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.

Yeah.. I had to read it three times, wondering why the British Pornographic Industry cares about music.

http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc11057s.pdf

16ch 12bit ADC (which, like on the old ones, is really a multiplexer on a single ADC).

2ch 16b DAC

9 32b timers
+1 32b timer for real time clock (presumably has 32768 crystal input, divided down, and runs at one second realtime)

Also has a bunch of UART/I2C/SPI channels, CAN, USB host/device, high speed SD card interface, ethernet MAC, ext. bus (for flash, etc).

etc

Every time I go to sparkfun I'm amazed by how much they overcharge. That's about $5 of parts in small quantity, and very little assembly. Nice margin.

Definitely a fan of the AVRs with hardware USB... I've been using them for everything lately.