If I had the option of subsidized hardware, I'd buy hundreds of these for clustering. I don't think they could create a business model to compensate for me, and people like me, who can use hundreds of subsidized machines.
In a way it would almost be a little poetic, having Microsoft repay all the gouging they've done over the past 20 years.:)
HBO did a pretty damn fine job with Tony Soprano, I think. Oh, wait, I have nothing to verify the correctness of that statement. HBO has made me believe I know what mafia are like. Nevermind.:)
War need not imply innovation. A war with Iraq et al. won't encourage new technology. It may be used to excuse past expenses in otherwise unjustifiable research, though.
WRT the anecdotal comment regarding mining diamonds: Potential diamond yield is unlikely to encourage anything, since diamond production is artificially stymied by a cartel. I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it seriously, but it does elucidate the enigma of incentive, which is really the core of this converse.
I think your comments on a China space race, and allusion to Nazi induced innovation, are right on the money. Let us hope that, with respect to the latter, it is not a price we should have to ever again pay for innovation.
Simple. Homemade pornography is the answer. Film yourself, friends or other consenting adults engaging in wholesome sexual fun. Encode your porn into SVCD format (the most popular format for getting porn and being able to watch it in a standalone player). Pick a suitable quality level for both the audio and video and you'll quickly see that a 1 hour high quality porn should need approximately 4 700MB CD-Rs for distribution over Direct Connect. That's 2.8 gigs per movie. Now you just need to make 36 such movies and you'll be over the 100 gig sharing restriction.
You've thought about that way too much, and it shows.:)
But once we are done with the grief and morning for these great people, the space program will be severely hampered from further progress. We need this program to continue, and I'm afraid we've just killed it for twenty years.
Maybe it is not so bad for the space program itself. It was the first failure of the Apollo mission that sparked NASA's motivation, and inherent success, thereafter, I believe. The results of this, although acutely tragic, could certainly bring about renewed motiviation. If that is the case, then at least this loss will not have been in vain.
In debian (and perhaps gentoo), it is easy to get mplayer installed,
# acquire wget ftp://...mplayer-link.../MPlayer-0.90rc3.tar.bz2 # decompress source tar jxvf MPlayer-0.90rc3.tar.bz2
# acquire useful directory state:) cd MPlayer-0.90rc3
# [X] build a debian package fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage
# fix various complaints about packages missing # (best to do this in another window; must be root # or apt-get set{u,g}id root, which is pure evil) apt-get install fakeroot libpng12-0-dev libgtk1.2-dev...
# do [X] again fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage
#... then cd.. dpkg -i mplayer_0.90rc3-0_i386.deb
Whammo. You have mplayer. Ok, by "easy" I mean "repeatable sequence of commands", not "point and click", I guess.:)
Cheers Brian - Just when Ih think I'm out.... they pulla me back in!
What the OP didn't mention (and probably didn't realize) is that you still have to pay separate royalties/syndication fees for the Internet. That's all I was really saying anyway.
There is no legislation regarding royalties for internet broadcasts of television in Canada. What you are implying is that in spite of written legislation dictating conditional rights to rebroadcast transmissions, there is some implied consent to pay royalties for compliant broadcasts across the internet medium specifically because it is the internet medium.
However, as of yet, the CRTC (the Canadian telecommunications regulatory body) has not identified or specified any such royalties for internet rebroadcasting of television, nor have they identified until this decision, any special regulations applicable to the internet as a medium, and there is no reason to believe that royalties are indeed due.
It is possible that through WIPO (international intellectual property protection treaty) regulatory compliance may some day be stipulated. However this, too, has not yet come to pass. This is less likely to happen if internet rebroadcasting has been banned altogether.
FYI, it is legal in Canada to rebroadcast television channels so long as it is not modified. (I don't recall any stipulations to that) There are special exceptions to the non-modification clause in that Canadian channels are permitted to play localized advertising over foreign content, as long as the same program is played. For example, we never see U.S. Superbowl commercials. We get the same game. But Canadian commercials.
So rebroadcasting over the internet is perfectly legal, perhaps immoral, but certainly legal in Canada, up until this latest decree. As someone noted elsewhere, Cable companies in Canada get money from customers for the method of distribution, not the content.
If all DRM hardware [doesn't] sell then the technology will be abandoned.
Not entirely true. If the cost of selling DRM technology exceeds the benefit, then it will be reduced in market share, perhaps to oblivion. On the other hand, if the benefits, which may include demands, or more precisely protection from, from entertainment and media conglomerates, exceed the costs of creating DRM, it will expand in use.
If it becomes standard, through de facto expansion, or mandate, then it will have marginal extra cost to manufacturers. This may enable market players to created added value in non-DRM technology, but the value-proposition, in lieu of wanted protections from aforementioned conglomerates, is exceedingly small. (ie. make something non-DRM and get sued.)
According to some interpretations of Schrodinger's Cat, if one were to employ such a black box with cryptographic keys, it may never work; this is in the same jest that the code to Windows 9x has never been seen, and consequently randomly doesn't work.
Re:The main benefit...
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There is no end-consumer demand for digital rights, per se, but there is certainly content producer demand for digital rights. I suppose content producers are consumers as well; as such, they want to protect their content, and in turn create demand for digital content restrictions.
There may be indirect demand for DRM insofar as it procures an environment conducive to content that consumers demand. In other words, without DRM there there may be less digital content produced under high demand.
Sounds like a prion, popularly believed to be the cause of mad cow disease et al. Prions are believed to be proteins that self-replicate using host DNA. They gestate over 20 or so years or so.
You are referring to a geosynchronous (GEO) satellite with unidirectional satellite broadcast data transfer.
LEO is bidirectional; it typically has ping times in under 20 ms, requires no cable, cellular, or other ground connections. It has stateful transfer between satellites, so you swap sats when one goes out of your Line of Sight (LOS), whereas with GEO you have one satellite that broadcasts all signals.
There are literally thousands of uplinks all over the world. Only a few of them have access codes to the IP data providers.
LEO satellites act in groups; for Iridium, as an example, there are always 2, and usually 3 satelites in LOS (line of sight) of any position on the surface.
The Russians have an interesting assymmetrical orbit, but I cannot recall the name of it offhand; it requires fewer satellites than dense coverage of the whole world, but only applies to hemispheres, North or South, of certain degree (in their case, North).
One does not launch a LEO satellite by itself, I would imagine; I think it circles the globe in 90 minutes, so it crosses the event horizon (passes out of LOS) every 45 of those in the least.
MEO satellites are potential options, but they have higher latency issues as well. See everything2.com for reasonable definitions of these.
Round trip ping times are extreme and completely unusable for online gaming
I was under the impression, by calculating the distances using the speed of light in a vacuum, that LEO (low earth orbit, eg. iridium) satellites had ping times in the 20 ms range, whereas GEO (geosynchronous earth orbit) satellites were in the 500 ms range.
Which is fine and dandy for LEO, but is this solution a GEO one? If GEO, then the ping time is a problem. But if it is a LEO solution, not so much. In fact, I get longer ping times to my cable provider from my telco.
The LEO 20 ms would be round trip airwave; presumably the sat. provider would put the hubs on the backbones. Or be backbones themselves.
Re:Yeah, but that's not the first solution we can
on
Stopping Killer Asteroids
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I disagree with your assertion that a barrier to colonization is 'social' problems, or capitalist issues, or attitude. If you build a road to Mars, people will walk it. Even if the only people that ever left were living in absolute misery, you would garner an enormous number of people. The idea of shaping a new colony is not one that comes around every day, either.
The attitude that "it doesn't benefit us now" is the same attitude that keeps people from buying insurance. One may never need insurance, but you can rest assured that if your house burns down, it is well worth it.
But extending that attitude to the existence of the human race, is obtuse to the point of being offensive. We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species. If we fail that dice roll, we all die. Forgive my presumption, but that warrants investigation. This dice does not have enough faces.
Your assumptions about large population, economical self sufficiency, and capitalism are not validated. Your assertion that people will not go is not qualified (it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment). If you don't want to go, that is ok. I assure you that other people may; it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means, but I suggest giving it more thought first.
You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times, none of which solve the problem that Earth is a single point of failure.
For some reason, I am reminded of telephone sanitation workers...
ACLs', sudo, non-rooting boot params, non transferable FS are not C2/CAPP requirements.
You are correct in the auditing claim. I suggest you read select sections 4 through 12 of version 2.1 of the CCITA part 2, available at: http://www.commoncriteria.org/cc/cc.html
Most pertinent of these, section 6 "User data protection", will qualify, upon investigation, the statement I have made regarding the necessity of ACLs, sudo, non-rooting boot params, non-transferrable FS. (see: FDP_{ACC,ACF,SDI}, and FTP_FLS in S.10.2) Make note that I specified these as sufficient, not necessary.
I do not understand the relevance of the remainder of your comments, except perhaps the BSD references, which are partly agreeable, but I suspect your perspective is biased. Of all the free software developers I have met, Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD fame is among the more finicky. Thankfully his skill and knowledge compensates more than adequately.
It is important not that Earth will be hit by an asteroid, but that civilization, our species, as we have come to enjoy (and/or lament) will be annihilated.
ISO/IEC 15408 (supercedes the rainbow series, to which CCITA belongs): ACL's, sudo (or equiv.), auditing, non-root'ing (ie. linux single) boot params, non transferrable FS. All are available for Linux, but more likely you will use or want to use a BSD.
I don't consider ISO/IEC15408 machines a burden, especially in lieu of the alternatives; most user-level programs may never tell they are there. As Linux is source, it is trivial (well, insofar as kernel hacking is trivial; maybe 'possible' is a better word) to acquire the necessary options for ISO/IEC15408. It seems easier to do this with BSD's because they tend to be simpler in design.
When the dye is heated, it becomes opaque, thus blocking the aluminum layer from view. Thus, the reading laser sees bumps where the opaque dye is, thus creating 0s.
Very good answer; some more anecdotal info. The extension of physical media to digital 0's is not quite right. Bits on a CD alternate at the physical media layer. Thus, 00000000...000+ec at the software is physically 01010101...101+ec. (ec=error correction)
Of course, at the physical layer, these bits aren't adjacent. either. Rather, they are spiraled around such that there is no single physical straight line of bits. Scratches tend to be straight lines, so spacing the data helps preserve more data+ec.
Find Cross-Interleave Reed-Solomon Code (CIRC)for more info on the ec.
Please qualify who 'you' is; it seems like you are talking to Americans, but you are replying to my message.
Some points: Canada has one major party right now, and has only ever demonstrated at best a 2 party national system. At the moment, Canada is not much different from Mexico's one party system, albeit significantly less violent (a factor I would attribute to the cold environment).
I am not sure what you mean by Bipartisian state. Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and the recent Bush upset over Gore, really indicates a relatively healthy competition. Most people take issue with the party system as a means of democracy; if you look at any given election in the US, there are generally dozens of parties, but the problem is in the mindshare necessary to make any of them effective.
"And second that the United States seems to be the ONLY country in the WORLD to be IMPORTING more in EVERY SECTOR OF ECONOMY, THAN THEY'RE EXPORTING."
I am not sure where you could have gotten that data, but I suggest you look again. The biggest export of the US is arms, which dwarfs every other export. They also have a significant surplus in WIPO copyright, patent fees, and automobiles.
"A little off topic though, final reminder, I do believe that Sweden is JUST as much socialist as the Norwegians are"
Sweden is often regarded as the most socialist state in the world (a label imbued by their tax rates if nothing else), so I am not sure what you mean by Sweden being as socialist as Norway.
An anecdotal note: Lumber is an interesting topic; the US has historically been very confused on the issue of making money from lumber. They have subsidized logging roads into their forests where the gross return from the logging is a fraction of the cost of the road. There are other reasons to build such roads (emergency response to airline crashes by vehicles, covert travel during wartime, etc.), but for the most part such expenditures have been attributed to a fickle government. Similarly in the lumber dispute, it seems as though the US government is fickle rather than focused.
Finally: A majority government is a blessing and a curse; I suggest you look into the Canadian laws about majority governments - it is riddled with oddities. If they fail to pass a motion, they are ousted, for example. The minority government has little more play than the media, and judging by the regular lineup of corrupt officials in the Canadian federal government of late, I would conjecture that it is in part influenced by the lack of potential punishment, a situation less evident in a minority government.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had the option of subsidized hardware, I'd buy hundreds of these for clustering. I don't think they could create a business model to compensate for me, and people like me, who can use hundreds of subsidized machines.
:)
In a way it would almost be a little poetic, having Microsoft repay all the gouging they've done over the past 20 years.
HBO did a pretty damn fine job with Tony Soprano, I think. Oh, wait, I have nothing to verify the correctness of that statement. HBO has made me believe I know what mafia are like. Nevermind. :)
War need not imply innovation. A war with Iraq et al. won't encourage new technology. It may be used to excuse past expenses in otherwise unjustifiable research, though.
WRT the anecdotal comment regarding mining diamonds: Potential diamond yield is unlikely to encourage anything, since diamond production is artificially stymied by a cartel. I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it seriously, but it does elucidate the enigma of incentive, which is really the core of this converse.
I think your comments on a China space race, and allusion to Nazi induced innovation, are right on the money. Let us hope that, with respect to the latter, it is not a price we should have to ever again pay for innovation.
I don't know about anyone else, but if the end of the planet was coming about, I'd change my personal policies on breeding.
Some things are just timeless. This is one of them. Here is another:
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html
Simple. Homemade pornography is the answer. Film yourself, friends or other consenting adults engaging in wholesome sexual fun. Encode your porn into SVCD format (the most popular format for getting porn and being able to watch it in a standalone player). Pick a suitable quality level for both the audio and video and you'll quickly see that a 1 hour high quality porn should need approximately 4 700MB CD-Rs for distribution over Direct Connect. That's 2.8 gigs per movie. Now you just need to make 36 such movies and you'll be over the 100 gig sharing restriction.
:)
You've thought about that way too much, and it shows.
But once we are done with the grief and morning for these great people, the space program will be severely hampered from further progress. We need this program to continue, and I'm afraid we've just killed it for twenty years.
Maybe it is not so bad for the space program itself. It was the first failure of the Apollo mission that sparked NASA's motivation, and inherent success, thereafter, I believe. The results of this, although acutely tragic, could certainly bring about renewed motiviation. If that is the case, then at least this loss will not have been in vain.
In debian (and perhaps gentoo), it is easy to get mplayer installed,
:)
...
... then ..
:)
.... they pulla me back in!
# acquire
wget ftp://...mplayer-link.../MPlayer-0.90rc3.tar.bz2
# decompress source
tar jxvf MPlayer-0.90rc3.tar.bz2
# acquire useful directory state
cd MPlayer-0.90rc3
# [X] build a debian package
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage
# fix various complaints about packages missing
# (best to do this in another window; must be root
# or apt-get set{u,g}id root, which is pure evil)
apt-get install fakeroot libpng12-0-dev libgtk1.2-dev
# do [X] again
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage
#
cd
dpkg -i mplayer_0.90rc3-0_i386.deb
Whammo. You have mplayer. Ok, by "easy" I mean "repeatable sequence of commands", not "point and click", I guess.
Cheers
Brian
- Just when Ih think I'm out
What the OP didn't mention (and probably didn't realize) is that you still have to pay separate royalties/syndication fees for the Internet. That's all I was really saying anyway.
There is no legislation regarding royalties for internet broadcasts of television in Canada. What you are implying is that in spite of written legislation dictating conditional rights to rebroadcast transmissions, there is some implied consent to pay royalties for compliant broadcasts across the internet medium specifically because it is the internet medium.
However, as of yet, the CRTC (the Canadian telecommunications regulatory body) has not identified or specified any such royalties for internet rebroadcasting of television, nor have they identified until this decision, any special regulations applicable to the internet as a medium, and there is no reason to believe that royalties are indeed due.
It is possible that through WIPO (international intellectual property protection treaty) regulatory compliance may some day be stipulated. However this, too, has not yet come to pass. This is less likely to happen if internet rebroadcasting has been banned altogether.
FYI, it is legal in Canada to rebroadcast television channels so long as it is not modified. (I don't recall any stipulations to that) There are special exceptions to the non-modification clause in that Canadian channels are permitted to play localized advertising over foreign content, as long as the same program is played. For example, we never see U.S. Superbowl commercials. We get the same game. But Canadian commercials.
So rebroadcasting over the internet is perfectly legal, perhaps immoral, but certainly legal in Canada, up until this latest decree. As someone noted elsewhere, Cable companies in Canada get money from customers for the method of distribution, not the content.
If all DRM hardware [doesn't] sell then the technology
will be abandoned.
Not entirely true. If the cost of selling DRM technology exceeds the benefit, then it will be reduced in market share, perhaps to oblivion. On the other hand, if the benefits, which may include demands, or more precisely protection from, from entertainment and media conglomerates, exceed the costs of creating DRM, it will expand in use.
If it becomes standard, through de facto expansion, or mandate, then it will have marginal extra cost to manufacturers. This may enable market players to created added value in non-DRM technology, but the value-proposition, in lieu of wanted protections from aforementioned conglomerates, is exceedingly small. (ie. make something non-DRM and get sued.)
According to some interpretations of Schrodinger's Cat, if one were to employ such a black box with cryptographic keys, it may never work; this is in the same jest that the code to Windows 9x has never been seen, and consequently randomly doesn't work.
("and why do I have /usr/local/bin, and why is it empty?").
/usr/local
See:
cheers & hth
bmh
There is no end-consumer demand for digital rights, per se, but there is certainly content producer demand for digital rights. I suppose content producers are consumers as well; as such, they want to protect their content, and in turn create demand for digital content restrictions.
There may be indirect demand for DRM insofar as it procures an environment conducive to content that consumers demand. In other words, without DRM there there may be less digital content produced under high demand.
We will see, I guess.
Sounds like a prion, popularly believed to be the cause of mad cow disease et al. Prions are believed to be proteins that self-replicate using host DNA. They gestate over 20 or so years or so.
You are referring to a geosynchronous (GEO) satellite with unidirectional satellite broadcast data transfer.
LEO is bidirectional; it typically has ping times in under 20 ms, requires no cable, cellular, or other ground connections. It has stateful transfer between satellites, so you swap sats when one goes out of your Line of Sight (LOS), whereas with GEO you have one satellite that broadcasts all signals.
There are literally thousands of uplinks all over the world. Only a few of them have access codes to the IP data providers.
LEO satellites act in groups; for Iridium, as an example, there are always 2, and usually 3 satelites in LOS (line of sight) of any position on the surface.
The Russians have an interesting assymmetrical orbit, but I cannot recall the name of it offhand; it requires fewer satellites than dense coverage of the whole world, but only applies to hemispheres, North or South, of certain degree (in their case, North).
One does not launch a LEO satellite by itself, I would imagine; I think it circles the globe in 90 minutes, so it crosses the event horizon (passes out of LOS) every 45 of those in the least.
MEO satellites are potential options, but they have higher latency issues as well. See everything2.com for reasonable definitions of these.
Round trip ping times are extreme and completely unusable for online gaming
I was under the impression, by calculating the distances using the speed of light in a vacuum, that LEO (low earth orbit, eg. iridium) satellites had ping times in the 20 ms range, whereas GEO (geosynchronous earth orbit) satellites were in the 500 ms range.
Which is fine and dandy for LEO, but is this solution a GEO one? If GEO, then the ping time is a problem. But if it is a LEO solution, not so much. In fact, I get longer ping times to my cable provider from my telco.
The LEO 20 ms would be round trip airwave; presumably the sat. provider would put the hubs on the backbones. Or be backbones themselves.
That's a different proverb.
I disagree with your assertion that a barrier to colonization is 'social' problems, or capitalist issues, or attitude. If you build a road to Mars, people will walk it. Even if the only people that ever left were living in absolute misery, you would garner an enormous number of people. The idea of shaping a new colony is not one that comes around every day, either.
...
The attitude that "it doesn't benefit us now" is the same attitude that keeps people from buying insurance. One may never need insurance, but you can rest assured that if your house burns down, it is well worth it.
But extending that attitude to the existence of the human race, is obtuse to the point of being offensive. We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species. If we fail that dice roll, we all die. Forgive my presumption, but that warrants investigation. This dice does not have enough faces.
Your assumptions about large population, economical self sufficiency, and capitalism are not validated. Your assertion that people will not go is not qualified (it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment). If you don't want to go, that is ok. I assure you that other people may; it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means, but I suggest giving it more thought first.
You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times, none of which solve the problem that Earth is a single point of failure.
For some reason, I am reminded of telephone sanitation workers
ACLs', sudo, non-rooting boot params, non transferable FS are not C2/CAPP requirements.
You are correct in the auditing claim. I suggest you read select sections 4 through 12 of version 2.1 of the CCITA part 2, available at:
http://www.commoncriteria.org/cc/cc.html
Most pertinent of these, section 6 "User data protection", will qualify, upon investigation, the statement I have made regarding the necessity of ACLs, sudo, non-rooting boot params, non-transferrable FS. (see: FDP_{ACC,ACF,SDI}, and FTP_FLS in S.10.2) Make note that I specified these as sufficient, not necessary.
I do not understand the relevance of the remainder of your comments, except perhaps the BSD references, which are partly agreeable, but I suspect your perspective is biased. Of all the free software developers I have met, Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD fame is among the more finicky. Thankfully his skill and knowledge compensates more than adequately.
Colonize other planets.
It is important not that Earth will be hit by an asteroid, but that civilization, our species, as we have come to enjoy (and/or lament) will be annihilated.
Remember the eggs in one's basket proverb?
ISO/IEC 15408 (supercedes the rainbow series, to which CCITA belongs): ACL's, sudo (or equiv.), auditing, non-root'ing (ie. linux single) boot params, non transferrable FS. All are available for Linux, but more likely you will use or want to use a BSD.
I don't consider ISO/IEC15408 machines a burden, especially in lieu of the alternatives; most user-level programs may never tell they are there. As Linux is source, it is trivial (well, insofar as kernel hacking is trivial; maybe 'possible' is a better word) to acquire the necessary options for ISO/IEC15408. It seems easier to do this with BSD's because they tend to be simpler in design.
When the dye is heated, it becomes opaque, thus blocking the aluminum layer from view. Thus, the reading laser sees bumps where the opaque dye is, thus creating 0s.
Very good answer; some more anecdotal info. The extension of physical media to digital 0's is not quite right. Bits on a CD alternate at the physical media layer. Thus, 00000000...000+ec at the software is physically 01010101...101+ec. (ec=error correction)
Of course, at the physical layer, these bits aren't adjacent. either. Rather, they are spiraled around such that there is no single physical straight line of bits. Scratches tend to be straight lines, so spacing the data helps preserve more data+ec.
Find Cross-Interleave Reed-Solomon Code (CIRC)for more info on the ec.
Cheers
Please qualify who 'you' is; it seems like you are talking to Americans, but you are replying to my message.
Some points:
Canada has one major party right now, and has only ever demonstrated at best a 2 party national system. At the moment, Canada is not much different from Mexico's one party system, albeit significantly less violent (a factor I would attribute to the cold environment).
I am not sure what you mean by Bipartisian state. Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and the recent Bush upset over Gore, really indicates a relatively healthy competition. Most people take issue with the party system as a means of democracy; if you look at any given election in the US, there are generally dozens of parties, but the problem is in the mindshare necessary to make any of them effective.
"And second that the United States seems to be the ONLY country in the WORLD to be IMPORTING more in EVERY SECTOR OF ECONOMY, THAN THEY'RE EXPORTING."
I am not sure where you could have gotten that data, but I suggest you look again. The biggest export of the US is arms, which dwarfs every other export. They also have a significant surplus in WIPO copyright, patent fees, and automobiles.
"A little off topic though, final reminder, I do believe that Sweden is JUST as much socialist as the Norwegians are"
Sweden is often regarded as the most socialist state in the world (a label imbued by their tax rates if nothing else), so I am not sure what you mean by Sweden being as socialist as Norway.
An anecdotal note: Lumber is an interesting topic; the US has historically been very confused on the issue of making money from lumber. They have subsidized logging roads into their forests where the gross return from the logging is a fraction of the cost of the road. There are other reasons to build such roads (emergency response to airline crashes by vehicles, covert travel during wartime, etc.), but for the most part such expenditures have been attributed to a fickle government. Similarly in the lumber dispute, it seems as though the US government is fickle rather than focused.
Finally: A majority government is a blessing and a curse; I suggest you look into the Canadian laws about majority governments - it is riddled with oddities. If they fail to pass a motion, they are ousted, for example. The minority government has little more play than the media, and judging by the regular lineup of corrupt officials in the Canadian federal government of late, I would conjecture that it is in part influenced by the lack of potential punishment, a situation less evident in a minority government.