Come on, obviously Shampoo is a Canuck. And as all Canucks know, CSIS is the agency that controls all inventions in Canada. For example, the reason you can't buy a Ford F350 that gets 120mpg (1.96l/100km)? Why, CSIS bought the manufacturing rights to the hyper-efficient fuel injection system that makes it possible! Why don't we have personal jetpacks and flying cars here yet? CSIS, of course- who, along with their good friends in the CIA and KGB, decided back in the 50's that civilians should never have access to such sophisticated technology. And why do you think that the cost of mobile telephony devices has dropped so dramatically, while the performance and feature set has increased? You guessed it- CSIS! They've poured billions of dollars (thousands in US dollars) into keeping the populace so busy learning the new features of their mobile phones that they forget to ask "Where's my jetpack?".
Also obvious to the casual observer: Shampoo was hung up on because he called CSIS directly with his inventions, rather than waiting for them to approach him and offer him the choice of Big Money or being Disappeared. He violated the Terms for Developing Suppressible Technologies, so of course they'd hang up on him. Any agent who'd have taken the call would have found themselves working stake-out duty in the Popeil Factory parking lot.
Yes, YouTube. You can get all kinds of great informative, and intellectually stimulating tech info there. I particularly like this one.
Seriously though, YouTube is a great resource. I am a big fan of the Periodic Table of Videos series, which is informative and funny.
I'd like to know what freak accident in the space-time continuum got that statement modded 5 for Insightful. Had me checking my calendar to see if I'd slept until April 1st again.
If by that you mean that actual copyright law is sane, but the enforcement of IP in general is seriously broken, then yes. But the 'system' (particularly in the US) is fscked up beyond all repair, and this is yet another lovely example for the history books.
They have, naturally, blocked non-US access to the shows they put up on YouTube. Naturally, I will go on using bittorrent to watch the few American TV shows I still bother with. If any studio execs are watching this thread, here's something to think about: until you make it easy for me to watch your content 'legally', I will continue to 'steal' it, and since I don't live in the US, you can bite me. All this bullsh*t about region codes and locking out non-Americans is ridiculous, and only costs you guys money. Wake up already!
I get a chuckle out of Americans' fuel economy problems- yet they refuse to buy diesel-powered vehicles (half of the new vehicles sold in Europe last year were diesels, including passenger cars). I have a 2006 TDI Jetta that gets 5.25 l/100km (~54mpg for you people living in the past). It gets the same fuel economy regardless of whether I drive 80kph or 130kph. City economy drops to around 6 l/100km, but since I live in a rural area and only drive in a city once a year, it's trivial.
The fact that GM won't be selling its new high-efficiency diesel cars in the US because there's 'no market' means that until Americans are willing to invest in better fuel technologies they will be at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to dependence on imported petrochemicals. If I lived in Europe I could purchase a car with even better economy than my Jetta, but for some weird reason (yeah we all know what it is) even in Canada the European autos don't meet 'emissions guidelines'; yet, Volkswagen can't keep its diesels on the lots here, the demand is so high.
Well, I'm sure Apple is giving them a serious discount,
Guess what? Apple does NOT give 'serious discounts' to education customers. If you want to know what a school district pays for its Apple hardware, go to the Apple online store and click the Education Store link on the lefthand side. There is NO discount for bulk purchases, except on MacBooks when you buy them in 5-packs, and even then, it's not much. Apple makes nice hardware, but their elitist attitude sucks. Ask me how I know- go on, ask. Ok, I know this because I work for a public school district that has a one-to-one program (that's the technical term for giving each student their own laptop, duh). I am responsible for purchasing all those hundreds of shiny white and silver slabs of Apple goodness that get issued to students and teachers (yes, our teaching staff get MacBook Pros). The education discount is typically less than 10% off of the retail price, with no escalating discount for bulk. Buy one, or buy 500 - you pay the same per-unit price. And to top it off, if you buy a laptop or whatever from the Apple web store, using your education discount (as an individual), you get a free iPod; schools don't even get that, while paying the same price. I asked my Apple rep if he could throw in a few goodies for me to give away at teacher workshops when I ordered a half-million dollars worth of laptops- the answer was 'Nope, sorry'. In the meantime, I have Dell offering me all kinds of incentives to buy their laptops.
As for the reliability, you're dead on. The only saving grace for Apple is that their hardware is rock-solid, and it's hard to screw up the OS, especially if you use tools like Workgroup Manager to keep the students' grubby little paws out of the software guts. We have over to 600 Apple laptops, all maintained by one tech. And he has time to read Slashdot, too! The only other hardware out there that gets even close is the old Thinkpads from IBM, but then you've got all the problems that go with Windows. We only give Windows machines to our administrators who need specific software not available on OS X (accounting, payroll, etc), and even those give us more headaches than the Apple machines.
Yeah, you're right- but they're trying to piggyback POTS onto new tech like DSL...whereas, I would consider the important part of POTS to be the "Plain Old..."- running a PSTN is still a lot simpler than DSL and all the other TLAs tossed around in the telecom field. Good point, though- POTS isn't really all that simple these days, is it?
Also, you need to bear in mind that POTS is incredibly simple technology compared to Internet/Cellular/Data services. I haven't had cable TV since the early '90s, but I don't ever remember it going out, either- that was long before we had digital cable/cable Internet in my market area. POTS never goes down because the equipment is extremely robust, even (especially) the older stuff. My local telco could continue to provide POTS for more than 4 days during power outages simply because of lower power requirements (after 4 days, they had to fire up their generators, and started dropping remote COs due to extreme cold).
We always want to compare service levels for newer tech with POTS and complain when they don't approach the same levels, but I'd expect that if we were to be still using the same equipment for ISP/Cellular service in a hundred years, it would be as stable and robust as the current (ok, previous generation) iteration of POTS. Problem is, we are constantly demanding better, faster, and cheaper: this has to be traded off for reliability, and for the most part people are happy with that tradeoff. Just like we're happy to buy crappy consumer goods from China at Wal*Mart because they're cheaper than domestic products./rant
Apple's Final Cut Studio. When you drag an item from the Browser over to the Canvas, a number of drop targets pop up, offering the editor a bunch of options for how to integrate that particular item (video clip, still picture, etc) into the timeline. Pretty straightforward stuff. Not sure if Apple has patented it, but it's definitely prior.
1) Stop scanning shoes. Dumb idea, useless time-waster.
2) Stop banning liquids. Nobody's built a binary explosive out of liquids, and as anyone with Chemistry 12 knows, you can explode 100ml of fluid just as easily as 300ml.
3) Stop turning on everyone's electronics, then telling them to turn them off again on the plane. Duh.
4) Hire screeners whose first language is English. That alone will speed things up a good 50%. Between having to ask the screeners to repeat themselves and them asking me to repeat myself, we waste a crapload of time. "Hello steady customer!"
Um...it was a WTO ruling, and the 'several billion dollars' was actually money that the US had illegally taken from Canadian forestry companies as 'tariffs'. In the end, after thousands of workers had lost their jobs and declared bankruptcy, the US grudgingly agreed to return SOME of the money. I don't actually think we've seen it yet, though. And a fat lot of good it does to the businesses who aren't around anymore to get their money back.
The simple fact is that Americans employ whatever protectionist methods they can to enrich their own companies. Anyone who trades with the US sees this on a daily basis, and believe me, we're all looking forward to the day when the global economy doesn't include US Dollars. As soon as some segment of the American economy complains, up go the tariffs, regardless of trade treaties. So we go to the WTO for a ruling, they say "Bad Americans, drop the tariffs", and the Americans stick out their tongues and give us the raspberry.
The best thing that could happen is for the American dollar to weaken substantially so that their trade became totally undesirable...oh, wait a second! Now what needs to happen is for us to get a set of balls and stop sending our energy to the Americans, and sell it to other markets (ones that will treat us fairly, natch) instead. Oh, and we need to start fingerprinting and interrogating every American who crosses our borders as well, and maybe throw a few in jail just for kicks, and ban a few of their academics and actors from ever ever entering Canada. No more cheap Tmbits for you!!
I think you made the right choice for your quality of life. However, if the real distance for the "last mile" was only the short distance you mention, why not use wireless? Introduce yourself to a neighbour who is within the service area, offer to pay for their broadband connection if they'll let you use a few cents' worth of electricity every month and throw a small mast on their house. Use a product like Tranzeo's 5.8ghz radios (less than $300 each end) and you'll have TONNES of bandwidth (or TONS, for you Americans living in the weights and measures stone age). There is really no excuse for paying $450 a month for a T1 when you can use cheap tech to beat the problem. If you live in a heavily treed area and can't get a clear LOS, use Tranzeo's 900mhz radios instead - they're only 11Mbps instead of 54 like the 5.8s, but they will punch through 500m of trees no problem, even in rain. I have used this gear in a lot of installations, and it does work. A total solution will run you less than a grand, even if you have to pay a ladder monkey to install it for you.
If there are a number of other residents in your position, you could set up a small co-op and go for a better product like Motorola's Canopy solution. Closer to $700 per subscriber, but phenomenally robust, and it'll punch through trees like a hot knife through "I can't believe it's not Butter!".
I get a bit of a chuckle when I hear Americans complain about rural broadband. The US is so densely populated compared to a lot of North America. Up here in northern Canada, where the closest broadband POP can be hundreds of kilometres away, we tend to get creative about it. A lot of small communities up here are putting in their own satellite uplinks and sharing it out via 802.11x to subscribers. Other people are installing relays across mountaintops to get broadband into their area, when the telcos have no interest in helping out. I am honestly not trying to sound smug here, but a lousy half-kilometre gap is a pretty easy obstacle to overcome!
Okay - yes, Tranzeo, yes, in a marine environment, no, not on naval or patrol vessels, but on a commercial fishing vessel. 5 kilometres, ship-to-shore. $150 CAD per radio (2 required), 2.4ghz. Horizontal polarisation, approximate antenna height above sea surface was 5 metres. Sure, we had to manually keep the yagi aligned with the shore station, but that's because I was too cheap to build a gyro system. With a 30-degree spread, the yagi was actually pretty forgiving. Actual throughput around 1.8Mbps.
On land, I have installed Tranzeo radios over 12km apart - and those are only putting out 80mw (19db gain flat-panel antennas). They rock.
Back on topic, people have gotten 50km out of "off-the-shelf" wifi gear (ie, consumer-grade gear from Best Buy, like a Linksys box), simply by placing the antennas at the focal point of large parabolic dishes. This isn't an increase in power output, but rather an increase in GAIN. Antenna gain is the crucial thing here - but you need to have similar gain levels at both ends (duh). Back in the day, I was setting up wifi links in the 10km range using 30mw radio gear from Orinoco and high-gain parabolic (24db) grid antennas. That's not suitable for marine use of course, since those antennas have something like a 3 degree beam spread, so keeping them aligned would be a real bitch. But with 14db yagis, you'd be laughing.
My conclusion is that this story is only significant because it shows how stupid the military folks are, not how innovative they are. A 700m ship-to-shore link can be done for cheap-as-free using bits from Best Buy (or my shelf). What they SHOULD have done was implemented a 128kbps VHF solution. For the kind of data they need to send, 128k is plenty, and the VHF is rugged, the signal is robust, the frequency is licensed, and the range is enormous. There's dozen (probably hundreds) of products that'll meet marine specs out there.
Whatever.
It's interesting you bring up the Left vs. Right issue, since BOTH extremes result in totalitarian states. Nazi Germany was extremely right-of-centre; the Soviet Union would be considered extremely left. In terms of Canadian politics, I would actually consider my conservative: I believe in less government, not more; I feel my taxes could go to support better services than (our poorly-funded) Universal Healthcare system; and I think I should be allowed to own a gun without having to go through insane amounts of paperwork. Compared to the current US administration, I'm quite a ways left, however. It's just another way in which Canadian and American politics differ. Right now in the US, you have a fairly right-of -centre government that in many ways is rapidly increasing its control of its citizens as this story from/. indicates.
In many ways my own government is following in your footsteps, but fortunately it's not as far along yet, and if your politics swing back a bit closer to the centre, we will follow there too. AT THE MOMENT, however, Canada is still a far less regulated society, and I certainly don't have to worry about some asshats showing up at my door with badges because I criticised the government.
I gotta hand it to our fellow countrymen in Quebec - they do know how to drink, and I love it there! It's too bad BC isn't next to Quebec, because we could both form a new country whose sole ambition was to get high and drink beer! Vive le bier!
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be an idiot.
I don't see the downside to that at all, as it means I have access to all his porn too!
Come on, obviously Shampoo is a Canuck. And as all Canucks know, CSIS is the agency that controls all inventions in Canada. For example, the reason you can't buy a Ford F350 that gets 120mpg (1.96l/100km)? Why, CSIS bought the manufacturing rights to the hyper-efficient fuel injection system that makes it possible! Why don't we have personal jetpacks and flying cars here yet? CSIS, of course- who, along with their good friends in the CIA and KGB, decided back in the 50's that civilians should never have access to such sophisticated technology. And why do you think that the cost of mobile telephony devices has dropped so dramatically, while the performance and feature set has increased? You guessed it- CSIS! They've poured billions of dollars (thousands in US dollars) into keeping the populace so busy learning the new features of their mobile phones that they forget to ask "Where's my jetpack?". Also obvious to the casual observer: Shampoo was hung up on because he called CSIS directly with his inventions, rather than waiting for them to approach him and offer him the choice of Big Money or being Disappeared. He violated the Terms for Developing Suppressible Technologies, so of course they'd hang up on him. Any agent who'd have taken the call would have found themselves working stake-out duty in the Popeil Factory parking lot.
And don't forget TED. More great stuff than you can shake a stick at!
Yes, YouTube. You can get all kinds of great informative, and intellectually stimulating tech info there. I particularly like this one. Seriously though, YouTube is a great resource. I am a big fan of the Periodic Table of Videos series, which is informative and funny.
Holy crap, I can't believe I made such a fundamental goof! Colour me stupid, eh? I guess I really was asleep there.
If you have their music, please host it somewhere so we can download it! The more people who can host this stuff the better.
I'd like to know what freak accident in the space-time continuum got that statement modded 5 for Insightful. Had me checking my calendar to see if I'd slept until April 1st again. If by that you mean that actual copyright law is sane, but the enforcement of IP in general is seriously broken, then yes. But the 'system' (particularly in the US) is fscked up beyond all repair, and this is yet another lovely example for the history books.
They have, naturally, blocked non-US access to the shows they put up on YouTube. Naturally, I will go on using bittorrent to watch the few American TV shows I still bother with. If any studio execs are watching this thread, here's something to think about: until you make it easy for me to watch your content 'legally', I will continue to 'steal' it, and since I don't live in the US, you can bite me. All this bullsh*t about region codes and locking out non-Americans is ridiculous, and only costs you guys money. Wake up already!
I get a chuckle out of Americans' fuel economy problems- yet they refuse to buy diesel-powered vehicles (half of the new vehicles sold in Europe last year were diesels, including passenger cars). I have a 2006 TDI Jetta that gets 5.25 l/100km (~54mpg for you people living in the past). It gets the same fuel economy regardless of whether I drive 80kph or 130kph. City economy drops to around 6 l/100km, but since I live in a rural area and only drive in a city once a year, it's trivial. The fact that GM won't be selling its new high-efficiency diesel cars in the US because there's 'no market' means that until Americans are willing to invest in better fuel technologies they will be at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to dependence on imported petrochemicals. If I lived in Europe I could purchase a car with even better economy than my Jetta, but for some weird reason (yeah we all know what it is) even in Canada the European autos don't meet 'emissions guidelines'; yet, Volkswagen can't keep its diesels on the lots here, the demand is so high.
Well, I'm sure Apple is giving them a serious discount,
Guess what? Apple does NOT give 'serious discounts' to education customers. If you want to know what a school district pays for its Apple hardware, go to the Apple online store and click the Education Store link on the lefthand side. There is NO discount for bulk purchases, except on MacBooks when you buy them in 5-packs, and even then, it's not much. Apple makes nice hardware, but their elitist attitude sucks. Ask me how I know- go on, ask. Ok, I know this because I work for a public school district that has a one-to-one program (that's the technical term for giving each student their own laptop, duh). I am responsible for purchasing all those hundreds of shiny white and silver slabs of Apple goodness that get issued to students and teachers (yes, our teaching staff get MacBook Pros). The education discount is typically less than 10% off of the retail price, with no escalating discount for bulk. Buy one, or buy 500 - you pay the same per-unit price. And to top it off, if you buy a laptop or whatever from the Apple web store, using your education discount (as an individual), you get a free iPod; schools don't even get that, while paying the same price. I asked my Apple rep if he could throw in a few goodies for me to give away at teacher workshops when I ordered a half-million dollars worth of laptops- the answer was 'Nope, sorry'. In the meantime, I have Dell offering me all kinds of incentives to buy their laptops. As for the reliability, you're dead on. The only saving grace for Apple is that their hardware is rock-solid, and it's hard to screw up the OS, especially if you use tools like Workgroup Manager to keep the students' grubby little paws out of the software guts. We have over to 600 Apple laptops, all maintained by one tech. And he has time to read Slashdot, too! The only other hardware out there that gets even close is the old Thinkpads from IBM, but then you've got all the problems that go with Windows. We only give Windows machines to our administrators who need specific software not available on OS X (accounting, payroll, etc), and even those give us more headaches than the Apple machines.
Yeah, you're right- but they're trying to piggyback POTS onto new tech like DSL...whereas, I would consider the important part of POTS to be the "Plain Old..."- running a PSTN is still a lot simpler than DSL and all the other TLAs tossed around in the telecom field. Good point, though- POTS isn't really all that simple these days, is it?
Also, you need to bear in mind that POTS is incredibly simple technology compared to Internet/Cellular/Data services. I haven't had cable TV since the early '90s, but I don't ever remember it going out, either- that was long before we had digital cable/cable Internet in my market area. POTS never goes down because the equipment is extremely robust, even (especially) the older stuff. My local telco could continue to provide POTS for more than 4 days during power outages simply because of lower power requirements (after 4 days, they had to fire up their generators, and started dropping remote COs due to extreme cold).
/rant
We always want to compare service levels for newer tech with POTS and complain when they don't approach the same levels, but I'd expect that if we were to be still using the same equipment for ISP/Cellular service in a hundred years, it would be as stable and robust as the current (ok, previous generation) iteration of POTS. Problem is, we are constantly demanding better, faster, and cheaper: this has to be traded off for reliability, and for the most part people are happy with that tradeoff. Just like we're happy to buy crappy consumer goods from China at Wal*Mart because they're cheaper than domestic products.
I had fun tearing this one apart. This lawyer type is so full of crap I bet his eyes are brown.
Apple's Final Cut Studio. When you drag an item from the Browser over to the Canvas, a number of drop targets pop up, offering the editor a bunch of options for how to integrate that particular item (video clip, still picture, etc) into the timeline. Pretty straightforward stuff. Not sure if Apple has patented it, but it's definitely prior.
1) Stop scanning shoes. Dumb idea, useless time-waster.
2) Stop banning liquids. Nobody's built a binary explosive out of liquids, and as anyone with Chemistry 12 knows, you can explode 100ml of fluid just as easily as 300ml.
3) Stop turning on everyone's electronics, then telling them to turn them off again on the plane. Duh.
4) Hire screeners whose first language is English. That alone will speed things up a good 50%. Between having to ask the screeners to repeat themselves and them asking me to repeat myself, we waste a crapload of time. "Hello steady customer!"
Yeah, that should do it, I'm thinking.
LCARS. Nothing more needs to be said!
Um...it was a WTO ruling, and the 'several billion dollars' was actually money that the US had illegally taken from Canadian forestry companies as 'tariffs'. In the end, after thousands of workers had lost their jobs and declared bankruptcy, the US grudgingly agreed to return SOME of the money. I don't actually think we've seen it yet, though. And a fat lot of good it does to the businesses who aren't around anymore to get their money back. The simple fact is that Americans employ whatever protectionist methods they can to enrich their own companies. Anyone who trades with the US sees this on a daily basis, and believe me, we're all looking forward to the day when the global economy doesn't include US Dollars. As soon as some segment of the American economy complains, up go the tariffs, regardless of trade treaties. So we go to the WTO for a ruling, they say "Bad Americans, drop the tariffs", and the Americans stick out their tongues and give us the raspberry. The best thing that could happen is for the American dollar to weaken substantially so that their trade became totally undesirable...oh, wait a second! Now what needs to happen is for us to get a set of balls and stop sending our energy to the Americans, and sell it to other markets (ones that will treat us fairly, natch) instead. Oh, and we need to start fingerprinting and interrogating every American who crosses our borders as well, and maybe throw a few in jail just for kicks, and ban a few of their academics and actors from ever ever entering Canada. No more cheap Tmbits for you!!
Lesbian Until Graduation. That makes the headline of this article even more interesting!
I think you made the right choice for your quality of life. However, if the real distance for the "last mile" was only the short distance you mention, why not use wireless? Introduce yourself to a neighbour who is within the service area, offer to pay for their broadband connection if they'll let you use a few cents' worth of electricity every month and throw a small mast on their house. Use a product like Tranzeo's 5.8ghz radios (less than $300 each end) and you'll have TONNES of bandwidth (or TONS, for you Americans living in the weights and measures stone age). There is really no excuse for paying $450 a month for a T1 when you can use cheap tech to beat the problem. If you live in a heavily treed area and can't get a clear LOS, use Tranzeo's 900mhz radios instead - they're only 11Mbps instead of 54 like the 5.8s, but they will punch through 500m of trees no problem, even in rain. I have used this gear in a lot of installations, and it does work. A total solution will run you less than a grand, even if you have to pay a ladder monkey to install it for you. If there are a number of other residents in your position, you could set up a small co-op and go for a better product like Motorola's Canopy solution. Closer to $700 per subscriber, but phenomenally robust, and it'll punch through trees like a hot knife through "I can't believe it's not Butter!". I get a bit of a chuckle when I hear Americans complain about rural broadband. The US is so densely populated compared to a lot of North America. Up here in northern Canada, where the closest broadband POP can be hundreds of kilometres away, we tend to get creative about it. A lot of small communities up here are putting in their own satellite uplinks and sharing it out via 802.11x to subscribers. Other people are installing relays across mountaintops to get broadband into their area, when the telcos have no interest in helping out. I am honestly not trying to sound smug here, but a lousy half-kilometre gap is a pretty easy obstacle to overcome!
I was under the impression that Down Under slang for vomiting is also "make a sale". As in chunderin'.
Okay - yes, Tranzeo, yes, in a marine environment, no, not on naval or patrol vessels, but on a commercial fishing vessel. 5 kilometres, ship-to-shore. $150 CAD per radio (2 required), 2.4ghz. Horizontal polarisation, approximate antenna height above sea surface was 5 metres. Sure, we had to manually keep the yagi aligned with the shore station, but that's because I was too cheap to build a gyro system. With a 30-degree spread, the yagi was actually pretty forgiving. Actual throughput around 1.8Mbps. On land, I have installed Tranzeo radios over 12km apart - and those are only putting out 80mw (19db gain flat-panel antennas). They rock. Back on topic, people have gotten 50km out of "off-the-shelf" wifi gear (ie, consumer-grade gear from Best Buy, like a Linksys box), simply by placing the antennas at the focal point of large parabolic dishes. This isn't an increase in power output, but rather an increase in GAIN. Antenna gain is the crucial thing here - but you need to have similar gain levels at both ends (duh). Back in the day, I was setting up wifi links in the 10km range using 30mw radio gear from Orinoco and high-gain parabolic (24db) grid antennas. That's not suitable for marine use of course, since those antennas have something like a 3 degree beam spread, so keeping them aligned would be a real bitch. But with 14db yagis, you'd be laughing. My conclusion is that this story is only significant because it shows how stupid the military folks are, not how innovative they are. A 700m ship-to-shore link can be done for cheap-as-free using bits from Best Buy (or my shelf). What they SHOULD have done was implemented a 128kbps VHF solution. For the kind of data they need to send, 128k is plenty, and the VHF is rugged, the signal is robust, the frequency is licensed, and the range is enormous. There's dozen (probably hundreds) of products that'll meet marine specs out there. Whatever.
It's interesting you bring up the Left vs. Right issue, since BOTH extremes result in totalitarian states. Nazi Germany was extremely right-of-centre; the Soviet Union would be considered extremely left. In terms of Canadian politics, I would actually consider my conservative: I believe in less government, not more; I feel my taxes could go to support better services than (our poorly-funded) Universal Healthcare system; and I think I should be allowed to own a gun without having to go through insane amounts of paperwork. Compared to the current US administration, I'm quite a ways left, however. It's just another way in which Canadian and American politics differ. Right now in the US, you have a fairly right-of -centre government that in many ways is rapidly increasing its control of its citizens as this story from /. indicates.
In many ways my own government is following in your footsteps, but fortunately it's not as far along yet, and if your politics swing back a bit closer to the centre, we will follow there too. AT THE MOMENT, however, Canada is still a far less regulated society, and I certainly don't have to worry about some asshats showing up at my door with badges because I criticised the government.
I gotta hand it to our fellow countrymen in Quebec - they do know how to drink, and I love it there! It's too bad BC isn't next to Quebec, because we could both form a new country whose sole ambition was to get high and drink beer! Vive le bier!
Canada doesn't have taverns, we have pubs. Not sure what the difference is, but there ya go!