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See The dark side of DNA

Short summary: crime labs make a lot of errors.

The ROB ran a long, long article just a few days ago with some insight into Canadian broadband politics.

Who do you call to clean up a mess like BCE? A man called Cope

On one side of this issue, I've got a copy of Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". It's an excellent book. I've read big chunks of Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" and I agree with most of it. I've watched the Edge Talk with Yochai Benkler.

On the other side of this issue, I've had broadband from Shaw Cable since June 2005. The Berkman report about the broadband situation in Canada is slanted, and this irritates me immensely, because I agree with their perspective *and* their agenda, but I can't stomach the way they have distorted their data to bring Canada into line with their desired conclusion.

I've had landline phone service from Telus during this time as well, which is why they've never earned my broadband loyalty. Telus definitely plays "blame the customer" as a form of cost control. Especially since Darren Entwistle gained control. Telco landlines in Canada are under very strict regulation about availability of service. On my service there was some floating voltage associated with rainfall (not good when you live fifty miles downwind from a rain forest) which kept triggering my phone to go off-hook when no-one was calling. People would ring, the moisture goddess would signal that my phone had already been answered, the caller would hear nothing, and not even be able to reach my voice message service. There was one wet spring month when my phone was going off hook every few hours. Many waste-of-life conversations with Telus support ensued where I was roundly assured the problem was on my end. Many tickets were closed, which I violently reopened. Meanwhile there was a Telus service truck parked on the street every other day a block away from my house having the most intense romantic affair with a sidewalk service opening. Coincidence? They finally found me a line pair above the water line, and my service has been fine ever since.

My father-in-law spent twenty years flying to oversea oil fields to supervise telephony infrastructure. We have passed some extremely pleasant evenings together discussing this Telus-presumption-of-customer-stupidity-until-they've-charged-you-a-big-fee. He had a problem with his service in Alberta, I forget the details, but it was a misconfiguration on the Telus side. He called them up and explained to them *the precise misconfiguration problem*. Telus of course did nothing for weeks or months, while blaming customer premise equipment. Finally, it did turn out to be their problem, exactly as originally described. Neither of us will ever get that chunk of our life back.

What we need here is a telephony ombudsman. When Telus says we'll charge you $200 if the problem is on your end, then you say "fine, I'll hire the ombudsman". I would easily pay $100 to the ombudsman to show up and adjudicate who really owns the fault. If I'm proved right, Telus owes me $1000. If Telus is proved right, they get my $200 (so I'm now out $300). The fee is higher for Telus, because they have the infrastructure and latitude to know better (should they choose to use it, which would entail some major culture shock).

Mr Entwistle, what's the point here? You waste the time of a lot of competent technical people, now we all hate your guts. Hey, that worked great for Bill, didn't it? No, none of us ever pipe up when the CRTC runs a public consultation. Is this your idea of job security? Scorch the earth so badly no one else *wants* your job? Do you carry "good will" on your balance sheet? How about "bad will", of which there is no shortage? With guerrilla marketing, scoring with the "in" crowd is supposedly a coup. So what

It's not just humans impacts on themselves. Humans have become 'superpredators' speeding up the evolution of the species they hunt and harvest at rates far above what is found in nature. Hunting techniques such as bagging the biggest trophy animal to commercial fisheries where mesh openings in nets capture the largest while allowing the smallest to escape has impacted the natural selection process. Removing the strongest and biggest species from the gene pool has resulted in offspring characteristics such as reduced body size and lower reproductive age.

More info from this article

I don't know which rock you (and the mods who modded you up) have been living under for the past few years but this has already happened. Ethanol induced food shortages were front page news in 2008 when oil prices skyrocketed and ethanol production increased. I know it's easy to forget these things when they doesn't affect you but the billions of people world wide who went hungry (and the many who died) definitely haven't forgotten. This all occurred very quickly in response to a rather small increase in ethanol production.

Here are a few articles I found for your reference...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/23/earlyshow/main4036816.shtml

http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/06/04/un_warns_of_food_shortage_and_unrest/?page=full3

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/article678698.ece

While China seems to be the boogeyman du jour for America, people should keep in mind that the Euro is competing very successfully against the greenback.

Don't be too sure about the Euro

Another link with the famous Milton Friedman comment about the Euro and a currency crisis.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Greece

China now owns the US dollar, thanks to the Fed. But don't take my word for it. If I were the US I would invest in some lube and bend over quietly.

“They don’t have to respond to us, and I was under the assumption that they wouldn’t,” said Roberson. “It had been three or four months since I had sent the subpoena." Bullshit. Three or four months....Really. Given the current news http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/teen-found-after-meeting-his-42-year-old-online-soulmate/article1416257/ I have to wonder what we are not hearing about. I almost suspect Blizzard is in the process of cutting deals to keep out of trouble here in the states.

I'm pretty sure Harper has done more to dismantle transparency in the last 3 years than Chretien/Martin did during their tenure.

Just a sampling of things I can recall off the top of my head since 2006: This, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

And I'll repeat again what I said above: all this (and more that I suspect I've mercifully forgotten over the last 3 years) has taken place under the watch of an autocrat who explicitly ran on the promise of transparency and accountability in the 2006 election.

... and people wonder why the general public thinks politicians are a bunch of assholes ...

People have been killed by trains because their walkmans (yes - it was happening even back then) were too loud.

Don't forget helicopters!

I don't know about the US, but the idea that Europe is being taken over by quickly breeding muslims is a myth, most likely spread by fear-mongering racists.

Here for MS treatment approach:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/researchers-labour-of-love-leads-to-breakthrough-in-treating-ms/article1372414/

I work in industry, so what I'm about to say applies to industry, and may only be allegorical in medicine.

One of the axioms we have for preventative maintenance is whenever you touch a piece of equipment, there's a risk of causing a failure that wouldn't have otherwise happened. Modern maintenance programs will often determine that you'll achieve better reliability on a piece of equipment by leaving it alone and letting it run.

Some flu vaccinations can increase your H1N1 risk, so I'd argue this idea has merit.

On the other side of things, there's a cost/benefit. For the possibility of causing harm through unnecessary preventative maintenance, you may avoid an illness that for most people won't be anywhere near fatal. It's a flu. We've had a flu every single year for millennia. Even if you get it, you're looking at two weeks untreated, or fourteen days treated.

So you're causing a risk just by doing something, there's a low chance you'll get anything, and if you do get something, it'll likely be comparable to the seasonal flu. Calling the choice not to waste your time "insane" is utterly lacking in any sense of scale.

I can't create a car that artificially locks out 3rd party replacement parts and upgrades... why should Microsoft be able to create a gaming box that does the same thing?

Actually the auto makers have been trying to essentially do that by denying training and key software to independent garages. story here

The technology involved is bloody well obvious.

"Cognitive Prosthetics" is bleeding-edge.

The tech has to be proven in clinical trials. Digital technology eyed in fight against Alzheimer's

Clinical trials cost money.

On November 27, Microsoft announced that it was giving $550 000 in funding to six teams of academic researchers in the United Kingdom and North America. One of the researchers, Fergus Gracey, a clinical psychologist from the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, in Ely, U.K., is planning to use SenseCam to help the rehabilitation of patients with acquired brain injury. "Many of our clients have a shorter fuse or find it difficult to manage emotional arousal," says Gracey. "We hope to use the reviewing of SenseCam images of the trigger situation, along with heart-rate recordings of the individual during that situation, to help prompt recall and to help the person tune in physiologically to what was going on." A Camera to Help Dementia Patients

Distributed for peer review last week, the study confounded infectious-disease experts in suggesting that people vaccinated against seasonal flu are twice as likely to catch swine flu.

The paper is under peer review, and lead researchers Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and Gaston De Serres of Laval University must stay mum until it's published.

Met with intense early skepticism both in Canada and abroad, the paper has since convinced several provincial health agencies to announce hasty suspensions of seasonal flu vaccinations, long-held fixtures of public-health planning.

"It has confused things very badly," said Dr. Ethan Rubinstein, head of adult infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba. "And it has certainly cost us credibility from the public because of conflicting recommendations. Until last week, there had always been much encouragement to get the seasonal flu vaccine."

On Sunday Quebec joined Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia in suspending seasonal flu shots for anyone under 65 years of age. Quebec's Health Ministry announced it would postpone vaccinations until January, clearing the autumn months for health professionals to focus on vaccinating against H1N1, which is expected to the more severe influenza strain this season.

"By the time the H1N1 wave is over, there will be ample time to vaccinate for seasonal flu," Dr. Rubinstein said.

B.C. is expected to announce a similar suspension during a press conference Monday morning.

Other provinces, including Manitoba, are still pondering a response to the research.

New Brunswick is a lone hold-out, announcing last week it would forge ahead with seasonal flu shots for all residents in October, as originally planned.

This is a much larger, more comprehensive study (13 million people) than most, which is why it may have found a correlation that other studies missed.

An international panel is currently scrutinizing the research data. "The review process has been expedited, so we're hoping for a response within days," said Roy Wadia, spokesman for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

Dr. Rubinstein, who has read the study, said it appears sound.

"There are a large number of authors, all of them excellent and credible researchers," he said. "And the sample size is very large - 12 or 13 million people taken from the central reporting systems in three provinces. The research is solid."

The vaccine suspensions do not apply for people over 65. Seniors are considered more susceptible to severe seasonal flu symptoms. At the same time, they carry antibodies from a 1957 pandemic that seem to neutralize the current version of H1N1.

Even if the statistical link is proven, the medical link between seasonal flu shots and H1N1 remains mysterious. One hypothesis suggests seasonal flu vaccine preoccupies the cells that would otherwise produce antibodies against H1N1.

But, according to Dr. Rubinstein, the research shows that people who received the seasonal shot during the 2007-08 flu season remained vulnerable to swine flu well into 2009 - an interval that should provide most immune systems ample restoration time.

"We don't understand the mechanism," Dr. Rubinstein said. "At the present time it is quite perplexing."

Or it could be that the negative effect of the vaccine extends for longer than originally thought. As one othr example, there is similar evidence wrt the MMR vaccine.

First, there's this study - flu vaccines may make you twice as likely to contract swine flu. A sample size of 13 million people is nothing to sneeze at. It's raised enough red flags that provinces are changing their recommendations.

Some vaccines make sense. Sure, smallpox and polio. They're proven. But not swine flu, and especially if you're not in an at-risk group (and most people who aren't fat slobs aren't). It doesn't make sense to have people who are at low risk get a shot.

Those at risk are the obese, and those under 65 with other chronic health care problems that severely impair their lives, kids 6 months to 5 years, and pregnant women. Pretty much everyone else is low-risk.

To show just how ineffective the swine flu vaccine can be expected to be, if you have already had H1N1, that's no guarantee you won't get it again. Exposure doesn't confer immunity. Different viruses mean different results. We were able to deal with smallpox effectively through vaccines - flu is a different beast. Rapidly mutating and fragile, unlike smallpox, which is basically unchanged over the decades.

Anyway, if you're not obese, don't have a severe health problem that compromises your day-to-day living, aren't pregnant or between 6 months and 5 years of age, why buy into the panic?

To the other Canadians out there: we won't be getting it, according to the Globe and Mail:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/why-you-cant-get-the-kindle-in-canada/article1316081/

I guess I'll have to get it shipped in from Burundi or Sri Lanka instead.

It's available all over the world, but not in Canada.

According to the Globe and Mail, that is because until next month, there is only one network in Canada capable of carrying it (Rogers). In November, Bell and Telus will also be capable of carrying it.

We'll see.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/telecom-competition-behind-kindle-delay/article1317633/

Canadians no longer have to remove their shoes at airport security--except when traveling to the US--according to guidelines obtained by Canadian media.

Apparently, aside from slowing down security clearances, it was spreading foot-borne diseases. And here I thought the world would collapse from an unsanitised telephone.

- RG>

Not only did i4i *have* a product - Microsoft paid them a visit expressing interest in said product, then went and implemented comparable functions in MS Word - effectively killing the potential market for i4i's product.

The Globe and Mail has an article with more details.

This isn't a patent-troll case.

I4I said they would have sued sooner but were having financial problems.

I checked out the i4i web site. My impression is that i4i had financial problems because they were a dinky little company with almost no significant products. I suspect they had no more than one software developer, and were probably lucky to stay in business all this time. I doubt MS even bothered to ever meet with them.

Well, this paints a totally different kind of picture. Few quotes:

"Nine years ago, an unusual and powerful alliance approached a tiny Toronto software company with a fateful proposition. Microsoft was helping U.S. intelligence sift through relentless mountains of documents relating to the 9/11 terrorist attacks but had few means to sort them out. This firm, i4i, had the software that could intuit crucial, revelatory patterns that its own software could not.

It wasn't long before Microsoft recognized the value of the firm's technology, and, as it is now famously alleged, pinched it."

"Their circumstances are more humble than they used to be, when i4i took up 21/2 floors of the building and employed roughly 200 people, with offices in Manchester, Paris, Amsterdam, Washington, D.C., and San Diego. âoeWhen Microsoft began offering their technology for free,â Mr. Vulpe says, âoeall of our customers went away.â"

It should be noted that it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time MS did something like this. They did it with Quicktime in the 90's as well.

I have to laugh at the echoes of Victorianism here. It's one step better than maintaining the public pretence that we don't have genitals, but somehow it all seems rather childish. Then again, if a guy has gone trawling to discover just how bad it can get, I don't think, if I were that guy, that I'd want the brain-sear popping up at random in my Awesome Bar.

Ten years ago I spend a couple of hours on rotten.com. Without seeing much of anything, I got enough brain-sear to inoculate me for the rest of my life. I'm a pussy. I like activities where I can return to normal when the activity is done.

Yesterday, I read this about an art installation.

An installation with a big impact

For art's sake, it would be fun to equip a Roomba with a webcam broadcasting in real time everything it finds under your bed on an open wifi channel.

What people sometimes get confused about is that the maintenance of privacy is not necessarily the primary thing. We judge people severely on their ability to maintain and navigate these real (or sometimes artificial) privacy gradients.

If a person can't keep their sex life out of casual conversation in a coffee shop, are you going to whisper to them in the dark of night who the KGB most recently picked up?

Maybe Clinton got himself into so much real hot water because he was afraid to install his porn loader in the white house.

If I were the world's most powerful man with only Hillary and the palm sisters to choose between, I'd be signing up for Botox injection directly into the perineum.

They have been accused of patent-infringement.

First, they have been found GUILTY of willful patent infringement, not just accused. Second, if you would actually take the time to read about what MS did instead of giving a knee-jerk reaction "Ooh patents are bad!" and comprehend it, you'll see that MS approached i4i about working together on national security issues and then STOLE THEIR CODE.

Muddying the differences between patents, copyright, and trademark is part of the reason why debates about "intellectual property" is often confused.

The only person muddying the waters here is you, because you are trying to paint MS' actions in a decent light, when they are clearly, clearly in the wrong. I can only think that i4i went to court under patent law instead of copyright infringement because they thought it was a more open and shut case. That or, the MS Office programmers were smart enough to cover their tracks and that copyright infringement wasn't possible to prove unequivocally.

Too old for too many to get to reading this, but I figure you, the parent might find it interesting: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-biblical-vengeance-of-i4i/article1253054/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-biblical-vengeance-of-i4i/article1253054/

Six years ago, an unusual and powerful alliance approached a tiny Toronto software company with a fateful proposition. Microsoft was helping U.S. intelligence sift through relentless mountains of documents relating to the 9/11 terrorist attacks but had few means to sort them out. This firm, i4i, had the software that could intuit crucial, revelatory patterns that its own software could not.

It wasn't long before Microsoft recognized the value of the firm's technology, and, as it is now famously alleged, pinched it.

I don't have an OED so I can't check the veracity of the Wikipedia citation, but newspeak it isn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#cite_ref-1

I can never get it straight which British newspapers are supposed to be trustworthy, but the Globe and Mail backs up the wiki (but maybe they just read it, who knows these days):

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/archives/article800923.ece

... on at various places like The Globe and mail which have not gotten that much media attention.

Globes Public policy wiki:

http://policywiki.theglobeandmail.com/tiki-forums.php

Copyright Chat:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/download-decade/law-professor-takes-questions-on-copyright/article1141598/

Fact is copyright as it stands right now is ludicrous for many things, software that ends up being abandonware, game companies that release games and then don't release the source (which should be released so fans of the game can fix and patch the stuff developers didn't bother with, etc).

We need more John Carmacks in the world that realize that releasing the source doesn't harm you. He's released the source to nearly all of his game engines so I give him major thanks.

... on at various places like The Globe and mail which have not gotten that much media attention.

Globes Public policy wiki:

http://policywiki.theglobeandmail.com/tiki-forums.php

Copyright Chat:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/download-decade/law-professor-takes-questions-on-copyright/article1141598/

Fact is copyright as it stands right now is ludicrous for many things, software that ends up being abandonware, game companies that release games and then don't release the source (which should be released so fans of the game can fix and patch the stuff developers didn't bother with, etc).

We need more John Carmacks in the world that realize that releasing the source doesn't harm you. He's released the source to nearly all of his game engines so I give him major thanks.

At this stage in the game, reef conservation is pretty damned environmentally friendly. That's like saying "wouldn't it be more environmentally friendly to do something other than replanting rainforests?"

Well, stealing the link from Threni, a few posts down:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090502.wflusat0502/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20090502.wflusat0502

From the link:

"Scientists are still trying to assess how the new virus behaves and how it compares to regular seasonal flu strains, which kill between 250,000 and 500,000 globally every year."

I did get my facts - I got them from sites such as these:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090502.wflusat0502/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20090502.wflusat0502

"Mexican authorities cut their suspected death toll to up to 101 from as many as 176 as more test samples came back negative."

Here's a good, balanced story on Beike. The reporter understood what he was writing about, and he talked to some independent researchers who actually studied stem cells.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070823.wlstemcell23/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

Stem-cell therapy: Cure or hoax in China?
'Some get miracles'; others are skeptical

PATRICK WHITE

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

August 23, 2007 at 9:11 AM EDT

The website for Beike Biotechnology bursts with stories that can only be categorized as medical miracles: a paraplegic can move his legs again; a man with muscular dystrophy can carry a cup of water, a stroke victim can speak.

(more)

Islamic group demands removal of online game

CAIRO â" An influential Islamic group has demanded the removal of an online video game depicting religious figures such as the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ fighting each other, saying it is offensive to Muslims and Christians.

The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents most Muslim countries, called the game âoeincendiary in its contentâ and today said its makers should take it off the Internet. Players of the game can fight each other with Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, God and the Hindu god Ganesh.

The game is made by Italy-based Molleindustria.

The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama's trip to Mexico City on April 16.

Not really. The trend was noticed on March 18 according to The Globe and Mail and El Universal (in Spanish). "Mid-March" according to the BBC

I find it ironic that on the same day TPB staff is found guilty, that Google annouces that it will provide full length hollywood movies and TV shows for free.

So, let's say I run a website on which users could provide a link to copyrighted material, and then a user goes ahead and copies that material in a way that violates that copyright. Furthermore, I make it easy for users to search for those links or associated information describing them, and I make some money from the site by having advertisements on it. At that point I could be charged and face potential jail time?

Wow. Will there be any websites hosted in Sweden after this?

So, let's say I run a website on which users could provide a link to copyrighted material, and then a user goes ahead and copies that material in a way that violates that copyright. Furthermore, I make it easy for users to search for those links or associated information describing them, and I make some money from the site by having advertisements on it. At that point I could be charged and face potential jail time?

Wow. Will there be any websites hosted in Sweden after this?

That's fine University of Toronto Grad students were held as exceptional for buying and assembling commercial Ham radio gear and using it to talk to the ISS. story about it

your GED and 15 years of experience seems to be a far higher education than most college Graduate programs.

...except they aren't using mod_gzip/deflate. At first I thought you browsed the web RMS style and maybe wc* didn't support compression** and you were just getting what you deserved***, but then I checked in firefox and lo and behold:

Response Headers - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/wgtgameblog0301/

Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:39:54 GMT
Server: Apache
P3P: policyref="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="CAO DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi OUR NOR IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT DEM STA PRE"
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

200 OK
No compression!

If they had been using compression, it would have made all that whitespace fairly negligible.

Probably a result of how their template system stitches everything together. Still, that is pretty bad. There is no excuse to run a webserver and not turn on compression. It is the single biggest way to boost page-load and decrease bandwidth.

* wget 4 lyfe!
** compression is probably evil and Anti-Freedom(tm) somehow, kinda like images are evil or fads like "graphical user interfaces" are evil. In otherwords,anything that makes things easier or faster for a user is basically evil and Anti-Freedom****.
*** braindead comment spamming bots are the only thing not using compression (except RMS, probably)
**** I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to deduce if I'm serious. Hint: no hint.

For an even more egregious example of web design / CMS fail, take a look at the HTML on this page.

$ wc wtf.html
12480 9590 166629 wtf.html

I'm not puzzled by the fact that it took 166 kilobytes of HTML to write 50 kilobytes of text. That's actually not too bad. What takes it from bloated into WTF-land is the fact that that page is 12,480 lines long. Moreover...

$ vi wtf.html

...the first 1831 lines (!) of the page are blank. That's right, the &lt!DOCTYPE... declaration is on line 1832, following 12 kilobytes of 0x20, 0x09, and 0x0a characters - spaces, tabs, and linefeeds. Then there's some content, and then another 500 lines of tabs and spaces between each chunk of text. WTF? (Whitespace, Then Failure?)

Attention Globe and Mail web designers: When your idiot print newspaper editor tells you to make liberal use of whitespace, this is not what he had in mind!

of possible tangential interest http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090325.wmothers25/BNStory/lifeMain/home "Highly educated women face a much more severe loss of earning power when they have children compared to mothers with less education, says a report published yesterday by Statistics Canada."

That link is from 2005. Here's a more recent link regarding a study done for Industry Canada in 2007.

http://auto.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090305.whautobuzz0305/GAStory/specialGlobeAuto/home

Disclaimer - I work with these guys on occasion.

I am an hESC biologist, and this stuff is quite significant. I expect iPS cells will take over from hESC in the near to mid-term future (5-10 years). Not that I have any problems with hESC, but as a professional in the field, if they can do the same things and not bother people as much, why not? It's worth noting though that this would never have happened without research on embryonic stem cells to allow us to identify the culture conditions etc necessary to maintain puripotence. This lab is not-coincidentally also one of the few Canadian labs licensed to make new hESC lines from discarded blastocysts. Also worth noting that iPS lines will eliminate some of the ethical issues around hESC - but definitely not all of them. This will be particularly important in the U.S. IIRC - Canadian law on hESC is defined around pluripotence (e.g. it includes human iPSC), whereas I don't think this is the case south of the border.

In a timely juxtaposition, the other primary front-page story in today's Globe and Mail was about cutbacks to Canadian research funding. While you guys get Obama and an extra $10bn to the NIH, we are stuck with a conservative government and losing hundreds of millions from our research councils. Our Minister of Science and Technology (a chiropractor FFS) apparently screamed at representatives of the national organization of University professors and stomped out of the room when asked about it.

For those Canadians reading this: Canadian scientists are among the best in the world. We can compete on this and many other playing fields - but we need stable, non-politicized funding, most particularly for basic research like this. Industry will not do this kind of work, the profits are too far down the road. Our government needs to stop playing silly power games, and pay attention to the task at hand, before we lose a lot of these top players to the U.S.

Please write (snail-mail as always is both free and most effective) your MP and encourage them to support scientific research in Canada. If nothing else, when the bailout money runs out and the carmakers finally go belly up, this is where the next generation of jobs will come from.

...about how to best handle "colliding" gTLDs previously established by alternate roots? I don't see it anywhere in the linked PDF.

Oh, silly me...Vint Cerf has already waxed majestic about how alternate roots would be "disastrous" to the architecture of the Internet. So I suppose this means ICANN can (pun intended) conveniently ignore the entire issue of alternate roots, even though China has already established an alternate root, with no sign of the meltdown predicted by Dr. Cerf.

Nelly Furtado is one of the few pop artists with a rep for *not* using auto-tune, at least if this article is to be believed. A pretty good primer on spotting auto-tune was posted on Hometracked a while back.

That's exactly what this is. An amateur radio contact.

If you watch the video linked by the article, you see the person making contact identifies himself as VA3JUV

If you search amateur callsign databases for it, it actually shows up in the database.

You may have seen the Globe article about telemarketers using the do-not-call list as a source of people to call, including some explicitly fraudulent calls: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090123.wdonotcall23/BNStory/National/home

There's quite an discussion on one of the nerd sites on this (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1312203) where I ran across it.

It strikes me we can best deal with this by addressing companies that pay for the unwanted calls. Not the companies that do the illegal acts, but instead the ones who pay them.

They (Canadian) purchasers of the illegal advertisements deserve a nasty fine. Mind you, that does require extra staffing for the investigators! An appropriate levels of fines, though, should nicely cover the cost.

To a degree, the same thing would dry up email spam: if there was a Canadian do-not-spam list, and substantial fines for paying someone to disobey it, the number of Canadian spammers would fall rapidly. Alas, Canada isn't where all the illegal calls and emails originate, so that might have to wait for a majority of countries to implement it.

Returning to do-not-call lists, a purely Canadian effort to fine the paymasters would dry up a lot of the calls, especially the ones being made from local numbers or for Canadian products.

--dave

I think this has already been invented, just not used, I remember reading somewhere about an artificial turf that was like fiber optics for each blade of grass and could change the color of any part of the field. It would even re trace the footsteps of a player to show everyone if he went out of bounds.

Found a link - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070313.wsb-turf13/BNStory/specialSmallBusiness/home

I need citation? The other guy didn't give any.

Go read a report like this one:
http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1911800&g=1

Or articles like this (more aimed at consoles):
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081223.wgtyearinreview1222/BNStory/PersonalTech/home?cid=al_gam_mostview

Or read Gamasutra.

Most of the "doom and gloom" PC game sales figures are for retail outlets, and fail to factor in the tens of millions(?) of sales done online, through services like Steam, Stardock, Direct2Drive, etc.

There's lots of articles out there stating that 2008 was a good year for gaming.