Slashdot Mirror

The thing is that in much of the U.S., if you are convicted of a felony, you lose the right to vote. So people who are branded "criminals" (even for things as silly as marijuana possession) are unable to fight back democratically.

Now that, if you ask me, is just crying for abuse.

(Up here in Canada, we've climbed off that slippery slope and everybody can vote--even those in prison and those without permanent addresses. See http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/elections/topics/1450/)

- RG>

The CBC has an article titled Bill Gates in Canada: a checkered legacy.

There are some choice quotes on anti-trust, Michael Cowpland (Corel founder and the WordPerfect debacle), recruiting from University of Waterloo, establishing a Richmond, B.C. campus, ...etc.

Worth a read.

From the CBC article on this:

between 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of the links that make up Bell's network in Ontario and Quebec experienced congestion between March 2007 and April 2008.

The question that comes to mind would be: what type of links are congested?

If it's a relatively minor link - just a few megabits - then the congestion wouldn't affect many people. If it's one of the primary links on Bell's backbone and it's pretty much continually congested then that might be a problem.

Of course, they could just invest in upgraded infrastructure...

The blog linked to is pure shit. Here's a link to the actual article:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/06/25/tech-caip.html

For now it shant be a problem especially if the new names are expected to cost over $100,000.

Correct. Flying thru the US, you will lose all rights, especially if you happen to not be white: http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/08/11/arar-lawsuit050811.html

I don't think they had patents. They tried using Trade Mark infringement law to prevent competition, but lost in Canada.

This kid was a jackass and deserved to get nailed, but he doesn't deserve to have them dig up every possible angle against the same thing, and hit him from all sides with it. The same tactics can (and have been) used to railroad those that didn't deserve a given charge, but were pressured into taking a lesser (though also undeserved) plea in fear of getting hit with the bigger punch if things went to trial. For example, see this case up here in Canada. Facing horrendous charges VS a lesser plea can push even innocent people to cave in.

The nomic looks pretty cool, might be adding that one later. Don't know who posted it, kinda got lost :S From top to bottom: all in English except otherwise mentioned. I'm using google reader.
1. Swedish travel journals of friends from resdagboken.com
2. Job that fits my search criteria at monster.ie
3. The Vinyl Café at http://cbc.ca/podcasting
4. CDFreaks News http://www.cdfreaks.com/news
5. Friend's blog
6. Another friend, probably not updating anymore. Book in blog form about a helpdesk. In Swedish. http://contactcentret.blogspot.com/
7. http://www.idg.se/ Swedish Computernews.
8. Another friend's blog.
9. Another friend's, probably not updating anymore.
10. Detroit Red Wings news.
11. Slashdot.
12. The Goliath Expedition. This dude is walking around the Earth. http://blog.goliath.mail2web.com/ Stalled at the moment though due to Russian VISA issues.
13. http://musicvsmusic.blogspot.com/ Pop Rock Indie Blog. Usually a bit emo music but sometimes they get it right. Sparsely updated.
14. non-working RSS feed for a Cybernations Alliance.
15. Three Panel Soul http://www.threepanelsoul.com/ Comic
16. http://www.tjuvlyssnat.se/ Swedish overheardit version
17. http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/ Another comic.

Delay Tolerant Internet (or DTN) is the current version of Vint Cerf's
"Interplanetary Internet" - basically, making a TCP-like protocol in situations where there may be long delays and no end-to-end connectivity. I thought that there was a test of this on a shuttle flight but cannot find a link, Vint Cerf last year talked about a test in 2010.

To me, that is a lot more interesting than just having a switch in LEO.

They also don't understand our government thinks it is OK to manipulate the media with government employees.

Government buffing Prentice's Wikipedia entry

At least we still have the CBC

That's why it is so important to argue the case for and against every law, before it becomes law. It's easy to write an introduction saying 'this is to stop terrorists', but much harder to frame the law so that it only applies to terrorism cases.

I'd say move! I left Blighty for Switzerland a few months ago, and have a whole new perspective now that I'm the foreigner. Generally great, but jeez, sometimes the Swiss make you feel like an outsider!

People have been executed, and then it was found that others had committed the murders.

Here's a poll that has some interesting stats.

More than 2/3 of those who answered said they believed in the death penalty. At the same time, 95% believe that, at least sometimes, an innocent person is convicted of murder. Most believe that people who are innocent have been executed within the last 5 years of the survey (2006).

Just do a search on how many people have had their convictions reversed because of DNA evidence decades later ... statistically, it's a certainty that at least some of those who received the death penalty would have been similarly exonerated. Here's a list of wrongful convictions in Canada. Here's 200 people who have been wrongfully convicted in California in the last 20 years - some of them sentenced to death.

Even judges agree that innocents have been executed

"In the past decade, substantial evidence has emerged to demonstrate that innocent individuals are sentenced to death, and undoubtedly executed, much more often than previously understood," the judge, Mark L. Wolf of Federal District Court in Boston, wrote in a decision allowing a capital case to proceed to trial.

The judge isn't denying it happens - he's saying it probably happens more often than we think. That's pretty damning.

So, if it is murder to kill someone who is innocent, the executioner is a murderer, to use the judge's words, "more often than previously understood."

I think bell canada has really shot itself in the foot with this one. If they are complaining that their lines are saturated they should install more infrastructure. Someone else pointed out that Europe has many countries with a larger population that have moved towards net neutrality without any infrastructure or network congestion issues. Seeing as bell has started throttling the service to customers who have already paid for a certain amount of data, they are in fact not delivering on their promise of providing said data. I was happily surprised by the insightful remarks on the cbc interview with Mr Mirko Bibic from bell. The full article can be found here http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/05/30/tech-qandabibic.html. Most consumers seem to have seen through his marketing speak. With the lawsuit from the consumer rights group and the government motion to move towards net neutrality it`s starting to look like Bell`s excuse for throttling is going to be what galvanizes Canadians towards net neutrality.

Just send out the Canadia to fix the problem!

Most people with that kind of knowledge are in research, writing papers. You might wonder if any organization that owns these kinds of weapons and won't forswear first use is a terrorist organization. Jimmy Carter was talking about the futility of anyone owning such things.

"One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."

Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie. MTBF can be generated, based on how long it takes for 'more than 50% of the data sectors fail' but who would keep using a disc that kept having randomly failing disc sectors, even if SMART technology can reduce the risk of loosing data...

so of course SSD makers are going to calculate a MTBF assuming the type of wear a typical person who boots vista once, for every time it crashes*, and does nothing but plays solitaire, freecell and spider solitaire all day! it takes a lot of hours of playing solitaire, a non disk heavy activity for a SSD device to fail!

remember NAND flash memory is based on changing the structure of a semi-conductor with an electric charge, the more you do it, the sooner the device fails... even reading the state of the material causes wear, because electricity is used to read as well as 'write' to the memory, kinda the way a laser erodes the dye on a recordable optical disc... obviously though if you can Write millions of times, you can read billions of times. there is another problem with NAND though, NAND memory is often made with tantalite, a rare mineral used in semiconductors and capacitors..

if we recycled 100% of computer parts, the tantalite problem would be solved easily, but we're not even close to 10% recycling... so even as we speak gorilla habitat in Africa is being destroyed for tantalite mines. they've been building more and more of the mines, since a price spike in 2000, and the number of mines running are keeping the cost of tantalite from spiking again, but it would be so much better if we just recycled our old computer waste. we could save gorillas, if we pushed for refundable deposits on recycling electronic devices like computers, etc. if it worked for the lead acid battery it can work for tantalite, copper, aluminum, gold, and silver in electronic devices. FWIW plastic in electronics can be recycled into diesel fuel, as i found out from here. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/small-business/recycling.html

*= which is probably every day, more if you install hardware drivers.

911 works on VOIP -they call it e911. It works as long as your provider has your address

The "as long as your provider has your address" is the catch: a kid died recently in Alberta after the parents called 911 via a VOIP line and the company didn't have their most recent address on file.

While I'm prepared to believe that the parents ought to have made sure their address with the VOIP company was current, I'm guessing there must have been some paperwork to fill out when they moved, for billing purposes at least. I expect more could be done to really drive the point home to people that unless you've provided your most recent address, the operator will have no idea where you are.

Hi squiggie :-)

The world food shortage is of rice.

Also wheat, caused by:

• 1. farmers shifting production from wheat to subsidized biofuels
• 2. people shifting from rice to wheat
• 3. wheat crop failures

Wheat shortage sends bread, pasta prices soaring
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 | 12:13 PM ET
CBC News

Soaring wheat prices have Canadian bakeries struggling, farmers rejoicing and customers digging deeper at the till to pay for their bread and pasta purchases.

The price of flour has been climbing steadily over the last year. (CBC)

The price of flour has doubled in the past two months as weather problems, including two years of droughts in Australia, have depleted wheat stocks to lows not seen since the 1970s.

Also contributing to the shortage is the flux of grain farmers switching to other crops, such as canola or corn, that produce biofuels.

"It's a very, very tight situation," said Canadian Wheat Board analyst Bruce Burnett. "World production has been under consumption in the last couple of years, so we have been drawing stocks down and we've finally hit levels that have made the market very, very concerned about supplies and rightly so."

Burnett said the prices are likely to remain high for at least another 18 months, as it could take up to three years of strong harvests to rebuild the worldwide stocks.

Bakers rising prices

The pricing crunch is affecting bakeries, and their customers, across the country. In Winnipeg, KUB Bakery said its prices need to go up to help cover the rising costs.

"We're not going to gouge anyone, we're going to take what we need to stay afloat. Bread is going to have to go up, any product with wheat in it will go up, that's a certainty," Ross Einfeld, the bakery's manager, told CBC News.

"I'm sure all bakeries across the board have the same problem. Their flour price has doubled, their ingredient price has doubled. So you're going to see prices increase."

Calabria Bakery, in Scarborough, Ont., is also finding rising flour prices a challenge.

The bakery's Sam Cuzzolino said they use roughly 15 tonnes of flour a month for bread and pizza dough and "as far as the bread side goes, if we're breaking even I'd be amazed at this point."

He said if the profits in the 50-year-old business continue to decline, he'll have to consider stopping baking bread altogether.

Mount Pearl, N.L., bakery manager Tom Bennett said bakeries can only swallow flour increases for so long.

"It's such a labour intensive thing and really, when you see the cost going up to pass it on to the customer, it's a very big increase for them to swallow," he said, adding that his customers would be upset if he raised his prices from $1.75 to $2.50 a loaf to help cover the costs.

The rising costs are also shrinking the bottom line at Coleman's grocery store in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland.

"From what we were paying a year ago to what we're paying now, it's actually phenomenal," said Tom Bennett, bakery manager.

"You wouldn't really think all these different things going on would affect the price of flour here in Mount Pearl, but it has." Soaring prices have farmers 'optimistic'

While bakeries are struggling, the high prices are encouraging for farmers.

Doug Chorney, a wheat farmer near Winnipeg and a member of farmers' group Keystone Agricultural Producers, says he and his colleagues are "very optimistic."

"These are the best prices for wheat we've seen in many farming careers, perhaps ever. Everyone is optimistic this is going to be a good year, providing we can produce the crop that hasn't grown yet," he said.

Chorney, who said he has already decided to plant more wheat this year, also said the expected profits may help keep some farmers

I hear that they're suspending the torch relay for three days too: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/05/18/olympic-torch.html So since there are to be three national days of mourning, maybe cutting access to entertainment sites is also a part of this...

We count votes by hand here in Canada, and I haven't noticed any speed problems. It's so fast they created a law so that the results from the east coast couldn't be released until the polls on the west coast closed, because they thought releasing the results influence the west coast results. It shouldn't be hard to find enough volunteers to get the counting done within a couple of hours for each polling station. Maybe you have too many people going to each polling station. There's only 352 votes per polling station, so counting that many ballots shouldn't take too long.

Because if they're international soil (or, for that matter, the US decides to declare its airports to be international soil), then suddenly the US can and probably will decide that the law is whatever they want and there isn't a constitution because it's not the US.

If passengers are deemed to be inadmissible, they have no constitutional rights even if later taken to an American prison. Mason told Judge David Trager that's because they are deemed to be still outside the U.S., from a legal point of view.

You'll love the comments posted on Canadian broadcast.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/05/12/quake-china.html#postc

It's incredible how much hatred there is here in Canada.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/05/12/quake-china.html#postc

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B

would you support Native American attacks against all other groups of Americans (e.g. you)?

if I say "the sky is yellow" and everybody accepts it, it's basically a religion: one person says and everybody else agrees.

This is not good at all, specially in the academic environment.

Do you have the opportunity to disagree?? ABSOLUTELY: prove it is wrong.

So, by searching the truth and trying to prove it's wrong, you MIGHT end up proving it is *really* wrong OOOOOOOORRRRRRR you might end up proving to yourself it's right.

Prove it's wrong. But don't come with "bullshit, big time bullshit!"

Perhaps it's hard to accept north-americans as the real terrorists. In that case, you might be the One who will take ALL the geopolitical academics IN THE WORLD from the path of being historically incorrect and mentally dammed. I'm not say in this or that country, I'm saying in the WORLD.

Perhaps you also don't want to recognize that the USA controls the United Nations and that there's some bacteria in south pole underground and some people thought about searching for it. They are really from the dinosaurs' epoch. Freeing those bacteria COULD be the end of the world, since they might do no harm, or might be like air-transmitted Ebola (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola). Those are possibilities. I don't have such knowledge to say what those bacteria really are. SOOO.... in face of that little problem, the scientists said "that's ok, folks, let's those things stay down there". But not the USA government.

Since the USA holds one of the chairs in the Security Council, which give USA, as the other chairs, power to block a project, blocked the non-exploitation of the Pole's underground. Any time we can die. Thanks to USA government. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

What do you want, huh?? You want a great power, but not the responsability that cames along with the power??? Who do you think you are, a rich? Have a huge quantity of money, but is not responsible for those who die of hunger...

I bet you don't read a lot of geopolitical books.
Here's something for you to begin with: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3818139/Chomsky_Books

Uncle SAM is goingo to save you (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/19/xin_27050119142492840419.jpg) from the devil nails (http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/pix/iraq_demnstrtn_cp_7433689.jpg) of the terrorists (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Abu-ghraib-leash.jpg) because terrorists (http://www.vermelho.org.br/admin/img_upload/crimedeguerra.jpg http://www.vermelho.org.br/admin/img_upload/terpalesti.jpg) are really bad. You, north-americans are good.(http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Abu-Ghraib-Prison-Photos11jun04p12.jpg).

Research on pigs has shown that tasers cause erratic heart rhythms when the barbs form a line that crosses the heart. Little surprise, because the heart's rhythm works on electric pulses.

In Canada we had more than one case of death after tasering, including a polish immigrant.

Funny, we kill people "accidentally" left and right. Are we "fixing the government" of Iraq?

The USA is the world's largest consumer of Cocaine, but we are continually fucking with cocaine-producing nations. We are the largest consumer of Afghani heroin, but we paid the Taliban to combat Opium production, no joke. The Bush family has been doing business with the Bin Laden family for many years (and long before that, they did business with Hitler) Note that I have included links only from reputable publications. Note also that if you search for documents related to these particular scandals, you have a very hard time finding documents in the US news. That's because 10 megacorporations control 95% of the media in the USA, and they're all owned or controlled by rich people getting richer on the status quo.

We're well past that point today. We've currently got a president who the people never elected. He wouldn't have even had the electoral college in the last election (he already didn't have the majority vote) if all votes had been counted. And the electoral college is unnecessary and inherently undemocratic. Only four times has it overridden the will of the American people, and in at the very least the last occasion it was both unwarranted and, simply, the wrong decision. We ended up with an AWOL DUI puppet instead of a genuine war hero without whom we might not have the internet today. The massive attempts to make Gore look like a whiny bitch worked and distracted all the sheeple away from the reality of what was occurring.

I'm not claiming that the Republicans are the problem. The populists are the problem, and unfortunately, that's most of our representatives - and most of our population.

Derek K. Miller on digital executors "Derek blogs about all aspects of his life, from his hometown of Burnaby B.C., to his kids, to his cancer. At the beginning of 2007, he was diagnosed with cancer and he's currently fighting stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. One of the things that Derek has been thinking about his digital legacy, and what should happen to our web presence when we die. Do we need to appoint a digital executor to oversee our online belongings? Someone who would know all of your passwords and keep up the payments for your domain name, for example, so your site would live on even after you have gone?"

Last time I caught the news, I heard that there was a group in Texas that got in big trouble for this.

I'd suggest that you find a girlfriend that's already been compiled elsewhere. If importing from certain countries (Thailand/Brazil/etc), you may want to ensure that the girlfriend is also compatible with your architecture and that you have complementary - rather than matching - peripherals.

Exactly. And its interesting that this coincides so nicely with this story.

Your municipal tap water is "socialized", but it works pretty well, I think.

Not nearly as well as after the water's gone through the products of a capitalistic filter company, it doesn't.

Except when Atlanta privatized it's water the water quality dramatically decreased. The city issued water alerts frequently. Personally I have a 5 gallon bottle I fill with filtered water at my coop.

more liberal states like California or New York could pass a universal health care law without the massive fighting that's necessary to push something like that through at a federal level.

Massachusetts is trying this. It even fines people for not having insurance. The unfortunate thing is that not everyone can afford health insurance and by not buying any they risk being fined.

this guy was thrown to prison and put to sex offender register for writing fiction.

He was writing fiction about having sex with children. Not sure if you're aware of this, but most pedophiles spend quite a bit of time fantasizing about this sort of thing before they actually commit the crime. The more material they have available to fantasize with, the further they progress down the path of becoming a pedophile themselves.

However, privacy and yadda yadda yadda. Pedophiles are the lowest of the lowest in my book. Why not use social networking sites as tools to catch those guys? If anything it'll deter them from using those sites to chase their prey.

Apart from the fact that "pedophiles" and "child molesters" aren't the same group, but two partially overlapping groups, the chances are that you are the lowest of the low in someone's book. If it's okay to ignore someone's rights because he's a pedophile, then it's also okay to ignore someone's rights because that someone happens to be you. Sure, you'd disagree - but then again, the people who's rights you refused to defend also disagreed, and it didn't do them much good, so it won't do much good for you either.

Child molesters are certainly scum. However, if you allow them to be deprived of their rights - including the right to privacy - then you are eroding the rights of both them and the children. Please think of the children and nip this in the bud !

Please also understand that "pedophiles" are, as far as authorities are concerned, no different than "terrorists" - a convenient boogeyman to keep people scared and act as X in "if we don't pass this law, the X win". It's a lot easier to turn the Internet into a tighly-controlled channel - and thus unable to threaten the status quo by letting people publish leaked information anonymously - if you can sell it as protecting children rather than protecting politicians.

Finally, the pedophilia boogeyman is already starting to hurt the very children supposedly protected; as an extreme example, there was a teen who got busted for uploading her own pictures, not to mention the couple who were arrested for sending each other pictures of themselves. Of course it hurts everyone else too - for example, this guy was thrown to prison and put to sex offender register for writing fiction.

The Academy Award-winning German film "The Tin Drum" was banned in 1980. src

Replying to my own post, bad form, I know ...

So, here is a news article which includes the assertion that you basically have no rights.

As a foreign national, and possibly even as a US citizen, you could find yourself with absolutely no legal rights whatsoever. I have no idea if that interpretation is still in effect or not. But, at one point, they could disappear your ass, and didn't feel like they had any real duty to protect you.

Scary shit!!

Cheers

And there was that guy who grew a new jaw bone on his back.

-l

I did. I then read about Cosmos 954 . I was referring more to the fact that we have had multiple launches with radioactive fuel on-board and very little fallout from them, such as Cosmos 954 that littered radioactive fuel across 124,000 square miles of land, and yet no fatalities. Nuclear would open up the solar system if we were just not so timid.

The latest Search Engine podcast (direct download) has an interview with the car dealership guy. Interesting story.

The latest Search Engine podcast (direct download) has an interview with the car dealership guy. Interesting story.

Hi,
I was listening to another member of the RepRap team, Adrian Bowyer, speak on the radio (actually podcast) today. He is a lecturer at the University of Bath and give some insights into the project. The interview has a great bit when he explains his motivations for open sourcing the project. You can listen to the interview on CBC's Spark website.

Enjoy,
Fenwick

unblocked the CBC? http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/04/04/cbc-china.html/

The CBC actually has a mandate to deliver the shows in the most relevant way for the public to get them. It's the same way a lot of their content is offered on podcast. It's the way that people want to listen to the radio, so they get it that way. In the same way, people want to be able to download TV shows using bittorrent, so they are trying to see how well it works. Limiting access to the CBC distributed shows is probably illegal in qutie a few ways.