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Obviously these idiots didn't learn from what happened when New Brunswick government had tried to bail out a poorly run company that could only produce one of the worst cars ever built. What a total Pricklin.

Canada's just jealous because their persistent stupidity at the UN finally turned other countries against them last year.

Samsung also will be paid the feed-in rate of 13.5 cents a kilowatt hour for the wind power it produces and 44.3 cents for its solar power. Electricity bills are climbing in Ontario, because these generous contracts with green power producers are well above the market price of 3.31 cents for electricity.

Notice the 41.0 cents they are getting for solar above market prices, guaranteed. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario-samsung-in-7-billion-deal-for-green-energy/article1439002/

Canada is selling it's nuclear industry to private interests.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ottawa-to-sell-aecl-to-snc-lavalin/article2078110/

That's fine. But posting offensive and tasteless videos to Youtube shouldn't be any of the school's business unless it's A) done from school property, B) the videos make threats, incite violence, or hatred, or C) specifically ridicule teaching staff (the latter would arguably disrupt the school environment). And any way you consider it, there is nothing wrong with a student collecting signatures on a petition voicing disagreement with the decision of the school administration.

School is a different environment, and students have less ability to express themselves there as they would in the broader public. That is as it should be for the sake of maintaining a school environment that all students can participate in. But if I had any doubt that the school administration had overstepped its bounds, hassling the petition organizer clinches it. The school administration is going too far. And it seems the police agree. There's already an updated article that indicates the police have finished their investigation and dropped the case.

Worrying that legal euthanasia may lead to trouble with insurance companies is only a problem in the very few, terribly uncivilized, western countries that do not have universal medical care paid for by taxes.

Yes, we keep hearing reports of how those government run plans turn out.

British healthcare in crisis despite massive investment
Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed
Hospitals must make deep cuts to survive

For $41-billion, Canadians deserve a straight answer

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks. . . .

Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on. ...

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.

Also note that the United States actually has tax payer funded medical care, Medicare, for example. Medicare refuses more treatment than private insurers:

ALL nuclear power will be ended in Germany by 2022. All but three stations will closed by 2021, wityh the final three being shuttered and buried the next year, if they need the power still, but not after. In related news, Germany plans to double renewables by 2020. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/germany-decides-to-pull-plug-on-nuclear-power/article2039434/ Go ahead and troll rate me down, it won't change the news.

This isn't the only time its happened in Mission http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/mission-resident-sues-over-safety-inspections/article2010579/ There are plenty more stories http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=557&q=mission+bc+hydro+inspections&aq=f&aqi=&aql=f&oq=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=7a3bfecf6f580253

It is in fact a "safety inspection". I believe they do need a warrant to get into your home unless you let them in, I don't know if the would need extra evidence to get the warrant or not. here is a link. BCLocalNews. There is also a $5200 that can be charged to you regardless of if you have a grow op or not, though it is not always charged. here is another link Globe&Mail

Article

It's an attempted end-run around obtaining a search warrant, which would require more than just higher than average power consumption. The way it works is the municipality sends a bylaw inspector to a home for a "safety inspection" after someone notices that the power consumption at the residence is higher than it should be.

The inspector can't force his way in, but a bit of bullying and a stern "What have you got to hide?" or "I'll come back with a warrant and make your week difficult" is often all that's necessary, especially if the homeowner in question isn't actually doing anything wrong, and isn't used to dealing with stuff like this. The inspector brings along a police escort for "safety and security." Convenient.

The inspector looks around, and if he finds a grow op, well, hey, lookee here, the police just happened to be down the hall! Now they don't need a search warrant because it wasn't "a police search."

If the inspector finds nothing illegal, he (often but not always) presents the homeowner in question with a bill for the inspection, which can range from $5k to $10k.

Good news though: A few days ago, the BC Supreme Court has issued a giant "fark you" to the practice:

Article

Article

It's an attempted end-run around obtaining a search warrant, which would require more than just higher than average power consumption. The way it works is the municipality sends a bylaw inspector to a home for a "safety inspection" after someone notices that the power consumption at the residence is higher than it should be.

The inspector can't force his way in, but a bit of bullying and a stern "What have you got to hide?" or "I'll come back with a warrant and make your week difficult" is often all that's necessary, especially if the homeowner in question isn't actually doing anything wrong, and isn't used to dealing with stuff like this. The inspector brings along a police escort for "safety and security." Convenient.

The inspector looks around, and if he finds a grow op, well, hey, lookee here, the police just happened to be down the hall! Now they don't need a search warrant because it wasn't "a police search."

If the inspector finds nothing illegal, he (often but not always) presents the homeowner in question with a bill for the inspection, which can range from $5k to $10k.

Good news though: A few days ago, the BC Supreme Court has issued a giant "fark you" to the practice:

Article

A longer version is here.

This article's a bit heavier on details:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/reports-say-osama-bin-laden-dead-us-president-obama-to-speak-soon/article2006299/

Mr. bin Laden was killed at a mansion outside the Pakistani capital Islamabad, CNN reported. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official told Associated Press Mr. bin Laden was killed in a ground operation in Pakistan, not by a Predator drone. A senior Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that he was killed in Pakistan.

Blaming it on a juniour member is definately a common thing to do when a senior member is at fault. Every time there is a hideous breach of private information or a NOT handwritten into Canadian legislation, it's a 'low-level' beurocrat at fault. It's used to conjure up images of pimply-faced amateur civil servants.

It's a good reason for intelligent, dedicated civil servants to leave the government...

You can't seriously still believe that vaccines cause autism after all the articles on slashdot that have mentioned the fact that the originator committed a fraud that caused the deaths of thousands of children?

Either a) The chinese are frustrated by the security measures in place on W7 phones, and can't compete, or (much more likely) ... b) They've already been using W7 on their phones, but have changed the colours slightly. When challenged on the "so-called" similarities, they'll simply state that it was a Chinese invention first. Much like the RedBerry .

B? history repeating itself. A? ... well, I'm still waiting for a security measure on a computer that can be both practical and unhackable.

Geert Wilders, is that you?

Canada. We're having the net neutrality thing to, the CRTC decided it was a bad idea and the prime minister (who is pretty right wing by Canadian standards, but basically a flaming commie pinko by US standards) publicly stated "CRTC will rescind ‘unlimited use’ Internet decision – or Ottawa will overturn it" (code speak for the PM).

So basically the language course will consist of: 1) learn to spell with extra "u"'s, 2) throw in an "Eh", "Eh!", "Eh?" or "EH(like a grunt)" at the end of sentences for emphasis and 3) stop saying things like "y'all".

In Canada, we are facing a fight over Usage-Based-Billing, and whether the federal government can effectively force it on ISPs. The idea isn't actually terrible per se, but the way they're trying to implement it certainly is.
One thing that has come up time and time again is that it's to protect the consumer from the excess of the 1% of extreme consumers. They're often implicitly labelled as pirates by the ISPs, but in fact are the vanguard.
An excellent article in the Globe and Mail had this to say on the matter:

The knowledge that penalties await heavy Internet usage does something quite terrible: discourage desirable behaviour. Most of Bell’s arguments for treating consumers as wrongdoers rely on the villainization of “bandwidth hogs” who use up everyone else’s bandwidth and generally bring misery to the land. But there are better words for big users of the Internet: “pioneers” and “innovators.” A nation that spends its time worrying about bandwidth caps is not a nation that leads.

The other thing Watson showed by its mistakes is that its AI still lacks understanding and intelligence.

Often it's your wrong answers that show how much you really understand.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0215/On-Jeopardy-Watson-s-mistakes-reveal-its-genius

Clue: It was this anatomical oddity of US gymnast George Eyser.
Ken Jennings' answer: Missing a hand (wrong)
Watson's answer: leg (wrong)
Correct answer: Missing a leg

And the "Toronto":
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/watson-computer-makes-elementary-error-on-jeopardy/article1909685/?cmpid=rss1

Once the AI's wrong answers start to look intelligent, the next level of understanding would be when the AI can actually teach someone what it knows.

If you can teach difficult new stuff to stupider people then you're getting to Feynmann material :).

Last.fm has been requiring a subscription in other "less-civilized" countries (for all devices, computers included) like Canada for a while now. $3/month isn't bad for premium services. Additionally, Pandora won't even show us Canadians their home page, let alone stream music to us.

Probably because, while it's bad enough here in the US, it's far worse with regards to the record labels in Canada and streaming music services. It also looks like this year it stands to get worse:

Starting next year [the article date was Sept. 2010, so that means this year], [Re:Sound] wants to charge web-based music sites that stream to mobile devices the greater of two figures: 45 per cent of the site's gross revenues in Canada or 7.5-tenths of a cent for every song streamed.

45%...

The CRTC doesn't really have much choice, as Tony Clement's tweet suggests.

Every time I post on this, I get modded toll by somebody with an agenda, but I think it's important so I try again.

Assange is a narcissist. He isn't doing anything honorable by dumping all this classified stuff. Leaking information which reveals wrongdoing is noble, wholesale dumping of classified material is chaos. Some secrets are secret for good reasons. For example:

What good comes from leaking the cables of a diplomat clandestinely investigating human rights abuses? It simultaneously gave the oppressive regime a reason to be more oppressive and the names of people to go after, but Assange knows best - people have a right to know! See WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive

How about undermining a democratic reformer in Zimbabwe? Did that do any good? I have a good friend in Zimbabwe, he's in enough danger already just for supporting the MDC. Now a cleptocratic tyrant has the excuse he needs to hold on to power, prolonging the misery of an entire country, and my friend might end up in jail, or dead. But I suppose the death and deprivation of faceless Africans won't keep Julian up at night.

Oddly, one case where Mr. Assange saw fit to withhold information was the "Collateral Murder" video. Not because it could endanger somebody, but because it didn't fit with the narrative he constructed. Rather than objectively present the video with the relevant context, he purposefully left out any mention of the convoy that was approaching or the attacks that had recently occurred that same day, implying that the helicopter was just randomly firing at a group of people. He implies that the pilot's identification of weapons was incorrect, but fails to provide a copy or even a link to the report (which was released, though names are redacted), which details fun facts like the RPGs and AKs they found on and around the "civilians". He doesn't mention that the Reuters employees had not told anyone where they were going to be, and were not wearing ANY press identification. I could go on...

The point is that Assange has always had an agenda, and it certainly isn't exposing government wrongdoing, or even presenting the uncolored, unfiltered truth (if it doesn't suit him). I don't know why so many people here idolize him.

with this awesome Canadian study proving that seeing meat calms you down.

I'm not singling out 'e-publication' as uniquely vulnerable. I think that e-publication could be great.

The problem is Apple's current model. If a few prominent publishers were to stand up to Apple then the problem could be solved, but I haven't seen much evidence of this yet.

I have seen some mentions of the issue, e.g. this article in Canada's national newspaper, but it amazes me how little of this I have seen:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/ivor-tossell/apple-esquire-dust-up-bodes-ill-for-the-publishing-utopia-we-pictured/article1809205/

On the whole I am shocked that people don't seem to care about freedom of speech anymore. Witness that my post has not been modded up but your response has been.

There are more than enough resources left on earth to reach that goal but our great civilized cultures would rather see the starving masses die off than elevated to our own level if one is to believe people like you.

I agreed until I got here. Besides thinking the planet's ecosystem would not survive if everyone became as wasteful as the average American, many person could actually die. As has happened in the past, US hunger for coltan, used in cell phones, DVD players, video game systems, and computers has fueled fighting and massacres in the Congo.

Falcon

Oh no....
The Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper loves to watch Fox News. :(

"The Prime Minister said he stopped watching television news five years ago, noting that he’s just “too invested” in the issues and stories. He joked that he’ll even tell his children to turn down the television if the news is on and he’s within earshot.

Rather, he scans the front pages of the newspapers every morning and lets his staff brief him on the rest of the news. He does, however, watch American political talk shows on Sunday morning. The network he watches the most is, of course, Fox News. "
(source: Globe and Mail, "Bob Rae’s tumble buys PM time before piano showdown", Jane Taber December 16, 2010)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/bob-raes-tumble-buys-pm-time-before-piano-showdown/article1840240/

I wonder if there is a correlation between Stephen's stupid policies and his addiction to Fox "right wing propaganda brainwash" network.

Ugh. At least I can claim I didn't vote for him.

While same-sex marriages are legal is Canada, they're not married. The interview you're reading is in The Lunch, a Globe section specifically meant to be people pieces.

For a little more background, the Globe is "Toronto's national newspaper", a business rag primarily aimed at our version of Wall Street, hence a specific connotation on Lunch here.

Once the students left and the office door closed, the teacher would open her desk drawer and with a shaking hand give me horrifying photos of disinterred bodies. The Timorese resistance would dig up the fresh graves of torture victims, take photos for evidence, and pass them through their underground networks to this teacher, who would then get them out of the country through me and other diplomats. ... The third most common topic in the WikiLeaks cables is human rights, with American diplomats doing the same thing we were trying to do in Indonesia: Make the world a little better.

That’s hard to swallow for the cyber mob that is celebrating the embarrassment being inflicted on the U.S. government this week. But the damage done to Washington is nothing compared to the pain that is about to be inflicted on the confidential sources in Russia, China and Sudan.
WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive

Those informants are real people, many actually doing what wikileaks is supposed to be doing.

Free speech is causing harm!

Just like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or releasing the names and addresses of informants against Mafia hit men, or the names and locations of informants against Al Qaeda & Taliban cut-throats & beheaders like Wikileaks is doing.

Dead informants mean fewer people to pass on information on scum like Shahzad, who tried to bomb Times Square with a bomb like this.

Calling himself a Muslim soldier, Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts. He said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen.

Would even a Wembley stadium type attack convince even most people many on Slashdot that terrorism is a serious problem? I wonder.

Bin Laden's demand to the United States (The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.) is that we all convert to his brand Islam, change our governments to observe Sharia, or he and his minions will continue to try to kill us. Their ultimate goal is to conquer the world for Islam, not simply get the US out of anywhere, destroy Israel, or anything else. Al Qaeda believes it is justified in killing 4,000,000 Americans in pursuit of its goal. As it is, Al Qaeda's world wide body count must be easily in the tens of thousands by now.

Meanwhile, planning continues for the next Al Qaeda assault in Europe, following up on the successful mass attacks in London and Madrid, various assassinations, and the failed attacks in Germany, France, and other places. (Hopefully there is a well placed informant or two that will survive the Wikileaks releases.)

I wonder how many on Slashdot are members of the Internet Jihad, or are otherwise radicalized and trying to influence opinion?

“I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win, God willing, and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads another Internet posting from Mr. Abdulmutallab.

This is not the secular, political language of resistance against foreign occupation. It is the language of apocalyptic salvation. It has nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinians, although countless young Muslims identify passionately with stories of perceived injustice. Radical Islam claims that martyrdom is the ultimate act of faith – the highest duty of a believer, next to the worship of Allah itself.

“

The Baroness' behaviour sounds positively tame compared to former Canadian Conservative MP Helena Guergis's temper tantrum when trying to catch a flight home earlier this year, going so far as throwing insults and her boots at security officials:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/airport-worker-says-guergis-meltdown-among-worst-hes-seen/article1482043/

Any of us little people would've been tasered, handcuffed and carried away after a stunt like that. Power certainly hath its privileges.

The people of the north have mixed feelings about warming.

"Imagine how this feels: The land and weather are turning erratic and dangerous. Warmer, unpredictable winds are coming from strange directions. Severe floods threaten to wash away towns. And native animals, the food supply, aren't behaving as they used to, their bodies less capable in the changing climate."

On the other hand, birds are coming north who have never been seen before. More game == better hunting. The winters are less cold so it is more comfortable and people can get outside a bit more.

"These observations by Inuit elders are detailed in a groundbreaking new documentary, Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, by acclaimed Nunavut filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (The Fast Runner, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and environmental scientist Ian Mauro."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/new-documentary-recounts-bizarre-climate-changes-seen-by-inuit-elders/article1763952/

One of the important lessons from the film is that scientists aren't entirely to be trusted. They spend, at best, a couple of months in the arctic. The native people live there and are expert observers of the environment. The scientists say polar bears are endangered. The people who actually live with the polar bears say the scientists are wrong. (The same argument happened over the Beluga whales. The scientists finally admitted they were wrong.) The native northerners say the sun is setting later. The scientists said the northerners were nuts. Then a scientist observed that thermal inversions were causing the sun to be visible long after a naive astronomical calculation said it should be below the horizon.

The bottom line is that I do not entirely trust all the scientific predictions we are hearing about the arctic. In any event, the real experts do not seem to be unduly alarmed. Change is constant and there will always be some good and some bad.

Do you think he might buy you dinner first, or is he cheap too?

Constable Adam Josephs doesn't look like a date-rapist, he seems more like a man cut from the same cloth as Colonel Russell Williams.

Hmmph - if it's rogue content that you want, go for this - at your own risk.. nothing cute and cuddly here.

Well in one case you're paying for a service where you're already using a pseudonym, and in the other case you're not. Blizz's idea was that outting everyone is a great idea(minus the downside that doing such is well, illegal in several countries like Canada, and Germany) along with several states in the US. In this case, they've simply said no more anon comments. Not that it makes much of a difference, since most people who are interested in commenting, don't read and post via wirefeeds. But rather to select forums where they can debate the topic.

For example, if I see something interesting and want to comment I'm more likely to go read the The Globe and Mail, National Post or the CBC and comment/debate/etc.

I say go for broke and call it "Olympic Pod." Trademark Madness

Canada *may* be in the midst of a housing bubble. It hasn't happened yet, and opinions are mixed. Personally, I think the prices are going to flatten out, but I'm no expert. Anyway, if it does happen you won't see the same kind of banking catastrophe as in the U.S. because the mortgage rules are stricter, and the banks have stricter rules regarding capital on-hand. In other words, if the housing bubble happens it won't be a big deal that will undermine the entire economy. Slow it, yes. As other people have pointed out, it isn't simply a matter of "more regulation", it's a matter of regulations that give a useful result -- in this case, stricter rules against wild financial speculation.

The reality is, the main reason a housing bubble might happen is that, unlike the U.S., there was only a slight and temporary wiggle in house prices at the time of the economic crisis, and then prices kept on rising. The rate of rise isn't sustainable long-term because housing prices are increasing faster than people's incomes, although at a lower rate than the crazy rates in the U.S. before the collapse. It's a worrisome trend that will have to change eventually.

Ironically, our benevolent Conservative government were the ones that changed to rules to allow riskier zero-money-down, 40-year mortgages (i.e. relax Canadian mortgage regulations to be more like the U.S.) when the crisis hit, and they quickly reversed the decision and hoped it wouldn't be noticed who was responsible for the risky change. Read that article. Our government almost blew it.

If you're looking for the key hash article, it's here.

This is the same government that has destroyed the accuracy of the Census under the smokescreen of "privacy rights." (We all know why the Conservatives don't like accurate census data; it makes it harder to spend money based on ideology rather than on real need.)

The Canadian government has always been notoriously non-transparent; even the Liberals have muzzled a scientist in the past.

The CRTC(our FCC) that seems to have supported this anti consumer situation is no longer friends with the government and thus the big players have lost their biggest weapon to stop annoying things like pro-consumer companies.

When I read this you rang a bell, and sure enough I had read a Globe and Mail article a couple of weeks about about how Harper's government is trying to neuter the CRTC. Here is the link.

www.google.ca

or
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article719050.ece
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/12/01/bc-monty-robinson-charged.html
http://www.rcmpwatch.com/rcmp-officer-faces-impaired-driving-charge-in-fatal-bc-crash/

Arrested by "a task force of around 50 police officers"?

Can you picture a force of 50 officers coming to arrest one person? The need for "security" has become so overdone since 911 it's beyond ridiculous. 50 officers is not a "task force". It's a fucking ARMY. No bloody wonder that Canada has spent over a BILLION DOLLARS on security for the G20 summit. What an incredible waste.

I don't like seeing the big maple leaf on Slashdot. I like Canada to be unnoticed. That's where it's safe.

Canada managed to ride out most of the last wave of economic melt down, (thanks to keeping regulations in place.) It's manage to stay out of the bulk of unnecessary wars. Though, with Harper in power and Canadians descending into "Dumb" too quickly to notice that their voting choices are INSANE, I suppose it was going to be inevitable that things would start to get ugly around here.

Here's how it works. . .

There is no "matter" in the universe; it's all energy right down to the smallest level. Every "particle" breaks down to reveal more vast expanses of empty. Matter truly is an illusion; everything is just energy vibrating in a medium of nothing. So what's the difference between a thought and a brick? They're both made of energetic nothing, but the thought pattern is more alive and dynamic than the brick. Here in the giant dream of reality, consciousness is king.

As such, I see everything which happens in the physical realm as being a metaphor little different than the objects and events which show up in dreams. So. . , earthquakes in Canada, eh?

Well, on the 26th, the G20 is landing in Toronto, and the government has spent approximately a BILLION dollars on security, including controversial sound cannons.

Yay. The problem with big ticket government purchases which keep thousands of people employed is that such expenses need to be justified. None of those thousands of employed people are going to want to have to go looking for work. Even in Canada's only slightly singed economic environment people fear losing their jobs. So. . , what keeps a billion dollars worth of security goons employed?

My guts are tied up in some knots over this because it seems very reasonable to expect violence at this clown show.

At least the earthquake didn't knock any buildings down or kill anybody.

-FL

It is never a happy occasion to realize that a not-for-profit group, no matter how destitute or successful, is undeserving of charitable donations. And just last week I had such an unhappy realization. I wanted to donate a sizable sum of money to the OpenBSD Foundation for development of the OpeBSD operating system and other related projects.

My uncle, an old Unix graybeard from the Seventies, devoted his retirement and considerable savings to teaching inner-city youth about computers and programming. He recently passed away and left instructions in his will that I donate money, in the amount of US $100,000, to the most meritorious Free, Unix-like operating system as according to my own research into the matter.

I immediately looked at OpenBSD and began to review its technical merits, of which there are many. Despite lacking serious symmetric multi-processing support and drivers for recent graphics hardware, OpenBSD security and code-auditing are second to none. One only has to take a look at the bevy of routers that ship with OpenBSD to know how many people successfully depend on it everyday.

The OpenBSD Foundation is also behind several software packages widely adopted in other operating systems, such as OpenBGPD, OpenCVS, OpenNTPD, and OpenSSH. OpenSSH, for instance, is what allows clueless Mac users to remotely log into their systems safely, blissfully unaware of hackers.

After looking at the technical merits of OpenBSD and related projects, I owed it to the memory of my uncle to check out the history of the people behind it all. But that's when I ran into some interesting decisions regarding OpenBSD advocacy and funding made my OpenBSD's lead developer, Theo de Raadt.

In 2003, Mr. de Raadt trash-talked the United States military and its various aid projects for the Iraqi people. But at the time, OpenBSD was receiving a multi-million dollar grant from the United States Department of Defense. After the interview was published the DOD cancelled funding, which left several OpenBSD projects in limbo for quite some time thereafter.

This is just one of the more public instances of Mr. de Raadt sharing unpopular personal opinions while acting as OpenBSD's public advocate and costing the project considerable time and money. And, unfortunately, there are others.

Another time, Mr. de Raadt visited his native South Africa to receive a donation from a wealthy politician but unexpectedly refused it at the podium, instead making a speech in which he equated the use of non-Free graphics drivers with Apartheid. Mr. de Raadt left without the check but later claimed to have won an important moral victory.

Mr. de Raadt himself is at the root of the problem, but here I can't really separate the man from the project; Theo de Raadt is OpenBSD. So donating toward OpenBSD's goals means handing over money to this crackpot activist, if he would even accept it. That's too bad because OpenBSD would be further ahead without these sorts of megalomaniacal antics.

Digging even further back in time, it's clear that this pattern of behavior is nothing new. Theo de Raadt was one of the incipient developers of NetBSD, but harass[ed] and abuse[d] both users and developers of NetBSD. His colleagues subsequently locked him out of the project, de Raadt forked OpenBSD, and the rest is history.

After reviewing these facts, it is clear that I will fail to honor my uncle's memory and all of the hard work he did in life by donating to OpenBSD. If I wanted to dishonor him, maybe. And I find it highly likely that Theo de Raadt

I suspect that they always knew their attempts to fix it would fall short, this is all make-busy to give the appearance that everything that could be done is being done. The correct solution appears to be forcing oil companies to drill relief wells for existing exploitation. The idea here is that the relief well is mostly completed so that if a disaster occurs, instead of taking months to connect to the main well, the work can be done within days.
BP's experience is showing us that the relief well is the only solution that will work.
It's why the Canadian government is taking the position that one must be drilled at the same time as a new well is being built. Unsurprisingly, oil companies are already lobbying hard to have these measures curtailed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-will-take-tough-stand-on-offshore-drilling/article1557095/
"At issue in talks between the oil industry and the National Energy Board on relief wells in the North is whether they must be drilled during the same season as the primary exploration well. The window for drilling in the North is only a few months because of ice conditions. However, allowing oil companies to wait a season to drill relief wells could leave a new well exposed to a potential rupture for a year or more. Mr. Pryce at CAPP said the policy for relief wells was devised in the 1970s, and alternative technology for dealing with ruptures has advanced considerably. "

Actually, there are many barriers to entry into the Canadian marketplace. Taxes, ownership restrictions, tariffs, operational regulations, etc. are all important considerations. In fact, for many products and services, entry into the Canadian marketplace faces more barriers than many other EU or Asian countries.

One of the first and most restrictive factors is the ownership and management restrictions. Take the wireless industry for example. A wireless carrier has to have at least 50% Canadian ownership in order to operate in Canada. This means that T-Mobile, for example, can't just waddle over across the border and start buying frequency, putting up towers, and offering a service. We've had a recent case where it was debated whether or not a certain wireless carrier (Wind Mobile) actually met that ownership requirement. There's also a general requirement for all corporations that the Board of Directors is comprised of at least 25% Canadians (or a minimum of 1 Canadian if the Board has less than 4 Directors).

Many of our industries are much more tightly regulated than are your industries. As I've briefly mentioned in a previous comment, Canada really is more of a socialist country with a market framework. The skeletal infrastructure of our economy is based on market economics, but we flesh that out with quite a heavy load (comparative to America) of social regulations that protect consumers from power asymmetry that arises from market failure, e.g., information asymmetry, natural monopolies,etc..

Many of these regulations are restrictive enough such that a company may consider that an investment in complying with such regulations would not really be worth it for a shot at the comparatively smaller marketplace. Since American companies design products and their respective distribution plans with American regulations in mind, it would take a significant investment to create another roll-out plan for the Canadian marketplace. We only have 30-odd million people, 1/10 of the American population, and our buying power for non-essential items is generally lower because of the way our consumption taxes are structured*.

On the one hand, we don't get many of the new and sparkly fancy gadgets right away. But that's okay, I'm pretty patient for the most part. It's not that big of a deal. Companies big and successful enough will eventually bring their products over the border. On the other hand, we as consumers and taxpayers are protected from many of the perils that arise from market failure. The biggest recent example is the global financial crisis. While many global banks and companies required bailouts, our financial institutions continued to post modest profits and showed a remarkable ability to quickly recover.

So yeah, there are many barriers to entry into the Canadian marketplace, mostly because of our traditional approach towards market economics that's more skewed towards the socialist side. But even though we may not get the latest cool gadgets or the cheapest deals, we're very well protected from many potential disasters that result from market failure. I wouldn't really call this a fault. I'm a patient guy. I can wait 3 more months for that iPad, or another 6 months for that HTC phone. Small price to pay, in my book.

* It's worth noting that our minimum wage is higher than in America, the last time I checked. The general minimum wage is $10.25 an hour in Ontario, and the average is over $9 across Canada (with only 2 provinces falling below $8.50). However, there are a few factors that influence buying power. The first is that non-essential items are almost always taxed higher throughout Canada. For example, groceries, utilities, etc. are exempt from the federal consumption tax. Alcoh

Don't Worry, it was all a bunch of hot air: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/volcanic-cloud-fears-lift-canadian-airspace-remains-open/article1539013/

Casual debit card fraud in Canada is pretty limited. Credit cards have better protection *after* a complaint has been logged. I've heard co-workers in nearby cubicles spout out all the information on their credit card, and I may already know their home address. Within a half hour I could ship a dozen toilet seats to their house, or go on an iTunes shopping spree for myself, with only a Hotmail and an IP address log to find me. If the whole office shares an external IP, good luck tracing it to the department laptop I borrowed during coffee break. (Note: risk-management is part of my job)

These days convincing credit companies NOT to raise my credit limit is hard. If I want to limit my debit liability, I simply don't put excess cash or overdraft into the accounts linked to my card. No money, no cry.

The newsworthy cases of debit fraud involve compromised card readers or fake fronted ATMs. That is serious effort. To use debit, you have to have a card in hand. If I have your debit card number and your PIN written down, that won't even buy me a pizza. You can't use them over the phone, so a fraudster has to be well equipped by recreating fake cards, or tapping into financial networks. This is why they're adding chips to debit cards now.

For all the millions that Interac reimburses to fraud victims, it's a tiny drop in the bucket for the total amount of transactions every year in Canada. For one, banks can set daily AND transactional withdrawal limits with Interac, just as they can for their ATMs. Hard to steal 5,000 if it takes a week. Why don't we mind? Canada isn't Japan, it's unlikely the average person walking around has over a grand in cash on them. We love debit.

Businesses love debit too. Less fees than Visa in many cases. Same-as-cash, so grocery stores will gladly give you cash back. No issues with charge backs. There are much fewer Canada-wide banks, so Interac-by-email is a viable option. Think Paypal but with actual bank protections for the buyer.

I'm really not sure who decided that giving Visa the ability to create debit cards was a good idea.

Really?
Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Quiet Manitoba Town, Toronto, Montreal,
and Snowstorm

So, we have shootings AND snowstorms in April.

I'll keep visiting Mexico during the coldest part of our winter.

The recent story from Canada about the group of snow mobile riders who triggered an avalanche that killed a few of them. The risk was obvious. Environment Canada had issued an avalanche risk warning. But the guys went out anyways.

Some people will always not do the right thing. No matter how obvious it may be.