Oh yes we can buy some... 20 years ago, Canada went shopping for nuclear subs. Trouble is, the only possible choices were american, with strings attached (every US-made weapon system comes with strings attached), british (US license with US strings attached) and french, the latest without any strings attached (every french-made weapon system comes with no strings attached, hence the extreme popularity of french weapons. Ask the Royal Navy how the like Exocet missiles after the Falklands war...).
Even better, the french subs were perfecly sized for the job to be done, whereas US subs were too big and too expensive to crew and operate.
But given how english Canada hates the french, it would have been political suicide to buy french submarines, so Canada instead waited 10 years and decided to buy used obsolete diesel british submarines that catch fire...
This intervention is a theft from the shareholders of the company in question.
Nowhere in the Canadian Constitution nor Charter of Rights you will find the "right to private property".
This was purposely left out. Back in 1982, when the constitution was repatriated, it was proposed to put the "right to private property", but it was not done to insure that a croporation could NEVER use the courts to get a person's property.
Now, you yankees can boast all you want about property rights, with the eminent domain supreme court decision (a government can expropriate a person to sell his land to a corporation that would pay more taxes), you look like a bunch of hypocrites.
And not having property rights in the constitution has the added advantage that you can block transactions that could have an adverse strategic effect, instead of blindingly let the "property rights" of a huge croporation rape everyone and their dog like it's done in the US.
How about all the people who actually want to drive instead of playing "dodge the stupid jaywalker." You want to jaywalk, sure thing as long as certain conditions are met. These would include such things as drivers having total immunity, criminal and civil, if they hit someone crossing in a non-designated place. Likewise the jaywalker (or his estate) would be required to pay any and all costs that result including cost to the driver who hit them (such as lost time) and estimated costs to society from the resulting traffic jam.
Well, no, of course. Driving is a PRIVILEGE, whereas walking is an inalienable right. If you don't drive well, you gonna have your license revoked, effectively stripping you of your privilege, whereas no matter what one does, he cannot be (legally) stripped of his right to walk.
Outlawing file sharing is like outlawing jaywalking. You can do it, but it certainly won't stop people from doing it. It may be enforced at first, but since people don't think it's shaking the very foundations of the Universe, they think nothing of doing it, everybody but a little bunch of anal jerks ends up doing it, and it's not enforced anymore.
The whole system is in shambles, courtesy of the deregulation.
30 years ago, when you flew somewhere, every ticket cost the same price, a price set by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Since no airline had a price advantage, they competed on service.
You had free drinks, free meals and whenever something fucked-up, they really took care of you.
But the best side of regulation was that US airlines had the newest fleet in the whole world! Now, how does this sounds in terms of safety? It's pretty significant.
Then, they deregulated. The "frea mahkit" decided everything. US airlines were free to do as they chose. So, instead of buying aircraft, they bought airlines. The net result? After 20 years of deregulation, US airlines went from the youngest fleet to having the oldest fleet in the world! And if you wanted to fly on a godforsaken place well outside of the profitable networks, you got to pay through the nose.
It is cheaper for me to fly to Europe than to fly to my sister's, even though she lives a 12 hour drive away!!!
Airlines bleed money, and too much of this money is taxpayer's money. Enough is enough, the "frea mahkit" has amply demonstrated it's utter, total, absolute, complete and indomitable failure. Bring back regulation; that's the only thing that will prevent the emergency nationalization of airlines.
Use that dark fiber laid down everywhere and abandonned since the dot-com bubble exploded.
It is only the greed of companies who artificially cause scarcity to raise bandwidth prices (the same reason why they won't deploy IPv6 so they can cash on the scarcity of IPv4 addresses). Yet again, it will become necessary to have the government regulate (cue the government-hating Ayn Rand-style brain-dead libertarian freeloaders)..
Feh. Once, I a library, I committed the cardinal sin of letting my cellphone ring (oh! The humanity!) As I headed to the bathroom 15 feet away, the noise made by the five employees who told me how sinful I was and to get out was much louder than my telling who called me to wait until I got to the can...
Amtrak and the TGV have a quiet cars. Smoke travels almost as well as sound.
Actually, no. When trains had smoking/nonsmoking sections, the air-conditionning was setup so that the nonsmoking section had a slightly positive air pressure compared to the nonsmoking, so that the smoke could never drift in the nonsmoking compartment.
All they're doing is improving the airport's profits, and as a result, some of that will lower my ticket cost in the future...
Since you believe that improving an airline's bottom-line will yield cheaper tickets, there's that nice bridge in San-Francisco (complete with "Free Tibets" banners) I want to sell you.
Only the yankees automatically assume that government is bad. Meanwhile, elsewhere, other government are nevertheless ran competently, and take decisions that are not second-guessed and immediately dismissed by the people. Now walk back in that snowstorm you came from.
What's the problem? 300 people connect to the BBC and stream Benny Hill. Those 300 streams take X amount of bandwidth, once for every subscriber, and 300 times for the BBC.
Each subscriber pays for his little tube, and the BBC pays for it's tube big enough to carry 300 Benny Hill streams.
We're in this mess partly because the governments saw fit to grant monopolies to various companies who now behave like monopolies. Raise your hand if you're shocked. We should always be leery of patching bad government with more government, because it's probably going to turn out to be bad government, and then people will want to...
Oooh, PUUUUHHHLLLLEEEEZE, we know yankees don't like government, it's deep inside their pea-brain culture.
Thing is, 95% of the planet AREN'T YANKEES and many of those people have no problem with government, and since those people don't have problem with government, their governments are able to attract competent people that will do a good job. Now, crawl back under that bridge and play with yourself.
Thanks for yet another laughable cliché that shows that you yankees are terminally clueless. Five percent less tax in Canada than in the US. (http://www.fin.gc.ca/toce/2002/cantaxadv_e.html)
Now, let's compare Canada and the US health care systems with relevant information instead of crap you pull out of your arse: US Canada Life expectancy 77.8 80.2 Infant mortality 6.8 5.3 Physicians 2.2 2.4 / 1000 people Nurses 10.0 7.9 / 1000 people Expense $3326 $6401 -- People pay twice as much to be denied care! Cost of GDP 9.8 15.3% of GDP Government spend 16.7 18.5% The US government spends MORE to uninsure people!
So, basically, you guys PAY MORE to fatten insurance executives that deny you health-care, you guys PAY MORE taxes for health care spending, yet many insured people are bankrupted by health-care costs. Really some system you guys have! Way to go! It's not for nothing that the whole planet thinks yankees are utter morons!!! They have to be to accept such a shitty system!!!
An ISP a friend worked for, however, took the other route. After selling Bell's service in Montreal, they hired my friend to do their ADSL rollout. They bought their own bandwidth, installed their own DSLAMs,
Would someone please tell me where I can an ISP in Ottawa (Canada's Capital of all places) that doesn't have a downstream cap, or throttling/traffic shaping and has (god formid) decent customer service.
It was working perfectly fine until a few weeks ago when Bell started fucking around with 3rd party traffic. It's been working well since the beginning. You just have to force the companies to not be assholes like Bell is right now.
Just like Comcrap(TM) a few weeks ago, it's gonna come and bite Bell in the arse. The government can say "we're against intervening into that, let the frea-mahkitt decide" all it wants, but it's a minority government, a minority government that chickened-out and withdrew it's copyright reform bill before even showing it to Parliament, given how loud the public outcry was.
That government is walking a very tight line right now, and the only thing keeping them alive is not their dynamism, but the utter lameness of the opposition leader.
Soon you will have a public utility running a subsidized feed of advertisements and surveilance kit to your boxen, call it TV++.
You mean like the public roads, which everyone is free to use a pair of shoes, a black bicycle, a violet chopper motorcycle, a silver motorcycle with sidecar, a red car, a blue station-wagon, a green mini-van, a yellow van, a purple "cube", a beige truck, a white tow-truck, an orange bus, a crimson semitrailer or a black horse to go where they want, when they want???
Heck, I'll have a free (as in software) public internet anytime over an unfree (as in Tibet) private internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, the french subs were perfecly sized for the job to be done, whereas US subs were too big and too expensive to crew and operate.
But given how english Canada hates the french, it would have been political suicide to buy french submarines, so Canada instead waited 10 years and decided to buy used obsolete diesel british submarines that catch fire...
This was purposely left out. Back in 1982, when the constitution was repatriated, it was proposed to put the "right to private property", but it was not done to insure that a croporation could NEVER use the courts to get a person's property.
Now, you yankees can boast all you want about property rights, with the eminent domain supreme court decision (a government can expropriate a person to sell his land to a corporation that would pay more taxes), you look like a bunch of hypocrites.
And not having property rights in the constitution has the added advantage that you can block transactions that could have an adverse strategic effect, instead of blindingly let the "property rights" of a huge croporation rape everyone and their dog like it's done in the US.
I never fail to be amazed how much yankees are so incredibly anal about personal responsibility... No other culture on earth harbours such thoughts.
Outlawing file sharing is like outlawing jaywalking. You can do it, but it certainly won't stop people from doing it. It may be enforced at first, but since people don't think it's shaking the very foundations of the Universe, they think nothing of doing it, everybody but a little bunch of anal jerks ends up doing it, and it's not enforced anymore.
30 years ago, when you flew somewhere, every ticket cost the same price, a price set by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Since no airline had a price advantage, they competed on service.
You had free drinks, free meals and whenever something fucked-up, they really took care of you.
But the best side of regulation was that US airlines had the newest fleet in the whole world! Now, how does this sounds in terms of safety? It's pretty significant.
Then, they deregulated. The "frea mahkit" decided everything. US airlines were free to do as they chose. So, instead of buying aircraft, they bought airlines. The net result? After 20 years of deregulation, US airlines went from the youngest fleet to having the oldest fleet in the world! And if you wanted to fly on a godforsaken place well outside of the profitable networks, you got to pay through the nose.
It is cheaper for me to fly to Europe than to fly to my sister's, even though she lives a 12 hour drive away!!!
Airlines bleed money, and too much of this money is taxpayer's money. Enough is enough, the "frea mahkit" has amply demonstrated it's utter, total, absolute, complete and indomitable failure. Bring back regulation; that's the only thing that will prevent the emergency nationalization of airlines.
It is only the greed of companies who artificially cause scarcity to raise bandwidth prices (the same reason why they won't deploy IPv6 so they can cash on the scarcity of IPv4 addresses). Yet again, it will become necessary to have the government regulate (cue the government-hating Ayn Rand-style brain-dead libertarian freeloaders)..
Yup!
It's just like history, really... History repeats itself, do does the Universe.
It is duly noted that you do not mention the European Union...
Only the yankees automatically assume that government is bad. Meanwhile, elsewhere, other government are nevertheless ran competently, and take decisions that are not second-guessed and immediately dismissed by the people. Now walk back in that snowstorm you came from.
Each subscriber pays for his little tube, and the BBC pays for it's tube big enough to carry 300 Benny Hill streams.
So what's the problem? Why are ISPs bitching?
Thing is, 95% of the planet AREN'T YANKEES and many of those people have no problem with government, and since those people don't have problem with government, their governments are able to attract competent people that will do a good job. Now, crawl back under that bridge and play with yourself.
Thanks for yet another laughable cliché that shows that you yankees are terminally clueless.
Five percent less tax in Canada than in the US. (http://www.fin.gc.ca/toce/2002/cantaxadv_e.html)
Now, let's compare Canada and the US health care systems with relevant information instead of crap you pull out of your arse:
US Canada
Life expectancy 77.8 80.2
Infant mortality 6.8 5.3
Physicians 2.2 2.4 / 1000 people
Nurses 10.0 7.9 / 1000 people
Expense $3326 $6401 -- People pay twice as much to be denied care!
Cost of GDP 9.8 15.3% of GDP
Government spend 16.7 18.5% The US government spends MORE to uninsure people!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada#Canadian_health_care_in_comparison)
So, basically, you guys PAY MORE to fatten insurance executives that deny you health-care, you guys PAY MORE taxes for health care spending, yet many insured people are bankrupted by health-care costs.
Really some system you guys have! Way to go! It's not for nothing that the whole planet thinks yankees are utter morons!!! They have to be to accept such a shitty system!!!
From their blurb, it's 5MB down/800mb up, capped at 200 (yes two hundred) per month.
That government is walking a very tight line right now, and the only thing keeping them alive is not their dynamism, but the utter lameness of the opposition leader.
Heck, I'll have a free (as in software) public internet anytime over an unfree (as in Tibet) private internet.