In spite of that, email communication and web communication is encrypted/decrypted on the BlackBerry smartphone itself, so RIM (the company that does BlackBerry) can't snoop into your data contents even if they wanted to. That's why some authoritarian countries around the world couldn't quite understand - they demanded RIM hand over the secret keys to let them read any message contents, which they just assumed RIM must have, even though they don't. Similarly, with the riots in Britain earlier this year, the authorities complained that the rioters were co-ordinating using BlackBerry phones, and they couldn't intercept those communications. To me, that's a strong recommendation for a BlackBerry if you want security and privacy.

Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass equivalent for matter? Given what we know about the laws of physics, does it seem to be required that they are equivalent for the laws of physics to be consistent or for any other reason? Or does it seem to be, as far as we currently know, just a coincidence that they are equivalent?

Yeah, I used that AI textbook, too, for my fourth-year "Intro to Artificial Intelligence" course at the University of Waterloo.

(1) It's not about whether the rights are reasonable, it's that any restrictions of those rights need to be reasonable.

(2) It's not the government that gets to decide what limits are reasonable, it is the judiciary.

There hasn't been a Queen of England since 1707 when England ceased to exist as an independent kingdom. Referring to her in this story as the "Queen of the United Kingdom" or the "British Queen" would have been a much better way to let most readers know who is on the obverse of the coins without being completely wrong as "Queen of England" is.

And, technically, it is the Queen of New Zealand who is on these coins, because Niue is in "free association with New Zealand and, although it is not part of the country of New Zealand, it is part of the Realm of New Zealand.

I know you didn't claim otherwise, but I wanted to point out that Queen Elizabeth II is not the head of state of most countries in the Commonwealth. Of the 54 independent countries in the Commonwealth, she is head of state of 16 of them. (A majority of the Commonwealth countries, 33 of them, are republics.)

Also, Niue is not technically a Commonwealth country, because it is not a fully independent sovereign state - it is in free association with New Zealand, which provides defence and conducts foreign affairs for Niue.

But yes, for these coins, the Queen is on them because Niue citizens are under the sovereignty of New Zealand and thus the Queen as Queen of New Zealand.

This was up on the AV Club yesterday. I mention this because an interesting (and often humourous) discussion occurred there that many here may be interested in reading.

They will just wait until after elections to vote on things like these.

The point of the poster to whom you replied is that, as long as there is a minority government in place, they will hopefully be held back from introducing some version of a DMCA by public opinion and a fear that it would cost the governing party at election time. Because in a minority government situation, there isn't really a significant amount of time "between" elections. You might be back in an election just six months after the previous one, so it's not a situation where you can pass unpopular legislation right after an election and then expect that it will be largely forgotten by the electorate at the next election in four years.

A few hundred? Roughly 200 miles south of the main campus of the University of Alberta (in Edmonton) is Calgary. About 300 miles south is Lethbridge, Alberta. Even 500 miles south and you're in Great Falls, Montana. None of those places is likely to be significantly warmer than the University of Alberta.

Here's what Stephen Hawking has said he wants on his tombstone: S = (pi.A.k.c^3)/(2.h.G) It's the formula for the entropy of a black hole, also the maximum amount of entropy possible in a volume of space. It's interesting and extremely insightful into the nature of the universe because all the values on the right-hand-side are constants except for A (the area). So it says that the amount of entropy in a black hole, and also the maximum amount of entropy possible, is directly proportional to the surface area! This is very counter-intuitive and is related to the holographic principle.

there's basic health coverage provided by the federal gov't

No. Unless you're in the army or something, the vast majority of Canadians do not get health coverage provided by the federal government. We're a federation, and unlike a certain other "federation" nearby, we still mean it.