Simple bills do not require 60 votes to pass in the Senate. A simple majority is all that's required to pass ordinary bills. That's straight from the home page of http://www.senate.gov/ for crying out loud. I'm not sure which magical land of civics you grew up in, but it wasn't the one that covers the United States Senate.
60 votes are required to end debate when a senator or senators choose to deny the Senate the opportunity to vote for a bill. Sometimes there's a legitimate reason for doing so, if issues remain for discussion in the "deliberative" legislative body. Other times it's a procedural trick to prevent the passage of a bill a senator (or senators) simply don't like.
Tragically, the Senate seems to have an informal agreement not to require Senators to actually be debating in order to prevent a vote. Someone threatens to filibuster, and the proponents of the bill cave and don't even attempt to call for an end to debate so that a vote can be taken.
According to the GP link, the vehicle had left the window and stopped. When she was removing the lid, she spilled it on herself. No handoff problem, no screwed up lid. Just an unfortunate old woman who didn't keep the cup upright.
Whether or not you CAN make coffee at 140, or 160 degrees, you cannot make GOOD coffee at 140 or 160 degrees. No amount of grind trickery will get around needing time and heat to brew a good cup. But even accepting that, 160 degrees spilled on sweat pants in your lap is perfectly capable of inflicting severe burns.
I get that it's inconvenient to take some responsibility for yourself when you order something that's ordinarily made hot, ordinarily served while hot, is easily sensed to BE hot by touch and visually, and has CAUTION - HOT! written on the container. Or you can go all in on the United States of America tort lottery, and sue White Castle because you get fat on an all-Slider diet.
Coffee is supposed to be brewed hot. Scalding, even. The quality of coffee drops off rapidly if the brewing temperature is below 195 degrees. If my home coffee maker brewed coffee with 140 degree water, like that link claims most do, I'd toss it in the trash - because it'd make shitty coffee.
Lawyers have a vested interest in tricking people in matters like these. They benefit as long as there are morons on juries that believe that people who get precisely what they ask for, and do something stupid with it until they injure themselves deserve a payday. Determined morons will find a way to hurt themselves with anything. Such as someone who can't keep a mcdonalds coffee cup, that anyone with a remotely functioning nervous system could identify as hot, upright -in a stationary vehicle-.
Copying for Private Use
Where no infringement of copyright
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
Limitation
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):
(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;
(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;
(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or
(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
1997, c. 24, s. 50.
You can make a copy of musical works for your own private use. You can't make a copy for a friends private use. The levy is only peripherally related, as it is also addressed in the Copyright Act.
Liability to pay levy
82. (1) Every person who, for the purpose of trade, manufactures a blank audio recording medium in Canada or imports a blank audio recording medium into Canada
(a) is liable, subject to subsection (2) and section 86, to pay a levy to the collecting body on selling or otherwise disposing of those blank audio recording media in Canada; and
(b) shall, in accordance with subsection 83(8), keep statements of account of the activities referred to in paragraph (a), as well as of exports of those blank audio recording media, and shall furnish those statements to the collecting body.
Federal courts have decided that DVDs, MP3 players, hard drives and so on are not "blank audio recording medi[a]". As such, there is no authority in the Copyright Act from which the copyright board can impose a levy on those devices. Parliament would have to grant authority in order for those items to have a levy imposed.
Anyway, this is just a guy who knows nothing about cooking and probably not much about chemistry. Don't think it malicious.
Crafting legislation about things he has no fucking clue may not be intended to be malicious, but it is without a doubt hazardous to the public. What will this imbecile legislate next, banning human production of CO2?
Re:Indeed... let's move forward with the current p
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Once upon a time, big successful companies had no trouble justifying R&D to shareholders. Then MBAs started being given out like candy, with teaching that the only thing that matters is the next quarter stock price. Cutting R&D frees up a bunch of money in the next few quarters. That makes short term investors and managers happy. But it comes at the cost of mountains of FUTURE revenue from the fruits of R&D. So you have companies like DEC and HP that went from research and development powers, to a company that makes commodities - cookie-cutter cheapest-parts-they-can-find PCs and shitty printers.
A tonne is 1000 kg. A ton is 2000 lbs. Unless you're in Britain, then it's 1016 lbs.
1 teragram is (very approximately) 2200x10^9 lbs. Or 1.1 million tons.
The problem with treating the school as an indivisible entity:
The taxpayers pay the bill. The douchebags that thought that this camera program without a police report for the stolen laptop will be back to ill thought out plans unhindered.
The nature of copyright has to evolve with current times and technologies, allowing P2P downloads for personal use while putting a fee on MP3 players and blank media is a compromise that I see as fair.
The media levy is great for people who want to justify getting music without paying for it.
However, people whose works are being distributed have no way of being fairly compensated out of the levy collections. By fairly compensated, I mean that levy proceeds are distributed in a way related to the relative volume of the distribution of material. At present, from their policies*, distribution of funds is based on sales and some airplay data rather than volume of exchange. And based on their own data**, over 10% isn't distributed to "artists" at all.
And unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted works isn't the only use for blank media. Penalizing people who aren't infringing anyones rights is fundamentally unjust.
At any rate, the blank media levy applies to tapes and CDs. Federal courts told the Copyright Board they didn't have the authority to impose any levy other media.
It exists outside the law (truly: a Canadian court ruled the Olympics violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but did nothing because the IOC is outside Canadian jurisdiction)
The defendant in the case was VANOC, not the IOC. That is a critically important element of the case. VANOC doesn't have the power to decide which events to include, they do have the contractual obligation to implement facilities for the events the IOC decides. VANOC in fact had been helping with providing women access to ski-jump facilities to practice, and unsuccessfully for their inclusion in the 2010 games.
The court examined the arguments, and found that men's ski-jumping being grandfathered into the Olympics was the critical factor in women being discriminated against by IOC policies. That is, neither men nor women meet IOC requirements for inclusion in the Olympics. Neither has sufficient participation and world standing to be included. IOC policy allows for inclusion of "traditional" events, such as men's ski-jump - which at one time met requirements for inclusion in the Olympics, discriminates against women - who have never met the requirements for inclusion in the Olympics. So the just solution would be for the IOC to discontinue men's ski-jump. That'd be a lot of help to the women who brought suit...
An admin may have access to customers email, but does not "in the ordinary course of business" go snooping through them. Unless they're a complete douche.
Why would companies choose to go into areas that are heavily saturated? This would only be feasible if they have some dramatic innovation to offer,
This is one of the textbook cases of how natural monopoly/duopoly arise. The cost of entering the market is high - digging up the street, buying pole space, connecting houses, etc. If there's already a market actor present, the expected return on the investment of entering that market is small. From the perspective of an investor, his money is invested better elsewhere.
Fiber doesn't provide all that much benefit over cable or dsl to most residential addresses. If all you do is check email, a few stock prices, and do light surfing, all that extra speed does jackshit. So the price that a new entrant can charge for their shiny new service has to be low, to attract any volume, or high enough that the very few who will pay that much of a premium will cover the costs and profit margin.
And these issues exist no matter what regulations are in place. Digging up streets is very costly, and so is renting pole space. Nevermind the labor costs of running new wires.
But keep on trumpeting that it's "regulation" impeding "the market". The market that's always justified using "perfect competition" models, except for the inconvenient bit where competition drives firm profits to zero.
The ISPs should have SLAs that document precisely how much bandwidth they are allowed to peak at.
They thought they did. They had contracted backhaul aggregation to their peering point at 151 Front St. One tariff covers the copper between end users and the CO, another tariff covers backhaul from COs to peering locations. The backhaul tariff resulted in Gig-E links from the Bell cloud. ISP looks at how much bandwidth they need, contract for that amount, plus error margin, plus expected growth. Peak requirement happens to occur during the hours Bell throttles. ISP is already tied into multi-year contracts for aggregated bandwidth that no longer matches their actual requirements.
The ideal world where third party providers can get customer concentrations high enough to create a business case for colocating DSLAMs and having their own backhaul or peering at each CO, or even at a meaningful number of COs, simply doesn't exist. Nevermind that many, many customers either cannot get dsl from a CO (only available through remotes, which Bell doesn't have to provide access to), or CO connections are available at embarassingly low sync rates.
Like all bills, there are some interesting bits to it. For example, requests of service providers can be made by (for the purposes of carrying out the duties of) the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or the Commissioner of Competition under the Competition Act (Section 16.2). Federal police body, intelligence body... I can see why they might have a desire to get subscriber information, but the competition commissioner? What kind of competition requires particular subscriber data - other than maybe the RCMP and CSIS competing for liberty-trampling-jackboot-thug-of-the-year.
It isn't -quite- as ridiculous as the summary makes it out to be. Section 17 outlines the circumstances under which police may request subscriber information, and while it falls short of requiring a warrant be issued, it is allegedly limited to circumstances of imminent harm by or to the subscriber. Section 17 also requires reporting by the police to the applicable agency who would normally make a request, listed in section 16. Section 18 refers to records which must be kept when requests are made. Section 19 restricts the use of requested information to the matter about which the request was made (no fishing expeditions or tying subscriber information into other matters). Section 20 outlines auditing and reporting by the bodies making requests, the privacy commissioner, and the Minister responsible for the requesting body.
Like many businesses these days, the "unethical practice" isn't the underhanded, slimy, douchebaggery. The unethical practice referred to is getting caught. Anything it takes to raise short-term stock prices!
While I'm sure it's sad for his family, it's NOT always sad when someone dies.
People who exploit the public and abuse its institutions, whatever their politics, are not owed sympathy or some rose-tinted remembrance. I'm not saying whether this particular person did or didn't, this is a general statement.
I don't think that most of the douchebags that run for public office actually believe that they're lying to achieve goals, making impossible promises (lies) during a campaign, or taking bribes (or future career options) for political favors. And they seem to really believe that creating a nanny/police state is the SAME as freedom. If their brains don't think there's any lying going on, will any truth serum or truth-zapping make a difference?
If there's one thing society needs to reward, it's extortion. Hiring this asshole is no better than hiring the mafia for traditional police services. They've shown excellent judgement and social conscience up to this point, so surely we can expect them to continue to do so once hired, right?
Pay me, or I'll hack/beat/rape/kill you!
Teksavvy gets last mile copper, and DSLAM to peering location at 151 Front St, in Toronto from Bell. If they had peering at each CO and remote, then Bell really would have no justification to impose throttling. Bell is claiming that some network links between the DSLAM and edges of their network are inadequate.
What's particularly greasy is that Bell negotiated transit bandwidth agreements with third party ISPs, and then pulled this throttling crap on them. So Teksavvy negotiates a multi-year agreement with Bell for X Gbps transit, so that they can serve their clients during peak hours and be prepared for anticipated growth of their subscriber base. After being locked into transit contracts, Bell starts throttling during peak hours, thus changing the bandwidth that Teksavvy would need during these hours. Further, they don't provide third party providers information about WHICH clients are throttled, putting third parties at a further disadvantage for planning bandwidth needs.
The Supreme Court of Canada just cleared the way for the sale of Bell to interests which are financing the sale to the toon of 34 billion dollars of new debt for a company with annual profits of about 4 billion dollars. I'm not at all surprised that Bell is electing to spend a relatively small amount of money on throttling boxes, rather than making any real investment in infrastructure.
In the overwhelming majority of homes the ONLY complicated element of a literate homeowner performing their own electrical wiring in compliance with the NEC is sifting through ambiguous and/or contradictory elements of the NEC. Requiring a licensed electrician to perform electrical wiring in your own home makes about as much sense are requiring a licensed nutritionist to cook your meals, or a licensed landscaper to mow your lawn.
I don't think teachers are being paid enough and they are certainly not valued enough by the community. Once upon a time, the best and brightest minds went into the teaching profession; it had respect and was highly valued. Now, it's whoever wants to become one, winner by default. The best and brightest need to be attracted back. Why would somebody who has the ability to earn more than four times the national average wage go into a job that earns less than the average wage?
Not only do teachers not get paid enough to attract and retain the good ones, but teachers unions and the fear of lawsuits make firing the awful ones nearly impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for noticing my MAGNIFICENT driving! And thanks in advance for staying the hell out of my way. :)
Simple bills do not require 60 votes to pass in the Senate. A simple majority is all that's required to pass ordinary bills. That's straight from the home page of http://www.senate.gov/ for crying out loud. I'm not sure which magical land of civics you grew up in, but it wasn't the one that covers the United States Senate.
60 votes are required to end debate when a senator or senators choose to deny the Senate the opportunity to vote for a bill. Sometimes there's a legitimate reason for doing so, if issues remain for discussion in the "deliberative" legislative body. Other times it's a procedural trick to prevent the passage of a bill a senator (or senators) simply don't like.
Tragically, the Senate seems to have an informal agreement not to require Senators to actually be debating in order to prevent a vote. Someone threatens to filibuster, and the proponents of the bill cave and don't even attempt to call for an end to debate so that a vote can be taken.
According to the GP link, the vehicle had left the window and stopped. When she was removing the lid, she spilled it on herself. No handoff problem, no screwed up lid. Just an unfortunate old woman who didn't keep the cup upright.
Whether or not you CAN make coffee at 140, or 160 degrees, you cannot make GOOD coffee at 140 or 160 degrees. No amount of grind trickery will get around needing time and heat to brew a good cup. But even accepting that, 160 degrees spilled on sweat pants in your lap is perfectly capable of inflicting severe burns.
I get that it's inconvenient to take some responsibility for yourself when you order something that's ordinarily made hot, ordinarily served while hot, is easily sensed to BE hot by touch and visually, and has CAUTION - HOT! written on the container. Or you can go all in on the United States of America tort lottery, and sue White Castle because you get fat on an all-Slider diet.
Coffee is supposed to be brewed hot. Scalding, even. The quality of coffee drops off rapidly if the brewing temperature is below 195 degrees. If my home coffee maker brewed coffee with 140 degree water, like that link claims most do, I'd toss it in the trash - because it'd make shitty coffee. Lawyers have a vested interest in tricking people in matters like these. They benefit as long as there are morons on juries that believe that people who get precisely what they ask for, and do something stupid with it until they injure themselves deserve a payday. Determined morons will find a way to hurt themselves with anything. Such as someone who can't keep a mcdonalds coffee cup, that anyone with a remotely functioning nervous system could identify as hot, upright -in a stationary vehicle-.
You can make a copy of musical works for your own private use. You can't make a copy for a friends private use. The levy is only peripherally related, as it is also addressed in the Copyright Act.
Federal courts have decided that DVDs, MP3 players, hard drives and so on are not "blank audio recording medi[a]". As such, there is no authority in the Copyright Act from which the copyright board can impose a levy on those devices. Parliament would have to grant authority in order for those items to have a levy imposed.
Crafting legislation about things he has no fucking clue may not be intended to be malicious, but it is without a doubt hazardous to the public. What will this imbecile legislate next, banning human production of CO2?
Once upon a time, big successful companies had no trouble justifying R&D to shareholders. Then MBAs started being given out like candy, with teaching that the only thing that matters is the next quarter stock price. Cutting R&D frees up a bunch of money in the next few quarters. That makes short term investors and managers happy. But it comes at the cost of mountains of FUTURE revenue from the fruits of R&D. So you have companies like DEC and HP that went from research and development powers, to a company that makes commodities - cookie-cutter cheapest-parts-they-can-find PCs and shitty printers.
A tonne is 1000 kg. A ton is 2000 lbs. Unless you're in Britain, then it's 1016 lbs. 1 teragram is (very approximately) 2200x10^9 lbs. Or 1.1 million tons.
The taxpayers pay the bill. The douchebags that thought that this camera program without a police report for the stolen laptop will be back to ill thought out plans unhindered.
Sadly, hospitals are not allowed to beat people until they have a condition worthy of visiting the ER, if they come in with a cold or stubbed toe.
The media levy is great for people who want to justify getting music without paying for it.
However, people whose works are being distributed have no way of being fairly compensated out of the levy collections. By fairly compensated, I mean that levy proceeds are distributed in a way related to the relative volume of the distribution of material. At present, from their policies*, distribution of funds is based on sales and some airplay data rather than volume of exchange. And based on their own data**, over 10% isn't distributed to "artists" at all.
And unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted works isn't the only use for blank media. Penalizing people who aren't infringing anyones rights is fundamentally unjust.
At any rate, the blank media levy applies to tapes and CDs. Federal courts told the Copyright Board they didn't have the authority to impose any levy other media.
* http://cpcc.ca/english/pdf/CPCC_Distribution_Eng_0401_2010.pdf
** http://cpcc.ca/english/finHighlights.htm
The defendant in the case was VANOC, not the IOC. That is a critically important element of the case. VANOC doesn't have the power to decide which events to include, they do have the contractual obligation to implement facilities for the events the IOC decides. VANOC in fact had been helping with providing women access to ski-jump facilities to practice, and unsuccessfully for their inclusion in the 2010 games.
The court examined the arguments, and found that men's ski-jumping being grandfathered into the Olympics was the critical factor in women being discriminated against by IOC policies. That is, neither men nor women meet IOC requirements for inclusion in the Olympics. Neither has sufficient participation and world standing to be included. IOC policy allows for inclusion of "traditional" events, such as men's ski-jump - which at one time met requirements for inclusion in the Olympics, discriminates against women - who have never met the requirements for inclusion in the Olympics. So the just solution would be for the IOC to discontinue men's ski-jump. That'd be a lot of help to the women who brought suit...
An admin may have access to customers email, but does not "in the ordinary course of business" go snooping through them. Unless they're a complete douche.
This is one of the textbook cases of how natural monopoly/duopoly arise. The cost of entering the market is high - digging up the street, buying pole space, connecting houses, etc. If there's already a market actor present, the expected return on the investment of entering that market is small. From the perspective of an investor, his money is invested better elsewhere. Fiber doesn't provide all that much benefit over cable or dsl to most residential addresses. If all you do is check email, a few stock prices, and do light surfing, all that extra speed does jackshit. So the price that a new entrant can charge for their shiny new service has to be low, to attract any volume, or high enough that the very few who will pay that much of a premium will cover the costs and profit margin. And these issues exist no matter what regulations are in place. Digging up streets is very costly, and so is renting pole space. Nevermind the labor costs of running new wires. But keep on trumpeting that it's "regulation" impeding "the market". The market that's always justified using "perfect competition" models, except for the inconvenient bit where competition drives firm profits to zero.
They thought they did. They had contracted backhaul aggregation to their peering point at 151 Front St. One tariff covers the copper between end users and the CO, another tariff covers backhaul from COs to peering locations. The backhaul tariff resulted in Gig-E links from the Bell cloud. ISP looks at how much bandwidth they need, contract for that amount, plus error margin, plus expected growth. Peak requirement happens to occur during the hours Bell throttles. ISP is already tied into multi-year contracts for aggregated bandwidth that no longer matches their actual requirements.
The ideal world where third party providers can get customer concentrations high enough to create a business case for colocating DSLAMs and having their own backhaul or peering at each CO, or even at a meaningful number of COs, simply doesn't exist. Nevermind that many, many customers either cannot get dsl from a CO (only available through remotes, which Bell doesn't have to provide access to), or CO connections are available at embarassingly low sync rates.
The actual text of the bill is at C-47.
Like all bills, there are some interesting bits to it. For example, requests of service providers can be made by (for the purposes of carrying out the duties of) the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or the Commissioner of Competition under the Competition Act (Section 16.2). Federal police body, intelligence body ... I can see why they might have a desire to get subscriber information, but the competition commissioner? What kind of competition requires particular subscriber data - other than maybe the RCMP and CSIS competing for liberty-trampling-jackboot-thug-of-the-year.
It isn't -quite- as ridiculous as the summary makes it out to be. Section 17 outlines the circumstances under which police may request subscriber information, and while it falls short of requiring a warrant be issued, it is allegedly limited to circumstances of imminent harm by or to the subscriber. Section 17 also requires reporting by the police to the applicable agency who would normally make a request, listed in section 16. Section 18 refers to records which must be kept when requests are made. Section 19 restricts the use of requested information to the matter about which the request was made (no fishing expeditions or tying subscriber information into other matters). Section 20 outlines auditing and reporting by the bodies making requests, the privacy commissioner, and the Minister responsible for the requesting body.
Your wife is so imaginary even the word won't appear?
Like many businesses these days, the "unethical practice" isn't the underhanded, slimy, douchebaggery. The unethical practice referred to is getting caught. Anything it takes to raise short-term stock prices!
While I'm sure it's sad for his family, it's NOT always sad when someone dies. People who exploit the public and abuse its institutions, whatever their politics, are not owed sympathy or some rose-tinted remembrance. I'm not saying whether this particular person did or didn't, this is a general statement.
I don't think that most of the douchebags that run for public office actually believe that they're lying to achieve goals, making impossible promises (lies) during a campaign, or taking bribes (or future career options) for political favors. And they seem to really believe that creating a nanny/police state is the SAME as freedom. If their brains don't think there's any lying going on, will any truth serum or truth-zapping make a difference?
If there's one thing society needs to reward, it's extortion. Hiring this asshole is no better than hiring the mafia for traditional police services. They've shown excellent judgement and social conscience up to this point, so surely we can expect them to continue to do so once hired, right? Pay me, or I'll hack/beat/rape/kill you!
The GP -did- say Fox News.
Teksavvy gets last mile copper, and DSLAM to peering location at 151 Front St, in Toronto from Bell. If they had peering at each CO and remote, then Bell really would have no justification to impose throttling. Bell is claiming that some network links between the DSLAM and edges of their network are inadequate. What's particularly greasy is that Bell negotiated transit bandwidth agreements with third party ISPs, and then pulled this throttling crap on them. So Teksavvy negotiates a multi-year agreement with Bell for X Gbps transit, so that they can serve their clients during peak hours and be prepared for anticipated growth of their subscriber base. After being locked into transit contracts, Bell starts throttling during peak hours, thus changing the bandwidth that Teksavvy would need during these hours. Further, they don't provide third party providers information about WHICH clients are throttled, putting third parties at a further disadvantage for planning bandwidth needs. The Supreme Court of Canada just cleared the way for the sale of Bell to interests which are financing the sale to the toon of 34 billion dollars of new debt for a company with annual profits of about 4 billion dollars. I'm not at all surprised that Bell is electing to spend a relatively small amount of money on throttling boxes, rather than making any real investment in infrastructure.
In the overwhelming majority of homes the ONLY complicated element of a literate homeowner performing their own electrical wiring in compliance with the NEC is sifting through ambiguous and/or contradictory elements of the NEC. Requiring a licensed electrician to perform electrical wiring in your own home makes about as much sense are requiring a licensed nutritionist to cook your meals, or a licensed landscaper to mow your lawn.
Not only do teachers not get paid enough to attract and retain the good ones, but teachers unions and the fear of lawsuits make firing the awful ones nearly impossible.