I'm not normally one to talk politics, and I regard it as distasteful (and annoying!) to deal with, but I do pay attention. Harper might have solace in his minority-majority, but eventually he's going to annoy enough people as to discredit the Conservatives -- much like the Liberal party has now -- for many years to come.

Michael Geist picked up a story about how Industry Canada staff are systematically trying to edit Wikipedia pages, deleting criticism of the new 'Canadian DMCA'. I say 'systematically' because certain text was deleted multiple times after being restored, and the edits come from the same IP range. And it's limited to a few specific points: criticism *of* the proposed act, and the fact that nobody in Canada wants it: only the US Big Media conglomerates.

The Boston Beer Company, owners of the "Samuel Adams' trademark, sent a cease and desist letter to the the registrant of a domain name for Mayor-to-be of Portland, Oregon because that's his name, too.

Wonderful.

Boston Beer's Helen Bornemann said she didn't know there was a real Sam Adams running for mayor when she sent the letter.
...

Whever I hear part of the phrase 'will never' in regards to computers, I have to say something about it. Let's see:

• 'everything that can be' ... 'has been invented' - patent office guy
• 'world market' ... 'maybe five computers' - IBM guy
• 'no reason' ... ' computer in home' - DEC guy
• "640 kilobytes' ... 'enough for anyone' - Microsoft guy

And some other anecdotes

• 'When I got my first hard drive' ... '2 megabytes' ... 'we called it "Gigantor"' -- Teacher guy

With Target and Wal-mart scaling back or ceasing to carry Sony's UMD format Sony is planning to distribute formats on memory sticks...

Let's see why the death of this format was inevitable:

1) Create a proprietary format called Universal Media Disk
2) Don't let third parties release movies for said format with signing piano-wire agreements to publish to the format
3) The only player for the format is the PSP