I usually open up the cover, power it the drive up so it spins (so a platter is exposed), use a dremel with a grinder attachment to damage the first layer. This will already make it unrecoverable.

After that I take the bunch of platters and bring it to a scrap metal dealer so it can be recycled / smelted.

Instead of spending so much money on the hopeless white elephant of online voting, they should just give out 50 to 100$ cash at the polling station to everyone who actually votes.

Even an online voting system where the whole software stack is open source, hardware is standard commodity hardware, with feeds of the votes cast provided live to all political parties, and with the software stack and hardware specs provided to the parties and independent observers, it would still be impossible to protect against the gazillions of issues on the voter's computers that could still affect the results.

Even though it looks like one issue, these issues reach deep into the other more mainstream issues.
Just in Quebec, faster generics can save at least 3 billion$ (that's a pessimistic estimate) on the cost of providing the publicly funded drug plan. That's all money that can be reused elsewhere.

It will be our own SSL CA, initially the launch will only support OpenVPN, but other technologies might be added later if we're confident that they are secure.

I've started the canvassing to be the candidate in Laval - Les Îles
I figured that I can't just wait for someone else to do it for me.

I've just opened a twitter account if anyone cares to follow me.
http://twitter.com/stephanebakhos

It's even worse then you think. The CRTC, as part of the way it is organized, is actually headed by ex-directors of the telecommunications companies.

When a company wants to add more charges to fleece customers it usually follow this flow:
1. Apply to CRTC
2. CRTC posts public comments
3. CRTC ignores 99% of the against comments and grants between 30 and 50% of the request
4. Provider appeals
5. CRTC restarts the process, media by then has started ignoring the issue at point 1
6. CRTC grants the appeal, keeping some elements "for further review"
7. CRTC accepts the last elements after the "further review", thus the telcos get their pie and CRTC saves face.

As for choice, I'm living in suburbia of Montreal. 2nd biggest city of Canada.
We have 2 providers for the infrastructure: Bell and Videotron.
Videotron started usage based billing years ago, they also monitor connections and send you bitchy emails if you dare use P2P or BitTorrent. They are also owned by Quebecor, a major media conglomerate.

The only 2 "competitors" I know of are SkyNetCanada (800$ setup fee + 100$/month for 3mbps) and FibreNoire, which would be happy to get service to my house if I pay the build fee (10000$+).

The market is producing an absolute pants load of entertainment every week.

This is what is coming for the rest of this month (20 days)
24 movies (only cinema, not DVD releases)
33 CD
8 X360 games

How are we supposed to sort through all of this with the very limited demos available?
Should we just remain apathetic to it all?

Many of us also took a lot of guesses at various products and got burnt big time.

If you want to get politically active, a political party is needed.

Pirate Party of Canada
www.pirateparty.ca

In Quebec while the contract is with the retailer, you can sue the both the retailer and the manufacturer for problems and liabilities.

In fact, stopping games from working with an older version of the firmware could also be used in court, as these are all conditions that are added after the initial contract (the sale). Furthermore, the consumer rights law in Quebec are very clear on the point that no contract can revoke any rights granted by the law.

The name "Pirate" is a great attention grabber, and by utilising it, we hope
to change the connotations of the name, and help show that people considered
"pirates", roughly 85% of the Canadian population, are not criminals, and
are as legitimate as we are.

Pretty much this is a major legal limbo.

There was a judgment that basically said that since we pay the cd-tax, we can't be sued civilly for using CDs to pirate music. That was appealed and set aside, meaning that legally the issue is undecided. The RCMP (our FBI) also said that they have much more important things to do then to investigate personal use pirates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing_in_Canada has a decent writeup of the situation.

Keep in mind that there is also much more to the Pirate Party then file sharing. Patents and Privacy are also very important aspects we fight on, and we've recently added Digital Sovereignty to counteract the Cybersecurity bill in the USA.

guest@xkcd:/$ who

Doctor Who?

(on the last comic)
guest@xkcd:/$ next

Time travel mode not enabled.

guest@xkcd:/$ enable time travel

TARDIS error: Time Lord missing.

guest@xkcd:/$ cat xkcd.com

You're a kitty!