Wish I was there.

So: competition in Canada’s cell phone den of thieves? CBC seems to think so.

Maybe. But I wouldn’t count on big changes any time soon. Mainly because new entrants are structured in such a way as to be Canadian: absurdly, no carrier can be more than 47% foreign-owned. This rule more than any other makes a mockery of the process, and makes the government solely responsible for the continuing ripoff that has Canadians pay some of the highest cell phone prices in the world. Where are the US carriers?

Another factor is that the new entrants will need to pay back the $4.5 billion they borrowed. This will put pressure on the companies to keep prices high.

The new networks will operate largely on new frequencies - meaning Canada-specific equipment. Meaning expensive and few handsets.

Finally, this stuff takes time. Building a network, especially a national one, is not done overnight.

So. Nothing to see here, folks, move along. Until we get a government that gets competition and that, instead of protecting its vested interests, enforces such competition, there will be continuing high prices for Canadians. And since that is likely to be neither the Tories nor the Liberals, keep paying.

What a great lens. Click for larger.

It is worth giving up freedoms to end terror. This quote from a newspaper article, reacting to a decree that granted emergency powers to the government, is right on:

“AN END TO TERRORISM

This emergency decree will find no opponent despite the quite draconian measures which it threatens. Against murderers, arsonists, and hijackers there can only be the most rigorous defence, against terror the call to account thorough the death penalty. The fanatics who would like to make a terrorists’ den out of America must be rendered harmless. The consequences of the most acute struggle against terrorism have finally been drawn.. it concerns more than parties, it concerns the United States, in fact the entire Western culture built upon Christianity. And for this reason we welcome the recent emergency decree.”

Oh.

Wait.

Sorry. I seem to have mis-typed.

The actual text was like this:

“AN END TO MOSCOW.

This emergency decree will find no opponent despite the quite draconian measures which it threatens. Against murderers, arsonists, and poisoners there can only be the most rigorous defence, against terror the call to account thorough the death penalty. The fanatics who would like to make a robbers’ cave out of Germany must be rendered harmless. The consequences of the most acute struggle against communism have finally been drawn.. it concerns more than parties, it concerns Germany, in fact the entire Western culture built upon Christianity. And for this reason we welcome the recent emergency decree”.

..and it was published in a Bavarian (but not Nazi) newspaper on 28 February 1933, the day after Hitler assumed all power and decreed an end to democracy.

Source: Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 2008

And today, he does his final “G” driving test.

Three men were shot dead in Toronto today. On a CBC news web site, a listener called “Pretty Woman” wrote this comment, which quite possibly gets the “stupidest-of-the-day” award:

Machine Guns were used, and there is a machine gun ban in place.

Ontario seems and especially Toronto seems to be a haven for drug delaers and thugs.

Sure you can argue legalize drugs but this is the mess that follows.

We are fight the crimminal drug dealers in Afganistan as they harvest poppies for herion production and and the distributors in Canada are just as happy to kill over drug deals.

The root problem is the Liberals who have appointed judges for thirteeen years who make excuses for these killers oh they were only 17, the root problem is they only got free education and health care but not a BMW the real victim is the killers.

It time we blame the crimminals and not society. We need to get back to teaching the 10 commanments in schools.

I think first of all that we need to go back to teaching spelling in schools. Then grammar, and then perhaps thinking. Though this bible thumper is probably beyond rescue, maybe her 12 children can be saved.

Summer in the city. Three city views. Three separate universes. All this is happening on the same street, and at the same time. As are a million other stories.

Elegance. Look at that walk…

Not so much:

Three cameras capturing a moment:

(click for larger, as usual)

This story [link] shows how censorship can backfire.

An embedded US War journalist was dis-embedded for publishing photos of war; specifically, of dead US marines. This is never done in the US: “clean” war is OK, but no-one ever shows how horrible war is. Dead American bodies are taboo.

The army could have ignored this and no-one would ever have heard of “Zoriah”, the photographer. But now everyone knows about him. Including you.

So His Holiness during a visit to Australia predictably blames society’s ills on greed and consumerism (he said this, I read, as he put on his gold glasses) and on sexual entertainment, and on TV and the Internet.

So the desire to do better is greed, is it? And greed is bad? Look who’s speaking.I do not see His Holiness giving away the Vatican’s treasures, or flying Economy to Australia.

As for TV: who watches that anymore? What century is he living in? He means only approved Catholic books must be read. Old story: free information is dangerous to those who want to rule others. I’d run, not walk, to the Internet.

Shot a music school this evening:

Outrageous, how a Canadian citizen is being treated in Guantanamo Bay. Videos of Omar Khadr have been released, and the story is causing understandable anger.

Let’s remember the facts:

• This kid is accused of throwing a grenade at US soldiers who were invading Afghanistan.
• He was 15 at the time. He was 16 when being questioned.
• He has been in Guantanamo Bay without a trial since 2002.
• Canada has been no help.
• In a further outrage, the Canadian PM does not care and has vowed not to “interfere” with the Americans.
• This is embarrassing to civilised nations. Prior to the interrogations, for three weeks he was moved from cell to cell every three hours.

What this does is once again put America back in the list of primitive nations. If Mr Khadr is guilty of crimes, put him on trial. And treat a 15- or 16-year old like a 15-or 16-year old. Our society is based on this, and on treating “nice” suspects and “nasty” suspects alike. Whichever of the two Mr Khadr is, he is entitled to civilised treatment and a fair trial.

New iMac arrived. Set it up. Used migration assistant. Result: got all my apps back. Got none of my data back - no files, bookmarks, lightroom files, or itunes music.

Of course I should have known better than to think a “migration assistant” can help more than it hinders. Why can I not back up from Mac A to the disk and then restore from that same directory to Mac B? Oh no - the Mac knows better, and it “interprets” the directories, and each account is separate. Checking a directory takes hours. And deleting one, more hours.

Oh yeah, I think I got it. Wait for this:

You can NOT simply transfer FROM a backed up account TO an account under the same name!

So my account “michael, full name Michael Willems”, may not be transferred to an account “michael, full name Michael Willems” on the new Mac. My only options:

• Rename the user account you are transferring
• Replace - but this is greyed out!
• Do not transfer this user account

Why the FUCK not, Apple? I am supposed to change my name every time I buy a new Mac?

OK, so now I guess I’ll rename my new Mac to “Fred / full name Fred Flintstone” so I can do the stupid transfer. That is dumber that anything Microsoft has even thrown at me. Sigh. When will I start trusting myself and not application vendors?

Also, I tried to re-install the OS from scratch. But my old Mac’s DVD wil not install to the new Mac: “OS cannot be installed”. Oh, sorry - here I was thinking that this should be easy.

“I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, oh my God”.

Right, Augustine, take a chill pill.

“The muddy concupiscence of the flesh”, he calls it. “The fog of lustfulness”. “Unholy desires”. “I boiled over in my fornications”. What IS it with these God-people that they have such a distaste of normal human behaviour? And we call this guy a “saint”, instead of a “confused hung-up weirdo who needs an analyst”? “…the madness of lust, to which human shamelessness gives free license, though unlicensed by Thy laws”.

And the Saint is kicking himself for his behaviour at sixteen.

I have never been more convinced that religion is evil.

I am reading “Confessions” by St. Augustine. And nothing occurs to me more than “take a chill pill, man, and give yourself a break”.

I know, I know, he is a great writer. He is also a founding father of the church, a leading Western thinker, an impressive rhetorician and philosopher, but this is what I think more than anything else: what a good example of the harm done by religion.

So on a US-based photography forum the other day, my morality was questioned by an American, who said that:

“ [unlike] the ‘anything goes’ European culture, which is so affectionately termed ‘progressive’, many of us Americans have chosen to maintain our dignity and do not like being labeled by terms that imply we have not ‘progressed’ at the rate of the Europeans to the point of showing nude photos to our children, etc.“

Oh boy. Maintain our dignity. Showing nude photos to our children. “Etc”, indeed.

Is this gap ever going to be bridged? Can I ever find any common ground with these people, whose world is as far from mine as Osama Bin Laden’s? In fact this American’s world and Osama’s world seem remarkably similar to me.

Please. Bring me back to Sumerian and Babylonian times. In keeping with this desire, my web servers are called Enkidu, Shamhat and Gilgamesh.

In the eponymous 5000-year old epic story, Gilgamesh was the King of Uruk, Enkidu was his wild friend, and Shamhat was the temple whore who was made to “do for [Enkidu the wild man] the work of a woman” and by thus doing so, to civilise him.

Somehow I doubt that my American friend would approve - or that he would know words like “eponymous”. But at least he is maintaining his dignity.

My Macbook Air would not start this morning. Reason: power supply dead, and battery depleted to 0%.

That is the second dead power supply for the MBA. Thank God I have bought three.

So Mohammad Khadr is going on trial, and our Prime Minister agrees.

This was a 15-year old!

He shot an invading soldier who had no legal right to be there - no love lost for the Taliban, but if Americans or any other nation’s soldiers invaded my street I’d shoot, too. Especially if I were 15 and ill-informed.

And after his capture, Master Khadr was tortured. The Globe and Mail today carried an article on the torture, which included waking him and moving him to a different cell every three hours, 24 hours a day, for weeks on end.

Guess, what, guys. Only Nazis, terrorist kidnappers, other totalitarians and, unfortunately, Americans carry out this torture. By doing this, America places itself in the list of “Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Zimbabwe, Meo Tse Tung, Osama Bin Laden, Syria, FARC”, and so on, and loses the respect civilised people have for it. We do not behave this way. Canada stood by and watched this. Someone please tell Mr Harper this is not OK.

When FARC maltreats people it is an outrage. When our American Uebermasters do it, it is OK.

This reduces Western democracies’ credibilitity. I used to be a pro-American: this kind of torture of a child, along with extraordinary rendition and most other Bush policies, places America outside civilised nations and outside what can be tolerated by civilised people.

And this is sad. Instead of setting an example, we go along with the terrorists and copy their example. This of course reduces our credibility.

The people rule. Kinda.

Rogers has caved in - kinda - with regards to iPhone pricing. $30 for 6GB. But only with a three-year new contract. Read the details here- CBC.

OK, it is a step. But not nearly far enough, So my ranting and raving against Rogersatan will go on for a while yet - until we stop being the most expensive country in the civilised world for mobile data.