Canadian Patriot Act, Canadian DMCA, etc... It's a shame that we can't even summon enough effort to name our own misguided Draconian legislation. Next up: "search and replace" function used to change all US references to Canada on US bills. I vote for giving the Privacy Commissioner a veto. From what I can tell, Jennifer Stoddart is the only competent person currently holding office.

The government MUST control the flow of information. Otherwise, the balance of power could rest with the people.

That's why you should always make those sort of self-protections locally initiating. Command Loss Timer Reset not received within the programmed timer duration? Wipe.

If I understand correctly, the Voyager probes have been coasting through space at constant speed since their last respective gravity assist manouvers. I am curious as to how fast they would be travelling now had they been equipped with VASIMR or similar engines thrusting away over that time? It is conceivable that we could engineer a repair vehicle to catch up to Voyager 2 and fix the glitch.

I became aware of this while reading Michael Geist's blog this morning (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/) - a good resource for information about copyright law, privacy matters and so forth. I'm in the process of composing a letter to my MP right now, and I encourage all of the Canadians here to follow suit. Only by voicing your concerns can you be an agent of change.

No, I haven't thought it through. I envision the payment mechanism as the email itself - requiring a fundamental rework of SMTP for example, and essentially an electronic money transfer to the recipient's account (ISP links email address to specified account at user's bank of choice) which must be validated prior to acceptance of the message. I don't know what would be technically involved - I'm not a computer guy, but given that 90% of all email is spam, the overhead to validate and process transactions could be nine times that of actual message traffic before no longer being beneficial. Money goes directly to the message recipient - no third parties involved, and email clients could be configured to simply waive these transactions altogether if a message is purposefully read by the recipient, versus getting caught by a spam filter, for example.

There is no easy technological remedy. That said, I have always been a proponent of an expense based solution, whereby it should cost 10 cents to send an email by making every message a legal account-to-account transaction, with the recipient able to waive the fee upon reading.

A few weeks ago, I viewed a video interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In the interview, he stated that privacy simply doesn't exist anymore, or rather, that the world will need to get used to a "new standard" of privacy in context to online networking. That statement alone was sufficient impetus for me to purge my Facebook acount (I let it sit empty for a few weeks, then deleted it), as well as all other social networking profiles that I irresponsibly let sit on the web, as the statement is indicative of a mindset that will abuse my information in the future, if not now. Many persons may think I am being overly paranoid, but this article is evidence to the contrary, and I feel vindicated in my efforts when I read this sort of thing. On a related note, I have also taken to preferring cash to credit card transactions lately, and have a long standing habit of never disseminating personal information to retailers. I seem to be in the minority, but I refuse to leave myself open to abuse.

Just to be sure that I understand you correctly, you're contributing to Slashdot during a class you are supposed to be teaching, while simultaneously complaining about the lack of education standards?

I was thinking the same thing about Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the 2010 sequel.

85 dB (C) is approximately the noise floor in many locations where I would wear my player. I use both noise canceling headphones and an external headphone amp, so it wouldn't matter so much to me, but I can see this limit rendering a player all but useless unless a customer invests in the additional equipment. Maybe this decision is a result of the electronics lobby?

This time around, the revolution WILL be televised (but apparently, just not in web-streamed 1080p).

Here's why: Your patent only protects you in the country in which you register it, meaning that to retain control of your product you may need to file separately in each jurisdiction - Canada, USA, UK, etc. Also, it is a common misconception that a patent protects you from someone stealing your idea and using it commercially. This is not the case. What the patent does, is afford you legal standing so that when you happen to discover someone who has stolen your idea and used it commercially, you can subsequently sue them for compensation. Not only does this necessitate being proactive in researching possible violations on a continual basis, but should you discover an infringement, the subsequent process in the courts is generally much more expensive than the cost of the patent, and these costs must be considered in any cost/benefit analysis of a patent application. Having a patent without the resources or the means to enforce it is as good as not having the patent at all. Finally, your patent remains valid for a definite time period, after which time the intellectual property of the patent falls into the public domain. The idea here is to give an inventor a reasonable opportunity to recover development costs and make some money on a commercial implementation of the patent material, but to eventually let the intellectual property into the public domain in order to further the sum body of knowledge and technological development. By contrast, if the details of your invention can be obscured in a manner that prevents reverse-engineering, retaining your invention in the form of a trade-secret is often a better choice, as the secret lasts indefinitely - providing you with the opportunity to profit from the invention for as long as you can successfully keep the details out of the public domain.

Don't we all...

Why does a "lucrative service business" exist at all? Is it naive of me to think that the effort that the car manufacturers put forth in lobbying for the protection of proprietary service might be better spent on developing vehicles which don't break down? Walking looks better every day.