I received an email from Pandora.  Here it is as follows:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I’m writing today to ask for your help.  The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.  The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all.  Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters.  I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception.  As a former touring musician myself, I’m no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians.  The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster’s business potential.

I hope you’ll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

I hope that people will follow the link and save internet radio.

Tags: save internet radio, Pandora, Mouseclone

I’m going to start posting my Technology postings on another site. I will do my best to move all that I have written here to 19 Inches Wide. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may pose to any one. I will leave them up and than then will try and change the direct links to the direct links on 19 Inches Wide.

Tags: 19 Inches Wide, Technology, Mousecleone

Well I was going to post a video blog about my thoughts on the Super Bowl but I can’t seem to get the right video encoding with out having people down load software to their PCs and I don’t like doing that so I didn’t figure other people would either.

About the coaches.  Give it a rest people.  We can all see that they are black.  That is nothing special about them.  What is special about them is that their team is in the Super Bowl.  I can’t believe that so much was made about them being black.  No one makes a big deal about my skin being off white or slightly tanned.  They are people, human beings.  They, along with their teams have made a long journey to the Super Bowl.  Gratz to them for working so hard to get there.

As for the teams.  The Bears where underdogs.  I was hoping that they would win, solely because they were the underdogs.  I don’t really follow sports to much any more.  I am glad to see that the game wasn’t a blow out.

Well that about wraps that up.  Gratz to both teams for making it such a long way.

Tags: Super Bowl, Bears, Colts, black people, Mouseclone

Space travel is soon going to become very trivial for some.  It would appear that they are just going to shoot people into space.

According to 99x this morning.  You will get to experience 6 minutes of weightlessness and plummet back down to earth. This can all be yours for $200,000.00 American.  The cost is approximate from what 99x talked about this morning.

Taken from Space-Travel.com:

The Starchaser Astronaut programme features centrifuge, microgravity and skydive training together with high altitude decompression and hypobaric work. Starchaser astronauts will also receive their own personal spacesuit which they may keep as a memento of their experience.

This sounds like a good deal.  I mean, I would never pay for someone to strap me into a rocket, shoot me into space.  The airlines can’t keep planes in the air 100% of the time.  What would make someone think that Being shot into space would be safe.

Well I take that back, just the part about me not paying.  I couldn’t afford it.  If I could, I would be there in a heart beat.  the rush alone would be worth the 200k.

Maybe in 2050 space will be a normal vacation spot.  But if we keep removing weight from this planet we will be in trouble.  I know I know we don’t remove enough to make a dent in the weight of it.  The earth has been spinning for way before we got here though.  It is a balance…

Is space travel for you?  Well it could be if you have the pocket change laying around.

Tags: Space, space travel, trips, vacation, Starchaser, mouseclone

relecantNoise is a blog spier. Whoa!? Yeah, they creep around on your blogs pulling the content down and seeing if you said something about someone else.

Lets say that Wal-mart sucks. In my personal opinion they do. Wal-mart has gone down hill from the times of Sam Walton. His children have made a money house that offers no consumer service. It doesn’t even open enough registers for people to check out. Why in the world would you have 30+ register locations to check out and only have 7 open?

Ok, the above will be spidered by relevantNoise and put somewhere for a Wal-mart exec or something like that to see. I wrote this because I don’t like what they are doing. Heck, I would go as far to say that people have been sued over some of the things that relevantNoise has found. None the less they are providing a service that would other wise take a good size IT department and server to do what they are doing. Hell, everyone likes to make money stepping on other people as well. American Dreams they call it.

relecantNoise might just be Big Brother disguised as a company and they are really looking to see if someone says something about the US Government. The US Government is not very competent in my opinion. Hell, just look at the war!

Tags: relevantNoise, Walmart, US Government, opinion,   Big Brother, Mouseclone