Toronto police union tried this, but got shut down within weeks.

Yup: excessive enthusiasm and pilpul don't make a good mixture.

--dave
[Hmmn, I'm thinking red/green/refactor may be something legal draftsmen may want to investigate. The conviction was RED, this is GREEN, a good case before a superior court would be the REFACTOR]

While it didn't address the lobbying, Jean Chretien's effort to shift party funding to $x per vote cast in the previous election was an excellent first step toward taking the power to influence out of the hands of the people who also hire lobbyists. It's contraintuitive that it was the ex-Reform party members who shut it down and took the election-spending power out of the hands of their own "grass roots".

Indeed: I notice a number of ex-reporters were caught up in the Senate scandal...

Even if you had no parties, individuals need to get thrown out of office, if only to keep them from getting in a rut.

We used to have four parties,
Left Left-Center Right-center Right
NDP Liberal Conservative Reform
plus a Quebec party, plus some oddballs.

We used to get lots of debate, and some very different suggestions from the NDP and Reform, which tended to keep the debate healthy.

Now we have Reform, renamed as the "Conservatives", a rump of the Liberals, and a invigorated NDP. The latter two split the left-center vote, the Reform party wins, and the policies look remarkably homogenized.

Bummer!

On April 8, 2004, the European Court of Justice – the highest court in the world’s largest economy – declared Data Retention to be an excusable violation of fundamental human rights. The court invalidated the entire directive (“EU federal law”) retroactively, making it have never existed. (courtesy Ricvk Falkvinge, https://www.privateinternetacc...

The EU and Canadian constitutions are sort of vaguely similar, so one can likely make the point that, even if the telcos are free to disclose, they're not allowed to keep much of the data the security services would want them to.

If you're doing a workaround, you need to have a regression test for the thing it worked around, so when the bug get's fixed your test fails, someone reads the description and you can turn off the workaround for that platform. That's pretty-ordinary practice from an anal QA person. And yes, I do TDD and still have an QA person siting across the aisle from me.

Clarification: no co-op with a reach bigger than a city or country!

I like the idea of a co-op, especially down at the level of cities and towns. To avoid eliminating rural areas, it should be bootstrapped from the existing companies, with the process of "rural electrification" under a single management, so we can keep it under tight oversight initially, when the expensive mistakes and bad behaviours are likely but are large-scale, then devolve operations onto the smaller areas. In my view, nothing bigger than a county or a city should manage day-to-day operations, like water and sewer, with the province setting the rules and providing the occasional cop.

Relax, they're talking about letting someone run it and policing their behaviour. Just like Ontario Hydro, which misbehaved a few years back and got broken up into parts, with more oversight applied. We're about to have a provincial election where the main question is around the government's involvement in Hydro planning, which demonstrates that the electors (us!) are providing proper oversight.

Yup, the cloudies reinvented timesharing (;-))

What they don't have, however, is a uniform memory architecture. Modern large processors (running AIX, Solaris, etc) are non-uniform memory (NUMA) machines, with memory on the same board as the cpu being faster then memory on the buss.

Memory on cloud/array-computing machines is the extreme of NUMA: the "bus" is an ethernet (;-))

On mainframes, the memory is in the "center" with the CPUs around it in a ring, using a "system controller" (the Honeywell term) to mediate multiple accesses to memory and manage cache consistency. That used to be the most expensive part on the machine, and typically scaled to between 4 and 8 CPUs on the Honeybun. On modern machines it's part of the CPU and cache structure and scales to about 4 sockets on a board. Six on a good day.

Thus you see lots of effort to handle NUMA effects, and get more ALUs and decoders per chip, to get more threads per socket.

Courtesy of Nat Torkington of O'Reilly and BoingBoing, video interview with Susan Crawford about why the Internet should be treated like a utility. She’s the only policy person I see talking sense. There’s a multilarity coming, when a critical mass of everyday objects are connected to each other via the Internet and offline devices become as useful as an ox-drawn cart on railway tracks. At that point it’s too late to argue you need affordable predator-proof Internet, because you’re already over the (sensing, e-ink covered, Arduino-powered) barrel.

In some countries, it would be obtaining a service (the takedown) based upon a false and fraudulent pretense. That's a criminal offence, and an injured party can call upon the Crown to prosecute it as such. Consult a lawyer in the jurisdiction in question, get a quote and take them with you to the fraud squad, to ensure the process happens correctly. It's arguably hard to do correctly in the U.S, as suggested by the low number of convictions reported...

I would expect it to be updated, just like the updates to ssh that have added newer encryption schemes. We're talking IETF, not Telcos!