Noon is good for me as well on that day.

I think the park should temporarily be renamed Jolly Roger's Park during the meeting. Every time I see Johnny Roger's Park written down, it's what I read it as. ;-)

VICTORY!

HUZZAH!

J

Nice find - thumbs up.

Finally someone with a bit of power has laid down some common sense.  No crime/offense committed by sharing media(which humans have being doing for a very long time with paper and analog materials.)

http://torrentfreak.com/judges-liken-p2p-to-the-ancient-practice-of-lending-books-100608/

If only we could get some common sense goin on in Canada.  I'm hopin'!

I recognize a need to put on a good show for the G-20....
But come on...enough is enough....BC just blew a gross amount of $ on the Olympics.
Stop hosting billion dollar parties please...we're running a deficit and in "economic crisis".

J

It seems like the cost of this thing keeps changing. My local news said last night it was going to cost $100. A newspaper I purchased said $52k. An article online said about $1.2m and now this is rounding to an even $2m,,,,where are the facts?? How much of this is reporter speculation (including every single related cost possible in order to get the highest number printed that is possible without lying) and how much is it ACTUALLY going to cost? Is there an actual breakdown available somewhere that shows material, labour, real estate, etc?

I think this is one of the single most assenine projects our administration has come up with to date, don't get me wrong...I'm just tired of hearing a different number from every different source.

Beware the Canadian Austerity Model, an article organically from The Progressive Economics Forum, in my opinion, one of the best blogs in Canada.

Meh, Lohan is unimportant, if you ask me. I don't think she was chowing down on English muffins after the MTV awards.

Hehe true... Then again there seem to be false-positives involved with things as simple as Windex use. Not that I think she was cleaning the windows for everyone but maybe being at one of those parties generated enough environmental conditions that it thought she was drinking.

That said these are pretty horrible devices. If I was ever required to wear one I'd like the specs and source code to examine for flaws after all, every accused person has the right to face their accuser, even if the accuser is a bunch of lines of code.

Re: Social Networking

This is a thorny issue. The power of this will completely astonish even people who know about it. I can help with this, but...

Short-term, we need to get things together a bit more. Before people just rain down on us and crash the Server, we need to get our house in order.

Forums are great for threaded conversations, but I suggest that reference material be plonked onto the wiki. We already lost a bunch of material to a forum change. Whatever its faults, mediawiki is a workhorse that can be at least maintained for reading and I don't see it going away any time soon.

<rant>
As an aside, I was wondering why I had a recollection of 'SMF', but had not really installed it or used it. I have tried just about everything. I went to the SMF site and found my answer. It is 'BadgeWare'. In fact, it is worse than BadgeWare. At some point, it is near certain that the Forum software will change because SMF's license is a ticking time bomb. Eventually, it will fail. That might take years, but unless they do a complete '180' on the license, the software cannot survive. It is too much to go into here, but I am not talking about people voting with their feet and starving it (though there is some likelihood of that). I am talking about the fact that the license ties the fate of the software inexorably to the fate of the SMF organization. If wikimedia fails, mediawiki can be supported by anyone. If SMF fails, their software dies with them. Will they fail? Yes. It is not often that you will get an unqualified answer like that from me. It contains the seeds of its own doom. Only the SMF people can cure that ill and they have been quite vocal that they will not.

I wrote a rant on BadgeWare here:

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BadgeWareIsEvil

BadgeWare being promoted under the guise of 'Free Software' or 'Open Source' is just false advertising. In the page linked above, I give an idea of the many thousands of people (me included) who contributed to a working (say SMF) software system. BadgeWare basically insists that everyone thereafter must give credit and free advertising for one contributor over another. Ironically, I think SMF ended up as BadgeWare because someone else used their original code base without giving them visible credit. Oh my.
</rant>

"This is your life. This is your life on legally-enforced DRM."

Haha... I remember those anti-drug commercials... Actually that would be an amusing one.

Guy buys CD/DVD at the store. Guy goes home and puts CD/DVD into his player. It works. Guy goes to friends house and puts CD/DVD into their player. Then have the guy try to copy it to his MP3 player and have the thing go in a creepy HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry dave, I cannot allow you to do that. You must purchase a digital copy off of iTunes because of the Digital Restrictions Management on this CD". Have him do the same with his car CD player and his buddy's player and then just smash the CD and go onto pirate bay or something

Sadly this is reasonable and what Canada should be doing today...

Deficit = Income < Spending
Surplus = Income > Spending
Debt = Sum of all deficits to date
Savings = Any money saved after debt is eliminated
Interest = Amount debt grows each year on it's own

If you are running a Deficit then you do what you do what you can to reverse that trend. You can increase income (unlikely as Canadians are heavily taxed as it is) or you can cut spending and get rid of government waste.

Ultimately comparing the existing financial situation of the country to an individual drowning in debt with credit cards and what not might be a good example for Canadians. Ultimately we have to pay off all the debt as quickly as possible and it may hurt in the short term but in the long term it will be worth it when we're no longer running debts but instead have savings to deal with future financial troubles (like the crisis we are in now).

Paying off the debt means you're paying less and less interest which means tax dollars are presumably spent on useful things rather than being 'pissed away' on interest. This is much like an individual paying off credit cards one by one and cutting them up and canceling them. The more cards (debt) you get rid of the better off you are.