Coincidentally, they also have the lowest wages, and the lowest quality of life.

If people just wanted to make calls, then Nokia would still be top of the heap.

That's obviously not the case.

You forgot imperial fluid ounce.

Canada is kind of silly. We get:
1.14L bottles of whiskey (UK quart, 40 oz),
1.18L bottles of 'malt liquor' (US 40oz).
Litres of milk, gas, juice, etc. (but juice also comes in US pints).
Beer comes in 341ml bottles (12 UK fl. oz.)
Beer also comes in 355ml cans (12 US fl oz.)
Cola comes in 12 or 20 US oz, and then litre, 2L.

Odd thing with cola - following metrication, for a time we had 500mL cola bottles, glass. Then they went to plastic, "bonus 100ml NOW 600ml!!" bottles. Years later it was revised to 591ml (20 US oz.) - Thing is, it had been a 20oz bottle since they moved to the "bonus", many years before... and they were just fudging the number.

Some of it is really weird. There seems to be no hard metric (one litre, say) hard liquor, even european liquor. They give us UK quarts, even for things like jagermeister... Which comes in 1L bottles in Germany. Why?

We really got robbed in some areas. We used to get things in Imp. gallons (4.55L), got metricated, which moved to hard metric - 4L, and with lack of regulation, i suppose, and less domestic production... everything seems to come in 3.79L, American gallons.

Of course the price didn't change, so we just got robbed 20% volume is all, and made packaging cheaper for Americans. (or Chinese, selling to both markets).

Come to think of it.. the American gallon invasion seems to fit roughly with the timeline of NAFTA.

Yeah. We should get them all to mine and smelt lead with no personal protective equipment / exposure limits / safe handling procedures / etc.

All these regulations are just tying business down, right guys!?

Canada is rather an anomaly in this respect, FPTP generally leads to only two viable parties.

But, regardless, there have still only been two parties (if you count the different iterations of the conservative party as the same) that have ever had power at the federal level in Canada, so it still holds true.

The only time a third party gets second place is when Quebec feels like it. (Bloc in 1993, which was really a party made of defections of the first two anyway, and just recently the NDP, which is a genuine third party).

Quick look at how badly FPTP hurts small parties:
(% vote) (% seats)
39.62% 53.90% (con)
30.63% 33.44% (ndp)
18.91% 11.04% (lib)
6.04% 1.30% (bloc)
3.91% 0.32% (grn)

See how brutally that favours the top two parties? 70% of the vote gets 87% of the seats.

What's even worse is that the first place contender often receives an absolute majority with less than a majority of voters supporting it, as in this case. FPTP causes this, and it's inherently undemocratic as far as I'm concerned.

Precisely this. The last Communist in China was Mao.

Authoritarian is the word.

Yeah, if I was looking to exploit workers and skirt regulations, I'd pick a backwater state, too.

The people there are so stupid they'll even think you're doing them a favour.

If the patent isn't understandable by someone proficient in the field, it is invalid. I'd imagine the Supreme court had called up experts.

The radio said - patent described several chemical structures, but neglected part of the process or which one was the final patented product, something along these lines. Which would be unrelated to the hard to understand part.

Or 10 cents worth of EEPROM.

It used to be generally 22/8 for a half hour slot (27%), in Canada at least. There was a comedy show with 22 minutes in the name, related to that.

It always seemed to me that American channels had more advertising, but maybe it was just more unbearable that it felt longer. Goddamn lawyer ads, loans, no credit this and that, factory outlet, and so on.

I seem to think tv-rips were/are still 20(40)+ minutes, and they fit in half (full)hour slots...

Soon they will have the TV split into a nine part grid, with the show in the centre, and ads running constantly on the other 8 equal sized portions of the screen.

And they'll still have ads on the 'show' portion of the screen half the time.

Then you'll need to get a projector to get the show back to the size it is now.

More and more... whenever I see the internet bareback, or watch TV, or hear commercial radio broadcasts... I'm shocked by how excessive and incessant the advertising is. I don't remember it being quite that bad when I quit watching live TV / started using adblock / only listen to the public radio station.

-5, completely fucking wrong.

Why not BY-SA?

That freely allows mashups and chopping, but they have to release it under the same licence.

I think it's more likely Harper phoned, begging for it. He seems to go out of his way, looking for raw deals for Canada.

Yeah, komovica is the first thing that came to mind - it's very similar to grappa.

All the seeds and whatnot are quite woody, so there is less room for error distilling this stuff. (the wood makes methanol).

I thought they normally fed it to pigs, if not making liquor.