Well, don't forget to pay us back for all of your medical expense you incured from birth onward, since paying for Health Care out of your own pocket is what you want to do. Oh, and throw in your education as well (especially in Quebec where tuition for university is cheaper than some single courses in the US). Make the cheque out to the Reciever General of Canada. You personally are probably responsible for about $50 to $75k alone just on thoise two counts.
Funny you should mention that... I added up the benefits I received vs. the taxes I paid in Canda (I have copies of all my tax returns since I started filing at the age of 14). After all, I wanted to know if I was getting a "good deal". I was not initally eager to leave for the "unknowns of the dog-eat-dog U.S." Even taking into account some subsidy for the poor (most faiths suggest 10% of gross income), I found I was getting really shafted: I paid over half a million dollars in taxes over my working life in Canada and had little to show for it: perhaps CA$100k in an RRSP.
So, not only did I "repay" the 50-75k in spades, I also repaid it on behalf of my wife and daughter.
I suppose it just natural selection then if someone is too poor to afford hospital and dies.
Yes.
Tragic, perhaps, but it is no one's fault.
But, when you take from others, and they suffer and die as a result you are responsible for their death, regardless of whatever good may have been brought about.
It is one thing to encourage charity and compassion. But, to wrap theft and murder in those words is utterly disgusting.
You realize that there are thousands of people that are alive because of our health care system.
The ends do not justify the means. Eventually, the medical knowledge gained by Nazis via their grotesque experiments on Jews will, no doubt, save many more lives than were lost. But, I submit that nothing justifies the taking of even one life.
I don't know what happened to your Dad, but I can tell you, he is the exception not the rule.
You really should Google for "Canadian Healthcare" and see how it has decayed recently.
To spend less money to try to save a person's life than was taken from them by force for their health care, is fraud at best, and murder at worst.
And I've also had some HORRIBLE experiences with the healthcare system (particularly in Quebec).
Quebec is actually better than a lot of places in Canada these days, notably BC and Ontario.
And finally I probably *would* find some (possibly illegal) way to pay for surgery if the government wouldn't support it.
Not in Canada, you can't. At least, not if your a citizen and the surgery is covered by government health care -- the argument is that it's "unfair" for you to get "ahead" of those that can't pay. (This, even though you've paid your "fair share" of taxes for the universal system already. But, you'd have to be quite wealthy to have enough left over for all but the most minor surgery.) It's questionable whether you can even go outside Canada legally. You could theoretically be arrested upon your return for illegally procuring health services (though that would no doubt spark an outrage -- nah, Canadians really are that meek).
I guess at the end of the day, it's a choice between what I perceive as the lesser of two evils for me: 1) a system where everybody fights each other and the top dogs are able to afford first class treatment (America), and 2) a system where you're taxed so heavily that fighting becomes meaningless, and drunken bums might get preferential treatment due to wrinkles or just unfairness in what is supposed to be a fair system (Canada).
The system in the U.S. is far more effective at delivering quality care to the most people: if you work, you generally have subsidized health insurance. Those that don't generally chose to "opt out" to save a few dollars a month. A 5% unemployment rate is considered an economic disaster, whereas it would be a panacea in Canada. Of course, in a population of 300 million people, the number of uninsured is significant.
It might seam "dog eat dog", but it actually works surprisingly well. You'd also find incredible levels of private charity that are unheard of in Canada, where people are far more stingy, because (a) they're taxed so heavily, and (b) the perception is that the government will provide. Americans, however, generally don't tolerate habitual free-loaders for very long.
The reality of Canadian healthcare is that it is an unmitigated disasterous failure, even among socialist countries.
I dunno. I think if there were less greedy people trying to fuck with the system, Canada's government would work a lot more smoothly. The whole sounds-good-in-theory bit, y'know. But then when I look to the south, I realize I'm sure glad I'm not down there, and find myself willing to put up with whatever screwball bureaucracy we may have, because on the whole Canada seems to be a more sane place to live.
At what expense? I do not wish to become so impoverished tax-wise that I can not provide for my, and my family's basic health care needs. I'm particularly affected because my wife does not work: where we can file a joint tax return in the U.S., I am effectively taxed as a single supporting three dependents in Canada (the non-refundable credit for my spouse is a joke). The societal pendulum swings wildly in the U.S., but it does return from extreme positions. It's amazing that a nation so powerful is not even more corrupt. Something must be right.
I'd just prefer not to be labelled a murderer because I have leftist views (same as I wouldn't label you a murderer because you don't).
Unless you are active in government the term I used was "accessory to murder." And, I stick by it: if your views cause even one person to die, who otherwise would not, regardless of how many others you might save, that is murder. Those views being popular does not mitigate the consequences of their exercise.
The U.S., despite appearing to be a dog eat dog world, works surprisingly well. I had reservations when I first came here in 1997. But, after a brief return to Canada in 2003-early 2004, I could not stand it. I had not planned to return to the U.S. -- my wife and kids were tired of moving and we'd just purchased a house in Ontario. But, when the job offer came, we were all in agreement and eager to leave what we percieved as utter hell. It is very true that "you can't go home again."
I we had hadthe US style healthcare you and the Conservatives seem to love, he would not have been able to afford going to the hospital and would have died in our kitchen, refusing to go to the hospital because he couldn;t afford the bill
Yes, it is easier to live when you steal from others.
Know this: there are people who see the murderous lie that is "Canadian Healthcare", which doesn't even permit citizens to spend their own savings, after paing the tax burden, to save their own lives. Their numbers are growing, and they view people like you as murderers.
Canada is the only country in the world where it is illegal for a citizen to pay for a medical service that the government "promises", regardless of whether it is actually delivered. Even countries generally considered more socialist have realised the folly of this: long lines for everyone, and critically ill people dying like flies.
When enough have awakened to see the fraud perpetuated upon them, I expect things to get very ugly.
He didn't "slip through the cracks". He was flatly denied an AAA repair surgery. That was a death sentence.
I methodically computed how much of his taxes were allocated for health care expenditures in the various annual budgets, and what the cost of the surgery would be. Surprise! He had paid for it over ten times over in the course of his earning years. From a purely financial perspective, he was defrauded of the means to save his own life.
My experience with health care in the U.S. has been far,far better.
Whereas you would argue to save one rich bastard's life (oh! woe is me! i'm broke because i earned so much and got taxed at 40% or more!) and let go of two lesser person's lives? I mean, they are worth less because they earn less, right?
Actually, the powers that be in government prostitute the plight of the poor: "He's poor! Gimme your money!!" to rob the middle class of their earnings, and fatten their coffers, while the poor remain so. Clearly you fall for the "tax the rich" line, hook, line, and sinker. "Oh look, he's still poor! Gimme more of your money!!".
I would hardly consider an ordinary engineer "rich": the 40% tax bracket starts at, what, CA$50,000 (US$40,000) a year?
But, your argument is telling: you consider that it is wrong even to save one's own life with the fruits of one's labour -- that the state should hold sway over life and death, i.e. play at God. By that reasoning, you should immediately commit suicide and donate your organs to save more than one life: there's a shortage, ya know.
It is precisely this kind of person I consider an accessory to Canada's state-sanctioned murder of the productive.
After the Canadian government taxed my father to death (literally: they taxed his income so much, to pay for, among other things, "universal" health care, that when he needed surgery to save his life he found that (a) the government didn't provide the surgery to him, (b) it was illegal for a citizen to purchase it in Canada, and (c) he was so impoverished from a life of high taxes that he didn't have the means to purchase it in the U.S.A.), I strove to escape with my family. The green card is in the works.
Canada is run by a bunch of murderous bastards, who'd carve out your liver and kidneys to save their cronies, leaving you to die, and call it "fair" because two lives were saved for one lost.
A sickening proportion of the population goes along with this, hoping to be on the receiving rather than the giving end of such "fairness" at some point. I consider them accessories to murder.
SIP registration and call initiation involve a challenge/response handshake with the ITSP SIP server: the response is basically a hash (MD5 and others are available, IIRC), of the challenge and a secret key. Before you get all clever, the challenge usually has a nonce added to it, so the response has to be different every time. Without knowing the secret key, you can't respond to the challenge.
That said, there are opportunities using man in the middle attacks: you get the challenge, present it to the ATA, get the response, and respond to the SIP server. This lets you use an ATA rather like a key fob, with another system, like Asterisk. I've been thinking of doing something like this for a while.
VoIP generally runs over UDP. TCP is just used for session establishment, if at all. (Can SIP run over UDP? If it's stateless and can recover from lost packets/responses, it certainly can.)
My Canadian friends own their own house. If Canada was truly so socialist, the government would own it instead. In other words: you exaggerate some...
Funny, when I bought a house in Ontario in 2003, I had no proof of title. Instead, there was a record in some government database, that I owned it. If the government wanted to make that record "go away", it certainly could, and I'd have no proof recognizable by a court of law that I indeed was the rightful owner of the property.
If that isn't making private property effectively non-existent, I don't know what is.
It's one thing to have ownership recognized in a civilized manner by the courts, but quite another to have the power of that recognition in the hands of the state.
Watch the movie "Freeze Frame". It's a story about how one person, charged with a heinous crime, but released on a technicality, recorded every aspect of his life in the event he was every so charged again.
Seriously, when I found, to my dismay, that I was off by about a factor of two in space to rip my CDs to disk, I stumbled upon the SHORTEN format and nice.wav to.shn transcoders. Whee!
I hadn't heard of it since.
I suppose it's time to re-rip to.flac.
It goes without saying that I am only interested in lossless codecs.
"Also, Canada has an extremely liberal immigration policy: it's a lot easier to get in than the U.S. "
As long as you are screening for terrorists and criminals, is this a problem?
Well, yes. A country can absorb people only so fast. Furthermore, it isn't fair that one can just waltz into a place and benefit from the existing infrastructure without having contributed toward its building. OTOH, the U.S. INS is notoriously slow in letting desirables settle in the U.S.
"I know many Americans think Canada is a panacea. However, almost all of the ones I've met base their opinion on what the government promises."
My friends who live in Canada near the border have a disabled child. The government-controlled health care system basically forgets her. They have to rely on U.S. services which they pay for. These are the same ones who "illegally" get US cable stations which are censored on Canadian systems.
This is typical.
My father, who never received serious health care from the public system, and paid hefty taxes all his working life in Canada (30+ years), required aortic aneurysm repair surgery, or he would surely die. The government refused to provided it, and with the hefty taxes he had paid, he could not have saved enough to pay for it himself. So, he died. I consider his case, and cases like it, an example of murder by the state: he was literarly taxed to death. (The proportion of his taxes earmarked for health care, over his working life, was many times that required to pay for the surgery).
But, that is not what drives my hatred of Canada. I had come to the conclusion that it is a murderous, corrupt nation long before he ever got sick. The form of his death just confirmed what I already believed.
Canada's socialist governments have elevated to an art form the prostitution of poverty: "He is poor! Gimme your money... or else!" They have even convinced the population that they have no right to what they earn, and if one manages to have a live better than average because of the fruits of their hard labour, even after high levels of taxation, this must be "corrected" by taxing them even more. Acceptance of that kind of propaganda is a Goebells wet dream. (Joseph Goebells was Adolph Hitler's Minister of Propaganda).
Yes, it is that bad. Just because people are flocking to get in does not mean it isn't horrible, just that it's better, or perceived to be better, than where one currently is.
I bemoan taxing people to promise health care which is not then delivered as state-sanctioned murder, but even that is, admitedly, better than active, murderous persecution.
Also, Canada has an extremely liberal immigration policy: it's a lot easier to get in than the U.S. I might prefer Canada over Afghanistan or Iraq, but not over the U.S.
However, this does not change the fact that the socialist experiment is failing miserably there, and the government is acting in ever-greater desparation (i.e. requireing people to agree to stay in Ontario permanently to get health care that they can not legally purchase otherwise).
I know many Americans think Canada is a panacea. However, almost all of the ones I've met base their opinion on what the government promises, as opposed to what it actually delivers. Grass, greener, "other side", and all that. I was born in Canada, and I've seen it's socialist slide over a period of 40+ years.
The U.S., by contrast, offers little except opportunity. But, the wise realize just how much that really is.
Not only that, but the Quebec language law, Bill 101, was struck down by the Canadian Supreme Court.
Not to worry, the Quebec government invoked the "Notwithstanding Clause" of the Canadian constitution to override the court!
Yes, the federal and provincial governments can, constitutionally, override the highest court in the land.
Mob rule, anyone?
Would you trust a government that could, legally, by its own constitution, throw you into the gas chamber, but promised to never do such a thing?
This is what you get when you replace "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness", with "Peace, Order, and Good Government." Killing the citizenry is a good way to get peace and order, leaving no one to question the "goodness" of the government, no?
What civilized nation's government needs that kind of power to govern effectively?
Canada is a nation of murderers and wimps and needs to be exposed for the fascist hell it is. Those of us who can escape, even temporarily, do -- the best way the average person can fight the opression is to become a non-resident, tax-wise, and stop feeding the monster.
As someone who uses a fanless C3 system with the open source unichrome/xxmc drivers, I object to them being called "less than reliable".
I had written: "These drivers were reverse-engineered to support an open source equivalent, which was less than completely reliable."
I was referring to the reverse-engineering process as being less than completely reliable at producing source code that, when compiled, properly drives the hardware, and not the apparent stability of the result.
If you've had success with hardware MPEG2 decoding on fanless C3-based systems, I'd be very interested in knowing more: I've been thinking of making a fanless media thin-client for the family room for quite some time.
I recently built vlc from scratch, and was a bit dismayed to find that DVD menu navigation while streaming remuxed PS to TS of the selected stream was less than stable on an FC2 desktop.
I had been thinking of hacking vlc to decode audio and video to black/silence, and just render the SPUs in the overlay buffer, and stream the MPEG2 to X225 hardware via Roku's libCascade. But, if the C3 eventually has the oomph to do HD decoding, that starts to get a whole lot more interesting, given the natural fit with the vlc/myth/xine decode/display architecture. Today, I'd settle for no less than 480p, though.
I find the lack of freedom to spend my own money, after taxes, for my own healthcare needs, and those of my family, a far worse situation, than the present climate in the U.S. Though, granted, both are unpleasant.
As for the U.S. committing "terrorism", so what? If a nation gets so powerful on the basis of its fundemental principles as to be able to (almost) wipe out other nations, how is this wrong if one accepts the notion that people kill other people when they can. Is it wrong only because you can't do to the U.S. what it can do to you?
Put another way, the U.S. must have done something right to get as powerful as it is, and who's to say that does not give it impunity to do as it wishes?
It may not be "nice", but since when are humans, as a species, "nice"?
Perhaps a bit, but I think it important to note that the common FOSS media decoder/display architectural paradigm is shortsighted in that much hardware does not fit into it. The CLE266 does, of course, but still raises some concerns.
The big drawback to HD on Myth (or any other system) is that it requires quite a bit of CPU. The Via chip has an mpeg decoder which with open drivers and libraries hopefully can then take a raw mpeg2 stream and decode without using much CPU at all, just sending it straight to the TV or monitor.
Except, it isn't clear that the CLE266 can do HD decoding. Do you know that it can? If so, then the news is, indeed, very good.
Furthermore, AFAIK (and correct me if I'm wrong), it does not decode to the display. It decodes to memory, which must then be mapped, or worse, copied, to the display buffer. At SD resolutions, this is doable, but at HD resolutions, one needs serious RAM bandwidth. Interleaved memory banks were de-rigeur on the X225, and even then, it had to work all out for dual HD streams, with one scaled PIP.
The X225 specifically addresses this by taking extensive control over memory, generally giving the embedded MIPS processor the lowest priority. How is the CLE266 set up on Via C3 boards?
Besides, it's the applications you mention are all FOSS, so if you need a particular decoding paradigm supported, you can build it.
Well, yes, it can be done. But, the existing decode/display paradign functions around managing decoded pictures, and to modify it to handle display of undecoded pictures is more architectural work than just adding a new display driver, or demux. Furthermore, things get hairy if the hardware demuxs MPEG2 as well (since most of these apps demux audio and video into separate streams), but does not demux SPUs (i.e. for DVD navigation -- the chip can, IIRC, but the firmware for that does not exist as (I think) it was not intended to be a "DVD player chip", with all the CSS stuff that entails.).
The whole architecture really needs a rethink to do anything clean.
Well, it leaves Xilleon-based systems in the dark, even if open drivers were available: the problem is that the common model used in vlc, xine, myth, etc. does not cover all forms of H/W MPEG2 decoding and display.
That means that it is difficult for them to support Xilleon-based systems, like the Roku HD1000 Photobridge using with H/W/ MPEG2 decoding. AFAIK, vlc has been ported, but it still uses S/W decoding (which can barely keep up at SD resolutions), and the graphics overlay buffer, which is limited to 1024x768.
There are non-open libraries for those chips, that do provide access to H/W MPEG2 decoding, but using a decode/display model that clashes with what the apps expect. In particular, the decoded video is not generally available (mostly, because the chip can also do CSS, and has options for a generic decryption interface) except for display.
I know the X225 will do dual stream 1080i decoding.
Can the CLE266 do that? Or even decode one 1080i stream? The memory bandwidth alone starts to become problematic with two 1080i streams (which is why you really need dedicated video memory for this).
Now, IIRC, the X225 can demux and decode MPEG2 audio and video, and return the raw frames, and that would fit within the vlc/myth/xine model. However, (a) displaying them using the graphics overlay buffer would limit one to 1024x768, (b) strain memory bandwidth at HD, and (c) generally would never have a public API exposed for this, because it would circumvent encrypted video source-to-display requirements and run afoul of licensing agreements regarding CSS, Macrovision, and other anti-plaintext schemes.
Unfortunately, the hardware decoder model in vlc, MythTV and, IIRC, Xine, presumes a hardware decoder, separate from the frame-buffer display. This is not true of all hardware.
ATI Xilleon X215, X225, X226, and X250 chips just plain eat MPEG2 and spit out video and audio, and this does not fit the common decoding model.
It should also be noted that Canada is the only country in the world where it is illegal for a citizen to spend one's own money, after taxes, to purchase health services that the government claims to provide.
Every other country with a nationalized health care system has a "two-tier" system, where, if one is not satisfied with the free system, and has the means, one can purchase private care. Interestingly, such countries have lower per-capita health-care costs (approximately 40% of Ontario government tax revenues go toward providing (abysmal) "universal" health care) than Canada, reduced taxes, and this enables all but the poorest to purchase private services (or, more likley, insurance for same).
You fail to realize that your example of a "bumber sticker" is an expression of an opinion.
I was threatened with arrest for citing section and paragraph of the Canadian Health Code, and explaining that truth to my ten year old daughter. It was the mere speaking of the facts that was deemed offensive, and not the expression of an opinion.
Simply saying that the average wait for certain types of medical procedures is X in Canada and Y in the U.S., where X is greater than Y, is enough to get one in trouble for being "offensive". The truth may offend, I suppose, but when is it a crime to speak it, particularly when it is public knowledge?
Neither situation is acceptable of course, but where a "Buck Fush" bumper sticker will fade into acceptability when Bush is out of office, uncomfortable truths in Canada will never escape the tyrany of oppression.
Canada offers the government promise of free (i.e. taxpayer-funded) health care.
The current wait for a tonsillectomy is around 80 weeks.
It used to be the case that women in labour in Ontario were denied epidural anasthetic and weren't allowed to pay for it themselves (because it is provided by the government "when necessary"). I don't know if that's still the case.
Many seriously ill patients (particularly cardiac patients) either die before getting to the head of the line for treatment, or are too far gone to benefit from it. There is supposedly some triage that takes place, but an aging population results in there being many "most urgent" cases in line.
It is illegal for a covered Canadian to pay for health services that the government promises to provide, whether they do or not. And, all Canadians can obtain coverage in the province where they reside. However, the application (at least in Ontario) for coverage requires an agreement to live in that province permanently. Many have argued that this is "fair" because transients should not benefit from taxpayer-funded services, except in their "home" province. However, the correct response would be a minumum waiting period, or perhaps paying for service received in a short period before leaving, instead of the opposite extreme: permanent residence. (And, in Ontario, I have verified that this means "forever".)
Not everything is covered, of course, elective surgery being one such item, non-ward hospital accomodations being another: one can pay for an "upgrade" to a semi-private or private room if one is available, and such "upgrades" can be funded by private health insurance -- that's all it can cover for Canadian citizens).
Non-citizens can pay for service, at rates far cheaper than those in, for example, the U.S., and they get to bypass the line in which citizens are forced to queue. There is increasing evidence that many Canadians get to "jump ahead" in line because of the nature of their relationship with their doctor, or their political or social stature. (The government will pay for politicians to get treatment outside Canada: Quebec premier (like a state governer) got cancer treatment in the U.S.) Corruption in the system appears rampant.
It is questionable whether a Canadian can legally leave Canada for service in another country (e.g. the U.S.). While Canadian law does not apply on U.S. soil, once "back home", it isn't clear whether they could be prosecuted for buying health care illegally. To date, this has not happened, likely because it would be the straw that breaks the camel's back when it comes to revolting against the government.
There is a loophole where Canadians resident in one province can travel to another one, and pay for health care (because they are non-resident, and thus not covered, in the second province), and some have been desperate enough to travel across the country to find the shortest lines. Many travel to the U.S.
Personally, I believe that for the state to tax to provide health care, and then deliver less health care to an individual than their proportionate share of taxes dedicated to health care could purchase on the open market, is criminal fraud. If the individual dies as a result, I consider it state-sanctioned murder. I've said so as much on Slashdot before, and have gotten modded down for it. But, don't expect me to shut up about the murderous state of health care in Canada.
Interested parties can Google for "Canadian" and "Health Care" and come to their own conclusions.
This is good news for fanless C3-based systems using CLE266 MPEG acceleration hardware: Via had released closed-source drivers (and, indeed, forked Xine to use them in a product called VeXP). These drivers were reverse-engineered to support an open source equivalent, which was less than completely reliable.
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Funny you should mention that... I added up the benefits I received vs. the taxes I paid in Canda (I have copies of all my tax returns since I started filing at the age of 14). After all, I wanted to know if I was getting a "good deal". I was not initally eager to leave for the "unknowns of the dog-eat-dog U.S." Even taking into account some subsidy for the poor (most faiths suggest 10% of gross income), I found I was getting really shafted: I paid over half a million dollars in taxes over my working life in Canada and had little to show for it: perhaps CA$100k in an RRSP.
So, not only did I "repay" the 50-75k in spades, I also repaid it on behalf of my wife and daughter.
I suppose it just natural selection then if someone is too poor to afford hospital and dies.
Yes.
Tragic, perhaps, but it is no one's fault.
But, when you take from others, and they suffer and die as a result you are responsible for their death, regardless of whatever good may have been brought about.
It is one thing to encourage charity and compassion. But, to wrap theft and murder in those words is utterly disgusting.
You realize that there are thousands of people that are alive because of our health care system. The ends do not justify the means. Eventually, the medical knowledge gained by Nazis via their grotesque experiments on Jews will, no doubt, save many more lives than were lost. But, I submit that nothing justifies the taking of even one life.
I don't know what happened to your Dad, but I can tell you, he is the exception not the rule.
You really should Google for "Canadian Healthcare" and see how it has decayed recently.
To spend less money to try to save a person's life than was taken from them by force for their health care, is fraud at best, and murder at worst.
Quebec is actually better than a lot of places in Canada these days, notably BC and Ontario.
And finally I probably *would* find some (possibly illegal) way to pay for surgery if the government wouldn't support it.
Not in Canada, you can't. At least, not if your a citizen and the surgery is covered by government health care -- the argument is that it's "unfair" for you to get "ahead" of those that can't pay. (This, even though you've paid your "fair share" of taxes for the universal system already. But, you'd have to be quite wealthy to have enough left over for all but the most minor surgery.) It's questionable whether you can even go outside Canada legally. You could theoretically be arrested upon your return for illegally procuring health services (though that would no doubt spark an outrage -- nah, Canadians really are that meek).
I guess at the end of the day, it's a choice between what I perceive as the lesser of two evils for me: 1) a system where everybody fights each other and the top dogs are able to afford first class treatment (America), and 2) a system where you're taxed so heavily that fighting becomes meaningless, and drunken bums might get preferential treatment due to wrinkles or just unfairness in what is supposed to be a fair system (Canada).
The system in the U.S. is far more effective at delivering quality care to the most people: if you work, you generally have subsidized health insurance. Those that don't generally chose to "opt out" to save a few dollars a month. A 5% unemployment rate is considered an economic disaster, whereas it would be a panacea in Canada. Of course, in a population of 300 million people, the number of uninsured is significant.
It might seam "dog eat dog", but it actually works surprisingly well. You'd also find incredible levels of private charity that are unheard of in Canada, where people are far more stingy, because (a) they're taxed so heavily, and (b) the perception is that the government will provide. Americans, however, generally don't tolerate habitual free-loaders for very long.
The reality of Canadian healthcare is that it is an unmitigated disasterous failure, even among socialist countries.
I dunno. I think if there were less greedy people trying to fuck with the system, Canada's government would work a lot more smoothly. The whole sounds-good-in-theory bit, y'know. But then when I look to the south, I realize I'm sure glad I'm not down there, and find myself willing to put up with whatever screwball bureaucracy we may have, because on the whole Canada seems to be a more sane place to live.
At what expense? I do not wish to become so impoverished tax-wise that I can not provide for my, and my family's basic health care needs. I'm particularly affected because my wife does not work: where we can file a joint tax return in the U.S., I am effectively taxed as a single supporting three dependents in Canada (the non-refundable credit for my spouse is a joke). The societal pendulum swings wildly in the U.S., but it does return from extreme positions. It's amazing that a nation so powerful is not even more corrupt. Something must be right.
I'd just prefer not to be labelled a murderer because I have leftist views (same as I wouldn't label you a murderer because you don't).
Unless you are active in government the term I used was "accessory to murder." And, I stick by it: if your views cause even one person to die, who otherwise would not, regardless of how many others you might save, that is murder. Those views being popular does not mitigate the consequences of their exercise.
The U.S., despite appearing to be a dog eat dog world, works surprisingly well. I had reservations when I first came here in 1997. But, after a brief return to Canada in 2003-early 2004, I could not stand it. I had not planned to return to the U.S. -- my wife and kids were tired of moving and we'd just purchased a house in Ontario. But, when the job offer came, we were all in agreement and eager to leave what we percieved as utter hell. It is very true that "you can't go home again."
Yes, it is easier to live when you steal from others.
Know this: there are people who see the murderous lie that is "Canadian Healthcare", which doesn't even permit citizens to spend their own savings, after paing the tax burden, to save their own lives. Their numbers are growing, and they view people like you as murderers.
Canada is the only country in the world where it is illegal for a citizen to pay for a medical service that the government "promises", regardless of whether it is actually delivered. Even countries generally considered more socialist have realised the folly of this: long lines for everyone, and critically ill people dying like flies.
When enough have awakened to see the fraud perpetuated upon them, I expect things to get very ugly.
I methodically computed how much of his taxes were allocated for health care expenditures in the various annual budgets, and what the cost of the surgery would be. Surprise! He had paid for it over ten times over in the course of his earning years. From a purely financial perspective, he was defrauded of the means to save his own life.
My experience with health care in the U.S. has been far,far better.
Google for "Canadian Healthcare" sometime.
Actually, the powers that be in government prostitute the plight of the poor: "He's poor! Gimme your money!!" to rob the middle class of their earnings, and fatten their coffers, while the poor remain so. Clearly you fall for the "tax the rich" line, hook, line, and sinker. "Oh look, he's still poor! Gimme more of your money!!".
I would hardly consider an ordinary engineer "rich": the 40% tax bracket starts at, what, CA$50,000 (US$40,000) a year?
But, your argument is telling: you consider that it is wrong even to save one's own life with the fruits of one's labour -- that the state should hold sway over life and death, i.e. play at God. By that reasoning, you should immediately commit suicide and donate your organs to save more than one life: there's a shortage, ya know.
It is precisely this kind of person I consider an accessory to Canada's state-sanctioned murder of the productive.
After the Canadian government taxed my father to death (literally: they taxed his income so much, to pay for, among other things, "universal" health care, that when he needed surgery to save his life he found that (a) the government didn't provide the surgery to him, (b) it was illegal for a citizen to purchase it in Canada, and (c) he was so impoverished from a life of high taxes that he didn't have the means to purchase it in the U.S.A.), I strove to escape with my family. The green card is in the works.
Canada is run by a bunch of murderous bastards, who'd carve out your liver and kidneys to save their cronies, leaving you to die, and call it "fair" because two lives were saved for one lost.
A sickening proportion of the population goes along with this, hoping to be on the receiving rather than the giving end of such "fairness" at some point. I consider them accessories to murder.
Er, they're Socialists ...?
SIP registration and call initiation involve a challenge/response handshake with the ITSP SIP server: the response is basically a hash (MD5 and others are available, IIRC), of the challenge and a secret key. Before you get all clever, the challenge usually has a nonce added to it, so the response has to be different every time. Without knowing the secret key, you can't respond to the challenge.
That said, there are opportunities using man in the middle attacks: you get the challenge, present it to the ATA, get the response, and respond to the SIP server. This lets you use an ATA rather like a key fob, with another system, like Asterisk. I've been thinking of doing something like this for a while.
Not my cup of tea, but hey... better her ass than mine. *shudder*
Still, jail? At the taxpayers' expense?
VoIP generally runs over UDP. TCP is just used for session establishment, if at all. (Can SIP run over UDP? If it's stateless and can recover from lost packets/responses, it certainly can.)
Funny, when I bought a house in Ontario in 2003, I had no proof of title. Instead, there was a record in some government database, that I owned it. If the government wanted to make that record "go away", it certainly could, and I'd have no proof recognizable by a court of law that I indeed was the rightful owner of the property.
If that isn't making private property effectively non-existent, I don't know what is.
It's one thing to have ownership recognized in a civilized manner by the courts, but quite another to have the power of that recognition in the hands of the state.
The acting is bad, but the story is interesting.
I hadn't heard of it since.
I suppose it's time to re-rip to .flac.
It goes without saying that I am only interested in lossless codecs.
As long as you are screening for terrorists and criminals, is this a problem?
Well, yes. A country can absorb people only so fast. Furthermore, it isn't fair that one can just waltz into a place and benefit from the existing infrastructure without having contributed toward its building. OTOH, the U.S. INS is notoriously slow in letting desirables settle in the U.S.
"I know many Americans think Canada is a panacea. However, almost all of the ones I've met base their opinion on what the government promises."
My friends who live in Canada near the border have a disabled child. The government-controlled health care system basically forgets her. They have to rely on U.S. services which they pay for. These are the same ones who "illegally" get US cable stations which are censored on Canadian systems.
This is typical.
My father, who never received serious health care from the public system, and paid hefty taxes all his working life in Canada (30+ years), required aortic aneurysm repair surgery, or he would surely die. The government refused to provided it, and with the hefty taxes he had paid, he could not have saved enough to pay for it himself. So, he died. I consider his case, and cases like it, an example of murder by the state: he was literarly taxed to death. (The proportion of his taxes earmarked for health care, over his working life, was many times that required to pay for the surgery).
But, that is not what drives my hatred of Canada. I had come to the conclusion that it is a murderous, corrupt nation long before he ever got sick. The form of his death just confirmed what I already believed.
Canada's socialist governments have elevated to an art form the prostitution of poverty: "He is poor! Gimme your money... or else!" They have even convinced the population that they have no right to what they earn, and if one manages to have a live better than average because of the fruits of their hard labour, even after high levels of taxation, this must be "corrected" by taxing them even more. Acceptance of that kind of propaganda is a Goebells wet dream. (Joseph Goebells was Adolph Hitler's Minister of Propaganda).
I bemoan taxing people to promise health care which is not then delivered as state-sanctioned murder, but even that is, admitedly, better than active, murderous persecution.
Also, Canada has an extremely liberal immigration policy: it's a lot easier to get in than the U.S. I might prefer Canada over Afghanistan or Iraq, but not over the U.S.
However, this does not change the fact that the socialist experiment is failing miserably there, and the government is acting in ever-greater desparation (i.e. requireing people to agree to stay in Ontario permanently to get health care that they can not legally purchase otherwise).
I know many Americans think Canada is a panacea. However, almost all of the ones I've met base their opinion on what the government promises, as opposed to what it actually delivers. Grass, greener, "other side", and all that. I was born in Canada, and I've seen it's socialist slide over a period of 40+ years.
The U.S., by contrast, offers little except opportunity. But, the wise realize just how much that really is.
Not to worry, the Quebec government invoked the "Notwithstanding Clause" of the Canadian constitution to override the court!
Yes, the federal and provincial governments can, constitutionally, override the highest court in the land.
Mob rule, anyone?
Would you trust a government that could, legally, by its own constitution, throw you into the gas chamber, but promised to never do such a thing?
This is what you get when you replace "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness", with "Peace, Order, and Good Government." Killing the citizenry is a good way to get peace and order, leaving no one to question the "goodness" of the government, no?
What civilized nation's government needs that kind of power to govern effectively?
Canada is a nation of murderers and wimps and needs to be exposed for the fascist hell it is. Those of us who can escape, even temporarily, do -- the best way the average person can fight the opression is to become a non-resident, tax-wise, and stop feeding the monster.
I had written: "These drivers were reverse-engineered to support an open source equivalent, which was less than completely reliable."
I was referring to the reverse-engineering process as being less than completely reliable at producing source code that, when compiled, properly drives the hardware, and not the apparent stability of the result.
If you've had success with hardware MPEG2 decoding on fanless C3-based systems, I'd be very interested in knowing more: I've been thinking of making a fanless media thin-client for the family room for quite some time.
I recently built vlc from scratch, and was a bit dismayed to find that DVD menu navigation while streaming remuxed PS to TS of the selected stream was less than stable on an FC2 desktop.
I had been thinking of hacking vlc to decode audio and video to black/silence, and just render the SPUs in the overlay buffer, and stream the MPEG2 to X225 hardware via Roku's libCascade. But, if the C3 eventually has the oomph to do HD decoding, that starts to get a whole lot more interesting, given the natural fit with the vlc/myth/xine decode/display architecture. Today, I'd settle for no less than 480p, though.
As for the U.S. committing "terrorism", so what? If a nation gets so powerful on the basis of its fundemental principles as to be able to (almost) wipe out other nations, how is this wrong if one accepts the notion that people kill other people when they can. Is it wrong only because you can't do to the U.S. what it can do to you?
Put another way, the U.S. must have done something right to get as powerful as it is, and who's to say that does not give it impunity to do as it wishes?
It may not be "nice", but since when are humans, as a species, "nice"?
Perhaps a bit, but I think it important to note that the common FOSS media decoder/display architectural paradigm is shortsighted in that much hardware does not fit into it. The CLE266 does, of course, but still raises some concerns.
The big drawback to HD on Myth (or any other system) is that it requires quite a bit of CPU. The Via chip has an mpeg decoder which with open drivers and libraries hopefully can then take a raw mpeg2 stream and decode without using much CPU at all, just sending it straight to the TV or monitor.
Except, it isn't clear that the CLE266 can do HD decoding. Do you know that it can? If so, then the news is, indeed, very good.
Furthermore, AFAIK (and correct me if I'm wrong), it does not decode to the display. It decodes to memory, which must then be mapped, or worse, copied, to the display buffer. At SD resolutions, this is doable, but at HD resolutions, one needs serious RAM bandwidth. Interleaved memory banks were de-rigeur on the X225, and even then, it had to work all out for dual HD streams, with one scaled PIP.
The X225 specifically addresses this by taking extensive control over memory, generally giving the embedded MIPS processor the lowest priority. How is the CLE266 set up on Via C3 boards?
Besides, it's the applications you mention are all FOSS, so if you need a particular decoding paradigm supported, you can build it.
Well, yes, it can be done. But, the existing decode/display paradign functions around managing decoded pictures, and to modify it to handle display of undecoded pictures is more architectural work than just adding a new display driver, or demux. Furthermore, things get hairy if the hardware demuxs MPEG2 as well (since most of these apps demux audio and video into separate streams), but does not demux SPUs (i.e. for DVD navigation -- the chip can, IIRC, but the firmware for that does not exist as (I think) it was not intended to be a "DVD player chip", with all the CSS stuff that entails.).
The whole architecture really needs a rethink to do anything clean.
That means that it is difficult for them to support Xilleon-based systems, like the Roku HD1000 Photobridge using with H/W/ MPEG2 decoding. AFAIK, vlc has been ported, but it still uses S/W decoding (which can barely keep up at SD resolutions), and the graphics overlay buffer, which is limited to 1024x768.
There are non-open libraries for those chips, that do provide access to H/W MPEG2 decoding, but using a decode/display model that clashes with what the apps expect. In particular, the decoded video is not generally available (mostly, because the chip can also do CSS, and has options for a generic decryption interface) except for display.
I know the X225 will do dual stream 1080i decoding.
Can the CLE266 do that? Or even decode one 1080i stream? The memory bandwidth alone starts to become problematic with two 1080i streams (which is why you really need dedicated video memory for this).
Now, IIRC, the X225 can demux and decode MPEG2 audio and video, and return the raw frames, and that would fit within the vlc/myth/xine model. However, (a) displaying them using the graphics overlay buffer would limit one to 1024x768, (b) strain memory bandwidth at HD, and (c) generally would never have a public API exposed for this, because it would circumvent encrypted video source-to-display requirements and run afoul of licensing agreements regarding CSS, Macrovision, and other anti-plaintext schemes.
ATI Xilleon X215, X225, X226, and X250 chips just plain eat MPEG2 and spit out video and audio, and this does not fit the common decoding model.
Every other country with a nationalized health care system has a "two-tier" system, where, if one is not satisfied with the free system, and has the means, one can purchase private care. Interestingly, such countries have lower per-capita health-care costs (approximately 40% of Ontario government tax revenues go toward providing (abysmal) "universal" health care) than Canada, reduced taxes, and this enables all but the poorest to purchase private services (or, more likley, insurance for same).
I was threatened with arrest for citing section and paragraph of the Canadian Health Code, and explaining that truth to my ten year old daughter. It was the mere speaking of the facts that was deemed offensive, and not the expression of an opinion.
Simply saying that the average wait for certain types of medical procedures is X in Canada and Y in the U.S., where X is greater than Y, is enough to get one in trouble for being "offensive". The truth may offend, I suppose, but when is it a crime to speak it, particularly when it is public knowledge?
Neither situation is acceptable of course, but where a "Buck Fush" bumper sticker will fade into acceptability when Bush is out of office, uncomfortable truths in Canada will never escape the tyrany of oppression.
The current wait for a tonsillectomy is around 80 weeks.
It used to be the case that women in labour in Ontario were denied epidural anasthetic and weren't allowed to pay for it themselves (because it is provided by the government "when necessary"). I don't know if that's still the case.
Many seriously ill patients (particularly cardiac patients) either die before getting to the head of the line for treatment, or are too far gone to benefit from it. There is supposedly some triage that takes place, but an aging population results in there being many "most urgent" cases in line.
It is illegal for a covered Canadian to pay for health services that the government promises to provide, whether they do or not. And, all Canadians can obtain coverage in the province where they reside. However, the application (at least in Ontario) for coverage requires an agreement to live in that province permanently. Many have argued that this is "fair" because transients should not benefit from taxpayer-funded services, except in their "home" province. However, the correct response would be a minumum waiting period, or perhaps paying for service received in a short period before leaving, instead of the opposite extreme: permanent residence. (And, in Ontario, I have verified that this means "forever".)
Not everything is covered, of course, elective surgery being one such item, non-ward hospital accomodations being another: one can pay for an "upgrade" to a semi-private or private room if one is available, and such "upgrades" can be funded by private health insurance -- that's all it can cover for Canadian citizens).
Non-citizens can pay for service, at rates far cheaper than those in, for example, the U.S., and they get to bypass the line in which citizens are forced to queue. There is increasing evidence that many Canadians get to "jump ahead" in line because of the nature of their relationship with their doctor, or their political or social stature. (The government will pay for politicians to get treatment outside Canada: Quebec premier (like a state governer) got cancer treatment in the U.S.) Corruption in the system appears rampant.
It is questionable whether a Canadian can legally leave Canada for service in another country (e.g. the U.S.). While Canadian law does not apply on U.S. soil, once "back home", it isn't clear whether they could be prosecuted for buying health care illegally. To date, this has not happened, likely because it would be the straw that breaks the camel's back when it comes to revolting against the government.
There is a loophole where Canadians resident in one province can travel to another one, and pay for health care (because they are non-resident, and thus not covered, in the second province), and some have been desperate enough to travel across the country to find the shortest lines. Many travel to the U.S.
Personally, I believe that for the state to tax to provide health care, and then deliver less health care to an individual than their proportionate share of taxes dedicated to health care could purchase on the open market, is criminal fraud. If the individual dies as a result, I consider it state-sanctioned murder. I've said so as much on Slashdot before, and have gotten modded down for it. But, don't expect me to shut up about the murderous state of health care in Canada.
Interested parties can Google for "Canadian" and "Health Care" and come to their own conclusions.
This is good news for fanless C3-based systems using CLE266 MPEG acceleration hardware: Via had released closed-source drivers (and, indeed, forked Xine to use them in a product called VeXP). These drivers were reverse-engineered to support an open source equivalent, which was less than completely reliable.