Holy “ask and ye shall receive”, Batman! From the CBC The National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across the country, on Friday wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to investigate the practice of “traffic shaping” and its impact on internet users. “These internet service providers are, with little or no public… Read more →
Category: Political
Canada Needs Some Net Neutrality Enforcement
Did you see the news about Bell deciding that it can filter and shape traffic even carried over “wholesale” pipes to ISPs? Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented “load balancing” to… Read more →
If I Were Him, I’d Just Be Saying “Told You So” All Day Long
Just for fun, let’s look at what Paul Krugman wrote five years ago. Snippet one, concerning the U.S. finances: Meanwhile, consider this: we need $400 billion a year of foreign investment to cover our trade deficit, or the dollar will plunge and our surging budget deficit will become much harder to finance — and there are already signs that the… Read more →
Understanding How Greed Hosed The Economy Again
If you had trouble following the last presentation I linked to that explained the subprime crisis and how it’s affecting the broader investment community, then you don’t have a chance with the NYT piece that attempts to take on the same task. If you could handle the stick figures though, you might want to give the piece a try. It… Read more →
Damn
Now that was a speech. Honest, reasonable, nuanced, and almost completely unable to be reduced to a soundbite. I kind of wish I could vote for the guy. Read more →
The correct answer is 7 (or “God did it”).
The ass hamsters are at it again, this time in Oklahoma, where House Bill 2211 has just passed the state House of Representatives. If you don’t want to read the Bill, here’s the summary from the Edmond Sun: The bill requires public schools to guarantee students the right to express their religious viewpoints in a public forum, in class, in… Read more →
Exceeding Expectations: Republicans and The Crazy
Seriously? I mean, seriously? Republicans picked Huckabee? Even in crazy Jesusland, isn’t “I won’t sign this bill because calling a tornado an ‘act of God’ makes God look bad” crazy enough to make someone unelectable? I expected some ludicrousness from Americans, especially Republicans, but my expectations have been exceeded. And I thought the TSA facecrime thing would be the dumbest… Read more →
Even More Things I Did Not Know
Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a rift between the permanents and… Read more →
This is one of the things political commentary looks like…
… in the postmodern/postirony/mashup/youtube generation. I am not too old yet to appreciate it. (Admittedly, the song is 20 years old, which may help in bridging that gap.) Read more →
A miscellany for a Friday
There’s absolutely no theme here, just a bunch of stuff that caught my interest. Why did I not know there was a new Grimjack comic being serialized to the web at ComicMix.com? There’s like 60 pages there already. I hope this is web-to-trade serialization. And look, there’s also a Jon Sable, and what’s this Bar Sinister? The good folks over… Read more →
He folded
Biff, did you call Prentice again today? ’cause if not, then it was definitely me this time. No Canadian DMCA This Year The roller coaster that is the Canadian DMCA has taken another turn. Sometime between yesterday afternoon and this morning, the government decided to hold off. At 10:00 am this morning, the introduction of new government bills came and… Read more →
Canadian DMCA — Act Now
If you didn’t do anything last week, you really need to do something now. Here’s what Geist posted yesterday: There are rumours in Ottawa this evening that Industry Minister Jim Prentice has decided to forge ahead with the Canadian DMCA with the bill to be introduced tomorrow morning. There has obviously been a huge amount of coverage of this issue… Read more →
Minor Victory
I’d like to think my call and email were the straws the broke the camel’s back. Because it’s not enough for my ego for me to be part of a success (no matter how minor or temporary), I have to be pivotal to it! Michael Geist – Canadian DMCA Introduction Delayed The word this afternoon is that Industry Minister Jim… Read more →
Groening
Why are old Life Is Hell cartoons from over a decade ago suddenly showing up everywhere I look? And why are they so apposite and topical? (click to see the full strips) Read more →
Canadians: Did You Call Jim Prentice Today?
I did. Don’t know who Jim Prentice is? Why he’s the Minister of Industry in Harper’s evil regime. And why should you have called him today? Well, that’s a long one. The short version is that he’s spearheading a really, really, REALLY bad law–essentially a Canadian version of the American’s dire DMCA–and since he’s been either dodging any questions from… Read more →
