Author: Serkadis

If you thought secrecy over ACTA was bad enough, apparently Canada and the EU are involved in equally secret negotiations on a separate treaty that has additional copyright implications that are just as bad, if not worse than what ACTA would require. As with ACTA, the details have just leaked, and they’re pretty ridiculous. From Michael Geist’s link above:

• Copyright term extension.  The current term of copyright law in Canada is life of the author plus 50 years.  This is consistent with the term requirements under the Berne Convention.  The EU is demanding that Canada add an additional 20 years by making the term life plus 70 years.
• WIPO ratification. The EU is demanding that Canada respect the rights and obligations under the WIPO Internet treaties.  The EU only formally ratified those treaties this week.
• Anti-circumvention provisions. The EU is demanding that Canada implement anti-circumvention provisions that include a ban on the distribution of circumvention devices.  There is no such requirement in the WIPO Internet treaties.
• ISP Liability provisions.  The EU is demanding statutory provisions on ISP liability where they act as mere conduits, cache content, or host content.  ISPs would qualify for a statutory safe harbour in appropriate circumstances.  There is no three-strikes and you’re out language (which presumably originates with the U.S.).
• Enforcement provisions.  The EU is demanding that Canada establish a host of new enforcement provisions including measures to preserve evidence, ordering alleged infringers to disclose information on a wide range of issue, mandate disclosure of banking information in commercial infringement cases, allow for injunctive relief, and destruction of goods.  There is also a full section on new border measures requirements.
• Resale rights.  The EU is demanding that Canada implement a new resale right that would provide artists with a royalty based on any resales of their works (subsequent to the first sale).
• Making available or distribution rights.  The EU is demanding that Canada implement a distribution or making available right to copyright owners.

Some of these are repeats from ACTA, but the others are pretty bad as well. Copyright term extension is just pointless, and it’s amazing that anyone still thinks it makes sense. The purpose of copyright is to create incentives to create. You can’t retroactively do that. It’s a farce. Copyright term extension is effectively a welfare program for content creators. If that’s what people want, then fine, but it should be discussed in those terms. It has nothing to do with copyright.

Resale rights are another huge problem. We were just discussing how Australia just added these. They’re officially to “help” up-and-coming artists, but they do the opposite. They basically give fewer reasons for buyers to purchase art from up-and-coming artists (knowing that selling them for profit will be that much more difficult) and really only help the well-established artists who can easily make more money by creating new art and selling it at much higher prices. It, again, is a welfare system designed mainly to give more money to successful artists at the expense of up-and-coming artists.

But the bigger issue here, as pointed out by Geist, is that between both of these treaty negotiations, you’re left wondering how come no one will let Canada create their own copyright laws? These treaties aren’t about “harmonization” (the buzz word you hear), but about having global copyright law in a position where a single change in one country forces pretty much every other country to ratchet the levels up (and, yes, they do always go up).

Allowing countries to set their own copyright laws and policies is important. Because we’ve never had an evidence based copyright, and because there’s growing evidence that draconian copyright laws can harm creative output, it would seem like a better solution would be to let different countries experiment with different copyright laws (or none at all…) to see what happens and what works best. Forcing all countries to align under identical copyright laws, entirely at the behest of a single industry, with provisions to regularly ratchet things up with no real review of the evidence seems immensely problematic.

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Gold's sudden drop still hasn't scared off commodity speculators. They remain at record levels and the market is massively net-long, according Citi's Alan Heap in his latest December 18th 'Commodity Heap'.

Citi's Alan Heap: Speculators Stay Long — Despite the recent USD strength, speculators have not liquidated positions in metals. Total LME open interest positions were largely stable since early December (Figures 8-11). COMEX non-commercial positions in gold and copper continue to increase (Figures 6-7).

The yellow line below represents the net long position, which remains at record levels.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CIBC: There Is No Gold Bubble, Diversification And A Mining Shortage Will Push It To $1400
• Goldman: Oil Going To $90, Gold To $1350
• How To Hate The Dollar And Short The Gold Hype At The Same Time

Filed under: Hirings/Firings/Layoffs, GM, Earnings/Financials

There are roughly 4,000 GM employees working at the company’s Renaissance Center headquarters in Detroit. During the restructuring, GM has been working out how many employees to let go and where to put the remainder, and that, for the state of Michigan, meant another few thousand workers unemployed.

To lessen the damage, the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) has been in talks with GM to limit the number of retrenched employees. The General had committed to maintaining a workforce of 2,500 at the RenCen in exchange for a $50 million tax break over twenty years, but the number was recently reduced to 2,000. GM simply needs to do all it can to get itself back in contention.

The company will still receive the tax break and talks are continuing, yet while there aren’t many details it’s an intriguing deal to strike. This could be cynical of us, but GM has white-collar workers in numerous locations in Michigan, and we wonder if the company wouldn’t simply shuffle people around to keep the required number at the RenCen but get rid of all the employees it feels it needs to. And when the company gets its new CEO, well, as we’ve seen before, he or she might plot a very different course than the one being charted now.

[Source: Detroit News | Image: Bill Pugliano/Getty]

REPORT: Michigan gives GM tax break but automaker to still halve staff at RenCen originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The chinese self immolation meme continues as Chinese property continues to rise.

This time a man is even goaded on by authorities to kill himself, after he had been under intense pressure to accept insufficient compensation for his eviction.

This is the second such event in just a month:

Telegraph: In the second incident last weekend, a Beijing man named in local newspapers as Xi Xinzhu set himself on fire after he refused to leave his home in a north-western suburb which had been earmarked for demolition under a village “improvement scheme”.

According to a report in the Beijing Times, Mr Xi had already suffered a fractured leg when he was beaten by “unidentified men” – violent intimidation is commonly reported in such cases – and was lying on a sofa when the officials entered.

After pouring petrol over himself, Mr Xi took out a lighter and threatened to ignite himself. “Neglecting his warning, the relocation people even said ‘go ahead, light up.’,” his wife told the newspaper.

Read more here.

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See Also:

• Anti-Goldman Protest Is Kind Of Lame
• Chinese Lady Self-Immolates To Protest Destruction Of Her Home
• Students Seize SF State Business School To Protest Tuition Hike

Bit.ly’s biggest asset at the moment is the amount of data it’s been collecting, especially for the past months since the service took off. It’s been using it to provide publishers with analytics for a while now and has recently introduced a premium service with even more stats Bit.ly Pro. Now, it’s putting all that data to good use again by launching an experimental product, Bitly.tv, which uses it to determine the most popular videos of the moment.

“Bit.ly TV is like the internet itself. There are parts of it that are terribly serious and important — like the footage of students battling the basiji on the streets of Tehran — alongside other bits, like the upside-down French bulldog puppy and the Ukelele kid, meant to surprise and delight,” Bit.ly writes.

Bit.ly has managed to become the biggest URL shortening service out there, in no small part because it was selected as the default service by Twitter. It pretty much dominates the market at this point, a great thing in itself, but there isn’t any money to be made from shortening links for free, at least not directly. So, it has to get creative in order to generate revenue and utilize its biggest asset, the sheer amount of link data that passes through each day.

It’s not going to make any money with the video rankings, but the move hints at the wider possibili… (read more)

Enhanced PPC4 pressure controller/calibrator from DHI adds lower pressure control range and new features, now up to 2,000 psi

EVERETT, Wash. – The DH Instruments Division of Fluke Corporation has announced a significant enhancement to its PPC4 precision pressure controller/calibrator product line.

PPC4 is a high performance pressure calibrator for testing pneumatic pressure instruments. It is designed to provide versatility and ease of use in calibration labs and manufacturing environments.

The maximum pressure range of the PPC4 has increased to cover the absolute pressure range of 1 kPa (0.15 psi) to 14 MPa (2,000 psi) and gauge pressure equivalent, including very low differential pressures. The patented dynamic control is further improved, extending the minimum controlled pressure down to 1 kPa. As always, PPC4 offers industry-leading control precision to ensure the lowest total uncertainty on dynamically controlled pressures, and to maximize the range covered by a single controller.

PPC4 enables users to select the user interface that best fits their application and budget. Bench top users can select the advanced graphic color display with point-and-click navigation to streamline pressure calibration and testing tasks. The advanced graphical user interface now supports 11 different languages; Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

If PPC4 spends most of its time interfaced with a computer, choose the basic front panel to minimize cost. Both interfaces include a front panel USB connection and free cockpit software for full PC-based ‘plug and play’ functionality. DHI’s COMPASS for Pressure calibration assistance software provides an advanced off-the-shelf tool to quickly automate your calibration and testing processes and handle a wide array of special requirements.

PPC4 uses DHI’s exclusive, individually characterized, quartz reference pressure transducer (Q-RPT) modules for increased precision and reduced measurement uncertainty. The AutoRange™ feature supports infinite ranging, automatically optimizing all aspects of operation for the exact range of the device being calibrated. It is rugged enough for mobile applications and standard shipment without special packaging.

For more information on the enhanced PPC4 and other pressure and flow calibration products from DHI, visit www.dhinstruments.com. To contact the DH Instruments Division of Fluke Corporation, call (602) 431-9100, or email [email protected].

About Fluke
Fluke Corporation is the leader in precision calibration instrumentation and software for electrical, temperature, pressure, flow, and RF measurements. Calibration products from Fluke and its Hart Scientific and DH Instruments Divisions are found in calibration facilities around the world, including National Metrology Institutes, that demand the highest levels of performance and reliability, backed by state of the art metrology and uncompromising support. They are relied on by quality engineers, calibration technicians, and metrologists to instill confidence in the measurements that are critical to their organizations for quality, safety, reliability, and cost. Fluke and DHI are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Fluke Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The flexibility of the TK 446 model makes it particularly suitable both for small manufacturing enterprises that often need to perform several tooling-ups due to frequent production changes and to larger multinational corporations that have to machine large batches.
Thanks to its excellent price/quality ratio, the TK 446 model represents a good starting point for those who wish to abandon their old machines with manual commands and to approach to industrial automation systems and to numeric-control machining centers.
The TK 446 model stands out for the high useful working lengths (also using aggregate heads) that set the TK 446 apart from other machining centers in the equivalent price range; this machining center is designed for drilling and conventional milling processes and also for copy-milling operations on aluminum extruded profiles and other materials, including steel profiles up to 5 mm thick, steel reinforced PVC, and various other plastics or wood.
Standard versions are available in 2 machining lengths: 3500 and 6500 mm.
Axis X: 3500 – 6500 mm
Axis Y: 370 mm / 250 mm (with aggregate heads)
Axis Z: 250 mm / 250 mm (with aggregate heads)

Filed under: Marketing/Advertising, Buick, GM, GMC

For the third time in two months, General Motors has a new Buick/GMC general manager, this time hiring longtime employee Brian Sweeney to the high-profile post. Sweeney gets the job one week after Michael RIchards quit after just nine days on the job.

Sweeney gets the general manager post after spending a year and a half as general sales manager of Buick GMC. GM Sales Service and Marketing VP Susan Docherty said in a press release that Sweeney “consolidated 13 different agencies to one dedicated partner to drive a consistent brand message, led the dealer network through a difficult transition and has earned a reputation for tirelessly driving results that benefit consumers.” That sounds like a lot of work to us. Here’s to hoping this Sweeney guy lasts a lot longer than the last guy.

Sweeney’s old job goes to 25 year GM vet Jennifer Costabile. The 25 year GM employee is coming off assignment as regional sales and marketing manager for Cadillac in GM’s Southeast Region. Hit the jump to read the GM press release.

[Source: GM]

Continue reading Sweeney takes over Buick/GMC general manager duties

Sweeney takes over Buick/GMC general manager duties originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s beena a lot of dicussion lately about so-called peak gold.

But as gold’s fans will tell you gold isn’t a commodity, it’s a form of money. Gold isn’t actually intended to be used in anything.

But what about metals that are meant to be used in industrial purposes.

In an excellent presentation, André Diederen presents an argument that all of the world’s important industrial metals are dwindling, and that despite increasing explortation budgets, our sources of them are becoming rare and more concentrated.

We present, via The Oil Drum, Diederen’s presentation Global Resource Depletion: Metal minerals scarcity and the Elements of Hope.

Now, see the charts — >

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See Also:

• The Overwhelming Evidence For Peak Gold
• The Coming Collapse Of The Global Gold Mining Industry

Oppenheimer banking analyst Chris Kotowski says banks are going to flush a ton of crap off their balance sheets in Q4.  This will make asset trends look temporarily bad–get ready for big write-offs–but it will also clear the decks for a much better 2010.

To this we would add that Bank of America will likely be even more aggressive about this than your average bank. 

The CEO switch gives new CEO Brian Moynihan a chance to clean the books and blame Ken Lewis for all the garbage.  The more Moyhihan rinses out now, the less he’ll have to answer for later.  So expect a veritable Augean Stables move from Bank of America.

Chris Kotowski:

We have been saying since our 3Q09 preview that we expect 4Q09 to be a clean-up quarter. We mean this not just in the sense of special charges that impact earnings, of which there will be plenty, but also in the sense that in order to get as much “reserve building” out of the way in 2009 as possible the companies will be very aggressive in classifying problem assets and this will likely make asset quality trends look poor. To this mix we now add reduced loan volume expectations for 2010 and a more pronounced than normal seasonal slowdown in trading.

We are trimming our 2010 estimates almost across the board with only Lazard untouched. At the investment banks the trims are fairly modest and driven mainly by the fact that our 2010 trading estimates were derived off full-year 2009 estimates, and with these somewhat diminished it has a modest pull-through effect on 2010. We are also trimming our price targets based on our reduced estimates.

At the commercial banks, our estimate revisions are being driven by lower loan volume assumptions (which drove a roughly 3% reduction in our pre-provision earnings estimates) and the assumption that loan losses will remain at their peak 4Q09 levels for two quarters rather than one. This latter change stemmed from sloppy November master trust data.

We view the 4Q09 slowdown in trading as seasonal and believe it has negligible implications for the underlying health of trading businesses, which we consider quite strong. In this report we take an extensive look at long-term trends in the business, which indicate that 2009 results are not far off trendline.

We continue to believe that investment banking and trading businesses are likely to do well in 2010. M&A is just beginning to rebound, enormous financing needs remain, and concern about the sustainability of trading profits (which is reflected more in the single-digit P/E multiples than in earnings estimates) is overdone.

Loan volume and NPA inflow trends will be poor for several more quarters, but historically such times have been good for bank stocks.

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See Also:

• Cramer: "I Like Bank Of America!"
• Bank Of America’s Below $15, The First Time Since July
• Bank Lending Is Collapsing All Around The Globe

Don’t be freaked out by the month-long swoon in gold.

CIBC, which has plenty of expertise in mining and commodities, remains very bullish on it, slamming the idea that somehow gold is in a “bubble”, and calling for a price target of $1400 in 2011. Of course, many of the late-stage gold buyers we’ve seen recently probably thought $1400 was a chip-shot by the end of this year, so even this bullish call may be disappointing to them.

Before getting to their reasoning, we’d like to highlight this chart, via PragCap, which also bolsters the case that there’s no gold bubble. Basically, bubbles look a certain way, and gold doesn’t.

 

Via FT Alphaville:

Gold has been exhibiting significant correlation to the U.S. dollar, yet we believe other fundamentals will support continued strong performance of the metal, including stronger investment demand, the market’s need for a safe haven investment, and the absence of growing mine supply.

. . .

The rationale for accelerated reactions to dollar-led gold price movement lies in the additional factors contributing to the strength in the metal. Currency movements may be important but they are not the only factor propelling the price of gold. Uncertainty of many factors has led to strong investment demand for the metal as one of the prime drivers to gold price increases. Whereas jewelry demand accounted for about 82% of metal purchases a decade ago, that figure has dropped with investment demand rising to as much as 73% of total demand in some recent quarters. Aside from the safety protection offered by bullion, we suspect that investors have sought to limit volatility within their holdings by diversification into traditionally counter cyclical vehicles such as gold.

The desire for diversification is not limited investors. In ever increasing amounts, Central Bankers have also joined the party that arguably they were responsible for its demise 12 years ago. Whereas back in 1997, there was selling pressure on bullion brought about first by the governments of the Southern Hemisphere (Argentina, Australia), followed by Switzerland, Netherlands and the United Kingdom, now there is net buying taking place among Central Banks. Key among the buying group of late is China and India. We think this trend to broader purchases by Central Banks will continue leading to a new source of demand that hitherto was a source of supply as Central Bank selling intensified at the turn of the millennium.

In the absence of growing mine supply, we anticipate that bullion will continue to perform well over the next few years and possibly longer. Short-term gyrations however will also be the norm and in the past two weeks we have seen what we consider to be a normal (and arguably healthy) correction to the upward phase of a continued long-term bull market for gold.

Read more at FT Alphaville >>

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See Also:

• Goldman: Oil Going To $90, Gold To $1350
• China Down Big Overnight, Japan Slips, Gold Back Above $1100
• Gold "Super Spike" Coming In 2010

Until recently, few people would have thought of using “Madagascar” and “Firefox” in the same sentence, but since the latest code name for the latter was released, this no longer seems an unlikely phrase. For those of you who do not know, the 3.6 version of Firefox is called Namoroka, named after a park in the northwest area of Madagascar.

The Mozilla team has already started and maintained a tradition when it comes to promoting free access to software and creative solutions for developing a “health ecosystem of communities” where “a shared space, shared resources or network of ideas, applications and products that are free to use.”

It seems Mozilla developers consider that parks resemble the open source software environment in terms of recreation, collaboration and conservation, not to mention the fact that both concepts are vital ecosystems for their respective fields.

Of course, it is not the first time when Firefox gets its pre-release code named after a park, other examples being Gran Paradiso (Italy), Bon Echo (Canada) and Shiretoko (Japan). Furthermore, the Japanese appeared to be very proud to have inspired the Firefox 3.5 code name that they even created Discover Shiretoko, a website designed for promoting the park with the same name, and to… (read more)

Sun-Maid Raisins recently had a radical makeover for its iconic raisin girl found on every box of raisins the company produces. In addition to modernizing the girl, Sun-Maid also appears to have given her a nice boob job.

The new girl is shown up top. Here’s what the old version looked like:

The new 3D animation is kind of creepy and the Sun-Maid girl now looks more like a farmer Barbie. Now if she would only ditch that bonnet for a bikini.

Here’s a new commercial featuring the animated hottie:

Related posts:

1. How to Really Get the Girl
2. Say Hello to Burkha Barbie
3. ‘Get the Girl Naked’ is One Awesome Game Show

cram writes in to let us know of a filmmaker/post production guy in Uruguay who spent a grand total of $500 to make a 5 minute “robots attack the world” movie that he put on YouTube, and, in response, has now been given tens of millions of dollars by a Hollywood production company to do something more significant:

There are a few things that are a bit unclear from the story, which alternates at points between dollars and pounds, so you may question the validity of the details. However, watching the video is quite compelling, yet again. We’ve seen other top amateur films with amazing special effects made on the cheap, and this is another one to add to the pile. Hollywood keeps insisting that it needs to produce $200 million movies, and studio insiders, who like to hang out in our comments and dismiss amateur special effects as being worthless, will — of course — mock this as being nothing special. And, sure, you can definitely see that the quality of the $500 effort is not the same as a big budget Hollywood film. But it’s not that far off. And what can be done today for $500 couldn’t even have been matched by Hollywood’s bigshots a decade ago. Just think what an amateur and $500 will do a decade from now? And then explain, again, why we’re going to “need” to produce $200 million special effect bonanza movies again?

In the meantime, congrats to this guy, who turned $500 into a chance to play around with a lot more (though, not $200 million). It’s difficult to turn that sort of opportunity down, though it would have been even cooler to see what he could have done on a smaller budget as well.

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It’s here, finally. According to Moody’s.

24/7 Wall St.: Moody’s Investors Service has raised the bias and outlook on the U.S. homebuilder sector this morning. Its report was titled “U.S. Homebuilding Industry Shows Signs of Stability” and the ratings agency raised the sector’s outlook to Stable from Negative. In short, Moody’s believes or suggests that a bottom has been reached.

…

Moody’s synopsis is that the stable outlook expresses a view that fundamental credit conditions in the industry will neither erode nor improve materially over the next 12 to 18 months.

Moody’s has cited that housing starts, new home sales, and existing home sales have all shown positive trends, and housing affordability is at the strongest point seen in many years. This is on the heels of a November figure showing a 8.9% rise in housing starts.

Read more here.

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See Also:

• Housing Starts And CPI All Benign
• Ken Rogoff: Housing, Unemployment Will Get Worse Before They Get Better
• California Housing Market Continues To Recover, Befuddling Bears

The Economist warns that the recession we just experienced is only a small taste of the pain to come.

While massive government action around the world softened this recession’s blow, to the point that many in the world barely felt it, it will soon be time to deal with the repercussions of bailouts and stimulus.

These include stagnation in developed economies, asset bubbles in emerging ones, and the rise of anti-business sentiment among outraged American and European populations.

The Economist: The bad news is that today’s stability, however welcome, is worryingly fragile, both because global demand is still dependent on government support and because public largesse has papered over old problems while creating new sources of volatility. Property prices are still falling in more places than they are rising, and, as this week’s nationalisation of Austria’s Hypo Group shows, banking stresses still persist. Apparent signs of success, such as American megabanks repaying public capital early (see article), make it easy to forget that the recovery still depends on government support. Strip out the temporary effects of firms’ restocking, and much of the rebound in global demand is thanks to the public purse, from the officially induced investment surge in China to stimulus-prompted spending in America. That is revving recovery in big emerging economies, while only staving off a relapse into recession in much of the rich world.

Read more here.

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See Also:

• Obama Administration Can’t Decide Whether The Recession Is Over, But It Wants Banks To Lever Up
• Six-Figure Federal Salaries Jumped 46% During The Recession
• John Mauldin: We’re Still Heading For A Double-Dip Recession

It’s not exactly a secret anymore that Google is pushing hard on translations, constantly updating the tools it built around its machine-translation technology, which is getting more accurate with every iteration. The reason is simple, to make more online content available to more people, which indirectly leads to higher revenue for the company. Now, Google is updating a recent tool that, while not directly related to translations, falls pretty much in the same category, Google Transliteration. The tool enables users to type words using roman characters, and then have them converted to other scripts like Greek or Hindi, and has now launched globally with 17 supported languages.

“Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it’s the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other… Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs,” Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, software engineers at Google’s Bangalore office wrote.

Google launched the tool in Labs with support for just one Indian language. Since then, the team has been hard at work both in the functionality and features, but also adding new lang… (read more)

Sweat is indeed odourless !  It is actually the bacteria which then feeds on the sweat which create a rather pungent odour, because the bacteria actually breaks down the fats (which are in fact sweat deposits)into unsaturated fatty acids.  And the familiar smell of body odour ensues.  

Fresh sweat ie sweat which has not yet been broken down actually contains pheromones which can attract the opposite sex.  But within half an hour or so, this will have changed into a body odour, so the pheromones are quite short lived !

Some people seem to produce body odour very quickly.  This is because if they have not washed for a day or so, then the underarm area will be ‘home’ to an astonishing number of bacteria, which will feed off the sweat very quickly.  Fewer bacteria means that the smell is less pungent… Hence why it is important to wash frequently.