Admittedly, I don't get it either, however we're pretty much joined at the hip with NAFTA and various other treaties. I'm really not sure what standing a ruling like this would have up here. It's almost certainly a bad thing for isoHunt, though.
More worrisome is that our currently (partially) elected government so desperately wants us to be the US that they've been going so far as to get the RIAA and the MPAA to consult on bills, so I wouldn't count on much government support for a Canadian citizen who has lost an American court case. Hell, they won't even go to bat for citizens held in other nations for various shady political reasons, in the US or other countries.
The only time you hear anything about Canadian sovereignty anymore is over the Arctic, during an election cycle.
Well. I went completely off topic. That's either rum or bitterness.
FlashBlock does most of what I need for ad blocking, too. I don't mind seeing ads - I even click on them occasionally. (Yes, targeted advertising does increase clicks! Imagine.) I've had Slashdot's "you have lots of karma, you can disable advertising" link on here for ages, and never used it. I like Slashdot, I don't mind paying for it with a bit of attention.
I finally installed ABP, though, when some site I was on had 1999-era blinky gif ads all over the sidebar. Impossible to read the article, then, and if I'm going to avoid a site's content because of their ads, they're not getting any revenue from me. Unfortunately, now anyone with well-behaved ads aren't either, so they're wrecking it for everyone.
I recently started using Chrome, and FlashBlock was on that thing in fifteen minutes. The web's unusable without it. No ad blocking software installed yet, though, so we'll see how that goes.
Anyway, I think Google's on to something with this. I can't be arsed to install blockers until I'm really annoyed, and I practically live online. Most people will put up with these things to a certain point, and if your revenue model is based on serving ads, you are invested in making sure they're not so annoying as to drive people to look for solutions.
Admittedly, I was awful tempted to just troll the heck out of this thread (never done it, and I have no foes, which makes me think I'm doing something wrong), but instead I will abstain. I really don't know enough about how they're being implemented to have an opinion. I do think it's more about implementation than the idea itself, but that's true of most things.
"Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually."
Way to ensure this whole thread goes off track, by trolling on an unrelated and politically charged topic. And with an example poorly chosen as proof of anything, at that.
How many different-but-very-similar programming languages do you know? How big a problem do you have switching between them? At a very boring syntactical level, C, C++, java, javascript, php and perl (and probably a few others I can't remember right now) are very similar ("if (condition) { [...]; }"). They're also semantically somewhat similar, yet you manage to write in the language you intend to.
Wouldn't the same thing be true for english and ${english-like programming language}?
Yeah, that's pretty much the list - add python and take out C++ (and it's been a looong time since I've touched C, but I'm very glad I learned it.) And they are of course very similar. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes to remember to stop typing '$' in front of a variable, or I'll use '->' instead of '.' I'll occasionally stutter over an idiom as well - I try and play to a languages strengths, and even if the "PHP way" will work fine in, say, javascript (*), I tend towards a more functional approach in the latter; it just fits.
If I was working daily in an English-like language, I could see myself at the liquor store saying something like "put beer in myBasket and add one wine." It's already hard enough coming out of the code hole!
(* yes, I've outed myself. My bread and butter these days comes mostly from PHP & javascript. I try and make the best of it;) )
Why not? Because you still need to understand the weird, contorted formal grammar of a programming language. How do you say widget.visible = true in English? "Set widget's visible to true"? "Set the visible of the widget to the value true"? "Set visible of window to true"?
Yeah, I think this looks easier to someone with no previous exposure to programming, but I would be spending all my time in the docs trying to figure out which English construct was the right one. I spend enough time looking up library calls and parameters - I don't need to be referencing the language syntax all the time as well. Terse == good!
Context switching would be a bitch, too. Going between programming languages takes me a few minutes to re-align myself. If I had to reprogram my brain switching between English and almost-English, it would get ugly;)
I can't help thinking that particular grail quest comes from mistaking which part of programming is hard. I can't count how many times I've heard "I could do that if I had the time to learn the language." Except the hard part of programming isn't the syntax.
Tools like the one under discussion seem to be aimed at the crowd that think the only thing to learn about programming is the language, and then you can skate on that knowledge. If the language is english, suddenly you can bypass all those expensive, crotchety programmers.
(This may be true for some tasks - there must be some utility here. But I'm sure I see some scales floating in that oil.)
That is an interesting thought...there could be a cornucopia of undiscovered meat flavours just waiting for the discerning palate. For those that have moved off meat but still would enjoy it, it would be a great thing.
The one thing I do still miss is sushi. I couldn't comfortably process it any more, but damn! That was the one meaty thing I did have trouble giving up.
Point taken - I'm going to go check up on the semantics of "veganism" as soon as I'm done posting, so cheers!
The zealous, dogmatic types bug the heck out of me, too. I've known more than a few and it's sooo hard not to poke at them. Just too much fun to be had. (Not to mention that I don't think they do their cause any favours by being so unpleasant.)
I would agree, too, that a creature existing in perpetual suffering deserves to be relieved from it. (Queue someone to jump in with some silly slippery-slope argument...)
I would encourage you to check out the full interview with DH. It's not all about his decision to be a vegetarian, and it's more nuanced than what is represented in that quote. It's all part of a more fundamental understanding of consciousness, and I found it incredibly refreshing to read something more grounded than "how can you eat something so cute!"
Bacon used to be one of my favourite things, too, even though my experience of it now is quite entirely different. For what it's worth, you have that much less competition in your enjoyment of that magical animal.
I knew this post would elicit a comment like this, so much obliged. (First, a minor quibble - I think you mean "vegetarians", rather than "vegans." The latter not only don't eat meat, but any animal byproduct, eg. dairy.)
As you implicitly acknowledge, there are a lot of different types of vegetarians and vegans, who have chosen to omit certain things from their diet for various reasons. A vegetarian who is one for health reasons won't be terribly interested in eating meat, regardless of it's origins.
There are other arguments for vegetarianism, of course. Sustainability is one (although this would imply more that we should eat far less meat, from animals raised in ways that are environmentally friendly and don't negatively impact our ability to produce other foods.) The level of cruelty involved in factory farming, which is required to sustain our voracious appetite for meat is another, but this has the same caveats. I've known organic farmers that take better care of their animals than some do their children.
The one that seems to cause meat eaters the biggest problem is ethics. Is it defensible that we take life away from other sentient creatures for our own pleasure simply because our sentience is more highly evolved? I became a vegetarian for health reasons, but after dissociating myself from a meat diet and no longer needing to justify it, this question become easier to contemplate. I cannot in good conscience cause pain and take away the life from another living creature when I don't need to for my own survival. I consider us fortunate that we have this option, that we do not need to cause harm to continue to exist.
(Douglas Hofstadter expounds on this quite eloquently:
At some point, in any case, my compassion for other “beings” led me very naturally to finding it unacceptable to destroy other sentient beings (or other hallucinations, if you prefer), such as cows and pigs and lambs and fish and chickens, in order to consume their flesh, even if I knew that their (hallucinated) sentience wasn't quite as high as the (hallucinated) sentience of human beings.
For myself, I am looking forward to the day when we find vat grown meat at our grocers, and fervently hope that one day this will supplant "naturally grown" meat. I believe that most vegetarians would agree, and not have a particular problem with people consuming non-sentient cell tissue.
As an aside, I was recently at a friend's place, and we were making caesar salad, hers with bacon, mine without. In the interest of science, I tasted a piece. It was the single most revolting flavour I've ever tasted, something like carrion. You do lose your taste for meat over time, and there are many vegetarians that really don't miss the nasty things you meat eaters put into your bodies;)
While I completely agree that the internet, as cranky as it makes me, is a tremendous boon for freedom of the press and a platform for those that wouldn't otherwise have access to one, some context for the bit you quoted is needed:
Everybody is a know-it-all these days. I blame the Internet. I know a little bit about a lot of things, and I'm not afraid to step up to a microphone or keyboard and do a little "truth screaming." Audience reaction, specifically ratings, determined whether I was allowed to continue such a practice. I was held accountable by management, listeners and, most important, advertisers.
These days, a person only needs a computer to spew opinion across a variety of platforms. Healthy doses of outrage and narcissism are also helpful.
What he was talking about was not placating advertisers. He was saying that he could only get away with a certain amount of straight-out ranting because only a certain amount would be tolerated by everyone. And we all know that advertisers follow "everyone", so if people stop reading, the advertisers pull out.
(Not to say I don't have issues with advertising being associated with news, but there are ways of keeping that from becoming the blight it could be. They just aren't always exercised.)
When CNN started broadcasting twit feeds, it just confirmed that they were desperate to fill up air time with any kind of cheap content they could grab. Bad enough that they were giving air time to uninformed idiots, it was uninformed idiots with a 140 character attention span.
I expect my news to bring me more information than I could get myself in the allotted time. When the attorney general (Canadian here) releases a report, reporters sequester themselves in a room for hours ahead of the press conference to go through it and try to make some sense of a dense lot of information so that the high points can be delivered to me in a five minute news segment. I don't have time or expertise to do that myself, but I still want the information. We can go on about how this means news is all editorialized, but the simple fact is I can't gather, assimilate and analyze everything that happens around me, and I need what are essentially public advisors to help guide me through it.
This is why competition in news is so important (if one outlet consistently skips things for editorial reasons, that will come out), why a well funded public broadcaster is essential (to prevent news from becoming infotainment, always trying to maximize the bottom line), and why we need independent competition in news (to keep the publicly funded sources from becoming Pravda.) It's not a perfect system, but it does pretty well.
Aside from all that, nothing has depressed me about my fellow Canadians more than reading the comments on cbc.ca. At least the Letters to the Editor section of papers filters out the people that can't form complete sentences, and I can go on pretending the citizenry has a certain level of intelligence.
And when I do want uninformed opinion, or want to spew my own, I have plenty of online sources to go to. Let's just not pretend it's news.
It even recognized my Atheros wifi and ethernet cards which I had previously had to custom compile the ethernet drivers, and install backported intrepid drivers for the wifi before, in Jaunty.
This is exciting - I picked up a 1050ha this summer and have been suffering along with the pre-installed XP because I didn't want to fuss with the drivers (and I knew this would eventually be taken care of.) Very good news...
I had two extremely minor issues - some language packs were not found during the upgrade (this fixed itself the very next time synaptic kicked in), and my network adapter didn't connect until I rebooted. Aside from that, my anecdotal experience has been that I noticed very little change (nice), and everything seems noticeably faster (very nice.)
I don't have time, unfortunately, to keep track of everything that changes each release anymore, and fuss with various things to try them out. To a large extent I've become Joe User - my machine is for work, and not playing around to make things go. My experience with Ubuntu has been extremely positive in that regard. I've had more annoying issues with Vista (same hardware - dual boot), like my speakers suddenly not working anymore. Ubuntu's not perfect, but I have far fewer annoyances with it.
Perhaps most importantly, if something does break, I can still drop to a command line and get it fixed. No, that's not for everyone. For me it beats the heck out of the way Windows tucks everything away from me and I have rely on uninstalling and reinstalling and general blind screwing around if something goes south.
Funny, I moved to Ontario from Alberta this summer, in part because Alberta (much as I love that part of the country) is run like a frat house, and getting increasingly more screwed up.
As for the cell phone law, I'm glad to see it in. It may keep one of my awesome-driver friends out of a nasty accident. He was incapable of not using his cell phone while driving, only, I'm sure, because of pride in his driving skills.
...as Wikipedia matures and common issues get covered. There are fewer "easy" items to add, and editorial standards rise. In the beginning, everyone was new. Now the more casual, less experienced editors are more likely to be reverted, at least until they rise to a higher bar than was required in the beginning. It could be that it's just becoming an incestuous cesspit, but I think increasing coverage and quality are likely reasons.
Shhh! You do know we let them think that, because every time they start feeling a bit insecure, they get into it with some under-funded dictatorship or island nation or something, don't you? I am right next door (north-wise) and keep having to remind myself to keep my trap shut about the whole 1812 thing. I figure there's a good bet that if they ever remember that bit of history, they'll want a rematch, and that will interrupt hockey season.
Go look at Canada's laws. It's pretty much against the law to say anything bad about homosexuality up there, from what I understand from some Canadian friends that I have.
That sounds like a slight misinterpretation to me. According to Seciton 319 of the Criminal Code:
Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace is guilty of
(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.
In other words (as far as I understand it) "God condemns homosexuality", or even "I hate queers" likely won't get you prosecuted, but "We should be stoning fags" would. The key parts are that the statements must be public and be likely to disturb the peace.
The new Irish law targets blasphemy, which (according to the Irish Times) is defined as
...matter "that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage."
So the Canadian law is about attempting to incite action against any identifiable group, the Irish blasphemy law is criminalizing saying things religious organizations find offensive. I think this is a significant difference, both in terms of what is illegal (an attempt to incite harm versus "outraging" someone) and in terms of who is protected (any identifiable group versus religious organizations.)
It doesn't matter how many people there are. It's how many meteors reach the earth's surface, the total surface area of our little globe, and how much space on it you take up.
More people just means a higher chance that _someone_ will get hit. Doesn't affect your chances at all. Unless meteors are actively looking for someone to strike.
Well, we have a better version of football up here;) There's still a lot of silk pants going 'round, though.
Curling I'll give you - I have no idea what the obsession is with curling. But we didn't start it - I blame the Scotts.
Hell, I'll throw you one - Celine Dione. That was all our fault. (Although, she is from Quebec, and the rest of us really haven't figured them out yet.)
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Admittedly, I don't get it either, however we're pretty much joined at the hip with NAFTA and various other treaties. I'm really not sure what standing a ruling like this would have up here. It's almost certainly a bad thing for isoHunt, though.
More worrisome is that our currently (partially) elected government so desperately wants us to be the US that they've been going so far as to get the RIAA and the MPAA to consult on bills, so I wouldn't count on much government support for a Canadian citizen who has lost an American court case. Hell, they won't even go to bat for citizens held in other nations for various shady political reasons, in the US or other countries.
The only time you hear anything about Canadian sovereignty anymore is over the Arctic, during an election cycle.
Well. I went completely off topic. That's either rum or bitterness.
FlashBlock does most of what I need for ad blocking, too. I don't mind seeing ads - I even click on them occasionally. (Yes, targeted advertising does increase clicks! Imagine.) I've had Slashdot's "you have lots of karma, you can disable advertising" link on here for ages, and never used it. I like Slashdot, I don't mind paying for it with a bit of attention.
I finally installed ABP, though, when some site I was on had 1999-era blinky gif ads all over the sidebar. Impossible to read the article, then, and if I'm going to avoid a site's content because of their ads, they're not getting any revenue from me. Unfortunately, now anyone with well-behaved ads aren't either, so they're wrecking it for everyone.
I recently started using Chrome, and FlashBlock was on that thing in fifteen minutes. The web's unusable without it. No ad blocking software installed yet, though, so we'll see how that goes.
Anyway, I think Google's on to something with this. I can't be arsed to install blockers until I'm really annoyed, and I practically live online. Most people will put up with these things to a certain point, and if your revenue model is based on serving ads, you are invested in making sure they're not so annoying as to drive people to look for solutions.
Damn you! I was just kvetching, now I've gone and learned something. (And, yes, you are correct about why I thought it a bad example.)
Admittedly, I was awful tempted to just troll the heck out of this thread (never done it, and I have no foes, which makes me think I'm doing something wrong), but instead I will abstain. I really don't know enough about how they're being implemented to have an opinion. I do think it's more about implementation than the idea itself, but that's true of most things.
"Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually."
Way to ensure this whole thread goes off track, by trolling on an unrelated and politically charged topic. And with an example poorly chosen as proof of anything, at that.
How many different-but-very-similar programming languages do you know? How big a problem do you have switching between them? At a very boring syntactical level, C, C++, java, javascript, php and perl (and probably a few others I can't remember right now) are very similar ("if (condition) { [...]; }"). They're also semantically somewhat similar, yet you manage to write in the language you intend to.
Wouldn't the same thing be true for english and ${english-like programming language}?
Yeah, that's pretty much the list - add python and take out C++ (and it's been a looong time since I've touched C, but I'm very glad I learned it.) And they are of course very similar. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes to remember to stop typing '$' in front of a variable, or I'll use '->' instead of '.' I'll occasionally stutter over an idiom as well - I try and play to a languages strengths, and even if the "PHP way" will work fine in, say, javascript (*), I tend towards a more functional approach in the latter; it just fits.
If I was working daily in an English-like language, I could see myself at the liquor store saying something like "put beer in myBasket and add one wine." It's already hard enough coming out of the code hole!
(* yes, I've outed myself. My bread and butter these days comes mostly from PHP & javascript. I try and make the best of it ;) )
Yeah, I think this looks easier to someone with no previous exposure to programming, but I would be spending all my time in the docs trying to figure out which English construct was the right one. I spend enough time looking up library calls and parameters - I don't need to be referencing the language syntax all the time as well. Terse == good!
Context switching would be a bitch, too. Going between programming languages takes me a few minutes to re-align myself. If I had to reprogram my brain switching between English and almost-English, it would get ugly ;)
I can't help thinking that particular grail quest comes from mistaking which part of programming is hard. I can't count how many times I've heard "I could do that if I had the time to learn the language." Except the hard part of programming isn't the syntax.
Tools like the one under discussion seem to be aimed at the crowd that think the only thing to learn about programming is the language, and then you can skate on that knowledge. If the language is english, suddenly you can bypass all those expensive, crotchety programmers.
(This may be true for some tasks - there must be some utility here. But I'm sure I see some scales floating in that oil.)
Heh. Obligatory Simpson's reference:
Lisa: I'm going to become a vegetarian
Homer: Does that mean you're not going to eat any pork?
Lisa: Yes
Home: Bacon?
Lisa: Yes Dad
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: Dad all those meats come from the same animal!
Homer: Right Lisa, some wonderful, magical animal!
That is an interesting thought...there could be a cornucopia of undiscovered meat flavours just waiting for the discerning palate. For those that have moved off meat but still would enjoy it, it would be a great thing.
The one thing I do still miss is sushi. I couldn't comfortably process it any more, but damn! That was the one meaty thing I did have trouble giving up.
Point taken - I'm going to go check up on the semantics of "veganism" as soon as I'm done posting, so cheers!
The zealous, dogmatic types bug the heck out of me, too. I've known more than a few and it's sooo hard not to poke at them. Just too much fun to be had. (Not to mention that I don't think they do their cause any favours by being so unpleasant.)
I would agree, too, that a creature existing in perpetual suffering deserves to be relieved from it. (Queue someone to jump in with some silly slippery-slope argument...)
I would encourage you to check out the full interview with DH. It's not all about his decision to be a vegetarian, and it's more nuanced than what is represented in that quote. It's all part of a more fundamental understanding of consciousness, and I found it incredibly refreshing to read something more grounded than "how can you eat something so cute!"
Bacon used to be one of my favourite things, too, even though my experience of it now is quite entirely different. For what it's worth, you have that much less competition in your enjoyment of that magical animal.
I knew this post would elicit a comment like this, so much obliged. (First, a minor quibble - I think you mean "vegetarians", rather than "vegans." The latter not only don't eat meat, but any animal byproduct, eg. dairy.)
As you implicitly acknowledge, there are a lot of different types of vegetarians and vegans, who have chosen to omit certain things from their diet for various reasons. A vegetarian who is one for health reasons won't be terribly interested in eating meat, regardless of it's origins.
There are other arguments for vegetarianism, of course. Sustainability is one (although this would imply more that we should eat far less meat, from animals raised in ways that are environmentally friendly and don't negatively impact our ability to produce other foods.) The level of cruelty involved in factory farming, which is required to sustain our voracious appetite for meat is another, but this has the same caveats. I've known organic farmers that take better care of their animals than some do their children.
The one that seems to cause meat eaters the biggest problem is ethics. Is it defensible that we take life away from other sentient creatures for our own pleasure simply because our sentience is more highly evolved? I became a vegetarian for health reasons, but after dissociating myself from a meat diet and no longer needing to justify it, this question become easier to contemplate. I cannot in good conscience cause pain and take away the life from another living creature when I don't need to for my own survival. I consider us fortunate that we have this option, that we do not need to cause harm to continue to exist.
(Douglas Hofstadter expounds on this quite eloquently:
)
For myself, I am looking forward to the day when we find vat grown meat at our grocers, and fervently hope that one day this will supplant "naturally grown" meat. I believe that most vegetarians would agree, and not have a particular problem with people consuming non-sentient cell tissue.
As an aside, I was recently at a friend's place, and we were making caesar salad, hers with bacon, mine without. In the interest of science, I tasted a piece. It was the single most revolting flavour I've ever tasted, something like carrion. You do lose your taste for meat over time, and there are many vegetarians that really don't miss the nasty things you meat eaters put into your bodies ;)
While I completely agree that the internet, as cranky as it makes me, is a tremendous boon for freedom of the press and a platform for those that wouldn't otherwise have access to one, some context for the bit you quoted is needed:
What he was talking about was not placating advertisers. He was saying that he could only get away with a certain amount of straight-out ranting because only a certain amount would be tolerated by everyone. And we all know that advertisers follow "everyone", so if people stop reading, the advertisers pull out.
(Not to say I don't have issues with advertising being associated with news, but there are ways of keeping that from becoming the blight it could be. They just aren't always exercised.)
When CNN started broadcasting twit feeds, it just confirmed that they were desperate to fill up air time with any kind of cheap content they could grab. Bad enough that they were giving air time to uninformed idiots, it was uninformed idiots with a 140 character attention span.
I expect my news to bring me more information than I could get myself in the allotted time. When the attorney general (Canadian here) releases a report, reporters sequester themselves in a room for hours ahead of the press conference to go through it and try to make some sense of a dense lot of information so that the high points can be delivered to me in a five minute news segment. I don't have time or expertise to do that myself, but I still want the information. We can go on about how this means news is all editorialized, but the simple fact is I can't gather, assimilate and analyze everything that happens around me, and I need what are essentially public advisors to help guide me through it.
This is why competition in news is so important (if one outlet consistently skips things for editorial reasons, that will come out), why a well funded public broadcaster is essential (to prevent news from becoming infotainment, always trying to maximize the bottom line), and why we need independent competition in news (to keep the publicly funded sources from becoming Pravda.) It's not a perfect system, but it does pretty well.
Aside from all that, nothing has depressed me about my fellow Canadians more than reading the comments on cbc.ca. At least the Letters to the Editor section of papers filters out the people that can't form complete sentences, and I can go on pretending the citizenry has a certain level of intelligence.
And when I do want uninformed opinion, or want to spew my own, I have plenty of online sources to go to. Let's just not pretend it's news.
This is exciting - I picked up a 1050ha this summer and have been suffering along with the pre-installed XP because I didn't want to fuss with the drivers (and I knew this would eventually be taken care of.) Very good news...
I had two extremely minor issues - some language packs were not found during the upgrade (this fixed itself the very next time synaptic kicked in), and my network adapter didn't connect until I rebooted. Aside from that, my anecdotal experience has been that I noticed very little change (nice), and everything seems noticeably faster (very nice.)
I don't have time, unfortunately, to keep track of everything that changes each release anymore, and fuss with various things to try them out. To a large extent I've become Joe User - my machine is for work, and not playing around to make things go. My experience with Ubuntu has been extremely positive in that regard. I've had more annoying issues with Vista (same hardware - dual boot), like my speakers suddenly not working anymore. Ubuntu's not perfect, but I have far fewer annoyances with it.
Perhaps most importantly, if something does break, I can still drop to a command line and get it fixed. No, that's not for everyone. For me it beats the heck out of the way Windows tucks everything away from me and I have rely on uninstalling and reinstalling and general blind screwing around if something goes south.
Funny, I moved to Ontario from Alberta this summer, in part because Alberta (much as I love that part of the country) is run like a frat house, and getting increasingly more screwed up.
As for the cell phone law, I'm glad to see it in. It may keep one of my awesome-driver friends out of a nasty accident. He was incapable of not using his cell phone while driving, only, I'm sure, because of pride in his driving skills.
...as Wikipedia matures and common issues get covered. There are fewer "easy" items to add, and editorial standards rise. In the beginning, everyone was new. Now the more casual, less experienced editors are more likely to be reverted, at least until they rise to a higher bar than was required in the beginning. It could be that it's just becoming an incestuous cesspit, but I think increasing coverage and quality are likely reasons.
Shhh! You do know we let them think that, because every time they start feeling a bit insecure, they get into it with some under-funded dictatorship or island nation or something, don't you? I am right next door (north-wise) and keep having to remind myself to keep my trap shut about the whole 1812 thing. I figure there's a good bet that if they ever remember that bit of history, they'll want a rematch, and that will interrupt hockey season.
Thanks for the clarification. Does it need to be a state-recognized religion?
It seems to be a rather open-ended law...
That sounds like a slight misinterpretation to me. According to Seciton 319 of the Criminal Code:
In other words (as far as I understand it) "God condemns homosexuality", or even "I hate queers" likely won't get you prosecuted, but "We should be stoning fags" would. The key parts are that the statements must be public and be likely to disturb the peace.
The new Irish law targets blasphemy, which (according to the Irish Times) is defined as
So the Canadian law is about attempting to incite action against any identifiable group, the Irish blasphemy law is criminalizing saying things religious organizations find offensive. I think this is a significant difference, both in terms of what is illegal (an attempt to incite harm versus "outraging" someone) and in terms of who is protected (any identifiable group versus religious organizations.)
Is that from Strunk and White?
It doesn't matter how many people there are. It's how many meteors reach the earth's surface, the total surface area of our little globe, and how much space on it you take up.
More people just means a higher chance that _someone_ will get hit. Doesn't affect your chances at all. Unless meteors are actively looking for someone to strike.
What, you're not big on Ayn Rand fanfic?
Well, we have a better version of football up here ;) There's still a lot of silk pants going 'round, though.
Curling I'll give you - I have no idea what the obsession is with curling. But we didn't start it - I blame the Scotts.
Hell, I'll throw you one - Celine Dione. That was all our fault. (Although, she is from Quebec, and the rest of us really haven't figured them out yet.)
Beer? I have two words: Coors Light. Now own up!