Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

David Hermance, executive engineer for environment engineering at the Toyota Technical Center USA in California, was a key figure behind the success of Toyota’s popular Prius hybrid cars… died in a plane crash.

“When that car came out, no one knew what it was,” said Bill Reinert, a Toyota national manager. “Dave dedicated his life to championing this technology. He was the American father of the Prius.”

“He made the Prius something that worked for the American market,” said Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “When people think of hybrid systems, they think of Toyota, and that is due in good part to Dave’s work.”

According to UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it’s time to get paid for it.”

The comment came on the heals of Microsoft’s agreement to share revenue from Zune sales with record labels and artists. At the heart of the issue was UMG which refused to license its music to the Zune unless it would get a percentage of each device sold, in addition to standard music licensing fees for downloads and subscriptions.¹

So, out of curiosity, does this means that ANY UMG music placed on a Zune (or a device with a similar agreement to that of the Zune) becomes legitimate because you’ve already compensated the copyright owner by purchasing the device?

So it’s not just the the RIAA that’s ruining music, add UMG and Doug Morris to the list.

This is yet another reason to support Independent Artists and avoid the huge media moguls that want to control every aspect of your music listening experience!

In an effort to boot reader participation though comments I recently turned off the requirement that comment posters be registered users on the site. Knowing this was an open door for comment spam, I took the plunge hoping that Akismet would help weed out the spams.

This morning I checked, sure enough, Akismet had caught 21 more comment spams (c-spam?). Not only that, that was 100% of the spam.

Can I get Akismet for my inbox?