Ok, so it's likely that everyone reading my blog knows that I passionately hate the conservatives, however, I got to thinking about what would happen if the conservatives did narrowly win the election. The fact that the statistics are currently showing a high percentage of votes will go to the conservatives really demonstrates the fact that Canadians are nearly as stupid as Americans. I'd say that Canadians are 3/5ths as stupid as Americans, based on the polls.

But perhaps Canadians aren't really that stupid... perhaps they're all just too trustworthy and believe everything that Harper is telling them. Trustworthyness is nothing to be looked down upon. But there's only really one way to show those people that Harper's government will try to fuck up Canada... let Harper's government govern Canada, it won't take long for the party to start collapsing under its own weight. Heck, look at the Aliance after the last election, as the official opposition they couldn't even keep their party own together let alone attack the ruling party, just imagine if they had actually won the last election!?

Now, let's take the following scenario...
Harper wins with 35% of the votes
Liberals come away with 34%
NDP gets 23%
Bloc gets 8%

If I've done my math right, that should be 100%. So Harper becomes PM. Let's say that the liberals decide not to join the NDP because they feel that the NDP is too left wing for them. Now Harper gets to make the decisions. Harper's government will start making BAD decisions. Decisions that Canadians hate. They'll start wasting money on defense contracts, they'll discuss re-implementing the draft. People will really start to see why the conservatives were a bad choice.

The people will have only one real alternative to turn to in an attempt to correct their bad voting decision... the liberals. They'll protest to the liberals to join with the NDP and abolish the Harper government, the liberals will do it, there'll be a vote of non-confidence, there'll be a new election and the people will realize that maybe a government could do worse things then cutting some programs in order to reduce our deficit and dept. This comes with the benifit that we won't have to worry about the conservatives for either this government, nor the next one.

If Harper comes a close second, he may just win next time.

Of course, the odds of liberals refusing to align with the NDP right off the bat are probably pretty minimal.

I just read Paul Graham's essay "What can't you say". Well, what I can say, was that it was an excellent read. I'd recommend it to anyone else too (especially if you think you don't like to think like everyone else). It was pretty long though (mind you, I'm also a really slow reader), but here's a sample, read the article it if you're still interested after this quote (heck, read it even you're not :-):

I still plan on reading the second part "Re: What can't you say".

So it appears that the US has just passed the INDUCE act (‘‘Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004’’). To sum up, this act aims to make anything that can be used to "intentionally induce" copyright infrigement illegal. It's an attempt to kill P2P networks such as kazaa and such from sharing music.

Now, this is a wickedly wonderfull act. Because how do you determine if "a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement" because of a particular product? You determine it if company X has more money to spend on lawers than company Y. This means that all VCR's, MP3 players, CD Burners, etc. are illegal. This is merely the tip of the iceberg, here's an example from slashdot...

Three rings for the elven kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for mortal men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Now, according to this bill, Dell, Viewsonic, NVidia, SFU, Movabletype and Mozilla all "induced" me to infringe on this copyrighted work. Hrmm... I'd say, at least this is only the US, but it might not be for long..

Our good old Ministry of Canadian Heritage made recommendations stating that we should
"make it illegal to sell software that cracks through the copy-protection coding." and
"make internet service providers (ISPs) subject to liability for copyrighted information."

Although this is just slightly further reaching than the US's DMCA it's just one step closer to making any product that can and might be used for copyright infringement illegal.

The EFF has a great piece on a mock lawsuit describing just how far reaching this bill is. Suing apple for making the ipod, cnet for reviewing the ipod, and Toshiba for supplying hard drives for iPods.

So a few of us headed out for Tall Scott's cabin this weekend. The weather was fabulous, although that also meant we spent most of our time in the shade :-). We did a little swimming, wake boarding, tubing, drinking, and just lounging. Not being a student anymore kicks ass, I think it's right in the middle of midterms right now... ahhh.

Anyway, I went wake boarding saturday after we got there. I think it was my best performance thus far (maybe my 5th time?), I was even doing little jumps on the wake, it was sweet. However, it appears that I'm now paying for it. Sunday I was pretty sore. But hot damn! Every time I rolled over last night I woke up cause my back hurt so much. Right now I can barely even walk! Heck, just sitting in this quite comfortable chair is painful. Am I really this old!?!? I think it's time to start doing deadlifts at the gym again...

Not much going on here today so I thought I'd post about a few movies I've watched lately.

Amelie:
I thought this movie was definately one of the better ones I've seen in a long time. It was a pretty cool story and I thought it was very funny, in a dark sort of way. Basically it's a story about this girl who's neglected by her parents so she's got an overactive imagination and decides to go around and make the world a better place for the people around her using very ellaborate schemes.

I would say it was most similar to Run Lola Run, although not all that similar I guess, but the same kind of style. If you liked Run Lola Run, you'd definately like this one too. I couldn't even say what my favorite part of the movie was since the whole thing was so good. Although I suppose the gnome travelling around the world was pretty good.

Along Came Poly:
About as text book romantic comedy as they come. Pretty typical and predictable but still has some good laughs.

50 First Dates:
This movie was hillarious. I couldn't stop laughing through most of it. I would definately recommend it to anyone looking for a good comedy. Heck I was even crying through a lot of it, it's just that funny!

btw, Ariane and I won a 19inch tv (through one of those home lotteries), which makes it a little easier to watch movies on than the old 12incher.