You should note that I've been very careful not to claim that Canada doesn't have its share of racists, sexists, or other hate mongers. Native People face a lot of racism in various parts of Canada (which I find a shame -- I've known a number of Native Canadians in my years, and have found them to be decent and honourable people). There are vocal segments of society who are openly against homosexuals. And yes, there are those who have an undercurrent of religious intolerance. The very people this article is about are self-proclaimed skinheads, living in the area of our nations capital.
I'm not trying to make Canada out to be a paradise with no social ills -- but what ills we have are generally minor compared to our neighbour to the south, and our hate propaganda laws help to keep those who wish to spread hatred throughout our communities from flourishing and splitting our communities apart.
I'm not trying to paint Canada out as the perfect society -- but I don't think the portrayal many have made here about Canada not respecting freedom of speech, or what our hate propaganda laws entail is right, and I feel the need to educate and correct such ignorance. Don't take my zeal to defend the hate propaganda laws, and my pointing out where their lack in other countries has had serious negative consequences to mean that I think we are lacking in our own social ills -- my only contention is that those ills are a few orders of magnitude lower in Canada than in most other countries on the planet.
The US Developed Atomic weapons first because Jewish scientists (couch, cough, Einstein) weren't so well welcomed in Germany at the time.
You're joking with me, right? The development of atomic weapons was a good thing to come out of incitement of hatred?
You do realize, that if Nazi Germany hadn't been so hell bent on inciting hatred, nobody would have even needed nuclear weapons, right? And that Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies before a single nuclear weapon had been developed or used, right?
I'm not so sure I'd rank the creation of a weapon that killed millions of civilians a particularly good thing.
The problem here is of course that both Canadian and the law in several European countries go much further than prohibiting incitement to violence into pure mindcrime territory. (I.e, "we really don't like your opinions, so we'll just throw you in jail.")
Care to cite and example in Canada? Because I'm really tempted to call "bullshit" on that statement, but would first like to give you a chance to back it up.
i'm not so clear on canadian rights and whatnot, but in the US we have this 'ammendment' that says we can SAY whatever we please... print whatever we please, ect, ect, this that and the other...
Even in the US, there are limits to free speech. You can be arrested and charged for uttering a death threat. You can be held accountable for slander and liabel. This is no different.
to me, it shouldn't matter if he hosted or owned such a 'questionable' site, or content... did he commit crime(s)?
Well, yes he did. He apparantly violated the criminal code section on "Hate Propaganda", which would be the textbook definition of commiting a crime.
is anyone tangibly hurt from his postings?
I imagine nobody here has seen the website in question, as it was taken offline a few years ago. As it happens, however, the WayBack Machine at archive.org has copies of it available for viewing:
Now it looks to me like there are a variety of areas on the website which are direct incitements towards violence. This bit is quite telling:
"We are NOT strong believers in a political resolution to our movement, it is a war, it will be faught like a war!"
I don't have the time to look through all of this crap to see if there are any specific incitements to violence -- but I have little doubt it is there. They make their intent fairly clear from a quick perusal of these old archives IMO.
where does it end? how liable is yahoo for it's random automated-make-your-own-website nonsense, where i am sure all sorts of hate material exists? bleh... ranting, sorry, but, really... c'mon?
Again -- if the President and CEO of Yahoo! Inc. were to use their ISP business as a front to a hate sight, and if Yahoo's Board of Directors were to authorize and write up a hate site, and then put it up on Yahoo, they would be liable.
That is the situation we have here. One of the men involved in running the site also ran (runs?) the web hosting provider. He was charged the fine as the individual who created the content, and not as a corporate entity.
You're liable for the content you create. He created the content. The fact that he also runs the web hosting service that hosted the content isn't of particular note nor interest for the sake of the judgement. The ass-hat created hate propoganda and put it online. That is what he was fined for. He should feel lucky that he didn't find his ass in jail over it.
Laws against "inciting genocide," sure. That's action.
No, it's speech.
Think of it this way. Is there any evidence anywhere that Adolph Hitler himself ever killed a single Jewish person by his own hand? Did he ever pull the trigger, participate in the pogroms, or dump canisters of Zyklon-B down the shaft into the "shower room"? Certainly not that I know of. He did, however, on a multitude of well-documented and well-known cases stand in front of crowds and incite others to genocide via the power of speech alone. Should he be considered innocent of the resulting eradication of roughly 6 million people because he never raised his own hand in their murders? I, and the rest of the world, think not.
But laws against "inciting hate"? That's a violation of free speech. Hate is just an opinion. Being given the oppurtunity to attempt to convince others of an opinion is part of free speech.
There is a difference between holding (and voicing) an opinion and spreading hate propaganda. That difference is very well laid out in Canadian law, as I've pointed out several times in this discussion. You can go around and tell people publicly how you hate people of whatever race/religion/nationality/creed/sex or sexual preference that you want. Sure, the vast majority of Canadians will think you're an asshole, but there is nothing illegal.
However, if you start to spread misinformation in an effort to convince others to hate a visible groupsyou don't like, or you are inciting peeople to violence towards such a group, then you're in trouble.
It's no different than any number of laws in the US which prohibit such speech against individuals. It's illegal to utter death threats. There are laws against slander and liable. Canada simply extends such notions, which are the law of westernized countries all over the world (the US included), to identifiable groups of people.
Oh yeah, got any cool ibm or os/2 swag you wanna get rid of?
Own a moving van?:)
I must have a metric ton of OS/2 swag around here. T-shirts (including pink Team OS/2 t-shirts). Mugs. Ball caps. Pens. Pins. Posters. Signs. Buttons. Shorts. Sunglasses. Bumper stickers. Note pads. Bags of various shapes, sizes, and types. Mouse pads. OS/2 hand grip excercisers. And software. Gobs and gobs of software. Including still shrink-wrapped copies of OS/2 2.1 on diskette. You name it, I probably have it somewhere. And a sizeable chunk of it predates Warp. I even have the OS/2 WARP v3 presss release kit kicking around somewhere, with slides of what the boxes looked like:). I even have stand-up booth signs that proclaim things such as "we're developing for OS/2!" and "we're OS/2 compatible!" for use by vendors at trade shows.
And I'm probably forgetting a lot of other really odd items. And that list doesn't include some of the interesting non-OS/2 related IBM items I have (like my VisualAge leather jacket).
Say what you will about IBM (and as a shareholder, I have my share of things to complain about), but one can't deny that know how to create and give away some damn fine marketing swag:).
Let's see -- in the 20th century alone I count 32 riots incited due to race in the US. This isn't counting the 2001 Cincinnati riots.
The frequency of cross burning and lynchings are a bit harder to state here, but in the 20th century were sufficientlycommon (admittedly moreso in some parts of the country than others).
These are sufficiently serious problems that the fact that they happen at all is too common. I won't pretend that Canada has a perfect record in this regard -- but compared to the US we're orders of magnitude better. The only reference to a race riot in the 20th century in Canada that I could find was from 1933 (although I do wantt to note that there was a riot in Toronto in 1992 that coincided with the Rodney King riots in LA, it seemed more opportunistic and involved people of all races. It's hard to see what the motivation would be for it, considering Canada has no say over the laws, courts, or police forces of the United States. But who ever said a riot has to make sense?).
How about this: "I hate Stephen Harper, and I hope his government goes down in flames like Bush's presidency." Hate speech, quite literally: "I hate...".
Just because it contains the words "I hate" doesn't mean it conforms to the legal defininition of "hate speech".
Indeed, the entire section of the Criminal Code pertaining to these limits is called "Hate Propaganda". Let's take a look at what the act defines "hate propaganda" as:
"hate propaganda" means any writing, sign or visible representation that advocates or promotes genocide or the communication of which by any person would constitute an offence under section 319;
As you're not attempting to incite genocide against an identifiable group, your statement doesn't rise to the status of "hate propaganda".
So now we have a reason to force Slashdot to remove this posting. And I can't publicly criticize my government. Welcome to this logical extension to government in Canada.
That's a nice straw man you've built up there. Mind if I borrow him for my garden?
There is no logic to your position at all, because you've based your argument on a fallacy: your statement doesn't rise to the legal requirements for hate propaganda as set out in the act (not for the least of which because you didn't direct it at an identifiable group, where (quote) "identifiable group" means any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.).
I've linked to the revelant section in the Criminal Code of Canada several times in this article. The section on Hate Propaganda isn't long -- take five or ten minutes to read it over before you go off half-cocked about "freedom" and "the government".
Freedom of opinion and expression is one thing. You can hold the opinion that ${IDENTIFIABLE_GROUP} smells bad, looks ugly, and is the bane of all of society if you want to. You can even express this feeling.
what you can't do is incite others to genocide or hatred against an identifiable group (ref: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/181181.html#rid- 181219). And there are a number of specifically assigned defences right in the Criminal Code which exempt you from any form of punishment for said speech.
We're not talking about reasoned debate here. Reasoned debate is fine. Spreading hate speech in private is also fine. But you can't stand up in a public forum and advocate that the townsfolks take up pitchforks and kill every member of ${IDENTIFIABLE_GROUP} they can find.
You really think the US is that much different? Tell you what -- you start a website advocating your fellow Americans to go and kill George W. Bush. Set up an online forum where you start discussing exactly how you are going to go about it. Excercise your free speech to the limit. And then time how long it is before Homeland Security and the FBI are bashing down your door and taking your computer equipment away.
Perhaps the protection of minorities makes you think that Canada is lacking in freedom of speech. Whatever. Want to know what else Canada lacks? Race riots. Crosses being burned on people lawns. Lynchings. People being denied their democratic right to vote based on the colour of their skin.
In closing, you can say whatever damned stupid thing you want here in Canada -- but that doesn't mean there aren't consequences when you decide to start preaching hatered, and try to incite hatred between communities. Absolutely nothing good has ever come of allowing hatred to spread and flourish.
Then what can you do to avoid hate speech laws? Popular speech doesn't need protection. Any serious attempt at freedom of speech MUST protect unpopular speech, or it doesn't protect anything.
You have the wrong idea about Canada's hate speech laws. Here's wher eyou can read up on them yourself:
It's illegal in Canada to incite hatred towards a group in public (private communications in this regard is permitted),
You can't be convicted of an offense under this section if (and I'll quote the criminal code directly here):
(a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true;
(b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text;
(c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or
(d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.
So there you have it. You can stand up and saw "I hate ${IDENTIFIABLE_GROUP}" all you want in Canada. But you can't incite others to actively hate another group, or to perpetrate violence towards another group. It's simple, and staright forward, and doesn't prevent you from hating whomever you want to hate, or from telling other people you hate said group. You simply can't use it to incite others to hate and violence against said group.
Look, I understand where your concerns are coming from, but in this case you're going off the deep end, because the fact of the matter is, the/. summary is wrong.
In other words, you're safe to run an online forum in Canada. If some ass-hat posts something in an attempt to incite hatred towards a group, you're not liable. If, however, you post that hate incitement, you are liable, regardless of the fact that you happen to own the web hosting service you're using.
In a landmark decision, the tribunal ordered the men, one of whom ran the web-hosting service that carried the websites, to cease their hatemongering, levied penalties totalling $13,000 and awarded the complainant $5,000. It is believed to be the first time a Canadian Internet web-hosting service has been found liable for hate messages.
In essence, the/. summary is not telling the whole story. This isn't a case of some corporate ISP where some customer happened to be running a hate site getting fined. In this case the ISP owner was providing the content, and not just hosting it.
Additionally, it wasn;t the ISP that was fined -- it was the people who created the illegal content, one of whom happens to own the web service provider in question.
You can't just start an ISP in order to avoid hate speech laws. The/. summary is highly misleading in this case, so please get off your high-horses and take a look at the facts before starting yet another rant, okay?
Good god, you lose 10 MB of HD. With today's capacities, that ain't squat.
I am in fact quite familiar with IBM's Boot Manager, having at one time been a DB2 for OS/2 developer at IBM. And I agree -- it is generally a much more elegant system.
The big problem is that Boot Manager takes up a precious primary partition, of which you're still only allowed 4 per drive. It also has its own built-in limitation that requires the boot partition to be wholely withing the first 1023 cylinders of the hard drive (usually within the first ~512MB of disk space). To some people, such restrictions are undesireable (not to mention that AFAIK there are only three ways to legally get Boot Manager in the first place: from OS/2, from an old copy of AIX x86, or through an old version of Partition Magic back when they used to bundle it).
Boot Manager always worked well for me -- I routinely used it in place of LILO on older Linux distros back in the day. But that hardly excuses the fact that it's still a work-around to what is largely a BIOS problem.
And my suspicion that programmers have unjustifiably taken the title "software engineer" in a petty attempt to inflate their status shows basis.
I'm a Computer Scientist. I wouldn't know, nor do I care about such semantics.
Where was the failure analysis? Who sat down and said "if this program has an error, how bad is the consequence? What can we do to minimize this negative consequence?" Instead, if GRUB fails, oops, sorry kid, tough luck. Your fault for following the instructions.
The problem here is that Software Engineers are not Hardware Engineers. They develop software for the system that is available. No amount of pure software can overcome the shortcomings of the BIOS.
BIOS sucks. If you're looking for me to argue with you that BIOS is a poor engineering solution, you're not going to find one. It's hardly the software developers fault that you (and most other people) keeping buying systems that feature the crappy old PC BIOS. Would you build a search and rescue helicopter out of a motorcycle engine and paper mache? And if you did, would it have the same level of fault-tolerance as an EH-101?
Boot loaders are fragile because the architecture they are based upon wasn't designed to handle them. Want a real solution? Go out and buy a system that doesn't use PC-style BIOS. Get a system that sports Open Firmware, or the Extensible Firmware Interface. And then go and bitch to Microsoft that their consumer-level OS's won't boot on such systems because they still only support the 25 year old BIOS for bootstrapping.
Fault analysis works best when you have complete control over the entire system. Software developers typically don't get a say in how the handward is designed, however, and PC hardware is so riddled with cruft and poor design from 25 years of backwards compatibility, developers working in dark corners like those of boot loaders have to make do with what little they have. If you want something more robust, then buy something more robust and ditch your PC altogether.
Otherwise, don't complain. The software developers in this case do the best with what little resources the system provides them. The fact that the system can't be made more fault tolerant isn't the fault of the developers -- it's the fault that the 25 year old system they must rely upon actively works against such fault tolerant code from being developed in the first place.
You toss control back to whatever would otherwise load when it fails.
The fact that you're not a software engineer shows.
Want to know what would have otherwise loaded? The Windows Bootloader, which would have been within the exact same 512b sector that Grub now occupies. Boot loaders on PCs are extremely restricted in what they can do -- their code can be no larger than 446b in size, they run in real mode, and basically must rely directly on BIOS for all of their I/O routines.
In effect, this is 1980's technology, and flexability is virtually nil. The primary boot loader can't just pass its duties off to another boot loader, as there aren't really sufficient instructions available to do this, and the two boot loaders cannot occupy the same space on the drive.
If you're looking for something to blame for this situation, it's the fact that the architecture of the PC BIOS hasn't changed significantly in more than 20 years. It's still firmly rooted in the days of 160KB floppy booting, where the idea of a second-stage boot loader for choosing what OS you want to boot would never have occurred (want to boot a different OS on a diskette-only system? Use a different boot disk). BIOS should have died a long time ago.
Boot loaders like GRUB do the best they can with what little resources and possibilities they are given. I'm sorry that the GRUB developers don't have access to your screwy system to test and debug on. Here I've run GRUB on a variety of systems, and the only machine I ever found which had problems with it is one with a built-in nVidia chipset, back in the Fedora Core 2 days, which was easily solved by switching to a different boot loader.
It all comes back to the old adage "say what you mean, mean what you say". Not to appear to be a Grammar Nazi, but the spelling, capitalization, and grammar, of your post was terrible, and yet you were able to easily get across the concept. If this is what Shaw intended to say, what's so wrong with their press release authors that they can't use simple logic and explainations when a "lower lvl employee" can?
To my mind, it looks like Shaw was being intellectually dishonest with their press release. As both a Shaw and a Vonage customer I've been trying to avoid taking sides in this tempest-in-a-teapot, but this press release seems partially dishonest, as if Shaw wants to gloss over and hide the issue by confusing the reader.
On a slightly different note, last night I ran a big pile of tests via http://testmyvoip.com, and while it was off-hours, I was routinely maxing out the score for G.711 connections on my Shaw cable connection with a score of 4.4 -- so I hardly have reason to complain about Shaw's service at this point in time. Just the wording of their press release is completely disingenuous.
Thanks. The only problem with these two lists is they only detail supported video cards. How about processor speed and RAM?
Burning the image to CD-RW on my PowerBook is just about finished, so I'll boot it up on my aged hardware to see what happens. I expect either bloody slow, or nothing at all:).
Does anyone have any minimum hardware guidelines? I've downloaded the ISO, but as I moved to PowerPC systems roughly two years ago my best Intel box here is an old P3-450 with 384MB of RAM and an old 16MB ATI AGP video card -- probably significantly below the minimum specs (although I am going to try it and will report on it here).
I imagine I can find a system in the lab tomorrow to try it out on, but knowing what the hardware requirements are in advance will help me narrow down which system I should borrow for some testing:).
Contrary to Vonage's claim, Shaw does not offer an Internet telephony service in direct
competition with Vonage or any other Internet phone provider. Shaw's Digital Phone
service is a carrier-grade, primary line, local and long distance residential telephone
service that uses a managed IP network. Shaw Digital phone calls travel directly from
Shaw's secure private network to the tried-and-true public telephone system. They do
not travel over the Internet. The result is a more reliable and higher quality phone
service.
Shaw and Vonage aren't in direct competition? How many phone service providers does the average home need? In my experience, if you exclude cellular service, most residential homes have a total of ONE phone service provider.
Clue to Shaw: you both sell a telephone service, and are thus in direct competition. Later in the same paragraph, Shaw even seems to indirectly acknowledge this fact, by saying that they provide "a more reliable and higher quality phone service". Come on Shaw -- you can't offer the same service as another company, claim you aren't in competition with them, and then claim that you're solution is better than their is.
As both a Shaw and Vonage customer, I'm currently sitting on the fence. I refuse to pay the extra $10 a month fee to Shaw, but have no problem with them offering an extra service so long as they aren't taking steps to degrade the service I've already paid for. However, this press release is just dumb, and makes Shaw look desparate. Whomever penned this press release should be re-assigned to something more suiting their lack of ability in logic and coherent thought.
If the phone business goes away, telcos are going to have to make up for it somewhere, and the only place left will be bandwidth...that stuff that we get for a flat rate now.
The problem in this instance being that Shaw is a cable provider, and not a traditional telco. Their own IP-based phone service is quite new (first offered only in the last 2 months I believe, at least here in Victoria), so they haven't lost any phone customers due to VoIP.
The only problem, and the only time the CRTC should get inolved, is when they start arbitrarily REDUCING the quality of service for specific protocols. I'm more concerned wiht throttling of bittorrent arbitrarily than I am with offering optional QoS for voip.
The only other case where the CRTC might get involved is if Shaw is misrepresenting the fee to their customers. I haven't been contacted by Shaw myself, but I've heard reports that Shaw has been calling some Vonage customers and telling them that their VoIP service might not work right if they don't pay this extra fee.
If this is the case, then Shaw may not be properly representing the fee and its plusses and minuses. If they're calling people and trying to scare them into paying extra money or their phone service might not work in the future, that would seem to me to be extortion. And as Shaw now offers their own VoIP service where they don't charge customers this extra fee, the CRTC may have something to say about them attempting to make their competitors VoIP services more expensive.
I think more evidence will have to come out into the public either way before I pass any sort of personal judgement. I'm just hoping that my VoIP service keeps working as it always has -- if it starts going downhill, I'm not going to be terribly impressed.
So, uh, how are you enjoying the snow?:) Out here by Mt Doug the ground is white. I'm sure it'll melt by tomorrow, but it's need while it's around.:)
Until I saw your post, I hadn't even noticed. Just call me "oblivious guy":).
I've stuck with Telus and avoided VoIP, because I have zero need for international calls. I mean, sure, maybe a discount rate to Malawi would be nice - but my sister's only going to be there for another two months. Shaw's offers all the features I would possibly want, but the extra monthly charge works out to more than or on-par with my Telus bill, so it's not worth it for me.
VoIP isn't just a deal for those who call overseas. In my case, all of my family is back in Ontario. For $20CDN a month, I'm getting 500 minutes anywhere in North America -- so it's quite worth it. Basic service alone from Telus would cost at least this much, never mind the long distance on top of that.
Mind you, I've never been a Telus customer, being a recent transplant from Ontario. I lived my first four months here offf my Fido cell phone, but reception inside my apartment was very poor. As well, I didn't want to give up my 416 area code number (the hardest area code to come by -- in Ontario, it has a certain prestige value in the business world due to it being the original Toronto area code, and the difficulty in being able to come by it these days. Besides which, people back in Toronto could call me without it having to be long distance for them). But the roaming charges were starting to hit pretty hard.
The other big advantage for me is being able to have the VoIP "soft phone", which runs on my laptop, or desktop machine at the lab I work out of. And being able to get your voice mail via the web (and e-mailed to me) is also a huge benefit. Anywhere I roam with my PowerBook and can get a WiFi signal, I can make a call anywhere in North America with no long distance (up to a maximum of 500 minutes).
I'm sold on VoIP, and so far am nothing but impressed with Vonage's service. Considering I'm not a heavy phone user, the price is perfect. I can call family and friends back home with no extra fees, have excellent local service, can make calls from my laptop (I have a bluetooth headset, making it easy to use it as a phone), have web and e-mail access to voice mail, and all the other cool phone features one can think of (call waiting, caller ID, etc.) for way lower than traditional POTS providers charge.
So long as Shaw doesn't screw things up fo me, I'm in heaven:).
I'm a Vonage and Shaw customer, having moved last fall to the Victoria, BC area from Toronto, and want to comment on this.
First off, while I'm as irritated and confused as everyone else, this fee is optional. Shaw isn't automatically charging people who use VoIP this extra fee. Apparantly, this is an added fee that VoIP users can pay to get better guaranteed QoS for their voice data packets.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, and at this time have no intention to pay the fee. On one hand, giving voice data network prioritization isn't necessarily a bad thing -- most home VoIP NAT routers provide a QoS service to do just this so downloads don't obliterate your ability to use your phone. At the same time, nobody else is charging these fees, and respecting QoS for VoIP packets isn't going to cost Shaw anything, so why should the consumer pay for such a service int he first place?
Shaw called me a few weeks ago asking me about my phone service, in an attempt to sell me on their new VoIP-based service. I told them I have Vonage. They asked me what services I was getting, and listed off the litany of services I'm getting. Then they asked me the price -- and suffice to say, I'm getting way more from Vonage, and am paying less. The phone jockey on the other end didn't know what to say about that, so just said "Uh, thanks, sorry for bothering you" and hung up.
As to the actual quality of service I'm getting -- I haven't had a single drop-out in my VoIP service in the two months that I've had it. Not a single blip. However, I also use iChat AV pretty heavily to take to family back home, and I have been having significant drop-outs in both audio and video conferences with family back in Toronto in recent weeks, where these problems didn't exist before. It's hard to say exactly where the fault lies, but I've been getting drop-outs galore in both audio-only and video conference mode between here and Toronto in the last month. I do have to recognise, however, that I do live on an island, and have no idea what the maximum bandwidth is like between the mainland and here. I can only believe that bandwidth usage is increasing, but at this time have no idea whether or not Shaw is working on running more underwater cabling between the mainland and Vancouver Island. It could just be because (due to time zones) my iChat AV conversations generally take place during peak hours.
So far, Vonage has been problem free, but I'm not a heavy phone user (I'm only paying for the 500 minute/month plan, with another 500 minutes through the soft phone option. I generally don't come even close to the 500 minutes per month). Perhaps I've just been lucky thus far. I have no intention to pay them another $10 a month just to get the service I'm already paying for, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my thus-far trouble free VoIP experience doesn't negatively change in the future.
The point is, this is our culture, it will not go away, it's in our genetic code to be this way, and simply by telling us its in our genetic code, or showing us our code, it's not going to change a damn thing because religion and culture are not defined by math equations.
Bullshit. Culture has never been a static, unchanging entity. Culture is whatever we as a society wish it to be, and it changes all the time.
Indeed, science has had an amazing impact on culture in the last 100 years. We moved from a culture of travel by foot and horse to an automotive culture. We've gone from Uncle George playing a banjo to carrying whatever music we want wherever we want on portable music devices. We've gone from having to spend hours at the library to look up an obscure fact to having information at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We've gone from candles and oil lamps to electric lights. And perhaps most noticably, we've gone from getting together with friends and family, or reading a book, or playing a board game, to sitting in front of the TV set.
Sorry, but our culture is very heavily influenced by science. It wasn't that long ago in certain parts of the Western world where the area you were allowed to sit in on the bus was determined by the colour of your skin -- something which is no longer part of any Western culture (except in the minds of a few deluded racists who think that culture is static and unchanging, so long as they get to dictate what culture is).
Yes, some parts of culture are sufficiently ingrained that it is hard to overcome their momentum -- but it is hardly impossible to do so. Major events and new ideas and inventions are changing culture every day.
I'm sure 10+ years ago there were some old white guys in South Africa who were convinced that Apartheid would never end as well -- and yet here we are. Women are allowed to vote everywhere in the Westernized world as well, in case nobody had bothered to tell you.
Sorry, but you come across as an appologist for racists and bigots with a dumb comment like that. Culture changes. Get used to it. Discrimination is not a given -- it's a completely learned trait
Thanks to this initiative, there will be a wireless network running (our building is right downtown) that users can switch to whenever they feel like accessing something that our content filters reject!
The service isn't going to be free, so it will take more than a whim for someone to switch to the public network.
However, it sounds like what you need is a tool which can lock down which wirreless networks your users can connect to. Of course, you could always get the necessary paint and window overlays to create a faraday cage to prevent acccess to the public wireless network (killing everyones cell phones within the office at the same time, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
You should note that I've been very careful not to claim that Canada doesn't have its share of racists, sexists, or other hate mongers. Native People face a lot of racism in various parts of Canada (which I find a shame -- I've known a number of Native Canadians in my years, and have found them to be decent and honourable people). There are vocal segments of society who are openly against homosexuals. And yes, there are those who have an undercurrent of religious intolerance. The very people this article is about are self-proclaimed skinheads, living in the area of our nations capital.
I'm not trying to make Canada out to be a paradise with no social ills -- but what ills we have are generally minor compared to our neighbour to the south, and our hate propaganda laws help to keep those who wish to spread hatred throughout our communities from flourishing and splitting our communities apart.
I'm not trying to paint Canada out as the perfect society -- but I don't think the portrayal many have made here about Canada not respecting freedom of speech, or what our hate propaganda laws entail is right, and I feel the need to educate and correct such ignorance. Don't take my zeal to defend the hate propaganda laws, and my pointing out where their lack in other countries has had serious negative consequences to mean that I think we are lacking in our own social ills -- my only contention is that those ills are a few orders of magnitude lower in Canada than in most other countries on the planet.
Yaz.
You're joking with me, right? The development of atomic weapons was a good thing to come out of incitement of hatred?
You do realize, that if Nazi Germany hadn't been so hell bent on inciting hatred, nobody would have even needed nuclear weapons, right? And that Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies before a single nuclear weapon had been developed or used, right?
I'm not so sure I'd rank the creation of a weapon that killed millions of civilians a particularly good thing.
Yaz.
Care to cite and example in Canada? Because I'm really tempted to call "bullshit" on that statement, but would first like to give you a chance to back it up.
Yaz.
Even in the US, there are limits to free speech. You can be arrested and charged for uttering a death threat. You can be held accountable for slander and liabel. This is no different.
Well, yes he did. He apparantly violated the criminal code section on "Hate Propaganda", which would be the textbook definition of commiting a crime.
I imagine nobody here has seen the website in question, as it was taken offline a few years ago. As it happens, however, the WayBack Machine at archive.org has copies of it available for viewing:
http://www.tri-cityskins.com/">http://web.archive. org/web/*/http://www.tri-cityskins.com/
Now it looks to me like there are a variety of areas on the website which are direct incitements towards violence. This bit is quite telling:
I don't have the time to look through all of this crap to see if there are any specific incitements to violence -- but I have little doubt it is there. They make their intent fairly clear from a quick perusal of these old archives IMO.
Again -- if the President and CEO of Yahoo! Inc. were to use their ISP business as a front to a hate sight, and if Yahoo's Board of Directors were to authorize and write up a hate site, and then put it up on Yahoo, they would be liable.
That is the situation we have here. One of the men involved in running the site also ran (runs?) the web hosting provider. He was charged the fine as the individual who created the content, and not as a corporate entity.
You're liable for the content you create. He created the content. The fact that he also runs the web hosting service that hosted the content isn't of particular note nor interest for the sake of the judgement. The ass-hat created hate propoganda and put it online. That is what he was fined for. He should feel lucky that he didn't find his ass in jail over it.
Yaz.
No, it's speech.
Think of it this way. Is there any evidence anywhere that Adolph Hitler himself ever killed a single Jewish person by his own hand? Did he ever pull the trigger, participate in the pogroms, or dump canisters of Zyklon-B down the shaft into the "shower room"? Certainly not that I know of. He did, however, on a multitude of well-documented and well-known cases stand in front of crowds and incite others to genocide via the power of speech alone. Should he be considered innocent of the resulting eradication of roughly 6 million people because he never raised his own hand in their murders? I, and the rest of the world, think not.
There is a difference between holding (and voicing) an opinion and spreading hate propaganda. That difference is very well laid out in Canadian law, as I've pointed out several times in this discussion. You can go around and tell people publicly how you hate people of whatever race/religion/nationality/creed/sex or sexual preference that you want. Sure, the vast majority of Canadians will think you're an asshole, but there is nothing illegal.
However, if you start to spread misinformation in an effort to convince others to hate a visible groupsyou don't like, or you are inciting peeople to violence towards such a group, then you're in trouble.
It's no different than any number of laws in the US which prohibit such speech against individuals. It's illegal to utter death threats. There are laws against slander and liable. Canada simply extends such notions, which are the law of westernized countries all over the world (the US included), to identifiable groups of people.
Yaz.
Own a moving van? :)
I must have a metric ton of OS/2 swag around here. T-shirts (including pink Team OS/2 t-shirts). Mugs. Ball caps. Pens. Pins. Posters. Signs. Buttons. Shorts. Sunglasses. Bumper stickers. Note pads. Bags of various shapes, sizes, and types. Mouse pads. OS/2 hand grip excercisers. And software. Gobs and gobs of software. Including still shrink-wrapped copies of OS/2 2.1 on diskette. You name it, I probably have it somewhere. And a sizeable chunk of it predates Warp. I even have the OS/2 WARP v3 presss release kit kicking around somewhere, with slides of what the boxes looked like :). I even have stand-up booth signs that proclaim things such as "we're developing for OS/2!" and "we're OS/2 compatible!" for use by vendors at trade shows.
And I'm probably forgetting a lot of other really odd items. And that list doesn't include some of the interesting non-OS/2 related IBM items I have (like my VisualAge leather jacket).
Say what you will about IBM (and as a shareholder, I have my share of things to complain about), but one can't deny that know how to create and give away some damn fine marketing swag :).
Yaz.
Methinks you need a history lesson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_ in_the_United_States
Let's see -- in the 20th century alone I count 32 riots incited due to race in the US. This isn't counting the 2001 Cincinnati riots.
The frequency of cross burning and lynchings are a bit harder to state here, but in the 20th century were sufficiently common (admittedly moreso in some parts of the country than others).
As for denying people the right to vote, you should probably read up on the entire American Civil Rights Movement. And perhaps about the murder of civil rights workers who were trying to help register disenfranchised Black voters. Or perhaps you should read up on the problems with the voters list in Florida during the 2000 US Presiedntial Election
These are sufficiently serious problems that the fact that they happen at all is too common. I won't pretend that Canada has a perfect record in this regard -- but compared to the US we're orders of magnitude better. The only reference to a race riot in the 20th century in Canada that I could find was from 1933 (although I do wantt to note that there was a riot in Toronto in 1992 that coincided with the Rodney King riots in LA, it seemed more opportunistic and involved people of all races. It's hard to see what the motivation would be for it, considering Canada has no say over the laws, courts, or police forces of the United States. But who ever said a riot has to make sense?).
Yaz.
Just because it contains the words "I hate" doesn't mean it conforms to the legal defininition of "hate speech".
Indeed, the entire section of the Criminal Code pertaining to these limits is called "Hate Propaganda". Let's take a look at what the act defines "hate propaganda" as:
As you're not attempting to incite genocide against an identifiable group, your statement doesn't rise to the status of "hate propaganda".
That's a nice straw man you've built up there. Mind if I borrow him for my garden?
There is no logic to your position at all, because you've based your argument on a fallacy: your statement doesn't rise to the legal requirements for hate propaganda as set out in the act (not for the least of which because you didn't direct it at an identifiable group, where (quote) "identifiable group" means any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.).
I've linked to the revelant section in the Criminal Code of Canada several times in this article. The section on Hate Propaganda isn't long -- take five or ten minutes to read it over before you go off half-cocked about "freedom" and "the government".
Yaz.
Sigh...
Canada does have protections in the realm of freedom of speech -- it's called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it explicitly states:
(Ref: http://lois.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/).
Freedom of opinion and expression is one thing. You can hold the opinion that ${IDENTIFIABLE_GROUP} smells bad, looks ugly, and is the bane of all of society if you want to. You can even express this feeling.
what you can't do is incite others to genocide or hatred against an identifiable group (ref: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/181181.html#rid- 181219). And there are a number of specifically assigned defences right in the Criminal Code which exempt you from any form of punishment for said speech.
We're not talking about reasoned debate here. Reasoned debate is fine. Spreading hate speech in private is also fine. But you can't stand up in a public forum and advocate that the townsfolks take up pitchforks and kill every member of ${IDENTIFIABLE_GROUP} they can find.
You really think the US is that much different? Tell you what -- you start a website advocating your fellow Americans to go and kill George W. Bush. Set up an online forum where you start discussing exactly how you are going to go about it. Excercise your free speech to the limit. And then time how long it is before Homeland Security and the FBI are bashing down your door and taking your computer equipment away.
Perhaps the protection of minorities makes you think that Canada is lacking in freedom of speech. Whatever. Want to know what else Canada lacks? Race riots. Crosses being burned on people lawns. Lynchings. People being denied their democratic right to vote based on the colour of their skin.
In closing, you can say whatever damned stupid thing you want here in Canada -- but that doesn't mean there aren't consequences when you decide to start preaching hatered, and try to incite hatred between communities. Absolutely nothing good has ever come of allowing hatred to spread and flourish.
Yaz.
You have the wrong idea about Canada's hate speech laws. Here's wher eyou can read up on them yourself:
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/181181.html#rid- 181219
In brief:
So there you have it. You can stand up and saw "I hate ${IDENTIFIABLE_GROUP}" all you want in Canada. But you can't incite others to actively hate another group, or to perpetrate violence towards another group. It's simple, and staright forward, and doesn't prevent you from hating whomever you want to hate, or from telling other people you hate said group. You simply can't use it to incite others to hate and violence against said group.
Yaz.
Look, I understand where your concerns are coming from, but in this case you're going off the deep end, because the fact of the matter is, the /. summary is wrong.
See http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pag ename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971 358637177&c=Article&cid=1142031016503. In this case, the person who owns the web hosting service was generating the hate content. In addition, it wasn't the web hosting service which was fined -- it was the owner who was generating and posting the hate content onto his own service.
In other words, you're safe to run an online forum in Canada. If some ass-hat posts something in an attempt to incite hatred towards a group, you're not liable. If, however, you post that hate incitement, you are liable, regardless of the fact that you happen to own the web hosting service you're using.
Clearer? Good.
Yaz.
Whoa -- can everyone slow down for a second and take a look at the facts?
From http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pag ename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971 358637177&c=Article&cid=1142031016503:
In essence, the /. summary is not telling the whole story. This isn't a case of some corporate ISP where some customer happened to be running a hate site getting fined. In this case the ISP owner was providing the content, and not just hosting it.
Additionally, it wasn;t the ISP that was fined -- it was the people who created the illegal content, one of whom happens to own the web service provider in question.
You can't just start an ISP in order to avoid hate speech laws. The /. summary is highly misleading in this case, so please get off your high-horses and take a look at the facts before starting yet another rant, okay?
Yaz.
I am in fact quite familiar with IBM's Boot Manager, having at one time been a DB2 for OS/2 developer at IBM. And I agree -- it is generally a much more elegant system.
The big problem is that Boot Manager takes up a precious primary partition, of which you're still only allowed 4 per drive. It also has its own built-in limitation that requires the boot partition to be wholely withing the first 1023 cylinders of the hard drive (usually within the first ~512MB of disk space). To some people, such restrictions are undesireable (not to mention that AFAIK there are only three ways to legally get Boot Manager in the first place: from OS/2, from an old copy of AIX x86, or through an old version of Partition Magic back when they used to bundle it).
Boot Manager always worked well for me -- I routinely used it in place of LILO on older Linux distros back in the day. But that hardly excuses the fact that it's still a work-around to what is largely a BIOS problem.
Yaz.
I'm a Computer Scientist. I wouldn't know, nor do I care about such semantics.
The problem here is that Software Engineers are not Hardware Engineers. They develop software for the system that is available. No amount of pure software can overcome the shortcomings of the BIOS.
BIOS sucks. If you're looking for me to argue with you that BIOS is a poor engineering solution, you're not going to find one. It's hardly the software developers fault that you (and most other people) keeping buying systems that feature the crappy old PC BIOS. Would you build a search and rescue helicopter out of a motorcycle engine and paper mache? And if you did, would it have the same level of fault-tolerance as an EH-101?
Boot loaders are fragile because the architecture they are based upon wasn't designed to handle them. Want a real solution? Go out and buy a system that doesn't use PC-style BIOS. Get a system that sports Open Firmware, or the Extensible Firmware Interface. And then go and bitch to Microsoft that their consumer-level OS's won't boot on such systems because they still only support the 25 year old BIOS for bootstrapping.
Fault analysis works best when you have complete control over the entire system. Software developers typically don't get a say in how the handward is designed, however, and PC hardware is so riddled with cruft and poor design from 25 years of backwards compatibility, developers working in dark corners like those of boot loaders have to make do with what little they have. If you want something more robust, then buy something more robust and ditch your PC altogether.
Otherwise, don't complain. The software developers in this case do the best with what little resources the system provides them. The fact that the system can't be made more fault tolerant isn't the fault of the developers -- it's the fault that the 25 year old system they must rely upon actively works against such fault tolerant code from being developed in the first place.
Yaz.
The fact that you're not a software engineer shows.
Want to know what would have otherwise loaded? The Windows Bootloader, which would have been within the exact same 512b sector that Grub now occupies. Boot loaders on PCs are extremely restricted in what they can do -- their code can be no larger than 446b in size, they run in real mode, and basically must rely directly on BIOS for all of their I/O routines.
In effect, this is 1980's technology, and flexability is virtually nil. The primary boot loader can't just pass its duties off to another boot loader, as there aren't really sufficient instructions available to do this, and the two boot loaders cannot occupy the same space on the drive.
If you're looking for something to blame for this situation, it's the fact that the architecture of the PC BIOS hasn't changed significantly in more than 20 years. It's still firmly rooted in the days of 160KB floppy booting, where the idea of a second-stage boot loader for choosing what OS you want to boot would never have occurred (want to boot a different OS on a diskette-only system? Use a different boot disk). BIOS should have died a long time ago.
Boot loaders like GRUB do the best they can with what little resources and possibilities they are given. I'm sorry that the GRUB developers don't have access to your screwy system to test and debug on. Here I've run GRUB on a variety of systems, and the only machine I ever found which had problems with it is one with a built-in nVidia chipset, back in the Fedora Core 2 days, which was easily solved by switching to a different boot loader.
Yaz.
It all comes back to the old adage "say what you mean, mean what you say". Not to appear to be a Grammar Nazi, but the spelling, capitalization, and grammar, of your post was terrible, and yet you were able to easily get across the concept. If this is what Shaw intended to say, what's so wrong with their press release authors that they can't use simple logic and explainations when a "lower lvl employee" can?
To my mind, it looks like Shaw was being intellectually dishonest with their press release. As both a Shaw and a Vonage customer I've been trying to avoid taking sides in this tempest-in-a-teapot, but this press release seems partially dishonest, as if Shaw wants to gloss over and hide the issue by confusing the reader.
On a slightly different note, last night I ran a big pile of tests via http://testmyvoip.com, and while it was off-hours, I was routinely maxing out the score for G.711 connections on my Shaw cable connection with a score of 4.4 -- so I hardly have reason to complain about Shaw's service at this point in time. Just the wording of their press release is completely disingenuous.
Yaz.
Thanks. The only problem with these two lists is they only detail supported video cards. How about processor speed and RAM?
Burning the image to CD-RW on my PowerBook is just about finished, so I'll boot it up on my aged hardware to see what happens. I expect either bloody slow, or nothing at all :).
Yaz.
Does anyone have any minimum hardware guidelines? I've downloaded the ISO, but as I moved to PowerPC systems roughly two years ago my best Intel box here is an old P3-450 with 384MB of RAM and an old 16MB ATI AGP video card -- probably significantly below the minimum specs (although I am going to try it and will report on it here).
I imagine I can find a system in the lab tomorrow to try it out on, but knowing what the hardware requirements are in advance will help me narrow down which system I should borrow for some testing :).
Yaz.
I think this part is pretty funny:
Shaw and Vonage aren't in direct competition? How many phone service providers does the average home need? In my experience, if you exclude cellular service, most residential homes have a total of ONE phone service provider.
Clue to Shaw: you both sell a telephone service, and are thus in direct competition. Later in the same paragraph, Shaw even seems to indirectly acknowledge this fact, by saying that they provide "a more reliable and higher quality phone service". Come on Shaw -- you can't offer the same service as another company, claim you aren't in competition with them, and then claim that you're solution is better than their is.
As both a Shaw and Vonage customer, I'm currently sitting on the fence. I refuse to pay the extra $10 a month fee to Shaw, but have no problem with them offering an extra service so long as they aren't taking steps to degrade the service I've already paid for. However, this press release is just dumb, and makes Shaw look desparate. Whomever penned this press release should be re-assigned to something more suiting their lack of ability in logic and coherent thought.
Yaz.
The problem in this instance being that Shaw is a cable provider, and not a traditional telco. Their own IP-based phone service is quite new (first offered only in the last 2 months I believe, at least here in Victoria), so they haven't lost any phone customers due to VoIP.
Yaz.
The only other case where the CRTC might get involved is if Shaw is misrepresenting the fee to their customers. I haven't been contacted by Shaw myself, but I've heard reports that Shaw has been calling some Vonage customers and telling them that their VoIP service might not work right if they don't pay this extra fee.
If this is the case, then Shaw may not be properly representing the fee and its plusses and minuses. If they're calling people and trying to scare them into paying extra money or their phone service might not work in the future, that would seem to me to be extortion. And as Shaw now offers their own VoIP service where they don't charge customers this extra fee, the CRTC may have something to say about them attempting to make their competitors VoIP services more expensive.
I think more evidence will have to come out into the public either way before I pass any sort of personal judgement. I'm just hoping that my VoIP service keeps working as it always has -- if it starts going downhill, I'm not going to be terribly impressed.
Yaz.
Until I saw your post, I hadn't even noticed. Just call me "oblivious guy" :).
VoIP isn't just a deal for those who call overseas. In my case, all of my family is back in Ontario. For $20CDN a month, I'm getting 500 minutes anywhere in North America -- so it's quite worth it. Basic service alone from Telus would cost at least this much, never mind the long distance on top of that.
Mind you, I've never been a Telus customer, being a recent transplant from Ontario. I lived my first four months here offf my Fido cell phone, but reception inside my apartment was very poor. As well, I didn't want to give up my 416 area code number (the hardest area code to come by -- in Ontario, it has a certain prestige value in the business world due to it being the original Toronto area code, and the difficulty in being able to come by it these days. Besides which, people back in Toronto could call me without it having to be long distance for them). But the roaming charges were starting to hit pretty hard.
The other big advantage for me is being able to have the VoIP "soft phone", which runs on my laptop, or desktop machine at the lab I work out of. And being able to get your voice mail via the web (and e-mailed to me) is also a huge benefit. Anywhere I roam with my PowerBook and can get a WiFi signal, I can make a call anywhere in North America with no long distance (up to a maximum of 500 minutes).
I'm sold on VoIP, and so far am nothing but impressed with Vonage's service. Considering I'm not a heavy phone user, the price is perfect. I can call family and friends back home with no extra fees, have excellent local service, can make calls from my laptop (I have a bluetooth headset, making it easy to use it as a phone), have web and e-mail access to voice mail, and all the other cool phone features one can think of (call waiting, caller ID, etc.) for way lower than traditional POTS providers charge.
So long as Shaw doesn't screw things up fo me, I'm in heaven :).
Yaz.
I'm a Vonage and Shaw customer, having moved last fall to the Victoria, BC area from Toronto, and want to comment on this.
First off, while I'm as irritated and confused as everyone else, this fee is optional. Shaw isn't automatically charging people who use VoIP this extra fee. Apparantly, this is an added fee that VoIP users can pay to get better guaranteed QoS for their voice data packets.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, and at this time have no intention to pay the fee. On one hand, giving voice data network prioritization isn't necessarily a bad thing -- most home VoIP NAT routers provide a QoS service to do just this so downloads don't obliterate your ability to use your phone. At the same time, nobody else is charging these fees, and respecting QoS for VoIP packets isn't going to cost Shaw anything, so why should the consumer pay for such a service int he first place?
Shaw called me a few weeks ago asking me about my phone service, in an attempt to sell me on their new VoIP-based service. I told them I have Vonage. They asked me what services I was getting, and listed off the litany of services I'm getting. Then they asked me the price -- and suffice to say, I'm getting way more from Vonage, and am paying less. The phone jockey on the other end didn't know what to say about that, so just said "Uh, thanks, sorry for bothering you" and hung up.
As to the actual quality of service I'm getting -- I haven't had a single drop-out in my VoIP service in the two months that I've had it. Not a single blip. However, I also use iChat AV pretty heavily to take to family back home, and I have been having significant drop-outs in both audio and video conferences with family back in Toronto in recent weeks, where these problems didn't exist before. It's hard to say exactly where the fault lies, but I've been getting drop-outs galore in both audio-only and video conference mode between here and Toronto in the last month. I do have to recognise, however, that I do live on an island, and have no idea what the maximum bandwidth is like between the mainland and here. I can only believe that bandwidth usage is increasing, but at this time have no idea whether or not Shaw is working on running more underwater cabling between the mainland and Vancouver Island. It could just be because (due to time zones) my iChat AV conversations generally take place during peak hours.
So far, Vonage has been problem free, but I'm not a heavy phone user (I'm only paying for the 500 minute/month plan, with another 500 minutes through the soft phone option. I generally don't come even close to the 500 minutes per month). Perhaps I've just been lucky thus far. I have no intention to pay them another $10 a month just to get the service I'm already paying for, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my thus-far trouble free VoIP experience doesn't negatively change in the future.
Yaz.
Bullshit. Culture has never been a static, unchanging entity. Culture is whatever we as a society wish it to be, and it changes all the time.
Indeed, science has had an amazing impact on culture in the last 100 years. We moved from a culture of travel by foot and horse to an automotive culture. We've gone from Uncle George playing a banjo to carrying whatever music we want wherever we want on portable music devices. We've gone from having to spend hours at the library to look up an obscure fact to having information at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We've gone from candles and oil lamps to electric lights. And perhaps most noticably, we've gone from getting together with friends and family, or reading a book, or playing a board game, to sitting in front of the TV set.
Sorry, but our culture is very heavily influenced by science. It wasn't that long ago in certain parts of the Western world where the area you were allowed to sit in on the bus was determined by the colour of your skin -- something which is no longer part of any Western culture (except in the minds of a few deluded racists who think that culture is static and unchanging, so long as they get to dictate what culture is).
Yes, some parts of culture are sufficiently ingrained that it is hard to overcome their momentum -- but it is hardly impossible to do so. Major events and new ideas and inventions are changing culture every day.
I'm sure 10+ years ago there were some old white guys in South Africa who were convinced that Apartheid would never end as well -- and yet here we are. Women are allowed to vote everywhere in the Westernized world as well, in case nobody had bothered to tell you.
Sorry, but you come across as an appologist for racists and bigots with a dumb comment like that. Culture changes. Get used to it. Discrimination is not a given -- it's a completely learned trait
Yaz.
The service isn't going to be free, so it will take more than a whim for someone to switch to the public network.
However, it sounds like what you need is a tool which can lock down which wirreless networks your users can connect to. Of course, you could always get the necessary paint and window overlays to create a faraday cage to prevent acccess to the public wireless network (killing everyones cell phones within the office at the same time, of course).
Yaz.