Month: February 2004

On January 25, 2004, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights entered into force creating an African court to judge human rights violations on that continent.

Comoros paved the way for the Protocol to come into effect when it became the 15th African state to ratify the Protocol in December 2003. The other states that have ratified the Protocol since its creation in 1998 are: Algeria; Burkina-Faso; Burundi; Côte d’Ivoire; Gambia; Lesotho; Libya; Mali; Mauritius; Rwanda; Senegal; South Africa; Togo; and Uganda.

Unfortunately — as with other human rights initiatives associated with the African Charter — this is likely to be just another paper tiger. The African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, for example, took six years to admonish Nigeria to respect the rights of the Ogoni people.

Proponents of the Protocol argue that the Commission’s decisions were not binding while Protocol will create a decision whose findings are binding . . . right up until the point that African nations decide to ignore them. Does anyone really believe that the same group of nations that has looked the other way at Zimbabwe’s human rights violations is suddenly going to grow a spine because 15 nations have adopted a protocol?

I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Sources:

African human rights court created. UN Wire, January 28, 2004.

Establishing an African Court on Human Rights. Press Release, Amnesty International, January 26, 2004.

Via Boing! Boing! it appears that activists have set up GreyTuesday.Org to encourage people to mirror The Grey Album on February 24.

The Grey Album is a mix album making the rounds that takes the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and mixes it with samples from the Beatles’ White Album.

Rolling Stone called The Grey Album “an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time” and the Boston Globe said it was the “most creatively captivating” album of the year.”

Okay, I will grant that it does make Jay-Z (barely) listenable for more than a few minutes at a time, though a couple run throughs on the CD player was all I needed.

Anyway, the Grey Tuesday folks apparently are upset that there’s no compulsory licensing system for samples of music. So if you want to re-record a Beatles tune you can, you just have to pay a set fee to do so. If you want to sample a Beatles tune, you have to pretty much beg the Beatles’ record company to do so, and they’re going to say no regardless of how much money you offer them.

Kevin Werbach has an article about one of my tech obssessions — storage, in this case portable storage.

As Werbach note, the rise of (relatively) cheap, high capacity storage for mobile devices is already changing what we use such devices for and that trend is going to accelerate to the point where we begin to use mobile devices for applications that would have traditionally been performed by desktop or laptop computers. According to Werbach,

Mobile devices are about to become much more powerful, and storage is the reason. There have been three waves of evolution in portable storage, each of which has produced new product categories. The first development was affordable flash memory, allowing handhelds to carry hundreds of addresses and user-installed applications. That was enough to launch the PalmPilot, which created the market for personal digital assistants. The second wave was removable storage, using the Secure Digital, CompactFlash, or MemoryStick standards. Without the ability to pop data into and out of a device, we wouldn’t have digital cameras. And the same basic technology, sealed into devices, powered the first generation of handheld MP3 music players. The third wave of portable storage was tiny hard drives, beginning with the 1.8 inch-wide Hitachi drives in Apple’s iPod.

Every stage in portable storage so far has involved more capacity. From the kilobytes on the original Palm (text and simple applications) to the megabytes in digital cameras (still photos) to the gigabytes on an iPod (music), increased storage space has brought new forms of media into play. The next evolution will be different. With the current-generation iPods topping out at 40 gigabytes, comparable to a desktop computer, there is enough space to store just about anything. The next challenge is to make portable storage elements smaller and more affordable. Storage creates new markets when it gets cheaper, even without adding capacity. For example, USB “keychain” storage devices wouldn’t be selling like crazy if they weren’t available for $50 or less.

I prefer to think of this as a PDA w/phone rather than phone w/PDA (most cell phone form factors are far too small to be useful multipurpose information appliances IMO), but that’s a chicken/egg sort of distinction.

The weird thing is that mobile storage is already dirt cheap — it’s just not as cheap as laptop/desktop hard drives are. For example, I was reading a Slashdot thread on e-books the other day in which someone complained about the high price of flash memory cards these days.

Well, a 1 gb compact flash card can be had for about $255 on Amazon.Com. Now clearly, that’s expensive compared to the sort of 3.5″ HD you could by. On the other hand, just looking around my house I noticed that the bookshelves I bought at $250/unit hold about 200 books each. OTOH, a 1 gb compact flash card will hold about 1,500 e-books (based on the average size of the dozens I’m carrying around my PDA). So, IMO, flash memory is actually a pretty good bargain even now — and, of course, it is only going to get cheaper.

Werbach also points to companies like Cornice, which is marketing a tiny 1.5 gb HD which supposedly will be available in bulk at the wholesale level for $70 or so and can run in portable devices for 12 hours or more using power management features.

Regardless of whether that, or other mini-HDs or flash memory (or, more likely, some combination thereof) wins, I can’t wait to have an iPaq with as much storage as an iPod.