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"Breaking the Law is useful in enforcing the Law that is illegal under the foundation of Law."

Wonderful little police state you got there.

Most people here will mistakenly think your comment is snide, but isn't it closer to the mark to call it appreciation tinged with envy?* Of course it isn't true, the United States isn't a police state. Defending yourself against would-be mass murderers, that is terrorists as opposed to political dissenters, is not oppression. Neither is surveillance on people in direct contact with Al Qaida oppression. You'll know the United States is a genuine police state when "slandering the state" earns you 10 years in a labor camp as was common under various socialist regimes of the sort you don't seem to criticize much.

The United States isn't quite there yet as President Obama's "Green Jobs Czar", Van Jones, was just a little too openly radical for the present age.

Proposed Soviet Legal Code to Retain Execution - By ESTHER B. FEIN, Special to the New York Times, December 18, 1988

Groups and individuals monitoring human rights have been anticipating the legal changes, hoping that they would eliminate articles that have been used to suppress and punish political dissent - in particular, Article 70, which sanctions imprisonment for anti-Soviet agitation, and Article 190, which allows it for anti-Soviet slander. But the ''guidelines for criminal legislation of the U.S.S.R. and the constituent republics,'' do not mention either article. They deal with some, but not all, of the individual statutes, and mostly offer direction to the 15 republics for rewriting their criminal codes.

* Nobody should be confused about the willingness of would-be revolutionaries to fight the system they intend to overthrow with its own procedures (Rule 4) to maximize their opportunity to act legally while working to subvert the nation. (Once power passes to them, surprises can follow.) The founding leadership of the ACLU is a case in point:

First, Roger Baldwin: Baldwin was the founder of the ACLU . . . Baldwin was an atheist. He was also a onetime communist, who, among other ignoble gestures, wrote a horrible 1928 book called Liberty Under the Soviets. Notably, he was smart enough not to join Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Other early officials of the ACLU, which was founded almost exactly the same time as the American Communist Party, included major party members like William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Louis Budenz (who later broke with the party). Communists used the ACLU to deflect questions from the U.S. government over whether they were loyal to the USSR, were serving Joe Stalin in some capacity, and were committed to the overthrow of the American system. . . .

So bad had been the ACLU in aiding and abetting American communists that various legislative committees, federal and state, considered whether it was a communist front. The 1943 California Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities reported that the ACLU "may be definitely classed as a communist front." The committee added that "at least 90 percent of its [the ACLU's] efforts are expended on behalf of communists who come into conflict with the law." That 90-percent figure was consistent with a major report produced by Congress a decade earlier, January 17, 1931. --- The ACLU's Not-So-Holy Tri

I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology. One of the most successful early projects, and one that I followed with a great deal of interest was MIT's Roofnet project - an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus.

In 2006 a spin-off company named Meraki was formed to develop and commercialize the MIT Roofnet technology. At the time I was on the board of the Vancouver Community Network and had been championing more development of wireless technology. We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks. We decided that this cost was prohibitive for our purposes and the Merakis were shelved.

In September of 2007 I heard about a group of Vancouver community wifi enthusiasts who were getting together with the goal of setting up community wifi in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. I came out to a meeting and invited along some people whom I know are interested in any project that is about bridging the digital divide. The technology that was trumpeted at that meeting was Meraki. Since my previous brush with them they had changed their pricing structure and now they would let you run a free network (with free access to their dashboard) or a subscription (paid) network for 10% of your charges. We (the group, which came to call itself " FreeTheNet ") were unanimous that the free option was what we wanted to do and we quickly began building out a public network.

In October Meraki announced that they were changing their pricing model (yet again) and that they would be vastly raising the costs of their hardware (tripling, in fact). I remember going to their website to learn more about what they were doing and their new marketing slogan was something like "Build your business using exciting new technology where the rules of the game keep changing " How ironic; I wish I'd kept a screenshot of that! Under their new system there was no way that we could build out the network we envisioned. At roughly that point, one of our most experienced hackers said "forget Meraki", we're going to write our own firmware and dashboard and promptly started researching that. By late Novermber he was able to demostrate an open routing firmware called B.A.T.M.A.N. running with a mesh helper inside called Robin, that provided the same functionality as the Meraki firmware. This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging "happy hacking" when you logged into it via the console.

Over December and January he worked on adding features that we wanted to our network to have (and that we had previously been encouraging Meraki to build to improve their system - things like per node custom splash screen, enhancements to the dashboard to improve scalability, etc.) All of this was being tested on Meraki hardware because this is what we had spent our money on back when they supported and encouraged the kind of work we were doing.

Then in February Meraki announced a change to their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) which precluded anyone from changing any of the software that they install on t

I am frankly not surprised that with a government that holds the values of most Canadians in contempt, that it would bend over backwards to make us more and more like the USA.

http://www.vcn.bc.ca/~dastow/harper.html

While few browsers are or have ever been 100% compliant on EVERY DETAIL of a published standard, only Microsoft (of the remaining major broswer vendors) has a history of DELIBERATLY ignoring standards or DELIBERATLY incorporating non-standard extensions into their browsers. They've been doing this since IE 1.0.

And, no, I'm not a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person. But the history here speaks for itself.

That's really funny, because history tells us exactly the opposite. Either you're too young and don't know your history, or you're intentionally spreading FUD. Please read about Netscape and tags like blink, spacer, multicol, center, keygen and others, for example here or, to see how the problem was regarded at the time, here.

So, do you think you may be a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person after all ?

The idea behind the French 35-hr week was that if people had to work fewer hours, companies would have to take on more people to do the same work.

Economists call this the lump-of-labor fallacy.

Henry Ford appears to have been a great proponent of the 40 hour work week. He actually looked at the economics of the work levels.

HENRY FORD: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

Ford Timeline

American Labor Timeline This does say that the move towards 8 hour days started in the 1880's. Ford didn't go to 8 hour days until 1914. But his company wasn't started until 1903. The assembly line started only in 1913. It was the assembly line that increased production enough that it made sense for Ford enough clout to cut hours.

Not discounting the deaths/beatings/other stuff, Ford was a pioneer for the forty hour week.

So one day I get asked to call this one group and give them a hand setting up their email. And it's a group for the blind. Fortunately they had a sighted volunteer there, though, so I talked to him. Unfortunately, he was...um..."developmentally challenged"...and this group had just moved into new offices, and the computer desk wasn't completely set up yet (let alone anything else in the office by the sound of it).

I was trying to talk this guy through setting his DNS servers in Win95, and it was painful. It took 1h40m -- no lie -- and the conversation was full exchanges like this:

Me: Okay, now move the mouse over to the window that's just popped up.
Him: [strange grunting sounds, lasting a full minute] Uh...okay.
Me: [switch back from reading Slashdot] Okay, now look for the button that says "Properties".
Him: [strange grunting noises, and the sound of the mouse moving against his pants...the desk isn't set up yet, remember]
Me: [bored] Have you found it yet?
Him: [strange grunting noises that last a full minute] Um...what?

I got him to put in one DNS number; after that I just gave up. I think it worked, though...

On the other hand, the users who don't know to fix this without having to be told are the most at risk. Given that MS claims to be the OS for ignorant users ("linux is for experts") this is kinda like the pesticide manufacturers promoting cherry and bubble-gum flavoured pesticides (I kid you not!)

It also sounds like the SQL server may CREATE an user with a blank password. If this is the case, the it would become a case of a login that didn't previously exist suddenly gives remote users the ability to seriously 'own' your machine.

In any case, this is rather like Linux installing with a blank root password. (or MySql installer adding a root user with no password, if that's what this bug does). Any half-ass distribution source should know far better than to do something like that.
You can blame the Royal Swiss Navy for not replacing the screen doors on their submarines, but it was a stupid manufacturer who installed them in the first place.

At least not without dooming your children to a world of one massive natural disastor to another. Global climate change is real, it's already happening, and we need to faze out "fossil fuels" now.

CDN government .. impacts

Floods, droughts, massive crop failures.... the list even includes the possibility of another ice age within a few decades. It's not worth the risk.

CDN government.. understanding

This is recognized by most scientists, who have even managed to convince a lot of national governments to sign agreements commiting to a policy of reduced fossil fuel use. Unfortunatly, none of them are doing anything to follow through, so it was all just talk to appease a few iconoclastic environmentalists.

A couple more links:

West Coast Environmental Law

International Red Cross

David Suzuki Foundation