And in the meantime hospitals who depend on our product lose support, my company goes under, and my fellow workers lose their jobs, and hospitals lose their ability to read studies since many of them no longer have film printers on site.
I'm going to say this as bluntly as I can: That is not your problem. That is for the management of your company to deal with. If they are putting all of this pressure on you when it's, as you say, way beyond the call of your duty, then your company is not managing their responsibilities properly, are flirting with disaster, and may go under anyway. Don't work yourself into an early grave for their sake.
I came through a hell-on-earth experience earlier this year where I was working 12-hour day shifts and then being on call for night shifts. In one span, 6 nights out of 7 I got late-night wakeup calls that I had to deal with - on two of those nights I got called in twice. I only barely got through it with my sanity intact, came about this " " close to quitting outright, and made everyone above me know that if it ever happened again, I would get the hell out and let someone else deal with that kind of crap.
That kind of workload just isn't worth it. It wrecks your social life, wrecks your mental health, physically exhausts you (I was a zombie for three days after that experience, only able to function on a very basic level; I'd never felt that kind of exhaustion before) and for what? A few extra bucks? Screw that! I've made some changes in my life since then to find a better balance between work and play, and I feel like I'm making some real progress, enough so that I found myself saying just today to a colleague that I don't want to take a possible 3-week work trip to Australia this fall because I don't want to kick my social life back down to zero again, not after losing most of the spring to work commitments.
I'm telling you: tell your bosses your situation, make it very clear how much work you're doing and that you can't, and won't, continue doing this much longer without help. Your company has to perform better, and you deserve better.
Shouldn't you be playing games to relieve stress, not create it? Shouldn't buying such a device and using it tell you something about how much time you're spending playing a game, and how much you're letting it get to you? Maybe what the thing should do is BSOD your computer and force you to do something else for fun that won't stress you out in the first place.
The project & time management suite we use in our firm is a server-client setup. All the data is stored in a SQL database on the server, and accessed through client tools. The client tools are unrestricted; we can install them on as many machines as we like. It's the server that handles the licensing, and it does it by number of employees stored in the database. If the license only allows 20 employees, then you simply can't add employee #21 to the database. Call up the vendor and order some more licenses.
I think this is a good compromise - we can't go over our licensed limit but we can wipe/reinstall/move the client software around as much as we need. The software has enough value to us that we'd never consider trying to work around the restrictions by doing something like accessing the SQL database directly - too much of a PITA. We add more employees, we add more licenses. Easy.
It's bad for SCO, this ruling; it doesn't get to bamboozle a fresh naïve jury but instead gets one of the two judges they've been irritating for the past 4 years, so that's it's next-to-last hope for a favourable ruling out the window.
Worse than that; remember that Judge Kimball is presiding over both the SCO/Novell and SCO/IBM cases. So SCO can't even try to pull a, "This is what the Novell judge really meant," bamboozle on the IBM judge, as they've tried to do with the Autozone and Red Hat cases in the past.
Imagine this had been an Open Source product for a minute... instead of an article just saying that it read/etc/ files, it would have said this part of the code reads the files, this is why it is necessary, or here is a patch to stop it from doing this.
Interesting you should say that - did you read the linked thread on the Skype forum? Here's a later post (emphasis added):
i was a bit curious and tried strace on a few internet/network programs.
it seems programs like skype, gaim, and perhaps other chat software all look in/etc/ passwd
Pidgin nee Gaim is GPL. A quick search on one of its mailing lists shows no useful hits for/etc/passwd. A later comment on this thread shows that something as innocuous as an ls command will trigger reads of/etc/passwd. Sounds like this is being overblown.
The posts that triggered this orgy of censorship saw me positing the likelihood that Israel had nuclear weapons forward-deployed in other nations. Shortly after the second post in the series, Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on their nuke program, got arrested again. It would seem as though there are some subjects Israel would rather we didn't discuss.
I don't think my eyes can roll around in their sockets enough to indicate what I think of your hubris. One little blogger who has his blog pulled wants to take credit for the government of Israel making an arrest of a prominent figure?
without question half-life. It was the first game to have mod tools for the fans that were freely available as well as an actual effort behind them to ENCOURAGE mod-making, it was the first to make such a business model succeed on a massive scale, and encouraged the proliferation of community involvement in games, eventually resulting in what some would call "Web 2.0".
Say what? Where were you when Doom was released, and in the years that followed? Doom had thousands of user-created custom levels, graphics, total conversions, out on the net by the time Half-Life got released. No computer game before Doom got that kind of community; I'm not sure the concept even existed prior to Doom. While it's true that id themselves didn't provide much for tools beyond the first.. darn, I forget what it was called. Node-builder? It was what "compiled" a WAD file into a usable form that Doom could play, IIRC. Anyway, id did specifically design Doom to be user-expandable and wrote right into the license that users could do it, spelling out the terms.
Half-Life mods, particularly Counter-Strike, may have proved to have more staying power, but they built on the groundwork laid for them by Doom.
For instance, the main reasons for the favourable trend in Germany in the 90s are an effort to increase efficiency in power plants and the restructuring of the industry of the former DDR after reunification
s/restructuring/collapse.
Why do you think Europe was so keen to pick 1990 as the base year, and the USA/Canada are not so keen on it? Why do you think Russia signed on to Kyoto at all? The collapse of the communist economies led to emissions reductions, all right, giving Germany a big head start (their CO2 emissions reduced 16% from 1990-1995 as the former DDR's economy collapsed; their emissions have flat-lined since) and Russia a bunch of "hot air" credits that they could sell to the highest bidders (their emissions fell almost 30% in the early 90s and have also flat-lined since).
That isn't what your constitution says. Bill Clinton, and any other two-term elected president, is constitutionally barred from being elected president. That's all that the 22nd amendment says. He isn't barred from holding any other elected office, including vice president, or ascending to the presidency by some other means. (Say he ran for Congress, got elected Speaker, and then the P & VP both die. He's next in line, he takes over.)
This is one of the reasons why it's good to RTFA... Microsoft was actually the appellant in this case -- the losing party who pushed the case to the USSC, and just won -- they were fighting AT&T, who claimed that U.S. patents basically could be enforced extraterritorially.
Actually, TFA isn't about the Microsoft/AT&T patent case, it's about another patent case, KSR International v. Teleflex, in which Microsoft came down on the side of KSR, who were challenging a Teleflex patent on adjustable gas pedals as being too obvious. The Microsoft/AT&T decision is briefly mentioned but it's not the focus of the article. I don't know whether to fault the submitter for not pointing out which case was being referred to, or the editor for not catching it, or both.
Bills such as the one described don't get you votes as it doesn't benefit the majority of voters.
They also don't cost you votes because it's not an issue that's going to fire up the general voting public. Our next election is shaping up to be fought around Canada's mission to Afghanistan, and the environment. Health care will make its usual sound-and-fury, signifying-nothing appearance, Quebec will get talked about, law and order will get talked about, the Liberals will bray on about how "neo-conservative" and "Bush-like" the Conservatives are, the Conservatives will bring up past Liberal scandals, and the NDP will be saying "a pox on both their houses" -- copyright changes will be way, way down the list.
Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function.
Best rejoinder I heard to a very similar whine the last time DST got "discussed" on Slashdot:
If messing with your clock by one lousy hour a measly two days a year has such a profound effect on your sleeping and ability to function, you'd better never have children.
20 seconds? I wish. Try running some specialized engineering software packages. There's one in particular by Rockwell Software that, as soon as it's been installed on my laptop, adds at least that much time to the "usable desktop" time by itself, as it bloats the registry like you wouldn't believe (it installs information about a raft of automation devices, all into the registry instead of its own database. So Windows of course seems to have to read it all in when it boots. At least I think this is what's happening).
Simply put, it's the difference between having a Republican President + Conservative Prime Minister vs a Democrat President + Liberal Prime Minister. Nobody ever called Jean Chretien an American lapdog, even though he & Bill Clinton got along just great.
I think I remember reading somewhere that loses are about 40% (15 to 9 amps) per run of cable. Not running at operational power also will decrease the life of the equipment.
I hope you're missing a couple of decimal points in there - anyone putting 15A on a 24AWG wire is asking for an electrical fire to start. 15A is the maximum allowable ampacity for most insulation grades of 14AWG wire, and 24AWG has 10x the resistance of 14AWG (87.5 ohms/km vs 8.54 ohms/km).
Voltage drop depends on the current & length of the cable, but even a 25-foot run with just 0.5A of current works out to a 0.66V drop - unsuitable for anything below 24V (maybe 12V could get away with it).
Let's not game the system any more, now that the seriousness of the threat is finally being widely analyzed and reported after generations of lies, coverups and propaganda all serving the oil companies at the expense of everyone else.
"At the expense of everyone else"?
I'm puzzled how you could come to that conclusion. The incredible economic & technological growth of the past century was fueled (yes, double meaning) by the plentiful and economically viable energy available in fossil fuels. Planes, trains, and automobiles, power plants, factories, industrial expansion, mass transport of products from one side of the globe to the other -- take fossil fuels away and it's hard to see how much of that ever happens. We'd all be stuck in subsistence farming.
We've all benefited from the plentiful availability of fossil fuels and their use in our economy and our society. It will be up to all of us to get a handle on where we go from here (just as a quick example: are we willing to face potential electrical shortages that would result from closing coal and oil-fired power plants, and/or construct new nuclear power plants to replace them?) -- slapping down the oil companies alone won't do it, and blaming them alone is ridiculously simplistic.
What other application out there, when it's active, both initiates and receives anywhere from dozens to potentially hundreds of connections from IP addresses (that don't point to popular servers) all around the world?
For example, Microsoft gets convicted of criminal restraint of trade and there are absolutely no personal consequences for the people authorizing it and perpetrating it. There are plenty of people in MS who knew of this and would not have allowed it to happen if their own butt was on the line.
That sounds well & good, but the complexities of corporate structures and criminal law lead to the problem of figuring just who to hold to account for actions in a corporation the size of MS. I sometimes wonder if there shouldn't be a form of "jail" for the corporation itself, not just the people behind it, when the case against the corporation is a slam-dunk even if the case against individual employees of it is murky. I think the only form of jail that makes sense for a corporation is for it to surrender its profits to the state for a period of time upon its conviction. How fast would shareholders demand fully above-board behaviour if they knew that their own profits & dividends could go up in smoke if the corporation is convicted?
The trouble with this idea is that the state could promptly treat the surrendered profits as a windfall and do god-knows-what with the "found money" in the form of political graft, kickbacks, and the like, not to mention launching politically-motivated prosecutions to extort funds from firms, play themselves up to the electorate, and the like. No easy solution to this one, and until one is found I think the disease is moderately preferable to the cure.
Oh, I do not know, maybe because most of _actual_ engineering is applied math?
Let me offer a perspective as a practicing electrical engineer. This is a generalization, and not necessarily an accurate one. There's lots of applied math in higher levels of engineering (say, aerospace design), but down at the more applied levels it tapers off. I specialize in industrial control systems - primarily PLC systems. The closest I get to applied math on a daily basis is sizing a transformer, a fuse, a motor starter, a cable, etc. For that, all I need to know is the expected load in amps, add in some spare capacity if needed, and then pick the appropriate component off a selection chart. That's the easy part of my job. Much more of my work is done making sure that all the components are going to fit inside an appropriate enclosure, making sure there are enough terminal connections to land all the field wires, preparing the electrical schematics for the electrician to work from, programming the control system (this is a whole field in itself that does not share as many similarities to computer programming as one might think), supervising the installation and startup, etc.
And most of that I didn't learn in university. My university seemed geared to spitting out digital designers who would get sucked up by the likes of Nortel when I went through. We were taught nothing about the Canadian Electrical Code, nothing about the importance of grounding, nothing about industrial power distribution (I actually signed up for a class in this in fourth year only to have it cancelled due to lack of interest. It still boggles me that a class about power distribution got cancelled because would-be electrical engineers didn't sign up for it.) Even the industrial controls class I did take - which still didn't include ladder logic or preparing electrical drawings - had the bare minimum number of students.
It takes us a good year or more to train a fresh EE graduate to do this line of work. The near-total neglect that industrial controls is given by the universities is a constant refrain/curse amongst our engineers.
So I would say dial back on the applied math for undergraduate degrees. Give an EE graduate at least some exposure to items like the electrical code, intrinsic safety, drive controls, protective devices. They're things that any EE going into industry damn well needs to know, and any EE should at least have some familiarity with.
Stuff like UI-isms (paperclips, ribbons, hiding the file menu, etc) isnt "innovation"....Stuff like Dtrace , TCP/IP, xml,.. THAT is innovation.
An innovative UI is no less innovative then technical jargon, it's just a different field of innovation. Apple, anybody? And a non-innovative UI can ruin what might otherwise be a fine application -- I'm looking at you, GIMP. Whether Microsoft's ribbon concept will prove to be a leap forward or a laughingstock is anyone's guess at this point, but to dismiss it as unworthy of being called innovation is just tunnel vision.
Where do you live that CTV isn't over-the-air? Growing up in rural New Brunswick, the only two stations we got in the pre-cable days were CBC & CTV.
It isn't the CRTC's place to dictate terms to the National Hockey League about who may or may not broadcast their games, and certainly not to protect the dinosaur that CBC's hockey coverage has become. What was once a nationally-respected program that gave fair coverage to all the Canadian teams has become nothing more than a marketing arm for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Whether CTV/TSN would be any better is an open question (the fact that Bell Globemedia owns a stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment suggests it might not), but I've lost all respect for Hockey Night in Canada (I think most Montreal Canadiens fans have by now). It doesn't deserve to be saved in its current form.
Take the source into consideration: CBC is the publically-funded national broadcast network of Canada, and its ratings are the pits across the board. Its one cash cow (and only real HDTV-showoff program), Hockey Night in Canada, is rumoured to be headed to private networks CTV and TSN next season. Conservatives are in power federally, and consider the CBC an adversary. Add it all up, and the CBC is staring at a cash crunch in the near future. They won't have the money to upgrade much of their programming to HDTV, so they blow smoke to the regulator that there's no business case for it.
Funny how this argument comes from Europeans, Canadians, etc. that spend all their time telling Americans that their culture is crap, their entertainment is crap, they're fat,
Who, while they're making said arguments, are watching American TV programs, listening to American music, surfing American websites, eating at American fast-food restaurants, etc. This is especially pronounced in Canada. The hypocracy is galling, and I say this as a Canadian who got tired quite some time ago of my country's wholly undeserved chip on its shoulder when it comes to our American neighbours.
I quit trying to understand the moderators here some time ago (I agree in general about the hypocracy of left-wing "tolerance" though). I'm actually something of a global-warming skeptic, myself (I consider Kyoto a worthless exercise in pablum masquerading as meaningful environmental policy, for instance) - I just thought the point about "GW" supporters seizing on evidence and marginalizing opponents could work both ways, depending on what side of the political aisle you sit on.
My problem with the whole GW crowd is how they will quickly object or attempt to marginalize anything which doesn't support their view. At the same time any little piece of information which supports their view is held forth as indisputable fact.
Interesting how one can read "GW" as either "Global Warming" or "George W" and have the statement remain accurate -- and also reinforce your point.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to say this as bluntly as I can: That is not your problem. That is for the management of your company to deal with. If they are putting all of this pressure on you when it's, as you say, way beyond the call of your duty, then your company is not managing their responsibilities properly, are flirting with disaster, and may go under anyway. Don't work yourself into an early grave for their sake.
I came through a hell-on-earth experience earlier this year where I was working 12-hour day shifts and then being on call for night shifts. In one span, 6 nights out of 7 I got late-night wakeup calls that I had to deal with - on two of those nights I got called in twice. I only barely got through it with my sanity intact, came about this " " close to quitting outright, and made everyone above me know that if it ever happened again, I would get the hell out and let someone else deal with that kind of crap.
That kind of workload just isn't worth it. It wrecks your social life, wrecks your mental health, physically exhausts you (I was a zombie for three days after that experience, only able to function on a very basic level; I'd never felt that kind of exhaustion before) and for what? A few extra bucks? Screw that! I've made some changes in my life since then to find a better balance between work and play, and I feel like I'm making some real progress, enough so that I found myself saying just today to a colleague that I don't want to take a possible 3-week work trip to Australia this fall because I don't want to kick my social life back down to zero again, not after losing most of the spring to work commitments.
I'm telling you: tell your bosses your situation, make it very clear how much work you're doing and that you can't, and won't, continue doing this much longer without help. Your company has to perform better, and you deserve better.
Shouldn't you be playing games to relieve stress, not create it? Shouldn't buying such a device and using it tell you something about how much time you're spending playing a game, and how much you're letting it get to you? Maybe what the thing should do is BSOD your computer and force you to do something else for fun that won't stress you out in the first place.
I think this is a good compromise - we can't go over our licensed limit but we can wipe/reinstall/move the client software around as much as we need. The software has enough value to us that we'd never consider trying to work around the restrictions by doing something like accessing the SQL database directly - too much of a PITA. We add more employees, we add more licenses. Easy.
Worse than that; remember that Judge Kimball is presiding over both the SCO/Novell and SCO/IBM cases. So SCO can't even try to pull a, "This is what the Novell judge really meant," bamboozle on the IBM judge, as they've tried to do with the Autozone and Red Hat cases in the past.
Interesting you should say that - did you read the linked thread on the Skype forum? Here's a later post (emphasis added):
Pidgin nee Gaim is GPL. A quick search on one of its mailing lists shows no useful hits forI don't think my eyes can roll around in their sockets enough to indicate what I think of your hubris. One little blogger who has his blog pulled wants to take credit for the government of Israel making an arrest of a prominent figure?
PUH-LEEEZE. +5 for this?
Say what? Where were you when Doom was released, and in the years that followed? Doom had thousands of user-created custom levels, graphics, total conversions, out on the net by the time Half-Life got released. No computer game before Doom got that kind of community; I'm not sure the concept even existed prior to Doom. While it's true that id themselves didn't provide much for tools beyond the first .. darn, I forget what it was called. Node-builder? It was what "compiled" a WAD file into a usable form that Doom could play, IIRC. Anyway, id did specifically design Doom to be user-expandable and wrote right into the license that users could do it, spelling out the terms.
Half-Life mods, particularly Counter-Strike, may have proved to have more staying power, but they built on the groundwork laid for them by Doom.
s/restructuring/collapse.
Why do you think Europe was so keen to pick 1990 as the base year, and the USA/Canada are not so keen on it? Why do you think Russia signed on to Kyoto at all? The collapse of the communist economies led to emissions reductions, all right, giving Germany a big head start (their CO2 emissions reduced 16% from 1990-1995 as the former DDR's economy collapsed; their emissions have flat-lined since) and Russia a bunch of "hot air" credits that they could sell to the highest bidders (their emissions fell almost 30% in the early 90s and have also flat-lined since).
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L3012256. htm
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/emissions/rus.dat
That isn't what your constitution says. Bill Clinton, and any other two-term elected president, is constitutionally barred from being elected president. That's all that the 22nd amendment says. He isn't barred from holding any other elected office, including vice president, or ascending to the presidency by some other means. (Say he ran for Congress, got elected Speaker, and then the P & VP both die. He's next in line, he takes over.)
Actually, TFA isn't about the Microsoft/AT&T patent case, it's about another patent case, KSR International v. Teleflex, in which Microsoft came down on the side of KSR, who were challenging a Teleflex patent on adjustable gas pedals as being too obvious. The Microsoft/AT&T decision is briefly mentioned but it's not the focus of the article. I don't know whether to fault the submitter for not pointing out which case was being referred to, or the editor for not catching it, or both.
They also don't cost you votes because it's not an issue that's going to fire up the general voting public. Our next election is shaping up to be fought around Canada's mission to Afghanistan, and the environment. Health care will make its usual sound-and-fury, signifying-nothing appearance, Quebec will get talked about, law and order will get talked about, the Liberals will bray on about how "neo-conservative" and "Bush-like" the Conservatives are, the Conservatives will bring up past Liberal scandals, and the NDP will be saying "a pox on both their houses" -- copyright changes will be way, way down the list.
Best rejoinder I heard to a very similar whine the last time DST got "discussed" on Slashdot:
If messing with your clock by one lousy hour a measly two days a year has such a profound effect on your sleeping and ability to function, you'd better never have children.
I hope you're missing a couple of decimal points in there - anyone putting 15A on a 24AWG wire is asking for an electrical fire to start. 15A is the maximum allowable ampacity for most insulation grades of 14AWG wire, and 24AWG has 10x the resistance of 14AWG (87.5 ohms/km vs 8.54 ohms/km).
Voltage drop depends on the current & length of the cable, but even a 25-foot run with just 0.5A of current works out to a 0.66V drop - unsuitable for anything below 24V (maybe 12V could get away with it).
Handy link for checking the numbers: http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm
"At the expense of everyone else"?
I'm puzzled how you could come to that conclusion. The incredible economic & technological growth of the past century was fueled (yes, double meaning) by the plentiful and economically viable energy available in fossil fuels. Planes, trains, and automobiles, power plants, factories, industrial expansion, mass transport of products from one side of the globe to the other -- take fossil fuels away and it's hard to see how much of that ever happens. We'd all be stuck in subsistence farming.
We've all benefited from the plentiful availability of fossil fuels and their use in our economy and our society. It will be up to all of us to get a handle on where we go from here (just as a quick example: are we willing to face potential electrical shortages that would result from closing coal and oil-fired power plants, and/or construct new nuclear power plants to replace them?) -- slapping down the oil companies alone won't do it, and blaming them alone is ridiculously simplistic.
What other application out there, when it's active, both initiates and receives anywhere from dozens to potentially hundreds of connections from IP addresses (that don't point to popular servers) all around the world?
That sounds well & good, but the complexities of corporate structures and criminal law lead to the problem of figuring just who to hold to account for actions in a corporation the size of MS. I sometimes wonder if there shouldn't be a form of "jail" for the corporation itself, not just the people behind it, when the case against the corporation is a slam-dunk even if the case against individual employees of it is murky. I think the only form of jail that makes sense for a corporation is for it to surrender its profits to the state for a period of time upon its conviction. How fast would shareholders demand fully above-board behaviour if they knew that their own profits & dividends could go up in smoke if the corporation is convicted?
The trouble with this idea is that the state could promptly treat the surrendered profits as a windfall and do god-knows-what with the "found money" in the form of political graft, kickbacks, and the like, not to mention launching politically-motivated prosecutions to extort funds from firms, play themselves up to the electorate, and the like. No easy solution to this one, and until one is found I think the disease is moderately preferable to the cure.
Let me offer a perspective as a practicing electrical engineer. This is a generalization, and not necessarily an accurate one. There's lots of applied math in higher levels of engineering (say, aerospace design), but down at the more applied levels it tapers off. I specialize in industrial control systems - primarily PLC systems. The closest I get to applied math on a daily basis is sizing a transformer, a fuse, a motor starter, a cable, etc. For that, all I need to know is the expected load in amps, add in some spare capacity if needed, and then pick the appropriate component off a selection chart. That's the easy part of my job. Much more of my work is done making sure that all the components are going to fit inside an appropriate enclosure, making sure there are enough terminal connections to land all the field wires, preparing the electrical schematics for the electrician to work from, programming the control system (this is a whole field in itself that does not share as many similarities to computer programming as one might think), supervising the installation and startup, etc.
And most of that I didn't learn in university. My university seemed geared to spitting out digital designers who would get sucked up by the likes of Nortel when I went through. We were taught nothing about the Canadian Electrical Code, nothing about the importance of grounding, nothing about industrial power distribution (I actually signed up for a class in this in fourth year only to have it cancelled due to lack of interest. It still boggles me that a class about power distribution got cancelled because would-be electrical engineers didn't sign up for it.) Even the industrial controls class I did take - which still didn't include ladder logic or preparing electrical drawings - had the bare minimum number of students.
It takes us a good year or more to train a fresh EE graduate to do this line of work. The near-total neglect that industrial controls is given by the universities is a constant refrain/curse amongst our engineers.
So I would say dial back on the applied math for undergraduate degrees. Give an EE graduate at least some exposure to items like the electrical code, intrinsic safety, drive controls, protective devices. They're things that any EE going into industry damn well needs to know, and any EE should at least have some familiarity with.
An innovative UI is no less innovative then technical jargon, it's just a different field of innovation. Apple, anybody? And a non-innovative UI can ruin what might otherwise be a fine application -- I'm looking at you, GIMP. Whether Microsoft's ribbon concept will prove to be a leap forward or a laughingstock is anyone's guess at this point, but to dismiss it as unworthy of being called innovation is just tunnel vision.
Where do you live that CTV isn't over-the-air? Growing up in rural New Brunswick, the only two stations we got in the pre-cable days were CBC & CTV.
It isn't the CRTC's place to dictate terms to the National Hockey League about who may or may not broadcast their games, and certainly not to protect the dinosaur that CBC's hockey coverage has become. What was once a nationally-respected program that gave fair coverage to all the Canadian teams has become nothing more than a marketing arm for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Whether CTV/TSN would be any better is an open question (the fact that Bell Globemedia owns a stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment suggests it might not), but I've lost all respect for Hockey Night in Canada (I think most Montreal Canadiens fans have by now). It doesn't deserve to be saved in its current form.
Take the source into consideration: CBC is the publically-funded national broadcast network of Canada, and its ratings are the pits across the board. Its one cash cow (and only real HDTV-showoff program), Hockey Night in Canada, is rumoured to be headed to private networks CTV and TSN next season. Conservatives are in power federally, and consider the CBC an adversary. Add it all up, and the CBC is staring at a cash crunch in the near future. They won't have the money to upgrade much of their programming to HDTV, so they blow smoke to the regulator that there's no business case for it.
Who, while they're making said arguments, are watching American TV programs, listening to American music, surfing American websites, eating at American fast-food restaurants, etc. This is especially pronounced in Canada. The hypocracy is galling, and I say this as a Canadian who got tired quite some time ago of my country's wholly undeserved chip on its shoulder when it comes to our American neighbours.
I quit trying to understand the moderators here some time ago (I agree in general about the hypocracy of left-wing "tolerance" though). I'm actually something of a global-warming skeptic, myself (I consider Kyoto a worthless exercise in pablum masquerading as meaningful environmental policy, for instance) - I just thought the point about "GW" supporters seizing on evidence and marginalizing opponents could work both ways, depending on what side of the political aisle you sit on.
Interesting how one can read "GW" as either "Global Warming" or "George W" and have the statement remain accurate -- and also reinforce your point.