Gary Lawrence Murphy:
>If we had more variety of franchise food than
>the Wendys/KFC/PizzaHut/TacoBell/TimHorton's monopoly .. The USA is a
>nation founded on creative free enterprise entrepreneurs; Canada
>is a nation built on monopolies.
Things aren't all that bad. I remember Vancouver
as having a broad variety of good, local eateries.
And Toronto as having a variety of good, local
strip joints. ;-) I never ate a doughnut in
Canada, so I cannot vouch for their quality. I
could live in either of these cities quite happily,
but Carolyn doesn't like cold weather.
Personally, I almost never eat at a franchise
restaurant. Usually you can find better fare or
cheaper fare (and often both!) at a local
restaurant.
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Digital radio playlists are prohibited?!
From fork-admin@xent.com  Wed Sep 25 10:24:53 2002

Anyone heard of this law before?
> Q. Can I get a playlist?
> A. We are unable to offer a playlist. The Digital Performance Right in
> Sound Recordings Act of 1995 passed by Congress prevents us from
> disclosing such information. The Digital Law states that if one is
> transmitting a digital signal, song information cannot be
> pre-announced. It is a Music Choice policy not to release a playlist of
> upcoming or previously played songs.
Recently, MusicChoice upgraded their website with a very important
service, as far as I'm concerned: real-time song info from their
website. My DirecTV receiver is up on a shelf (and its display scrolls
intermittently); and I'm surely not going to fire up my projector while
listening to the "radio", so I'm quite happy that I can retrieve r/t
song info with URLs like:
http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/soundsoftheseasons.asp
http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/rap.asp
http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/opera.asp
etc...
Now, if I were a more eager hacker, I'd write up little WSDL stubs for
these event streams (they're clearly not worried about load, since their
own web pages specify 15 sec meta-refresh) and then feed 'em through a
content router to alert me to cool songs. Heck, cross-reference the
service to CDDB and... :-)
RK