It's not that reality has a liberal bias, it's that conservatives in the US especially have a 'not intended to be a factual statement' bias which they seem to have developed since the 70's. This means that on the rare occasion democrats in the US aren't proverbially shooting themselves in the foot there is a small possibility that they may align with facts, for no other reason than it being bound to happen occasionally. Conservatives have institutionalized support for things that aren't factual, and an overt rejection of anything that is factual.
I'm not really sure how that happened and you'd think it would have cost them more business support, after all, businesses can't function unless things they buy, people they hire etc all deal primarily in facts. You can't 'not believe' in Liquid crystals existence, you can't just 'believe' parts from china aren't counterfit etc. 'trust but verify' (popularized in english by Reagan) requires you to do the verification part honestly.
by that argument the much larger windows ecosystem + software + knowledge base for training is and awesome combination. Which it is. That's why they continue to retain market share.
Bring your own device has its advantages. But it poses problems too, especially at public bodies. Did your employee leave a p2p app running? Who is liable if they start uploading bioshock from your network (we got a takedown notice for bioshock when precisely that happened a few years ago at a previous university). If it doesn't get taken down who is responsible? What happens if an end user plugs in a machine with a virus on it, or has a machine which is stealing 'secret' information (whatever that may be, in our case thats student grades, student medical info, and student ID's)?
Also, I wouldn't count on (or want) most businesses to contribute code to open source. It's not better for them, it costs money they aren't getting paid for, generally they don't have staff for it (IT isn't the same as development, in fact they are almost completely separate things).
Why? Competition is good. Even if you think microsoft makes decent products this gives you a sense of how much the competition compares and if it's cheaper, well MS needs to come out with cheaper.
The question with all of these things is whether or not employees are just working on personal laptops instead of linux machines (I've seen that happen a few times, and that's a very serious problem), and whether or not they have any productivity changes. They might, they might not. Depends what they're doing. Saving money on licencing isn't the same as saving money. If you have 10 000 computers (as per the article) but you reduce productivity by even 1% you're worse off with linux than windows since to make up 1% is 100 people, which runs about 10 million euros.
TCO is a hard thing to calculate. It's pretty obvious that you can save money on licencing using linux, and probably training as well (no microsoft certifications). The hard part is measuring employee compliance, the cost of non compliance (this is a big issue where I am, where the IT guys are very pro linux, so about half our staff just do all their work on personal equipment, since it's a university department that's not a huge problem, but for a corporation or a city that could be problematic), and productivity gain/loss. You'd think that in this day and age, when everything is on the web and a web service that most of this wouldn't matter too much productivity wise, if not a productivity increase by not being able to waste as much time with crap that isn't work related since you can lock down linux more easily.
Right, but this is somewhat different, in that the people involved are being given information that is obviously not true, and a minimum of exposure to the world makes it obvious it isn't true, and it's not a 'go profile people right now' or their immediate boss overseeing it. It's more of a powerpoint slide, which at the best of time aren't high impact.
The people who want to believe nonsense will still believe it, those who don't, still won't. The issue of what they are allowed to do is probably the more serious of the lot, because it plays into the movie fantasy that has been established in peoples heads since they were 5. The idea that you can bend the rules if they're getting in the way is pervasive in far more than law enforcement and is somewhat troublesome, but we do all recognize that government does have a habit of over regulating itself in an effort to keep itself from doing stupid things.
Our telecoms infrastructure ends up being a tree, with a mainline for a couple of areas and then branches off to all the little dots of inhabited places. In the US and europe it's basically a bush or a grid, where those branches connect to other trunks. Each of those branches is fairly expensive, because it only services one area, for redundant service you actually need two branches to the same place rather than in other places where it's one from the north one from the south sort of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropolitan_areas_in_Canada gives a great breakdown of our 'area' blobs. About half of the ontario cities form something approximating a reasonable line, which connects neatly to montreal, and could fairly logically extend to quebec city. Everything else is no where near. Sudbury, thunder bay,north bay etc. Once you get out of the windsor-montreal corridor (including ottawa, guelph peterborough and barrie which are sort of outliers but not really) it's a lot of randomly placed dots of 50-60k people here and there, and fairly lengthy connection westwards to thunder bay, winnipeg, regina, edmonton calgary etc.
We essentially have one loop that runs through ontario, with some major lines from toronto out to Alberta and BC, and everywhere else is basically latching onto those. The US has two major lines, one that runs more or less through the middle of the country and another further south that hits northern texas I think, so people in the north central and north west are kinda screwed but the northeast, - texas-californa is covered in layers.
the third of the country or so who live in southern ontario very much subsidize the telecom infrastructure to everywhere else (and up until recently, pretty much all of the other infrastructure too).
actually the review process is central to the article and the FBI's response. They didn't have in place a centralized review system, which they are changing supposedly.
Where I am (a university) we have a business school that does for hire management training. You tell them what the topic is, they hire the right people to teach the topic for however long you want. There isn't necessarily a 'review' process there, since you're hiring people who you suppose are experts, I'm sure the same happens internally. You might review someones work diligently for a few years, but after 10 or 15 you figure they've been doing it this long, they can't have anything too wacky in there. The tenure system for professors is very much like that. You deeply review everything done to get tenure, but once they have it there's a lot more independence and freedom, and I'm sure the same is true in every business, if not as well formalized.
This demonstrates one of the fundamental problems of running government. Everyone gets outraged whenever something goes wrong, whether it was actually serious or not (and it's not clear how serious this actually was, which is a combination of what was said, how widely that was distributed, whether or not anyone took it seriously, and how much it cost). So governments spend huge amounts of time and money on accountability, they're going to have to pay several people to constantly review the training material for the whole organization, who are in turn going to need to be overseen by someone who is a political appointee. Sometimes it's better to just cut your losses and move on. Because now (or maybe this was the problem in the first place) some political hack is going to be deciding what is and isn't acceptable, and that will be in effect a patronage appointment you're going to get the kid of a rich party in power donor running it.
they probably don't, or at least not the same job or training contracts.
It might have been so farcically stupid that people in the training rightly realized it was asinine and didn't actually do anything from it either, hence the lack of a need for retraining.
Inevitably in life you will go to a training session where the person doing the teaching clearly has no clue what they're talking about, and sometimes it's easier to just write it off as a wasted venture than to try and argue the point or get a refund. This happens in technical training as much as social, business, security, safety or any other kind of training and I somehow doubt this is the first time the FBI has got a bad deal training people on something.
It depends how long ago all of this was, and what has happened since, but a lot of times you can't get your money back, since the person is out of business, or it would cost more in lawyer fees to recoup it.
And, sadly, there are racists in the US. The sooner you get used to dealing with that the better off you'll be. They're everywhere, even if there aren't a lot of them, you should have enough brains to know to ignore them. It's not like the FBI is training 5 year olds on racial profiling, these are adults who should have the brains to realize when information they're getting is batshit crazy, and the ones who think it's the greatest thing ever were racists already. By the time they get to the FBI they're long past the point of being able to influence their biases (or lack thereof) about people from a training session.
If you want to connect toronto to anything else though that's where costs start to rise. The windsor to montreal corridor is pretty manageable, trying to connect to thunder bay, winnipeg or farther east/west is where things start to fall apart fast.
Having a 'toronto only' provider is as you say, one way around this. But I'm not in toronto, so that doesn't really do me any good.
The marginal cases do drive up costs too. If you only ever had to supply paris, London, etc with telecoms it wouldn't be so bad, but when you have to connect sudbury to toronto well, there aren't that many people in sudbury anymore, but that sort of thing, all the random little tendrils to the telecom network are what make it costly, especially if you separate out toronto to its own thing.
And less huge gaps between them. Canadas big cities are the 'greater Toronto area', Montreal, Vancouver and then a significant dropoff in size when you get to Calgary and Edmonton.
It's not that we don't have density, we do, it's just in very disconnected blobs and some of those blobs have nothing in between (especially as you move west)
If you look at the US they have the same thing though, 200 million people that ring the borders of the country about 100km deep and then the interior. Canada has a dense strip in the windsor to montreal corridor, and hooking up everyone else is a bugger of a problem, which is what lots of places face. It's the long tracts of emptyness that link up the one dense strip in ontario/quebec to the (kind of) dense bits in mannitoba, alberta and BC. Where we have density we're about the same as other places, it's that we have dense blobs splattered around which makes everything a bloody pain. And of course winter, and an anti competitive regulatory environment etc.
Also, the aforementioned 250 GB cap from rogers is a 50-75 megabit service, so who wins depends on what you want. They rate it at 50 Mb but I regularly get up around 72 (including right now in fact), but either way, 4x faster with a different cap is a fairly different service.
Long before they had VOD services here up north your plan always stipulated that traffic on rogers or bell networks didn't count against your bandwidth. That even applies to mobiles on rogers for sure (not sure about any of the others).
It was a hold over from the days of very expensive internet with modems etc and people didn't like the idea of having to pay more money to look at their bill or the like online. Now it has some other implications.
Oh and Rogers does have a 250 GB/month plan ($100/month) and 120 and 150 GB plans. Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
They started with I think 6 candidates. A couple dropped out in the first round, some more in the second until it was just two candidates.
Even though everyone knew well in advance who 3 of the candidates were going to be, and you could reasonably guess the top 2, the process is an elimination rounds system until one person got a majority (of party voters).
Basically every couple of hours was another round of voting, and the idea was to engage all the NDP membership even if they didn't want to fly to a convention. Until you actually know who's running, especially in each round, you can't vote effectively in advance. Some people did, not being NDP I'm not sure exactly how that process worked, but the idea was to see how it worked with people voting real time.
Also, it didn't matter if it was gummed up, because the NDP have no political power (the conservatives have a majority), and they won't have to run in an election for at least 3 years so there's there's time to find a better leader if they don't like the one chosen or, lets face it, 3 years is a long time, they may have to do this again several times for any number of reasons.
This is the first time they've managed to get anywhere politically. Previously they were just dividing the left wing and handing power to conservatives through several elections, or they were 3rd and 4th rate fiddles to the liberals, the conservatives, and the bloc quebecois (the french separatists).
They've been trying (and until this past election failing) to present themselves as the 'new left' to replace the liberals. Whether this new found success will last past one election is anyones guess.
10 000 IP addresses is a pretty small botnet, it could be pretty much anyone, from anywhere, even someone just trying to get their moment of fame from the fact that the NDP convention was being broadcast live.
And keep in mind the NDP has no fucking clue what it's doing yet now that they're down layton, and it doesn't really matter since they won't be able to run in an election for at least 3 years (the conservatives have a majority) so this was a good time for a system like this, even if it completely failed there's really no harm that can be done. Literally the worst thing that could have come of it was the wrong leader for a party that has no power, that has 3 years to fix the problem or find someone they like better.
In the UK yelling that at someone as a result of a football match could start a riot, that will cause thousands in damage and potentially get people seriously injured. So it seems very clearly to tie into resulting harm.
I think it's demonstrably the opposite, they've got the right idea. If you are trying to incite racial violence then you aren't behaving like you belong free in a civilized society, because you aren't being civilized.
The US lives in a fantasy land of it being ok to threaten (or imply a threat) to politicians, other politicians, people of other races etc. And how does that work out for that poor texas congresswoman who was shot meeting her district and the half a dozen or so other people who were killed with her, the poor kid in florida who was just shot etc. etc. etc.
You are not free to incite violence anywhere in a civilized society. Race baiting definitely falls in that category. Hell, the UK as I said, has this problem with football in general and what they so aptly call "hooliganism", and this has been a pervasive problem in british society for 50 years, that they have had the indecency to spread to the continent whenever an english football team is playing over there. It is a sign of an uncivilized society when you have a riot over football. This was a kid trying to incite racial hatred over football, that in the UK especially is a particularly dangerous combination.
You have to realize that laws and 'freedom' are sometimes contextual. A guy walking down the street in los angles outside a film studio with a noose is different than a guy with a confederate T-shirt on carrying one around in "colony" alabama (in cullman county). In the UK race baiting like this can trigger a riot, so in the context of what could your actions cause, it's very serious.
If you're talking purely from a security perspective then you can't count RIM out of the picture either. The blackberry ecosystem is pretty robust at the consumer and business level as well.
AFAIK though, the only NSA certed phones for 'top secret' communications are stuff by general dynamics, ratheon and lockheed and you're looking 3k for that kinda phone, assuming you can even get one as a civi. I know there's a sepctra phone that runs an old windows phone software version, but I don't know if they have a new version.
In general dynamics parlance these are (SCIP)-compliant devices (that's for secure communications interoperability protocol).
Right, all legitimate technically interesting issues. But a range of 11Km, 10, 12, or something else means absolutely nothing to a non expert out of context. Did scientists predict 10 and got 11? Or did they predict 100 and got 11 or...? It's all science but reporting on science as though they've either discovered something particularly interesting (which they haven't) isn't going to do the discipline any favours. This is an article that broadly explains that research is being done on an area but nothing substantive.
Worst case predictions are worst case, not what is probably going to happen. Hence the term 'worst case'.
Unfortunately it's not obvious from the bbc article linked what exactly he said, or how broad that law is. Huffington post seems to have the 3 that got him in trouble
Had he stopped at laughing at the (not actually) dead player he might have had a freedom of speech argument. The racist replies ('go pick cotton') would seem to cross the line into illegal speech in the UK as inciting racial hatred.
I can't imagine a situation in the physical world where a drunk guy wandering down the street shouting at blacks to 'go pick cotton' is going to go over well, and the UK has enough problem with football riots that anything that encourages that sort of thing is rightly frowned upon.
Given how much oil leaked I don't see this as a great shock. There's probably some legitimate technical interest in exactly how far the oil spreads and how it does damage, but to an outside observer it seems like a foregone conclusion that a massive oil spill will probably do bad things to the area.
If you're using a travel agency you're in as a business customer usually. Some people do care about the experience of flying, or have a relationship with a travel agent through a business already, but now days just about everyone is booking flights online, by hand, which was sort of my point.
And even then, the travel agent is doing to some degree the same thing, they check price as one of their factors, and lower has it's advantages from being top of the list.
No, that wouldn't do it, because the civilized world have health plans not dedicated to maximizing profits and we don't have some magical solutions either.
It's all politics, the US especially but others generally are willing to invest a huge amount into R&D for soldiers who get injured, but many thousands more people who suffer similar problems every year seem to not get the same priorities.
Apparently, despite all of the people who are injured in road accidents, left over land mines, general mishaps that befall the population etc, the key to moving technology forward is to have 30 or 40 000 soldiers injured.
In the era of internet searches for flights basically the only thing you compete on is price and times. Everything else only matters to business customers who are contented with champagne and seats which don't jam their knees into their chins.
And safety regulations, which, despite the talking points of some political parties, do exist for a reason.
When the experience of travel matters (say a cruise) you can pitch a more expensive product than the next guy as a different experience that justifies a higher cost. But people view the air travel portion as an inconvenience (which I suppose it is) that must be endured rather than a value added part of the experience. No one likes flying anymore, and if you still do, there are some TSA screeners who will adjust your excitement to approved levels.
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It's not that reality has a liberal bias, it's that conservatives in the US especially have a 'not intended to be a factual statement' bias which they seem to have developed since the 70's. This means that on the rare occasion democrats in the US aren't proverbially shooting themselves in the foot there is a small possibility that they may align with facts, for no other reason than it being bound to happen occasionally. Conservatives have institutionalized support for things that aren't factual, and an overt rejection of anything that is factual.
I'm not really sure how that happened and you'd think it would have cost them more business support, after all, businesses can't function unless things they buy, people they hire etc all deal primarily in facts. You can't 'not believe' in Liquid crystals existence, you can't just 'believe' parts from china aren't counterfit etc. 'trust but verify' (popularized in english by Reagan) requires you to do the verification part honestly.
by that argument the much larger windows ecosystem + software + knowledge base for training is and awesome combination. Which it is. That's why they continue to retain market share.
Bring your own device has its advantages. But it poses problems too, especially at public bodies. Did your employee leave a p2p app running? Who is liable if they start uploading bioshock from your network (we got a takedown notice for bioshock when precisely that happened a few years ago at a previous university). If it doesn't get taken down who is responsible? What happens if an end user plugs in a machine with a virus on it, or has a machine which is stealing 'secret' information (whatever that may be, in our case thats student grades, student medical info, and student ID's)?
Also, I wouldn't count on (or want) most businesses to contribute code to open source. It's not better for them, it costs money they aren't getting paid for, generally they don't have staff for it (IT isn't the same as development, in fact they are almost completely separate things).
Why? Competition is good. Even if you think microsoft makes decent products this gives you a sense of how much the competition compares and if it's cheaper, well MS needs to come out with cheaper.
The question with all of these things is whether or not employees are just working on personal laptops instead of linux machines (I've seen that happen a few times, and that's a very serious problem), and whether or not they have any productivity changes. They might, they might not. Depends what they're doing. Saving money on licencing isn't the same as saving money. If you have 10 000 computers (as per the article) but you reduce productivity by even 1% you're worse off with linux than windows since to make up 1% is 100 people, which runs about 10 million euros.
TCO is a hard thing to calculate. It's pretty obvious that you can save money on licencing using linux, and probably training as well (no microsoft certifications). The hard part is measuring employee compliance, the cost of non compliance (this is a big issue where I am, where the IT guys are very pro linux, so about half our staff just do all their work on personal equipment, since it's a university department that's not a huge problem, but for a corporation or a city that could be problematic), and productivity gain/loss. You'd think that in this day and age, when everything is on the web and a web service that most of this wouldn't matter too much productivity wise, if not a productivity increase by not being able to waste as much time with crap that isn't work related since you can lock down linux more easily.
Right, but this is somewhat different, in that the people involved are being given information that is obviously not true, and a minimum of exposure to the world makes it obvious it isn't true, and it's not a 'go profile people right now' or their immediate boss overseeing it. It's more of a powerpoint slide, which at the best of time aren't high impact.
The people who want to believe nonsense will still believe it, those who don't, still won't. The issue of what they are allowed to do is probably the more serious of the lot, because it plays into the movie fantasy that has been established in peoples heads since they were 5. The idea that you can bend the rules if they're getting in the way is pervasive in far more than law enforcement and is somewhat troublesome, but we do all recognize that government does have a habit of over regulating itself in an effort to keep itself from doing stupid things.
Well in russia maybe.
Our telecoms infrastructure ends up being a tree, with a mainline for a couple of areas and then branches off to all the little dots of inhabited places. In the US and europe it's basically a bush or a grid, where those branches connect to other trunks. Each of those branches is fairly expensive, because it only services one area, for redundant service you actually need two branches to the same place rather than in other places where it's one from the north one from the south sort of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropolitan_areas_in_Canada gives a great breakdown of our 'area' blobs. About half of the ontario cities form something approximating a reasonable line, which connects neatly to montreal, and could fairly logically extend to quebec city. Everything else is no where near. Sudbury, thunder bay,north bay etc. Once you get out of the windsor-montreal corridor (including ottawa, guelph peterborough and barrie which are sort of outliers but not really) it's a lot of randomly placed dots of 50-60k people here and there, and fairly lengthy connection westwards to thunder bay, winnipeg, regina, edmonton calgary etc.
We essentially have one loop that runs through ontario, with some major lines from toronto out to Alberta and BC, and everywhere else is basically latching onto those. The US has two major lines, one that runs more or less through the middle of the country and another further south that hits northern texas I think, so people in the north central and north west are kinda screwed but the northeast, - texas-californa is covered in layers.
the third of the country or so who live in southern ontario very much subsidize the telecom infrastructure to everywhere else (and up until recently, pretty much all of the other infrastructure too).
actually the review process is central to the article and the FBI's response. They didn't have in place a centralized review system, which they are changing supposedly.
Where I am (a university) we have a business school that does for hire management training. You tell them what the topic is, they hire the right people to teach the topic for however long you want. There isn't necessarily a 'review' process there, since you're hiring people who you suppose are experts, I'm sure the same happens internally. You might review someones work diligently for a few years, but after 10 or 15 you figure they've been doing it this long, they can't have anything too wacky in there. The tenure system for professors is very much like that. You deeply review everything done to get tenure, but once they have it there's a lot more independence and freedom, and I'm sure the same is true in every business, if not as well formalized.
This demonstrates one of the fundamental problems of running government. Everyone gets outraged whenever something goes wrong, whether it was actually serious or not (and it's not clear how serious this actually was, which is a combination of what was said, how widely that was distributed, whether or not anyone took it seriously, and how much it cost). So governments spend huge amounts of time and money on accountability, they're going to have to pay several people to constantly review the training material for the whole organization, who are in turn going to need to be overseen by someone who is a political appointee. Sometimes it's better to just cut your losses and move on. Because now (or maybe this was the problem in the first place) some political hack is going to be deciding what is and isn't acceptable, and that will be in effect a patronage appointment you're going to get the kid of a rich party in power donor running it.
that goes to my last point, which is that some people are beyond saving by the time the FBI is training them.
they probably don't, or at least not the same job or training contracts.
It might have been so farcically stupid that people in the training rightly realized it was asinine and didn't actually do anything from it either, hence the lack of a need for retraining.
Inevitably in life you will go to a training session where the person doing the teaching clearly has no clue what they're talking about, and sometimes it's easier to just write it off as a wasted venture than to try and argue the point or get a refund. This happens in technical training as much as social, business, security, safety or any other kind of training and I somehow doubt this is the first time the FBI has got a bad deal training people on something.
It depends how long ago all of this was, and what has happened since, but a lot of times you can't get your money back, since the person is out of business, or it would cost more in lawyer fees to recoup it.
And, sadly, there are racists in the US. The sooner you get used to dealing with that the better off you'll be. They're everywhere, even if there aren't a lot of them, you should have enough brains to know to ignore them. It's not like the FBI is training 5 year olds on racial profiling, these are adults who should have the brains to realize when information they're getting is batshit crazy, and the ones who think it's the greatest thing ever were racists already. By the time they get to the FBI they're long past the point of being able to influence their biases (or lack thereof) about people from a training session.
If you want to connect toronto to anything else though that's where costs start to rise. The windsor to montreal corridor is pretty manageable, trying to connect to thunder bay, winnipeg or farther east/west is where things start to fall apart fast.
Having a 'toronto only' provider is as you say, one way around this. But I'm not in toronto, so that doesn't really do me any good.
The marginal cases do drive up costs too. If you only ever had to supply paris, London, etc with telecoms it wouldn't be so bad, but when you have to connect sudbury to toronto well, there aren't that many people in sudbury anymore, but that sort of thing, all the random little tendrils to the telecom network are what make it costly, especially if you separate out toronto to its own thing.
And less huge gaps between them. Canadas big cities are the 'greater Toronto area', Montreal, Vancouver and then a significant dropoff in size when you get to Calgary and Edmonton.
It's not that we don't have density, we do, it's just in very disconnected blobs and some of those blobs have nothing in between (especially as you move west)
If you look at the US they have the same thing though, 200 million people that ring the borders of the country about 100km deep and then the interior. Canada has a dense strip in the windsor to montreal corridor, and hooking up everyone else is a bugger of a problem, which is what lots of places face. It's the long tracts of emptyness that link up the one dense strip in ontario/quebec to the (kind of) dense bits in mannitoba, alberta and BC. Where we have density we're about the same as other places, it's that we have dense blobs splattered around which makes everything a bloody pain. And of course winter, and an anti competitive regulatory environment etc.
Also, the aforementioned 250 GB cap from rogers is a 50-75 megabit service, so who wins depends on what you want. They rate it at 50 Mb but I regularly get up around 72 (including right now in fact), but either way, 4x faster with a different cap is a fairly different service.
Long before they had VOD services here up north your plan always stipulated that traffic on rogers or bell networks didn't count against your bandwidth. That even applies to mobiles on rogers for sure (not sure about any of the others).
It was a hold over from the days of very expensive internet with modems etc and people didn't like the idea of having to pay more money to look at their bill or the like online. Now it has some other implications.
Oh and Rogers does have a 250 GB/month plan ($100/month) and 120 and 150 GB plans. Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
Uh... it does in this case.
They started with I think 6 candidates. A couple dropped out in the first round, some more in the second until it was just two candidates.
Even though everyone knew well in advance who 3 of the candidates were going to be, and you could reasonably guess the top 2, the process is an elimination rounds system until one person got a majority (of party voters).
Basically every couple of hours was another round of voting, and the idea was to engage all the NDP membership even if they didn't want to fly to a convention. Until you actually know who's running, especially in each round, you can't vote effectively in advance. Some people did, not being NDP I'm not sure exactly how that process worked, but the idea was to see how it worked with people voting real time.
Also, it didn't matter if it was gummed up, because the NDP have no political power (the conservatives have a majority), and they won't have to run in an election for at least 3 years so there's there's time to find a better leader if they don't like the one chosen or, lets face it, 3 years is a long time, they may have to do this again several times for any number of reasons.
This is the first time they've managed to get anywhere politically. Previously they were just dividing the left wing and handing power to conservatives through several elections, or they were 3rd and 4th rate fiddles to the liberals, the conservatives, and the bloc quebecois (the french separatists).
They've been trying (and until this past election failing) to present themselves as the 'new left' to replace the liberals. Whether this new found success will last past one election is anyones guess.
10 000 IP addresses is a pretty small botnet, it could be pretty much anyone, from anywhere, even someone just trying to get their moment of fame from the fact that the NDP convention was being broadcast live.
And keep in mind the NDP has no fucking clue what it's doing yet now that they're down layton, and it doesn't really matter since they won't be able to run in an election for at least 3 years (the conservatives have a majority) so this was a good time for a system like this, even if it completely failed there's really no harm that can be done. Literally the worst thing that could have come of it was the wrong leader for a party that has no power, that has 3 years to fix the problem or find someone they like better.
In the UK yelling that at someone as a result of a football match could start a riot, that will cause thousands in damage and potentially get people seriously injured. So it seems very clearly to tie into resulting harm.
I think it's demonstrably the opposite, they've got the right idea. If you are trying to incite racial violence then you aren't behaving like you belong free in a civilized society, because you aren't being civilized.
The US lives in a fantasy land of it being ok to threaten (or imply a threat) to politicians, other politicians, people of other races etc. And how does that work out for that poor texas congresswoman who was shot meeting her district and the half a dozen or so other people who were killed with her, the poor kid in florida who was just shot etc. etc. etc.
You are not free to incite violence anywhere in a civilized society. Race baiting definitely falls in that category. Hell, the UK as I said, has this problem with football in general and what they so aptly call "hooliganism", and this has been a pervasive problem in british society for 50 years, that they have had the indecency to spread to the continent whenever an english football team is playing over there. It is a sign of an uncivilized society when you have a riot over football. This was a kid trying to incite racial hatred over football, that in the UK especially is a particularly dangerous combination.
You have to realize that laws and 'freedom' are sometimes contextual. A guy walking down the street in los angles outside a film studio with a noose is different than a guy with a confederate T-shirt on carrying one around in "colony" alabama (in cullman county). In the UK race baiting like this can trigger a riot, so in the context of what could your actions cause, it's very serious.
If you're talking purely from a security perspective then you can't count RIM out of the picture either. The blackberry ecosystem is pretty robust at the consumer and business level as well.
AFAIK though, the only NSA certed phones for 'top secret' communications are stuff by general dynamics, ratheon and lockheed and you're looking 3k for that kinda phone, assuming you can even get one as a civi. I know there's a sepctra phone that runs an old windows phone software version, but I don't know if they have a new version.
In general dynamics parlance these are (SCIP)-compliant devices (that's for secure communications interoperability protocol).
Right, all legitimate technically interesting issues. But a range of 11Km, 10, 12, or something else means absolutely nothing to a non expert out of context. Did scientists predict 10 and got 11? Or did they predict 100 and got 11 or...? It's all science but reporting on science as though they've either discovered something particularly interesting (which they haven't) isn't going to do the discipline any favours. This is an article that broadly explains that research is being done on an area but nothing substantive.
Worst case predictions are worst case, not what is probably going to happen. Hence the term 'worst case'.
Unfortunately it's not obvious from the bbc article linked what exactly he said, or how broad that law is. Huffington post seems to have the 3 that got him in trouble
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/27/liam-stacey-racist-tweets-twitter-muamba-dead_n_1381876.html
Had he stopped at laughing at the (not actually) dead player he might have had a freedom of speech argument. The racist replies ('go pick cotton') would seem to cross the line into illegal speech in the UK as inciting racial hatred.
I can't imagine a situation in the physical world where a drunk guy wandering down the street shouting at blacks to 'go pick cotton' is going to go over well, and the UK has enough problem with football riots that anything that encourages that sort of thing is rightly frowned upon.
Given how much oil leaked I don't see this as a great shock. There's probably some legitimate technical interest in exactly how far the oil spreads and how it does damage, but to an outside observer it seems like a foregone conclusion that a massive oil spill will probably do bad things to the area.
If you're using a travel agency you're in as a business customer usually. Some people do care about the experience of flying, or have a relationship with a travel agent through a business already, but now days just about everyone is booking flights online, by hand, which was sort of my point.
And even then, the travel agent is doing to some degree the same thing, they check price as one of their factors, and lower has it's advantages from being top of the list.
No, that wouldn't do it, because the civilized world have health plans not dedicated to maximizing profits and we don't have some magical solutions either.
It's all politics, the US especially but others generally are willing to invest a huge amount into R&D for soldiers who get injured, but many thousands more people who suffer similar problems every year seem to not get the same priorities.
Apparently, despite all of the people who are injured in road accidents, left over land mines, general mishaps that befall the population etc, the key to moving technology forward is to have 30 or 40 000 soldiers injured.
In the era of internet searches for flights basically the only thing you compete on is price and times. Everything else only matters to business customers who are contented with champagne and seats which don't jam their knees into their chins.
And safety regulations, which, despite the talking points of some political parties, do exist for a reason.
When the experience of travel matters (say a cruise) you can pitch a more expensive product than the next guy as a different experience that justifies a higher cost. But people view the air travel portion as an inconvenience (which I suppose it is) that must be endured rather than a value added part of the experience. No one likes flying anymore, and if you still do, there are some TSA screeners who will adjust your excitement to approved levels.