I'm fine with elections where it actually changes something. Right now we've been having elections just for the sake of having them. Nothing changes. We get minority governments where nothing gets done. A majority government from any party is probably going to make some happy (corporations) and others not so happy (everyone else). I said before that the parties' goals are too different for them to work together. This coming election is merely an unnecessary expense. Re-purpose the money for something we need.. like fixing our highways or funding another sponsorship scandal. I'm aware of what our forefathers have done for us, and I'm happy with my right to vote (which I always exercise). I'm also sure that our forefathers wouldn't want us to waste taxpayer money when there are better things that could be done with it. In Harper's speech when he won the last election he said that canadians have spoken and want the government to work together. Very true. It'll never happen. Another major problem with the elections in our country is the low turn out of voters. How can we know what the majority wants if the majority doesn't vote? What does it show? It shows that the majority doesn't like any party so they abstain.

I've voted in every election since I've been old enough to vote. I'll vote in every election until I die. That's not the problem. The last two elections had the same result.. a conservative minority government. But as it always is, the parties can't work together because they all want to be the ones on top. I'd put money on this coming election having the same result. Especially if we see another low voter turn out. Even if the liberals or the NDP win, it'll still likely be a minority and nothing will get done. The parties have such a disparity in their goals that they just can't agree on what's best for Canada.

All of the parties have more bad qualities than good ones. So, there's more to base your voting decision on.

Every time I think of the NDP I think of what Bob Rae did to Ontario all those years back. Sure, we had great health care, but we couldn't afford it. It put Mike Harris in an awful place.. he had to cut a lot of the stuff the NDP had done, to negative reviews from the public of course, to get us out of our huge debt. An example, my grandfather knows Mike Harris, and he found out that the NDP had a secretary pool of 125 secretaries making around $60,000 a year, and their job was to sit in a building for 8 hours a day, doing nothing but waiting for a call if a secretary somewhere didn't show up for work or quit. That's $7.5 million tax dollars a year and it was one of the first things to go when Mike got in. I do keep an eye on what the parties say.. and to be honest I just don't like any of our parties. There isn't a single party with more advantages than disadvantages. Canada suffered some during the Jean Chretien/Paul Martin liberal years. It suffered during the Brian Mulroney(sp) years.. it's suffering now and it will in the future. I don't agree with a lot of what Harper has done.. but I don't like Ignatieff or Layton, and I really didn't like the whole coalition thing. What Canada needs is an election where more than 52% of the eligible voters actually vote and we can see what the majority says.

While I think it's good the bill died.. as a canadian I'm a little pissed that we're having another expensive election. All of the parties suck. The conservatives (currently in power) are probably the best of the bunch, and that's not saying a lot.

This almost sounds too good to be true.

I'm fairly certain the definition of profit is total revenue less expenses. Gross and net profit sound like terms you'd use when dealing with contracts or expenses that deal with only the profit in the venture and not with the total revenue. Or it's doublespeak for "we aren't going to pay you."

If by profits you mean revenue, then yeah.. otherwise the production costs have to be factored in.. in fact all expenses need to be factored into the box office revenue to determine the profit. I imagine this is where the highly paid accountants in black suits and black SUV's come in to make sure there are no profits.

Newspapers, and a great deal of pre-press rooms, do a lot more than just re-size images. One major feature included in Photoshop but with only rudimentary support in GIMP is the CMYK colour space. I run a printing press. I need images ripped into CMYK (with spots for the colours that can't be represented in it) so that I can get plates to print whatever the customer is looking for. Newspapers are no different. If the page is a full-colour page, they print it CMYK, so they need to take the page layout, find and fix any colours that can't be represented with CMYK (unlikely that they'll use spots), and then send it off to the ripper to be separated into the four colors to be made into press plates. The ability of PS to be able to view the separations before sending to the ripper can be a god-send, as it's very expensive to find out at press time that a colour drops off sharply (which can lead to unsightly lines), or a multitude of other unwanted effects. I've looked at the gimp's abilities for this, and while there is rudimentary support, it's nowhere close to being usable in the printing industry. That said, if you're doing image creation (for a graphic design company), you probably don't need to worry about that stuff because you'll just send the image to the printer and they'll deal with making the image printable (if possible), and GIMP may well work fine if it has the features required to create the image the customer wants. You can't group all image manipulators into one category.

Perhaps I'm an uninformed moron, but I always thought that nuclear explosions were the result of a nuclear fission chain reaction runaway.

Not true. About 12 years ago my uncle was in a bad car accident and was hospitalized. My family and I went to visit him and the doctor told us he was suffering withdrawl from lack of alcohol. The thing is he only had one beer a day.. after dinner. After many years of it I suppose the body gets used to even such a small amount.