That was brilliant! The Toronto accent made me laugh hysterically.

8 degrees? Eight degrees? Please, no, not EIGHT WHOLE DEGREES WARMER!! That's about TWO degrees Celsius! I mean, it will be only -38 Celsius here in winter and then 32 Celsius in summer! Oh, the horror! What ever will we do??

Oh, wait, I know! Ignore this douchebag spewing raw sewage from his pie hole.

Concerns about global warming aside (and it's a big aside), Ted Turner was never the sharpest tool in the shed. Lately he seems to be lacking any edge at all.

we need sledgehammers too

Well, we know one thing for certain: he is a tool.

I have to agree with everything ZIKZAK, #2.

Digger sounds pretty neat for distributing your own stuff from your website without breaking the bank to pay for bandwidth, but that's probably about it.

For anything else, it would appear that they only thing it has over the bittorrent protocol is that it doesn't require casual users to download a client. Other than that, the centralized nature of this application makes it impossibly censorship-prone. This is, unless they distribute the server-side application, in which case it is no longer "tracker free". Additionally, the files need to stored on a web server anyway, which is a good thing for the former example (distributing files from your website), but useless for anything else.

I like the idea of the shower of chicken droppings for vandals, but a railway sleeper (a.k.a. "railroad tie") is a heavy block of wood about 7 inches by 9 inches and up to eight feet long. Rubber cap on the end or not, I've got to imagine that firing one of those out of a cannon at an intruder is going to lead to very serious injuries, and equally serious lawsuits.

Maybe it's a bit excessiue, but they tresspassed first. He has the right to protect his property, not that it makes any difference in the UK with health & safety taking over absolutely everything over there.

While I'm definitely sympathetic, I don't think it's good accurate to say that autism is simply a "different way of thinking".

One of the most prominent features of autism is a lack of empathy for others. This is likely caused by a severe reduction in mirror neurons.

Lacking mirror neurons also changes the way that autistics have to acquire new information. In that sense, yes, it is definitely a "different way of thinking".

I really can't see autism as an evolutionary step. At the very least, I hope that the future of our species isn't one that lacks empathy for others.

Her "different way of thinking" keeps her from being able to take a shower on her own. Sounds like a handicap to me.

I have to agree with these statements. While autism is definitely not the same as retardation, it is a disability. It's downright insulting to ignore this fact, to both "normal" people and to autistic people. It's a lie to make everyone all feely-goody and warm'n'fuzzy.

Sure, it may, technically speaking, be a "different way of thinking", but not in way you're thinking it is.

So, who's to blame?

1. Airport Personnel
I'm sorry, but when you leave someone -- someone who doesn't speak English and is in completely foreign surroundings and who may have completely different acceptable behaviours in their home country -- in an airport for nearly half a day, how the heck do you expect them to react? Could those pointless, minimum-wage paid, xenophobic morons masquerading as airport "security" personnel not be bothered to find someone else who could translate from Polish? Perhaps, I dunno, his own mother?

2. Police Officers
A taser death is NEVER acceptable any more than a gun death is. Period. Tasers are meant to be used in place of guns when possible. If deadly force is necessary, use a taser if there is little or no danger to the officer as compared to using a gun.

I will NOT blame the man for not knowing English. This is Canada. I thought we were "multicultural". I thought we accepted immigrants looking for opportunity. I thought wrong.

Haha, that made my day! Thanks :)

@ EPP_B Everyone who cares about the economic health of Toronto, and by extension the rest of Canada, should take a moment to register their discontent with those pigs via the 'contact us' button on their website [ www.mint.ca ].

Of course, I'm not sure why I didn't think of that. Thanks.

Last time around it was hair dressers. I guess they got "car repair garages" on the most recent spin of their random victim generator.

Please tell me to where I can write and to whom I can call to express what I think of this absolute ape dung.

Amazon: an innovator, once again.

Too bad there's still the "we own it, you're just renting" mentality, but un-DRM'd tracks in itself is huge!

Cell phones blow, and it's all because of this industry of racketeering. That's one of the reasons I don't have a cell phone -- that, and I don't want to be one of those obnoxious people who talks on a cell phone incessantly.

Here's what I think would fix the industry:

1. Have an open standard communication protocol for one or all types of data transfer (voice, SMS, data, etc.) and require that all carriers use only these standards. Of course, technological improvements would be inevitable, at which point the standards can be changed, but it should be available to any carrier or manufacturer. This way, you can use any phone on any carrier, no ifs, ands or buts about it.

2. The manufacturers need to grow a spine and tell the content and carrier industries to shove it. Make devices that customers will actually want to buy and the carriers will have no choice but to support them. Give me a cell phone with an MP3 player without wasting engineering time and effort to restrict me from playing them as ringtones, don't charge me a fortune and firstborn for the dang thing, and encourage hacking it. Imagine the cool ecosystem of cell phones we would have if open source geeks could freely get the specs and build whatever OS/firmware the wanted to go on the cell phone!

3. Require that carriers be ONLY carriers. You can't be a carrier and a manufacturer and a content provider. You can only be one of the three and you cannot make deals with any of the others in order to lock a phone to a network, provide exclusive content, etc.

I'm sure it's an innocent typo :-) but I'm trying work out what a Rune Goldberg device is, 'One over engineered widget to rule them all...'

Oops! Yes, a typo, indeed :)

So, the DMCA was supposed allow the music industry to wage war against their own fans and customers, halt innovation, make instant millionaires out of scammers, oppress essential rights and liberties, and otherwise counter-interact the very purpose of this magnificent thing called the world wide web? Well, then, mission accomplished!

Another incompetent Bush appointee.

It should be clarified that it was the Clinton administration in charge in 1998, when the DMCA was enacted.

This nightmare already exists:

I live in a small Sierra community, and there is only one ISP, (SierraTel,) available to us.

SierraTel sells two packages of monthly DSL service, "normal" and "fast." Now, this obviously means that ST is not doing anything to make their DSL service faster for the additional $20/month, but that they're actually slowing down all of us rebels who refuse to be extorted by them.

...which suddenly gets to me wondering about something: You can't use any old DSL modem with the service, you have to rent or purchase a "specially coded" modem from ST... so, could it be that the "fast" or "slow" configuration is selected in the modem?

Hmmmm... Time to break out the tools and have a look see at the jumpers in the modem.

Sorry, that's not a very good example because it's not what we're talking about (and I'm a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth proponent of neutrality).

An ISP intentionally slowing down a single Internet connection for a particular customer who selected a lesser package is normal and there's nothing wrong with it. Because you're provided less bandwidth, you'll transfer less data, it will cost the ISP less money for your throughput and therefore charge you less for the connection. It has nothing to do with QOS or "guaranteed delivery". It doesn't matter what type of connection you have, a $5/month dial-up connection should get you absolutely the same access as an $35/month high-speed cable or DSL connection, just at different speeds because the bottleneck is at your end (not because a business has refused to be extorted by an ISP).

What we're talking about is ISPs double-dipping. An example is AT&T claiming that Google is getting a "free ride". My backside, they are. You pay for your Internet connection from your ISP, Google pays for their Internet connection from their ISP. ISPs then use the money they make to pay for access over the "backbone" of the Internet, which serves to connect ISPs together. What AT&T wants to do is charge your for your connectivity (which is fine) but also charge Google for "guaranteed content delivery" (which is bullocks). "Guaranteed delivery" is implied because both parties are paying for connectivity. That is how the Internet is supposed to work.

For example I make heavy use of Skype Out but quality is patchy and I often have to fall back to regular phone lines.

Why shouldn't I be able to pay my ISP a little extra in return for a guaranteed high bandwidth connection to Skype's nearest Skype Out gateway?

Why not? Because you should be getting good service to begin with. Secondly, that's not a particularly good example. VoIP <-> PSTN is still in its experimental stages and is quite a Rune Goldberg-esque system. It's really quite amazing that it actually works at all.

Secondly, pricing for bandwidth is NOT the same thing as pricing for "guaranteed delivery". Using more bandwidth genuinely costs the ISP money to provide, so you have to pay for it. It's that simple. "Guaranteed delivery" is a scam to wring in people who don't have a proper understanding about Internet infrastructure (particularly politicians)

No... I'm not talking about just higher bandwidth.

I'm talking about a guaranteed service quality for a connection to a particular service provider (Skype).

That's the kind of value added service that net neutrality would prohibit.

No, you're still not getting it. It should be "guaranteed" to begin with, barring any inevitable problems with software bugs, hardware failures, human error, etc.

I don't know what "other things" he's talking about so I won't comment on that. Modern RF spectrum is auctioned to the highest bidder and given the amounts paid it's hard to argue that they aren't buying a property right. As for the "public internet", no, it doesn't belong to the public! It's a bunch of fiber lines and switches and every single one of those is owned by a company, a government, or a private individual.

You mean, except for the millions of dollars the government gave to the telcos and ISPs to lay their lines to provide public access, which came right from the public's pockets via taxes, right?

Also, I'd just like to say to Elisa that I can't express how insightful your comments were. You are absolutely correct.

I've being saying this for a long time: ISPs should be regulated to sell connectivity and nothing else. Period. Wiring should be publicly owned.

This would ensure true competition among ISPs and telcos where one ISP can't restrict another by selling it's lines and abusing them however they please.

Additionally, ISPs should not be allowed to own backbones either; it should be one or the other (or public).

I'm *really* tired of reading about Second Life everywhere...

No kidding. Some people should try getting a first life to for starters...

I don't think the levy is necessarily a bad thing. You just have to get past the selfish, American idea of "I ain't payin' fer yer crap!".

I'm not familiar with the Canadian constitution, but surely they have some equivilent of the U.S. Fourth amendment?

It's called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 8 applies this perfectly.

I find it appalling that TSA inspectors are basically trained to be clueless, xenophobic chimps.

If these people are to be who we're told they are (which, let's face it, they aren't), then they need to be trained properly and include specialists in some common categories of items people bring on board (eg.: electronics, hygienic products, chemicals/medications, etc.).

And maybe find a way to add some glamor to the job. Don't make them egotistical, authoritative power-trippers, but just happy to be there knowing that they're experts in their fields.

The stupidity of the entertainment industry really is astonishing.

That's a great picture. I like the surreal underexposure of it.

I have stayed away from iPods for...ever, actually. Currently, I use my Palm Zire 31. It's great, because it has all the basic hardware architecture for audio playback and I can use whatever software I can find because it's basically a small "computer". The player itself is completely limitless as to the formats, features and so forth as it's all in the software.

TCPMP is excellent for playing many formats and I love the geeky power features and control I get out of being able to anything with it.

The only limitation is the amount of memory (in Secure Digital form) the hardware will support, which is only 1GB. I've pretty quickly met that limit.

If you're looking for something new without pouring money into an (dis)organization to use for suing children, Cowon makes some sleek, harddrive-based players with no anti-competition engineered in, and with vast format support a-la VLC.