Sarah Palin used to border jump to Whitehorse to take advantage of our socialized medicine. So she likes free medicine, she just hates paying taxes.
Preston Manning claims that Health Care here is broken because it uses the American system as a crutch. The Conservatives probably haven’t taken into account the effect of Americans — prominent, rich, gubernatorial Americans — crutching around on our dime.
Of course, the Republispin is that this just proves that socialized medicine benefits border hoppers.
Hey, y’all — I just got Drupal running locally, all the way from GD down to clean urls. None of that happens by default on OS X. It all involves what Jill calls “typing into the black box” (ie, the CLI):
I’m proud of myself because this takes a fair bit of understanding of the DAMP stack (eg, Entropy PHP, which you can use to easily get GD, still tries to use the deprecated /tmp/mysql.sock and breaks apachectl).
Now I just have to translate and communicate the same to our LAMP stack host so I can deploy, or get Coach Jimmy to give me root on his colobox
Jack and The Tyee have both criticized the latest edition of How to Be a Canadian by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. It made me think about the book A People’s History of the United States (which I haven’t read and don’t plan to because I don’t care about the US). It’s a history of oppression in the US that looks at major national events and oppressive episodes from the point of view of the least powerful.
Apparently A People’s History is an invaluable teaching tool for critical American History. But from what I’ve read, none of the spin-offs (A People’s History of the World, in particular) are as good.
What do you get when you Google “A People’s History of Canada”? The historical TV seriespublished by the government. It’s a nice project for teaching people the framework of Canadian history, but even a sometimes-rogue Crown corporation like the CBC can’t be expected to produce truly critical history.
Does a popular critical history of Canada exist? If not, why doesn’t someone make one?
Toyota has set up a site, Toyota Conversations, aggregating social media surrounding the company into one site where it can provide information and respond to trending Toyota memes as-they-propagate.
This is certainly a good attempt at a game-changer when it comes to communication from the auto industry. When GM or Chrysler need to talk to the people what are they gonna do — fly a private jet to a senate hearing?
This is on my radar as a possible emerging best practice for online PR.
Via BB, Assassin’s Creed 2’s supposedly “uncrackable” DRM (Digital Rights Management) was broken in less than 24 hours.
DRM is bad business, for a bunch of reasons. When I was working for Unnamed Giant Game Conglomerate they wanted us to cripple our games for future generations by making them unarchivable add digital locks to our games to briefly stop piracy.
“Briefly”, yes. The theory was if we could hold off the pirates for just a month — just one — then most of them would give up and buy the game.
So we added a week to our already-horrible schedule (at the cost of actual features) to cripple lock-down the product.
We uploaded the gold master to the disc printer, and my brother sent me a link to download a cracked version that afternoon.
Via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a video showing the gameplay and windup clockwork behind Blip a Tomy “digital” game (and PONG rip) from 1977.
The only digital part is the LED, but it manages to include mechanical pseudorandom action — a neat trick — and somewhat cleverly fuses game design and the engineering of the beast (the “game timer” is actually the windup knob).
Thank God for digital technology. It makes my putative calling so much easier (but don’t get me wrong — working on Blip was probably pretty awesome).
It would be pretty sweet to come up with CNC plans for this thing — open source clockwork pong.
In the end, however, Mr. Kenney’s view trumped that of the bureaucrats. The 63-page guide, released with fanfare last November, contains no mention of gay and lesbian rights.
They claim the guide was edited for length, not political content. If that’s the case, that removing two bullet points was necessary to avoid turning the guide into an encyclopedia of rights*, then surely editing out sections which are so politically contemporary betrays a shocking level of either bias or incompetence on the part of the editor, the Minister himself.
Liberal MP Marlene Jennings called Kenney’s actions “abhorrent.”
QFT — this edited guide is unacceptable and un-Canadian. Next time you vote, pick ABC — Anything But Conservative.
The deleted sections included one reference that said Canadian churches ran Indian residential schools, where aboriginal children were abused.
Shameful.
* An “Encyclopedia of Rights” sounds like a fantastic thing to give to new citizens, no? It’s almost as though the Conservatives don’t want immigrants to know the extent of their freedoms.
