See how many electrcity/bulb puns are in this Irish Times article.
What the hell is happening in Cork in the jobs front?
Conor Pope’s Pricewatch blog on Ireland.com. Nice to be linked. Nice to see blogs there.
Via Tim Worstall is this wonderful debut blog post from Dan Hardie.
Smaller online communities = better interaction. As social sites grow, average interaction per user goes down.
Nearly a third of adopted children in the District of Columbia live with gay or lesbian parents … gay and lesbian parents are raising 4 percent of all adopted children in the country. Roughly 100,000 foster children await adoption, the study reported …
I find the fact that 100,000 foster kids are looking to be adopted to be a shockingly high number. Some other U.S. adoption facts.
A nice write-up by David Hollingworth who went to ShareIT in Cork.
DRM free, the music might be but they charge more for it. Ripoff.
But the DRM-free music is sold at twice the encoding rate, 256kbps as opposed to 128kbps, and thus higher quality.
It would be a ripoff if it were the only way to access the music, but of course, it’s not. You can always buy the CD and rip it (completely DRM-free) if you wish. However you could end up paying a lot more, depending on where you buy it.
If you don’t want to buy from iTunes, you don’t have to.
[…] Similarly, Damien Mulley (a blogger for whom I have a great deal of respect) declares the new dispensation to be a “Ripoff.” Sorry, Damien, but music downloads are not an essential in life, and if you feel that this new product is a ripoff, then don’t buy it. The recorded music business is an open competitive market, and if Apple and EMI have made a mistake by pricing this new product at a premium, then the market will tell them this toot sweet. Higher gas prices in a monopoly market; unnecessary bank charges or insurance cover in a cartelised market – those are ripoffs. […]
Gerry, a 33% premium to remove DRM and for an increase in quality *is* a ripoff. I don’t think it cost Apple or EMI 33% exdtra to do this or even 1%. It’s just a way of taking more money for the same old rope.
Ultimately, the market will decide whether this new product is a rip-off or not. The standard DRM’d format will still be available at €0.99 alongside the new higher-quality, DRM-free one at €1.29. What it cost EMI or Apple to bring this new product to the market is irrelevant. If the market decides that the new product is poor value for money in comparison to the existing one, it will not buy it. The retail music business is an open, competitive and free market after all. We shall see.
Hi, this is Nivi from Venture Hacks. Thanks for the mention!
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