Archive for January, 2007

29
Jan

Should the Government Control Bank ATM Fees? No!

By Witchdoctor 2 Comments
Categories: Business

Federal Government Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was quoted recently as saying that the government would be investigating why Canadian banks charge fees to users of their automated teller machine devices (ATMs). While I applaud this move, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. Yes, Canada’s big banks are making record profits but are they making profits from ATM fees? I don’t think so.

There are about 20,000 ATMs in Canada of which less than half are owned by Canadian banks. A bank will charge you ATM fees only if you are a cardholder of another bank. Let’s estimate the revenue and cost profile of a typical Canadian bank with 1,000 ATMs which generate ATM fee revenues on 5 million transactions a year.

Annual Statement of Income and Expenses
Revenue:
Interac Fees at $1.50 per transaction $7,500,000.00
Surcharges at $2.00 per transaction 10000000
Total Revenue $17,500,000.00


Expenses:
Fees paid to Interac – estimated at $0.30 per transaction $1,500,000.00
Suppose the average bank machine costs $ 20,000. Let’s say we write off 20% for depreciation & interest on the purchase 4000000
The ATM must be loaded with as much as $120,000 in cash (which must be financed by deposits). This cash could have been used for lending purposes. Cost of cash (5% x 1,000 ATMs x $20,000 average float) 1000000
The ATM owner must pay for servicing the machine – cleaning the area; maintaining the device; and periodically changing the empty cash cassettes with full ones. Let’s say each machine is visited 200 times a year and it costs the ATM owner $40 per visit 8000000
The ATM must be connected via a data network to a host server system which performs transaction routing and processing with the cardholder’s bank deposit systems. The ATM owner must pay for these software services and for the costs of the network. Let’s assume this costs $150 per device per annum. 1800000
The ATM must be monitored on a 7 x 24 basis to ensure that it is fully functional and able to service cardholders. Let’s estimate this cost at $200 per device per annum. 200000
There would be other costs. For instance: the ATM owner may be required to pay rent for the space occupied by the ATM. Let’s estimate this at $1000 per device per annum. 1000000
Total Expenses $17,500,000.00


Net Income / Loss $ Nil

This case study does not take into consideration the costs of deposit envelopes or the payroll costs associated with opening these envelopes, or clearing and processing the deposited cash and cheques. Banks do not charge their customers for making ATM deposits.

The Canadian public receives fairly reliable service from the highly competitive ATM industry. Instead of imposing price controls on an industry that provides quality service and convenience for millions of Canadian consumers, the government should direct its attention to non-bank owners of ATMs. Do these companies ensure that the cash in their ATM’s is not counterfeit? Does the government confirm that ATMs of non-bank organizations are not stocked with illegal (laundered) money? I don’t think so.

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27
Jan

Trinidad and Tobago Carnival 2006 Video

By Cynapse 2 Comments
Categories: Life and Times and Video-Blogging



Click To Play

Carnival 2007 is around the corner and anyone familiar with the T&T carnival knows it is the greatest party on earth! If you are lucky enough to attend this year, or want to know what the hype is about, play Mas at home with this footage shot from the Main Grandstand in Port of Spain.

This video is rated “PG” – plenty of delights for both sexes.

Technical Details:

  • The original footage was shot using a Sony DCR-HC26 MiniDV video camera
  • Video files were preprocessed in VirtualDub using the Deshaker plugin (absolutely essential for home videographers who want their footage to look semi-professional. Strangely enough it is FREE and has no commercial comparison)
  • Sony Vegas Video was used for editing and producing the original video file
  • Videos will be stored at several sites but Blip TV will be the primary video source. Links to other sites will be provided at the end of video posts.

I believe video will play a significant role in the future of blogging and plan to integrate it into some future posts (where applicable).

Video Links:

View on Blip.TV
View on Google Video

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25
Jan

The Movie Industry Threatens Canada … Foolishly

By Cynapse 2 Comments
Categories: American Politics, Politics, Technology and World Politics

(Via Jack’s NewsWatch) Canada.com is reporting that movie distributor Twentieth Century Fox –apparently on behalf of the entire American film industry- is threatening to delay releases in Canada due to rampant piracy:

As much as 50 per cent of the world’s pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
…
Changes to laws in the United States have seen movie piracy in that country plummet … one man caught with a camcorder in a theatre was jailed eight years and fined $250,000.
…
Because of movie piracy, a U.S. congressional committee has added Canada to a “country watch list” that includes such well-known piracy havens as China, Russia, India and Malaysia.

As a member of the The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Fox is attempting to scare Canadian authorities into ignoring such trivialities as terrorism and serial murder in order to recover Hollywood film profits.

Could 20th Century Fox and other film studio truly be contemplating delaying movie releases throughout Canada to pre-empt the release of pirate movies overseas by a few days? Unless the lot of them has gone completely mad, the answer is almost certainly “no”. Retarding a prosperous market to stem the proliferation of inferior products to and from an unstable market is economically dubious. Furthermore, the suggested course of prevention and punishment would only irritate legal movie goers while presenting little or no deterrent to pirates familiar with modern data transfer technologies.

Camcorder Movies are Poor Quality

It is important to understand the nature of these Canadian bootlegs before assessing the validity of Fox’s threats. First, consider the source – As the article states, movie pirates are literally recording movies using camcorder in the theatre. In the hacking world, these bootleg movies are known as “Cams” and are known for having extremely bad quality: Camera angles are usually not perfect since the camera has to be obscured by the bootlegger in order to avoid arrest. This means plenty of shaky pictures, cutoff images (most camcorders record video in 4:3 aspect ratio – the same as television – whereas theatres show movies in 16:9 widescreen), and silhouettes of moviegoers getting up to go to the washroom. The sound is typically recorded using the camcorder’s internal microphone, making the sound unclear and easily drowned out by cell phones or audience chatter.

To be fair and balanced, there are bootleggers who make deals with theatre owners to record movies in an empty theatre; however, even under perfect shooting conditions (the camera is placed on a tripod with a direct connection to an external audio source), the picture quality of a bootleg –in this case called a Telesync bootleg- would still be poor because video cameras simply can’t photograph television or movie screens with any degree of accuracy (for a live demonstration, try videotaping your own television!). Thus, any camcorder videos produce a quality slightly worse than home-taped VHS cassettes – definitely unacceptable in most first-world nations and increasingly unacceptable for even third world nations.

Now consider the destination format of the bootlegs. Originally these videos were sold on VideoCD discs, a low-resolution CD-based format popular in Asia but generally ignored in North America. Until a few years ago, VCD’s were dominant in the Far East and sold for between $0.75US and $2.50US. However DVD’s have since taken over and tend to retail for around $7.00US.

While Cams and Telesyncs were good enough for VideoCD discs, their low quality is quite visible on bootleg DVD’s and are avoided by people even slightly concerned about quality or who would otherwise be willing to pay for the “movie experience”. In other words, camcorder bootlegs threaten the movie industry the way home cassette taping threatens CD sales – not greatly.

Asia is an Unstable Market; Canada is Not

Quality is only part of the story, however. Fox news knows as well as anyone that Asia is very much a market dominated by individual merchants who survive on offering basement bargains (which inevitably includes piracy of films, music, video games and computer software). There is little chance that the entertainment market will be dominated by Blockbuster-style chains that can be easily influenced by MPAA threats or demands. Moreover, there is little incentive for Asian authorities to comply with American demands – any job or economic losses caused by piracy of American films will not affect local Asian economies but the sales of those discs could stimulate economic growth. Furthermore, India and Hong Kong both have prosperous film industries (the former being the largest film industry in the world) far more likely to successfully lobby for legal favor against pirate activities.

Asian piracy is also inadvertently perpetuated by protectionist government policy. China in particular limits the number of foreign films released on Chinese screens in order to favour the local film industry. Chinese consumers respond by seeking illegal copies of the movies online or through the underground market, contributing to the staggering 93% of Chinese film sales purchased illegally.

By comparison, Canada is very prosperous market upon which the MPAA has great influence. Last weekend alone, the top 10 box-office films in Canada grossed $5,440,837, with Fox’s own “Night at the Museum” taking first place [source: Tribute.ca Top 10 Movies in Canada, January 19-21, 2007]. As the article states, there are also guards at many Canadian cinemas actively looking for camcorder pirates, since Hollywood IS the local film industry (at least indirectly).

Piracy Logistics Have Advanced

The US watch list referred to in the article states that Canada has become a “dumping ground” for imported pirated goods from Russia and the Far East. This claim is rather dubious for the simple fact that these logistics are outdated for present-day movies. Aside from DVD and VCD, bootleg films can also be compressed into DivX files, which are MPEG-4 based computer files famous for allowing high quality video streaming over a low bandwidth. A 2 hour movie ripped directly from DVD can be compressed into a 700MB file that looks virtually identical to the original file. Transmitting such a file over a high speed internet connection from Russia to Canada can be done in a matter of hours. In fact, online pirates and casual internet users do so frequently using advanced file sharing technologies like BitTorrent. A transmitted DivX file can be converted back to a DVD for duplication and distribution in the local market. Transmitting pre-manufactured pirated movies from abroad is both expensive (in a market where black market movies will not sell well if priced for more than about $6) and unnecessarily risky. One has to assume the MPAA is aware of these technological advances.

Verdict: “Not … Very … Likely”

So to review Fox’s threat in terms of the information provided above and the original article –

  1. Fox would have us believe that the sale of sub-VHS quality movies in a market where over 90% of purchased films are pirated has a significant impact on their bottom line
  2. Fox and other movie studios are willing to stifle a prosperous, primary movie market over which it does have legal influence in hopes of indirectly forcing compliance on a struggling, secondary market where it has limited legal or political influence.
  3. Canadian police and customs officials should waste millions of dollars searching for bootlegged media entering/exiting via Canadian ports when a piracy operation of average aptitude realizes the cost saving and risk reduction of transmitting one copy and replicating locally.
  4. Fox is upset because Canadian authorities won’t jail camcorder pirates for as long as our nation jails murderers

One can only hope that Fox is merely saber-rattling to scare Canadian authorities into recouping some supposedly lost revenue (which is a dishonest argument, but that will be another post), because if this is an actual anti-piracy strategy then the mighty film studio is in bigger financial trouble than they think.

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24
Jan

WordPress 2.1 – Worth the Upgrade?

By Cynapse 2 Comments
Categories: Technology

WordPress 2.1 is out, just days after a bugfix/maintenance release. The feature list is impressive –

  • Autosave
  • Tabbed editor for seamless switching between WYSIWYG and code editing
  • Lossless XML import and export (about time! Brilliant!)
  • Spell Checking (eh … not so important if you have Firefox 2)
  • Blog privacy – avoid being searched by google
  • Any page can be front page
  • More efficient database code (a god-send for high traffic websites … this blog unfortunately not being among them)
  • Draft/Private settings for pages
  • Upload manager
  • Updated Akismet

It appears WordPress is not only making sure it keeps up or stays ahead of competing blog software but it also seems to be taking aim at power-bloggers who been lured away by portal software such as Joomla and Drupal. While still short of being full-on portal, WordPress is definitely starting to take on the appearance professional website creation software.

This time I’m going to be a “first adopter” rather than waiting for other bloggers to trip over the bugs. Information on compatibility with selected plugins will be provided as it becomes available, and if all goes well the upgrade will be rolled out to the other sites under my hosting plan.

Plugin Compatibility Report (to be constantly updated):

  • BDP RSS Aggregator 0.4.10 – (Jan 23) No apparent issues – as you can see, the news headlines on the right hand side are still updating.
  • Subscribe to Comments 2.0.8 – (Jan 23) Displays alright. Maybe a subscriber can weight in on functionality?
  • WordPress Database Backup 1.8 – (Jan 23) Ran a manual database bckup
  • Adhesive 3.2 – (Jan 23) This post is stuck to the top of the front page for now.
  • Digg This 1.0.1 – (Jan 23) Trying this one for the first time …
  • Spam Karma 2.2r3 – (Jan 23) If this doesn’t work, I’m rolling back to v2.06!
  • Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9.2.1 – (Jan 23) No longer 100% vital to web traffic but a “nice to have”. In the admin display, the input text field overlaps right wide bar.
  • Google Sitemaps 3.0b1 – (Jan 23) Again, incompatibility might inspire a downgrade!
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23
Jan

Software Review: Flash Earth

By Cynapse 1 Comment
Categories: Technology

Flash Earth is web front end that allows users to seamlessly navigate the earth using map data from multiple providers. Although Google’s maps provide the most detail (I was able to evaluate several potential honeymoon resorts based on their proximity to “civilization”), data is also available from Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com, OpenLayers and NASA Terra.

Flash Earth’s interface is simple and seamless. Zooming is accomplished with the mouse wheel or an on-screen slider, while panning uses the click-and-drag interface. A search bar in the lower right corner of the screen provides adequate searches for nations and major cities, along with latitude/longitude coordinates and the ability to save URL’s for exact locations.

flashearth.jpg

Click to Enlarge Picture

Two features make this web application a winner

  1. No external client is required to use all of Flash Earth’s features. All you need is a Flash-equipped web browser (I was able to run the application successfully on Firefox 1.5, FireFox 2, and Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7
  2. Maps fill the whole browser window. No more navigating tiny and awkward frames – combined with the smooth zooming effect, Flash Maps handles like a regular desktop application.

What’s missing? A labeled version of the Google Map data would be welcome (the Microsoft map data comes with labels, but as mentioned earlier does not provide as much detail). Other than that, no complaints.

Rating: 8/10

URL: http://www.flashearth.com/

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22
Jan

Barack Obama: Not a Muslim but Possibly a Martyr

By Cynapse 4 Comments
Categories: American Politics and Politics

The initial media love affair with Barack Obama was doomed to have a short shelf life, but even a cynic couldn’t have predicted he’d be savaged so quickly.

Fox News drew first blood with a TV segment accusing Obama of hiding his Muslim heritage and in particular the fact that he was educated in an Indonesian Madrassa for 4 years.

The clip suggests that supporters of rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s are primarily responsible for probing Obama’s Islamic past, a notion that many journalists and bloggers (present company included) initially accepted as fact; however, an “anonymous source” was the closest anyone ever got to pinning the attacks directly on Clinton.

Conservative strategists were undoubtedly hoping to catalyze this potential chasm within the Democrat party, not only because it would put the party at war with itself but because it could permanently weaken support from one of the Democrats’ strongest voting blocs – black voters. Blacks would be far more suspicious of the “good guys” if they attacked Barrack’s name (his middle name is Hussein and his last name rhymes with Osama – geddit?), religion and most importantly race. Combined with his overly progressive viewpoint -considerably to the left of any president elected since Carter- and lack of experience, Barack Obama (or more accurately his strife) could have been the best thing to happen to the Republicans for the 2008 election.

To that extent, the Republicans have wisely avoided any direct scrutiny of the half-black Muslim, hoping that faux-tolerant Democrats would draw first blood. Alas, the Republicans cannot control their conservative grassroots and ideological supporters, who jumped quickly on the Fox report and fiercely attacked Obama for WHAT he is (black, formerly Islamic, in possession of an Arabic name) rather than who he is (progressive, not particularly forthcoming with his platform). The attacks neatly conformed to every negative conservative stereotype:

And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that’s not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he’s a Christian, but they do not
…
So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?
Is that even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?
-Debbie Schlussel

Black, stupid or both: that’s your only excuse for getting excited about Barack Obama. And they’re pretty lame excuses. “He’s so well spoken!” “He’s so handsome.” You sound like my grandma. Why not toss in “He’s a credit to his race!” while you’re at it? (PS: white guilt counts as “stupid”)
…
I’ll be repeating this a lot during the next few years, so get used to it: there is nothing “compelling” about a black man impregnating a white woman. In more than one Toronto neighbourhood, that’s what they call “Saturday night.”
-Kathy Shaidle (Relapsed Catholic)

“His father is Kenyan, his mother was white – a charismatic fresh face breaks the race barrier as America’s first African-American presidential candidate”! Or so one would think, based on media coverage. Al Sharpton * must be so pleased.
-Small Dead Animals

Without the political martyrdom provided by crude and bigoted personal attacks, Barrack’s candidacy would have faded long before the final vote took place. Like Canadian Liberal Party hopeful Michael Ignatieff, Obama’s presentation is slick and his forward-looking image beneficial to modern-day liberals; however, like Ignatieff, Obama is inexperienced and similarly would have made a fatal faux pas when forced to stray from niceties to spell out his actual platform. Furthermore, his pockets and political links within the Democrat are not nearly as deep as Clinton’s and he would have at best been offered a shot at vice-president.

Instead, due to the negative focus on his demographic traits, Obama’s candidacy will turn into a referendum on how far America has progressed in terms of race relations and religious tolerance. American culture has been traditionally kind to its virtuous underdogs, and the sympathy vote could carry Barack Obama into a close heat with the comparatively unlikable Hillary Clinton – if not to a victory. All he has to do now is keep smilin’

H/T: Waking Up On Planet X

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21
Jan

Sylvia Drops the Ball Again

By Cynapse 5 Comments
Categories: Society

Awhile ago, I posted a short commentary on Sylvia Browne’s 2007 predictions, complete with a healthy dose of skepticism (based on her previous mistakes).

With the unexpected and welcome return of kidnapped teen Shawn Hornbeck, Ms Browne is once again in trouble for making wildly incorrect predictions. As the video below will show, Sylvia told Hornbeck’s parents on an episode of The Montel Williams Show (2003) that their son was killed after the abduction.

While Browne was able to correctly identify the abductor’s first name, Michael J. Devlin is far removed from Sylvia’s description of a “dark skinned Hispanic”. Thanks to YouTube, it will be hard to Ms Browne to say otherwise. The Hornbeck family alleges that Sylvia Browne offered to help them find their son’s body for the low, low price of $700/hour.

Sensing the obvious need for damage control, Sylvia’s business manager issued a statement in her defence:

Sylvia has NEVER charged a fee to any law enforcement person, agency or any individual for her work on a missing person’s case and has worked on hundreds of such cases over the years with positive results … She cannot possibly be 100% correct in each and every one of her predictions. She has a during a career of over 50 years helped literally tens of thousands of people
-Statement from Sylvia Browne’s Business Manager

This being the case, why does she feel she can charge ANYONE $700/hour for information that may be false? Does she refund the money if her predictions turn out to be wrong?

In Sylvia’s partial defence, the Hornbeck family also consulted fellow psychic James Van Praagh, who delivered an equally inaccurate prediction. Perhaps it’s not just Sylvia, but the profitable psychic “industry” that needs to be scrutinized.

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