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Actually it's called stealing and stealing since that's all they do. They just hack and steal and reverse engineer and clone everyone else's tech.

Yes, hacking, stealing, and reverse engineering are likely included within the R&D budgets.

Did you just get to the party now? I now know my country does it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/child-porn-charges-laid-against-10-laval-teens-1.2426599 "Child porn charges laid against 10 Laval teens Police allege boys traded screen grabs of girlfriends' explicit Snapchat photos ..."

So.... you don't care who's looking at your holiday photos.

I really hope that all of them are only of you, and nobody else. Consider the following: what you might or might not know, is that your sister/daughter/cousin's girlfriend/etc "Susie", has just broken up with her now ex-boyfriend. She thinks it's over, and isn't talking about that unpleasant chapter. Unbeknownst to you, her ex is obsessed with her, and is stalking her. He's managed to get access to facial recognition software, and because of your carelessness, he's found those holiday pictures with Susie in them. He now knows where to look for Susie at holiday time. He shows up with a gun and starts shooting everyone who gets between him and Susie.

That would be you and your loved ones. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/1st-degree-murder-charge-laid-in-michael-wassill-death-1.1406031

Go ahead, and be as uncaring as you want about photos of yourself, but don't be rude and assume it ok to be careless with photos of other people.

We went a similar but different direction in Canada, rather than killing the phone there's a list of IMEIs for stolen phones, and all carriers will honour not allowing phones in the database on to their networks. Which this solution sounds little less onerous than re-engineering every handset OS to have this kill ability.

Also the phone doesn't actually have to be turned on to be blacklisted, how often will you send the "kill" pings out when stolen? Would a thief simply have to wait a few weeks until the heat dies down?

We have devices that register with networks when activated, isn't it far easier to wait for that event than to try and push a command to a phone that may never be turned on again?

Reference:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/stolen-phones-blacklist-launches-in-canada-1.1873674

Just an FYI, sellers of houses have offered to accept Bitcoin on at least a couple newsworthy occasions:

- http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/developer-sell-house-bitcoin-020107308.html
- http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/03/alberta-man-accepting-bitcoins-in-exchange-for-home.html

A far cry from denominating mortgages, but still, it's something.

Check these out: CBC Radio 3 ( http://music.cbc.ca/#/radio3 ). The Polaris Prize. The Peak Performance Project.

I watched this on CBC. Dr. Peter Lin made two good points:

(1) The study was carried out on healthy subjects. Thus the impact is minimal.

(2) Vegetarians, pregnant moms and people who are selective in their diets (college students) can benefit from supplements.

I could not find the transcript but the video is available here: http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Health/ID/2424891913/

ps: just fast-forward to 2:03

Stephen Wise was interviewed on a Canadian radio program this morning:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/12/12/granting-rights-and-personhood-to-animals/

He wants this case to go up the legal court ladders. This would get him more press coverage and more profits from sales of his book. The cost to society of his failed attempt would be judges' wasted time. The cost to society of a ruling somehow favouring Wise would be less effective drug testing, for the chimps he is trying to "free" are used in medical research. Either way, it is lose-lose for human society.

Just to drive the point home, from the comment section on the CBC article:

"Off grid gal
The radiation from these things is unbelievable, parents should not even be holding their kids hands when they're on these things...I even have witnessed mothers breast feeding while they hold their smart phones centimeters from their baby's brains!!! We need to wake up out of our techno-haze stupour and get back out into nature, untethered!!"

"globecare
No, they should be banned. Not available. This is a children's rights issue. We want healthy, well developed children."

Actual analysis says eating healthy costs about $550 more per person per year.

There is certain bacteria, that is selected for via antibiotics (bacteria is resistant), that produces some sort of a fatty acid that results in autism symptoms in test mice, even at very low levels. This has been known for a few years already.

People created autism. It is not just "we didn't know what it was" like Alzheimer or dementia in older people in general.

It is known that before antibiotics, there was no incidence of autism. It is known that before oral antibiotics, there was no incidence of autism. It is known that with current "ear infection => antibiotics" "cold => antibiotics" culture, autism has exploded.

    http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/autism-enigma

and posts about it,
    http://cogentbenger.com/autism/
    http://treatautism.ca/2011/12/08/the-nature-of-things-autism-enigma/

Connect the dots.

Where I live (British Columbia), our provincial government has contracted a US multi-national to maintain our public health records. This caused considerable controversy at the time, including an unsuccessful court challenge.

It should come as no surprise to any Canadian that the US has access to their health records when we're paying a US company to maintain them.

Not due to private medical records, due to her medical condition being advertised all over the internet

There have been at least 12 others with similar experiences at the border. I think it is unlikely that they've all written books about their circumstances.

A few years ago, I saw some stupid bitch reading while driving. She was actually tailgating the vehicle in front.

That's all right, bus drivers do it in Toronto as does everyone's favorite mayor

Who was the US politician who openly called for Assange to be assassinated?

"University of Calgary Professor" "Tom Flanagan, a former aide to the Canadian prime minister, has called for Assange's assassination"

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40467957/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/t/assange-lawyer-condemns-calls-assassination-wikileaks-founder/

Canada is part of the US by now, isn't it? Did the kids sew another star on the flag yet?

Of course he was "obviously talking tongue-in-cheek" and got quoted out-of-context by idiotic reporters.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/flanagan-regrets-wikileaks-assassination-remark-1.877548

I think the 15 minutes just ended: 10 teens arrested on child-porn charges related to Snapchat images of their girlfriends

how many of those DSL providers are just reselling?

All of them, which means that when your local Baby Bell decides to start throttling, it doesn't matter which DSL reseller you're paying, you get the short end of the stick (as Canada Bell has already demonstrated)

The spying is too much without enough oversight and should be scaled back, reined in, and controlled. BUT, spying on real, actual enemies is required.

And it isn't just the abuses of the NSA. The USA is FORCING people to have intrusive body cavity searches then being asked to PAY for them. And how about those border searches 100 miles from a border. There is a lot of government abuse that needs to be fixed.

But you still need to spy on your actual, real enemies.

And this... http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canada-s-spying-touches-nerve-in-brazil-susan-ormiston-1.2054334

Maybe it's the fault of libertarians that seem to make up a significant percentage of the tech demographic; wanting to kill the Affordable Healthcare Act. Or tea party programmers wanting the same thing who managed to get on the project. Come on man! Think of some more conspiracies!! Lovin' it.

Of course it couldn't be the incompetence of contracting companies that seem to make a living because they have or aim to have some sort of inside track in Washington rather than the chops to do the actual thing that needs doing. Of course that would never happen in Washington or any other political capital. I'm not saying the way the primary contractor, Quebec company CGI, does business in any way follows recent Quebec business practices. They are probably a well above board and good honest corporate citizen (although according to the Washington Post article above they did screw up another medical system based project). I'm just saying that if Quebec ever did separate from Canada, as it is now, they'd have to think up some other adjective to describe it. It's too cold to grow bananas there.

Frankly (and personally) though, I wouldn't trust any company to government contracts with stated aims published in their profiles like: "The ultimate aim is to establish relations so intimate with the client that decoupling becomes almost impossible," (see Washington Post article). Especially not from Quebec.

"Apart from a FedEx truck not checking his mirrors before he tried to merge on top of me, we didn't really have any issues"

While I really doubt the FedEx driver was at fault given the average speed of this car, this is exactly why people should drive at reasonable speeds and avoid distraction. Shit happens. People make mistakes on the road. But if you're driving like an asshole you increase the risk of accident/injury when those mistakes happen.

We can only hope he filmed it and ends up without a license like these idiots.

Tell you what, we'll take our apathy and greed and environmental destruction and you can have Quebec.

I'd be happy to take Quebec. I like Quebec. Sure, they have nutjobs and corruption there, (as they do everywhere else), but at least they've declared a moratorium on poisoning people's wells for the sake of Big Oil.

According to CBC, the privacy commissioner is Already Starting an Investigation

Dear mod troll:
Welcome to Canada.

What I am most curious about is who is part of that consortium.

According to this it's Bank of America Merrill Lynch and BMO Capital Markets. It's telling how little the commpany is being sold for. The company is basically being sold for the value of it's current assets ($2.6 billion in cash reserves, patent portfolio, software, etc.). Seems like the buyer has no intention to turn the company around and get profits out in the future.

Amongst many other streaming services in Canada, we have CBC Music, which covers a wide variety of properly licensed streams. In fact, some of the other internet radio stations in the country are right pissed at the agreements CBC managed to sign up to, and even the record companies have cried "foul" over the fact that CBC has the right to stream their entire catalogues for a fixed fee.

But they can't do jack shit about it, because they negotiated the contract -- they just didn't think it through.

Much as they didn't think it through when they signed up for the fees on blank CDs that essentially made it implicitly legal to rip and burn your own copies of CDs in Canada, because every blank you bought had a fee to pay for the privelege.

I posted an article in another response the the St. Mary's frosh week incident. When the girls were asked why they participated they said they weren't feminist so it didn't matter to them.

Ugh. I'm trying to find the upside to that Nova Scotia chant and it doesn't seem like there is one, nor does it seem like people are overreacting to it. It seems like a cheerful chant in support of raping underage girls in an area which has a high proportion of sexual assault.

That doesn't seem like anti-feminism, that's just nasty. You don't have to be a feminist to be against it. :-/

Without any long term baseline for comparison it's hard to judge what type of cycles affect ice formation and whether the current trends are normal or irregular.

This is true, however we have some understanding of the physical reasons that are driving the changes, and no reason to believe those factors will change any time soon. We know that the CO2 concentration in the air has increased, which traps more heat in the atmosphere and the ocean, we also know that ice loss is a self-reinforcing trend through loss of albedo. So while it could, in theory, be a cyclical variation, there is also no evidence to suggest that it is. On the other hand, there is some evidence to suggest that the ice loss is unprecedented in the last 1,450 years.

No, there was a ban on hard balls. Don't know what you link refers to but I know a teacher at that school and they confirmed it was true.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/11/16/toronto-school-balls.html

That's also the reason why many young women now automatically say "I'm not a feminist".

I posted an article in another response the the St. Mary's frosh week incident. When the girls were asked why they participated they said they weren't feminist so it didn't matter to them.

They don't want to be associated with the negative destructive effects that occur when an extremist walks into an office and all the sudden everyone's hiding under their desks for fear of being the next target. Men have to be extra careful and guarded when talking around female co-workers because we have no idea how they might react and what will be taken as offensive. The result is a lot of women are excluded from some conversations until the language has been vetted and we can be sure it won't set off the fire alarms.

Extreme feminism hurts women, I've seen it first hand and completely agree.

Case in point. St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Have a look at some of the outrage there. Drunk students during frosh week sang a chant that's been going on for a couple of years. "Young, Y = Your sister, O = Oh, so tight, U = Under age, N = No consent, G = Grab that ass, St. Mary's boys like them young".

The students that took part in the chant were sent for sensitivity training. It seems like everyone and their dog wanted these kids expelled and sent to jail for conspiracy to commit a criminal act. Anyone that says, it's a bunch of stupid drunk teens out on their own for the first time is met with accusations of being pedophiles and death threats.

Read the comment section, there are tons of people throwing outrage and expect the boys to be castrated, despite the fact that more than half of the participants were female.

Lol!!!

Reminds me of the banning of balls at a school in Ontario because a parent got knocked out by a ball to the head.

Shit happens. We can't stop the world from spinning because of one incident.

FYI that was "fake" with the banning of balls at a school in Ontario.

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/09/cbc-radio-show-strikes-again-with-ball-less-soccer-satire.html

""The CBC Radio show This is That — a satire of Canadian culture, news, and CBC Radio itself — aired its first show of the new season last weekend and already people are mistaking its spoofs for real news. Again.

They posted their latest offering on their blog on Tuesday and it was believable enough to enrage some sports fans."

But on to the main subject I agree wth the majority here that it was the 19 year old's fault 100%. Obviousely the father didn't teach him enough safety lessons in regards to R/C helicopters and the kid did it to himself by sitting down and landing the damn thing right next to his body on a table. To me that's kind of like eliminating another moron from the gene pool that SHOULD have realized "Um Gee maybe I shouldn't land this next to my body". But I do feel for the father though he'll have to live with not only seeing his son kill himself like that but also realising he could have prevented it by trying to teach him some more safety lessons and hope for the best.

Do you have a citation for a single dangerous fish being caught outside of that part of Japan?

Here's a few dangerous fish stories.

There was also a radiocative fish caught near California, but it wasn't deemed dangerous. But it does go to show how far the effects of the disaster have been felt so far.

Make him tune into Canadian election coverage for a few hours...

That probably runs into problems with 'cruel and unusual punishment'.

Have you seen how Canada handles political debates? Or Rick Mercer interviewing Prime Minister Jean Chrétien? Has the State of the Union address ever been crashed by Marg Delahunty dressed as a warrior princess?

And have you seen how Canadians deal with (or at least used to deal with) US-style conservatives?

I have a lot of respect for the USA's Rick Mercer wannabes, but they would be shot at by the Secret Service if they tried any of the stunts that the Canadian press does.

And yet despite those precautions and hook checks, hang glider pilots and sometimes their passengers still die.

I have wondered over the last few years why more big-name general news sites around the world don't just shut down their comment systems. The comments attached to virtually any major TV news network site or newspaper site tend to be filled with content that does little if anything to actually further any sort of discussion or dissemination of knowledge about the topic at hand.

I have noticed recently some of the sites I follow daily have started to only selectively permit commenting on stories. Stories which are likely to bring out the trolls and bigots seem to have commenting disabled more and more. However, I'm not sure why these news sites don't just bite the bullet and dismantle the comments attached to stories. Nobody seems to ever benefit from them.

(Obviously, something like /. which is centred around discussion and commenting is a somewhat different beast. I am specifically talking about general news outlets like CBC News, The Toronto Star, or CNN.com, and others like them. /. naturally also has the benefit of community-driven moderation to limit trolling, flamebait, and spam).

Yaz

I mean, a senator and high ranking official just lost their jobs because of ... wait for it ... $90,000 of questionable expenses.

It's a tempest in a teapot.

1. Harper wants to drastically change Senate
2. Harper is prevented from doing so by the constitution. The end? Perhaps not!
3. Suddenly, there is an expensive audit of all the little things some stupid senators do, like stopping in Toronto on their way home! You know, instead of taking their connecting flight immediately, they wait a while.
4. RAWR RAWR RAWR! CORRUPTION in the senate! OMG OMG!
5. Public's perception of the Senate drops. When some in parliament want to extend the audit to include House of Commons (the *real* government), they are blocked by the government. Only the Senate is to be investigated after all!

Now connect the dots. *How* can you start to even talk about reforming anything if there is no perception of some crises or problem?? You can't. You have to either find it, or manufacture it.

The audit found some minor things. Now I would not be surprised that after the next prorogation of parliament (again), we will not get an agenda to look at the "corruption in the Senate" and how to make it more "democratic". Considering it was Harper that appointed these people there in the first place!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/02/08/pol-patrick-brazeau-senate-arrest.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Brazeau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Wallin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Duffy

So, maybe the future steps will be,

6. Start debate about reforms and "accountability" in the Senate (favourite *word* of current government)
7. Start to gauge public opinion about senate reform
8. (after) next election, start the ball rolling on changing (abolishing and then maybe replacing) the senate. The trick is to keep all this in the spot light while pretending you don't want it in the spot light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Senate_expenses_scandal

A June 2013 poll revealed that in the wake of the controversy, 49% of Canadians wanted to reform the Senate, 41% wanted to see it abolished, 6% wanted to keep it as it was, and 4% were unsure

Imagine that!!

Here's the thing. If your military need were down south in areas with plenty of roads, and your military was screaming for a vehicle to drive on those roads, would you spend the money to develop a "stealth car", or just buy a made-in-Canada conventional car off the shelf and tweak it a bit?

Of course snowmobiles are essential in the north. That's not the point. Buy the damn things. Don't waste years developing a "stealth" version and leave the military without enough *regular* snowmobiles in the meantime. That is what is going on right now: our soldiers have had less snowmobiles than they needed for arctic training for a couple of years now. The solution? Spend $620k on "stealth" snowmobile development while leaving them without enough of them. It's like the lunacy a couple of years ago where the military didn't have enough parkas to do their winter training. How in the !$%@$& does that ever happen in Canada? Because military procurement is screwed up, not because people are loath to give the military what they need to do their job.

Let me put it another way. Spending $620k on experimental snowmobiles could buy a heck of a lot of regular snowmobiles that you don't currently have enough of.

"When some Canadian "Arctic policy expert" opines that no one needs a small, quiet, efficient prime mover because of a lack of "terrorists", I am reminded why no one asks "Arctic policy experts" about military matters. Same reason I don't ask soldiers about environmental policy."

When we've got small, effcient prime movers already, and the military has complained that they don't have enough of them to do patrols now, we're spending money developing fancy "stealth" versions? The priorities are messed up. That's the issue. It may be cool to have a stealth snowmobile, but $620k buys a lot of ordinary ones that the military has been waiting for since 2011:

"Internal army documents warned in late 2011 that there were "insufficient numbers of (snowmobiles) in the Army to meet the needs of (Arctic Response Company Groups) and the training requirements." Officials discussed the possibility of renting equipment.

The response units, a key pillar of the army's plan to enforce Canadian sovereignty in the North, could not be formed until they had over snow transport and even then, "there were insufficient numbers in the field force to enable cold weather training," said the Nov. 3, 2011 memo to former army commander, the now-retired lieutenant-general Peter Devlin.

Since then, the defence department has replaced 310 snow machines, out of a total fleet of 963, including 69 allocated to the Rangers. It has also purchased 310 small all-terrain vehicles."

It's the usual nonsense. There's an obvious and urgent military need, and then procurement spends years trying to find the perfect, advanced solution (read: experimental) instead of just buying the vanilla ones available now.

I hope they do decide against the F-35 contract. It's ridiculously overpriced for our military, especially given that the F-35s aren't even all that well designed for frozen-weather operations.

Personally, I think Boeing's Super Hornets are a much better offer. Half the projected price, bigger control surfaces for easier landings on ice and better agility in the air, and two engines so that if one stalls in the cold the other can keep the plane going.

Canada has concerns about protecting the sovereignty of its arctic territories. Snowmobiles could prove useful in that.

Battle for the Arctic heats up
Defending our sovereignty in the Arctic
Why everyone wants a piece of the Arctic

The main problem I see with such a system, even to a lesser extent with a system with term limits, is it takes a LONG TIME to get used to the job. Like any job there's a time before you become productive and useful in any reasonable capacity.

During that time, it's the civil service that holds the power. So long-term you'd just end up with all the power-hungry outsized-ego alpha types vying for the top jobs in civil service. And a random 4 year puppet show for the public.

We're seeing some of that in Canada, just look at how rampant, and blatant, political interference by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has become. That's a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who tell our "elected officials" what to do, and what to say, and are basicly running the show behind the scenes. Sometimes even without the Prime-Ministers knowledge! (If you believe Harper. I'm not sure what's worse, the PM not knowing what his office is doing, or condoning it ala the Nigel Wright Mike Duffy scandal)

Some of our MPs have even resigned from the government to sit as independents to be free to represent their constituents.

So, I think we would need a more thoroughly thought-out solution, with safeguards to prevent these sorts of issues in the unelected civil-service. Otherwise we'll end up back where we started, if not worse.

Jonathan

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/07/11/day-six-facebook-teen-jail.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130502/18364622931/ma-teen-arrested-held-without-bail-posting-supposed-terrorist-threat-facebook.shtml

Before you argue that that is not "protected" speech let me remind you of the point I was making about being allowed unrestricted freedom of speech in your own home joking around with your friends. The NSA is making nearly all forms of communication fullly public to be put under the microscope by law enforcement agencies looking for something to bust you on.

Hyperbole? Hardly.

At least Hayden didn't go overboard like Canada's then-public safety minister, Conservative Vic Toews, who actually did claim that online surveillance opponents supported child pornographers. That caused a very severe backlash from his own party's supporters, some of whom were against the legislation as much as the "liberals" were, if for different reasons.

As like the case in BC, Canada

Just to make sure you see the right article, I searched it myself. Here's one of the first ones that interviews the whistle blower who started the ball rolling on holding RBC to task for the issue: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/04/05/bc-rbc-foreign-workers.html

Watch Dr. David Suzuki's "The Nature Of Things" episode called "Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour":

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/smarty-plants-uncovering-the-secret-world-of-plant-behaviour.html

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/autism-enigma.html
http://www.andysstory.com/2011/12/nature-of-things-autism-enigma.html

Perhaps a much more "eye opener" reason for most of autism cases than "it's the vaccines!".

When I was a kid, my doctor would not give me antibiotics in pill form. He said that "it is unknown how they would affect developing gut bacteria". Heck, they (pill antibiotics) plainly weren't that available either. Antibiotic injections were the popular choice. Autism was also unheard of (1986, communism poland). As oral antibiotic usage exploded, so did autism. People forget that antibiotics are not benign. They kill a part of you - only 10% of a human body actually has human DNA. The rest is an ecosystem in itself.

I've always believed that when humans start to affect the microbe balance in the world, then all of us will be in trouble. It is ironic that we start with screwing up our innards, suffering and haven't yet figured out that we are the cause! Road to hell is paved with good intentions, eh?

I post videos of actual events that take place around the world to help people understand what really is happening so they don't live in a fantasy, but fall into reality. This approach helped to prevent countless disasters and made our streets and neighborhoods safer. It also made it safer for people who do all they can to hurt me or the site. Take the 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick video which had you contact me - members of Best Gore identified the perpetrator 4 days before the discovery of the torso in Montreal and the foot in Ottawa. Had the police not ignored the reports made at the time, they would have likely caught the perpetrator red-handed, while still in the apartment. Due to a mishap outside of Best Gore's control, the report was dismissed as not credible and perpetrator not checked up on, allowing him to carry through with his deed of mailing the body parts off and disappearing without a trace, but it changes nothing on the fact that because the video was made public, Best Gore community was able to identify the perpetrator and report it, which if not dismissed by the police, would have likely taken the perp off the street. But as it goes - no good deed goes unpunished.

Canada will send you to prison for purchasing a sex doll. No need to harm children. Just crimethink.