1) the kid was not arrested, nor did he suffer any "damages" in light of the celebrity and overly-friendly treatment from the President, and
2) once the jury hears about his overly-activist father and the lawyer's insinuation that the whole thing was a set-up?
I'm not seeing this one going very far.
You wouldn't be one of those who is against the overly oppressive government intruding on freedom, would you?
You DO realize that he's moving to Qatar right? The worst school in America isn't gonna be as religiously batshit and backasswards as a country under Sharia.
I know, lots of people don't like what Snowden did. And they disagree with the view that, even though he was exposing wrongdoing by our government AGAINST ALLIES AND CITIZENS, he "hurt" America by laying bare intel assets and methodologies.
Okay. I can live with that. I think it's narrow-minded and stupid myself. But I can live with people thinking that.
But trying to lay blame at Snowden's door for the Paris attacks?
Gimme a fucking break. That's just being an asshole and mouthing a party line designed to further destroy the rights and privileges of the US citizen, allowing intel agencies carte blanche for whatever means and methods they wish to use, on whoever they wish to use it on. Regardless of the legality or morality.
"Woolsey was CIA director when Aldrich Ames was arrested for treason and spying against the United States. The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in Ames' standard of living; and there was a "huge uproar" in Congress when Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. Woolsey declared: "Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled...Sorry, that's not my way." Woolsey was forced to resign." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Changed his tune a bit.
... that the origin of life is spirit. Yes, it's put in different words and there's math behind it to back up the theory, but it's basically the same thing.
Why do you think it's the same thing? How could you even tell if something is the same as "spirit"?
What do you mean by "spirit"? Can you define it? I don't just mean some vague mutterings that define one word in terms of a bunch of other equally vague, undefined words. I mean something rigorous, so we can look at things and clearly say whether they do or don't meet the definition.
Information theorists do have a precise, rigorous definition of information. Mystics spend millennia muttering in their mystical way. Then scientists come along and do something entirely new, rigorous, and well defined. Then the mystics say, "Look, that's exactly the same thing we've been saying all along!" Except it isn't. One is a rigorous theory you can use to make precise predictions, while the other is just a bunch of vague mutterings. No matter what the scientists discover, the mystics will find a way to claim it's the same as what they said.
Indeed. If you can't make a quantitative model, it's philosophy/mysticism/rhetoric, not science
Thank goodness for your post. Before it, we didn't know we don't know there are things we don't know.
Turns out, old Donny Rumsfeld was something of a mystic sage on this very topic way back in 2002.
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
I do believe if he and Claude Shannon had been closer friends, we'd have knocked out Prof. Amadi's program decades ago. Alas.
More appropriate in Rumsfeld's case, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." Ironically, the thing that everybody knows about this quote; that it was by Will Rogers or by Mark Twain, appears to not be so, as no primary source for either having authored the quote has surfaced.
Of course he doesn't because he is an atheist. God created life and it will take a long time for this liberal dumbass to figure that out and start using real science.
Just think of all the land in Canada and Russia that will be opened up to farming.
Mushrooms, maybe. Green plants tend to be optimized for a particular latitude, which includes both temperature range and hours of daylight, correlated. While the thawing lands of Canada and Russia consist of frozen bogs, which when thawed will rot nicely and provide a new Golden Age, but for fungi.
It does seem a bit strange that the late 1800's are most definitely the ideal global temperature we should achieve for peace and love and whatever. Who's to say a slightly warmer planet won't have as many benefits as downsides?
BUT, we do know full well that crops will grow, oceans will harbor life, and weather phenomenon will be mostly survivable at those temperatures, so why mess with a good thing? I'm hardly on the doom and gloom side, but this just doesn't seem like something you mess with willy nilly because 'fuck it, why not.'
It does seem a bit strange that the ideal global temperature we should achieve for peace and love and whatever should be, not that at which we and our society and civilization evolved; but rather, that which would occur as a byproduct of burning all the fossil fuel we can as fast as possible. Lucky!!
Unless doing something about it is worse than doing nothing about it - such as crippling your society in order to make a barely measurable change in CO2 emissions. There is a lot of profoundly bad policy aimed at mitigating global warming.
That's the same argument that was made against abolishing slavery, the major source of both energy and wealth in the mid 1800s in the US. What would be the good of helping those people who were slaves, if they and the rest of the US were thereby plunged into poverty on an international scale? Well, somehow we managed to luck out, anyway.
Often warming temperatures equals increasing precipitation due to the warmer air holding more moisture. In the case of the Antarctic, a continent that is mostly desert, the expectation should be more snowfall which can lead to more ice. Kind of surprised that snowfall is considered consistent. And of course if snowfall is increasing due to warming (numbers pulled from my ass and exaggerated) from -40 to -10, then the expectation should be more ice buildup.
Precisely. if the antarctic is colder than the arctic; and if both warm more or less equally; then ice will relocate from the arctic to the antarctic. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
So there are some losses, but the accumulation is still growing faster. That's straight from NASA. How you debunk that without completely ignoring their results is a mystery to me. But you seem determined to do so! No thanks, I'll take NASA's statement and study that say ice volume is actually accumulating. Slower, but still accumulating overall.
Uh, no. In addition to the quote above from your site, there follows this
"But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”
i.e. the longterm trend, since 10,000 years ago has been upward, but the slope of that upwards trend is growing smaller, and in the near future will become negative; according to the site you are apparently relying on to "debunk" AGW. that is not "growing faster", according to neither of those paragraphs; nor anything else in the article.
So you are saying that CO2 has no effect on warming? Really? Hint: If you are scientifically illiterate, it doesn't help for you to goatse your ignorance all over slashdot for people to point at and laugh.
CO2 is the main driver of warming. Without human activity, CO2 levels would be decreasing, as the natural sinks for CO2 are greater than the sources. We know it's industrial CO2 emissions which are driving warming. We know this. You simply stating that it's erroneous is pathetic, as you have no evidence to support your claim, yet you think your claim somehow trumps the actual scientific findings.
I love the talking points, those are pretty good. Of course one has to remember that Revenue Canada bloated in size. And those invesigations into "left wing non-profits" was because in Canada we have electioneering laws which say you can't use more than 10% of your funds in political acitivism. Several were caught saying on TV and the print media that they used more, that some were getting special funding from the US which is...illegal. And of strange, I have yet to find out where people couldn't figure out where to vote properly because of cutting back at elections canada.
Oh you want a good one with the military? How about those Sea Kings and the replacement helicopters. You know we're still using those Sea Kings even though most of them are now flying death traps, but it was the Liberals(you know the same party that just got elected) who killed the replacement plan. You can't forget about the C130's either, which are our primary method of moving troops and equipment. Did you forget to mention that under the liberals that the funding for the military was cut back so far that when the conservatives came into office back in 2000ish, that they were considered flying death traps? That members of the airforce were doing repairs to them, using their own money out of pocket. Though both governments have fucked up badly with injured vets no doubt on it. A huge propaganda dept? That one's special, did you miss Ad Scam. Though I haven't seen said ads saying that spying on citizens and disagreement is wrong politics.
But you want a really big mess? How about under Pierre Trudeau(Liberals), who implemented wage and price controls screwed up the economy so badly that we officially had hyper inflation and to boot interest rates peaked at just shy of 30%. When Mulroney came in, he inherited a mess and actually scarified his political party to fix it. Including getting rid of the 8-12% manufactures tax with a 7% GST but that was unpopular for some reason. Got the budget under control, and the Chretien promptly pissed it up against the wall, and used things like EI, and other management funds to balance the budget. Of course under the Liberals they were also the ones that changed the laws so companies they could take money out of the private pension plans, leaving them underfunded.
If you think Harper has been the worse PM we've ever had you're still pretty young.
Let's see..
$1.1 billion for the 2010 G8/G20 summit in Toronto, including a a $2-million tourism pavilion featuring a fake lake.
$45 billion estimate in 2012 for the purchase of F-35 joint strike nonfunctional fighter, up from $9 billion estimate in 2010, including $47K for a photo op of Defence Minister Peter MacKay sitting in a F-35 mockup for a 2010 press conference,
$1.3 million in legal fees to fight mothers who became disabled while on maternity leave from collecting disability benefits
$750 million in public funds for partisan political ads, in favor of Keystone XL for instance.
$826K in federal grants to Cardinal Meat Specialists Ltd. for development of a sausage which will not split during cooking
$4.5 million to redesign Armed Forces uniforms
$14K for a survey by the Defence Department to find out what powers people think superheros have
$45K for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2011 Labor Day visit to Manhattan
$650 a day for a room at the Savoy Hotel and $1k a day for a limo for International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda's 3 day visit to London, England
$5,600 for two one-way flights between Toronto and Calgary for Finance Minister Joe Oliver
Yep, them Conservatives are trustworthy guardians of the people's money
It's people like you fucking this country over. Harper was simply amazing. He was leading us out of debt and into growth for 8 bloody years and to thank him you guys oust him??? It's incredibly frustrating how people like you poInt out flaws that don't exist. Focus on how a well a country did, not random shit. The liberals have just as many bad points. Also fuck you.
What "flaws that don't exist"? The comment was about scientist's being muzzled, how did that not exist??
As for the economy part of the reason Canada was doing better is we weren't hit as hard by the '08 meltdown because our banking sector was more restricted. The Conservatives were in the process of eliminating those restrictions before '08 happened and everyone saw what a cataclysmically bad idea it was. Recently the Conservatives bet on oil and failed to diversify the economy, now that prices are down the economy is suffering.
"The share sale by Ottawa will help federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver balance the federal budget."
Exactly. the canadian financial industry is much more the province (get it) of a few giant banks than the us; but the government regulations on them saved the country from the same kind of bubble that the us experienced, Canada still got blasted, on the grounds that when the us catches cold Canada sneezes.
That sounds suspiciously like the beginnings of a totalitarian regime. Probably why the liberals got a 'surprise' win... I think Conservatives assume all other people are as stupid as they are. I'm in the US, but once I realized how conservatives here reject solid scientific conclusions based on hard evidence of many things, even when the logic is undeniable (to a rational person)... I realized how irrational they really are. I'll never vote for another one as long as I live. This covers a myriad of topics, but I use Creationism as my litmus test. Anyone that believes the earth was literally created in 6 days a few thousand years ago is not mentally equipped to be making policies or laws that will affect me.
And coming at it from the other direction, "What? The world is older than 6,000 years? Then my faith in Jesus is completely based on a lie, and there is no reason for me to not murder people"
Not only were scientists muzzled, the media wasn't allowed to question the government either. Any kind of press was carefully preplanned, scripted and designed with the best interests of the Conservative party in mind.
I strongly disagree with the Conservative Party of Canada. Don't forget, these aren't the "Progressive Conservatives" that won votes on policy, these are the hard right Reformers who campaign on fear and divisiveness.
The new Conservative Party came out of Calgary. So did Ted Cruz. This is not a coincidence.
you've made a reasonable argument in a reasonable tone
He didn't. His 'reasonable argument' consisted of ad hominems ('their leader is politically young'), general poisoning the well tactics ('his father is bad, thus he must be bad'), FUD and generally baseless statements ('civil liberties are walking dead', 'mark my words' and pretty much everything else in the post).
It adds nothing of substance to the discussion and does so in an alarmist and offensive way. It deserves a solid -1.
If you disagree, please point out the well-reasoned bits I've overlooked. Either that or accept that you were ever so gently sucking his dick (I take it you have no issue with this 'reasonable tone').
Acting like a Republican. Canadian Conservatives are learning.
You've been able to do this for years and years a different way.
1. Get a sheet fed scanner like a Fujitsu Snapscan ($400)
2. Cut the binding off the book
3. Place the stack of pages into the scanner
4. Get a coffee
And you're done, the thing's 600 DPI and does both sides in the same pass. It creates a PDF directly, and you then want to OCR the PDF, running a sharpen filter on the text, and decide on how much you want to compress the PDF. A 1000 page textbook ends up being about 700 megabytes, in crystal clear quality.
I vaguely recall something recently about an IR scanner or something that could be focused finely enough to read the pages sequentially down through a closed book.
"Any digital camera on a tripod can do the same thing."
Both of the smartphone OSes have apps for that, and they perform just as well as a digital camera on a tripod, and rival a good flatbed. Back in the nineteen hundreds, if I wanted to save an article I was reading at the library, I had to check out the volume and bring it home, or bring it to the reserve librarian, who would make a not-very-good paper copy for me at a buck a page - assuming that some horrible copyright objection wasn't raised.
Now, wherever I might be, I just whip out my iPhone and run JotNot, which snaps a picture of each page and saves it as a PDF, just like a flatbed scanner. I love living in the future!
Get the book you want in audio format, then run it through voice recognition software.
Slashdot Mirror
The school certainly overreacted, but...
1) the kid was not arrested, nor did he suffer any "damages" in light of the celebrity and overly-friendly treatment from the President, and 2) once the jury hears about his overly-activist father and the lawyer's insinuation that the whole thing was a set-up?
I'm not seeing this one going very far.
You wouldn't be one of those who is against the overly oppressive government intruding on freedom, would you?
You DO realize that he's moving to Qatar right? The worst school in America isn't gonna be as religiously batshit and backasswards as a country under Sharia.
you mean they might speak as fact about something without even googling it? http://www.lifeinqatar.com/Pag...
I know, lots of people don't like what Snowden did. And they disagree with the view that, even though he was exposing wrongdoing by our government AGAINST ALLIES AND CITIZENS, he "hurt" America by laying bare intel assets and methodologies.
Okay. I can live with that. I think it's narrow-minded and stupid myself. But I can live with people thinking that.
But trying to lay blame at Snowden's door for the Paris attacks?
Gimme a fucking break. That's just being an asshole and mouthing a party line designed to further destroy the rights and privileges of the US citizen, allowing intel agencies carte blanche for whatever means and methods they wish to use, on whoever they wish to use it on. Regardless of the legality or morality.
well,, it was snowden or pollard. flipped a coin.
you lost your keys in the alley, why are you looking for them in the street?
because the light is better here
"Woolsey was CIA director when Aldrich Ames was arrested for treason and spying against the United States. The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in Ames' standard of living; and there was a "huge uproar" in Congress when Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. Woolsey declared: "Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled...Sorry, that's not my way." Woolsey was forced to resign." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Changed his tune a bit.
"The Word" in this context does not refer to the Bible (as a book/collection of words/information); it does refer to Jesus (see Joh 1:14, Rev 19:13).
Bird bird bird
Bird is the word
... that the origin of life is spirit. Yes, it's put in different words and there's math behind it to back up the theory, but it's basically the same thing.
Why do you think it's the same thing? How could you even tell if something is the same as "spirit"?
What do you mean by "spirit"? Can you define it? I don't just mean some vague mutterings that define one word in terms of a bunch of other equally vague, undefined words. I mean something rigorous, so we can look at things and clearly say whether they do or don't meet the definition.
Information theorists do have a precise, rigorous definition of information. Mystics spend millennia muttering in their mystical way. Then scientists come along and do something entirely new, rigorous, and well defined. Then the mystics say, "Look, that's exactly the same thing we've been saying all along!" Except it isn't. One is a rigorous theory you can use to make precise predictions, while the other is just a bunch of vague mutterings. No matter what the scientists discover, the mystics will find a way to claim it's the same as what they said.
Indeed. If you can't make a quantitative model, it's philosophy/mysticism/rhetoric, not science
Thank goodness for your post. Before it, we didn't know we don't know there are things we don't know.
Turns out, old Donny Rumsfeld was something of a mystic sage on this very topic way back in 2002.
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
I do believe if he and Claude Shannon had been closer friends, we'd have knocked out Prof. Amadi's program decades ago. Alas.
More appropriate in Rumsfeld's case, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
Ironically, the thing that everybody knows about this quote; that it was by Will Rogers or by Mark Twain, appears to not be so, as no primary source for either having authored the quote has surfaced.
Thank goodness for your post. Before it, we didn't know we don't know there are things we don't know.
Wait, I didn't know that!
How do you know that you didn't know that?
Of course he doesn't because he is an atheist. God created life and it will take a long time for this liberal dumbass to figure that out and start using real science.
God obviously created him to not agree with you.
Just think of all the land in Canada and Russia that will be opened up to farming.
Mushrooms, maybe. Green plants tend to be optimized for a particular latitude, which includes both temperature range and hours of daylight, correlated. While the thawing lands of Canada and Russia consist of frozen bogs, which when thawed will rot nicely and provide a new Golden Age, but for fungi.
It does seem a bit strange that the late 1800's are most definitely the ideal global temperature we should achieve for peace and love and whatever. Who's to say a slightly warmer planet won't have as many benefits as downsides? BUT, we do know full well that crops will grow, oceans will harbor life, and weather phenomenon will be mostly survivable at those temperatures, so why mess with a good thing? I'm hardly on the doom and gloom side, but this just doesn't seem like something you mess with willy nilly because 'fuck it, why not.'
It does seem a bit strange that the ideal global temperature we should achieve for peace and love and whatever should be, not that at which we and our society and civilization evolved; but rather, that which would occur as a byproduct of burning all the fossil fuel we can as fast as possible. Lucky!!
So lets do something about it.
Unless doing something about it is worse than doing nothing about it - such as crippling your society in order to make a barely measurable change in CO2 emissions. There is a lot of profoundly bad policy aimed at mitigating global warming.
That's the same argument that was made against abolishing slavery, the major source of both energy and wealth in the mid 1800s in the US. What would be the good of helping those people who were slaves, if they and the rest of the US were thereby plunged into poverty on an international scale? Well, somehow we managed to luck out, anyway.
Often warming temperatures equals increasing precipitation due to the warmer air holding more moisture. In the case of the Antarctic, a continent that is mostly desert, the expectation should be more snowfall which can lead to more ice. Kind of surprised that snowfall is considered consistent. And of course if snowfall is increasing due to warming (numbers pulled from my ass and exaggerated) from -40 to -10, then the expectation should be more ice buildup.
Precisely. if the antarctic is colder than the arctic; and if both warm more or less equally; then ice will relocate from the arctic to the antarctic. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From the NASA article:
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
So there are some losses, but the accumulation is still growing faster. That's straight from NASA. How you debunk that without completely ignoring their results is a mystery to me. But you seem determined to do so! No thanks, I'll take NASA's statement and study that say ice volume is actually accumulating. Slower, but still accumulating overall.
Uh, no. In addition to the quote above from your site, there follows this "But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” i.e. the longterm trend, since 10,000 years ago has been upward, but the slope of that upwards trend is growing smaller, and in the near future will become negative; according to the site you are apparently relying on to "debunk" AGW. that is not "growing faster", according to neither of those paragraphs; nor anything else in the article.
So you are saying that CO2 has no effect on warming? Really? Hint: If you are scientifically illiterate, it doesn't help for you to goatse your ignorance all over slashdot for people to point at and laugh.
CO2 is the main driver of warming. Without human activity, CO2 levels would be decreasing, as the natural sinks for CO2 are greater than the sources. We know it's industrial CO2 emissions which are driving warming. We know this. You simply stating that it's erroneous is pathetic, as you have no evidence to support your claim, yet you think your claim somehow trumps the actual scientific findings.
What is wrong in your head?
Because... conspiracy.
I love the talking points, those are pretty good. Of course one has to remember that Revenue Canada bloated in size. And those invesigations into "left wing non-profits" was because in Canada we have electioneering laws which say you can't use more than 10% of your funds in political acitivism. Several were caught saying on TV and the print media that they used more, that some were getting special funding from the US which is...illegal. And of strange, I have yet to find out where people couldn't figure out where to vote properly because of cutting back at elections canada.
Oh you want a good one with the military? How about those Sea Kings and the replacement helicopters. You know we're still using those Sea Kings even though most of them are now flying death traps, but it was the Liberals(you know the same party that just got elected) who killed the replacement plan. You can't forget about the C130's either, which are our primary method of moving troops and equipment. Did you forget to mention that under the liberals that the funding for the military was cut back so far that when the conservatives came into office back in 2000ish, that they were considered flying death traps? That members of the airforce were doing repairs to them, using their own money out of pocket. Though both governments have fucked up badly with injured vets no doubt on it. A huge propaganda dept? That one's special, did you miss Ad Scam. Though I haven't seen said ads saying that spying on citizens and disagreement is wrong politics.
But you want a really big mess? How about under Pierre Trudeau(Liberals), who implemented wage and price controls screwed up the economy so badly that we officially had hyper inflation and to boot interest rates peaked at just shy of 30%. When Mulroney came in, he inherited a mess and actually scarified his political party to fix it. Including getting rid of the 8-12% manufactures tax with a 7% GST but that was unpopular for some reason. Got the budget under control, and the Chretien promptly pissed it up against the wall, and used things like EI, and other management funds to balance the budget. Of course under the Liberals they were also the ones that changed the laws so companies they could take money out of the private pension plans, leaving them underfunded.
If you think Harper has been the worse PM we've ever had you're still pretty young.
Let's see..
$1.1 billion for the 2010 G8/G20 summit in Toronto, including a a $2-million tourism pavilion featuring a fake lake.
$45 billion estimate in 2012 for the purchase of F-35 joint strike nonfunctional fighter, up from $9 billion estimate in 2010, including $47K for a photo op of Defence Minister Peter MacKay sitting in a F-35 mockup for a 2010 press conference,
$1.3 million in legal fees to fight mothers who became disabled while on maternity leave from collecting disability benefits
$750 million in public funds for partisan political ads, in favor of Keystone XL for instance.
$826K in federal grants to Cardinal Meat Specialists Ltd. for development of a sausage which will not split during cooking
$4.5 million to redesign Armed Forces uniforms
$14K for a survey by the Defence Department to find out what powers people think superheros have
$45K for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2011 Labor Day visit to Manhattan
$650 a day for a room at the Savoy Hotel and $1k a day for a limo for International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda's 3 day visit to London, England
$5,600 for two one-way flights between Toronto and Calgary for Finance Minister Joe Oliver
Yep, them Conservatives are trustworthy guardians of the people's money
It's people like you fucking this country over. Harper was simply amazing. He was leading us out of debt and into growth for 8 bloody years and to thank him you guys oust him??? It's incredibly frustrating how people like you poInt out flaws that don't exist. Focus on how a well a country did, not random shit. The liberals have just as many bad points. Also fuck you.
What "flaws that don't exist"? The comment was about scientist's being muzzled, how did that not exist??
As for the economy part of the reason Canada was doing better is we weren't hit as hard by the '08 meltdown because our banking sector was more restricted. The Conservatives were in the process of eliminating those restrictions before '08 happened and everyone saw what a cataclysmically bad idea it was. Recently the Conservatives bet on oil and failed to diversify the economy, now that prices are down the economy is suffering.
Moreover the "balanced budget" was a bit of subterfuge based on things like selling off the GM shares from '09 for a huge loss:
"The share sale by Ottawa will help federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver balance the federal budget."
Exactly. the canadian financial industry is much more the province (get it) of a few giant banks than the us; but the government regulations on them saved the country from the same kind of bubble that the us experienced, Canada still got blasted, on the grounds that when the us catches cold Canada sneezes.
That sounds suspiciously like the beginnings of a totalitarian regime. Probably why the liberals got a 'surprise' win ... I think Conservatives assume all other people are as stupid as they are. I'm in the US, but once I realized how conservatives here reject solid scientific conclusions based on hard evidence of many things, even when the logic is undeniable (to a rational person) ... I realized how irrational they really are. I'll never vote for another one as long as I live. This covers a myriad of topics, but I use Creationism as my litmus test. Anyone that believes the earth was literally created in 6 days a few thousand years ago is not mentally equipped to be making policies or laws that will affect me.
And coming at it from the other direction, "What? The world is older than 6,000 years? Then my faith in Jesus is completely based on a lie, and there is no reason for me to not murder people"
Not only were scientists muzzled, the media wasn't allowed to question the government either. Any kind of press was carefully preplanned, scripted and designed with the best interests of the Conservative party in mind. I strongly disagree with the Conservative Party of Canada. Don't forget, these aren't the "Progressive Conservatives" that won votes on policy, these are the hard right Reformers who campaign on fear and divisiveness.
The new Conservative Party came out of Calgary. So did Ted Cruz. This is not a coincidence.
So you think muzzling scientists is a good idea? Please explain why.
Because they research dangerous viruses and get infected. And some of them are zombies.
Really? From an invasion? The boogy man?
Yes, the Russians were jealously eyeing the Canadian horde of cold territory, for when their own supply would run short,
you've made a reasonable argument in a reasonable tone
He didn't. His 'reasonable argument' consisted of ad hominems ('their leader is politically young'), general poisoning the well tactics ('his father is bad, thus he must be bad'), FUD and generally baseless statements ('civil liberties are walking dead', 'mark my words' and pretty much everything else in the post). It adds nothing of substance to the discussion and does so in an alarmist and offensive way. It deserves a solid -1.
If you disagree, please point out the well-reasoned bits I've overlooked. Either that or accept that you were ever so gently sucking his dick (I take it you have no issue with this 'reasonable tone').
Acting like a Republican. Canadian Conservatives are learning.
You've been able to do this for years and years a different way.
1. Get a sheet fed scanner like a Fujitsu Snapscan ($400) 2. Cut the binding off the book 3. Place the stack of pages into the scanner 4. Get a coffee
And you're done, the thing's 600 DPI and does both sides in the same pass. It creates a PDF directly, and you then want to OCR the PDF, running a sharpen filter on the text, and decide on how much you want to compress the PDF. A 1000 page textbook ends up being about 700 megabytes, in crystal clear quality.
I vaguely recall something recently about an IR scanner or something that could be focused finely enough to read the pages sequentially down through a closed book.
"Any digital camera on a tripod can do the same thing."
Both of the smartphone OSes have apps for that, and they perform just as well as a digital camera on a tripod, and rival a good flatbed. Back in the nineteen hundreds, if I wanted to save an article I was reading at the library, I had to check out the volume and bring it home, or bring it to the reserve librarian, who would make a not-very-good paper copy for me at a buck a page - assuming that some horrible copyright objection wasn't raised.
Now, wherever I might be, I just whip out my iPhone and run JotNot, which snaps a picture of each page and saves it as a PDF, just like a flatbed scanner. I love living in the future!
Get the book you want in audio format, then run it through voice recognition software.