CBC Investigates

'I want someone to take my pain': Woman set on fire by husband denied home insurance payout

 What kind of happy horse crap is this story anyways ? It says right there in the title someone set the house (and her) on fire deliberately. No insurance company is going to pay for an act of arson. 

Yet this article goes on and on about how evil the corperation is for not doing so. 

Yeah right. You want to burn down half the city ? Start paying people for committing arson and it will burn real quick. 

No thank you. 

 

Unfair Trade Practices

U.S. announces duties up to 24 per cent on Canadian softwood lumber

 

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced late Monday it will impose “countervailing duties” of up to 24 per cent on Canadian softwood lumber, opening a new round in the long-running trade dispute.
The Department said it had “preliminarily determined that exporters of softwood lumber from Canada received countervailable subsidies of 3.02 per cent to 24.12 per cent.”
“As a result of today’s determination, Commerce will instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection to collect cash deposits based on these preliminary rates,” it said.

...
Transport Minister Marc Garneau, who chairs the cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations, said earlier that Canada has always acted fairly -- which has been proven repeatedly in trade rulings.

 An obvious political move.
They lost the last couple of rulings when they accused Canada of this , but the American Corperations cleaned up in the mean time, and Canadian corperations started going belly up as the court cases dragged on for years before they were exonerated. Those that were still around, that is.

The Free Trade agreement is worthless in the face of such tactics. Tear it up and kick all the american corperations out.

Time to start making all our stuff with 3D printers.
Who the heck wants an american car or computer anyways ? Now that NSA is drafting every american corperation into the intelligence game ? There have been reports of them trying to use new model computerized cars as "untraceable" assassination tools, and everyone knows Google is in bed with the NSA ,whether they like it or not.

And that doesn't even begin to cover the issue of "illegal immigrant labour" helping out everywhere in the american economy. You think they actually declared that some illegal helped them produce that product cheaper ? I don't think so.

American has been ripping off the world for decades. 

Kick 'em all out.

Thanks for nothing, Wynne !

Three Ontario cities to test basic income pilot project

 

HAMILTON  - Ontario is launching a basic income pilot project this spring, aimed at providing financial stability for low-income residents in a time of precarious work and a changing economy.

Premier Kathleen Wynne announced the details of the province’s three-year basic income project during a speech in Hamilton Monday.

...

The pilot will launch in the Hamilton area — including in Brantford, and Brant County — and the Thunder Bay-area late this spring, and in Lindsay this fall, with a minimum payment of nearly $17,000 for an eligible single person

 In this age where rent controls have been discarded, EVERY  land lord in Ontario would now like to thank Kathleen Wynne , premier of ontario , for giving people more money.

And all rents in those target cities just DOUBLED.

Thank you so much ! Here's my contribution to your election fund to make sure you don't decide to undo those rent increases.

PS: Every land lord outside of those cities is pushing up the rent as well , by as much as they think they can get away with , and then funding organizations demanding you give everyone more money in their cities as well.

Tell the truth, you did this on purpose because it means more money in your political war chest, didn't you ? 

 

Online Gaming is Doomed

Article = none , personal experience

I can't log into Wow. (World of Warcraft, an online game) . Or Diablo III.

Two different games ? Yeah , they didn't crash. It's a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. Been trying for a few hours now, checking back every now and then.

This brings me to one of my rants, that I can't remember if I wrote about this before or not.

Online gaming is doomed. 
Seriously. The entire world is on one network , and you're trying to run a business (selling access to your game across the internet) and every hacker in the world wants money or they're going to shut you down ? You don't dare pay them, because if you do ten other hackers will start up , and demand twice as much as the first guy did.

I heard about some game developer going to make a "serverless" game. Basically anyone who starts up the game takes on some server duties, and so the game is distributed across all the players, rather like the block chain that bitcoin used to use. (is bitcoin still around ??? Are there still suckers willing to give away their money ? Apparently yes. Such people are with us forever. ).

Trouble is , I got a six megabit down , one megabit up connection. Meaning if I ran a server , it would be the slowest , most worthless server out there. And of course, most internet providers don't want you running servers, because it causes too much network traffic. Traffic they don't get paid for ! They just want their users to access someone elses server, that's far less traffic than the world beating a path to your doorstep.

Which means ...

Online gaming is doomed. 

These attacks will get worse and worse , until the games literally cannot function. Why ? Because crackers want money and they think this might maybe get them some. Because religious fanatics think games are evil. Because some idiot is selling the services of his hacked computer network to shut down anyone you like so every business man in the world can decide to shell out a few bucks and hit the competition.

Switching to national networks is really the only solution.
I mean , if the hacker is inside of my nation , the cops can go after him. If the hacker is in the middle of china , guess what ? Nothing the cops can do for you.

I've mentioned this a few times on various forums, but all I get are "stupid no's". As in , that would be bad for my business so I'm going to make up some excuse that doesn't actually make any sense to say NO DON'T DO THAT IT'S IMPOSSIBLE DON'T EVEN TRY .

I suppose I should run through the usual arguments.

The Technology Doesn't Support  That.

The TCP/IP stack doesn't support security , period. A new protocol needs to be written from scratch. Since you're writing a new protocol , you can include all sorts of security features, like , say , the routers attaching information to each data packet (I came from this router !) that cannot be accessed by the user (and thus not faked).

This would allow you to decide "I don't speak chinese, I don't want any data coming or going from my computer to china". (All the chinese data comes from these particular routers when they enter the country, you just block traffic that came from those routers , and no foreign nation can do anything about it because they're CANADIAN routers, other nations don't have access to them, and can't stop them from saying "All my data comes from china" )

They'll send the data to some other country first and then to Canada
Lame.
The "new protocol" routers aren't on the old internet. That's kind of the point of making a new local to Canada only internet. The only other countries you exchange data with are those with a similar secure protocol , even if you have to build a "translation" server if the protocols aren't identical.
Plus your users should be able to specify a list of countries they'll accept data from. (the chinese student at school wants to skype home of course, but I don't speak chinese so that nation is off my list !) There's less than 250 nations in the world, so modern computers and routers can easily track that.

Selecting which countries you will and won't communicate with would be a primary function of the new protocol.


They'll just set up a proxy and get in anyways

Lamest excuse ever.
A proxy will have a lot of data flowing through it , lots more than a regular user. Which means they stand out like a bonfire compared to the rest of the network , and it won't take much to write a routine (with your brand new secure protocol) to automatically detect the high traffic, notice all the packets come from out of country , and cut it off from your network.

Someone will build a bridge between the old internet and the new 

And we're back to the proxy argument. Such a bridge would generate a lot of traffic and be shut down fairly quickly.

I want to connect my computer (or home network) to both networks so I don't miss out on anything
Obviously disallowed. The whole point of the new network is to leave the old behind. Go buy an old second hand clunker of a computer and have one on each.

Windows / Microsoft / other corperations demand I use the old internet and want nothing to do with the new since it's bad for their business

These corperations, and government security agencies are the worst offenders against the security of computers ever. The answer is , the old internet is crashing ! I'm writing this because right now , at this moment, I can't access my favorite online business (world of warcraft) and this situation is only going to get worse ! Their demands that you stay with the old internet will become meaningless when the old internet starts having way too much down time and you can't access those services anyways.

It Would Be Bad For My Business

Your business is dead if the internet crashes under the weight of all those hackers smashing everything in sight and demanding money , spreading virii, etc etc.  Adapt to the new system. Besides, the current internet is bad for your business. Sony Entertainment got hacked and a movie stolen and released across the internet. Which means they blew millions making it and got not a single dime in return.  A hospital in Beverly Hills got hacked, and it shut down all their medical records and scanning equipment . That was pretty bad for business too.

Google Filters

Article = none , personal experience

So , my girlfriend moved to a new place, I just got out of the hospital , and I had to go do blood tests once every two weeks, which meant I needed to find a new blood test place.

So I went to google. And it recommended dynacare.
But the only Dynacare place close to where I live was for students of Ottawa University only. So I tried other places on Google. No luck , they were all across town far far away.

That's strange. I saw a sign for blood testing just down the street near a pharmacy.
Tried to find it , and couldn't for the life of me. All I got were "prefered search results" and "advertising results" (now adays it's just a green box that says "Ad" , who knows what it will be next week)

So I gave up , and walked down the street to the pharmacy, and he said it's just around the corner , about 20 paces away.

Place is literally three blocks from home. But they don't do advertising , they don't show up on google search results because they don't pay google a shit ton of money (that they pass along to the consumer).

This brings up the phenomenon known as "search filtering" .
Search engines are not your friend. They're out to make money . Pay them and your search results show up (and you pass the costs onto the consumer in the form of higher prices) , or don't pay them and as far as the world is concerned you don't exist.

This renders using the internet to search for stores as USELESS !!!! I'm not looking for the high priced stuff. I'm looking for the cheap deals. And if they aint there on google, then I guess google is of no use to me.

Hospital Woe's

Article = None, personal experience

Do I want to go over my various serious but boring medical conditions that landed me in the hospital for a week ?

Not really ,no.

Do I want to talk about the evil corruption of the Ottawa Civic Hospital on the corner of Parkdale and Carling Avenue ?

Well...yes.

I had some medications on Hold. What does that mean on hold ? They'll get them later in a day or two ? I was there seven days, it took them four to tell me "On Hold" means that's really pricey stuff and the hospital can't afford it, you have to provide your own.

Seriously ? It took you four days to tell me I gotta bring my own ? I don't care that the hospital can't afford it , because I'm getting it for free from my insurance, but my girlfriend was there twice, she could have brought the stuff in if I had known. But no, they have to play games with phrases like "On Hold" and "We're working on it" before they finally fess up that you aint getting any. There's an actual note on my chart saying I have to provide my own supply. But do they tell me about that ? No , it's embarrassing or something, they can't be bothered.

So I have SOME meds with me, I brought the bag because it had a full list of every med I had from the pharmacy which hospitals are always asking for, and I gave them ten pills , which should be plenty since it was one pill a day kind of thing.

Yeah, they promptly lost the meds. Didn't give me any. Stuff was gone , endless explanation of maybe it was put here, maybe they did this or that ... basically no one knows what happened the stuff is gone and the hospital doesn't provide replacement because it's "On Hold" they can't afford that stuff.

Failed to tell me to provide my own meds, and then stole them when I did.

Not impressed.

Ontario creating service to help people access medically assisted dying

 

 My opinion on this matter is unchanged. 

If you don't have the guts to climb to the roof and jump , then you're not suicidal enough , and the medical establishment should assume you want to live and do their best to accommodate that wish. 

We're all going to die soon enough. There's no need to rush it.