Content Producers & Distributors: Stop Encouraging Piracy

Media producers and distributors don’t you think it is time you guys joined the rest of the world in the 21st Century and stopped with these silly rules based on geolocation? Honestly, you are just encouraging the very piracy you sit around complaining about. Case in point the image above. My friends and I were talking about re-watching this series from 2004-05 which unfortunately got cancelled after one season. My friend looked for the DVDs and they don’t exist. He looked for it on iTunes, and it is not available to be sold in Canada. What do you think people’s next step is going to be? We look online and see if we can find it pirated. Lo and behold it is readily available online!

Another case in point my friend asked me to recommend some new music. I told him about this awesome new artist I had heard about out of the UK. My friend went to iTunes to look for the artist’s music and download it only to find they only had one or two songs available for download in Canada. Can you guess what the next steps were? (Hint: Exactly the same as above.)

Both of the cases above were people willing and ready to pay for the content but they weren’t allowed to because of a boundary drawn on a map. The first example specifically that content is available FOR FREE on one side of a line and utterly unavailable for any price on the other side of it. Calling it ridiculous doesn’t begin to do this justice.

If content distributors aren’t distributing the content where they have the license to do so then their licenses should be revoked and be given to someone who will or just be distributed by the creators themselves. It is that simple. This is the second decade of the 21st Century and it is time the people who are in charge of getting content out there realized what this means. If you don’t, then I don’t see how you can then turn around and complain that people are pirating your content when you seem to be doing everything you can to encourage them to do so.

“Electricity vs The Internet”? How Is This Even A Question?

In the Post-A-Day Challenge there are often days where some of us need help figuring out what to write. As such, WordPress, has set up a blog called “The Daily Post” to help us think of topics on days when we have nothing. Tonight I decided to take a look at the blog, which I haven’t in a while and saw Topic #270: What’s more important: electricity or the internet?

All I could think when I saw this post was, “REALLY?!?!?! How is this even a question? See below for a screenshot of the question in its entirety before I rip on it..and the 12 bloggers who “Liked” it as a topic.

How can this even be a question? Are the people at WordPress just getting extremely lazy? I don’t mind the question so much and the topic itself until the last few words:

If you had to lose one of these inventions, which would you keep? And why?

Well this here is a real tough one…what good is having all these computers and servers which make up the Internet if you have no electricity to run them? No matter what the power source they have to be supplied some sort of electricity otherwise they simply won’t run and then you have no Internet. I don’t even see how there is a debate on this – OF COURSE you have to choose to want electricity over the Internet because electricity isn’t useless without the Internet whereas the Internet is useless without electricity. The Internet can’t exist without electricity so the very concept of losing electricity but keeping the Internet just makes zero sense.

Come on WordPress! I admit I was lazy today and went to your blog for some inspiration but I wasn’t expecting such laziness from you guys! I know it is hard to write a post every day – believe me 10 months into this challenge I know how hard it is – but this is just beyond ridiculous. I am very happy that the comments I read on the post (I didn’t read all 43) agreed completely with me.

Maybe I and those commenters see this wrong…if we do let me know how else we can look at this in the comments below.

Will The Different Ways Of Spelling The English Language Survive The 21st Century?

US spelling of a sentence in the Twitter web update box. Notice there are 35 characters left available to be used.

 As we begin to rely more and more on our different technologies people have long said it is the death of the English language as spelling and grammar go out the window. But I have something a little more insidious to discuss today – the death of the variations between the local spellings of the English language. One of the things that always confused the heck out of me when I was a kid was that there was American and Canadian spellings for things especially as my dad was American and my mom a Canadian it didn’t help that my dad had never even stopped to consider that color might be spelled with a ‘u’ (remember these are the days BEFORE spell-check…and even with spell-check do you always make sure the computer you’re using is set for your local dialect of English?)

However, as we move further into the 21st Century and tweeting and texting become ever more the norm limiting us to 140 characters (on Twitter) and 160 characters (text messages) every letter counts. Assuming you can get people these days to use proper spelling in their internet/cell phone text based communication how are you ever going to explain to them that because they’re Canadian they need to waste characters for proper spelling of the word color is colour or snowplough instead of snowplow? Those characters are precious on the interwebs! Granted the sentence I typed in the pictures above will probably never be something that is actually tweeted but I did it to illustrate a point. With those 6 extra characters available to me I can completely change the thoughts being written via text or on Twitter. Those characters seem oddly wasted when the only reason we are using them, really, is nationalistic and now trying to keep traditional spelling as reasons. What other reason can there be?

UK/Canadian spelling of the same sentence as above in the Twitter web update box. Notice there are 29 characters left available to be used.

Therefore, I say that very soon we are going to see the end of these spellings. Even in my time, in private school if we spelled something the American way on a spelling test we got points for it – and this was in the 1980’s before every 10 year old had a cell phone. If the kid’s spelling of the word is correct somewhere in the world are you really going to push him/her to spell it the correct way specific to one group of countries and not the other? (Never mind that Canadian English spelling seems to just pick and choose at random which words will be spelled the US way and which will be spelled the UK way, further confusing the issue).

To be clear, I am absolutely, positively NOT advocating that we should get rid of the different spellings of homophones. There is a big difference between to, too, and two and those should be strictly obeyed.

UPDATE 7:51pm January 24th: This post is now in the FAIL category as well because I published it without a title. I was trying to get it done because I really had to go to the bathroom. That will teach me to hurry these things up!

TV Channel Surfing: Something I Still Enjoy…Don’t You?

Channel Surfing

I know how most people of my generation will agree they’d rather give up TV as opposed to their computer/internet. However, I have to say I still enjoy going to a TV and flipping it on to see what random show I can find. Sure, I can go to a streaming website, a hard drive collection, or even a DVD/Blu-Ray collection and watch any show/movie I want but there is something to be said for just seeing what reruns (or randomly interesting shows) are on and vegging out to them. Have you ever sat around for half-an-hour in front of your computer/disc collection trying to figure out what you want to watch? Sometimes too much choice is just paralyzing. It’s nice to flip to a channel and see that random rerun of Friends or Seinfeld or whichever episode from whichever Star Trek series Space is showing at that moment.

I also fully admit I LOVE having every TV show at my fingertips online. But sometimes it is just too much work deciding what show/movie I want to watch when I can just flip on the TV and see what’s on. Haven’t you ever had that moment when you turn on the TV and flip around a bit and lo and behold a movie you haven’t seen since the late 90’s is on. Yes, it was a cheesy movie even then, and yes, the commercials are annoying. But c’mon, you have to agree there’s something so simple and enjoyable about tuning in to the randomness of shows and movies that are on the boob tube 24/7/365.

I think, though, that in the future we may see a final shift from television when people start broadcasting  Internet TV Stations much like the Internet Radio Channels that started popping up in the early 2000s and continue on to this day. When that happens, one of the only things TV is still good for will be lost. Then, all that will be left will be sports and award shows which I know are already being broadcast online both for free and for pay.

A bunch of people watching a bunch of really big TVs at a sports bar in Toronto