Canada recently had a case where someone was denied a passport by Passport Canada for unspecified reasons of national security. The guy appealed and, as I recall, the Court ruled that getting a passport was not a constitutionally guaranteed right. They conceded that someone could be denied entry to a foreign country without a passport and that airline regulations imply the use of a passport to confirm a passenger's identity prior to boarding a plane, but didn't seem to have a problem with the outcome of having someone factually unable to leave the country for failure to produce a passport.
I have to disagree. Canadian border guards are not Mr.Nice Guy. They are painfully dumb and arrogant. I'm Canadian-born but I've been living in EU for close to 9 years. I recently visited my relatives in Montreal on a very Canadian passport and speaking a very obvious Montrealer slang.
First, there was the endless grilling from the Immigration officer, about where exactly all my parents and relatives live and how long I factually intend to stay in the country. One would think that citizens have an unrestricted right to visit their homeland, but that guy apparently never heard about it. He was clearly looking for an illegal immigrant traveling on a fake passport (probably because I had just gotten myself a new passport, shortly before the trip).
That was followed by more grilling by the Customs officer, for whom it would not compute that a citizen did not fill the "Residents of Canada" section of the Custom Declaration (for obvious reasons: I haven't had any place of residence in Canada since relocating to EU). I literally to connect the dots for him, by showing him all my European pieces of ID and pointing out that they were issued by the same country as the invoice attached to the Tax-Free goods I was carrying in a sealed transparent plastic bag from the same airport I had departed from. Even then, he didn't look too convinced, but he eventually let me go when he couldn't think of any other smart question to ask.
I tend to be a rather patient guy, but this "welcome" to a place that is supposedly my "homeland" was the icing on the cake: I wrote a formal complain to the Customs and Taxation Board and another one to Immigration Canada, demanding acknowledgment that I no longer am a Canadian citizen (never mind the fact that I never accepted citizenship, in the first place; there's nothing more typically Canadian than to turn a right into an obligation). I already left largely because I was really tired of the governmental bureaucracy's antics; giving me more of that definitely was the wrong way to convince me to ever return. At this point, I really don't want to have anything to do with Canada or its monkey citizenship, ever again. Fuck off, Canada, and good riddance!
Lovely hardware, more flexibility with the peripherals and a more recent Geode LX core: Linutop. Free Software -based, of course. It even uses LinuxBIOS. Me wanna!
Not quite a laptop, but indeed a low-power, Geode-based, small, Web-oriented product, the Linutop seems like a nice platform. Heck, they even mention that it's based on Free Software and that they invite Free Software developers to invent new usages for the platform. I'll take one of those over Negroponte's crankshaft toy any day!
Sorry, all the IT and language skills in the world are not enough to get into Ireland.
I'm Canadian, married to a Finn and, despite Irish laws that let outsiders married to an EU national walk in, no questions asked, even without their EU spouse, recruiters and employers still turn me down on the basis of citizenship - even after an insider has recommended me. I've had tons of friends give my CV to their boss or to HR, received extremely enthusiastic calls from them essentially welcoming me onboard, only to abruptly end the interview the minute I reply to the citizenship question with "non-EU". Countless friends lost juicy hiring bonuses because of that.
how about merging patches submitted by distributions quickly and releasing more often, to avoid the current mess that resulted in the creation of Iceweasel, for starters?
As posted elsewhere in this thread: What is average Joe supposed to to do against this war mongering governmental and megacorporative beast that unilateraly takes away the average citizen's freedom?
I really don't care who started this mass terrorisation of the population. Whether it was
paragovernmental agencies legally operating above the law,
undercover cops infiltrating anti-globalisation groups to coherce them into commiting felonies,
government-hired private paramilitary contractors operating outside the law,
terrorists sending a message to foreign powers and megacorporations to get out of their 3rd-world homeland,
pissed off poor white trash venting off frustration at their government,
etc.
No matter which one of them started it, we all lose, because the result is increased loss of freedom and a world-wide megacorporate police state.
Besides, average Joe Whitetrash and average Ahmed Terrorist both have legitimate reasons to be upset. After all, it is megalomaniacs and their laquays that maintain the populace into learned helplessness, misery and slavery. That the average rebel's miscalculated response has nasty consequences for the freedom and safety of the whole planet is a separate issue.
This really does beg the question, does the populace really have a more constructive way out made available to them, other than bursting into government and megacorporate offices and slaughtering the merchants of terror? We are fighting governments that are openly discussing the use of weapons that can leave people blind, deaf or suffocating to death into an allergic reaction, as a method of silencing public discontent. What can we honnestly do against that?
Board members are not employees. They tend to be outsiders brought in because of their relevant experience in successfully running a business, to guide the company management into making good decisions. While there sometimes are heirs of the company founders or members of the management team on the board, most members are outsiders.
I'm still gathering data, but what I've seen so far clearly points in the direction of more serious actions by Canada towards Finland and other countries nearby. Then again, as I said, it takes two to tango, so oen can only suspect that Finland has done a few infuriating things towards Canada too.
We also tend not to go around and meddle in other countries as a hobby.
Don't be so sure.
It has been my unfortunate experience to find that Canadians, although they are quite welcome as people, are totally unwelcome as citizens of a country that routinely manages to piss off an increasing number of other countries. To make an analogy, if USA is the proverbial highschool bully, then Canada is his skinny sidekick who spits on you and kicks you in the shins while you are lying on the ground bleeding to death. In other words, on the diplomatic map, Canada is a hypocritical asshole.
For instance, as reported by consulates of a growing number of Central European countries, Canada still considers all former members of the Warsaw Pact as potentialy dangerous and thus refuses to enter into reciprocal visa exemption agreements that would give citizens of those countries the possibility to visit Canada visa-free for the traditional touristic 90 days per year.
There's also been far worse diplomatic incidents:
After World War II, a number of Baltic people fleeing the arrival of Soviet troops relocated to Canada. Among them, a majority of Estonians relocated to Ontario and they have been having a yearly folk festival to keep their culture alive, ever since. After Estonia regained independance from USSR, a delegation from the homeland was invited to attend the folk festival. We're talking about folk musicians and dancers, business people and representatives of the freshly elected first post-Soviet Estonian government. Immigration Canada denied the entry visa to absolutely everyone, except for president Lennart Meri. Not surprisingly, Estonian custom officers have been giving the Ben Laden treatment to Canadians visiting Tallinn ever since then.
I have heard similarly gruesome stories while visiting the Latvian and Polish consulates in Helsinki.
The Latvian consular staff acted in a visibly agressive way. When cautiously asked if anything was wrong, the consul herself came to the desk and hinted that I really ought to enquire with the Canadian government and learn for myself how things got that tense between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the Polish consular assistant conceded that I needed a visa to transit via Poland, but gleefully granted me one on the spot, throwing in plently of touristic brochures and asking me if I needed any advice for planning my trip. The Polish lady then candidly shared the reason why Canadians need a visa to visit Poland, while preparing my visa: Canada refuses to enter into a reciprocal visa exemption treaty with Poland, stating security concerns that created a diplomatic incident with the Polish government. This being said, the average Pole has nothing against Canadians per-se, which is why she was able to grant me a visa on the spot.
Since the enlargement of the European Union, several Central European countries stopped requiring a visa from Canadian citizens. However, harrassment at the border crossing continues, because Canada still won't budge and offer them the same courtesy of a touristic 90-day visa-free visit per year.
In Finland, Canada attempted to close its embassy several times, thinking that a single embassy in Stockholm ought to be enough to cover for the whole Scandinavian area. Canadian Finns threatened to withdraw their sizable investment in the Canadian forest industry, every time. Still, there are compelling evidences that Canadians living in Finland receive the Bin Laden treatment, whenever attempting to acquire and renew their Finnish residence permit. Google the name "Brett Young" for a taste of Finnish Immigration absurdities. This being said, it takes two to tango and I suspect that Canada repeatedly trying to close its embassy in Finland (assuming that it's the only diplomatic snafu they made in Finland) might have something to do with it.
Canada's presence in Afghanistan and in other former US colonies is also well-known.
Canada doesn't meddle in the affairs of foreign countries, you say? Think again.
That's a complete human rights violation and unconstitutional in any country that respects the declaration of human rights.
Many countries sign all kinds of treaties and later have no qualms about voting exceptions and creative reinterpretations of all sorts. For instance, there used to be soldiers and civilians. Now, there's also "ennemy combatants" - whatever that means. There, USA created an exception to circumvent international laws of warfare.
Besides, several treaties allow this sort of creative reinterpretation or selective enforcement explicitely, stating in the preamble that any signing member may derogate in whole or in part.
In Canada, they changed something in the Laws during the early 1990's that basically legalized the purchase of stolen property, if the property is purchased thru a legit registered business.
The typical case would be a victim of robbery that kept all receipts in a safe at the bank, then noticed some of their stolen goods lying in a pawn shop shelf. They would then notify the the police, receipts and other proofs in hand, but would meet resistance from the pawn shop owners. Anyhow, in most cases, the most valuable merchandise was already gone and could not be traced. As I recall, pawn shop owners felt that the Law shafted them by forcing them to return stolen goods to their rightful owner, after already handing money in exchange. What did Canada do? They changed the Law. Once a pawn shop has paid money in exchange for some valuables, they legally own them, even if you can prove that they stolen goods that belong to you.
A friend in Montreal lost a whole recording studio worth of equipment that way, right after the law was changed. Showed up in various pawn shops, noticed that the serial number of serveral items there matched those of material declared as stolen to the police a week before... only to hear the police say that he could not recover them, because the Law protects pawn shop owners and tramples the rights of stolen property's rightful owners. his story made the evening news in Montreal, back then.
So, however grossly unfair as this story about stolen houses might be, it remains consistent with Canada's position of protecting the buyer, in total contempt of victims of criminal acts such as property title theft or robbery.
For what it's worth, I think that proper remedy would be to:
Give the house back to the old man,
provide monetary compensation to the buyers,
strip the attorney that validated the transaction of his citizenship and forfeit all of his assets, to cover the price of reimbursing the victims, then promptly deport him.
part because of the social contract inherent in British society
Stop it right there. There is no such thing as a social contract, on any country on this planet. Anyone claiming there is deserves to be shot dead and their parents to be hit with a depleted uranium cluebat.
Honnestly, any country claiming to be a democracy would actually dare produce the contract and give people the option of opting out. Me predicts that whole MacCartyist countries would suddenly be left with zillions of ungoverned anarchists.
FreeDOS is the only way to flash a BIOS using Free Software. Never mind the slow release cycles, it already works and it has helped me upgrade countless computers, without a single copy of MS-DOS on hand.
They messed up the Mach64 framebuffer driver a couple of releases ago; it paints garbage during the early stage of the boot process and flashes red on UTF-8 characters.
USB keyboard and mouse jam in a cyclic way that eats keystrokes and makes the mouse cursor freeze momentarily. I tried every elevator and preemptive mode, to no avail; something is definitely borked in the HID driver since about 2.6.4.
That might not amount to much on a server, but it's one heck of a way to disturb desktop usage.
I've tried every handset model that Nokia ever released and guess what? I keep on going back to my good old 3210. Why? Because it does the simple job it was designed to do extremely well: It's a great, simple, usable phone. It also offers T9 in a dozen of languages.
Meanwhile, newer models restrict the selection of T9 to the national languages of the target country and they come with all sorts of virus-prone Java crap that I won't ever need.
There is a tremendous market for simple, durable handsets with no Java, no embeded Konqueror or WAP crap; just splendid SMS facilities with user-installable T9 wordlists and polyphonic ring tones. Who will grab it?
Good leaders who understand the limitations of technology exist, The problem is getting geeks to find legitimacy in a manager who is not a geek too. In a nutshell: forget it.
Better avoid a situation like Debian where duplicate libraries in Perl and Python (soon enough in Ruby and Pike too - $deity forbid - followed by yet more duplicates in Mono) become standard packages, simply because too many important or essential tools were coded in those languages without consideration for keeping the basic installation's package count to the strict minimum. This is one of the main reasons why transitions are so impossibly difficult to manage in Debian, nowadays.
Then again, at the other extreme, an OpenBSD situation where an excessively spartan C shell and a substandard Korn shell are the only two possibilities should also be avoided.
Pick one compiled language for binaries and one scripting language for everything else (boot scripts and "glue" components). That's it. Then, standardize on those two choices and spank unconscious anyone who tries to deviate from the company's selected standards.
Except that companies there cannot be bothered with using the Labour Law paragraph that allows foreign spouses of EU nationals to get their work permit free for the asking. They all insist on "playing it safe" by systematically avoiding non-EU nationals, whether married to an EU national or not, which is why I am not in Ireland right now, even though just about all my Estonian, Latvian and Polish friends have already moved there and are earning good money.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada recently had a case where someone was denied a passport by Passport Canada for unspecified reasons of national security. The guy appealed and, as I recall, the Court ruled that getting a passport was not a constitutionally guaranteed right. They conceded that someone could be denied entry to a foreign country without a passport and that airline regulations imply the use of a passport to confirm a passenger's identity prior to boarding a plane, but didn't seem to have a problem with the outcome of having someone factually unable to leave the country for failure to produce a passport.
I have to disagree. Canadian border guards are not Mr.Nice Guy. They are painfully dumb and arrogant. I'm Canadian-born but I've been living in EU for close to 9 years. I recently visited my relatives in Montreal on a very Canadian passport and speaking a very obvious Montrealer slang.
First, there was the endless grilling from the Immigration officer, about where exactly all my parents and relatives live and how long I factually intend to stay in the country. One would think that citizens have an unrestricted right to visit their homeland, but that guy apparently never heard about it. He was clearly looking for an illegal immigrant traveling on a fake passport (probably because I had just gotten myself a new passport, shortly before the trip).
That was followed by more grilling by the Customs officer, for whom it would not compute that a citizen did not fill the "Residents of Canada" section of the Custom Declaration (for obvious reasons: I haven't had any place of residence in Canada since relocating to EU). I literally to connect the dots for him, by showing him all my European pieces of ID and pointing out that they were issued by the same country as the invoice attached to the Tax-Free goods I was carrying in a sealed transparent plastic bag from the same airport I had departed from. Even then, he didn't look too convinced, but he eventually let me go when he couldn't think of any other smart question to ask.
I tend to be a rather patient guy, but this "welcome" to a place that is supposedly my "homeland" was the icing on the cake: I wrote a formal complain to the Customs and Taxation Board and another one to Immigration Canada, demanding acknowledgment that I no longer am a Canadian citizen (never mind the fact that I never accepted citizenship, in the first place; there's nothing more typically Canadian than to turn a right into an obligation). I already left largely because I was really tired of the governmental bureaucracy's antics; giving me more of that definitely was the wrong way to convince me to ever return. At this point, I really don't want to have anything to do with Canada or its monkey citizenship, ever again. Fuck off, Canada, and good riddance!
Lovely hardware, more flexibility with the peripherals and a more recent Geode LX core: Linutop. Free Software -based, of course. It even uses LinuxBIOS. Me wanna!
Not quite a laptop, but indeed a low-power, Geode-based, small, Web-oriented product, the Linutop seems like a nice platform. Heck, they even mention that it's based on Free Software and that they invite Free Software developers to invent new usages for the platform. I'll take one of those over Negroponte's crankshaft toy any day!
Sorry, all the IT and language skills in the world are not enough to get into Ireland.
I'm Canadian, married to a Finn and, despite Irish laws that let outsiders married to an EU national walk in, no questions asked, even without their EU spouse, recruiters and employers still turn me down on the basis of citizenship - even after an insider has recommended me. I've had tons of friends give my CV to their boss or to HR, received extremely enthusiastic calls from them essentially welcoming me onboard, only to abruptly end the interview the minute I reply to the citizenship question with "non-EU". Countless friends lost juicy hiring bonuses because of that.
how about merging patches submitted by distributions quickly and releasing more often, to avoid the current mess that resulted in the creation of Iceweasel, for starters?
As posted elsewhere in this thread: What is average Joe supposed to to do against this war mongering governmental and megacorporative beast that unilateraly takes away the average citizen's freedom?
No matter which one of them started it, we all lose, because the result is increased loss of freedom and a world-wide megacorporate police state.
Besides, average Joe Whitetrash and average Ahmed Terrorist both have legitimate reasons to be upset. After all, it is megalomaniacs and their laquays that maintain the populace into learned helplessness, misery and slavery. That the average rebel's miscalculated response has nasty consequences for the freedom and safety of the whole planet is a separate issue.
This really does beg the question, does the populace really have a more constructive way out made available to them, other than bursting into government and megacorporate offices and slaughtering the merchants of terror? We are fighting governments that are openly discussing the use of weapons that can leave people blind, deaf or suffocating to death into an allergic reaction, as a method of silencing public discontent. What can we honnestly do against that?
Is that what you suggest as the solution for the whole World to return to more peaceful and productive times?
Board members are not employees. They tend to be outsiders brought in because of their relevant experience in successfully running a business, to guide the company management into making good decisions. While there sometimes are heirs of the company founders or members of the management team on the board, most members are outsiders.
I'm still gathering data, but what I've seen so far clearly points in the direction of more serious actions by Canada towards Finland and other countries nearby. Then again, as I said, it takes two to tango, so oen can only suspect that Finland has done a few infuriating things towards Canada too.
Don't be so sure.
It has been my unfortunate experience to find that Canadians, although they are quite welcome as people, are totally unwelcome as citizens of a country that routinely manages to piss off an increasing number of other countries. To make an analogy, if USA is the proverbial highschool bully, then Canada is his skinny sidekick who spits on you and kicks you in the shins while you are lying on the ground bleeding to death. In other words, on the diplomatic map, Canada is a hypocritical asshole.
For instance, as reported by consulates of a growing number of Central European countries, Canada still considers all former members of the Warsaw Pact as potentialy dangerous and thus refuses to enter into reciprocal visa exemption agreements that would give citizens of those countries the possibility to visit Canada visa-free for the traditional touristic 90 days per year.
There's also been far worse diplomatic incidents:
After World War II, a number of Baltic people fleeing the arrival of Soviet troops relocated to Canada. Among them, a majority of Estonians relocated to Ontario and they have been having a yearly folk festival to keep their culture alive, ever since. After Estonia regained independance from USSR, a delegation from the homeland was invited to attend the folk festival. We're talking about folk musicians and dancers, business people and representatives of the freshly elected first post-Soviet Estonian government. Immigration Canada denied the entry visa to absolutely everyone, except for president Lennart Meri. Not surprisingly, Estonian custom officers have been giving the Ben Laden treatment to Canadians visiting Tallinn ever since then.
I have heard similarly gruesome stories while visiting the Latvian and Polish consulates in Helsinki.
The Latvian consular staff acted in a visibly agressive way. When cautiously asked if anything was wrong, the consul herself came to the desk and hinted that I really ought to enquire with the Canadian government and learn for myself how things got that tense between the two countries.
Meanwhile, the Polish consular assistant conceded that I needed a visa to transit via Poland, but gleefully granted me one on the spot, throwing in plently of touristic brochures and asking me if I needed any advice for planning my trip. The Polish lady then candidly shared the reason why Canadians need a visa to visit Poland, while preparing my visa: Canada refuses to enter into a reciprocal visa exemption treaty with Poland, stating security concerns that created a diplomatic incident with the Polish government. This being said, the average Pole has nothing against Canadians per-se, which is why she was able to grant me a visa on the spot.
Since the enlargement of the European Union, several Central European countries stopped requiring a visa from Canadian citizens. However, harrassment at the border crossing continues, because Canada still won't budge and offer them the same courtesy of a touristic 90-day visa-free visit per year.
In Finland, Canada attempted to close its embassy several times, thinking that a single embassy in Stockholm ought to be enough to cover for the whole Scandinavian area. Canadian Finns threatened to withdraw their sizable investment in the Canadian forest industry, every time. Still, there are compelling evidences that Canadians living in Finland receive the Bin Laden treatment, whenever attempting to acquire and renew their Finnish residence permit. Google the name "Brett Young" for a taste of Finnish Immigration absurdities. This being said, it takes two to tango and I suspect that Canada repeatedly trying to close its embassy in Finland (assuming that it's the only diplomatic snafu they made in Finland) might have something to do with it.
Canada's presence in Afghanistan and in other former US colonies is also well-known.
Canada doesn't meddle in the affairs of foreign countries, you say? Think again.
Many countries sign all kinds of treaties and later have no qualms about voting exceptions and creative reinterpretations of all sorts. For instance, there used to be soldiers and civilians. Now, there's also "ennemy combatants" - whatever that means. There, USA created an exception to circumvent international laws of warfare.
Besides, several treaties allow this sort of creative reinterpretation or selective enforcement explicitely, stating in the preamble that any signing member may derogate in whole or in part.
In Canada, they changed something in the Laws during the early 1990's that basically legalized the purchase of stolen property, if the property is purchased thru a legit registered business.
The typical case would be a victim of robbery that kept all receipts in a safe at the bank, then noticed some of their stolen goods lying in a pawn shop shelf. They would then notify the the police, receipts and other proofs in hand, but would meet resistance from the pawn shop owners. Anyhow, in most cases, the most valuable merchandise was already gone and could not be traced. As I recall, pawn shop owners felt that the Law shafted them by forcing them to return stolen goods to their rightful owner, after already handing money in exchange. What did Canada do? They changed the Law. Once a pawn shop has paid money in exchange for some valuables, they legally own them, even if you can prove that they stolen goods that belong to you.
A friend in Montreal lost a whole recording studio worth of equipment that way, right after the law was changed. Showed up in various pawn shops, noticed that the serial number of serveral items there matched those of material declared as stolen to the police a week before... only to hear the police say that he could not recover them, because the Law protects pawn shop owners and tramples the rights of stolen property's rightful owners. his story made the evening news in Montreal, back then.
So, however grossly unfair as this story about stolen houses might be, it remains consistent with Canada's position of protecting the buyer, in total contempt of victims of criminal acts such as property title theft or robbery.
For what it's worth, I think that proper remedy would be to:
Stop it right there. There is no such thing as a social contract, on any country on this planet. Anyone claiming there is deserves to be shot dead and their parents to be hit with a depleted uranium cluebat.
Honnestly, any country claiming to be a democracy would actually dare produce the contract and give people the option of opting out. Me predicts that whole MacCartyist countries would suddenly be left with zillions of ungoverned anarchists.
FreeDOS is the only way to flash a BIOS using Free Software. Never mind the slow release cycles, it already works and it has helped me upgrade countless computers, without a single copy of MS-DOS on hand.
How is this story supposed to be any improvement over Wengophone?
- They messed up the Mach64 framebuffer driver a couple of releases ago; it paints garbage during the early stage of the boot process and flashes red on UTF-8 characters.
- USB keyboard and mouse jam in a cyclic way that eats keystrokes and makes the mouse cursor freeze momentarily. I tried every elevator and preemptive mode, to no avail; something is definitely borked in the HID driver since about 2.6.4.
That might not amount to much on a server, but it's one heck of a way to disturb desktop usage.Meanwhile, newer models restrict the selection of T9 to the national languages of the target country and they come with all sorts of virus-prone Java crap that I won't ever need.
There is a tremendous market for simple, durable handsets with no Java, no embeded Konqueror or WAP crap; just splendid SMS facilities with user-installable T9 wordlists and polyphonic ring tones. Who will grab it?
...that the provision Texas gave itself for seceeding from USA should be used against Texas to kick them out of the country and bring democracy back?
Good leaders who understand the limitations of technology exist, The problem is getting geeks to find legitimacy in a manager who is not a geek too. In a nutshell: forget it.
Better avoid a situation like Debian where duplicate libraries in Perl and Python (soon enough in Ruby and Pike too - $deity forbid - followed by yet more duplicates in Mono) become standard packages, simply because too many important or essential tools were coded in those languages without consideration for keeping the basic installation's package count to the strict minimum. This is one of the main reasons why transitions are so impossibly difficult to manage in Debian, nowadays.
Then again, at the other extreme, an OpenBSD situation where an excessively spartan C shell and a substandard Korn shell are the only two possibilities should also be avoided.
Pick one compiled language for binaries and one scripting language for everything else (boot scripts and "glue" components). That's it. Then, standardize on those two choices and spank unconscious anyone who tries to deviate from the company's selected standards.
'Nuff said.
Except that companies there cannot be bothered with using the Labour Law paragraph that allows foreign spouses of EU nationals to get their work permit free for the asking. They all insist on "playing it safe" by systematically avoiding non-EU nationals, whether married to an EU national or not, which is why I am not in Ireland right now, even though just about all my Estonian, Latvian and Polish friends have already moved there and are earning good money.