text:
not as we know it, Captain!
"We come in peace! (shoot to kill, shoot to kill)" - James T Kirk
(reference for those not in the know: Star Trekkin' [youtube.com] by The Firm)
If you know anything about TV science fiction, then you would know that all sapient life forms look like white people with maybe some ridges on their forehead or something (and they speak English). All flora looks just like what you find in California. And animals look like shambling people in horribly fake costumes.
All flora looks just like what you find in California.
Some planets resemble forests in British Columbia, or quarries in Wales.
There may even be planets that resemble the Tunisian desert, or Norwegian glaciers.
Unless they're brutal, bloodthirsty warriors with some primitive sense of honor. Then they resemble black people with maybe some ridges on their forehead or something.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
The requirement for water or carbon is not part of the definition, it's simply properties we thought all life forms had.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
The requirement for water or carbon is not part of the definition, it's simply properties we thought all life forms had.
Mod up. Biologists have indeed told me that life is defined by a collection of properties such as metabolism and reproduction. Maybe NASA needs to change its definition, but not "Science".
Without disputing that there is no consensus on the definition of life, I am of the opinion that there is a possible definition which includes everything we take to be alive and nothing we reasonably shouldn't take to be alive. It is in terms of thermodynamics, specifically entropy.
Let us define mechanical work as "productive" upon some system when it changes the said system to a state which is less entropic. We can then say that a machine X is productive upon some other system Y when the product of its work is a decrease in the entropy of Y. There may be limited circumstances under which X is productive upon Y; to do work X will need some sort of energy flow through it, but not any energy flow will do. So for example, an electric machine which sorts and stacks coins coined can be said to be productive upon the coins when it is plugged in to an electrical circuit of the proper frequency and voltage, and turned on, and otherwise in its operating conditions, but not just when it is being heated, say.
With that out of the way, we can now define a system as "alive" when it is productive upon itself, or more simply define "life" as "self-productive machinery". The given conditions under which a given system is self-productive will of course be limited and vary, but those constitute the conditions under which a given system can live, which are also limited and vary.
Crystals, fire, and car batteries all seek lower-energy, higher-entropy states, and so are not life, though they might fuel life (like fire) or be instrumental in the construction of living things (like crystals).
Viruses, by this definition, can only live inside of more complicated cells, the way that a severely deformed baby might only live on life support, or humans in general can only live in an atmosphere of appropriate composition, temperature, and pressure, with sufficient water and appropriate chemical fuels available. A virus floating around by itself is dead, though under the right circumstances it can come to life (unlike humans, but that's because dead humans decay more readily than dead viruses, being big complex things instead of simple molecules). Spores and seeds likewise: not alive just sitting there inert, but alive when put into the conditions in which they grow. Prions I don't know enough about to say.
Mules are definitely alive, whether or not they are a viable species; reproduction is just one way for life to continue living, not a prerequisite for living at all.
The only really controversial part of this definition is that computers may count as alive, when plugged in and turned on etc, the same way that viruses may count as alive when inside another cell of the appropriate type. But that's only controversial because they are artificially constructed machines made from something other than the stuff we are made of. Artificially constructed organic nanomachines modelled after the ones we're built on are indisputably alive: artificial life, but life nonetheless. Computers differ only in being bigger, and made of different materials. Their information-processing functions certainly reduce the information entropy of their storage media.
This factor has the nice benefit to this definition of ensuring that intelligence, sentience, sapience, etc, are a proper subset of life; you can't have something which takes in information about the world around it and does something productive with it, without that thing being alive by this definition in the process.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
So... fire is alive by your definition and a bumble bee drone isn't.
So... fire is alive by your definition and a bumble bee drone isn't.
Huh? A (bumble)bee drone reproduces. Essentially, that's the only thing it does, and then it dies. But its descendants live on, starting from the fertilized eggs inside the drone's mate(s).
Fire does sorta throw water on the definition, though. It definitely "feeds", and reproduces in the sense of expanding. So do crystal formations, which aren't considered alive.
Methinks this definition needs a bit of revision. Maybe some actual biologists could chime in with something with better wording.
Fire does sorta throw water on the definition, though. It definitely "feeds", and reproduces in the sense of expanding. So do crystal formations, which aren't considered alive.
I'm not a biologist.
I think you can distinguish fire vs. life by metabolism. With metabolism, chemical processes inside the organism occur to fuel the organism. With fire, those processes do not happen within the flame, they happen inside the fuel. I can't think of an organism which fuels itself by chemically transforming fuel outside of its "body". This may be shaky, because you could argue that the chemical processes would not happen were it not for the presence of the flame. Fire doesn't sound like it fits the definition of metabolism though, unless you view the flame as simply the result of the metabolism and the organism itself which produces the fire through metabolizing the fuel is unknown.
With crystals growing in a liquid, matter which is dissolved in the surrounding liquid gets added to the crystal. There is no real chemical change that takes place, the dissolved particulates just coalesce on something else. When the liquid and its particulates is removed the crystal no longer grows, but the crystal itself does not take the particulates out of the liquid. The particulates simply adhere to the crystal (or any other structure on which the crystal starts).
External digestion does exist; fungii are a good example of this (heterotrophy II).
I can't think of an organism which fuels itself by chemically transforming fuel outside of its "body".
Cooking, or other food processing, could fall under this broad concept.
This whole debate is silly, just like the definition of planet that people were arguing over a few years ago---people who should be doing science and not trying to define and then redefine words to re-fit reality into their preconceptions. Definitions are human constructs, attempting to create bright lines between what is an x and is not
With crystals growing in a liquid, matter which is dissolved in the surrounding liquid gets added to the crystal. There is no real chemical change that takes place, the dissolved particulates just coalesce on something else. When the liquid and its particulates is removed the crystal no longer grows, but the crystal itself does not take the particulates out of the liquid. The particulates simply adhere to the crystal (or any other structure on which the crystal starts).
A mule is alive because it was created though reproduction. Sterility does not mean that something is not alive.
Something which is comprised of living things is by class inheritance alive. Hence mules via their cells. And corporations via their "citizens united."
That would exclude viruses, which are quite subject to natural selection. And Eunuchs don't reproduce, but they are still "alive" by most accounts.
We've had a long debate about this at c2.com. We considered robots, prions, parasites, etc. I've concluded there is no simple definition.
My eventual favorite was a weighted definition involving combinations of the following:
* Shaped by natural selection
* Ability to adapt to changes
* Reproduces
* Maintains self
* Consumes energy
* Complex
It had to have at least one o
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
Meh, not so simple. I won't even talk about things like mules, or other infertile animals; but are for example erythrocytes (red blood cells) alive? They feed, but don't reproduce, you know; how about viruses? They do reproduce, but surely don't feed. Or prions? They also reproduce, but don't even carry nucleic acids. What about Sydney Fox's protobionts [wikipedia.org]? They both (kind of) reproduce and (kind of) feed, but can form spontaneously from inorganic matter.
FTA: Simply, Life is "self-reproduction with variations" - like mutating computer viruses?
Fact: We know carbon based life forms exist
Fact: we know they need water.
So it makes sense to start looking where you know for a fact life COULD exist withing know parameters.
And thus, my lifelong pursuit to create a carbon-based life-form that does not need water is born.
so you pick things that at least you can work out how to look for and that you know can exist.
> but life could generally be defined as the ability to actively resist entropy
Indeed, that's what I thought of too - I think it was in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that he used a phrase something like "phenomena of localized negative entropy".
Here it is:
Three of them were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were mere pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black outer reaches of space. All of them, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life~, in the cases of the third and fourth planets their surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide-in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social co
Meh... life isn't negative entropy except with very very rose coloured glasses on, and only if you look at it from one side.
Human life is on some level just a chemical fire that needs a near continual influx of fresh fuel to burn.
You mean like fire?
I am always depressed about the primitivity of human thought, when I hear people discuss "Is this alive, or is it dead?". As if that was some binary either/or question or switch.
We have to face, that for every step between completely dead and whatever we define as completely alive, there exists something that fits that. And why wouldn't there?
Then we can rethink our egocentrism, and accept that we are neither special nor unique, and that that is OK.
It really is.
Life has to follow the constraints that we defined it to have, and therefore logically is between some bounds. E.g. the elements it uses, if it needs water, what temperatures it requires, what processes it uses and consists of....
But really it's just a definition thing. And nothing else. Since "life" is just a word. Nature itself does not know the concept of a "concept".
So I see this from a relaxed point of view. All this bickering about definitions and "ME, ME, ME, ME, ME, ME!" doesn't matter.
What matters, is that we are on the brink of discovering things on other planets... Things that can be so vastly different from ourselves, that our knowledge may leapfrog forward... And that yet may be so very similar to us in so many aspects, that is will tell us things about ourselves we could never have imagined.
Exciting times, baby. Exciting times indeed.
The dichotomy isn't false. Death is simply defined that way. If it's not alive, it's dead. If it's not dead, it's alive.
You may as well say that it's a false dichotomy to only have 0 and 1 as valid significant figures in binary.
IF we're going to find any life on Mars, it's probably going to be the carbon stuff we've been hearing so much about. Silicon life and other sorts of voodoo biology might exist in stranger environments but Mars is basically a big dry dust-ball sitting next to a big wet swamp-ball. Odds are that whatever splashed our planet in the first place also got Mars, and Mars just so happened to be tinier, lighter and colder than us enough that its water cycle kind of evaporated. Or at least that's the theory they'
We don't assume something just because we can't rule it out completely, we assume something because there are signs indicating it's true. We have pretty good proof that shows that carbon-based life can exist, but there is neither physical nor theoretical proof of other exotic lifeforms. Not being able to rule it out is not enough reason to send another expensive probe when that money could finance far more promising research.
Just because it's not like us, doesn't mean it's technology wont be the same. We might end up using oscillating radio waves to communicate.
You have to be able to define life before you can redefine it. Turns out to be pretty tricky.
They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive.
This is likely to trigger red flags in the minds of a lot of people with biological training. Just what is "organic carbon"? That's a media phrase that isn't too well defined in scientific circles. There's a great variety in the "organic" carbon chemistry of our world. But we should expect that any life on other worlds, even if it uses carbon, will produce compounds and radicals that are different and/or more varied than what we see here.
Another problem is that astronomers long ago pointed out a probable path for Earth bacteria colonizing the rest of our solar system, and possibly beyond. Earth has a thin "dust tail" produced by the same solar light pressure that produces comet tails. This is a problem for some kinds of astronomical observations in the plane of the solar system, since our dust tail reflects back back to us. Anyway, back in the 1970s, satellite and upper-atmosphere probes verified the presence of both fine dust particles and bacterial spores at all altitudes. The planet's dust tail thus contains such dust and spores. So the Earth has been contaminating the outer solar system with bacterial spores, presumably for some billions of years. We don't know whether any of those bacteria can survive on the outer planets. But the default assumption should be that some of them have, and have adapted to some degree over those billions of years to their new environments. Maybe they have; maybe they haven't. But if we find Earth-like bacteria out there, they probably came from here.
Some astronomers have also calculated out that part of our dust tail (and comets' tails) escapes the solar system. So we've been contaminating the galaxy with bacterial spores for billions of years. A billion years is around 4 or 5 orbits of the galaxy, up to 20 or so orbits since life arose here. The chaotic nature of galactic dynamics mean that our dust has spread through the entire galaxy, as has the dust from other planets with atmospheres.
This argument is more often used by the "panspermia" supporters, who point out that life from anywhere else in the galaxy could have colonized Earth in its early years, since the galaxy is around 13 billion years old, while our solar system is only about 1/3 that age. But some astronomers use it to explain how earthly life could have colonized the rest of the galaxy before humans evolved here. And, of course, both could be true.
Of course, the main problem with all this is that we have no data on how well bacterial spores can survive the millennia in interstellar space. Probably not well, but it doesn't take a whole ecosystem to establish a colony. For bacteria, it only requires one spore (and hundreds of millions of years
Probably the best prediction is that eventually, some probe will find a few bacteria on Mars and/or other planets, and they'll be somewhat similar to bacteria on our planet. This will raise more questions than it answers, as is common in most scientific fields.
Two choices:
A) We can look for the sort of life we understand the best, with sensors that are very good at doing that, in places which are likely to harbor such life.
B) We can look throughout the universe for something completely unknown. We have no criteria to define it, no instruments to detect it, no idea where to look for it, and no way to interpret it.
Which of these two choices is the more feasible for a small unmanned probe?
James Lovelock came up with a perfectly good definition that doesn't stipulate any specific chemistry - he merely stated that life is that which will actively sustain a dynamic equilibrium when the non-living parts of the system passively change*. (He also argued that the distinction between living and non-living was stupid anyway, since there are too many inter-dependencies to make such a distinction in a productive way. Since his work forms the backbone of almost all modern life science, it seems pointless NASA resorting to definitions of "life" that have been considered obsolete for a decade or more.)
Indeed, Lovelock's theories on life are exceptionally useful to astronomers, because you CAN monitor the chemistry of the atmosphere of an exoplanet and you CAN monitor things like the solar radiation it gets. You can therefore utilize Lovelock's work to determine if the planet has life on it or not, remotely, without any regard whatsoever to the chemistry of that life or the mechanisms it utilizes.
*The basis of Lovelock's definition is that all life MUST geo-engineer. It has to, with no exceptions. That goes for viruses, bacteria, algae, etc. Not only must it geo-engineer, but in order for a system to be in dynamic equilibrium, the geo-engineering HAS to contain a negative feedback loop. The mere presence of life will alter the planet, but if it were to alter it without creating a dynamic equilibrium it would necessarily create a positive feedback loop that would destroy itself. In his view, you cannot treat the geology, the meteorology and the biochemistry as distinct fields - they interact and compartmentalizing will never let you understand the processes going on.
Analyzing soil samples will help on Mars but really it shouldn't be necessary. Dormant's another matter. If life exists in an active form, there will be variables that are held to a value and do not passively fluctuate with the seasons. If life *ever* existed on the planet, then the chemistry of the rocks will show that variables were held to a specific value and did not fluctuate with the seasons. The geology will record the feedback processes that all life (in this model) must have. The soil samples would let you identify what that life was/is, and to understand HOW it operated, but to merely detect if it was there to begin with you need look no further than the chemistry of the sedimentary rock we already know exists on Mars.
That is, if his theory is correct.
Evidently, despite the views of the life sciences, NASA is not following this path. Ergo, NASA thinks that despite the fact that it doesn't know what to look for, it shouldn't look where Lovelock said. I would hope they have a really good reason -- it's exceptionally bad science to ignore the prevailing theory, particularly if you have none of your own. They have to be rejecting his theory because if they accepted it then they wouldn't need to care about carbon, water, etc. They'd merely need to care about whether the chemistry could or could not be explained by passive processes alone. What the process was would simply not matter.
expand the definition and hope you get lucky.
how many lifeforms have you seen not on earth?
changing the question to fit your answer is not science, its religion
How we define "life" when searching the cosmos is entertaining, but to me the bigger philosophical question to consider is alien sentience (not just intelligence) -- self willed, thinking, rational or irrational beings who think, feel, and act for themselves similar to us, but likely following completely different structures of society and morality.
After posting the article linked in the summary, Zimmer followed up by posting the comments of evolutionary biologist David Hillis [discovermagazine.com] on his own website. For those that don't want to read the entire post, the basic idea is that we ought not try to define life as a collection of characteristics (i.e. reproduction, inheritance of traits, existence of metabolism, &c.). Any such definition is likely to exclude things that we think of as alive, or include things that we think of as not-alive. Instead, it ma
For convenience, when it happens in the chemical domain and contains hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, we call it "life." Quaint and parochial, but convenient.
Salt crystals in hypersaturated solution, bacteria, books, religion, money. Self replicators all. Some more limited than others.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."


text:
time to pack my bags and head north. ohh wait....
That's right.
Thirst for power and oppression of dissent is engrained in the very core of humanity's political genes.
There is no escape.
Not just our 'political' genes, but our actual genes.
Every simian species* has a hirarchical social structure whereby those at the top dominate and control those at the bottom, often extremely viciously. Humans are little different in that respect.
*Except Bonobos, who settling disputes by fucking, and spend most of their spare time doing the same. Man, I wish we were more like Bonobos.
All the guy has to do is raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of ONE juror.
When he's not convicted, this will be seen by many as proof that the RCMP did in fact perjure themselves. Dumb move, cops.
The "defamatory libel" (there's no such thing as libel in Canada, just "defamatory libel") wasn't committed in Canada. The publication took place in the US. Even trying to argue that it was posted from Canada fails - it isn't published (under the meaning of
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, defending yourself eats up so much time and money that even when you win, you lose.
The Internet has changed the balance of power. People can do their research, find precedents, previous filings that they can cut-and-paste and edit, the rules of procedure, etc. Anyone with a bit of hard work and intelligence can make a good pre
Odds are that he won't get a jury trial. I haven't read the fine article but in Canada we only have the right to a jury trial for crimes where the maximum sentence is over 5 years.
It's in the Charter.
Also, except in indictments specifically enumerated in section 553, it is up to the accused, not the judge, to decide whether they will have a trial by judge alone or by jury. See section 554. Also sections 558 and following. Don't take my word for it - here's the Canadian Criminal Code directly from the government website: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/C-46/FramesView.html [justice.gc.ca]
Hope this makes it a bit clearer.
All the guy has to do is raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of ONE juror.
Even in the US, that's hardly sufficient to reliably be acquitted. If one juror's doubt is merely reasonable, the odds of him caving to the other jurors are quite high. It requires considerable certainty to persist when hounded by five or eleven other people.
The juror's decision must be unanimous, and if one juror sticks to his gun and will not vote guilty, and the other jurors stick to their guns and vote guilty -- this eventually results in a mistrial and the accused gets a new trial -- and really, if
That's a loaded and subjective statement - care to back it up?
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees a Canadian's right to free speech, is inherently weaker than the US constitution because it contains a notwithstanding clause that allows a province to suspend many rights for 5 year periods. Quebec's language laws wouldn't stand up to a first amendment challenge in the US but it is allowed to violate the charter of rights and Freedoms in Canada because they used the notwithstanding clause.
I think the GP is right actually. The problematic part of Quebec law is the requirement that French be predominant on all business signs. I can't see that surviving in the US.
Note that the restriction is not on what you can say, it's on the language of business signage. Practically speaking I'm not sure if that means Canada has less free speech that the States.
Given that this was one of only two uses ever of the notwithstanding clause, I don't consider it to be a weakness in the constitution. Think of it more as a shortcut constitutional amendment. Note that notwithstanding overrides expire after five years in order to give voters a chance to express their opinion via a general election it before they are renewed.
The US constitution has...how many amendments? The Canadian Constitution has none, and two uses of the notwithstanding clause. I wouldn't say one is stronger or weaker than the other.
Finally, as clear as the 1st amendment appears to be, we all know you can't say anything you want whenever you want wherever you want. There are limits. The Canadian constitution is explicit about that so when you read them side by side the Canadian text appears wishy-washy, but in effect they are equivalent.
I can't see that surviving in the US.
IANAL, but there's a lot less protection for business/commercial speech than for political. And regulations on signs in general have been upheld.
They are a affront to your freedom but not mine.
Like he parent said, the majority in Quebec are in agreement with these laws.
Without these laws we would lose our language, people don't seem to remember,but only a few years ago, all big stores inside and outdoor signs where in English.
The majority of patrons were francophone but the owner were anglophone.
Is that why changed the stop signs too?
Next time you get a chance to go to France, checkout their stop signs. They say STOP on them.
They say Stop in the City of Westmount in Quebec too.
They were changed because all the French speaking driver refused to stop at the "Stop" signs arguing they could not understand the meaning of the word. This was causing general mayhem on the streets and a lot of nasty accidents, something had to be done.
They couldn't tell what a stop sign was regardless of what was printed on it? Sounds to me like they were trying to be pricks.
>>>Without these laws we would lose our language
So? There have been millions of human languages... only about 1% of them have survived to the modern day. In fact the world would be better served if everyone spoke just a few. Look at the benefits gained when Roman Latin replaced the native european languages (circa 100 to 900 AD) - you could travel anywhere from Africa to Rome to Portugal to Britannia, and communicate to everyone with ease.
A single language promoted the sharing of ideas and uni
Fine if less language is better learn French and stop using English.
Language is a big part of culture, mono-culture is very bad, not only in computers (windows zombies)m also in agriculture and society.
Languages dies, like culture and civilizations and people.
"A single language promoted the sharing of ideas and unity."
Multiple languages promote innovation and diversity, I like that better.
Speaking more than one language give you a broader mind, as our thinking is dictated by words, language structures, we think mostly in words.
Ask anybody who speaks multiple languages, there is words and concepts in each of them that can only be approximated in other languages.
The Quebec Languages law do not aim to eradicate English, they are there to preserve French.
There is mandatory English classes in French schools.
Or, looking at it another way, a single language was used to enforce the control of a privileged minority who trampled the rights and freedoms of people across an entire continent.
The same thing happened with Arabic in the Ottoman Empire, with English in the British Empire, and with Mandarin in China. The Japanese also attempted it in China, Taiwan, and Korea in their brief imperial period.
Having a single language is only a good thing if you belong to the culture whose language it was originally. It is never a good sign for people whose cultures used to speak something different.
The restrictions only apply to COMMERCIAL SPEECH and even in the US, there are restrictions to commercial speech.
Only businesses have been affected by law 101 and businesses are not human so they do not have human rights.
Businesses are owned by humans. Any time you put a restriction on a business you are restricting the rights of their owners who last time I checked were pretty likely to be humans.
Ok, what about television and radio broadcast standards? In Canada, I can watch uncut movies on public air broadcast channels that contain violence and nudity. In the US, your broadcasts are under a required broadcast delay and censored when deemed inappropriate. Who in this case has more freedom of speech? Do you think ABC would ever get away with broadcasting nudity on a Friday night?
And the US constitution does not protect anyone from libel statements. There are limits to acceptable free speech in both countries.
The article summary just reeks of ignorance and bigotry.
And the US constitution does not protect anyone from libel statements.
Technically true, but the burden of proof in libel cases in the US is frankly astronomical, especially if the victim is a public figure. I don't know if Canadian law is closer to the US or the UK on this.
From the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Tne First Amendment doesn't have the qualifer, therefore it is slightly stronger.
Note that this is in theory. It is not necessarily true in practice, for either nation.
I believe the individual was referring to such bodies as the Alberta Human Rights Commission. These bodies have the ability to prosecute an individual for speech outside of the normal judiciary and without any of the normal protections you might expect from a judiciary. In that sense free speech takes a hard hit, especially when you have to wonder what solution the AHRC (and others like it) provide that the courts could not.
Even in Canada, which has much less free speech protection than the United States
Really? Because in canada there is a tonne of laws protecting free speech - so long as you're not engaging in hate speech. In fact, the laws are almost exactly the same as in the USA in regards to freedom of speech (with hate speech being a key difference).
I think what the article means to say is that "In canada, they're not litigation happy, and the courts have made it very difficult to get a multimillion dollar settlement for pouring hot coffee on your lap and claiming that it was the fault of the coffee shop for not telling you that coffee is hot... (and other such nonsense cases
Yes, in Canada you can't walk around holding a pistol and suing everyone who looks at you funny. You also can't start a chapter of the KKK, start publishing material that has no value and offends a large audience. Oh, and queer-bashing? Also illegal. Why? Because you couldn't say or do the same things to someone that wasn't queer, and not get arrested/charged. That doesn't mean canada has lax free speech laws. That means Canada has a better system of protecting the rights of its citizens.
That doesn't mean canada has lax free speech laws. That means Canada has a better system of protecting the rights of its citizens.
Actually, I would say that it means both.
Are there any exclusions for factualness?
Or in Canada can I not say that all members of the westboro baptist church are evil scumbags since I'd be promoting hate of a religious group?
The truth is an absolute defense in libel and slander cases.
Even in Canada, which has much less free speech protection than the United States
The first item in the US bill of rights guarantees freedom of speech. What does the first item in our charter of rights do?
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Oh, right, it effectively nullifies the rest of the charter by including vague language about "reasonable limits".
You also can't start a chapter of the KKK, start publishing material that has no value and offends a large audience.
Yeah, that's the problem. See, I don't think we should have government bureaucrats decide whether or not something "has no value". How about we let the audience decide that for themselves? If we want to prove that our ideologies are indeed superior to those of the KKK, that can only be done on a fair and equal forum of debate where the other side has a fair chance to speak. Right now, all we've proved is that the anti-racists have bigger guns.
The problem is that whenever you stop protecting the unpopular speech, and let the government decide what is and is not of "value" or "useful" or whatever, you open the gates to restricting speech for all sorts of bad reasons. It is the unpopular speech that must be protected.
As an example, look at the sham that is the Canadian Human Rights Commission. You have a lead investigator that said, on the record "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value. It's not my job to give value to an American concept." Where you don't have the right to question your accuser, hearsay is admissible with few exceptions, and truth is not always a defense. Basically, if a plaintiff can demonstrate you hurt their feelings (with rather dubious standards of evidence to do so), even if your statements were true you can get in trouble.
Really you want free speech very protected, where there are clear lines as to what can't be done and those lines are only there as needed to protect people (like you can't order someone to kill someone else and claim free speech). As it stands in Canada, the laws are used to shut down unpopular speech.
Down here in the US, we have come to believe that Freedom of Speech is a French concept. On which grounds we are planning to eliminated it, along with pommes frites, as soon as possible.
Oh, right, it effectively nullifies the rest of the charter by including vague language about "reasonable limits"
This is NO different that the US. The US constitution on free speech does not give someone the right to break the law. For example it does not allow you to slander someone else, nor can you do something like lie on your tax returns. The right to free speech is bounded by other laws in both countries.
I'm sure that "vague language" has never been interpreted by the courts. Oh wait: [wikipedia.org]
You're right, though, that's pretty permissive in what it allows the government to do. Fortunately for Americans, their rights are not subject to such "vague language". For example,
I think what the article means to say is that "In canada, they're not litigation happy, and the courts have made it very difficult to get a multimillion dollar settlement for pouring hot coffee on your lap and claiming that it was the fault of the coffee shop for not telling you that coffee is hot... (and other such nonsense cases
I love how everyone uses that case as their poster-child for all things wrong in American courts. I guess everyone is susceptible to media bias as one point or another. Here's the actual facts of the case: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm [lectlaw.com]
Because you couldn't say or do the same things to someone that wasn't queer, and not get arrested/charged.
Wait, what? I'm with you on the assault bit, but you're not allowed to walk around with a sign saying "NERDS ARE EVIL SINNERS" or "NERDS WANT TO MAKE YOUR CHILDREN PASTY, BASEMENT-DWELLING SLOBS"?
You don't have a right not to be offended, IMO. As soon as you set up a group of people that have the ability to tell you to shut up because your speech has "no value", you're just institutionalizing one set of prejudices - a set that might not be stable over time. (Always assume your worst political enemies will
>>>You also can't start a chapter of the KKK, start publishing material that has no value and offends a large audience. Oh, and queer-bashing? Also illegal.
It shouldn't be. You're not truly a "free" person if you don't have the right to be an asshole. You've basically made assholes second-class citizens without rights and without freedom - i.e. you demoted them to Serfs. So in my opinion the United States enjoys more freedom because even assholes are free to be themselves.
Yes I'm being serious. Freedom means freedom for ALL people, even the ones you don't like
And yet by forcing society to permit hate groups like the KKK, you deprive everyone else of the democratic right to choose the laws that they are governed by.
Yes, in Canada you can't walk around holding a pistol and suing everyone who looks at you funny. You also can't start a chapter of the KKK, start publishing material that has no value and offends a large audience. Oh, and queer-bashing? Also illegal. Why? Because you couldn't say or do the same things to someone that wasn't queer, and not get arrested/charged. That doesn't mean canada has lax free speech laws. That means Canada has a better system of protecting the rights of its citizens.
What rights are being protected here? The right to associate with whom you choose? Nope. The right to say what you think? Nope. All these are sacrificed for some alleged right to not be offended. Looks like folly to me. Maybe you should think about this.
You also can't
... start publishing material that has no value and offends a large audience.
Off the top of my head:
Bryan Adams.
Alanis Morissette.
Celine Dion.
Justin Bieber.
Your argument cuts like a knife through all criticism.
As long as it actually WAS libel.
There are enough people out there who distrust the police, we don't need unfounded accusations reducing police support further.
On the other hand, if the statements were factual, the cops and prosecutors involved need to be lined up against a wall and shot.
Don't worry, no matter how fake or factual his claims will be found officially to be baseless.
the cops and prosecutors involved need to be lined up against a wall and shot.
Yeah, somehow that never seems to happen. All Mike Nifong [wikipedia.org] got was being disbarred, and spending one night in jail for contempt of court, on charges that he trumped up and that would have, if successful, put three men in jail for a long, long time. And those are the ones with lots of money to defend themselves. As far as I'm concerned, that level of dishonesty should lead to putting him in jail for the full length of the sentence he was trying to get.
The investigation that pressed the criminal charges was conducted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not the local Calgary Police Service. The Royal's are the Canuck equivalent to the American FBI, and are a national police force.
There is a lot of infighting between the various Law Enforcement Agencies in Canada over jurisdictional rights, etc, and to the best of my knowledge, they don't really go out of each others way to help each other out that much.
This is very evident at family functions. I have a couple of cousins (cousins to each other as well) one is local CPS, and the other is RC. They get into pissing matches with each other all the time over who has the more important role in Canadian Civilization, and I am usually the one who gets to moderate their arguments, generally by telling them both to STFU, and handing them a beer.
The Royal's are the Canuck equivalent to the American FBI, and are a national police force.
This is incorrect. The FBI only has investigative jurisdiction over federal crimes, thus differentiating them from local police departments. The RCMP and the Calgary police department enforce the exact same set of laws - Criminal Code of Canada, and they have identical investigative jurisdictions. While the RCMP is a national police force, it is not the equivalent of the FBI.
Simply put, RCMP hands out parking tickets but the FBI does not.
http://www.bownessca.com/ [bownessca.com]
The purpose of this site is to inform the residents of Bowness, the citizens of Calgary and others, as to how senior individuals within the City of Calgary placed the Bowness Community Association (the BCA) into receivership by illegal, corrupt and criminal means.
There has been over 5 years of corrupt and criminal acts that have been committed and they are continuing to be committed by Derek Podlubny and the present Board, ably assisted by lawyers from the law firm of Blake Cassels and Graydon.
Both of these sites have a distinct flavour of crackpottery, mixed with a generous dose of lunacy and tipped with wholesome nuttiness.
I think the RCMP will end up with a rather embarrassing situation of having dragged a certifiable conspiracy nut before the courts wherein he will quickly drown them in spittle and general ranting incoherence, which then will prompt more reasonable citizenry to start asking pointed questions as to why the RCMP feels threatened by an individual whose case would best be dealt with by the medical profession and if maybe there is something to his ranting...
Also I don't know the libel standard in Canada but in the US:
1) The statements must be untrue. Truth is the ultimate libel defense. So if his statements are true (probably not, but just saying) then that is the end of that.
2) The person making the statements had to know they were untrue. While this gets a little more "he said, she said," in the case of someone who's connection to reality is a bit tenuous, this could easily be a defense. He may honestly believe what he is writing is true. In that case, it is
This guy has an amazing sense of entitlement, and I say this as someone who lives in the Calgary area, and has heard of him through friends who live in the Bowness/Montgomery area.
Just reading the index to the main site that you listed it is obvious that he just has an axe to grind against the entire community association, probably because he was expelled. Why was he expelled? I have no idea, as all we are able to see is his side of the story, and as we all know there are always at least 3 sides to ever
The front page is really ambiguous and more griping about the failure to stand up about the claims he has made. More interesting are his actual claims:
http://www.rosscarrock.info/id6.html [rosscarrock.info]
Personally, I would attribute most of his problems (if true, we obviously are not seeing any primary sources here) to simple negligence rather than intentional malice or fraudulence. It may be worth looking into, however, and if at the very least this guys stink causes the association to get their accounting and record keep
Loose bits sink chips.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The DuPage County Sheriff's Department will be one of the many law enforcement departments and companies competing in the fifth annual Law Enforcement Torch Run Plane Pull.
The competition, which benefits Special Olympics Illinois, features teams of 20 competing against one another to pull a UPS Airbus 20 feet in the shortest amount of time, according to a news release from the Special Olympics.
Teams can register in the open division, which consists of companies, clubs and other groups, or in the public safety division, which includes law enforcement, fire departments, EMTs and armed forces.
Other teams scheduled to compete in the Sept. 21 competition include the Berwyn Police Department, Cotter Consulting, Inc. from Darien, MAKE Corporation in Oakbrook Terrace, the Woodridge Police Department and Meade Electric from McCook, according to the release.
For more information, visit illinoisplanepull.com


text:
Many consider this to be Triumph's commendable follow up to their mammoth hit Allied Forces. Not an easy task, any artist will tell you that. The songwriting shines on this album, and Rik delivers powerful vocals. The title song well represents this hard rock album, which is also melodic.
Pingback: TRIUMPH launch ONLINE SHOP and brand NEW WEBSITE. | urArtist network
Pingback: interview, memorbilia, community, shop, newsletter, bundles


text:
BANGOR, Maine — Calling it a "feel-good," paper-tiger ordinance, Bangor City Councilors 27 months ago rejected an ordinance that would have restricted where sex offenders could live in the city in a lopsided 8-1 vote. Now, they'll tackle the proposal again.
This year's council, at least initially, isn't nearly as united in its opposition of such an ordinance.
Councilor Charlie Longo, who was among the eight in 2010, argued that Bangor is a drastically different community than it was two years ago, and that this ordinance would "send a message."
Councilors James Gallant and Ben Sprague, who argued that the burden of proof should be on why such an ordinance shouldn't exist, also expressed their tentative support.
The city's Government Operations Committee voted during its Monday evening meeting to send the ordinance back to council for a first reading, and then onto a committee or workshop to iron out details.
The 2010 ordinance applied to people convicted of Class A, B or C sex offenses perpetrated against a person younger than 14. Offenders in that category would have been restricted to living outside a 750-foot radius around any elementary or middle school or any publicly-owned property where children are the primary users, like certain parks or a playground.
After receiving requests from several newer city councilors about what the city's options are regarding restrictions on sex offenders, City Solicitor Norm Heitmann said state statute allows municipalities to restrict how close convicted sex offenders may live to public places frequented by children. He pulled out a copy of the 2-year-old failed ordinance, which the council, committees and city staff had deliberated, researched and debated for about six months.
Council Chairman Nelson Durgin said Monday that the ordinance targeted an "emotional issue" but that research conducted by then-Police Chief Ron Gastia found that such efforts were "totally ineffective in other states and had nothing but symbolic meaning."
He also disagreed with Longo's assessment that Bangor has changed dramatically in the past two years.
Councilor Patricia Blanchette also argued that the ordinance wouldn't accomplish anything significant. She said the courts and probation officers already do a good job policing sex offenders.
Councilors Patricia Blanchette, Nelson Durgin, Charlie Longo, Susan Hawes and David Nealley were on the 2010 council. Nealley was the only councilor to support the ordinance in 2010.
City Manager Cathy Conlow said the city could use geographic information system data to map out the zones in which registered sex offenders wouldn't be allowed to live and assess its effects.
Also on Monday night, the city council rejected Kristian M. Lawson's appeal of the city's decision to not renew his taxicab license. The city has the right to deny a license based on certain criminal convictions.
During a background check in February, police found that Lawson had a 2009 conviction for possession of Schedule W drugs, which lead to the denial of his request.
Lawson appealed, but didn't show up at Monday's special council meeting to explain himself. Because he wasn't there, councilors quickly rejected his appeal.


text:
The Morris volleyball team went 3-2 at the Geneva Invitational over the weekend, losing to Burlington Central (25-22, 25-23) and Geneva (25-15, 25-7), but beating IMSA (25-14, 25-7) the Geneva JV team (20-25, 25-14, 26-24) and Aurora Christian (25-22, 25-23).
Kaylin Korte had 26 kills in the first four matches to pace the Redskins. Morgan Hussey had 11 digs against Central and four more against Geneva. Austin Thompson also had eight assists and four digs against Geneva.
Against IMSA, Cara Cummings had four kills and both Taya Torkelson and JoAnna Nowicki had five aces each.
Against the Geneva JV team, Emma Thomas and Thompson had three aces each, Torkelson five digs and Daisy Gonzalez had five perfect passes to target.
In the final match, Abby Baker had six kills and a block, Kirsten Galloway had seven digs, Morgan Spencer a block and Torkelson six digs.
Minooka fifth at Tiger Classic
The Indians defeated Carlinville (25-16, 25-18) and Auburn (25-10, 25-12) in pool play but lost to Bloomington (25-21, 25-27, 11-15). In the Silver Division play, Minooka beat Farmington (25-22, 25-13) and Decatur St. Theresa (25-23, 16-25, 15-10.)
Newark 3rd at Manteno Early Bird Tourney
Newark went 3-2 at the event, beating Illinois Lutheran (25-18, 25-20), T.F. North (25-15, 25-15) and Grant Park (26-24, 26-24) while losing to Manteno (25-10, 25-23) and Watseka (25-17, 22-25, 15-4).
Rachel Lape and Melanie Kala made the All-Tournament team.
Coal City 42,
Dwight 0
Coal City evened its record at 1-1 on the season by beating the Trojans by the running clock.
Coal City scored in the first quarter on a 3-yard TD run by Corey Jurzak and a 3-yard run by quarterback Brennan Shetina,
In the second quarter, D.J. Budde ran in from a yard out, Shetina completed a 16-yard scoring pass to Kaisey Kaiser and the two then hooked up on a 7-yard strike before halftime. The running clock was in order when Jurzak ran in a 4-yard TD.
Morris, Seneca at Twilight in the Woods
Plainfield North won the girls meet and Pontiac the boys event on Friday.
The Seneca girls were fourth and Morris eighth. On the boys side, Morris was fourth and Seneca eighth.
Minooka at Hornet red Devil Tournament
The Indians' girls team finished fifth as a team with 128 points and the boys were eighth with 259 points. Palatine won the girls meet with 59 points and Hinsdale Central the girls with 59 points.
On the boys side, Andy Geldean had the best time of 16:11, followed closely by Gabe Ceballos (16:16).
Shabbona 12,
Channahon 11
Shabbona took the lead in the sixth and never looked back.
At the plate, Michael Metesh had three hits, Nick Vejr and Austin Hatcher had two hits each and Collin Kingsbury and Payton Cummings had one hit each.
Kingsbury, Cummings and Dawson Moore combined on the pitching victory.
Shabbona 4,
Seneca 0
Moore was the winning pitcher, going all seven innings in recording the shutout. He fanned 13.
Vejr had two hits and Moore, Kingsbury, Metesh, Hatcher, Scotty Scaman and Mason Stapleton also had hits.
Minooka 7,
Coal City 5
In the Illinois Valley Conference championship, the Indians came back and scored four runs in their last at-bat to win it.
Justin Dabulskis was the losing pitcher despite allowing only three earned runs.
At the plate, Keegan Gagliardo had three hits
Coal City 12,
Wilmington 2, 5 innings
The Warriors won behind the pitching of Blake Harseim.
At the plate, Nick Jones had four runs scored, Gagliardo had three RBI and Beau Wills two runs. Each had two hits.
Coal City 11,
Manteno 2
The Warriors handed Manteno its first loss of the season behind the combined pitching of Blake Harseim, Justin Dabulskis and Keegan Gagliardo.
At the plate, Austin Friddle went 3-for-3 with three RBI and Kaleb Spreitzer had three hits and three runs scored. Carter Copes and Beau Wills had two hits and two RBI each.
Coal City 10,
Minooka 5
Coal City won the IVC title behind the pitching of Payton Hutchings, Jack Bunton and Alex Friddle.
Nolan O'Keefe had two doubles and three RBI while Mickey McDowell and Connor Skubic had two hits each.
Coal City 10,
Channahon 6
Trailing 6-0, Coal City rallied for the win behind the pitching of Jack Bunton and Payton Hutchings.
At the plate, Nolan O'Keefe had a three-run triple, Connor Best was 2-for-4 with two doubles and three runs scored and Connor Skubic had a run scored and two RBI.
Coal City 4,
Manteno 3
Conner Best went 2-for-4 with a double and Alex Friddle got the win in relief for the Coal City (9-1) seventh-graders.
Shabbona 4,
Seneca 3
Lyda Robinson had 2 hits, a run and 2 steals for Seneca (8-5) in the walkoff loss Thursday. Taylor Bushman (RBI single) struck out 9 on the mound.
Seneca 11,
Grand Ridge 0, 6 innings
Morgan Pifer had a double, triple, two stolen bases and three RBI in the win while Madison Maloney added two hits, including a two-run double. Lydia Robinson also had two hits.
Taylor Bushman pitched the first four innings, allowing one hit while striking out four. Gillian Culbreth went two innings, striking out two.
The Morris Warriors swept the Joliet Raiders this past weekend.
Warriors 35,
Raiders 0
Nathaniel Baldwin, Kameron Dransfeldt and Kaden Laurie were the team's leading rushers in the game while on defense Laurie and Nolan Feeney helped preserve the shutout.
Warriors 30,
Raiders 6
Cole Laurie had an interception returned for a touchdown for Morris in the win.
Warriors 21,
Raiders 6
Tristan Martin had an interception returned for a touchdown and Zander Smith and Josh Coote combined to record a safety in the win.
Evan Briones was the leading rusher.
Warriors 19,
Raiders 0
Troy Mutz scored two rushing touchdowns in the win while Steven Wagner added another.


text:
Watch: Argo
Directed by Ben Affleck (Warner Brothers, 2012)
Films based on true events face the dual challenge of making real life captivating on the big screen and of keeping a story engaging for an audience that likely already knows the ending. Director and star Ben Affleck's Argo successfully does both, as the film takes a few necessary liberties with historical details in order to create a movie that is suspenseful to the very end.
Argo tells of the rescue of six U.S. employees who escaped from the American embassy in Tehran before it was taken over and where hostages were held for 444 days beginning in 1979. Having taken refuge at the home of the Canadian ambassador, the rescue of the six becomes urgent when the Iranians begin to piece together (literally, from shredded documents) that some Americans may be missing. Affleck plays Tony Mendez, a CIA consultant tasked with removing the group safely from Iran, a most dangerous place for an American at that time.
Mendez plans to disguise the six as a Canadian film crew scouting an exotic location for a Star Wars knock-off. For the plan to work, Mendez must actually begin production and create media hype for a bogus movie, to be called Argo. John Goodman and Alan Arkin shine as John Chambers and Lester Siegel, Mendez's contacts in the film industry who aid the secret operation; the two provide comic relief without detracting from the seriousness of the task at hand.
Though the film paints the CIA agents as the main heroes behind the covert mission that was declassified in 1997, the end credits note that the intellgience agency "complemented" the rescue efforts of the Canadian government.
Enhanced with real news broadcasts and radio clips—plus plenty of period-appropriate big glasses and shaggy beards—Argo will keep you rooting for the mission's success, even if you remember or can guess how it ends.
This article appeared in the December 2012 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 77, No. 12, page 42).


text:
Meridian's most historic restaurant got back a little piece of its history this week.
Weidmann's Restaurant was established in 1870 and fed people from all over the country with its down home cooking, southern style.
Under its former ownership about 12 years ago, the sign that had been there for years was taken down and sold.
"It changed hands to Mr. Price, who sent the sign back to us," said manager, Molly Robin.
Buckley Electric helped to refurbish the sign.
"The sign was the original sign from the original restaurant and it was sold at auction when the restaurant closed the first time," said Jim Buckley. "And it was given back about a couple of weeks ago and Mitchell Signs completely refurbished it."
Some of the people here today have been coming to Weidmann's for more than forty years.
"Oh the food is wonderful," said Tom Maynor of Meridian. "I've had about everything on the menu. Friday noon is my gumbo day; I love the gumbo here."
"I've been coming here all my life," said Cluis Daniels of Collinsville. "Back whenever they didn't even have a lock on the front door and it stayed open twenty-four hours a day."
Weidmann's is known all over the country for its gumbo, fried green tomatoes, and crab cakes.
"We've got about a party of eighty going upstairs right now," said chef John Tourtellote. "They're getting crab cakes and Chicken Bolognaise and prime rib."
Weidmann's opened its doors back in 1870, but it didn't move to the current location until 1923. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The current owner, Charles Frazier, took over two years ago.


text:
People used to get excited when a CPU clock was measured in MEGAHERTZ! Now we're jaded...
The fucking things did not run a GUI that emulated transparent glass. They could process video or images that we use today etc. People use to get excited about ASCII art and how clever that was. Today you can see pictures Hubble has taken in intricate detail, and instead of playing ASCII strip poker people are viewing HD porn instantly.
When home computers were new anything they could do was a marvel. Now we've seen what more processing power can do. We have a lot of bloat. We also have a lot of functionality that is taken for granted. You have to remember that international direct dialing was considered a wonder when the BBC microcomputer was introduced. ("What, you mean no operator connects you!?")
In the late 1980s Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on the second generation of the ARM core. So once again Apple is there. It's getting like the black obelisk on 2001. Pick anything and apple may not have invented it but they did shape what it became.
I really think that's the issue when people talk about computers of yore, its not that we now have 3.8Gh quad-core chips with megabytes of RAM as cache that appear to perform the tasks we set them with less user responsiveness than the old computers, I think its because in the old days, you got the chance to be clever to make it work. Today's computers are built up with layer after layer of bloat that is designed to make it easier to code, but really makes the overall experience for the end user less than o
Ones the eye candy novelty factor has worn off which takes, ooh , 3 minutes , no one cares one way or the other. All it does is waste energy by forcing the GPU to do pointless calculations. You couldn't have picked a worse example to explain why computers are better today.
That depends. If I'm in a first person shooter, I most certainly do want a good emulation of glass in the windows. If I'm using a loope in an application, then I certainly do want a good emulation of a glass magnifer. And in a GUI, if you want to indicate that a button is clickable, it's best to give it some kind of 3D effect so it looks like a physical button. And a glass effect can be part of that.
But I assume you're talking about glass borders around windows on the Windows OS. In which case I agree. But
Shut. Your. Ass. I'd read about proper, component-level emulation, but I had no idea people had actually done it on anything more sophisticated then a calculator. Incredible.
Thanks to the power of javascript and web2.0, you can again await the day when we'll be able to push a 6502 into the realm of the megahertz! [visual6502.org]
That is one of the coolest projects I have ever seen! I wish we had had something like that when I was taking intro to digital design.
For the biggest geekfest ever, get the BBC series which accompanied the launch of the BBC micro. Truly brilliant!
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6314602/Making_The_Most_Of_The_Micro [thepiratebay.org]
I loved Micro Men. The Beeb show absolutely no interest in releasing it on DVD, but it's on YouTube. I'm getting really fucking tired of waiting for banner ads to load on YouTube, but if you want to see it, start here [youtube.com].
Some of the original people have cameos, like Sophie Wilson as the exasperated barmaid toward the end.
For the biggest geekfest ever, get the BBC series which accompanied the launch of the BBC micro. Truly brilliant!
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6314602/Making_The_Most_Of_The_Micro [thepiratebay.org]
Does that link work for you? I get a 404 when I click "Download this torrent", I'm wondering if my ISP has done something awful since I last tried using TPB...
Programming with 6502 assembly... all of us cool kids were doing that back in those days.
Sez you...the cool kids in my neighborhood were programming their Sinclair ZX81 [wikipedia.org] (which apparently was sold in the U.S. as the Timex Sinclair 1000) in Z80 assembly. B registers, C registers, (and pairing them as BC) D, E, F (paired with A as AF if I remember correctly?) H, L, IX, IY, etc.
Then we got the Commodore 64 and I had only three registers to play with (can't remember what their names were). I felt like I'd taken several steps backwards.
What the 6502 in the C64 (and the BBC Micro, under discussion) had which most people who started asm on the Z80 missed was the zero page. Effectively, using the zero page you had 256 registers. Zero page operations on the 6502 were as fast as register operations on the Z80. While I'm much more proficient at Z80 asm than 6502, I really appreciate the very straightforward and uncomplicated - but powerful - design of the 6502.
The most remarkable thing about the BBC is that they're still going running production code.
I had the good fortune of working with (or rather, near) one of these systems a few years ago. When I asked why they hadn't upgraded the machine in nearly 3 decades the head of the system simply responded; "It still works."
Ah, someone with brains. If it still works, why would you change it (concerns about suitable replacement being timely aside as that's a separate issue).
BBC's were great for all sorts of things. Working in school IT departments I often find them, and sometimes I find "old" staff there who tell me how they used them for EEPROM reading/programming, and other interfacing that today's school machines hardly do any more with specialist adaptors.
They even ran the Teletext service in the UK (they actually have a "Teletext" video mode on them) and all sorts. It was a programmable, extendable computer that did what was necessary and no more.
Oh for those days again. Here's hoping that Raspberry Pi thing takes off.
Of course, Teletext is pretty much dead in the UK now, replaced by shiny MHEG-based digital text services. The BBC ended up having to add Teletext-style page numbers to their replacement for it though - there was just such an incredible amount of demand from people that preferred that method of navigation.
With a system that old you can get away with taking that approach - with today's fascination with having everything somehow connected over the Internet, you simply don't have the luxury of being able to say "It works. Why change it?"
Probably still 20 sitting in my old highschool with pupils having to code in COMAL.
"CHAIN" in BASIC dialects tended to be a "merge in the code into the running state." Ie, it wouldn't delete the current variable set.
It's how you got around RAM limitations - you broke your code up into separate source files, and just "swapped" in bits of BASIC code as you needed them.
Then there's "CHAIN MERGE" (at least on the Amstrad CPC), which merges in code into running state -and- code. So you could say reserve lines 10000-65500 for "chained" code, and just do this:
100 CHAIN MERGE "sub.bas", 10000, DE
The BBC Micro let you put the BASIC code anywhere in RAM to execute it.
I still have fond memories of spending my school days playing Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro; that game was bloody hard when you were 8.
Did you have "An L Adventure" too?
Do you remember using Yeknod to knock a wall down
"L" was the game that first got me hooked with computers. I played that game through to completion on one of our school's BBC micros, even though it involved doing so during break times, lunch and after school. I was very fortunate to have a maths teacher that was really into the BBC and knew what could be done with computers. We had an Econet network, fileserver and a computer room that we could spend our breaks in.
The OS and built in BASIC in the BBC are extremely elegant: functions, procedures, a VDU dri
The BBC easily had the best versions of early 80's arcade games - Defender, Asteroids, Scramble, Pacman. Nothing on any other machine could touch them.
I still say FRAK! when the need arises. Nobody knows what I'm talking about
I know. I can even hum the tune. No yo-yo, though.
I still wonder where all the resources are wasted in current software.
I occasionally wonder what sort of performance we'd see out of modern PCs if anybody was loopy enough to go into the sort of detail as Braben & Bell.
You don't need to count clock cycles. You just bind some code to the horizontal blank interrupt. Doesn't waste any cpu at all
Hey , don't feel bad , we all did something similar
I remember in electronics classes being told the TTL chips could only handle 5 volts. And they gave us power supplies which went up to 25V. I mean seriously, what did they EXPECT a bunch of teenagers would do?? "Hey, nice bang, cool smoke effects! Lets try a some capacitors now!"
Karma is a bitch
Elite [wikipedia.org], developed for the BBC Micro and published by the same company that made the Micro, did get a lot of attention here in the U.S. (it was ported to all the major platforms). It was one of the first big universe sandbox games, and modern games like EvE Online are still influenced by it.
Can anyone familiar with the BBC Micro give a comparison to the contemporary 6502 computers from the States?
Was the Beeb available before the Apple ][ ? Was it more or less expensive in the UK?
I get the feeling that the BBC Micro enjoyed a kind of tax protected status, the way American made pickup trucks do in the US.
It was roughly contemporary to the Commodore 64 and Atari 800/800XL micros. More expensive than both of those, but cheaper than an Apple II, which were very expensive in the UK. The Apple II predated it by about 4 years if I recall. My impression at the time was that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Timex Sinclair in the US) was far more popular in the UK, along with the C64. The BBC was common in schools, but less common at home, mostly due to a dearth of games and pricing. A cheaper version, Electron, was releas
Cool - I remember something about Atari Jaguar being much more widespread in the UK than the US, but, then, today I can't even put my finger on what exactly the Jaguar was - I had an 800, plus a couple of 400s when they dropped to clearance price ($99 or less..), and then one of the Atari 16 bit machines that finally died when its internal floppy drive belt stretched out (OS was always loaded from floppy, so....)
Was the Beeb available before the Apple ][ ? Was it more or less expensive in the UK?
I get the feeling that the BBC Micro enjoyed a kind of tax protected status, the way American made pickup trucks do in the US.
The BBC came quite a while after the Apple II - if you've been following the 30th Birthday announcements, its actually younger than the IBM PC (...of course, the IBM was eye-wateringly expensive for a few years, until the Clone Wars began).
I've programmed both and, generally, the BBC was considerably more powerful than the Apple.
It had a (much) better BASIC with 'structured programming' facilities (Repeat/Until loops, multiline if/then/else named procedures), a built-in 6502 assembler (so you could use BASIC as a macro language) and neat indirection facilities for working with bytes/words/strings in memory. Unusually for "home" computers of the time it had a 'proper' operating system, quite separate from BASIC - the BASIC ROM lived in a paged memory space alongside applications such as wordprocessors and other utility ROMs such as the disc filing system (popular BBC expansions included extra ROM sockets for applications or 'sideways RAM' for use as a RAMdisk or to let you develop your own ROMs).
The graphics were much better (but with a caveat) than the competition - 160x256 in 8 colours, 320x256 in 4 colours or a TV-tousing 640x256 in monochrome. Also, those colour modes were fully bit-mapped c.f. the attribute-based solutions on other systems (where you could e.g. only have 2 colours in each 8x8 cell, or on the Apple where you could only plot white by plotting a magenta pixel next to a green pixel). There was a proper palette system (so you could do fast animation by palette switching - only TTL though so its always the same 8 colours) and 'hardware' scrolling by tweaking the memory mapping (which could also pull tricks like changing display mode half-way down the screen, as used in Elite). The caveat was that the RAM was shared between data and video - so the higher modes used 20K out of your 32K. Although aftermarket upgrades appeared that added a 20K page to replace the video RAM (which worked seamlessly provided that the application used the correct OS calls rather than poking things directly) Acorn took their own sweet time before building that feature into later models.
It also had a shedload of internal hardware: a Teletext-compatible character generator chip for low-memory, high-quality TV friendly 40 col text & block graphics (without eating your RAM); a 'proper' sound generator chip; analogue inputs (not audio frequency, but great for proper joysticks and school science experiments) and a 'user port' which made about half of a 6522 VIA chip available for digital I/O, a serial port, parallel port, proprietary expansion port & vacant sockets on-board for a floppy controller and 'econet' LAN... Plus a really decent keyboard (the kind with discrete key-switches for each key). Then there was Acorn's 'Tube' interface, which allowed you to hang off a 'second processor': i.e. a headless 6502, Z80 or (later) 32016-based computer that used the BBC as an I/O processor. (Of course, the really interesting one was the ARM second processor, but AFAIK that was never publicly available).
The Apple's advantages were (a) software base (but the BBC accumulated quite a big software base in the UK) and (b) internal expansion (the BBC had lots of expansion potential but it was either via external interfaces or slightly kludey piggyback boards). I think there were more options for upgrading an Apple 2 to '64K clean' RAM configuration.
However, If you got the BBC 6502 second processor (a 4MHz 6502 with 64k RAM, with the original BBC handling all the I/O) then anything else with 8 bits (and quite a few things with 16) could eat your dust... unfortunately the price of that hampered adoption and, hence, software support (although you could play the definitive version of Elite).
The BBC B cost ~£400 - but
What Braben and Bell did to get this running on the BBC makes for pretty interesting reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)#Technical_innovations [wikipedia.org]
Aside from Elite, one of the classic games for the BBC was Citadel. I'm still amazed how it managed to fit about 100 screens worth of platform adventure game into 12k of memory without touching the disk after it had loaded. IIRC it ran in mode 2 - which took 20k out of the available 32k memory. I think they only used part of the screen and used the rest for storage with some weird trick to make it invisible. The Electron version (see link) couldn't do the hiding trick somehow.
The BBC version also spoke to you when the menu program loaded up, and to this day I think of it as "Seeta-toddle", which gives you some idea of the audio quality.
For those who are curious, there is a wikipedia entry here: Citadel (video game) [wikipedia.org].
I grew up programming advanced Java routines on a difference engine. Your BBC Micro and your ZX81 have nout on me.
What a trip down memory lane... I still remember that I wanted an Archimedes back then, but couldn't afford it. For its time, it was an incredible machine... *sigh*
The current ARM has little to do with the BBC micro. Apple purchased a stake in Acorn with the goal of getting them to FAB a low powered CPU to power the Newton. While the Newton was never a success as a device, the technology and patents that resulted from the project set ARM on it's current trajectory. In a round-about way the Newton did save Apple. At it's darkest hour the sale of Apple's holding in Arm netted $800m in hard cold cash when Apple needed it most. Without the Newton Apple wouldn't be wh
And if it weren't for Acorn, the ARM would never have existed for Apple to put in $800M in hard cold cash. The ARM project started in 1983, years before Apple or anyone else for that matter even knew of the project. The BBC Micro was the seed, the ARM's original purpose was to put in the next BBC Micro (the Acorn Archimedes).
Apple saved the ARM, and the ARM saved Apple, it went both ways
The current ARM has little to do with the BBC micro. Apple purchased a stake in Acorn with the goal of getting them to FAB a low powered CPU to power the Newton.
...except that if the 6502 BBC micro hadn't happened, Acorn wouldn't have developed the ARM2/3 to use in the next gen BBC Micro and there wouldn't have been anything for Apple to buy in to. It may have evolved since then, but Apple sure as hell didn't invent the ARM.
The first ARM-based machines were the ARM2-powered Acorn Archimedes range, released in 1987, the entry level model of which was still branded as "BBC Micro". At the time, they kicked sand in the face of 80286-based machines. The Newton didn't appear until much later.
Cheekily, in 1994, Apple touted their new PowerPC-based Macs as the first RISC-based personal computers.
I think you're missing the point. ARM clearly lost to x86 in terms of the PC and I think it's fair to contend that they would have become a footnote in computing if not for the capabilities they developed while working with Apple. Specifically the reason arm continues it success today is because the Newton needed ultra-low (for it's time) power consumption. Apple spent almost 5 years working with ARM on that processor before releasing the Newton with the ARM6. I think it's fair to say there are bits of
At least I think they were BBCs. I remember they had this special hard plastic yellow thing that went in the floppy drive (a 3.5" IIRC) to keep it from being damaged when the machine was moved or something.
You didn't have BBCs if they had a 3.5" floppy drive - they almost invariably had 5.25" floppy drives.
Great memories with this computer. And it was so far ahead of all competitors : even the predecessor of the Acorn BBC B (the Electron) already had 2Mhz and 32KB RAM and was networkable using a thing called Econet.
The BBC B+ could be expanded up to 128KByte and had a second processor (we're talking 1986 !!!!), teletext-reader, lightpen that allowed you to draw by using a pen on your screen (think tablet !) and so on.
And then Archimedes with its 32-bit RISC CPU came in 1987 (!), doing 4 MIPS and offering a Wi
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken


text:
La traviata
It wouldn't be like the German director Peter Konwitschny not to provoke just a little. So his take on Verdi's most popular opera, for English National Opera, shouldn't surprise all that much. Cut and spring-cleaned, it runs at under two hours, without even an interval for us to drown our sorrows at the bar. And there's plenty to be sorrowful about, not least Violetta's futile desperation, for life and love, intensified by this accelerated journey towards death.
The set, meanwhile, could hardly be more simple, consisting of just a chair and several rows of curtains. These serve as an entrance to the heroine's psyche, revealing it layer by layer, as Violetta's love for Alfredo gradually forces her to drop her defences. At the climax, they collapse altogether, leaving her exposed and broken, amid the wreckage of her dreams. But that's not all Konwitschny has to say – he even introduces a new character. This is Alfredo's sister, whose marriage prospects are apparently threatened by Violetta's reputation – a normally unseen side story, though one central to the plot. What we see here, however, is an insipid excuse for a creature, clearly terrified of her tyrannical father, Giorgio.
As a whole, it is an innovative, thought-provoking staging, to which the singers are a mixed blessing. In her European debut, Corinne Winters sings sweetly as Violetta, but doesn't quite have the vulnerability to embody the role. Ben Johnson is endearing as a geeky, bumbling Alfredo, while Anthony Michaels Moore is charismatic, if slightly vocally-strained, as Giorgio. Making each moment count, conductor Michael Hofstetter breathes some fire into the orchestra's belly.
'La traviata' runs at ENO until Mar 3 2013.
|Venue name:
|London Coliseum
St Martin's Lane
|Tube: Charing Cross
|Event phone:
|0871 911 0200


text:
Southampton manager Mauricio Pochettino is refusing to let increasing praise for his team distract them as they prepare for a physical battle at Stoke on Saturday.
Saints moved to third in the Barclays Premier League - albeit only for a few hours - last weekend after beating Fulham at St Mary's to claim their fifth victory of the season.
While they were subsequently overtaken by Chelsea and Tottenham, Southampton are still in fifth, just four points off leaders Arsenal and with European qualification being mooted as an ever more realistic possibility.
Pochettino, though, is adamant his side will not listen to such talk and his players are likely to heed his words given the positive results of his demanding approach.
The Argentinian told Saints Player: "It makes me happy for the fans and for the players as well.
"It's always nice to get some recognition from the media, it makes me happy for the chairman as well as it's all part of this club, but at the same time, my focus is on the staff and trying to improve on every single game and I'm 100 per cent focused on doing the best for this team and this club."
He added: "We always aim to maintain the same focus in training and training with the same intensity, so we just want to keep on training hard.
"It's clear that when you win you get a good atmosphere within the team and the club which is a very good thing, but we need to stay grounded and keep on training hard and looking ahead to the next game."
In contrast to Saints' good form which sees them unbeaten in six games, their hosts are struggling at the wrong end of the table and have not tasted victory since August 31.
Pochettino does not, though, expect anything other than a gruelling outing.
"We expect a very tough and physical game," Pochettino said.
"It's going to be very difficult and tough.
"On average they have the tallest team in the league, so I think they still have some aspects from when Tony Pulis was manager, but there some new aspects that Mark Hughes has introduced to the team and I think that it's a team which over 90 minutes is able to do two different styles.
"They can go for the long ball but also the short one so, overall, we expect a very tough encounter."
Source: PA


text:
Mall name:
5715-62A Richmond Road, Williamsburg, Virginia - VA 23188
Phone number to Williamsburg Premium Outlets mall
757 565 0702
Hours (mall)
Monday – Saturday 10:00 am – 9:00pm, Sunday 10:00 am – 7:00 pm.
Driving directions
Other stores in Williamsburg Premium Outlets:
Looking for another location of Easy Spirit store?
Go to Easy Spirit store locator to see all Easy Spirit stores


text:
By Chris Spafford and Darryl Rose of Oliver Wyman
For independent aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul providers, the world is shrinking.
For years, major engine and component manufacturers have muscled into the aircraft maintenance market, blocking MROs from winning work on new models that comprise the lion's share of modern fleets. MROs are left fighting for a vanishing piece of the pie: end-of-life aircraft destined for retirement or second lives in far-flung markets.
MROs stayed afloat by signing licensing deals with manufacturers and cutting costs by relying on serviceable materials. However, neither strategy guarantees a future to these providers. MROs seeking long-term prosperity need to access the growing market for new aircraft models that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) dominate.
In our annual MRO Survey, Oliver Wyman confirmed this competitive imbalance is deepening. These dynamics have eliminated opportunities for airlines to find cost-competitive maintenance following aircraft delivery, where MROs and OEMs once fiercely competed. In response, airlines now increasingly conduct maintenance procurement in parallel with equipment selection processes, forcing OEMs to compete against each other. While this trend benefits airlines, it has blocked independent MROs from major procurement campaigns altogether.
As a result, MROs vie for a diminishing share of work tied to mature fleets, which are not dominated by OEMs. While shorter removal intervals and heavier work scopes typical of older components are a boon to MROs today, this market may already be endangered.
Retirement of aircraft less than 25 years old has been rising, hitting 43% of all retirements in 2011, compared with just 21% in 2007. Recent retirements shrink the mature aircraft market and will harm the MROs relying on those fleets.
MROs have begun to seek partnerships with manufacturers as an avenue to growth. More than 70% of our MRO respondents indicate reaching at least one OEM partnership within the last three years. And more than 80% of such respondents characterize those partnerships as a licensing agreement. This is a short-term survival strategy that leaves the MROs in a subordinated position, prone to shifts in the licensor's fulfillment strategies and to encroachments by rivals.
According to our survey, many MROs have attempted to establish more symbiotic partnerships with OEMs, with little success. Until MROs can implement more ambitious tie-ups with manufacturers, maintenance organizations will remain susceptible to their more-powerful partners' shifting priorities.
Still, MROs are far from doomed. Current strategies and fleet types can sustain many MROs over the medium term, and some MROs maintain strong and sustainable niches.
Plus, encouragingly, airlines want a more robust maintenance market that includes MROs in a meaningful way. According to our survey, most airlines would welcome competition from MROs for long-term maintenance services when aircraft are purchased.
To thrive rather than survive, MROs must find a way around OEMs and into these sourcing campaigns. MROs must seek partners who can inject them into the selection process. Two candidates are aircraft lessors and airframe manufacturers.
Aircraft lessors work with many operators at the point of aircraft acquisition. MROs could serve carriers in need of bundled services and owners keen to ensure capable stewardship of their asset through its lifecycle.
According to our companion survey of the aviation finance market, many lessors would support this strategy. Of lessor respondents, 70% indicate they already advise airlines on maintenance contracting matters. And a significant majority of our respondents also favor pairing MRO services with lease agreements for commercial (63%) and asset marketability (100%) reasons.
MROs should also consider partnerships with airframe manufacturers to gain access to the aircraft selection process. These players continue to develop their own aftermarket service offerings, but with less success than their engine and component counterparts.
There are clear challenges ahead for engine and component MROs. Seeking powerful allies, defining ways to serve unmet needs, and developing innovative business designs to combat OEM dominance are critical to long-term viability.
The authors may be reached at: firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com.
Opinions expressed are not those of Aviation Daily or McGraw-Hill. Bylined submissions should be sent via e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com and limited to 680 words. The DAILY reserves the right to edit for space. A photo of the author, in print form or via e-mail, is welcome. Submissions become the property of McGraw-Hill and will not be returned.


text:
OCEAN CITY -- Boat show exhibitors from Delmarva and the surrounding area will set up in Ocean City's Roland E. Powell Convention Center this weekend for the 29th annual Seaside Boat Show.
Sponsored by the Ocean City/Berlin affiliate of Optimist International, this year's show will have about 350 boats on display and about 50 of the show's more than 140 exhibitors will be boat dealers.
Dealers and exhibitors come from Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia for what the club calls the No. 1 inside boat show on the Eastern Shore.
Bass boats will be displayed and accompanied by accessory shows. There will also be sport cruisers, sportfish, center consoles, cuddy boats and performance boats, among other wares.
Show Chairman Charlie Dorman says that in addition to boats, there are a myriad of accessories, including "anything you need to go fishing," as well as jewelry, pottery, nautical flag dealers and more.
The Optimists sell tickets to a drawing that funds college scholarships for Stephen Decatur High School seniors. For attendees, the lure to buy the $100 ticket is a $100,000 cash prize. From total ticket proceeds, the Optimists give about $50,000 in scholarships for a handful of Decatur students who apply.
Boat show proceeds also are used by the Optimists for youth and community service programs. The club donates to several youth programs around the Lower Shore.
"Everybody who volunteers, they all work their butts off for the children," Dorman said.
Admission to the show is $9, or $15 for an all-weekend pass.
For the 24th year, the owners of North Bay Marina in Selbyville are donating a pontoon boat and motor as the event's grand door prize.
Read more at http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20120214/DW03/202140340/Show-feature-about-350-boats
Like what you read?
Want to know when we have important news, updates or interviews?
Join our newsletter today!
Send to your friends!


text:
Dante is a free implementation of the proxy protocols SOCKS version 4 and SOCKS version 5 (RFC 1928). It can be used as a firewall between networks, controlling outgoing traffic. The package consists of two parts: a socks server and a proxy client that supports socks, HTTP proxies, and UPnP. RFC 1961 (GSSAPI) is supported in both the client and the server. Commercial support is available.
DeleGate is a multi-purpose application level gateway or proxy server that mediates communication of various protocols, applying cache and conversion for mediated data, controlling access from clients, and routing toward servers. It translates protocols between clients and servers, converting between IPv4 and IPv6, applying SSL (TLS) to arbitrary protocols, merging several servers into a single server view with aliasing and filtering. It can be used as a simple origin server for some protocols (HTTP, FTP, and NNTP).
FilterProxy is a Perl script that acts as a generic Web proxy. It is unique in that it allows you to install modules that can perform arbitrary transformations on HTML (or any other MIME-type) and HTTP headers. It filters ads by stripping HTML from the page, anonymizes requests by removing Referer and User-Agent headers, compresses HTML content, and de-animates animated gifs. Configuration is done via Web-based forms or editing a Perl data structure.
Frox is a transparent FTP proxy that runs under Linux and *BSD. It should also work on other UNIX OSes that use ipfilter. It supports caching of FTP downloads, either by redirecting through a Squid proxy, or through its own local cache. Downloads may also be transparently scanned for viruses (through an external scanner). Additionally there is an interface for writing scripts to add features or modify frox's behavior, and examples are included to limit download file size and to transparently direct connections to specific hosts to mirror servers. The proxy is written with security in mind, and in the default setup runs as a non-root user in a chroot jail.
HTTPGate is a filtering HTTP Gateway originally intended to enchange user's privacy when surfing on the net, but it can also be used to avoid censorware systems in web browsing. HTTPGate operates on a user definable internet port where the user connects using a web browser. The main page shows a text box and a set of options user can choose to avoid transmitting some information during client/server negotiation.
httpMonitor is a Python program which lets you monitor the HTTP traffic between a browser and a Web server. You configure your browser to use httpMonitor as its proxy to ensure that all HTTP traffic between browser and server goes via httpMonitor. In a XML-configuration file you can specify a Python-function as processor for the HTTP-messages you are interested in (requests or responses, which match certain criteria). You may have as many processors as you want, without modifying the actual program. The only thing you need to do is configure the httpMonitor and write your processors.
jftpgw is a proxy server for the FTP protocol. It is highly configurable, allowing you to use an XML-like configuration file to define almost any combination of the client's IP, the server's IP, the user name, the destination port, and so on. jftpgw supports inetd/daemon mode, transparent proxying, forwards, caching, logging, data IP and port specification (port ranges), limiting of the number of simultaeous sessions, and several proxy login styles for clients that support FTP proxies.
Jonama is a piece of software acting as a relay between a client over the Net and your internal systems. It was developed which security in mind, ie. it makes use of the SSL protocol to identify remotes and crypt channels and uses Unix mechanisms like chroot and setuid to minimize rights and actions.
A mass e-mail sender program.
Software to build and execute shell command lines from standard input in parallel.


text:
Image Data
|634px × 889px
Aston Legal is committed to fighting tirelessly to protect the rights of our clients and we get GREAT RESULTS. We practice in a variety of areas, including all criminal, family, child and child parenting, property settlement, AVO, and driving matters. All matters are handled by mature, experienced lawyers capable of providing full representation in all NSW and Commonwealth Courts, including Local, District, Supreme, Family and High Court of Australia. The team of lawyers at Aston Legal are totally committed to achieving the best outcome possible for you during this very stressful time. Call for a confidential discussion or fill the form in below and we will be in touch with you shortly.
Parramatta Office
Suite 2, Level 3
96 Phillip Street
Parramatta NSW 2150
Tel: (02) 9635 3777
Fax: (02) 9094 2261
Mobile: 0448 807 075
Aston Legal Solicitors & Barristers | Sydney Defence Lawyers | Sydney Family Lawyers
Disclaimer: All content on this website is intended as general information only and is not to be considered as legal advice. | ©2018. Aston Legal Solicitors Pty Limited. ABN: 99623575913 All Rights Reserved. Site By: IanRedford.com | Sitemap


text:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- A cancer support group in Wisconsin is sticking with its name honoring comedian Gilda Radner following public outcry after the group announced a change in November.
Gilda's Club Madison planned to change its name to the Cancer Support Community Southwest Wisconsin this month. But leaders of the group tell The Associated Press that they decided the better move was to stick with Gilda's Club.
The Madison chapter's board voted last week to keep the name. The decision was announced publicly Wednesday.
Board chairman Wayne Harris says the original intention was to find a more recognizable name for people seeking cancer support services. But he says the proposed change struck a chord with people, many of whom considered it a slight to Radner, who died of cancer in 1989.


text:
I have a memory of a whole rabbit roasted in the oven that was served by a Frenchwoman who rented out rooms to students in Grenoble back in 1974. I was the assistant to the professor who was running the University of Illinois Year Abroad program that year, and the woman had invited us to dinner. I'm not sure I had ever eaten rabbit before — but maybe I had, because I had already spent a year and half in France on earlier trips.
Whatever... the rabbit was delicious. It looked a little strange laid out whole in a baking pan. I remember the woman opened the oven and basted it while we watched. She chattered away in French, and I could understand what she said but probably couldn't add an awful lot to the conversation. She was used to having American students living in her house, so she didn't mind.
Yesterday, I was tempted to cook the rabbit whole, because that would have avoided the whole problem of cutting it up. The recipe I found, however, called for rabbit cut into serving pieces, and it was otherwise a simple preparation that sounded very good. Walt and I have been eating rabbit once or twice a year for nearly 30 years now, so I've had a certain amount of experience when it comes to carving up a raw rabbit. Mainly you need a sharp knife, some kitchen scissors, and a lot of patience.
If you want to know how to go about it, have a look at this web page. It's not for the faint of heart. I won't show you the process here — just the result.
Mustard is a classic ingredient in sauces for braised or roasted rabbit in France. Sometimes the rabbit — or the meatiest pieces, like the rable (the "saddle") or the back legs — is basted with Dijon mustard and then wrapped in strips of fat or bacon and roasted in the oven for 60 to 90 minutes. It's basted frequently with the mustard-flavored pan juices and fat.
serve the sauce separately if you want.
Or, as in the recipe I chose, the rabbit pieces are browned in butter and/or oil and then braised in a mixture of stock (chicken or vegetable) and white wine (half a liter in all), with sliced onions and carrots, bay leaves, thyme or rosemary, and salt and pepper. After the rabbit is braised and completely cooked to your taste — some like it a little firm, others prefer it falling off the bone, so cook it anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes — you just add about half a cup of cream and 4 or 5 tablespoons of Dijon mustard to the sauce and let the dish simmer for another 10 minutes before serving it.
broccoli is good with the mustard cream sauce.
It's easy to see why mustard is a classic ingredient in rabbit dishes. It's delicious. This kind of thing would be really good made with chicken thighs and legs too. I'd take the skin off to minimize the amount of fat and to mimic the skinless rabbit pieces.
Domestic rabbits (farm-raised, not wild) give a very lean white meat that is not strongly flavored. Rabbit is a standard item that's always available in French markets and supermarkets (as is duck), alongside chicken, turkey, guinea fowl, beef, pork, veal, lamb, and so on.
and steamed new potatoes.