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posted by roj at 10:32 pm
from the voice of america, news that all criminal charges against captain james yee have been dropped. the washington post has more.
a quick flashback is in order. yee was detained on suspicion of espionage, but no espionage charges were filed. instead, he was charged with mishandling classified information, adultery and downloading porn. the official reason for dropping the charges is that moving forward with the court marshal could jeopardize national security. he’ll be subject to administrative punishment of some kind instead of risking a trial.
i guess this means that it is now offical policy that criminal prosecution is a matter of political convenience.
posted by roj at 12:40 am
as covered in the washington post, aol has been blocking sites promoted via spam. it’s a controversial approach. thoughts?
posted by roj at 12:32 am
(i think not)
the sydney morning herald leads me to some music industry numbers from the flipside of the planet.
the aria (that’s australian record industry association) has released their industry statistics for 2003. their headline: “Music DVD continues its rise whilst CD singles slide further.”
sure, there’s still room for indsutry spin, but the aussies managed 6% revenue growth in 2003, and managed to break sales records with total unit sales 1% higher than the previous record volume. all this despite the gobal internet and the vast number of pirates and thieves that the riaa hasn’t managed to prosecute yet.
how can this be? well, there’s a hint in the release – unit prices for cd’s are down, unit volume is up (this is a difficult concept, maybe you can ask an economist to explain it to you), dvd formats are up (this is an “adding value” approach), and there’s a mysterious “other” category which increased 6666.20% (units) or 5951.76% (dollars) over 2002. the footnote on the table says that this category “includes sales of Mini Disks & SACD” – but i’m guessing it also includes online sales. there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of play for a 6000-percent increase in a category.
peter martin has his own analysis, and while i disagree on some points (death of the album and it’s about the singles and suchlike…), it’s good to have perspectives.
strangely, this isn’t too far from some things we touched on here and there a couple months ago. so maybe it’s not so different.
then again, who is delta goodrem? 14-times platinum? and not a peep here.
update: slashdot has more.
posted by roj at 9:09 am
Apple has admitted its online music store will fall short of the target of 100 million sales by the end of April.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Apple boss Steve Jobs said he now expected to sell between 70 and 75 million tracks by then.
just to put apple on the record… so to speak.
still, itunes is moving 2.5 million songs a week. is there still time to launch the meta-roj music store?
posted by roj at 5:44 am
posted by roj at 10:16 am
posted by roj at 10:00 am
“thank you for your 3 minutes”
fuck that [windows media. warning: explicit language (fuck that) and violence and stuff]
you’re welcome.
[via metafilter].
posted by roj at 11:41 pm