The Information technology and research firm, Gartner is predicting Christmas 2008 as the last year of the Retail CD.

The research company this week called in the music biz to leave this old optical technology behind – the CD has been on sale for more than 26 years – and fully embrace downloading instead.

Indeed, it said, it’s that insistence on sticking with the CD that’s preventing music companies make the most of the online sales opportunity.

“By propping up the CD business, rather than fully investing in online distribution alternatives, the major labels and the larger music industry have neither succeeded in stamping out piracy nor done much to recreate the business models of the old ‘record business’,” said Gartner’s Mike McGuire.

“Music labels should… move CDs to an on-demand publishing mode,” he suggested.

Look at the numbers. In 2007, online sales yielded 23 per cent of music revenues in the US, though only 15 per cent throughout the world as a whole. This year’s numbers aren’t in yet, but they’re clearly going to show both figures rising sharply. Since 2005, downloads have gone from nine per cent of music revenues to 23 per cent last year, and it’s hard not to see a similarly sharp increase between 2007 and 2008.

CD sales have declined over the past three years by the same amount. That’s left labels struggling even harder to forecast demand so that they can get the right number of CDs manufactured, packaged and distributed. It’s Gartner’s contention that they haven’t done so too well. While that many not have mattered in the 1990s – retailers would ‘soak’ up the excess units on their store shelves – it has now become a real liability.

Contrast that with downloads where, once the source file is encoded, production costs cease no matter how many or how few are sold. Put the money wasted on CD over-production and lost through under-production into marketing online music and the business will blossom.

Throw in the ability to better monetise back-catalogue – which the labels have still to fully embrace, though that may be as much down to Apple and iTunes’ willingness or ability to load up the servers with limited-interest content – and the industry can drive down costs, lower the price of entry for consumers and beat the pirates that way.

With an all-digital approach, labels are free to sell through almost any online outlet, from iTunes to social networking sites to – heck – irreverent technology news sites who happen to mention a track or an album in a review. Source: The Register.

Personally I’ll greatly miss CD’s, me and my wife have amassed a collection of over 2,000 – MP3 downloads just won’t be the same.

You can download the full report here – but you’ll have to pay.

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

He explained that defending God’s creation was not limited to saving the environment, but also protecting man from self-destruction. Source: The BBC.

No – saving humanity from religion is as important as saving the environment.

Administrators at Woolworths have given details of the dates when each of its 807 stores will close over the next two weeks.

All stores will be closed by 5 January, but the first shops will shut on 27 December, just after Christmas.

All 27,000 permanent and temporary staff will lose their jobs unless a last-minute buyer can be found.

Some stores will be reopened by other retailers who have expressed an interested in buying their leases.

Shop windows will display a countdown showing how many days are left before the store closes.

Staff will be entitled to compensation under the statutory redundancy payment scheme and will be retained for a few days following store closures. Source: BBC.

Statutory redundancy payment

• 0.5 week’s pay for each full year of service where age during year less than 22
• 1.0 week’s pay for each full year of service where age during year is 22 or above, but less than 41
• 1.5 weeks’ pay for each full year of service where age during year is 41+

For the payment calculation a week’s pay can’t exceed £330 and you can’t claim for more than 20 weeks. So the most a worker could get is just short of £10,000. How does that compare to the fat cat bankers, bonuses? Derisory.

Gary Hedges reports on Gaza.

Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.

…

The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of family members do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a “martyr”?

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.

Read the whole article at AlterNet.

Hat Tip: Lenin’s Tomb.

An £18m plan to regenerate the Stroudwater Canal from Stonehouse to Brimscombe Port in Gloucestershire has been given the go-ahead.

Stroud District Council is the lead partner in the project which ran into trouble after British Waterways withdrew its support.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has agreed to award the scheme nearly £12m.

Work on the six-mile stretch of water, which runs close to the M5 to the east of Stroud, is expected to begin later.

When fully restored, the canals will form a continuous waterway from Saul Junction on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to Lechlade in Gloucestershire. Source: BBC.

Read all about the project at the Cotswold Canals Partnership website.

Lord Sutherland has completed his inquiry into this year’s Sats test fiasco and says

In practice, failures occurred at almost every stage of the test delivery process in 2008 from the registration of pupils to the presentation of results. Source: The BBC.

A damning indictment, however the response mustn’t be the abandonment of testing – it was a mistake to abandon testing for 14-year-olds. Why you ask? Conor Ryan supplies the answer.

Those who think this is a terrible burden clearly have short memories. The reason the national tests were introduced was because we used to have no idea whether or not primary schools were doing their job. When the first national test results were published in 1995, and over half of all youngsters failed to reach the expected standard (it is now 20%), the country was shocked. When individual school results were published despite the objections of the teaching unions, we learnt how apparently similar schools were achieving radically different results.

In short, those same forces who are now demanding an end to testing had conspired to hide the truth from parents and taxpayers. The problems with this year’s tests must not become an excuse to return to those days. And Schools Secretary Ed Balls must speak up loudly and clearly in favour of school standards – after all, they matter most to the least advantaged children who lack the parental support to get on without decent schooling. Source: Conor’s Commentary.

In his article Pin-Striped Pirates George Monbiot explains how by the British Government’s ownership of tax-havens supports crime and is killing millions in developing countries. George opens his article:

If you want to know why Britain has never completed the process of decolonisation, look at two lists side by side. One is the official register of tax havens, compiled by the OECD. The other is the list of British overseas territories and crown dependencies. Over a quarter of the world’s tax havens are British property. More than half of Britain’s colonial territories and dependencies are tax havens. Strip out Antarctica, the military bases and the scarcely-habited rocks and atolls, and of the 11 remaining properties, only the Falkland Islands is not a recognised haven. The obvious conclusion is that Britain retains these colonies for one purpose: to help banks, corporations and the ultra-rich to avoid tax.

As George writes the website Shelter Offshore, which helps people to avoid their obligations to society, rates Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man as the top tax havens.

Why does this matter? Well here’s a list, I compiled fro George’s article.

1) Tax havens are used to divert money from developing countries, Christian Aid estimates $160 billion a year, the Pope suggests $225 billion and the US research group Global Financial Integrity proposes $900bn.

2) We the tax-payers are robbed when taxes the rest of us pay are avoided.

3) Tax-havens have been a major contribution to the current financial crisis,

Tax havens set out deliberately to “undermine the impact of legislation passed in other jurisdictions”. This is their core business, and this is the threat they pose to the world. Source: The Guardian.

4) Organised crime depends on tax-havens, as George writes anyone who wanted to stamp out drug smuggling, kidnapping, gun-running and fraud would start by shutting down tax havens.

5) At least one Government department has become involved – The Inland Revenue signed a PFI transferring its buildings to Mapeley Steps registered in Bermuda and owned by Mapeley registered in Guernsey, which the FT reports, claims not to have paid tax in any of the jurisdictions it operates.

Read more on these points in George’s article.

I’ve only one thing to say to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, stop the carnage close the UK’s tax-havens now.

There’s often much discussion about our education system, many bemoan our drop in standards. However in my experience as a parent of four, nothing would appear further from the truth, children work far harder than I or my contemporaries ever did.
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) survey ranks England in the top 10 for the first time.

These results are magnificent tribute to teachers and students, placing them above all our major European Competitors as well as the United States. As Conor Ryan Points out this is the generation of 14 year-olds who were educated through Labour’s numeracy strategy from the start of primary school.

Still, you can trust the Tories to try and undermine the achievement.

Conservatives’ children’s spokesman, Michael Gove, said it showed England’s pupils were in the “global second division” behind Asian countries.

“Parents will be worried that our maths performance is behind that of Kazakhstan,” said Mr Gove. Source: BBC.

Does Grove have any idea what has been achieved, back in 1995 under the Tory government England was ranked 25th for maths, but I guess he’d like to forget that.

Hat Tip: Conor’s Commentary.

I’d not heard about Jim Beresford and Douglas Smith, of Doncaster-based Beresfords Solicitors until this morning listening to Radio 4, what a thoroughly unpleasant pair they are.

Two solicitors who took millions of pounds from compensation payouts given to sick miners have been struck off.

Jim Beresford and Douglas Smith, of Doncaster-based Beresfords Solicitors, had denied 11 counts of serious professional misconduct.

The Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal heard the men acted “unacceptably” by charging clients even though the government was paying their fees.

It found eight of the 11 allegations against the lawyers proven.

The law firm argued there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with earning substantial fees from its business conduct. Source: The BBC.

See, no morals at all, I’ll make millions from others misery with out a thought.

Beresford, 58, said last year to be Britain’s highest-earning solicitor, and Smith, 52, made millions of pounds from personal injury claims for miners under the government’s coal health compensation scheme.

Tribunal chairman David Leverton said: “If ever there was a group of persons who needed the full care and attention from solicitors, it was these miners.”Mr Beresford described himself as an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, his attitude allowed himself and Mr Smith to put commercial goals before his clients’ best interests.”

The lawyers were also accused of not giving adequate advice and entering into contingency fee deals against their clients’ best interests.

Both men denied the charges at the tribunal hearing last month, which heard that up to 30% of a miner’s damages could be deducted by Beresfords.

The compensation scheme was set up by the government because of British Coal’s lack of safety standards and led to hundreds of thousands of claims from former miners and their families.

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) agreed to pay lawyers’ fees in successful cases and it was also agreed that in unsuccessful cases miners would not have to bear costs.

Beresford and Smith’s joint earnings went from more than £182,000 in 2000 to £23,273,256 in 2006, the tribunal heard.

But Timothy Dutton QC, appearing for the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority (SRA), said charging conditional or contingency fees over and above those set out in the scheme was “unacceptable”.

In one case, the firm deducted a “success fee” from the widow of a miner, leaving her with a total payout of just £217.73, the tribunal heard. Source: The BBC.

And don’t forget they’ve already been paid by the government – horrid people. But then they aren’t the only solicitors who are unpleasant.

Questions are still being asked as to how the government allowed more than half the money paid out from the £6.9bn fund to go to law firms. Source: The Guardian.

How the rich like to screw the poor.

The media is full of talk about global warming and carbon (CO2) emissions – The Guardian’s interactive CO2 emissions map is an effective way of presenting each countries emissions.