In Halifax we have The Coast which did the complete opposite. Not only did they not roll right over but they didn't even send a lawyer to defend their having to release the information on anonymous posters. They said something like, "The judge will make a good decision." Hello, in Canada, we too have an adversarial court system where without a defense the plaintiff will win the day.
So Bravo Ripoff Report and burn in hell Coast Magazine.

Cable companies have a huge incentive to protect what is otherwise a dying industry. They will do whatever it takes to block or otherwise interfere with those services that are going to kick their butts. This whole "you didn't pay for the bandwidth" is crap as it is their customers demanding these services and thus if anyone is going to pay it should be the customers. Except at wholesale rates bandwidth is nearly free. Even if you downloaded a gig an hour 24/7 the cost to provide this on a per customer basis is a tiny fraction of what customers are already paying per month. Most of the costs of providing high speed connections are things like call center support and marketing. The tech portion while large is actually tiny per customer per month.

Pretty much everyone around here loves to bash Microsoft but we will have to have a Microsoft party where we all do a Windows theme for a week on our Linux and Mac boxes if Microsoft does some serious damage to the patenting of software.
Seriously, if MS trashes this whole deranged patent situation they will win the true title of "Do no evil masters of 2011". If you were to compare it to other things on our tech head collective wish lists this would rank at the top with Oracle fully opening up Java, or Network Neutrality. The reality is that not many other companies have the resources to see this through to the end. Even Google tends to roll over in the face of these lawsuits. RIM caved in on one, paying out hundreds of millions, just before the patent was tossed. It seems that MS has realized that Patent Trolls are only going to grow into a bigger problem that cuts into smaller margins.
Yes MS will probably burn some of this Karma by being obnoxious but this is a major deposit in the Karma bank to my thinking.
Thank you Microsoft!

Took long enough. I though it would be the ACLU but they seem to have really dropped the ball when it comes to the TSA. Here is the problem with all airport security theater. A dogs are better bomb sniffers than any machine. And B you can put a bomb up your ass. I suspect that the ACLU didn't go after the TSA because they too are turning into a bunch of ass covering bureaucrats and worried about the optics of them shutting down half this airport crap and then some dickweed blowing up a plane and their getting the blame.

I just deleted my bookmark to the Times (I miss Jeremy Clarkson) and after two seconds of searching found Telegraph.co.uk. Done.
Times loses.
BTW with the massive expat community around the world 100,000 subscribers is nothing.

In Canada we have no competition for apparently 6 reasons:
- Previous governments gave a monopoly to friends who supported them. Where these monopolies have collided they don't compete.
- We have no working anti-monopoly laws in Canada preventing collusion and other anti-competitive behavior. Technically we do but please tell me the last time a company was fined and how little they might have been fined.
- The CRTC (our FCC) is the tool that previous governments used to give their friends these monopolies and thus the CRTC will enforce the monopolies behavior not prevent it.
- Any competition that poses an actual threat will be bought out.
- The present government is a minority government and thus is focused on other fish that need frying such as keeping power and maybe finagling a majority. How many bytes people can download is not on their radar for now.
- Many of the telco monopolies also are media giants thus they control what the pubic thinks about this stuff.

Software patents should be the next target of the DoJ. If you can tell me how a one click patent, or other crap obvious patents, are for the general good then please reply.

A key patent rule is non-obvious. I haven't heard of a software patent in years that 8 out of 10 developers wouldn't invent given the same problem to solve. Also prior-art needs to be able to kill patents in an afternoon. A huge amount of this stuff we have all seen from the 90's and yet it is getting patents from applications in like 2008.

Oddly enough Thermal Receipts have the most BPA. Something like a 1000 x as much as you would get from a water bottle.

If you get a receipt and then eat your burger is the receipt a food product regulated in the same way you might regulate a plastic fork?

In Canada regulation will all depend on if the receipt paper is made in Quebec or near Ottawa.

Also ATMs are regularly audited by most customers and banks. If they make any mistakes most people will catch them and complain. If the machines don't tally for the bank then they will look into it. But if your e-vote goes astray then good luck figuring that out.

A paper vote is physical with interested parties scrutinizing their every move. Short of hiring 10,000 tight-lipped magicians for an election it is nearly impossible to steal an election in a western democracy.

Plus if someone cheats and wins an election they now would then be best placed to prevent an investigation.

Long ago I found some setting where you can set ignore posts from a person. No insult given and no more "I'm bored" posts( or more specifically "im board' posts.)
I forget the setting but that is what Google is for.
Although this is best for people who have nothing useful to say. The worst is when 1 post in 100 is critical.

I would love to see the list of things that this guy spent 75 or more dollars on recently; what size TV did he have, XBox?, Booze?, Cigarettes? Did he have cable?, Satellite TV?

If he was having to decide between food for the kids or Fire coverage then that is when the government should step in. But seeing that he lost a few dogs he was spending at least $75 per year on those. Hmmm.... dogs or fire coverage; that is a choice that he made not the government or the Fire Fighters. As for the fire fighters "helping him out" if they do that enough then they will blow their budget and then it will be time to cut some firefighters.

I feel for the guy but I am getting really sick of hard luck people expecting me to pay for not their bad luck but their ineptitude.

I do have one other question: What does this have to do with us tech heads?

Why can't these guys do the right thing and stop making this evil stuff? Playing a shell game with the facts does not change reality.

What I have observed is that a happy income is double your present income. I have seen this with people earning less than 20k and more than a million.
75K would be about double the national average.
Also this 75k number would completely depend on where you are. 75K is poverty in NYC while in most Podunks 75K would make you near royalty.