species at-risk and their habitat. The failure to protect species in the provinces has led to lawsuits in British Columbia and Alberta.

“When the federal government passed this legislation, they promised no species would fall through the cracks but many are,” said Sierra Legal lawyer, Devon Page. “As it stands now, we’re back to where we started from before we had national legislation – battling province by province and species by species.”

The federal government has committed to addressing concerns raised by the report, but the leaked policy document reveals that the federal government might, in fact, be tracking in the opposite direction. The report can be downloaded at http://www.ec.gc.ca/….