The Canadian press is all over the brutal mobile data rates Canadian carriers charge (compared with reasonable rates elsewhere). An editorial in the Gazette; an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, now a big article in the National Post. I agree with them, and I’ll wager that CanWest (who owns all three papers) has some big […]
I’ve been following the Gonzales scandal pretty closely. Turns out, one of the complex parts of the growing (and worrying) scandal is government data mining (NYTimes, reg required probably). A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic […]
The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did. […]
Oh man, just watched this again. Check this quote out from Tom Delay (at 3:46): If you don’t believe abortion affects you, I contend it affects you in immigration. If we had those forty million children that were killed over the last thirty years, we wouldn’t need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that […]
The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) just released their Communications Outlook 2007 report, that gives an overview of member states’ communication (mobile, broadband, broadcast, telephony etc) infrastructure, usage, pricing, etc. Michael Geist gives a brief review of the report, and extracts these key points: Canada ranked second last in the OECD for the […]
The latest big Canadian company to get sold off to foreign interests is Alcan, the Montreal-based Aluminum giant. It’s hard to imagine any big Canadian companies left in a decade or so unless we change our policies. Among the big Canadian companies that have been sold off in the last few years: Four Seasons Hotels, […]
Let’s get this straight: U.S. Congress investigates alleged wrongdoing to at the US Department of Justice, particularly undue political influence of the White House in firing a number of US Attorneys. Justice Department officials can’t remember who made the contentious decisions. Congress issues subpoenas to various White House officials, and others to testify under oath […]
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America WHEREAS Lewis Libby was convicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the case United States v. Libby, Crim. No. 05-394 (RBW), for which a sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment, 2 years’ supervised release, a fine of $250,000, and […]
As a parallel to the civicaccess.ca project, I just whipped up a new group blog datalibre.ca. Here is the about: datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected […]