We're a software company, not a taxi company.

Actually, Uber accepted to become a taxi company (and get a taxi licence) in Québec. So THEY ARE a taxi company (that also has a software division).

... Most DVD-Rom drives allow you to change the region DRM only 2-5 times. In other words, you must buy specific equipment by region. Most people will just give up and satisfy themselves with Disney crap, giving up on broadening their culture.

In the end, I did the illegal thing: bought a cheap DVD player with a region hack and... hacked it!

This shows again how copyright laws are a nuisance to the spreading of culture. (Although I could hear the argument of those who claim that karaoke soundtracks are not the richest cultural expression.)

When I emigrated, I wanted to bring some DVDs from home (Europe) to my new land (America), but then I couldn't play them on local equipment because of region-DRM, once again meant to protect "copyrights" for products THAT WERE NOT AVAILABLE anyways in America!

These laws must be rebalanced in order to allow dissemination of culture across country borders. Diversity enriches the whole community, whereas those laws are made to enrich just a few.

After trying to consolidate all my emails on Outlook and then losing a couple of years of archives because of a file corruption, in 2007, I did just that: set up an IMAP server (Dovecot), using MailDir format (which saves each e-mail in its own file). A regular job rsync's everything to another machine for simple backups.

Everything's was then migrated on a Plug Computer (low performance, but excellent power consumption).

The whole setup, from installing Debian to having the server running took less than 4 hours, using online guides.

No matter which party wins, it will be signed. Libs, NDP or Conservatives will all bow down to banks and big money.

It sounds like Volkswagen DOES have the technology to be clean. So why wouldn't they enable this clean consumption mode by default???

Libraries don't PUSH Mein Kampf, people BORROW books. Still, the library is criminally liable (in Germany) if they make the copy of Mein Kampf available.

This is really the question that applies...

Should corporations (a.k.a "moral persons") have more rights than national citizens? Should they be allowed to ignore laws they don't like and replace them with "our corporate policies"? Or, should there be a new international framework to regulate internet communication, rather than trust self-regulation?

Managers of Facebook consider holocaust deniers to have higher morals than women breast-feeding. This is a typical example of what self-regulation will bring.

Facebook managers should face the same legal consequences than the publisher of a German newspaper publishing the same posts. Unless, of course, the answer to the initial question is Yes, in which case there is no reason to forbid sales of drugs through Internet...

Confidentiality

The statistics are about "total water withdrawal", where "some portion may be returned for further use downstream". I guess that the water used to produce hydro-electriciy could be counted as water withdrawn.

In that case, since Canada is producing a lot of hydro-electric power, it could impact the statistics.

Tar sands, on the other hand, although an important source of water pollution, seems to come up to approximately 10 m3/capita/year. In this case, not the culprit...

Society is not a restaurant.

If I was going to buy a drone, then I'd weaponize it and hunt with it directly!!!

No need to walk needlessly in dirty forests or swamps. All done from my cosy armchair, watching the TV and controlling the drone with my wii-mote.

I never thought I would miss Clippy's explanations so much...

Repartition of wealth is not a game of dice.

Humans have will, intelligence and tools that can bias probabilities in one direction or another.

Entropy is a law of physics. Economics is driven by humans and their greed, not by physics.