This is why all those sob-story TV ads imploring me to donate to help children in poor countries piss me off. Not because I'm a cold-hearted bastard who doesn't want to help, but knowing that such help will make the overall situation worse.
Add in religious-mandated foreign policies from the former Bush administration and the current Harper-led Canadian government, which in part required that any funding to humanitarian NGOs must not promote or even mention any birth control other than abstinence (never mind abortion), and you have a classic snowball effect where there will be even more impoverished children being born, with the same or fewer people back home able to donate their own money, and less tax dollars to fund the foreign aid.
3rd world population is increasing exponentially while developed countries' populations are steady or even declining except for immigration--this isn't rocket or climate science, it's simple, indisputable math.
Strictly speaking, this only applies to CD-Rs, because the original late 90s legislation was passed in response to the music industry's demands. A few years later, hard drives and anything with them got a levy too, but they were dropped a few years ago. An opposition party member tried reintroducing the hard drive levy idea last year, but was shot down.
AFAIK, recordable DVDs do not and have never had a levy.
I do the foot-off-pedal engine-brake routine too, but I'm not a dick about it, either.
If there's a dedicated left-turn lane ahead and there's a car behind me, I usually don't let go of the gas, just in case he is indeed trying to get there in time to trigger the sensor (or make it through in time, if there's already a car or two stopped there).
If there's no one behind me on approach to a red, though, yes I'll lay off the gas long before the intersection. 4 out of 5 times, I don't come to a complete stop. And if safe to do so, I turn the car off if I know it'll be red for at least 30 seconds, based on claims and experimentation that suggests gas used to start engine is equivalent to 10 seconds of idling.
People who leave their feet on the gas on approach to a red, and then hard-brake at the last second, are nuts. I hate seeing these drivers coming up in my rearview mirror when I'm stopped at a light. It's even worse in the winter when you don't know if there's a patch of ice at the intersection.
To a lesser extent, so are people who idle their cars more than half a minute in fair conditions (i.e. heater or AC not needed) especially when some reds can be several minutes long. VERY especially when you're just parked outside someone's place and saying goodbye for several minutes.
Most of the people with "uncontrolled acceleration" cars apparently didn't even think of trying to shift into Neutral. Certainly lends weight to your theory.
You'd think! But I visited San Jose and southern California a month ago, the entire time there, it was far hotter and more humid (42C, or about 110F) back home in Ottawa, Canada. California only got to 27C. Shattered a few notions about hot and sunny California, let me tell you...
(Ottawa has gone to -40 in the winter, so it's quite the range of temperatures)
At some point (possibly quite soon) Tim Cook will have to throw away Steve Jobs's legacy and take the company in a new direction. They can't compete with a mature market and android is coming up fast.
Sure they can, if you remember Apple does not really care about market share, only profit. If they have it, market share is just icing on the cake.
They are still only about 10% of the traditional PC/laptop market share, but make more money from that than any other company in that space. The smartphone and tablet market will saturate with time, of course, just like the mp3 player market did, but Apple has shown it's willing to cannibalize sales of its own, older product lines in order to push a new market (iPhone bumped iPods, iPads bump Macbooks, Macbook Air bumps entry-level Macbooks, etc).
The answer is "Yes, rioting and looting could have taken off to the same extent without Blackberries and Twitter."
The 1992 riots in LA lasted 6 days. 53 people died and damange was pegged at $1 billion. The recent London riots were nowhere near as bad (3-4 days, 5 dead, £200-M damage).
1992 was long before Twitter, SMS, BBM or even real cellphone use.
Anything imposed on Twitter, Blackberry and other social networking tools to prevent future riots, would be equivalent to landline phone companies in 1992 cutting all service to all of Los Angeles, and authorities taking TV and radio off the air to keep people ignorant about what's happening. Or worse, censoring of point-to-point voice and data conversations in realtime (we know they already monitor).
Microsoft is in no danger if they dropped Windows license prices further. Hell, they could afford to give away end-user licenses for free if they wanted to (in reality the OEMs and Microsoft's shareholders would scream bloody murder).
Half the people on the road are "assholes who can't drive". I include in this category people who never signal non-emergency lane changes, and to a lesser extent the drivers (especially those in the left lanes) who go at exactly the speed limit across all four lanes on the Florida turnpike.
If you're seriously willing to gun down someone just because *you* decide, on your own and in the heat of the moment, that someone is an asshole driver and should be removed from the gene pool, then you are an irresponsible gun owner (or defending the actions of one) and exactly the type of person I mentioned earlier--someone ruining it for those who ARE responsible gun owners, who are levelheaded about their use and don't whip it out in anger.
I wasn't lack of patents that held progress back, Bell had a government-granted MONOPOLY on the taxpayer-funded phone system, to the point where phones had to be rented from Bell itself. Then when 3rd party phones started becoming available, Bell argued they shouldn't be allowed to connect because it might damage the phone network. The telecom space was not free-market by any stretch.
Apple Canada honoured the warranty of an iPod I bought in Hong Kong a few years back.
Not honouring purchases from authorized dealers abroad would be shooting themselves in the foot--what if someone traveling on business or leisure has a problem with a product while in a different country?
I think you're referring to Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the NDP candidate (and now MP of course) for Berthier-Maskinongé, a riding north of the Saint Lawrence between Montreal and Trois-Rivières. Credit where due: she hasn't shirked the responsibilities she signed up for (though my cynical side says the parliamentary paycheque probably played a part). Politically she may be inexperienced, but as an assistant manager at a Carleton University bar in Ottawa at the time, she's more than qualified to deal with loud, rowdy and obnoxious adults around her:-)
The government pissed about $1B over a weekend on the G8. $300M for election spread over a month and a bit isn't chump change either, but I dare say the money saved on paying elderly voting station staff, cardboard ballot boxes, and paper ballots will be easily outweighed by consultants and the computer equipment they have to set up, maintain, verify (hopefully!) and tear down afterwards.
The rural location and winter argument also doesn't fly. They chose (in many cases) to live that far out, and in Canada. Canada has winters. Our soldiers suffered and died to preserve our democracy, and they can't be bothered to drive an hour there and back to vote? (I'll grant there's a small chance they hit ice, spin out, crash and die, but a city dweller could be run over on the way to the polls on a nice summer day, too, so I ignore that line of argument also).
Though technically a problem, absentee votes are limited in number, geographically dispersed, so not worth as much effort to do it en masse. Any absentee voter tampering that could affect even a single riding's overall results would be so big an operation they could not remain hidden.
There's logic, then there's the whole fear about mandatory government ID being the same as being asked "papers, please" while moving within the country. Apparently there's an argument that homeless would be disenfranchised, too.
Very true. IMHO, political parties would be outright banned and representatives do what they're told to--by their LOCAL constituents. This is how it is at the city level.
Absentee voting is geographically dispersed, and not worth the effort by criminal elements to go after. There's the scenario of an abusive partner demanding to see a vote before it's sent off, but that number too would be too small to affect the outcome in a particular riding.
You seem to be talking about in-person ballots ("vote cabinet"), but the question is online voting.
Isolated and cannot affect more than a few hundred votes. Probably fewer if an honest citizen (or just someone who doesn't like the party of the guy he's being paid to vote for) tips off the elections staff and they arrest the guy.
Indeed; on the CBC forum there's already totally unqualified people calling those against online voting luddites. The hilarious counterpoint is that all the ones saying they're techies, are solidly against the idea.
I will grant that Elections Canada has apparently considered many of the issues, and has been since 1998 apparently, and aren't rushing into this like many US districts did with e-voting in 2004.
Online voting is a magnitude worse than e-voting, and the unwashed masses don't have the background knowledge to realize this. I blame reality/talent shows like Idol and So You Think You Can Dance for this--no one voting in those cares if a vote can be traced back to their phone number, or that you can vote 5 times (and game the system even more by adding more calls/texts from the phone of someone who doesn't care). Things are a little different in real elections.
I guess I should have specified... I voted using paper ballots, but this was in the US, not Canada. The Canadian voting system is run far more efficiently, eh?
FAR more efficiently. Federally, a single organization, Elections Canada, runs the show, and only local candidates of the federal parties are on the ballot (we do not cast votes for our prime minister directly, like you do for president). Once a poll is closed, they're counted locally, sometimes observed by reps from different parties, and results sent up the chain within an hour. Literally within 2 hours of the last polls closing, on the Pacific side of the country, we know all the results (barring any recounts of course).
From what I've seen and understand of US federal elections (please forgive and correct any mistakes that follow), Americans vote on everything from the president, local congressman, senator, district attorney, etc all at once. On top of that, since states control their own election system, not the feds, each state is free to use its own voting method. This led to the infamous butterfly ballots, confusing punch-outs, and hanging chads, not to mention Diebold e-voting machines.
With all due respect to the American election system and historical/legal reasons for it, it's far more complicated than it needs to be, and it's no wonder lines in the US can be so long. The longest I've ever waited in line to vote in Canada was a minute or three, and once I was handed my ballot, I was done voting and out of there within two minutes.
Take a page from the iPhone's touchscreen accessibility mode. When you move a finger over an element, it reads it out. Obviously you don't want it read aloud so others can hear, but this would be a good use of most of my bank's ATMs audio-out jack.
Okay yes, then the criminals hack or replace the audio jack with their own. I assume Disability Discrimination laws don't allow fully-abled people to use features disabled ones can't (translation: blind people must be able to access new, more secure features, otherwise the 90%+ of the population who aren't blind aren't allowed to use it either), so maybe we just go back to face-to-face tellers.
This is partly why even though my credit card has a chip, it does not have a PIN. The other reason is my issuing bank didn't have the infrastructure set up to handle CC PINs when they started shipping chipped replacement cards out, but considering at least one guy's already been denied a disputed charge because his CC company claims the system is secure and it MUST have been him entering the PIN, I'll just keep signing my CC-paid bills for as long as I can.
Would this be Arizona? Even if not, I'll use the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt (which killed 6 even if the actual assassination failed) as an example/question...
Gun advocates are always going on about if everyone, or at least enough people, were armed, then incidents like this would be prevented or stopped from going on too far. Some use the recent Finland massacre as an example of how an armed citizenry could have stopped it the gunman.
And yet the assassin in the Giffords assassination attempt was stopped not by a gun, but by people who tackled him and held him down after he fumbled when reloading.
Okay it was a gathering of Democratic party rep and some staff/supporters, so perhaps not the most gun-happy people, and about 20-30 members of the public (can't assume their party affiliation) according to wikipedia, and *none* of the people there had a gun they were willing to use in their defense?
Secondly: assume someone had tried shooting the assassin. How is a second gun-toting defender, perhaps further away, supposed to know who the assailant is, and who is trying to help? If they didn't see the initial shooting, and without training to assess crisis situations (and even police/military can assess situations incorrectly while under fire), it might look like someone in the crowd is shooting towards the congresswoman and her party, and a plainclothes guy shooting back.
Too many like the right but ignore the responsibility/consequences. This applies to free speech as much as bearing arms.
When you have road rage incidents in the middle of the city where shots are exchanged and someone is killed for the simple discourtesy of cutting someone off, it ruins it for gun owners who *are* generally responsible about their ownership and use.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why all those sob-story TV ads imploring me to donate to help children in poor countries piss me off. Not because I'm a cold-hearted bastard who doesn't want to help, but knowing that such help will make the overall situation worse.
Add in religious-mandated foreign policies from the former Bush administration and the current Harper-led Canadian government, which in part required that any funding to humanitarian NGOs must not promote or even mention any birth control other than abstinence (never mind abortion), and you have a classic snowball effect where there will be even more impoverished children being born, with the same or fewer people back home able to donate their own money, and less tax dollars to fund the foreign aid.
3rd world population is increasing exponentially while developed countries' populations are steady or even declining except for immigration--this isn't rocket or climate science, it's simple, indisputable math.
Strictly speaking, this only applies to CD-Rs, because the original late 90s legislation was passed in response to the music industry's demands. A few years later, hard drives and anything with them got a levy too, but they were dropped a few years ago. An opposition party member tried reintroducing the hard drive levy idea last year, but was shot down.
AFAIK, recordable DVDs do not and have never had a levy.
I can replace the batteries in my camera in 15 seconds.
Your camera is a lot thicker than an iPod touch.
I do the foot-off-pedal engine-brake routine too, but I'm not a dick about it, either.
If there's a dedicated left-turn lane ahead and there's a car behind me, I usually don't let go of the gas, just in case he is indeed trying to get there in time to trigger the sensor (or make it through in time, if there's already a car or two stopped there).
If there's no one behind me on approach to a red, though, yes I'll lay off the gas long before the intersection. 4 out of 5 times, I don't come to a complete stop. And if safe to do so, I turn the car off if I know it'll be red for at least 30 seconds, based on claims and experimentation that suggests gas used to start engine is equivalent to 10 seconds of idling.
People who leave their feet on the gas on approach to a red, and then hard-brake at the last second, are nuts. I hate seeing these drivers coming up in my rearview mirror when I'm stopped at a light. It's even worse in the winter when you don't know if there's a patch of ice at the intersection.
To a lesser extent, so are people who idle their cars more than half a minute in fair conditions (i.e. heater or AC not needed) especially when some reds can be several minutes long. VERY especially when you're just parked outside someone's place and saying goodbye for several minutes.
Most of the people with "uncontrolled acceleration" cars apparently didn't even think of trying to shift into Neutral. Certainly lends weight to your theory.
You'd think! But I visited San Jose and southern California a month ago, the entire time there, it was far hotter and more humid (42C, or about 110F) back home in Ottawa, Canada. California only got to 27C. Shattered a few notions about hot and sunny California, let me tell you...
(Ottawa has gone to -40 in the winter, so it's quite the range of temperatures)
At some point (possibly quite soon) Tim Cook will have to throw away Steve Jobs's legacy and take the company in a new direction. They can't compete with a mature market and android is coming up fast.
Sure they can, if you remember Apple does not really care about market share, only profit. If they have it, market share is just icing on the cake.
They are still only about 10% of the traditional PC/laptop market share, but make more money from that than any other company in that space. The smartphone and tablet market will saturate with time, of course, just like the mp3 player market did, but Apple has shown it's willing to cannibalize sales of its own, older product lines in order to push a new market (iPhone bumped iPods, iPads bump Macbooks, Macbook Air bumps entry-level Macbooks, etc).
The answer is "Yes, rioting and looting could have taken off to the same extent without Blackberries and Twitter."
The 1992 riots in LA lasted 6 days. 53 people died and damange was pegged at $1 billion. The recent London riots were nowhere near as bad (3-4 days, 5 dead, £200-M damage).
1992 was long before Twitter, SMS, BBM or even real cellphone use.
Anything imposed on Twitter, Blackberry and other social networking tools to prevent future riots, would be equivalent to landline phone companies in 1992 cutting all service to all of Los Angeles, and authorities taking TV and radio off the air to keep people ignorant about what's happening. Or worse, censoring of point-to-point voice and data conversations in realtime (we know they already monitor).
Microsoft certainly has that luxury. They only charge OEM manufacturers $50 on a $1000 PC. As of late 2009, 80% of Windows license revenue came from OEM. That's about $2 BILLION in OEM sales alone.
Microsoft is in no danger if they dropped Windows license prices further. Hell, they could afford to give away end-user licenses for free if they wanted to (in reality the OEMs and Microsoft's shareholders would scream bloody murder).
Half the people on the road are "assholes who can't drive". I include in this category people who never signal non-emergency lane changes, and to a lesser extent the drivers (especially those in the left lanes) who go at exactly the speed limit across all four lanes on the Florida turnpike.
If you're seriously willing to gun down someone just because *you* decide, on your own and in the heat of the moment, that someone is an asshole driver and should be removed from the gene pool, then you are an irresponsible gun owner (or defending the actions of one) and exactly the type of person I mentioned earlier--someone ruining it for those who ARE responsible gun owners, who are levelheaded about their use and don't whip it out in anger.
I wasn't lack of patents that held progress back, Bell had a government-granted MONOPOLY on the taxpayer-funded phone system, to the point where phones had to be rented from Bell itself. Then when 3rd party phones started becoming available, Bell argued they shouldn't be allowed to connect because it might damage the phone network. The telecom space was not free-market by any stretch.
Apple Canada honoured the warranty of an iPod I bought in Hong Kong a few years back.
Not honouring purchases from authorized dealers abroad would be shooting themselves in the foot--what if someone traveling on business or leisure has a problem with a product while in a different country?
Punishment by the party from who, though?
I think you're referring to Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the NDP candidate (and now MP of course) for Berthier-Maskinongé, a riding north of the Saint Lawrence between Montreal and Trois-Rivières. Credit where due: she hasn't shirked the responsibilities she signed up for (though my cynical side says the parliamentary paycheque probably played a part). Politically she may be inexperienced, but as an assistant manager at a Carleton University bar in Ottawa at the time, she's more than qualified to deal with loud, rowdy and obnoxious adults around her :-)
The government pissed about $1B over a weekend on the G8. $300M for election spread over a month and a bit isn't chump change either, but I dare say the money saved on paying elderly voting station staff, cardboard ballot boxes, and paper ballots will be easily outweighed by consultants and the computer equipment they have to set up, maintain, verify (hopefully!) and tear down afterwards.
The rural location and winter argument also doesn't fly. They chose (in many cases) to live that far out, and in Canada. Canada has winters. Our soldiers suffered and died to preserve our democracy, and they can't be bothered to drive an hour there and back to vote? (I'll grant there's a small chance they hit ice, spin out, crash and die, but a city dweller could be run over on the way to the polls on a nice summer day, too, so I ignore that line of argument also).
Though technically a problem, absentee votes are limited in number, geographically dispersed, so not worth as much effort to do it en masse. Any absentee voter tampering that could affect even a single riding's overall results would be so big an operation they could not remain hidden.
There's logic, then there's the whole fear about mandatory government ID being the same as being asked "papers, please" while moving within the country. Apparently there's an argument that homeless would be disenfranchised, too.
Very true. IMHO, political parties would be outright banned and representatives do what they're told to--by their LOCAL constituents. This is how it is at the city level.
Absentee voting is geographically dispersed, and not worth the effort by criminal elements to go after. There's the scenario of an abusive partner demanding to see a vote before it's sent off, but that number too would be too small to affect the outcome in a particular riding.
You seem to be talking about in-person ballots ("vote cabinet"), but the question is online voting.
Isolated and cannot affect more than a few hundred votes. Probably fewer if an honest citizen (or just someone who doesn't like the party of the guy he's being paid to vote for) tips off the elections staff and they arrest the guy.
Indeed; on the CBC forum there's already totally unqualified people calling those against online voting luddites. The hilarious counterpoint is that all the ones saying they're techies, are solidly against the idea.
I will grant that Elections Canada has apparently considered many of the issues, and has been since 1998 apparently, and aren't rushing into this like many US districts did with e-voting in 2004.
Online voting is a magnitude worse than e-voting, and the unwashed masses don't have the background knowledge to realize this. I blame reality/talent shows like Idol and So You Think You Can Dance for this--no one voting in those cares if a vote can be traced back to their phone number, or that you can vote 5 times (and game the system even more by adding more calls/texts from the phone of someone who doesn't care). Things are a little different in real elections.
I guess I should have specified... I voted using paper ballots, but this was in the US, not Canada. The Canadian voting system is run far more efficiently, eh?
FAR more efficiently. Federally, a single organization, Elections Canada, runs the show, and only local candidates of the federal parties are on the ballot (we do not cast votes for our prime minister directly, like you do for president). Once a poll is closed, they're counted locally, sometimes observed by reps from different parties, and results sent up the chain within an hour. Literally within 2 hours of the last polls closing, on the Pacific side of the country, we know all the results (barring any recounts of course).
From what I've seen and understand of US federal elections (please forgive and correct any mistakes that follow), Americans vote on everything from the president, local congressman, senator, district attorney, etc all at once. On top of that, since states control their own election system, not the feds, each state is free to use its own voting method. This led to the infamous butterfly ballots, confusing punch-outs, and hanging chads, not to mention Diebold e-voting machines.
With all due respect to the American election system and historical/legal reasons for it, it's far more complicated than it needs to be, and it's no wonder lines in the US can be so long. The longest I've ever waited in line to vote in Canada was a minute or three, and once I was handed my ballot, I was done voting and out of there within two minutes.
Take a page from the iPhone's touchscreen accessibility mode. When you move a finger over an element, it reads it out. Obviously you don't want it read aloud so others can hear, but this would be a good use of most of my bank's ATMs audio-out jack.
Okay yes, then the criminals hack or replace the audio jack with their own. I assume Disability Discrimination laws don't allow fully-abled people to use features disabled ones can't (translation: blind people must be able to access new, more secure features, otherwise the 90%+ of the population who aren't blind aren't allowed to use it either), so maybe we just go back to face-to-face tellers.
This is partly why even though my credit card has a chip, it does not have a PIN. The other reason is my issuing bank didn't have the infrastructure set up to handle CC PINs when they started shipping chipped replacement cards out, but considering at least one guy's already been denied a disputed charge because his CC company claims the system is secure and it MUST have been him entering the PIN, I'll just keep signing my CC-paid bills for as long as I can.
Would this be Arizona? Even if not, I'll use the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt (which killed 6 even if the actual assassination failed) as an example/question...
Gun advocates are always going on about if everyone, or at least enough people, were armed, then incidents like this would be prevented or stopped from going on too far. Some use the recent Finland massacre as an example of how an armed citizenry could have stopped it the gunman.
And yet the assassin in the Giffords assassination attempt was stopped not by a gun, but by people who tackled him and held him down after he fumbled when reloading.
Okay it was a gathering of Democratic party rep and some staff/supporters, so perhaps not the most gun-happy people, and about 20-30 members of the public (can't assume their party affiliation) according to wikipedia, and *none* of the people there had a gun they were willing to use in their defense?
Secondly: assume someone had tried shooting the assassin. How is a second gun-toting defender, perhaps further away, supposed to know who the assailant is, and who is trying to help? If they didn't see the initial shooting, and without training to assess crisis situations (and even police/military can assess situations incorrectly while under fire), it might look like someone in the crowd is shooting towards the congresswoman and her party, and a plainclothes guy shooting back.
Too many like the right but ignore the responsibility/consequences. This applies to free speech as much as bearing arms.
When you have road rage incidents in the middle of the city where shots are exchanged and someone is killed for the simple discourtesy of cutting someone off, it ruins it for gun owners who *are* generally responsible about their ownership and use.