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Original premise was "more religious people give" than do "non-religious people give".
Which is not true. In fact, they don't give - they are taxed by the church. But it is counted as "giving".

Similarly, secondary premise that "Republicans give more than Democrats" is not true.
In fact, they don't even give. They invest.
Into rich institutions, which include religious ones - but explicitly excludes working poor and public schools.
Such donate-for-profit scheme was established by - Republicans.
I.e. Republicans are deliberately and systematically taking from the poor and giving to the "many religious charities" - cause that makes them a profit.

Thus, those "many religious charities that do much good in the world" are taking the money from the poor, creating profit for the rich - while servicing said rich.
I.e. Not even that "do much good in the world" is true.

Unless we count making rich more rich and making poor suffer more. You know... like what "Mother" Teresa did.

[Citation Needed]

There you go.

There was a paper presented at a Lisp/Scheme - related conference a few years ago about how someone managed to wrestle an ERP system (whatever that was) into submission.

It started out as hundreds of thousands of lines in C or C++ (I forget which).
They decided they wanted to add a scripting language to it.
They picked Gambit/C, an implementation of Scheme that can be compiled to C, and can also be interpreted.

Gradually, when they had trouble with particular parts of their huge system, they discovered it was often easier to rewrite them in the scripting language than to fix the C code. Gradually, over a few years, hundreds of thousands of lines of C code were replaced by about 30,000 lines of Gambit. And it ran faster in the scripting language (which could be compiled, after all) than it had formerly run in C. And it had more features.

If you can accomplish a major rewrite an improvement incrementally, you can probably achieve continuity of operation that would be difficult any other way.

Now I don't know how Gambit would link with Microsoft's BASIC. But there's probably a way, and perhaps you should look into it.

You might want to communicate with Marc Feely, the Gambit/C author about the possibilities.

The Gambit/C mailing list is at https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
Yes, there's a server misconfiguration that may prompt your browser to give scary messages, but that's the URL.

The main page of the Gambit wiki is at http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

-- hendrik

There was a paper presented at a Lisp/Scheme - related conference a few years ago about how someone managed to wrestle an ERP system (whatever that was) into submission.

It started out as hundreds of thousands of lines in C or C++ (I forget which).
They decided they wanted to add a scripting language to it.
They picked Gambit/C, an implementation of Scheme that can be compiled to C, and can also be interpreted.

Gradually, when they had trouble with particular parts of their huge system, they discovered it was often easier to rewrite them in the scripting language than to fix the C code. Gradually, over a few years, hundreds of thousands of lines of C code were replaced by about 30,000 lines of Gambit. And it ran faster in the scripting language (which could be compiled, after all) than it had formerly run in C. And it had more features.

If you can accomplish a major rewrite an improvement incrementally, you can probably achieve continuity of operation that would be difficult any other way.

Now I don't know how Gambit would link with Microsoft's BASIC. But there's probably a way, and perhaps you should look into it.

You might want to communicate with Marc Feely, the Gambit/C author about the possibilities.

The Gambit/C mailing list is at https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
Yes, there's a server misconfiguration that may prompt your browser to give scary messages, but that's the URL.

The main page of the Gambit wiki is at http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

-- hendrik

How "very random" do you need, that a Mersenne Twister is not good enough, but an untested signal is? And if you only looked at the 1 bit word mean, you basically didn't test it at all. If you don't care about specifics, you can just use the Testu01 suite of tests. If you care about specifics and want to do your own tests...you should do the same bias test for various word lengths. So besides making sure the 0 and 1 appear about 50% of the time, you should make sure that 00,01,10,11 appear about 25% of the time, 000,001,etc are all uniform for 3 bit words, and so on until at least several hundred bit words (yes, it will take you a long time to sample enough words!) Besides those simple "fair dice" tests, you can also pick a dimension, (2 or more) and sample a lot of points (using whatever bit words you like) and then find the minimum distance between two points. With repeated tests this minumum distance should follow an exponential distribution, with the parameters describing that distribution depending on the range of possible values and the number of dimensions. Similarly, if you treat your n bit words as floats from [0,1) (by dividing by 2^n), then sampling a large number and adding them together should get you a normal variable, where the mu and sigma depend on n and how many you are adding together. There's also a 'pigeon hole' test where you have 2^n bins and sample n bit words and put them in the bin, and then take the maximum occupancy. Again, statistically this value should have a known distribution and you can test against that. A related one is called a "parking lot" test, where you sample in 2 dimensions and treat points as circles of some radius, and you only place a circle if it doesn't overlap with other circles already placed. After 10,000 samples you should have less than 10,000 placed, and the number you actually placed should be normally distributed, with the mu and sigma depending on the size of the lot, the number of attempts, and the radius of the circles used. There are plenty of such tests. They all revolve around using your generator to simulate a simple statistical system where the distribution of the result is known by you, so you can see how consistent your repeated simulations are with the expected distribution. A 1-bit mean test is just simulating coin tosses, while a 2-bit mean test is simulating 4 sided die tosses, etc.

But a Mersenne Twister does quite well on Testu01, so you have to ask yourself why a software generator can't possibly be sufficient.

As for the mechanical "what's wrong" side of things, if you don't know the physical mechanism, you can't know what conditions are required for your tests to remain valid. Where is the line noise coming from? Just noise from the physical components, or is there a radio wave factor? Will a new tower broadcasting alter the behavior of the noise in a meaningful way? What about wifi devices? I know of sound cards that pick up the signal sent when a cellphone rings so you can tell moments before it actually rings. (You can get a TARDIS for your keychain that lights up when a nearby cellphone is being rung, which works by the same mechanism but on purpose).

Then there's Gambit, a Scheme implementation that compiles Scheme to C. Instant C compatibility!

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

-- hendrik

To help seperate the demafation issue from the linking issue, here is some relevant reading of a precedent about publishing quotations: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc61/2009scc61.html

My read of it: the court leaves the jury a lot of leeway to infer intent of a writer based on common sense ... so the ruling on this new case will probably focus on what new defences (misunderstanding, possible edits of the document linked to, etc) a jury can consider, rather than letting the linker off the hook completely.

When you say "deliberately harvested and planted his field with seed which he knew had Monsanto's genetic modifications," it sounds like he stole Monsanto seed and planted it in his field. From reading the wiki page, it sounds more like he collected seeds from his own fields that had been pollinated with Monsanto GM naturally. In the former case, I'd say Monsanto should win - stealing their seeds is wrong. But if his fields had been naturally pollinated, why should he be responsible for Monsanto's inability to contain their pollen?

The court erred in their ruling. From the court ruling: "The trial judge found the patent to be valid and allowed the action, concluding that the appellants knew or ought to have known that they saved and planted seed containing the patented gene and cell and that they sold the resulting crop also containing the patented gene and cell. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the decision but made no finding on patent validity."

In other words, the Canadian courts took as fact Monsanto's word that their patented gene could not spread naturally, so if Mr. Schmeiser found crop which was Roundup-tolerant, he ought to have known that he was infringing the patent. Since it's now become clear that the gene can spread despite the best efforts of Monsanto's geneticists to prevent it, the ruling is in error and should be overturned.

In fact, if he was in the business of selling non-GMO, the contamination of his fields could cost him value, customers, or even entire markets.

A group of organic farmers in Canada filed suit claiming exactly that. The presence of GMO grains in Canada prohibits their export to the EU (where GMO is banned). These farmers argued that Monsanto, by selling GMO seed in Canada, was economically harming them by cutting them off from this market.

Can you cite an example where they succeeded? I'm not trolling, I'd really like to see one. I've never yet seen a case where someone was successfully sued for seeds that "blew across from the next field". A poster above cited the link below, but the story clearly indicates that Monsanto dropped their action and the state even changed their laws to restrict Monsanto's ability to go onto farmer's land.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/26/eveningnews/main4048288.shtml

Then there is the well-known Schmeiser case. Schmeiser was clearly and knowingly applying Round-Up to selectively kill non-GM canola and preserve the Monsanto Canola that had blown in. He saved those seeds to use the following year. In the decision, the court noted the argument that seeds had "blown in" but that it was implausible given that the entire field consisted of Round-Up Ready Canola.

So, again, I am not saying I support Monsanto's legal tactics. Nor that I support the idea patenting genes. But that does not change the fact that family farmers being ruined because a few seeds blew in would appear to be a total myth. If someone has an example otherwise, I'll gladly retract my statement.

Until then, I do not believe that exaggerating things to make Monsanto appear worse is in any way helpful to the very real problems that do exist.

Mens rea = Guilty mind. Meaning you intended to commit the act, thought it through and did it.
Actus reus = Guilty act. The objective action, i.e. downloading something/driving through people/etc.

In Canada, for most criminal offences you need both to be proven in order to have the proof that the crime was committed. There's some exceptions to this but without spending a few weeks explaining it there's no point. Having only one but not the other leads to other legal avenues. In this case(without reading the entire SCC judgment, mine is still in the mail unfortunately), it sounds like the crown couldn't prove by the existence of cached data that the individual had the mental intent(mens rae) to commit the crime. However, a crime was committed(the action).

That's the extremely short version of it.

The entire judgment can be read here: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2010/2010scc8/2010scc8.html

If you ever get a chance to visit the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, you will see just how tech-savvy it really is. All documents must be filed electronically. Every station in the court (judges, clerks, lawyers and reporting media) has an embedded computer to manage the digital case materials. There are large-screen monitors for the public gallery to follow along.

The SCC broadcasts select hearings over the web. The court's decisions are all published and searchable on the internet.

Slashdot readers would also be interested in the 2004 case CCH v Law Society of Upper Canada, which considered the concept of "fair dealing" under Canada's Copyright Act.

The Supreme Court of Canada took it in another direction in R. v. Tessling (Wikipedia summary). Basically the SCC asked whether there was a significant privacy interest in images that don't provide any precise information on what's happening inside the home. This speaks to both points. The first is that the SCC determined that those images are not particularly invasive. You can see heat patterns, but no specific activities. The second point here is the emphasis on the subject matter of the image, and not whether the technology to produce that image is widely available.

Thus with the SCC's stance, it seems that if there exists some technology that can look through the walls of a home and see precise activity, then that technology would at least require a warrant.

In any event, I don't know if Kyllo's decision was that weak in the first place as to hinge on the question of whether a technology is widely/cheaply available. A much more important aspect of Kyllo seems to be the emphasis put on the "sanctity of the home". If the Court hears a similar case in the future, I'm positive that the sanctity of the home question will play a huge role in the decision.

I'm pretty sure that in the US, under Sullivan, plaintiffs only need show "actual malice" if they're public figures. The Grant decision even mentions that:

[67]: In Sullivan, the United States Supreme Court applied the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee to hold that a “public official” cannot recover in defamation absent proof that the defendant was motivated by “actual malice”, meaning knowledge of falsity or reckless indifference to truth. In subsequent cases, the “actual malice” rule was extended to apply to all “public figures”, not only people formally involved in government or politics: Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1967). Sullivan and its progeny have made it extremely difficult for anyone in the public eye to sue successfully for defamation.

So I'm not sure 3 is true in the general case.

The Grant decision offers a two part test: (1) was the publication on a matter of public interest; and (2) was publication of the defamatory communication responsible? It gives a couple of "relevant factors that may aid in determining whether a defamatory communication on a matter of public interest was responsibly made" which should thought of as "illustrative guides". They are:

-The Seriousness of the Allegation
-The Public Importance of the Matter
-The Urgency of the Matter
-The Status and Reliability of the Source
-Whether the Plaintiff’s Side of the Story Was Sought and Accurately Reported
-Whether Inclusion of the Defamatory Statement was Justifiable
-Whether the Defamatory Statement’s Public Interest Lay in the Fact That it Was Made Rather Than its Truth (“Reportage”)

It seems likely that a blogger that ignored all of those factors would likely be at more risk of losing a defamation case than one that went to efforts to maintain some sort of journalistic standards and satisfy most of those factors .

Rather than quoting the reporter who quoted bits and pieces of the decision - why not read the decision.

http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc56/2009scc56.html

Accordingly, the content of the communication is not necessarily determinative: what matters is whether the evidence as a whole establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused communicated by computer with an underage victim for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a specified secondary offence in respect of that victim.

The issue is if you get a child to trust you for the purpose of facilitating the commission of one of the included acts: sexual interference, invitation to touching, bestiality, exposure of genitals or abduction. That is - you still have to have the intent to commit one of the specified illegal acts.

Legally speaking, there is a huge difference between covering someone else's song and using the actual audio of their performance. An artist cannot prevent their own song from being covered, hence this.

The issue isn't singing someone else's song, as that has a long, long tradition and is not prevented legally. The question is whether you should be able to take the Beatles master tapes, muck around with them, and release the result without either their permission or paying them.

A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision found that the police can collect and examine your garbage without a warrant, even if it is in sealed, opaque bags, in a trashcan, within your property line. Decision: http://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc17/2009scc17.html.

The Rules of Civil Procedure govern this case. There's nothing new about this case, per se. Anything published on Facebook is a relevant document, and the laws of Ontario oblige disclosure (even if that document was private, notwithstanding rare exceptions for such as solicitor-client privilege) by the person with control over it.

The relevant section governing documentary discovery is Rule 30. Rule 30.01 defines "document", and 30.02 places an obligation on a party to make appropriate disclosure of all relevant documents. The curious can read more about a report on electronic discovery in the Ontario Bar Association's guidelines (pdf) (see also OBA "e-discovery"), and a e-Discovery web-site.

I've reproduced cited excerpts of Rule 30, here:

RULE 30 - DISCOVERY OF DOCUMENTS

INTERPRETATION
30.01 (1) In rules 30.02 to 30.11,
(a) "document" includes a sound recording, videotape, film, photograph, chart, graph, map, plan, survey, book of account, and data and information in electronic form; and
(b) a document shall be deemed to be in a party's power if that party is entitled to obtain the original document or a copy of it and the party seeking it is not so entitled.

SCOPE OF DOCUMENTARY DISCOVERY
Disclosure
30.02 (1) Every document relating to any matter in issue in an action that is or has been in the possession, control or power of a party to the action shall be disclosed as provided in rules 30.03 to 30.10, whether or not privilege is claimed in respect of the document.

There are some interesting scenarios related to Sedona obligations, namely the obligation to not destroy or delete electronic documents once a party has been advised of the potential relevance of certain electronic documents.

No, the law isn't "clear". There is a legal precedent about it. The law didn't change, so if you get sued, your lawyer has to quote a precedent, not the law as written in the books.

The Copyright Act is pretty clear about copying music. Methinks you are thinking about the P2P aspect of downloading, which involves redistribution via uploading. That part isn't clear and AFAIK remains in the grey zone since the 2004 supreme court decision that established "fair dealing" (not fair use!) as a user right, even though it was about photocopying.

However, if I download audio via http or ftp or some other conventional means, or borrow a friend's CD and rip it, that is private copying and is unequivocally NOT infringement. In fact, I pay about $0.21 per blank CD for the privilege.

Here's the relevant section from the Act: in short, copy from your friends' music collection all you want, just don't turn around and use it to make money. Unfortunately, that includes innocuous stuff like background music in a restaurant.

Copying for Private Use

80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of

(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,

(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or

(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied

onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):

(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;

(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;

(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or

(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.

1997, c. 24, s. 50.

"I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense." --- Charles Darwin

Here are some classics in the field. I'll let you google them yourselves.

LeCun et al, 1998: Gradient-based learning applied to handwriting recognition. A deep convolutional net that can read handwriting, and was deployed nationally . Yann LeCun tells me that a patent lawyer in California reimplemented in his free time as a hobby, so it can't be that hard.

LeCun et al, 1998: Efficient BackProp. Tricks and implementation details that are not discussed often.

Btw, as I understand it LeCun was offered a position to be head of Google research. He declined, and Corinna Cortes took the job instead. Regardless, if you googled Yann for a while, Google ads would try to entice you to work at Google.

There is a recent trend in neural networks towards something called Deep Learning. This deep neural networks more closely mimic how the brain works, and are supported by arguments from neuroscience, circuit complexity, and machine learning. You can read more about them here:

Bengio, 2007: Learning deep architectures for AI

From http://www.megabloks.com/en/corpo/pdf/20040802.pdf :

The block was originally created by Harry Fisher Page of the UK company Kiddicraft Ltd. in the late 1930â(TM)s, and later reproduced and marketed by Lego, Mega Bloks and other traders in the toy business.

From: http://www.marquedor.com/telemarque/archives/02-06-01b_en.htm :

In 1947 or 1948, Ole Kirk Christiansen and his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, respectively grandfather and father of Kirk Kristiansen, obtained samples of KIDDICRAFT self-locking toys and these samples led them to make the first LEGO toys. KIDDICRAFT brick construction sets with cylindrical knobs were designed, manufactured and sold by Mr. Harry Fisher Page, a British citizen, and protected by patents in the United Kingdom, Canada and France . These patents were obtained between 1940 and 1952.

From: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2005/2005scc65/2005scc65.pdf :

From The LEGO toy business was founded in 1932. In 1949, Kirkbi produced its first toy building blocks. Those blocks were derived from a British product, the Kiddicraft blocks, which used a system of interlocking blocks. Kirkbi bought the patents covering the Kiddicraft system a few years later.

This is an area with lots of crackpots, but also lots of really interesting stuff.

How do you tell the good stuff from the crackpot?

The good ones are published in top machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and AI conferences and journal. The crackpot stuff doesn't survive peer review.

Here are a few good examples:
- Geff Hinton (U. Toronto): http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/
- Yoshua Bengio (U. Montreal: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/
- Yann LeCun (NYU): http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/index.html
- Andrew Ng (Stanford): http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/
- Sebastian Seung (MIT): http://hebb.mit.edu/people/seung/
- David Lowe (U British Columbia): http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/

It's about causing violence and trying to cause violence, not offending. Read the Criminal Code on Hate Propanganda: Section 318 is about advocating genocide. Section 319 subsection 1 is about inciting hatred, in a public place, that would likely lead to violence. Subsection 2 is about inciting hatred, which I find very vague; it's addressed in R. v. Keegstra but I haven't read the entire thing yet. To me these do not communicate that nobody should be offended. "Jews have big noses" is protected.

I'm not a laywer, obviously, but I'm willing to muddle through the law in the Slashdot tradition.

Ah, no, and you're not only pretty wrong, you're blatantly wrong. The case of Aubry v. Duclos was based along these exact lines.

The issue was that "The respondent brought an action in civil liability against the appellants, a photographer and the publisher of a magazine, for taking and publishing, in a magazine dedicated to the arts, a photograph showing the respondent, then aged 17, sitting on the steps of a building. The photograph, which was taken in a public place, was published without the respondentâ(TM)s consent."

As the Supreme Court of Canada put it:

"The right to oneâ(TM)s image is an element of the right to privacy under s. 5 of the Quebec Charter. If the purpose of the right to privacy is to protect a sphere of individual autonomy, it must include the ability to control the use made of oneâ(TM)s image. There is an infringement of a personâ(TM)s right to his or her image and, therefore, fault as soon as the image is published without consent and enables the person to be identified."

By the way, damages were awarded against the magazine.

How about a link to the actual ruling. "Monsanto wins Canada seed battle" is very misleading to say the least--I'm surprised to see such horrible spin from BBC--at least from my reading of the decision. I'd be inclined to say that, all things considered, the victory is squarely in Percy's hands. Don't agree with me? Here's a quote from the decision:

Accordingly, the cultivation of plants containing the patented gene and cell does not constitute an infringement.

You have a farmer who has spent the last, say, 50 years, manually culling and selecting seeds from his best crops to engineer that crop to his liking. Then his neighbor moves in and plants Roundup Ready seeds. At first there's no problem, but gradually the neighbor's crops will pollinate our farmer's land. Well, naturally this is to be expected, and our farmer would normally just select around the intruders. The problem is, Monsanto takes it upon themselves to sue our farmer and force him to stop using the same farming technique he's been using his entire life. ...
It's people like Percy Schmeiser who have suffered for it.


That's what I thought, but my dad was again better informed on the matter than me. When I mentioned Monsanto suing a guy for exactly the reasons you describe he was already aware of the details. My dad farmed in Manitoba so news from a small farm just over in Saskatchewan is always relevant. Here's the details from the Canadian Supreme court case.

Schmeiser never purchased Roundup Ready Canola nor did he obtain a licence to plant it. Yet, in 1998, tests revealed that 95 to 98 percent of his 1,000 acres of canola crop was made up of Roundup Ready plants.

Greater than 95% cross contamination was very hard for the courts to swallow. The fact of the matter was that all evidence pointed to the fact that Percy deliberately planted Round-up ready seeds, not cross contaminated ones. I still wanted to argue how it was wrong, but the evidence really just shows that Percy was deliberately and knowingly using round-up ready seeds. If your familiar with another case that really did involve cross contamination I'd be glad to hear it, but saying Percy was a victim of it is just spreading misinformation.

Lego Turing Machine

Lego Difference Engine :D

http://www.dms.umontreal.ca/~andrew/PDF/VS.pdf

Link about the marbles/pegs/bell curve:

http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/cousined/lego/5-Machines/Galton/Galton.html

Ballistic electrons in graphene:

http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=2340.php

Canadian government is also forbidden to do illegal searches by Constitution. Recently someone got of due to the fact that he was searched on a hunch by the border guards (they had no reasonable suspicion) even though they found 50 Kg of cocaine. http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n880/a12.html of course it will probably not stand up to appeal.
Another interesting decision found while googling above is http://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1988/1988rcs2-548/1988rcs2-548.html where someone got of for not being informed of his right to a lawyer as soon as customs decided to search him.
Canada's constitution is a bit weaker as whether illegal evidence is admitted is based on whether it brings justice into disrepute. Also the constitution is a bit more modern than America's as it was put into place in 1981.

The only case I could find with a quick Google search in Canada was Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v. Canadian Assn. of Internet Providers, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 427, 2004 SCC 45 .

Glancing over the case briefly, the Supreme Court of Canada reached a conclusion that ISPs act merely as a "conduit" (which is the word specifically used in the decision), and should therefore not be liable for anything that happens over their networks (unless the content is hosted on their networks, and they explicitly reject to do anything about the contested content). They can only act as a "conduit" and enjoy a "don't shoot the messenger" protection if the "participation is content neutral", meaning it doesn't do anything with the content other than communicating it. ISPs can only claim exemption from liability if they act merely as conduits. The moment they tamper with the content, they stop being a "conduit". Once they have some control over the content, it COULD be argued that whenever copyright infringement occurs over their networks, they should be able to stop it.

Which is what makes this move by Rogers TOTALLY bizarre. Since Rogers is now modifying the content of web sites, they can no longer, it can be implied from this case, claim exemption from liability of copyright infringement. I don't think they consulted with their legal department before rolling these "features" out. The CRIA should jump on this opportunity to quickly sue Rogers and cite this case.

The case is nowhere near as straightforward as most people seem to believe. If you research the details, he bought massive quantities of Round-Up, which was basically the first smoking gun in Monsanto's case[1].

The quantity of Round-Up be bought exceeded the amount that could be applied to his non-crop acreage, ruling out the possibility that it was purchased solely for border weed control etc. This was a very strong indication that he not only knew he was growing RR Canola, but that he was actively selecting for it by spraying his fields.

The other smoking gun was the fact that his crop was 95-98% RR canola[2]. That level of 'contamination' indicates very aggressive, active selection for the target genotype. You do not get that from the trace contamination due to windblown seed or accidental cross-pollination.

I don't doubt that the first few plants were accidental, either through unintentional cross-pollination or stray seed, but once he found that they were round-up resistant, he actively worked to integrate the rr the genotype into his own populations. He probably just didn't feel like he was doing anything wrong.

Small-time seed producers have done exactly the same sort thing with non-GMO germplasm from, e.g., Pioneer Hi-Bred for decades. They'd buy and plant a bag of hybrid seed, and look through the field for accidental selfs (plants produced by accidental self-pollination due to incomplete detasseling during hybrid production) to steal their inbreds from their female heterotic lines. That is just as illegal as what Schmeiser did, but you don't really hear about those guys being busted and completely ruined because Pioneer isn't run by the same type of raging pricks as the guys at Monsanto.

[1] http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=gm-54 - "Monsanto argues that in spite of Schmeiser's claims that he did not use Roundup on his crops in 1998, there is no evidence that he used Muster and Assure herbicides as claimed. Furthermore, Monsanto provides evidence that Schmeiser purchased 720 liters of Roundup in 1998."

[2] http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2004/2004scc34/2004scc34.html - Schmeiser never purchased Roundup Ready Canola nor did he obtain a licence to plant it. Yet, in 1998, tests revealed that 95 to 98 percent of his 1,000 acres of canola crop was made up of Roundup Ready plants. ... The trial judge found that "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's crop."

Interestingly, the Supreme Court of Canada just released a decision that cuts the opposite way. The Court upheld the "binding arbitration" clauses that many companies put in their various contracts and agreements. This essentially shields them from class actions, since disputes have to go to arbitration instead of the courts.

Since the matters involved in these cases actually took place, two provinces (Ontario and Quebec) have passed consumer protection laws (probably similar to Washington's) that protect consumers' ability to sue as a class. More jurisdictions need to step up to the plate and do the same.

I agree with you in that the prosecutor should be dismissed When it comes to whether or not his statements should factor into the outcome of the deportation hearings, however, I beg to differ, and, at least in this country, so do the courts.

United States of America v. Cobb, [2001] 1 S.C.R. 587, 2001 SCC 19

The defendants were accused of running a telemarketing scam, making phone calls from Canada and bilking people in the US. In a media interview, the US prosecutor said to the defendants, "You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition." Further, the US judge sentencing a co-conspirator in the case said that defendants who didn't cooperate (ie, submit to extradition) would receive the "absolute maximum jail sentence". That was enough for the Supreme Court to refuse to extradite them, and IMHO, rightly so.

The Charter is a framework of rights & interpretation is what's used when launching a Charter case.

As for fair use or fair dealings, which basically means making copy's of copyrighted works. That falls very easily under section 2b of the Charter, freedom of expression.

Even our beloved PM Stephen Harper used this as the basis for his court case, later to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada & he won!

Harper v. Canada (Attorney General)
http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2000/2000scc57/20 00scc57.html

I find it pretty hard to get worked up about. It doesn't sound like it is one person in a basement deciding what Canadians can and can't look at, but rather an attempt to keep world-wide recognized child exploitation off the net. The submitters reaction sounds very American. We Canadians don't tend to get so worked up about individual freedoms when the common good is at stake. I run a filter at the school I work at. I can understand the need to block content for the kids who are our responsibility. Legal issues fall under the government. Why not allow them to block obviously illegal material?

Copying for personal use is exempt from copyright infringement within Canada, this is true, but this exemption does not apply if one is sharing it with others

You'd be surprised at the amount of lego used by scientists in quick setups.

There's a surprising amount of things that can be done with Mindstorms. You can even use a wide variety of alternative programming languages such as robotC or leJos a form of Java. These are just two of many different projects.

Just have a look around and you'll find lots of different pages about modding, and making custom bricks. It's much more potent than any of the "build your own robot-arm" type of kits. (which you can also do with Mindstorms)

For those who read French here is a press release about a team of Scheme hackers headed by Marc Feeley participating in a Quebec security competition who won both the first prize for keeping the other nine teams out and the second prize for finding the most security problems in the other teams's servers.

Technically speaking there is nothing in the Canadian Criminal Code that outlaws Holocaust denial. The authorities have tried, in the past, to prosecute deniers under laws against 'spreading false news', but those laws were shot down by the Canadian Supreme Court.

The facts are laid out in the court case itself. See Monanto vs Schmeiser at http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/ where it was proved that Schmeiser collected Monsanto seeds from road spill, tested them to make sure they were Roundup resistant, and planted them knowing he was using Monsanto seeds illegally. This not a case of some poor farmer charged by a large corporation for some accident or inadvertence but a case where someone deliberately attempted to breach Monsanto's rights. Unfortunately, the anti-GM movement has distorted the facts for political reasons and has smeared both Monsanto and the Canadiaqn judicial system.

If their actions have placed her kids at risk and (been part of what) led her to spend the expense and time of putting up the website to document their illegal actions, that should be just cause for a countersuit against them.

Sue them for direct costs, her time (at a consulting rate of $60/hour), and punitive damages of $2Million. If they have said anything public about the suit (like claiming that she lied), then she can also countersue for libel. (In Canada, You can't sue for statements made in court or court documents, but you can sue for what's said on the courtroom steps before or after you file.)

Wow... 12 years. Lots has changed since in far fewer years than that!

Maybe you should check out PLT Scheme, a modern scheme interpreter and compiler and IDE, with several "Teachpacks" which help one come up to speed in doing clever things with Scheme. DrScheme is the thing to download, for various platforms.

There are plenty of other Scheme implementations out there, interpreted and compiled.

Personally I do a lot in SCSH, the Scheme Shell which is handy for writing scripts and tools close to the metal on on UNIX/POSIX systems, however PLT and other environments are incorporating more and more of SCSH-like goodies into their libraries, and write stuff that needs to be fast in Chicken or Gambit, which compile Scheme to C. On the Common Lisp front, on a Mac, there is also OpenMCL, which compiles to *particularly fast* native PowerPC code and has a straightforward way of communicating with Cocoa and a number of other Mac-development-friendly features. In fact, all of these implementations have foreign-function-interface abilities which let you call e.g. C functions from Scheme/Lisp, or vice-versa, so you can write performance-critical sections in a low-level language of your choice, and use higher-level languages to develop "smarts".

3) They're broke, and they're issuing licenses to desperately seek money.

They're not broke, they've got a $933 million surplus.

And even though I find it reprehensible as well as counterproductive for a government entity to have exclusive copyright, it appears that the MTA is indeed entitled to enforce its rights. In the USA, only works produced by the US (Federal) Government are explicitly placed in the public domain.

The Pecking Order for BC:

1. Supreme Court of Canada Court of last resort
2. BC Court of Appeals Normally sits as 3 judges but can reconsider it's own rullings with a bank of 5 or 7
3. BC Supreme Court Civil court, major felonies and appeals of lower courts
4. BC Provincial Court non-indictable crimes

BTW: The injunction is probably unconstitutional, but I can't see anybody appealing it.. By the time the appeal went thru, the book would be released. I'm guessing that the judge who issued it just didn't want to face down his/her kids for not protecting 'ol Harry.

he might be a great guy and all ...

but the same year he started providing grant money for research at my university, they signed an exclusivity agreement with microsoft... that means that they started dismantling the mac equiped labs (we would have no more if some faculty members had not fought against it!), and that it is now a hassle for researchers to buy macs with their own research grants! Giving away a few hundred thousand dollars here and there in exchange for valuble contracts does not seem so charitable to me!

You cannot contest a law, without being charged with it, either. Where is that written?

Grandparent's statement isn't exactly precise legal language, but there is something to it. In general, the courts will only act when there is an "actual controversy", which means a criminal prosecution or civil suit in which the parties are actually at odds. For instance, if you consider a criminal law to be unconstitutional, you will normally have to violate it and get yourself charged in order to get the issue before the courts. You cannot, in general, file a suit asking the courts to nullify the law.

A relevant example is the Office of Foreign Asset Control's decision that for an American publisher to edit or translate something written by a citizen of a country embargoed by the US (such as Iran and Cuba) would violate the US embargo and thereby subject the publisher to criminal sanctions. Last year a group of publishers sued the Secretary of the Treasury (OFAC is part of the Treasury Department), asking the courts to overturn this position. In this case, as I understand it, the suit was possible because it addressed the interpretation of a regulation, not the law itself. In fact, the suit argued that the regulation as interpreted by OFAC violates the underlying law.

A decision by a court as to what the law is, without further relief, is known as a declaratory judgment. Under what circumstances it is possible to obtain a declaratory judgment is a complicated area of law. It is also one that varies from country to country. The US courts are more restrictive in this respect than those of some other countries. For instance, in Canada the government can ask the Supreme Court to state what the law is on a certain point. There doesn't have to be a case in which that point is disputed. A recent example is the reference (technically by the Governor General, the Queen's representative in Canada) to the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage. In the United States, the government could not ask the Supreme Court for a similar statement of the law.

The Charter itself is a balancing act between different rights. As you correctly noted, one is free to express one's religion as long as it doesn't impinge on someone else's freedom.

If you're really interested, the leading Supreme Court of Canada case is R. v. Keegstra. As a counter-point, see R. v. Zundel, where the accused was acquitted of spreading falsehoods about the Holocaust because the relevant portions of the Criminal Code were found to be unconstitutional.