Slashdot Mirror

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2007/0 2/05/urban-reserves.html This shows about the "urban reserves." They have been happening for many years now.

Indian nations are a farcical anachronism who have greatly outlived their usefulness. The US and CA govs should just stop recognizing them. It's time to move out of the stone age people.

We (or our parents) had a choice of coming to North America. The Indian nations were here, recognized by the crown (Queen Vicky, lor bless her!) as sovereign nations within the British Empire and their land claims recognized. Then some trumped up judge in London decided to write law from the bench (a.k.a. "activist judge") that said that aboriginals had no claim to their land. In direct violation of treaties and the ruling of the privy council. The government of the day said "What harm could come?" Well, as New Zealand and Canada learned, acting on an invalid judgement is a legal time bomb and as a result, modern Supreme Courts in NZ and Canada have said "That ruling should have never happened -- the land claims and treaties are in tact".

This case isn't about what you think it. A bunch of commissions over the years pointed out the bloody obvious: life on the reserves suck because they were systematically neglected and restricted by the Indian Act on how they could earn a living and still be allowed to live on their land (Part of the goal was to erase the identities and land claims of the original Indian nations and "Westernize" them). So a couple years ago, the Feds and provincial ministers got together with the native bands to figure out how to change things so the native Indians can become self-sufficient and agreed to the Kelowna agreement.

An agreement the current Conservative government unilaterally decided to break. This little stunt is probably going to be the first of many public actions. As some have said, it's going to be a long, hot summer in Canada this year...

(Note, I am not a Native Indian, but a real honest-to-goodness Indian (half actually), but I grew up with native Indians and have great sympathy for them. I also live in Canada and pay taxes so I'm not some unemployed, liberal hippie who won't have to pay for the settlements.

This was a big news story a few weeks back. At the time they mentioned the gallons of fuel and I immediately googled to compare it to the fuel capacity of a 747 and was shocked how much fuel a 747 needs. Ferrying 500 people upto 12,000 miles if fuel-efficient compared to the same distance by car, but it is still A LOT of fuel.

Here is a CBS story and here is a googling of 396 other mentions.

As to why WTC7 collapsed, why would our Government feel the need to collapse an un-hit building? It would surely just lead people like you to say "what about WTC7?!?!" WTC7 was smaller than the other two towers, really big to be sure, but smaller. While the two towers collapsed straight downward their debris shot out at their bases, with not just tons of material, but with hundreds of thousands of tons of material (together the two main towers weighed approximately a MILLON tons!), much of which slammed into the base of WTC7. The fact that it didn't collapse immediately is similar to why the other towers didn't collapse immediately. Once huge structures like these are compromised it can take minutes or hours for the sagging support columns to finally deform so much that they reach a point where those above them snap and give way completely. Add to this there were fires in WTC7 that where not being attended to due to all the attention on the other buildings and the difficulty of getting past the afore mentioned debris. While the two main towers may have been designed on paper to withstand an airplane hit -- WTC7 was never designed to withstand being bulldozed at its base with what amounts to hundreds of bulldozers simultaneously at huge velocity.

Again, I am sure your unconvinced, because no mater how many logical explanations I can provide your camp will hang on anything that seems anomalous to support a conspiracy theory that validates a certain view of our government. No matter that you or Sean Penn or Rosie O'Donnell or thousands of other bloggers have no training or expertise to decide what is anomalous or not.

There are beautiful things to see in Canada too, including mountains.
We're right in the middle of picking the top 7 of these 50:
http://www.cbc.ca/sevenwonders/

You comment made me think back to an interview I heard a few days back on the CBC (Canadian radio) asking about whether computer should forget. I know it is great we have all this information at our fingers tips but at what point is it too much being able to sort though and make sense is a skill not many people have and begging able to ignore all the junk and think that are not importer even fewer people have.

With the shear amount of information being created and none of it going away EVER these days were becoming pack rats to the point where we even box up all our own feces and file it away for later examination. In the real world we would clean this up and throw it out every so often. So it is no surprise to me that when someone's slate is wiped clean (and all there shit is tossed out) in the computer world they feel so good after their initial shock of the loss. Most things that are critically important are backed up or have been passed around with other people who you are working on it with.

Any who if you would like to listen to it:
15/05/2007: Internet Memory - Technology that doesn't Forget
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20070515_2306.mp 3

Here in Canada, it is allowed by law to use "minor corrective force of a transitory and trifling nature" : http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/01/30/spanking04 0130.html

I'm glad that someone has at last unmasked the conspiracy. The international prefix 'kilo-' being the awkward 1000 instead of the far more convenient 1024 is clearly a takeover of standards bodies by corrupt automobile manufacturers, who wish to claim a top speed of 200 so-called kilometres per hour when in fact you're only getting 195.3125 kilometres/hour for your money.

Even governments are in on the scam. Yesterday the Royal Canadian Mint issued a one hundred 'kilogram' gold coin. Nowhere do they point out to investors that they're being suckered into receiving only 97.65625 kilograms of gold. It's time we, as consumers, rose up and declared we're not going to stand for it any more!

Clearly the animal rights activists are our only savior. They know so much more than we do, that is why they are pushing to have a chimpanzee legally declared a 'person'. [sarcasm meter at maximum level]

Live TV is not dead. It just requires a live event to make you want to watch: sports, concerts, debates, fights, etc.

Communications is an eyes & ears business... Some media moguls understand this -- buying up or getting exclusive deals with sports teams & venues ensures revenue stream from eyeballs no matter how it happens.

Appointment TV is also not dead, it's just a bit different. For 12 million people, the season finale of Heroes is appointment-worthy. In an on-demand world, viewings just might be spread out across 2-3 days instead of a single hour.

Climate change will undoubtedly have losers -- but it will also have winners.

I have run the idea that some amount of warming doesn't seem such a great evil for Toronto past friends and neighbours, and their heads nod. "Oh, yeah," said one in a voice bathed in a vat of sarcasm heated to about 150 degrees. "Everybody here just loves long, cold winters. That's why so many of us go ice fishing on Lake Ontario."

What this means politically is that the climate debate in this country is going to have to be much more nuanced than elsewhere to make a lasting impact on the average resident. It is going to have to seriously take into consideration benefits. It's going to have to accept that some of the benefits are genuine improvements and not some oil company's propaganda.

This article reminded me of a segment I saw last year on the Dragon's Den TV show, where an inventor presented an embedded-chip technology for discs:
http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/e05/4.html

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/05/08/fish-f arms.html?ref=rss/

Hopefully all the nuts (like yourself) in the big wide land of the fucked will pass away and do us all a favor. Cheers to Canada and China for doing us all a big favor.

Anyone who's taken the tour at the Mint in Ottawa (it's pretty nifty) knows those coins are something they boast about quite heavily. The people leading the tours I've been on, said the printed coins (be it the red poppy available only through Tim Horton's at the time or the pink ribbon through Shoppers Drug Mart and RBC) are a world first. Here's the CBC article from 2004 first announcing them.

She did surrender. From the CBC story

Sarkozy defeated his rival, Socialist Party Leader Ségolène Royal, who conceded minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m. local time

AIDS isn't some disease you catch through the air by luck

Tell that to these women

Mods were wrong to mod you as flamebait - it's a valid opinion although it disgusts me that people think that way.

It's human nature to want to procreate. We're coded to desire to procreate. That's why it feels soooooooooooo good :) And just so you know, although Jesus may say differently, we're biologically made to have more than one parter in life too. So given that science has made us a certain way, and there's a disease out there that exploits it.

Good on Brazil for taking a stance against an opportunistic company. There's the need to recover R&D costs - which is understandable, but fleecing these poor people is another story.

When you take this incident and compare it to a recent one in Canada (involving a gun not a hammer!), and the comparable measured response...

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2007/05/02 /gun-bandtrip.html

The CBC writes:

"Catholic schools in the Elk Island district outside Edmonton will examine security procedures after a 12-year-old student on a field trip was arrested in British Columbia for carrying a loaded handgun.

The student was one of 20 members of the Holy Redeemer School's band, which was in Whistler last weekend to perform at a festival.

The gun was surrendered without incident after other students told their supervisor about the weapon. The student was arrested, charged with possession of a prohibited weapon, then put on a plane home and released to his father. He has since been suspended from school."

______

I guess we Canadians don't think everyone is a terrorist... Perhaps because we don't have a government and a media establishment with the goal of distracting us from the much more tangible real risks. Like risk of dying due to lack medical care (because our medical insurance won't pay for it), or the fact that we're involved in a war half way around the world.

Maybe it's also because we spend more on education than on keeping people in jail..

I switched my house to CFLs and started saving $15-20 per month. If everyone did this then the big power companies would see a dent in their bottom line and so they start spreading lies like this.

Actually that's not true...shame on you. Around here the power companies (big and small) are pushing everybody to use CFLs like mad, and I think that'a a very good thing.

The more likely thing to happen, though, is that if everybody did switch to CFLs the power companies would lose enough money that they'd raise rates! That's what happened in several places; here's one link. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2007/03/22/ toronto-hydro-conservation.html

Ferretman

School education has nothing to do with how skilled you are and how well you can get the job done.

So, where do you get your dental work done? Some guy in a garage? Or do you go to a dentist who went to school and studied the subject?

I'm prepared to bet you also get your medical treatment from a qualified doctor, rather than someone who didn't go to medical school but has read a bunch of books and seen every episode of "ER".

Actually, speaking of which, I heard a story on the CBC about a StatsCan study which showed that ethanol in gasoline made little or no difference in terms of harmful emissions. The link is here. On a [slightly] unrelated note, it really bugs me that our [my] government is building a subway to Vaughn at a cost of CAN$6bn. Really....WTF! Who is going to be using a subway to Vaughn?? Oh right, that would be the Minister of Finance of the government of Ontario. WTF! Why can't we use money for useful things, like a light rail network across the city of Toronto.

I agree. And all that nonsense about breaking up "company stores" that kept workers in virtual slavery back in the 1800's was nonsense. I think it is wonderful to have a captive audience of customers who you can sign contracts with and then execute them in a way so they can never get free of the contracts.
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/bigsugar/sugar.htm l
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-4175(198610) 28%3A4%3C729%3A%22MFOST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

If it is legal, then screw'em I always say. I think abolishing debtor's prison was a terrible idea in fact and it was great that we recently reduced people's ability to declare bankruptcy when they develop catastrophic illnesses. Honest businesses were just losing too much money on destitute people who still had a small amount of money they could fork over. The way we charge people without insurance five to ten times as much for the same procedure as we charge the insurance ($75 vs $1500 in some cases) company so we can have a "retail" rate is completely legal. Vicious and evil-- but completely legal.

All these things and eternal copyrights for mickey mouse are what makes America great.

You mention candy makers moving to Canada, so I feel obligated to share the news that Hershey's is moving their Canadian plant to Mexico. It was the biggest employer(400 year-round jobs and 200 seasonal ones) in a small town of about 10,000... I don't see Smiths Falls doing very well in 10 years time unless something major happens to dump cash into it again.

You can read a CBC article on the subject here. Kind of sad, since the plant was apparently still profitable for Hershey's, just not *as profitable* as it could be in Mexico. Still, the workers at the plant had a hand in it, they've been collecting very healthy raises for years, eventually priced themselves out of a job. Sucks for the city and all the other poor bastards who are going to go out of work because of it though. With a huge jump in unemployment there'll be less money to spend at restaurants, etc... etc...

Have you actually seen the LOTR musical? I saw it the first week it opened in Toronto, and actually liked it! Critics are critics because they think they are intelligent enough that they can pick apart something. I was entertained, I felt it was well worth the money for the trip and I was very impressed with the show. Tear it apart all you want, but you just proved to me that all you did was just read a few news snippets and drew uninformed conclusions...

The sadder thing is that saving energy can lead to you paying more for electricity.

Like most electric companies, the utility in Toronto, Canada promotes conservation. But they've been too good at it. Rates will go up 6.3% to make up for a $10.4-million drop in revenue.

Remember, this is Canada we are talking about, where, for a short while, it was illegal to name a cow with a human name all because a mid-level functionary, and hyper-sensitive twit shared the same name as a state owned cow.

What do you mean Vista is selling?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/151221 6
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/03/27/tech -vistasales.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&si d=aQ.oZSDrncbk&refer=us

You must mean why Vista is selling *at all* which is also related to issues other than security.

And from the CBC.

Nobody cares how many men are becoming ... nurses.

Religion has a utility.

If you're dealing with a bunch of peasants who are too primitive and uneducated to be able to behave in a fashion that is in their own long term self interest, religion will allow a wise man to say to his fellows "Forget why we should live this way, GOD said to live this way, so do it." and they do.

This will allow them to behave in a co-ordinated fashion, and that is going to provide them benefits.

But it makes them sheep.

If you follow a religion, you're following a cult of a dead wise primitive. If it's good advice, good. But when not if it becomes bad advice, you all die and scatter to the four winds. You die because you're a bunch of stupid sheep and you didn't know why you were doing what you were doing in the first place, let alone how to recognize when it's stopped being wise.

It's served humanity well. Take the whole sexual taboo thing. Look at Africa, the AIDS problem thing, imagine there's no condoms and no medicine. In an environment like that, the group of primitives that has a religion with sexual taboos will survive while the others go the way of Soddom.

But it's not ideal.

It's not even good, not by the standards of any educated person.

It's a bunch of lies and charlatanism and propaganda techniques, generally only effective on the young and the desperate.

People should be able to make educated and informed decisions about how to live without having their minds polluted with the belief that justifying actions and decisions with faith and desire instead of reason is an ok thing for them to do.

It's not an ok thing for them to do, it's an insane thing for them to do.

It makes them a danger to themselves and others, and it makes them a weapon with shining eyes and no brain, ready to be wielded by power-hungry charlatans.

Oh, if you want a more direct example, you can look at yesterdays headline on CBC.ca.

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/04/16/sextuple ts-court.html

Jehovah's Witness parents of sextuplets. Don't believe in blood transfusions, so they let 2 of their babies die before someone with more sense than political savvy stepped in and seized the kids. Now they're suing the government for violating their human rights. They'll likely win. Shame about the dead babies...

Was it not Paul Martin's LIBERAL government that started sending troops to Afganistan?

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2004/07/25/canada_a fghanistan040725.html

I'm sorry, I know it's tempting to think that, but by saying that you disrespect what happened at both Dawson College and École Polytechnique, and even Taber.

These tragedies are not uniquely American, no more than rape and murder are.

Oh, but they do! See here or here.

And so do the Canadians -- see here.

No one is immune to such aberrant behaviour.

I can not help but wonder if CBC, and eMarketer think that Canadian men that sign on as women are probably acting like a bunch of women?

The article makes no mention of the fact that it has been disease and not navigation problems the honeybees have been suffering from. There is already strong evidence that a disease that attacks the bees immune systems is the culprit and not anything to do with navigation.

Disease article 1

Disease article 2

Disease article 3

these are three of hundreds by the way.

So where's the link from navigation to disease. Sure the bees may not be returning, but maybe because they died along the way and not that they got lost. The only possible link is the bees know of certain things that cause disease that they stay away from, but until some link as such is shown this theory it isn't worth a dime.

Here's a collection of articles on how Canada made the change to the metric system back in the 1960s. I'm amazed that the US still follows the old imperial system; indeed, only three countries do not use the metric system, and those are the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.

No, I mean *this* dispute in which the U.S. was required to return about 80 per cent of the more than $5 billion in duties it had collected on lumber imports.

One thing that was glossed over quite a bit in the article from the Beeb is that the US is actually launching two WTO complaints about China. The CBC article says

On Monday, the U.S. government said it would file two WTO cases contending that Beijing's lax enforcement of trademark and copyright rules violates WTO rules and that China is unfairly blocking sales of U.S. movies, music and books.

It figures -- first they complain that the Chinese aren't selling enough US movies, music, and books. Then when they find a way to start selling them by the truckload, the US complains about that too. =)

I think it was this series of disputes (linked from your law.pitt.edu reference), most of which have been decided in favour of Canada, many of which have been ignored or misapplied by the US. Yes, some of the decisions have gone against Canada, but most of them seem to have gone against the US.

I am a Carleton Alum. A few years ago during my ENGINEERING ETHICS course, 30 students were busted for plagiarising their final project. When they announced it in class, it was the funniest moment of my life. I am glad to see Carleton doing something about it!

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2002/07/04/plagiari sm020704.html

As a Canadian, I cycle through most of the same sites. Add "Not Even Wrong", SciTechDaily, aldaily, edge.opg, and until quite recently Wired. I tried to read Lubos once or twice, I just can't do it. Something bad happened to Wired after the ownership changed. aldaily and edge.org are not what they used to be, either. Hate the new three-column format at the NYTimes. I read half as much content there since that style change. If I'm super bored and listless, I click on the lower left link on CNN and read about the ten tightest buns in college sports. Somehow I think CNN would know.

For a moment there I thought "The Register" was listed under the heading "For actually thinking". Good thing I wasn't drinking milk at the time. Mostly I read the Inquirer instead, despite their green-eyed malice toward the Wikipedia, 500 stories a year about stock photography, and another 300 stories a year about Wikipedia repeatedly declaring stock photography "non-notable", and an unrelated 200 stories a year about Sony's incompetence, if Shannon hasn't died recently, or Pamela hasn't been outed. Stories about the incompetence of HPaq, however, receive my undivided attention.

Scratch CTV. Never visit there. I prefer to get my water-insoluable fiber content from the hockey coverage at slam.canoe.ca. For a couple of seasons, I'd kill time when I was out of sorts watching Rick Mercer video from his site at CBC.

If the link is still there, this was one of the truly good ones. Right now I'm on a codec-impaired Fedora Core system so I can't check it myself. On my Feisty Fawn beta crash-box, X refused to start. No soup for me.

http://www.cbc.ca/mercerreport/backissues.php?seas on=2

I believe in a traditional family. Week of Feb 14, 2005.

If you're American, don't take offense. There's usually a whole segment of a Mercer episode devoted to offending Americans. This segment is not that one. I think the difference between Canadian humour and American humor is that Americans mock failure, while Canadians mock failure rebranded as success. If it hadn't been for Hurricane W. half of New Orleans might still be there, but then I digress.

In any case, Mercer has a few sharp words to direct towards "Tradition, Mark II". That's what I like. Speaking of chimps, I'll trawl edge.org or sciencedaily for six months for one good Sapolsky.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sapolsky.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/07021 8134333.htm

Thanks, I've already added a couple of those sites to my bookmarks, too bad they don't have RSS feeds. Ill look at some of the rest of them in a bit.

As for me, being Canadian, (but living in Europe) and using a lot of politics with my teaching (English teacher), I try and keep a diversified list. I'll try and list them more by theme than amount visited.

Canadian:
The CBC - Dissapointing RSS feed, they don't have too much/day, but it's always good to see what they have to say on Canadian politcs.
The Globe and Mail - The best site for at least a bit thoughtful Canadian news.
The CTV - OK, pulp, but once in awhile it's interesting to see what pulp has to say about things.
TSN - Sports, got to keep up with hockey and curling, none better.
Macleans - The Canadian equivalent of Time, some of their stuff is really great.

International:
The BBC - Probably the best English language news in the world, enough said.
The Guardian - Better analysis than the BBC, but not the sheer volume.
Al Jazeera - More balanced than what you'd think, at least the English version ... well, except for the editorial cartoons.
NY Times - Amazingly crummy RSS feed, seeing as it's one of the biggest newspapers in the US (but probably still better than the CBC).
Deutche Welle - Not the best site, either, but as I'm living in Germany ...

For actually thinking:
The Christian Science Monitor - I'm not religious, and except for a few things (see their "about us"), neither are they. What they are is the most balanced news in the US I've ever seen. They are thoughtful, honest and as far as I can see don't pander to any particular point of view.
Sign and Sight - This is only if you want to spend some time actually reading, as it's not meant for the masses. It takes articles by thinking people from across Europe and translates them into English.

Others: The Register - Tech news with a British sense of humour, and people think they are biased because of it.
Neil Gaiman's Blog - Not as interesting as it used to be, but I've learnt a lot about the book/publishing world through his blog.

Yes, I'm an information hound, and I like to see as many points of view as possible. I've tried fox news a couple of times, but most of the topics I'm interested in they've just taken things off the wire, so nothing new. What I also do is search google news when I find an article I want to get more points of view on. I don't use the service itself, but they are great for finding out who is saying what about a particular topic - you might even find a new angle that hadn't been said 100 times before.

Please see: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/06-07/oct28.html . This was a radio show with an interview with one of the researchers on an icebreaker that goes into the northwest passage in the high arctic every summer. This research shows that CO2 increases may indeed be an EFFECT of global warming. It is also claimed that warming will release large quantities of methane from arctic tundra. Also, you can find the Vostock data and plot it yourself. Finally, for those who support the "forcing" model that a small step wise increase in CO2 will cause a forcing of H2O that will in turn amplify the impact of the CO2, consider that eliminating CO2 also reduces aerosols and dust. The forcing (in the opposite direction) of aerosols and dust is (according to the IPCC Global Climate Model) much much larger than the forcing of CO2. So reducing human emmissions of CO2 will accelerate global warming. Indeed, pollution control seems to follow the recent (1940 to 2006) trends much more closely than CO2 levels do.

Cheers

JE

Obviously burning ethanol emits carbon, but that carbon recently came from the atmosphere. So at least it's not unlocking any carbon that has been long bound as a solid or liquid inside the Earth

This affects some purchasers from the Canadian retailers Winners, and HomeSense, as per this CBC article.

More importantly, there has been recent arrests in Florida relating to this case.

This affects some purchasers from the Canadian retailers Winners, and HomeSense, as per this CBC article.

More importantly, there has been recent arrests in Florida relating to this case.

The initial release of material from the report did not provide details of the reasons for Canada's tumble in the rankings. For the U.S., it cited the low rate of mobile telephone usage, a lack of government leadership in information technology and the low quality of math and science education.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2006/10/26/ ombudsman-probe.html

... he was trained by Hamas in order to assassinate a senior Israeli official visiting the US and to attack members of the US and Canadian Jewish communities. Hamas-trained terrorist, Canadian national, arrested by ISA

One of those charged -- an Edmonton, Alberta, man who used the screen name "Big_Daddy619" -- allegedly distributed live videos of himself molesting the four children younger than 12. 27 charged in child porn sting

By journalists you mean half-human buffalo herders right?