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After a couple days of not being able to log into my admin panel, I finally managed to fix the problem. Luckily I remembered to save all of my posts, however I completely forgot to backup the categories and comments. Oh well, relatively minor.

Dear NBC Executives,

My name is Travis Harder and I am writing to express my disagreement with your recent decisions regarding your late night schedule. I feel that moving Jay Leno back to 11:35, pushing Conan O’Brien back to 12:05 and Jimmy Fallon to 1:05 is not only a mistake, but simply wrong. The fact of the matter is, Jay Leno is past his prime and isn’t funny anymore, to anyone except old people. True, Conan has not done as well as David Letterman recently, but that is because you have failed to give Conan a good lead in. Obviously, it makes sense to get rid of Leno, however, moving him to 11:35, screwing Conan and Jimmy Fallon over in the process makes no sense. If people aren’t watching Leno now, what makes you think they’ll watch him when he goes back to 11:35? Sure, he had viewers before he “retired”, but he’s not going back to a hour long comedy/talk show, like he had before. People watched Leno because he had the big name guests. Putting him in a 30 minute show, relying solely on his comedy will fail. Pushing Conan and Fallon back half an hour will give David Letterman and Craig Ferguson a major advantage, and people aren’t going to watch half an hour of Letterman and switch to NBC for Conan. Furthermore, Conan has now said that he will not host The Tonight Show at 12:05. If you are going to lose a host either way, lose Leno. At best, you’ll get another 5-10 years of bad comedy and low ratings with him, whereas with Conan, you will get many years of a genuinely funny show. It was bad enough when you lost David Letterman because of Leno, don’t lost Conan as well. Fox has already said that they would be willing to do a show with Conan, and I will follow Conan to Fox if he takes them up on that offer. Think about this: if Fox decides to go into the late night game, they will logically want a later show to follow Conan O’Brien’s. Jimmy Fallon can’t be happy about his treatment, either. It’s not unreasonable to think that he may follow Conan to Fox, leaving you with, what, Carson Daly to host Late Night? Where is the upside to this? How do you benefit by pissing off the host of your flagship late night show? How does causing more splintering benefit NBC? Let me end this by saying that if you do not cancel your current plans to move Leno back to 11:35, I cannot continue to support the network by watching. Furthermore, I will contact any company that advertises on Leno’s show and let them know that as long as they are advertising with Leno, I will not purchase their products and/or services.

Travis Harder

While watching the latest episode of Diggnation yesterday, one of the hosts, Alex Albrecht, made an interesting point about Google becoming a monopoly by entering other industries. He said that because Google has so much money, they can go into another industry (in this example: turn-by-turn navigation) and do it for free without having to make money. This, he said, will push out the other competitors in the market (you can’t beat free), thus establishing Google as the sole company providing a service, which would lead to a degradation of quality of service. Part of his argument used the examples of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. The two leaders in the industry, he said, didn’t need to many money from video gaming, since they had other products that provided their cash (Microsoft’s OS and Office suite, Sony’s computers, TVs, etc.), so they could sell their consoles at a loss. While he made some interesting points (far more interesting than anything I’ve ever said after a few beers), and I agree that monopolies must always be avoided, Google currently is not the enemy. (more…)

Last night, Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain (R-AZ), made a posted on her Twitter account a picture of her sitting around in a tank-top holding a book (“Andy Warhol” by Arthur C. Danto ). Being the daughter of a prominent Republican (as well as a self-described Republican herself), it’s no surprise that most of her followers are also Republicans. What is, however, surprising, is the backlash that the picture gathered. While she did appear to be going for sex appeal or something when she took this picture, it’s still tame compared to what we see every day on television, celebrity gossip sites, or your local newspaper. So, that begs the question: why the fuss?
Twitter user LDG1981 posted:

Is @McCainBlogette vying to be the prostitute in the next undercover ACORN video? What is she thinking? Hope her kids never see that.

Really? You’re comparing Meghan McCain sitting at home in a tank-top, showing some cleavage to prostitution (SFW)? Note that the woman the camera is focused on for most of the video is not the one pretending to be a hooker. Also, you really think her future children (keep in mind Meghan currently does not have any children) will be traumatized if they saw this picture? She’s showing off a book to her Twitter followers, not parading around on stage in a swim suit (maybe not the best example, considering Bristol). (more…)

The Grant MacEwan College Board of Governors announced a while ago that the facility would maximize the tution increase for next year. Being a student at Grant MacEwan, this obviously resonates with me very strongly. Seeing as MacEwan is going to provide the Bachelor of Science degree and needs money for that, and the majority of the increase will go towards staff wages, I do not hold any ill will towards the college for the increase. Who I do blame for the massive increase, however, is the provincial government. The amount of funding that Alberta provides for post-secondary institutions is so miniscule that it is embarassing. There is no excuse for it.

Obviously, some will argue that with the economic recession starting to hit Alberta, we cannot afford to increase spending. Quite frankly, this is wrong. In a recession, we must have manageable deficits to minimize the effect of a recession, and pay it off when the economy picks up again. What should have happened was when we were in a boom, the government should have put the surplus into a savings account, so we could retroactively pay off the deficits that we would be forced to go into during the inevitable recession. Instead, our idiot former Premier Ralph Klein and his moronic successor Ed Stelmach decided to do nothing and let the province run on “autopilot*”. Only an eighth-grade dropout could come up with an idea so mind numbingly stupid. The second he came up with the idea of a government that does nothing, he should have forfeited his salary. He was never elected to do nothing. Where I work, if you do nothing, you get fired. In the next election, did we fire Klein? No, we re-elected him. This is a man who once insulted handicapped recipients of Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH), claiming that “…they didn’t look severely handicapped to me…”. No, Ralph, they didn’t. You know why? Because we don’t give M.D.’s to people who can’t even finish grade 9, never mind grade 12 or university.

When Ralph Klein finally retired, many thought that the era of doing nothing (other than slash-and-burn spending) was finally over. Oh how wrong we were. Instead, we got more inaction (if you don’t count giving himself and his cabinet a massive pay raise). To put that raise into perspective: the increase alone is almost as much as my mom makes in a year. It is over double what I make in a year. Stelmach justified this increase by saying that it would attract brighter people to politics. Ignoring the obvious jokes about him implying that his own cabinet (including himself) are not adequate for this province (they’re not), keep in mind what they get. $184,000/year for cabinet ministers and $213,450/year for the Premier. Think about that. Chances are very good that you did not make anywhere close to that. How can this man claim to represent you, and have any idea on the economic challenges that you face when he makes four times what you make? His bright idea for dealing with the recession is to have Ralph Klein era budget cuts. This begs the question: what is there left to cut? Rather than cut anything you can see, Stelmach, why not give yourself a pay cut? If the economy is so dire, give yourself a 50% pay cut. You’ll still make more than double what the rest of us make.

One has to wonder, how does this party keep getting elected? How is it possible that a party full of nothing but imbeciles and dunces can hold onto power for 38 years? Is this province really so collectively stupid that they are incapable of having any thought process other than “I’ve always voted conservative, so I’ll keep voting conservative”?  In 2011, when we go to the polls again, I urge everyone to remember this history of mental retardation when it comes to governing and strategically vote A.B.C. (Anything But Conservative). If we ever want to have a government that understands the people, we need to get involved and put this current on on the street. Until the next election, write both your current MLA and Ed Stelmach, and let them know about your displeasure with the current path of the government.

*It should be noted that, despite our common last name, I am not related to Dr. Lois Harder

According to a report by Ars Technica, four major Canadian ISPs, including Bell, Shaw and Rogers throttle P2P traffic via Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). According to a report done by University of Victoria grad student Christopher Parsons, most of the filings for submitted by the ISPs were submitted in confidence, thus hiding traffic numbers to the public.

This is just shameful. There is no reason for ISPs to throttle internet access and is simply counter-productive. Many Canadians wonder why we are always behind the rest of the world, technologically speaking, and this is out answer. The CRTC refuses to regulate our ISPs and enforce net neutrality, thus letting the companies do whatever they want. TV is dying, and new media is the future. Unfortuantly, new media access in Canada will be stunted due to the fact that P2P traffic, such as bit torrent will be restricted and bit torrent is a cheap way for people to distribute files, such as podcasts, Linux image files and WoW updates. Yes, it sucks that it’s going to cost the ISPs more money for upload, but so what? It’s a cost of business. If you never want to embrace changing technology, get out of the technology industry. It’s shameful that not only can these companies rule in a virtual monopoly, they can take advantage of that situation and screw over their customers, knowing that they will not be able to take their business elsewhere, unless they want to go back to dial up.

As you may have heard, Revision3 recently suffered a DDoS attack brought on by Media Defender. What happened is that Revision3 uses BitTorrent to host their files, giving viewers another way to obtain the show, and lessening the load on their servers. For one reason or another, they left their tracker open, allowing anyone to add torrent information to it. Many people ended up using this to their advantage, adding torrents which linked to copyrighted content. Media Defender, rather than contacting Revision3 about this, decided to host spoof files (files which appear to be copyrighted content such as the Iron Man movie) on the tracker. A member of the Revision3 forums discovered the illegal content one could obtain from Revision3′s tracker and let them know. Revision3 responded by locking up the tracker so only authorized Revision3 shows could be obtained via this tracker. Media Defender responded by sending out numerous SYN packets to Revision3 servers (approximately 8000 per second according to Revision3 CEO, Jim Louderback). This crippled the Revision3 servers, preventing access to the website and apparently even internal corporate email.

According to the latest episode of TWiT (this WEEK in TECH), the FBI is investigating this matter. While no one is arguing that Revision3 should not have made their tracker public, Media Defender should not have reacted this way. When Media Defender noticed that this tracker was open, and that one could obtain copyrighted content using it, they should have contacted Revision3, as the forum member did, and let them know about this. By DDoSing Revision3, Media Defender broke the law and caused Revision3 considerable financial harm.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, however, is not the attack that Media Defender committed, but rather when it committed the attack. Media Defender was silent for the five weeks when Revision3 was unknowingly providing access to copyrighted content, but the second that Revision3 cut off access to the illegal content, they attacked. It seems that they did not care so much about copyrighted content as they did to having access for their files. Once the tracker was locked down, they responded the same way a two year old would at the grocery store when you take away the candy he wants to buy, throwing a massive tantrum.

On TWiT, Jim and Leo Laporte speculated that perhaps this whole incident occurred because Media Defender and so-called old media companies that back it do not understand the concept of new media organizations such as Revision3, and cannot grasp the idea that BitTorrent would be used for anything other that piracy. This brings out a major problem with old media. Old media is a dinosaur losing out to new media. People are getting sick of paying $20-30 for a DVD or Blu-ray disk, then being told what they can and cannot do with it. Companies such as Revision3 give you their content and basically say “you can whatever you want with it as long as you aren’t making money with our work”, and people love this. A person can take the latest episode of Diggnation or The Totally Rad Show and put a copy on their iPod, a copy on a DVD and another copy on their laptop, and watch them wherever they want. Aside from their monthly internet bill and the time required to download the shows, there is no fee and you get high-definition and high-quality content. Even shows with advertising such as Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show, Hak5 and TWiT, the advertising is minimal compared to that of many television shows, which like layer it on in excessive amounts.

The only way for companies such as CBS, NBC, Fox and Disney to survive in the long run is for them to finally embrace new media, and remove many of the restrictions. Let the user download the latest episode of their favorite television show, even if they don’t live in the United States (hint, hint Comedy Central, NBC and MTV), DRM-Free, and let them do what they want with it. Restricting the rights of their customers is nothing short of suicide and will lead to the inevitable downfall of television, music and possible movies.

I stumbled upon a really cool website the other day called The Sixty One. Basically this is a website where you can discover new music. It allows you to search by genres to discover new music by smaller/newer/indy artists. Many of the songs are available as free downloads, and most of the ones that aren’t are available to purchase as DRM free mp3s. Sign up and start discovering new music. Be sure to check out my profile to see what I like.