Tax Reform Goes Backwards and Blu-ray Eats Your Battery

Canada's Conservatives have fallen into an all to common Tory trap, that of "why should my tax dollars pay for art I find offensive?" An amendment to a routine update to the Income Tax Act allows the government to withhold the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit for films and TV shows deemed to be offensive. And, let's face it, it doesn't take much to offend a conservative. The decision would be made by a closed-door committee with little or no oversight, nor would artists have an opportunity to plead their case. The cries of "Censorship!" are already going up, but this amendment snuck through pretty much unnoticed and is already before the Senate.

There is already speculation that this move could destroy Canada's indie film scene. If you watch TV here in the great white north, you realize that a lot of productions depend on the CFVTC to go ahead, as evidenced by a logo which is placed in the end credit. In theory, even more mainstream shows like CBC's riotous comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie could find itself in trouble. The show draws heavily on the cultural friction between Muslims and Christians and could be seen as offensive depending on one's sense of humour.

After all that, it is nice to know that some things in life make sense. There was quite a lot of head scratching when the new MacBooks did not include a Blu-ray drive. After all, HD DVD is dead and Apple has backed Big Blu since the beginning. Well, Crave comes to the rescue with this report that Blu-ray would eat your laptop battery for breakfast, probably draining it in less time than it would take to watch a feature-length film. So mayhaps some more engineering time is needed on this one to get the power requirements down or for a higher capacity class of batteries to come along.

Crave does not always come to the rescue, though, like in this report on a headset that sits around the throat and picks up sound through body conduction. Portrayed as the somewhat frightening wave of the future, this technology actually dates back to the late thirties. They where used by German tank crews as the commander had to make himself heard over the noise of the engine and anything that might be blowing up in the vicinity. Today there's a few floating around as collector's items.