What are Canadians smoking?

Incumbency, plus the major opposition party sabotaging itself with infighting in the last two elections ("Wahh, I don't want to win if he's the leader.").

That said, we will kick a party out based on a corruption scandal â" if we can find a replacement. As much as I'd enjoy an NDP/Green coalition, what's really going to happen, eventually, is that the Liberals will recover with an electable leader and sell the concept of the Conservatives as arrogant and corrupt. I think Rae could do it absent punditry spending the whole campaign declaring him unelectable, but that's like saying that an empty balloon would float if it had helium in it.

Odd, cause the NDP were fessing up to it according to the National Post.

Rae was NDP back when he was premier of Ontario, but he's federal Liberal leader now.

...none of the parties are looking that great lately...

I certainly hope you're not trying to put the Vickileaks Twitter prank, a protest against the provisions of Bill C-30, in the same category as scumbag election tampering. One hurt the feelings of a cabinet minister who'd just called everyone who didn't support his stupid bill child molesters; the other was an attempt to stop people from voting.

I really wish they'd do something more productive.

The Conservative agenda proceeds apace, with an austerity budget — hey, everyone's doing it, great excuse to gut the public sector — out in a week or so.

A committee will get formed that, after lengthy discussion...

It's worth noting that Elections Canada is investigating, and they have burned the Conservatives before (on the so called "in-and-out" campaign spending limit violations). This won't go away entirely based on a committee of politicians meeting in camera and deciding that everything's dandy.

We have dozens of parties!

Orientation note for foreigners: it's really more like three or four.

And with so many calls, has there been any attempt to cross-reference them with phone logs to try to figure out where the calls originated from?

Oh, yes. The most hilarious detail is a burner phone registered to "Pierre Poutine, Separatist Street, Joliette Quebec." It's one of our best/worst political scandals in a generation.

Amusing you brought up SAGE, as ICBM are of course part of and intertwined with the story of the space age and space age technology. In fact, I'd say it was downright stupid of your and hurts your arguments terribly.

Well trolled! For those playing along at home, SAGE was for spotting and intercepting bombers.

...for every 1 innocent person you save from life sentences or execution you are in effect sentencing many more innocent people to a much more grisly death at the hands of murderers.

Rubbish. Serial killers are rare. What a terrible reason to do less than your best to avoid convicting innocent people.

Government-started is not the same as Government-provided.

Except that if it were up to you, nothing would get "government-started," since you'd decry the initial involvement of the government as a commie plot, so we're back to you getting off of the Internet.

if this isn't proof copyrights are broken I don't know what is.

Actually, it's just proof that either the people you were dealing with were being silly, or that you are lousy at making that kind of deal.

I don't think that a "huge scaling problem" is necessarily implied -- Twitter is probably slow because it's querying your tweets out of its database, not because the front-end Web servers are CPU bound.

They want to "defend against memory safety vulnerabilities?" I assume that they're talking about buffer overflows, if nothing else, and I can think of a couple of ways to prevent them: 1) non-von Neumann architecture; or, and here I'm going really crazy, I know, with an idea that'd disrupt the entire industry: 2) stop using bloody C.