I had a little hassle with my Cable Company over cancelling my service, so I just hung up and redialed. The second call was to "remove the cable drop" because the "house was being demolished". They actually gave me a little grief over this, so I said "either you remove it or I will, and I won't be careful". This costs them (around here) about $200 because they contract this to a third party company. Don't worry if you want cable again in the future, they will happily re-install the drop. Costs them ANOTHER $200). You can do this any number of times you want. They will always remove and reinstall at their expense.

Prime Minister Harper is determined to expand FT agreements worldwide. Last week the final touches on the FTA with the EU was finalized. They have eliminated the Canadian Wheat Board late in 2011 ... something that the US vigorously demanded in the original US-Canada FTA signed by George Bush Sr and PM Brian Mulroney and ratified by the two governments in 1988 ... and then equally vigorously demanded a second time when the Canada-US FTA was abandoned and NAFTA (adding Mexico) took it's place. He has also gone on record as saying he will dismantle any legislation that stands in the way of the Trans Pacific Partnership (there are Dairy and Poultry mechanisms that are also on the chopping block, and which the US is keen to exploit once they do).

Since he's already (twice) introduced the very legislation this story calls for over a number of years (due to political realities, like elections and minority governments they haven't yet been able to pass the legislation, but with a fresh mandate and a solid majority this time it won't be an issue) I very strongly suspect this is a planted comment asked for by Canadian diplomats and the US has complied. It's clearly designed to blunt some of the opposition to many aspects of the bill domestically (and which have been subjects on /. previously). The hard reality is he has the power to pass the law anytime over the next 3 years or so and he will.

I can imagine diplomats on both sides smiling at the success of the plant making Slashdot.

It's not like it's unheard of. To get a pilot's licence, you have to experience and recover from a stall ... a potentially fatal condition that causes many air fatalities. The thing is, they don't just talk about it ... they put you in the goddamn airplane, take off and fly in the air, put you at the controls, and then make you stall the goddamn plane, and make you recover from the stall. The instructor sometimes has to intervene to save your life, and his. You can expect to experience pretty much all of the other possible danger conditions, and have to show competency getting out of them, or you fail.

A bunch of mechanical stuff is on the written test ... you have to know about the various kinds of engines, propellers, brake systems, how they work, what to do if one fails, etc.

Having said all that, getting a pilot's license is not "hard". Any reasonably competent person can do it; including a few that shouldn't come within a hundred yards of a pilot's seat. I've flown with five pilots who are now dead, they were competent professionals but that's no guarantee all your problems will go away. They were all better pilots than some others I've flown with who are still alive and still incompetent.

So, it's not like more stringent license procedures would actually give us nothing but good drivers, but it would at least help a few people take it more seriously, and it might give us a slightly higher percentage of better drivers.

As long as people realize that a small improvement is all you're going to get out of it. It's not going to solve any "big picture" issues, which is what I think a lot of people who support it think is going to happen.

I always like to keep in mind a headline from The Onion (a parody news magazine ... only mentioned because I have seen people take an Onion article seriously). But, like all parody, it works best when it reveals an underlying truth. Anyway ... the title:

"97% of Americans polled reveal they are in support of other people taking public transit."

It's pretty hard ... I'd say impossible, but perhaps there's some scenario one might imagine ... to use a manual transmission without anticipating traffic and executing your intentions deliberately and with planning. Nor is it all that easy to fiddle with a cellphone or drink coffee when both hands are needed to operate the vehicle.

If you look at cockpit videos of professional drivers, they have their right hand (North America) either on the wheel or on the shifter, and they don't rest their hand on the shifter; it goes to the wheel the moment it's not needed to operate the transmission.

I won't suggest the average manual driver has the same discipline or habits ... one hand on the wheel is common in every kind of car ... and the automatic transmission is hardly an evil thing, but it frees up an idle hand to create mischief, almost invitingly so.

I don't see anything wrong with a vehicle that requires two feet and two hands to operate; most people have all four and know how to use them.

Although I could be accused of commenting on the obvious, apparently it requires pointing out specifically ... you're there to drive the car. Using both your hands and both your feet to do so is hardly an intrusion; it's the only job you actually have at the moment.

Can't comment on this particular accident.

However, we do have data in Canadian provinces regarding hand-held devices (cellphones, texting behaviour, etc) and driving.

In Saskatchewan (pop 1 million) fatal accidents known to have contributing factors of the driver either taking on a cellphone or texting while driving were 60 in 2010 (the last year data was available), with 8500 non-fatal accidents.

This compares to 69 fatalities attributed to impaired driving, with 760 injuries and only 1400 collisions.

Since impaired driving as a cause can be made with much more certainty (blood alcohol readings are taken from drivers either by breath analysis or blood tests at the hospital or by the coroner when road accidents are involved) it remains a possibility that talking/texting while driving has surpassed impaired driving (about 20%) as the major cause of road fatalities in that jurisdiction.

WTF; rest of my post disappeared.

Should Read:

On That Note ...

An airline was shut down by executive order over a labour (as they spell it in Australia) dispute.

This is not a Slashdot Story. Stop approving these or "utter failure" looms ominously.

" ... Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure. ..."

That was the Slashdot 'Quote of the day' displayed when I read this topic (and set out to grumble, which is what this comment is).

I actually don't really agree with the sentiment expressed ... mistakes are key to learning, and often lead us where our tunnel vision won't let us go. But you can't argue that all mistakes have some saintly outcome; some are just warnings that you should stop now and abandon your course. Maybe the random /. quote generator isn't so random.

On that note ...

Ummm ... you do know that The Onion is a parody news site, right?

Actually, they're neither Radio Shack or Circuit City operations in Canada.

They're owned by Bell Canada; Circuit City USA went bankrupt and in 2009 Bell bought the Canadian assets of The Source from Circuit City, which were still profitable and a viable operation, and operated by a Circuit City subsidiary, a company called InterTAN.

InterTAN was formed from the former Canadian operations of Tandy/Radio Shack ... don't know the exact date, but think 20 years or so, when Tandy USA spun off and sold them to Canadian investors. If you dig through your parts bin, you definitely have to go a long way back to find the Tandy Radio Shack name in the small print on the back of the package if you bought it in Canada; for many people, all they will have will be marked InterTAN instead, even if it says Radio Shack on the front.

There was a licensing agreement to use the Radio Shack name, however, as part of the deal. When Circuit City bought InterTAN in 2004, that licensing agreement was declared invalid (after a lawsuit, by Radio Shack USA, of course) in 2005. Thus the rename to "The Source by Circuit City".

Technically now they're called "The Source (Bell Electronics, Inc)". Some stores, however, to this day retain the old branding with the "The Source by Circuit City" name on the outside signage. You could probably chalk that up to Bell being cheap more than anything else.

InterTAN, which is still based in Barrie, Ontario, was created out of a big part of the "old" Radio Shack operation in Barrie, which was responsible for sourcing components offshore and commissioning the Radio Shack branded parts, like Archer, Realistic, etc, and warehousing and distributing stock for North America. It was sold by Radio Shack's parent company, I believe which is Tandy, and renamed InterTAN at that time.

So, there hasn't been a true Radio Shack in Canada for many years, and although the two companies have been independent for a very long time, there was some relationship that saw the same products in both stores, but also they differed with each offering unique products not available to the other. Although there is some relevance because there are similarities between the two national companies product mix and target customers, for the most part this /. submission has nothing to do with the Canadian situation.

Since they're now owned by one of Canada's largest cellular phone networks, it's hardly surprising that the phones are prominently marketed in the stores in Canada.

Apple has NEVER denied that any computer, including it's own, is potentially vulnerable to exploits. Their position is the same as it's always been ... users should take appropriate precautions. At times in the past they've offered for free commercial anti-virus apps as part of AppleCare and DotMac. Current users should download Sophos Antivirus for Mac. It's free.

Australia did not ban Gardisil, it is still available for voluntary vaccination, and the Australian health authorities have no known deaths linked to Gardisil in Australia.

http://www.tga.gov.au/alerts/medicines/gardasil.htm

The rest of your post ... well, Gardicil would have to be just a bit more toxic than even you suggest to have a hope. Either the conspirators are laughably inept, or there's no conspiracy. The /. reader is free to decide.

Reports of deal associated with Gardicil have two things in common; one, no link to the vaccine could be found in forensic investigation, and two, the causal relationship is simply one of sequence; this girl dies of unknown causes, no link to Gardicil can be found, but she had been vaccinated at some point earlier in her life. The link to hot dogs causing the death is equally strong, equally unproven, equally unhelpful, and equally attractive to paranoid killer hot-dog conspiracists.

Well, 25 of 26 don't sign into Facebook daily. 4% losers ... sounds about right, Facebook or no Facebook.

" ... However, I'm still pretty sure they couldn't just pour whiskey in the tank and expect it to work. Your gas line antifreeze is basically just alchohol, sure -- but whiskey on the other hand, even if it was 180 proof, is still 10 percent water. Ever try to run a car on watered down gas? ..."

Well, "whisky" is not what you would get from a quick distillation. 180 proof alcohol (95% alcohol, 5% water) most certainly does work fine as a fuel in an internal combustion engine. In fact, aside from the taxes and the fact that it does not have poisonous alcohol added to prevent drinking (denatured alcohol) the liquor store variety is exactly the same thing as acceptable fuel grade alcohol.

Alcohol absorbs water ... petroleum (like gas) won't. Water will not necessarily prevent combustion if additional fuel is present ... water injection is common in supercharged applications, for example, and gasoline that contains suspended water will still support combustion usually to the point where the fuel filter is saturated with water and won't allow any more gas to pass to the engine. Gas line antifreeze actually works by mixing with water in gasoline fuel, absorbing that water into the alcohol, and since alcohol and petroleum will mix, suspending that water within the gasoline fuel itself, where it can be a component in combustion without ill effects.

Water will separate from alcohol-based fuel in storage ... in as little as a few weeks in a car's fuel tank if you use E85 from the pump, for example ... but while suspended in alcohol, it's not an issue and it will most definitely run in a vehicle.

Gas line antifreeze (methyl alcohol) also contains water in the factory-sealed container, as does all alcohol-based fuel ... It becomes fairly stable at the 95% : 5% ratio, but not at higher alcohol concentrations, where it will simply absorb water from the atmosphere when the last 5% is water free. Also, it's difficult to remove 100% of the water from any alcohol, especially once you get to the 95% point, each successive process to remove water removes only a portion, not the full remaining 5%, so most alcohol based fuels still contain some water even in the factory sealed container.

If you're already at your lowest acceptable price, then there is little you can do to attack piracy from a pricing standpoint. I would think that puts you at the point where you could reasonably consider non-price based anti-piracy efforts to address the issue.

I don't think Geist is advocating abandoning or denigrating anti-piracy efforts; I think instead he is suggesting there are situations out there where vendors are not selling at their lowest acceptable price in order to maintain market pricing across diverse geographic and economic areas.

Whether that actually even applies to an iPhone app is debatable ... that market is still limited to mature economies and economically comfortable users. There was a time when, say, DVDs or business software applications were limited to those same economies, but that is not true today. 20 years ago a movie rental store paid $100 for a VHS tape when at the same time ordinary consumer could buy them for $20, and that pricing structure was protected by copyright laws regarding lending and rental versus ownership and private viewing.

What ended up happening is that $100 price fell to the new-release consumer price for both buyers. Now we have a market where streaming movies have put the rental business in disarray, and the studios now try to earn revenue from licensing or limited distribution, or both. Again, they have adjusted their per-unit pricing to reflect market reality. Even though they have done so reluctantly, to say the least, it's an admission of the market reality. The question then becomes are they justified in maintaining the higher per-DVD price in markets where streaming is not an option ... Netflix is only available in two markets at this point in time.

I don't know if that's an example of Geist's argument being implemented but it certainly might be.

There is a transition point when your product becomes a worldwide commodity attractive to what would be middle-class buyers ... I don't see iPhone apps there yet. When it does, there is a tradeoff between vastly larger buyer pools and per-unit pricing that is worth exploring as it relates to the likelihood of piracy becoming rampant.