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Yeap, totally didn't happen. ISPs never blocked or throttled anything.

MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today.

So they got fined by the FCC and stopped doing it

https://www.cnet.com/news/telc...

COMCAST: In 2005, the nationâ(TM)s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers.

The FCC ruled against them and they said they'd move to different mechanisms to handle 'high bandwidth customers'.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

TELUS: In 2005, Canadaâ(TM)s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites.

This is bad. On the other hand Google and Facebook have also blocked content on political grounds on Youtube and Facebook and everyone told me 'private company, First Amendment doesn't apply'.

Obviously it's Canada so the First Amendment doesn't apply, and neither do FCC rules. It seems very bad though

https://thetyee.ca/News/2005/0...

AT&T: From 2007â"2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such âoeover-the-topâ voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.

Apple operate a walled garden and if AT&T convinced them to block apps from their store, they can do that. Net Neutrality doesn't affect this

WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstreamâ(TM)s own search portal and results.

They were exposed in the press and backed off the change.

https://www.dslreports.com/sho...

MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizonâ(TM)s court challenge against the FCCâ(TM)s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agencyâ(TM)s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices.

The service seems pretty terrible but who cares? It's not like you don't have a choice of other mobile carriers if you don't like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
" Slate's Farhad Manjoo panned the service by suggesting that MetroPCS was able to

My suggestion for what else to do would be to put some next-generation nuclear power plants into operations. We basically know the problems with nuclear power now; and it is possible to design better power plants; let's do it.

I'm not against nuclear power by a long shot, but this is a bit overly optimistic. We know the problems with current nuclear power plant designs now. It is possible to design new power plants that fix the short comings of current designs, but we don't know what problems those new designs would have. Although, we can predict some of the problems with new designs, it's the ones we can't predict that are going to be the real problem. For example, Canada designed a pair of new reactors to produce medical isotopes in the early 90s. Neither reactor has ever produced any isotopes. Both reactors have been plagued by design flaws and failures, to the point where they were permanently shut down before they were ever used.

Today there are few people who can afford to test a new reactor design. Public opinion is against trying new reactors because of nuclear power's history of sensational failures, and most private companies would be literally betting their entire future on a untried design. If it didn't work they'd be left with billion dollar losses. Generally speaking, investors don't like that kind of risk.

If you're a foreigner, once a druggie, always a druggie, dixit the border thugs.

With Stephen Harper in charge the Canadian government doesn't look much different than the US's these days.

He is as bad as any leader we've ever had when it comes to science in general.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12...

http://www.academicmatters.ca/...

http://www.climatesciencewatch...

So long as he does a good job (and he has) and does use his position of power to push those beliefs on others (he hasn't) you have nothing to complain about.

Right. It's not like his government is shutting down libraries and burning books. That kind of thing only happens on American TV.

With 22 wells nearby, the chances of their water not being contaminated are very low.. Thus industry lifetime Failure rate for these wells runs 30% to 50%!

The industry really needs to step up to the plate and improve their drilling tech and methods. Hopefully more and more juries around the country will impose these costs on the oil and gas industry. Either clean up or get out!!

Personally, we really don't need this fossil fuel tech, when Renewable energy sources are very capable of fulfilling ALL our energy needs . We know fossil fuels are finite.. they're going to run out, sooner or later.. Let's jump into the future and skip over these nasty fault prone energy sources. It boarders to the point of insanity, that the general public hasn't figured this out..

Norway

The claim that the Canadian government is "just" digitizing them appears to be false. Instead they are burning and throwing them in the dumpster: Ref 1. Ref 2 Also, these documents are about the natural environment or climate science which the Conservatives (big C) have attacked, in part by muzzling scientists. These documents are going to a murky bottom at the bottom of a lake so to speak. Maybe somebody should be properly digitizing them though, in which case I would agree with your "Meh." statement.

The Tyee article you link to does paint a very different picture, but I also have to wonder how even handed it is given some bits like the passage below:

Many scientists, including Hutchings and world famous water ecologist David Schindler, compared the government's concerted attacks on environmental science to the rise of fascism and the total alignment of state and corporate interests in 1930s Europe.

"You look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s," noted Hutchings, "and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?"

Fascists? Really?

Don't believe Shea's claims about the usage numbers. Those stats reflect people who requested help in using the libraries - relatively rare with specialized research collections where a host of users just get to work in what used to be showpiece collections. Many of these users came from the DFO institutions but also from outside, including academics, people in industry and other government employees. The provision of materials over the internet? Largely had to be digitized from library collections. Now we'll have neither the collections nor the librarians to do so.

The hasty closures and haphazard deaccessioning of these collections that represent substantial investments of taxpayer money over decades? Entirely the opposite of what conservatives claim to value - careful custody of a nation's heritage and citizen investment. (Canada's federal government is in the control of the Progressive Conservative party, hard at work muzzling the scientists supported by our tax dollars.)

From The Tyee's December 23 story on the topic, "What Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries": Moreover records on library usage were overtly biased and based on who asked for help, said Burton Ayles, a retired director general for DFO who lives in Winnipeg and has used the Freshwater Institute library frequently.

"Most people that come in to the library don't have to request help. They just use the material. Just look at any regular library."

Don't believe Shea's claims about the usage numbers. Those stats reflect people who requested help in using the libraries - relatively rare with specialized research collections where a host of users just get to work in what used to be showpiece collections. Many of these users came from the DFO institutions but also from outside, including academics, people in industry and other government employees. The provision of materials over the internet? Largely had to be digitized from library collections. Now we'll have neither the collections nor the librarians to do so.

The hasty closures and haphazard deaccessioning of these collections that represent substantial investments of taxpayer money over decades? Entirely the opposite of what conservatives claim to value - careful custody of a nation's heritage and citizen investment. (Canada's federal government is in the control of the Progressive Conservative party, hard at work muzzling the scientists supported by our tax dollars.)

From The Tyee's December 23 story on the topic, "What Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries": Moreover records on library usage were overtly biased and based on who asked for help, said Burton Ayles, a retired director general for DFO who lives in Winnipeg and has used the Freshwater Institute library frequently.

"Most people that come in to the library don't have to request help. They just use the material. Just look at any regular library."

Don't believe Shea's claims about the usage numbers. Those stats reflect people who requested help in using the libraries - relatively rare with specialized research collections where a host of users just get to work in what used to be showpiece collections. Many of these users came from the DFO institutions but also from outside, including academics, people in industry and other government employees. The provision of materials over the internet? Largely had to be digitized from library collections. Now we'll have neither the collections nor the librarians to do so.

The hasty closures and haphazard deaccessioning of these collections that represent substantial investments of taxpayer money over decades? Entirely the opposite of what conservatives claim to value - careful custody of a nation's heritage and citizen investment. (Canada's federal government is in the control of the Progressive Conservative party, hard at work muzzling the scientists supported by our tax dollars.)

From The Tyee's December 23 story on the topic, "What Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries": Moreover records on library usage were overtly biased and based on who asked for help, said Burton Ayles, a retired director general for DFO who lives in Winnipeg and has used the Freshwater Institute library frequently.

"Most people that come in to the library don't have to request help. They just use the material. Just look at any regular library."

It does seem sad that digitizing books leads to destruction of physical copies. I hope they are earnestly being offered to other libraries beforehand.

The point here is that the books are _not_ being digitized, and it is the _only_ copies which are being destroyed. This isn't the public library getting rid of their extra copies of "Fifty Shades of Gray", it's decades of scientific data being sent to dumpsters or outright burned. In many cases the destruction has been done without any attempt at identifying or recording the books being destroyed, so we may not even be able to know exactly what has been affected.

Very few got the internet, or the prevalence of pocket computing and connectivity that we take for granted 20 years later.

Star Trek had the basic concept of portable computing in the late 1960s, albeit crudely. And I'm pretty sure that there were folks predicting it long before that.

Mark Twain predicted the Internet in the late 1800s. Not precisely, of course—who would have thought that text-based communications would actually make a comeback—but he pretty much described the concept of a worldwide communication network with webcams where you could see and hear what was going on around the world... in an era when computers were mechanical devices, when television was basically still in the hypothetical stage, etc.

What people didn't predict was that we would clog up those pipes with advertising....

I'll take it you haven't been paying attention to Canadian politics. Our current government is running a bit of a deficit in the "rationality" department.

...and perhaps for not-unrelated reasons.

For years Victoria BC paid labs to prove that shitting in the ocean didn't cause problems with the ecosystem. You can prove any negative hypothesis if you pay enough scientists. The Nazis did it all the time, hell they even proved the inferiority of Jews with the pseudo science of phrenology. To say that fracking is completely ecologically safe completely ignores the evidence and experience of some.

It's as if a bunch of people were brought up to believe human beings aren't adaptable to some moderate temperature hikes. We are, only stupid ones aren't.

It sounds like the Exxon CEO: . Fossil fuels will warm planet, but humans can adapt Therefore, no problem for people rich, young and in good shape. Just too bad for the others and wild animals! I've found indecent and immoral to read these disconnected comments.

I'm with you - and given that the largest single source of GHG emissions are from livestock (18% according to the UN FAO study Livestock's Long Shadow - http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM, closer to a scary 51% if you consider what the Worldwatch Institute rebuffs with: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294 ).

Also consider that "three-quarters of the world's agricultural land is devoted to raising livestock, either for grazing or for growing feed" - http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/Food-Farming/2011/10/13/food-meat-double-study/

Plus, it's more ethically consistent with how most people (at least Westerners) think. If you wouldn't harm a cat or dog for pleasure, why would you do it to a cow, pig or chicken?

The Internet has been predicted quite a few times. Off the top of my head, Mark Twain:

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/01/08/MarkTwain/

Also I found this article on the topic, although the comments are far more interesting than the article itself:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/03/who-said-science-fiction-never-predicted-the-internet/

I think that's his point. Any government department that's mandated to manage the truth will ultimately become the controller of truth. Or we will end up with something like the abusive Canada Human Rights Act.

"Look at these pictures from my city (Vancouver, Canada). I have lots of friends raising families in the city"

Are you fucking kidding me?

Perhaps if your friends are super rich they can afford to live in vancouver city proper. MOST people with kids live in the suburbs, unless they live in their parents old house or some other stroke of luck. There was even an article on it in the tyee recently: Vancouvers Downtown Chases out kids

Not to mention the fact that EVERYONE drives in the lower mainland.. EVERYONE.. Taking the transit is simply not an option as its between 3.75 to 5.00 each way from any suburb. Which is MORE than it costs for gasoline on the same trip, even with gas being 1.31/L currently. Source

Vancouver is HORRIBLY designed. We have very poor density compared to many other urban centres, with sprawling "vancouver special" houses which are built wide, not tall due to regulations. You have these choke points of bridges which clog up and waste tonnes of time every day. Even in my 7km commute to downtown (read BARELY in the suburbs), generally takes an 30-45 minutes in rush hour. And thats using plenty of shortcuts.

Now these condos you mentioned, from your image it looks to be olympic village. Want to know what it costs to live there? Go take a look: Olympic Village Pricing. You will see that it costs 500k -1M for a 2 bedroom 800sqft apartment in your "city planners with vision" utopia. How the fuck is that affordable for a family???
Sure if you think its a good idea to raise a family in an 800sqft shoebox with only concord pacifics Ãvisionà of "shared green space" (2 acres for like 10k people to relax in) Source. But honestly, i think you are rich, terribly deluded, dont have kids over 4 years old, or simply misinformed.

The bottom line is that you are wrong to use vancouver as a good model of anything sustainable or affordable. Vancouver, where you cant get a 1200sqft house for under 850k. Vancouver, where there is a whole site making fun of the fact that you cant tell million dollar houses from crack house.

Vancouver has a LONG way to go before it is hospitable to families or even pedestrians! When was the last time you walked to surrey from downtown? To burnaby? To richmond?

carefully selected evidence

If the entire AGW is built on carefully selected evidence, then you should have no problem providing evidence for that from the preponderance of literature out there.

Try to find a single peer-reviewed article published since 2000 that unequivocally uses carefully selected evidence, and has not been subsequently corrected. That would be a very instructive exercise for you, instead of merely parroting what other people have said to be true.

British Columbia's Tyee.ca just ran a fundraising appeal to bring in dollars for additional election coverage. They asked for $5,000 and got $20,000.

People will pay for good journalism, at least if they feel that the conventional outlets aren't doing the job.

British Columbia's Tyee.ca just ran a fundraising appeal to bring in dollars for additional election coverage. They asked for $5,000 and got $20,000.

People will pay for good journalism, at least if they feel that the conventional outlets aren't doing the job.

I didn't see it mentioned in the summary, but world speed record holder Sam Whittingham's bike was designed by a Bulgarian sculptor, Georgi Georgiev, who is not an engineer. The bike was not designed from computational fluid dynamics, or other modern engineering techniques. The design emerged from the brain of Mr. Georgiev; he designed the bike to "hide from the air", while providing Sam Whittingham with just enough space to pedal comfortably.

I have always been amazed that Sam Whittington and Georgi Georgiev have been able to consistently beat teams with engineers and batteries of computers with advanced aerodynamics software. Mr. Georgiev is something of a genius.

From http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/01/30/DefendNorthwestPassage/:

In 1969, an American oil company sent an ice-strengthen oil tanker, the SS Manhattan, on a test-voyage through the Northwest Passage. The company, which was cooperating closely with the U.S. government, made a point of not seeking permission from Canada.

If the US resumes that path, and there's no evidence they will right now, it'll lead to a fundamental change is the perceived "special relationship" between Canada and the US. Americans would be surprised at the change in attitude that would result.

However, I believe things are quite a bit different now compared to 1969. We have Russia making macho territorial claims all over the place and Canada (plus Denmark) are in the best position to legally defeat those claims, not the US.

Also, there might be some recognition in Washington that treating the NWP as the high seas could easily result in an environmental mess of biblical proportions because, for example, dumped oily bilge water in the cold Arctic water doesn't disperse like it does in warmer climates. A large oil spill up there would be an unmitigated disaster.

Finally one would assume the US would like to know, via Canadian tracking of ships in it's territorial waters, who's going where. Canada would have some rights to actually board and inspect ships which is much superior to what the US could find out if the passage was international waters in which case they would be limited to satellite, radar, or airborne tracking.

"Special Relationship"?

yeah, thanks for 9/11 assholes!

From http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/01/30/DefendNorthwestPassage/:

In 1969, an American oil company sent an ice-strengthen oil tanker, the SS Manhattan, on a test-voyage through the Northwest Passage. The company, which was cooperating closely with the U.S. government, made a point of not seeking permission from Canada.

If the US resumes that path, and there's no evidence they will right now, it'll lead to a fundamental change is the perceived "special relationship" between Canada and the US. Americans would be surprised at the change in attitude that would result.

However, I believe things are quite a bit different now compared to 1969. We have Russia making macho territorial claims all over the place and Canada (plus Denmark) are in the best position to legally defeat those claims, not the US.

Also, there might be some recognition in Washington that treating the NWP as the high seas could easily result in an environmental mess of biblical proportions because, for example, dumped oily bilge water in the cold Arctic water doesn't disperse like it does in warmer climates. A large oil spill up there would be an unmitigated disaster.

Finally one would assume the US would like to know, via Canadian tracking of ships in it's territorial waters, who's going where. Canada would have some rights to actually board and inspect ships which is much superior to what the US could find out if the passage was international waters in which case they would be limited to satellite, radar, or airborne tracking.

Postman has a tendency towards technological determinism. It is not necessarily fruitful to treat the Internet as a single medium, and it's certainly not a medium whose social significance has stabilized yet. At this point, the convergence with TV that you talk about is only one possible outcome - one that must be vigorously resisted.

That said, you are right to focus on the effects online activity have on people, rather than the relative value of the content they produce. Participation online can help people think and develop their capacities (e.g. writing skills), it can form communities, and it can result in action in the offline world (e.g. political organization). These effects can be beneficial even if nothing is produced, or if what is produced is not of high quality.

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone also takes aim at television. Putnam attributes 25% of the decline in social capital (community involvement etc.) in America since the mid 1960s to television. I find his evidence compelling. See also William Gibson talking about when TV was switched on in New York. A feature on the DVD for The Naked City goes into some detail about this (I can have the text of the quote if you're interested).

When I worked at the helpdesk of a small ISP, we were approached by this company to see if we were interested in letting them test their ad-inserting proxy server on our customers. I protested that it was scummy and might lead to legal trouble (I was guessing) over changing pages in-flight, but my bosses didn't listen. That was back in 2002 or 2003, and I left shortly after to take another job. No idea what's going on there now.

I'm moving to a new ISP since my current one has started blocking port 25 in and out. I run my own mail server, so I appreciate that Uniserve's TOS explicitly allow servers (clause #19). However, they also explicitly say that they insert ads:

65. UNISERVE shall have the right, without notice, to insert advertising data into the Internet browser used by a UNSERVE customer, and transferred to a UNISERVE customer over UNISERVE's network, so long as this does not involve UNISERVE establishing the identity of the customer to whom such data is sent.

Needless to say I'm not happy about that, but in Vancouver my choices are limited: Telus (who'll censor web pages if they belong to a union striking against them), Shaw, or a handful of small ADSL ISPs that all seem to be much the same. Uniserve seems the best of a bad bunch.

Sadly and in a way very scary, the U.S. is on the lead in using the net against people. As Professor Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist learned, when it comes to the current U.S. government, and the use of the Patriot Act, a simple border patrol officer, or a normal cop, can google your name and "decide" what kind of person you are. Laws like the Patriot Act, put way too much power in the hands of low level security workers, that with the internet tools can ban, and maybe even incarcerate anyone on their sole judgment. Prof. Feldmar wrote an article published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry." The guard didn't like what he saw, and pulled him off the line and in to a nightmare that hasn't really finished. He has been baned to enter the U.S. for ever due to "narcotics" use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn't interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file. I don't think computers should "forget" stuff, in this case for example, the computer would have to forget the professor's work entirely. I think the use of the internet as a weapon against people is just ripe for a government like the current U.S. administration. I wish we could just forget despot laws and politicians, but the net will never forget.

Ho-hum another blog hoping that shakespere will get shat out from a million monkey's behinds.

For some real grass-roots journalism: http://www.thetyee.ca/