Why it sucks to be a Canadian

I should really be studying for the distributed computing final I have tomorrow morning, but hilarity wins out.

Citizen Game posts a (less than) amusing truth about living north of the 49th parallel: You get screwed in the exchange rate. Once upon a time, our shining little loonies and toonies were worth half a big green American bill. This is happily no longer the case.

Never the less it would seem that the US would like to pretend that it was the good ol’ days of the ninties and charge exchange rates to that tune. I’m not going to bother showing the analysis here, but the image below sums it up pretty well (you can go to Citizen Game for the full run-down).

I would mention however that exchange rates are not the only place where we get nailed (or even the worst). My biggest beef is in the lack of digital content that we get up here.

In the USA, there are lovely services such as TiVo, Amazon Unbox, iTunes Music Store, Zune Marketplace, Xbox Live Marketplace, and so on. These lovely services will allow you to pay them money - in real dollars - and in exchange they will give you media content (movies and TV shows in particular). In Canada I’ve heard it’s theoretically possible to buy a TiVo system, but there’s some magic you have to pull. Rogers will allow you to rent a PVR system from them at an approximately cost of $15,000 a month, with an initial start up fee of whatever you’ll get for putting a second mortgage on your house. iTMS sells music, but nothing else, and the Zune and Xbox Live Marketplaces just aren’t available here.

What is going on here people? You wonder why we download so much media off torrent sites up here? Maybe it’s because for some reason nobody wants to let me have the ability to give them money so that I can watch the Colbert Report whenever I like. My guess being that nobody seems to be able to secure licensing rights from the IP owners for distribution in the great white north. This does not make any sense to me whatsoever, but I would guess that the enemy of Mankind, Rogers Communications, has something to do with this as they are responsible for all problems in Canada.

I may have gone on a bit of a tangent here, but to return to the land of Videogames, Gametap has a restricted set of titles for Canada as well (and that I _Really_ don’t understand).

In conclusion, if you don’t allow someone to buy something, they will steal it from you and lobby their government to make it okay to do so.