I've worked as an IT professional on an royalt processing system for the 3 of the biggest labels. The project failed because the royalty processing algorithms needed are so convoluted and the backlog of unprocessed royalties so large that you would need supercomputer level processing to get through it. Fact #1: Royalty processing systems of today are 25 years old, based on midframe/mainframe technology and would take 3 months to process the monthend of all their artists. What does that mean? They selectively choose what artists they calculate royalties for (read new artists) and shunt the others to their backlog of billions of unpaid royalties. Fact #2: Current system is album based, even a per song sale requires an album in their system, this adds to the complexity. Fact #3: Because they've already collected money for royalty but not processed the artist portion, they are sitting with billions and billions of unpaid royalties...A lot of artists have to sue their own labels for their royalties and the ARTISTS have to prove the royalties were owing. Only then will the label get off its ass, do an emergency processing of royalties for that artist and then pay it out.

Leasing seeds, being unable to replant or risk being sued. GMO companies buy all the seed companies out to prevent farmers from having a choice. Patenting 6000 years of crop variants so they can sue the shit out of you for planting anything but their crops.

Feed billions, sure, but what farms can afford to lease their seeds indefinately? They can't so corporations buy the foreclosed assets and leverage their licensing agreements with GMO companies and cheap migrant labor to flood the market with cheap crop and bankrupt even more farmers. The end result in 10 years you will have farming corporations all planting the same monoculture crops and risk having massive round-up resistant blights.

What are they using for switching infrastructure? How are they handling incoming web load distribution?

A couple things you aren't taking into consideration. Bell and Rogers were heavily subsidized by the Canadian government (recall "information super highway") to build national fiber networks. So tax payers have paid for the backbone of our big providers. They have imminent domain rights to property that smaller ISPs will never have, so the CRTC mandated that they allow smaller ISPs to use their last mile access. Some of the arguments put forth by Bell/Rogers/Shaw is that a small percentage of users were taking up most of the available bandwidth and that it was increasing costs. In reality, it is the practice of basing your required bandwidth to support X number of customers on the lowest bandwidth users, then taking the results and averaging it over a 24 hour period. Divide that number by 10 to get your 10:1 standard telco over-subscription and you get the current bandwidth problem. These bandwidth problems aren't as bad as Bell and Rogers are letting on. Distributed content networks like Akamai allow them to keep streaming the content local. Youtube, Bittorrent and other media sites are the big targets for Bell and Rogers because it allows Canadians to download tons of content without paying a PPV fee. The really big problems stem from the fact that ISP A and ISP B co-locate in the same building yet they do not peer with each other in a non-transit capacity...Along comes US ISP C that both A and B connect to, now if a user from ISP A wants to download data(torrent) from a user on ISP B he has to transit an expensive US carrier. Now cut to the future, imagine communities being able to communicate via streaming channels on the net without requiring ANY rogers or bell IP TV services. I can be Bob the cabinet maker and have a daily show streamed from my house to a local, regional, national and international community for $40/mo. I can be Jane the concert pianist and I can internet stream one of my performances. I can be the "Next Great Band" and allow people to stream our music or download it without UMG, WMG or BMG ever seeing a dime. There are a thousand different uses for Fiber to the Home level bandwidth and none of them make money for Rogers and Bell....Hence the situation we are in. Solutions: - Don't base your capacity planning on the lowest common denominator - Don't over-subscribe links so much - Make every Canadian ISP peer with every other Canadian ISP so that if the content exists in Canada there is no need to pay US carrier costs. - Enable a national multicast backbone and MAKE Rogers and Bell be a part of it. - Invest in more local content caching - pay Bram Cohen to add an Autonomous System affinity into bittorrent to have peers local to Canada higher on the desirable seed list. Cost about 500 bucks. - stop fighting change

Well to show people how green the pastures are on the other side. I spent some time with my brother in Sweden, he moved over there during a student exchange program. He liked it so much he stayed. Why does he like it so much? Well he works for Sony Ericsson as a programmer/engineer and to say they have a different work philosophy is an understatement. To list some of the perks: On day 1, out of university, he gets 6 weeks vacation, with the ability to bank another 2. He has 8+2 weeks now. Overtime, period....law...no such thing as "Salary employee". You are payed extra to carry a blackberry By law a person has to be no farther that 10 meters from a natural light source...even in a skyrise. They have a whole classes in architecture schools on this. Free medicare Free gym Free bereavement time no questions asked 6 months PATERNITY leave free daycare services Managers and executives that fail employee review are often pushed into no managerial roles. Sony-Ericsson is considered a slave driving company in Sweden. Google may have won "Best Employer" in the US, but they would be considered McDonald's level in Scandinavia and a lot of the western european countries.

I hear that term a lot "sending our money overseas" or "giving all our money to the middle east"...Thats not quite how it works. US has contracts(not a well kept secret) with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait...etc, that state they will pay X dollar per barrel of oil. In the case of Kuwait I bet its pretty damn low (they would no longer be a country without western intervention). So how it goes, from my understanding, is this: US companies buy oil at contract for 40/barrel, then sell it to US citizens at 110 barrel...Oil companies see all the profit. Big oil = republican = current government = high oil prices. US didn't invade Iraq to steal the oil, they invaded Iraq to prevent Saddam from giving it away(oil for food lol) to EU and driving the prices down BELOW contract values..In that case the money does go the middle east. On topic: I think high oil prices are the greatest thing ever...you can't give away SUVs now. EV hackers get my support, they'll be the auto barons of the future.