Fun fact, s.351(2) of the Criminal Code of Canada already makes it an offence to wear a mask while committing an indictable offense.

The government wants it to be an offence to wear a mask while disagreeing with those in power.

I was a scrutineer for one of the parties at one of the polls in the riding I lived in during the last federal election in Canada. There were two other parties at the poll who had scrutineers. Each of the three of us sat around a table while the deputy returning officer counted each ballot, showed it to the scrutineers, and waited for the scrutineers to not any exceptions. When he was done, the ballots were sealed in envelopes (which the scrutineers were permitted to initial on the seal), and placed in a box for delivery to Elections Canada.

At the end, each scrutineer checked their count against the official count by the deputy returning officer. The vote total was checked against the ballot booklets. All counts were consistent with each other, and the total consistent with the number of ballots cast.

In this polling station there were no irregular or spoiled ballots, and we had a count to report to our candidate HQ, and for the deputy returning officer to report to Elections Canada, in less than a half hour after the polls closed.

There's no need for machines to count votes. And the notion that people can't count votes quickly, and accurately is pure bullshit.

US currency is not backed by gold reserves, and hasn't been in any meaningful sense since the 70s. It's backed by a common belief that the currency in and of itself has value.

The same thing that prevents real competition in all high fixed-cost industries. "The market" produces oligopolies where there are very high fixed costs relative to the variable costs. The incumbent advantage is higher, at least for Bell and Rogers. Both can leverage their other product oligopolies in the ISP market. That is, they can offer price reductions, and multi-product discounts out of their existing monopoly rents. So a new entrant would have to enter all the markets (phone, wireless, tv, internet) to be able to compete. The other obstruction to new entrants is that the incumbents have "special deals" and perform upgrades in an area when an incumbent starts a new deployment (like ftth). They can afford to wait out the new provider, knowing that they can get back to their monopoly rents when the new company goes out of business.

and the execs would find it harder to justify their $100M year-end bonuses.

They can keep using the same line they always have: they need to pay out those salaries and bonuses to attract the most capable people for the positions. It doesn't matter how badly the company does.

Police and military are effort to no productive purpose, so no they do not create value. Imagine two scenarios. The first is reality, where some people insist on stealing from, and killing each other. In such a world, total surplus from productive effort is higher when a portion of total effort is expended on police and military services. The second is magicalfairyland, where people aren't douchey. That effort which was spent on police and military services in the first scenario can now be allocated to productive purpose. The total surplus in magicalfairyland is the surplus from the first scenario, plus the surplus created by the now productive non-military-and-police-services efforts. So as I said, once again douchebags ruin it for the rest of us.

This creates jobs for both sides

It may create jobs, but they do not create value. These jobs are an economic drain. As usual, people who act like douchebags ruin it for the rest of us.

The US exist strategy for Germany? Maintain status quo: US exists, Germany exists.

Damn. You had my hopes up for an exciting career as a car.

Maybe I could learn to be a garden* instead.

* gardener

At the bank I work, you do not receive a bonus for being extraordinarily good. You are entitled for a bonus if you did your job.

That is not a bonus. That is base compensation - even if the amount of the bonus isn't a fixed dollar figure. A bonus is something you are NOT entitled to.

Coming soon, Wikileaks will be declared a terrorist organization, and you go to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for aiding and abetting terrorists.

(Well except for you. You are a MAGNIFICENT driver, and we should all just stay the hell out of your way when you drive.)

Thank you for noticing my MAGNIFICENT driving! And thanks in advance for staying the hell out of my way. :)

Simple bills do not require 60 votes to pass in the Senate. A simple majority is all that's required to pass ordinary bills. That's straight from the home page of http://www.senate.gov/ for crying out loud. I'm not sure which magical land of civics you grew up in, but it wasn't the one that covers the United States Senate.

60 votes are required to end debate when a senator or senators choose to deny the Senate the opportunity to vote for a bill. Sometimes there's a legitimate reason for doing so, if issues remain for discussion in the "deliberative" legislative body. Other times it's a procedural trick to prevent the passage of a bill a senator (or senators) simply don't like.

Tragically, the Senate seems to have an informal agreement not to require Senators to actually be debating in order to prevent a vote. Someone threatens to filibuster, and the proponents of the bill cave and don't even attempt to call for an end to debate so that a vote can be taken.

The problem is usually user-related in this case. If you execute something and "click away" all the little warnings that are liable to pop up that this thing is doing something nasty, you can, without even knowing, escalate the program privileges straight to the top where the antivirus/firewall can't do jack all about it.

Many Anti-Virus packages these days will attempt to deny you access to that part of the computer but I've seen people disable their anti-virus so many times to get "The cute squigglie mouse" to come up on their screen that it actually sickens me. Once thats done if the computer is on a trusted network breaking everything else on the network is relatively trivial unless each machine is set up as its own island fortress which within a company network isn't a good solution as it will also interfere with a lot of day-to-day useful apps.

I always find these legal battles so amusing. Not to bad mouth youtube/google but, the percentage of accounts that have uploaded "infringing content" is such a laughable statistic. I wonder what percentage of accounts have uploaded anything? More than 1 vidoe? More than 2?

My guess is, most accounts would fall into one of a couple of catagories:
1. People who made an account to post a comment, and never used it again
2. People who made an account to upload some stupid video from their phone, and never used it again after one or two such videos.
3. People who wanted to see a video that was only accessible to people who made an account because it had some "mature content"
4. People who would fall into catagory 1-3, but found they liked commenting or having personal playlists
5. Old accounts tied to old email addresses of people who currently are in 1-4.\

If those categories don't account for 70% or more of all accounts, I would be shocked.

-Steve