Re: Black IT professionals forge global alliances (May 9)
I am a member of a non profit community youth organization, reaching potentially 300 black children and young people in a community.
I’m
interested in keeping up to date as things progress. Part of the mandate is to bring information and technology to the black youth in the inner cities and make it an appealing career choice. This venture is very appealing and I look forward to hearing more about its development in the near future.
Rowan Nelson
Associate Director
Customer Network Operation
Re: Harry Zarek rides again (May 8)
Zarek is a Canadian pioneer in the computer industry. He took Compugen to a national company, then looked to partner to compete with the major telcos.
Give the man credit for sticking with his values as everyone I have ever dealt with at Compugen has the same values. Tell me what other CEO of a company has an open door policy and even takes his own phone calls.
Maybe the Norigen investment didn’t work out, but Harry was around to pick up the pieces and rebuild the company. If there is a Hall of Fame for Canada, Harry is my first candidate as an inductee.
Marshall Postnikoff
Megafacts
Re: Mind you PDAs and Qs (May 8)
I trust it has occurred to you that the 11 per cent who have used these items may very well have retreated to the only remaining private place in a hotel or restaurant. Just try and find a phone booth that is really a booth or a vestibule or cloak room that is more than a row of hooks. The social amenities that used to allow a few private words no longer exist.
Still, it would be nice if more than the reported 40 per cent of persons actually washed their hands before leaving the washroom.
Mark Bernier
Re: Copyright and wrong (May 3)
This issue has bugged me for years. I was running a small software company and called them to see if I could get an exemption from the levy. They told me no, and I asked them if they wanted me to move my CD burning to the USA – they didn’t seem to care.
Wayne Borean
Re: Copyright and wrong (May 3)
I am glad to see someone in the media is paying attention to what the bureaucrats in Ottawa are doing. Taxing CD-Rs and paying it to media conglomerates to prevent music piracy is like taxing paper and paying it to banks to prevent counterfeiting.
If this tax gets through I will lay in a supply of a few hundred CD-Rs to keep our company going for a while. Not one song will be ever be recorded on any of them. The truly bizarre thing is that by taxing CD-Rs, CD-RWs, etc., these bureaucrats will be legitimizing music piracy. So they should put a tax on paper so we could get rich.
Hermann Kerr
Canoe, B.C.
Re: Copyright and wrong (May 3)
Thanks for your article on the proposed blank media tariff increase. Please write again about this issue and publish a link to the PDF of the proposal. You should post the objection/comment guidelines, and the e-mail address that those objections or comments can be sent to.
Christopher A. Gaul
Re: Copyright and wrong (May 3)
I completely agree that we are being tried, found guilty and punished, all while being denied due process. I have never copied music and have no intention to start copying now (outside of ‘fair use’ rules). I see this as the media monopolies using the government to avoid the realities of digital media and alternative methods of distribution.
Larry Karnis
Application Enhancements Inc.
Re: Itemus and aftermath (May 3)
As Jim Tobin rightly pointed out, absence of sound governance and financial control was a common feature of firms spawned in the bubble. However, there were more fundamental issues of acquisition by trading stock which had extremely high P/E ratios. In fact, some of the firms were stock swapping with no recorded earnings. What that meant was that there was an enormous risk if the markets turned, if the products never developed, if revenues from the working firms didn’t cover the lame ones. The high (or infinite for no sales firms) P/E ratios caused the effect of paying too much with dollars that were not yet earned and not coming for a long foreseeable period. The question that comes to mind is “”Where did these dollars come from?””
As for the aggressiveness of spending, I couldn’t agree more. Unless there was a compelling situation to take a company away from a potential competitor, there was really no need to be so generous with monies that were obtained from the public in capital markets.
Ari Berman
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