Is it just me, or is 25% off car insurance not worthwhile for all the loss of privacy? I would only consider something like this if the savings were reasonably related to actual risk. I have frequently avoided driving on days where there were major traffic issues, or arranged to work from home (or very close to home) in bad weather, so my risk went to zero on a day that could have been expensive for the insurer.
Currently though, I get a 40% discount from a major insurer just because of where I work, and further discounts for having home insurance with the same company. These have no bearing at all on the actual risk of a claim, but add up to a much bigger discount than this new program and its invasion of privacy.
I had the same type of experience heading south on I-87 in New York.
Homeland Security and NY State Troopers had set up a roadblock on the interstate, and marked it as if it was a lane reduction for construction.
Once we got to the actually roadblock, they were asking for ID from everyone coming through. The car in front of us had a black family in it, and they had a Quebec plate on their minivan. The car was loaded up like they were going on a roadtrip or something. Somehow, the Officers speaking to them decided that these people were suspicious-looking, and proceeded to ask the family to get out of their van, remove their stuff and sent a sniffer dog through the van. Their young children looked pretty scared by the whole thing (it didn't seem like the kids understood much english - so they looked pretty confused by what was happening).
Once this family was pulled to the side and they and their belongings were out of the way, the officers waived us forward. I suppose Americans were able to show a driver's licence or something, but since I'm Canadian, and an Ontario plate on my car, they wanted to see a passport. Both of our passports were in the trunk, and we nervously told the officers that we didn't have them handy. He just looked at us, shrugged, and waived us through. Behind us, that family from Quebec was still behind harassed as we drove away.
For us, it was just a delay, but it was hard to watch how they treated the family in the minivan. Getting stopped at a random checkpoint by Troopers, with Homeland Security officers behind them with machine guns and Hummers really drove home how much the US has changed.
I can't provide an exhaustive list, but I can give at least one brand example - every recent VW/Audi has this. I may be wrong that the feature is widespread among other brands, but it certainly is a part of VW AG's products.
There is an article from IEEE Spectrum's Risk Factor Blog about the number of design faults that may have contributed to these crashes.
There are some other problems with Toyota's that seem to contribute to this problem. The most significant of which is that the models in question apparently lack a failsafe that shuts off the engine when both the gas and brake are applied simultaneously. Most other manufacturers have this, and it would immediately solve the problem (even if the root cause was the floor mats).
Also, the shifter layout of many current Toyota's makes it not entirely trivial to shift into neutral without looking at the shifter, as there are a couple of different stops in the shifter's travel to accommodate things such as manual shift modes. So, its not as simple as just dropping down one position from drive, and something that a panicked driver may not be able to do.
I was stopped last summer in one of these checkpoints coming south on I-87 in the Adirondacks. I have to say that it was pretty shocking.
As a Canadian, traveling in the US is usually feels pretty much like being in Canada (from the perspective of things feeling comfortable and familiar) but coming up to that checkpoint was pretty jarring. The whole thing was setup to look like construction on the highway with warning of road work ahead and gradually dropping speed limits, until finally you reach the head of the line and see that it was a checkpoint. There were a number of border patrol vehicles around with officers stopping each car asking for IDs and other officers with dogs or shotguns.
Personally, we (my girlfriend and I) weren't sure what to do because we didn't want to get pulled over and searched, but we had our passports in the bags in the back of the car. As it turned out being a couple white kids from Toronto was not a problem and they were willing to accept Ontario Driver's Licenses as proof of citizenship (despite the fact that they have nothing to do with proving that we were citizens).
The car ahead of us was a family in a minivan with Quebec plates and who happened to be black, where the border patrol officers were searching the van with the help of their dogs before the parents even had a chance to get out of the car and take their young kids out of their child seats. Ahead of them was another car with three people that looked Indian (of course they could be Pakastani, Sri Lankan or anywhere else) with NY plates having their car searched.
Now, I have no idea what led the officers to pull those cars over and search them, or if those suspicions were justified, but it did feel very wrong that we passed through no problem with ID that did not prove what they were looking for, but two cars with visible minorities were thoroughly searched.
As we drove away, my girlfriend, who is a dual US/Can citizen commented that this made her regret that she was at all American. I said that I would expect a lot more from a country that claims to value freedom and in a mocking Col. Klink-like German voice said 'Papers, please!'
You get one full free play without registering. This seems to be the ultimate example of where the analog hole proves that even the most draconian online music service can be bypassed. Of course we knew that anyway, but apparently it never dawned on Warner Music.
I'm not the type to exploit this type of service, but anyone who knows how to record a sound file now has instant access to thousands of copyrighted tracks with the opportunity to record as they listen.
Doing that would undoubtedly bankrupt Bell Sympatico, as people realize that Sympatico's service is the shits, and they get tired of yelling at Emily for a human being. I'm completely OK with that. Competition is what Bell needs to provide a decent service. Their phone pricing is steadily marching downwards while they work on reliability to use that as a selling point, and slashing LD prices to catch up with competitors, all things that they would not have dreamed of doing before deregulation. If they had to play on more equal footing with their DSL competitors, that would be the one and only situation that would force them to provide a Sympatico service that was anything more the mediocre.
Until this all hit the fan in recent weeks (after the CRTC affirmed their policy to force Bell to continue to lease its lines) I had no idea there was a problem. Just looking at the math on paper, it seems relatively clear that Bell is still making decent money maintaining the network, as $20 of my $29.99 internet service is going directly to Bell, and I am also paying $9.10 extra for a dry loop to my house as well. So, of my monthly internet cost, $29.10 is for Bell to provide the connection, and roughly $10 is for my ISP to provide a service over that connection. For that small portion of the cost, they provide a generous cap, do not throttle, have excellent customer service and provide a very reliable internet connection.
Bell gets the lion's share of the monthly fee, and my ISP gets the smaller chunk, and does not complain at all about the service they provide vs. its cost.
I would have to say though that my preference would be that Bell should be broken up into one company that maintains the network, and another company that sells the service. That way, Bell's Sympatico service would have to compete on equal footing with any other DSL provider.
Exactly right. The reason that CANDU uses pressurized tubes rather than a large reactor vessel is because Canada lacks the ability to manufacture a large vessel. It hasn't been too much of an issue though because Canada has built enough CANDU reactors for a peak of 100+ TWh of power, and currently around 85 TWh of power
As much as we all know that the lobbying effort was very over the top and that the numbers were all pretty cooked, I didn't really have a problem with the new law. It was already illegal, the law just stiffened the penalties for something that almost nobody was doing. I would be very surprised if the number of people charged with recording a movie in a theater changed much at all, and I would also be very surprised if anyone who was caught got more than a slap on the wrist.
So, if the Conservatives introduced legislation to punish a tiny percentage of people for something that was already illegal, and that legislation got the **AA of our backs for a while, maybe its not such a bad thing. If the MPAA is dumb enough to be satisfied with a couple days publicity and a law that affects almost nobody, I'm relatively satisfied with the situation. Not as happy as I would be if the gov't told them to piss off, but at least satisfied.
EXACTLY. I've been reading through all the other comments to see if there was one such as this.
The significant difference between an IP tax and other types of property is that IP is an imaginary type of property. Almost by definition, it has no single estimatable value because any number of customers can purchase a copy/license to that limitless resource. So, you don't worry about asking a copyright holder to declare the value of the work when registering the copyright, you just have them file a declaration of the sales of copies/licenses for that year. Then, you escalate the tax as a percentage of sales based on the age of the copyright.
Therefore, a VERY high value, old copyright like Disney's on Mickey Mouse would cost a small fortune to maintain (as it should), but a very young copyright on a freely distributed work like Linux would cost nothing since the licenses are free.
With this system, all work is still protected, taxes are collected to encourage copyright holders to rationalize the value of the copyright over time, and individual work would not be prohibitively expensive to protect. In terms of protecting your copyright, you just set the maximum damages as the economic value to the infringer plus the appropriate amount of copyright tax on the rights holder's behalf. This way, any infringer cannot realize any value from infringing, and would essentially pay to continue to protect the rights holder. A person could then license their IP for free, but still sue for monetary damages and there would be no conflict between taxed value vs. value in damages.
The side benefit of this is that as Western economies move toward a knowledge-based economy, it gives government a source of revenue to replace the taxes that would have been paid previously on large buildings, machinery purchases and material inputs in an industrial economy.
Not quite. It takes a great deal of effort to sell drugs in the US market, and part of that is either FDA supervision of a Canadian or other foreign plant, or to make the drugs under US jurisdiction. In the case of Biovail, they chose the latter option. They chose that to be able to sell those drugs in the US. Otherwise, they could continue to produce drugs in Canada as they otherwise would have.
I am not a Rogers internet customer anymore - but my parents are. They cannot subscribe to DSL in their area, and I hear all the complaints that they have with Rogers service.
Personally, I'm a TekSavvy customer and could not be happier (other than even more speed or an ever cheaper price).
Rogers Cable has been doing this here for sometime. After people found that encrypted proxies could get around their blocking, they began to block all VPNs. Since that time, their policy has essentially been that only HTTP traffic is guaranteed to be highspeed. Ever since they decided to be a phone company with IP phones over cable, the quality of their internet service has suffered badly.
If Canada had the power to fine Rogers in amounts like Comcast is being threatened with, that would be a mighty big stick in the hands of the gov't and consumers. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like this as AFAIK so bandwidth throttling is practiced by most of the big ISPs
Payola was my first thought as well. While officially it doesn't exist in terms of cash payments for song plays, other promotional tools still play a big part. Exclusive tracks, interviews, in-studio performances, concert tickets, etc. are all pretty common ways for a record company to 'support' a radio station. Given the long history of cash and non-cash payments from the record industry to the broadcasters, I can't imagine how this situation came about.
The radio stations and the recording industry have a pretty symbiotic relationship where needs songs to attract listeners to sell ads, and the other needs airplay to promote bands and sell records. I don't understand how one of the partners, who need to move records/CDs more than ever would sour the relationship? Radio may have lost some of its power as a promotional tool, but as evidenced by the NAB's retaliation, they are a group who understand exactly how the music industry works and have the power to fight back in a way that almost nobody else does. This is dangerous territory for the RIAA, and I hope there are more fireworks in the future!
You're right, they do deserve a mention. When I tell people about how great Teksavvy's service is, they ask how much extra it will cost. When I tell them that its cheaper, they ask why I didn't tell them sooner.
Everything else aside, the customer service is what does it for me. I really appreciate having someone there to answer the phone. I appreciated even more the help that they gave to my girlfriend when she needed to reconfigure our DSL modem after its settings were reset and I was out of town. She couldn't get in touch with me, so she called teksavvy, and they walked her through the process even though we have an unsupported modem that was bought refurbished from somewhere else.
My god that overage fee is high. My ISP just changed its fee/service structure so that Unlimited DSL service is $39.95 Canadian, and DSL with a 200 GB cap is $29.95 (previously the two were both $29.95 and the capped service had a 100G cap). The kicker is that the overage charge with my ISP is 25 cents per GB or 10 cents if you buy it ahead in 100G blocks.
To see Telstra charge for overages at a rate up to 1300 times the rate here in Canada with my ISP is stunning. Just absolutely stunning
I experienced these problems. Torrents becoming unusable (one week I could download an Ubuntu ISO at 550K, the next week it dropped to 0.6 and continued to drop from there, making my one hour download a 62 day download had I kept using bittorrent). I started to use an encrypted proxy, but within weeks, that ceased to work, and my work VPN went with it.
After that, I switched to a local ISP, and never looked back.
Well said. Harper is not perfect, even to his own constituency, but I think that he has done the best job of moderating Canada's various regional agendas better than any Prime Minister in recent memory. This has led to quite a bit of whining in Liberal areas like cities here in Ontario, but there seems to be much more agreement with him outside of these areas than the Liberals or Mulroney beofre them ever were able to muster. Harper's not perfect, but reflecting the views of more Canadians is a very good thing for our political system IMHO.
Are paper ballots really that complicated? If there are multiple referendums or positions to be voted for, just use colour-coded ballots and ballot boxes. All this trouble with voting machines is just ridiculous.
As a Canadian, I've never voted with anything other than a paper ballot, and I have never had a reason to question the voting process as a result.
I was being a bit generous to HMV. They charge an arm and a leg for everything, but my $13 vs. $10 example was to contrast the promotional prices for new releases. You are quite right to point out that the gulf between their pricing and their competitors' gets wider as the album drops down the charts.
No, its not the dollar (though that will help a bit of course), but the cost of CDs has stayed somewhat high, while the cost of movies has dropped, DVDs are getting cheaper all the time, and video games seem to have hit a ceiling.
That, in addition to HMV loosing its leadership position in music sales to Walmart, Future Shop and BestBuy, makes HMVs traditionally high prices seem rediculous. Why would I pay $13 for a CD at HMV, when I can get it at Best Buy for $10, and I can buy the concert DVD elsewhere for $18? HMV has had some good sales with their 2-for- or 3-for- sales, but the majority of CDs in their stores are sitting in the racks at regular sale prices much higher than anywhere else.
That's why I worked hard to find a good laptop for my girlfriend that came with XP instead of Vista. She's not very accepting of Linux, so if I'm going to have to help her with Windows, its going to be a version that I am familiar and comfortable with.
I've found the opposite. The last few times I've been shopping for video games, it seems that the 60G PS3 is the one that is always in abundant supply. Even in the fall just after the initial release, my local Best Buy was sold out of the few 20G PS3s it had, and had a skid of 60G models for some time. The skid was only cleared because they sold their mini-PS2s and that opened up some shelf space for them after Christmas.
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Is it just me, or is 25% off car insurance not worthwhile for all the loss of privacy? I would only consider something like this if the savings were reasonably related to actual risk. I have frequently avoided driving on days where there were major traffic issues, or arranged to work from home (or very close to home) in bad weather, so my risk went to zero on a day that could have been expensive for the insurer.
Currently though, I get a 40% discount from a major insurer just because of where I work, and further discounts for having home insurance with the same company. These have no bearing at all on the actual risk of a claim, but add up to a much bigger discount than this new program and its invasion of privacy.
I had the same type of experience heading south on I-87 in New York.
Homeland Security and NY State Troopers had set up a roadblock on the interstate, and marked it as if it was a lane reduction for construction.
Once we got to the actually roadblock, they were asking for ID from everyone coming through. The car in front of us had a black family in it, and they had a Quebec plate on their minivan. The car was loaded up like they were going on a roadtrip or something. Somehow, the Officers speaking to them decided that these people were suspicious-looking, and proceeded to ask the family to get out of their van, remove their stuff and sent a sniffer dog through the van. Their young children looked pretty scared by the whole thing (it didn't seem like the kids understood much english - so they looked pretty confused by what was happening).
Once this family was pulled to the side and they and their belongings were out of the way, the officers waived us forward. I suppose Americans were able to show a driver's licence or something, but since I'm Canadian, and an Ontario plate on my car, they wanted to see a passport. Both of our passports were in the trunk, and we nervously told the officers that we didn't have them handy. He just looked at us, shrugged, and waived us through. Behind us, that family from Quebec was still behind harassed as we drove away.
For us, it was just a delay, but it was hard to watch how they treated the family in the minivan. Getting stopped at a random checkpoint by Troopers, with Homeland Security officers behind them with machine guns and Hummers really drove home how much the US has changed.
I can't provide an exhaustive list, but I can give at least one brand example - every recent VW/Audi has this. I may be wrong that the feature is widespread among other brands, but it certainly is a part of VW AG's products.
There is an article from IEEE Spectrum's Risk Factor Blog about the number of design faults that may have contributed to these crashes.
There are some other problems with Toyota's that seem to contribute to this problem. The most significant of which is that the models in question apparently lack a failsafe that shuts off the engine when both the gas and brake are applied simultaneously. Most other manufacturers have this, and it would immediately solve the problem (even if the root cause was the floor mats).
Also, the shifter layout of many current Toyota's makes it not entirely trivial to shift into neutral without looking at the shifter, as there are a couple of different stops in the shifter's travel to accommodate things such as manual shift modes. So, its not as simple as just dropping down one position from drive, and something that a panicked driver may not be able to do.
How 'bout posting how much faster you can recreate the ad?
Frankly, I tried with a 1st Gen touch, and overall it seemed to be a lot closer to PC Pro's time than Apple's
I was stopped last summer in one of these checkpoints coming south on I-87 in the Adirondacks. I have to say that it was pretty shocking.
As a Canadian, traveling in the US is usually feels pretty much like being in Canada (from the perspective of things feeling comfortable and familiar) but coming up to that checkpoint was pretty jarring. The whole thing was setup to look like construction on the highway with warning of road work ahead and gradually dropping speed limits, until finally you reach the head of the line and see that it was a checkpoint. There were a number of border patrol vehicles around with officers stopping each car asking for IDs and other officers with dogs or shotguns.
Personally, we (my girlfriend and I) weren't sure what to do because we didn't want to get pulled over and searched, but we had our passports in the bags in the back of the car. As it turned out being a couple white kids from Toronto was not a problem and they were willing to accept Ontario Driver's Licenses as proof of citizenship (despite the fact that they have nothing to do with proving that we were citizens).
The car ahead of us was a family in a minivan with Quebec plates and who happened to be black, where the border patrol officers were searching the van with the help of their dogs before the parents even had a chance to get out of the car and take their young kids out of their child seats. Ahead of them was another car with three people that looked Indian (of course they could be Pakastani, Sri Lankan or anywhere else) with NY plates having their car searched.
Now, I have no idea what led the officers to pull those cars over and search them, or if those suspicions were justified, but it did feel very wrong that we passed through no problem with ID that did not prove what they were looking for, but two cars with visible minorities were thoroughly searched.
As we drove away, my girlfriend, who is a dual US/Can citizen commented that this made her regret that she was at all American. I said that I would expect a lot more from a country that claims to value freedom and in a mocking Col. Klink-like German voice said 'Papers, please!'
I'm not the type to exploit this type of service, but anyone who knows how to record a sound file now has instant access to thousands of copyrighted tracks with the opportunity to record as they listen.
Until this all hit the fan in recent weeks (after the CRTC affirmed their policy to force Bell to continue to lease its lines) I had no idea there was a problem. Just looking at the math on paper, it seems relatively clear that Bell is still making decent money maintaining the network, as $20 of my $29.99 internet service is going directly to Bell, and I am also paying $9.10 extra for a dry loop to my house as well. So, of my monthly internet cost, $29.10 is for Bell to provide the connection, and roughly $10 is for my ISP to provide a service over that connection. For that small portion of the cost, they provide a generous cap, do not throttle, have excellent customer service and provide a very reliable internet connection.
Bell gets the lion's share of the monthly fee, and my ISP gets the smaller chunk, and does not complain at all about the service they provide vs. its cost.
I would have to say though that my preference would be that Bell should be broken up into one company that maintains the network, and another company that sells the service. That way, Bell's Sympatico service would have to compete on equal footing with any other DSL provider.
Exactly right. The reason that CANDU uses pressurized tubes rather than a large reactor vessel is because Canada lacks the ability to manufacture a large vessel. It hasn't been too much of an issue though because Canada has built enough CANDU reactors for a peak of 100+ TWh of power, and currently around 85 TWh of power
As much as we all know that the lobbying effort was very over the top and that the numbers were all pretty cooked, I didn't really have a problem with the new law. It was already illegal, the law just stiffened the penalties for something that almost nobody was doing. I would be very surprised if the number of people charged with recording a movie in a theater changed much at all, and I would also be very surprised if anyone who was caught got more than a slap on the wrist.
So, if the Conservatives introduced legislation to punish a tiny percentage of people for something that was already illegal, and that legislation got the **AA of our backs for a while, maybe its not such a bad thing. If the MPAA is dumb enough to be satisfied with a couple days publicity and a law that affects almost nobody, I'm relatively satisfied with the situation. Not as happy as I would be if the gov't told them to piss off, but at least satisfied.
EXACTLY. I've been reading through all the other comments to see if there was one such as this.
The significant difference between an IP tax and other types of property is that IP is an imaginary type of property. Almost by definition, it has no single estimatable value because any number of customers can purchase a copy/license to that limitless resource. So, you don't worry about asking a copyright holder to declare the value of the work when registering the copyright, you just have them file a declaration of the sales of copies/licenses for that year. Then, you escalate the tax as a percentage of sales based on the age of the copyright.
Therefore, a VERY high value, old copyright like Disney's on Mickey Mouse would cost a small fortune to maintain (as it should), but a very young copyright on a freely distributed work like Linux would cost nothing since the licenses are free.
With this system, all work is still protected, taxes are collected to encourage copyright holders to rationalize the value of the copyright over time, and individual work would not be prohibitively expensive to protect. In terms of protecting your copyright, you just set the maximum damages as the economic value to the infringer plus the appropriate amount of copyright tax on the rights holder's behalf. This way, any infringer cannot realize any value from infringing, and would essentially pay to continue to protect the rights holder. A person could then license their IP for free, but still sue for monetary damages and there would be no conflict between taxed value vs. value in damages.
The side benefit of this is that as Western economies move toward a knowledge-based economy, it gives government a source of revenue to replace the taxes that would have been paid previously on large buildings, machinery purchases and material inputs in an industrial economy.
Not quite. It takes a great deal of effort to sell drugs in the US market, and part of that is either FDA supervision of a Canadian or other foreign plant, or to make the drugs under US jurisdiction. In the case of Biovail, they chose the latter option. They chose that to be able to sell those drugs in the US. Otherwise, they could continue to produce drugs in Canada as they otherwise would have.
I am not a Rogers internet customer anymore - but my parents are. They cannot subscribe to DSL in their area, and I hear all the complaints that they have with Rogers service.
Personally, I'm a TekSavvy customer and could not be happier (other than even more speed or an ever cheaper price).
Rogers Cable has been doing this here for sometime. After people found that encrypted proxies could get around their blocking, they began to block all VPNs. Since that time, their policy has essentially been that only HTTP traffic is guaranteed to be highspeed. Ever since they decided to be a phone company with IP phones over cable, the quality of their internet service has suffered badly.
If Canada had the power to fine Rogers in amounts like Comcast is being threatened with, that would be a mighty big stick in the hands of the gov't and consumers. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like this as AFAIK so bandwidth throttling is practiced by most of the big ISPs
Payola was my first thought as well. While officially it doesn't exist in terms of cash payments for song plays, other promotional tools still play a big part. Exclusive tracks, interviews, in-studio performances, concert tickets, etc. are all pretty common ways for a record company to 'support' a radio station. Given the long history of cash and non-cash payments from the record industry to the broadcasters, I can't imagine how this situation came about.
The radio stations and the recording industry have a pretty symbiotic relationship where needs songs to attract listeners to sell ads, and the other needs airplay to promote bands and sell records. I don't understand how one of the partners, who need to move records/CDs more than ever would sour the relationship? Radio may have lost some of its power as a promotional tool, but as evidenced by the NAB's retaliation, they are a group who understand exactly how the music industry works and have the power to fight back in a way that almost nobody else does. This is dangerous territory for the RIAA, and I hope there are more fireworks in the future!
You're right, they do deserve a mention. When I tell people about how great Teksavvy's service is, they ask how much extra it will cost. When I tell them that its cheaper, they ask why I didn't tell them sooner. Everything else aside, the customer service is what does it for me. I really appreciate having someone there to answer the phone. I appreciated even more the help that they gave to my girlfriend when she needed to reconfigure our DSL modem after its settings were reset and I was out of town. She couldn't get in touch with me, so she called teksavvy, and they walked her through the process even though we have an unsupported modem that was bought refurbished from somewhere else.
My god that overage fee is high. My ISP just changed its fee/service structure so that Unlimited DSL service is $39.95 Canadian, and DSL with a 200 GB cap is $29.95 (previously the two were both $29.95 and the capped service had a 100G cap). The kicker is that the overage charge with my ISP is 25 cents per GB or 10 cents if you buy it ahead in 100G blocks.
To see Telstra charge for overages at a rate up to 1300 times the rate here in Canada with my ISP is stunning. Just absolutely stunning
I experienced these problems. Torrents becoming unusable (one week I could download an Ubuntu ISO at 550K, the next week it dropped to 0.6 and continued to drop from there, making my one hour download a 62 day download had I kept using bittorrent). I started to use an encrypted proxy, but within weeks, that ceased to work, and my work VPN went with it.
After that, I switched to a local ISP, and never looked back.
Well said. Harper is not perfect, even to his own constituency, but I think that he has done the best job of moderating Canada's various regional agendas better than any Prime Minister in recent memory. This has led to quite a bit of whining in Liberal areas like cities here in Ontario, but there seems to be much more agreement with him outside of these areas than the Liberals or Mulroney beofre them ever were able to muster. Harper's not perfect, but reflecting the views of more Canadians is a very good thing for our political system IMHO.
As a Canadian, I've never voted with anything other than a paper ballot, and I have never had a reason to question the voting process as a result.
I was being a bit generous to HMV. They charge an arm and a leg for everything, but my $13 vs. $10 example was to contrast the promotional prices for new releases. You are quite right to point out that the gulf between their pricing and their competitors' gets wider as the album drops down the charts.
No, its not the dollar (though that will help a bit of course), but the cost of CDs has stayed somewhat high, while the cost of movies has dropped, DVDs are getting cheaper all the time, and video games seem to have hit a ceiling. That, in addition to HMV loosing its leadership position in music sales to Walmart, Future Shop and BestBuy, makes HMVs traditionally high prices seem rediculous. Why would I pay $13 for a CD at HMV, when I can get it at Best Buy for $10, and I can buy the concert DVD elsewhere for $18? HMV has had some good sales with their 2-for- or 3-for- sales, but the majority of CDs in their stores are sitting in the racks at regular sale prices much higher than anywhere else.
That's why I worked hard to find a good laptop for my girlfriend that came with XP instead of Vista. She's not very accepting of Linux, so if I'm going to have to help her with Windows, its going to be a version that I am familiar and comfortable with.
I've found the opposite. The last few times I've been shopping for video games, it seems that the 60G PS3 is the one that is always in abundant supply. Even in the fall just after the initial release, my local Best Buy was sold out of the few 20G PS3s it had, and had a skid of 60G models for some time. The skid was only cleared because they sold their mini-PS2s and that opened up some shelf space for them after Christmas.