We’re encouraging fans to submit their articles about Guild Wars 2 character diversity for the next Blog Carnival at GuildMag. Now that we’ve had some opportunity to digest all the new information that came out after the press closed beta test weekend, it’s time to let the fans express themselves about what we’ve learned about the game.
March 14, 2012
Blog Carnival 3 at GuildMag
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Michael Geist rounds up the changes to Bill C-11
It’s not wonderful, but as he points out, it could have been much worse:
In the days leading up to the clause-by-clause review, many focused on three key issues: no SOPA-style amendments such as website blocking or warrantless disclosure of information, maintaining the fair dealing balance found in the bill, and amending the digital lock provisions. By that standard, the changes could have been a lot worse. The government expanded the enabler provision, though not as broadly as CIMA requested. Virtually all other copyright lobby demands – website blocking, notice-and-takedown, iPod tax, copyright term extension, disclosure of subscriber information – were rejected. Moreover, the provisions supported by consumer and education groups including user generated content protection, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies, Internet provider liability, and statutory damages reform were left untouched. This represents a major victory for the many Canadians and groups such as Open Media that spoke out on these issues.
The fair dealing provision was similarly left unchanged despite a full court press from publishers and copyright collectives who sought elimination of the education category within fair dealing (didn’t happen), inclusion of the Berne three step test in the law (didn’t happen) or a new fair dealing test that overrules the Supreme Court of Canada CCH test (didn’t happen). The expanded fair dealing provision will not cause the horrors claimed by those groups and it is heartening that the government dismissed the misinformation campaign.
The only loss was the least surprising — digital locks. Despite widespread support for compromise legislation and sensible amendments from both the NDP and Liberals, the government rejected any changes. Given the government’s consistent support for digital locks, the ongoing pressure from the U.S., and Prime Minister Harper’s direct intervention on the issue in 2010, amending the digital lock rules presented a major challenge. Government MPs yesterday emphasized the possibility of future new exceptions via regulation but that will be cold comfort in the short term to those with perceptual disabilities, researchers, documentary film makers, consumers, and the many others adversely affected by the restrictive approach. In fact, one NDP MP raised the possibility of constitutional challenges to the bill.
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A possible solution to Canada’s long, long search for new search-and-rescue aircraft
David Akin in the Toronto Sun:
Here’s the back story: For nearly a decade, the Department of National Defence has had cabinet approval to go out and spend $3.1 billion on new search-and-rescue planes. That’s a big contract and several aircraft vendors wanted to win that deal.
Aircraft makers and their lobbyists knew which buttons to push within DND but also at other key government departments such as Public Works and Government Services and at Industry Canada.
The goal of the lobbyists was to rig the bid so only their plane could win.
Pulled eight ways to Sunday by the heavy lobbying, the bureaucrats at three departments kept pushing pieces of paper at each other but never got close to making some purchase decisions.
Now, with the possibility that the search-and-rescue purchase process could be tied up in the bureaucracy for yet another year (followed by delivery of planes years after that!) the government may be ready to slice through this Gordian Knot and simply turn to our American allies to pick up most of their fleet of C-27 Spartans.
Apparently one of the remaining hurdles to be cleared is that the manufacturer of the Spartan aircraft, Alenia Aermacchi, is trying to prevent the sale and is even threatening not to provide spare parts or service to any country that buys the aircraft from the US. I have no idea why, but I’m sure there’s a reason for it.
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The red meat of medical churnalism
Rob Lyons on the latest red meat scare from the medical press, who “churn out scary-sounding studies about steak and bacon faster than McDonald’s produces Big Macs”.
It’s official, it seems: red meat — particularly processed red meat — will be the death of you. ‘Small quantities of processed meat such as bacon, sausages or salami can increase the likelihood of dying early by a fifth, researchers from Harvard School of Medicine found. Eating steak increases the risk of early death by 12 per cent’, declared the Daily Telegraph yesterday. BBC1 Breakfast’s resident GP, Dr Rosemary Leonard, told millions of viewers the link was ‘very, very clear’.
[. . .]
The topline results were that, after adjustment for major lifestyle and dietary risk factors, there was a 13 per cent increase in the risk of death for each portion of red meat eaten per day and a 20 per cent increase in mortality for each portion of processed meat consumed per day. This is not the first study to suggest that eating meat is bad for you. But that might simply mean that this study shares many of the same problems that all the other studies have had.
However, before we get to the problems, here’s some brighter news. At the end of the study, the members of the two groups studied had, on average, reached the grand old age of 75. How many had died along the way? Less than 20 per cent. Those who started the study were four times more likely than not to reach 75. So, whatever your eating habits when it comes to eating red meat or processed meat, the most important lesson is that most people live a long time these days. ‘Early death’ is very much a relative concept.
The authors claim that 9.3 per cent of deaths in men and 7.6 per cent of deaths in women could be avoided by eating little or no red meat. To put that into some back-of-an-envelope statistical perspective: multiplying that 9.3 per cent by the 20 per cent who actually died shows that about 1.8 per cent of red-meat eaters would die by the time they were 75 because of their meat-eating habit. Even if that claim were absolutely accurate (and even the authors call it an estimate), would you really give up your favourite foods for decades on the slim possibility of an extra year or two of old age?
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The culture of Goldman Sachs
Joshua M. Brown responds to the “why I’m leaving x” meme, specifically about Goldman Sachs variants:
The “culture” of Goldman Sachs was, is and always will be about making money, often at the expense of a client. Do you even know where the term “wirehouse” originally came from? Let me help you out with that. In the 1920’s, there was no CNBC or internet — there was only news delivered by wire and cable, stock market news and prices included. The “wirehouse” firms like Goldman would transmit stock and bond prices to their far-flung offices around the country from Wall Street where the action was taking place. It is a peculiar and yet telling fact of history that during the Crash of 1929, not a single major Wall Street brokerage firm went under. Wanna know why? Because when the sell-off began, they dumped all their holdings prior to wiring the news out to the rest of the investing public and their clientele across the country. Sound familiar, motherfucker? THAT is your firm’s culture, going back a hundred and fifty years.
Deal with it or leave and open an Etsy store.
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EFF reports on most recent legal setback for former owners of Righthaven
It’s pretty much good news all the way through for bloggers and anyone else who quotes and links to material on the web:
Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.
The judgment — part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven — found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper’s website.
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March 13, 2012
Yet another straw in the wind on Canada’s F-35 plans
An article by Murray Brewster, published in the Winnipeg Free Press looks at more signs that Canada may not be as tightly bound to their F-35 purchase plans:
The point man on the F-35 stealth fighter purchase says the Conservative government has not ruled out abandoning the troubled project.
“We have not, as yet, discounted the possibility, of course, of backing out of any of the program,” Julian Fantino associate defence minister, told the Commons defence committee on Tuesday.
He made the comment after a series of pointed questions from both opposition parties.
Fantino said the government is still committed to buying the radar-evading jet, but no contract has been signed.
The Conservatives still believe the high-tech jet is the best choice to replace the aging CF-18s, but the minister suggested they are taking a cautious approach.
None of the other nine allied nations involved in the program has yet withdrawn and the minister said: “We are not.”
[. . .]
In months of questioning in the House of Commons, Fantino has insisted there is no need for a backup plan in case of further delays in the project as the manufacturer works out software and design glitches.
But on Tuesday, he told the committee he was waiting for defence officials to prepare alternate scenarios to the F-35 deal, the so-called Plan B that opposition parties have demanded.
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Still no reason to get excited about robopocalypse, says Kelly McParland
Oh, good. I’m not alone in finding the robocall armageddon to be a bit less than exciting:
I have a confession to make. I have not been following the robocalls “scandal” with all the fervency it calls for.
It’s possible my inability to get excited results from six years … oops, make it seven … of the Liberals leaping to their feet every 18 seconds to accuse the Conservatives of plotting to pervert Canadian values, undermine democracy and display their contempt for the laws of the country. There’s this old morality tale about a kid who cried “wolf” too many times, so when a real wolf showed up, no one believed it any more. Maybe that’s why I have a hard time believing this is the real wolf.
It could also be that I find the premise hard to accept. To wit: a top-level conspiracy of Conservative grandees to steal the election by disrupting the vote, sending voters to incorrect polls or discouraging them from turning up at all. This would indeed be a major scandal if it was true, but think about it: Would a nation-wide exercise in disruptive phone calls have any chance of going undetected? Does anyone really believe (outside the fetid confines of the Toronto Star) that the senior ranks of any sane government would take such an extreme risk going into an election it expected to win anyway?
I could see some local bozos getting it into their heads that robocalling the opposing candidate’s supporters might be a great idea, but your cynicism has to be a lot deeper than mine (which would take some doing) to believe anyone could get to be Prime Minister, or his national campaign chairman, and still be either dumb enough, irresponsible enough or reckless enough to sign on to such a plan
Update, 15 March: In the comments, Saskboy strongly disagrees with my lack of excitement over the robocall scandal, and he’s been covering the story on his blog (that’s one of several posts on the topic).
El Neil on Limbaugh’s “show of weakness”
L. Neil Smith weighs in on the Rush Limbaugh “apology” to Sandra Fluke and the media feeding frenzy it perpetuated:
Please understand that I am not a conservative of any kind. As a more or less lifelong libertarian, and a proud, battle-scarred (and, I like to think, highly decorated) veteran of America’s 1960s Sexual Revolution (which actually began in the 1920s), I’m very much in favor of individuals finding joy, and generally doing whatever they desire with their own lives. Love (or whatever floats your boat) is such a rare commodity that they ought to revel in it whenever they can. What I am vehemently opposed to, however, is making other people pay for it.
But then, despite the basic truth behind what he’d said about her, Limbaugh decided — far more likely it was decided for him — to apologize.
John Wayne became famous, among other things, for declaring, in several of his movies, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.” Mark Harmon has said it, too, in the role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs of NCIS. And there’s a basic, Darwinistic truth in what they’ve both said, as illustrated by what happened next to the Formerly Fat Flumpus.
When his ideological enemies began screaming about what Limbaugh had said, if he’d told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine and break it off, their screaming would have subsided and finished with a whimper.
But the minute he apologized, the minute he rolled over on his back, sticking his paws in the air and exposing his belly, they fell on him like wolves. With the ladies and gentlemen of the evening who constitute our news media cheering them along, public figures called for removing him from the air the way they had Don Imus — and Imus, true to the sad, broken figure of Winston Smith he had become, joined in.
“Do it to Limbaugh!”
Meanwhile animals and barbarians of all kinds showered Limbaugh with death threats and other worst-wishes, and the Internet writhed like a pit of snakes with vile, anonymous accusations of every kind against him. Clearly free speech in this country is supposed to be reserved to the creatures who call themselves “progressives” because they’ve dirtied the word “liberal” to the point it can’t be used any more.
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Guild Wars 2 will be available for pre-order on April 10th
We still don’t know when the game will be launching, but at least we can finally stop throwing wads of cash at the monitor … Our summary of the details at GuildMag:
It seems as things are slowly coming together, today, ArenaNet has released an image detailing the contents of three of their launch versions of Guild Wars 2: the Collector’s Edition ($149.99), Digital Deluxe ($79.99) and the Digital Edition ($59.99). You can start purchasing these versions of the game starting April 10th on a special dedicated page on the Guild Wars 2 website
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March 12, 2012
Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage
Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage is a parody music video paying homage to Alice Paul and the generations of brave women who joined together in the fight to pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote in 1920.
H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward for the link.
The role of narcissism in calls for military intervention in Syria
Brendan O’Neill says that one of the driving factors for those demanding military action in Syria is narcissism:
Failed Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff recently made waves with an op-ed in the Financial Times calling for Western intervention in Syria. Revisiting some of the themes of his 1990s writings (Ignatieff made a living championing ‘humanitarian interventionism’ before he led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst electoral defeat ever), Igantieff said the West should impose a ‘comprehensive quarantine of Syria’ in order to ‘force [Assad] from power’.
Yet the most startling thing about his piece was not its extreme short-term historical amnesia, its ignorance of the disasters unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan following Western meddling, but rather its exhibition of self-regard and self-concern, even of that most malignant form of self-love: narcissism. Ignatieff mentioned his own feelings about what is happening in Homs six times and the possible feelings of the people of Homs themselves only three times. His short op-ed mainly focused on the ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ felt by people like Igantieff — that is, Western observers possessed of a good, caring, Sarajevo-informed ‘international conscience’ — while the ‘fear’ and ‘desperation’ of the people of Homs were given far briefer treatment.
This ratio of 2:1 between Ignatieff’s feelings of guilt and Syrians’ feelings of desperation not only suggests that modern Western interventionists are two times more obsessed with themselves than they are with the victims of foreign conflicts they claim to care so much about — it also reveals that what is really motoring the demands for Western intervention in Syria are the emotional needs of Western observers rather than the practical needs of Syrians. This kind of narcissism is now widespread among those who desperately want the ‘international community’ to intervene in Syria. These people are so amazingly vain that they see the bombing of Syria as a kind of balm for their guilt-ridden consciences, a physical act that might help to make their own emotional turmoil that bit more bearable. Their rallying cry should be: ‘Bomb Syria so that I can sleep at night.’
QotD: Corporate income tax rates
If you assume that there’s no behavioural response, then each percentage point added to the federal CIT will generate roughly $2b in new revenues. So you’d conclude that the January 1, 2012 reduction in the CIT rate from 16.5% to 15% would reduce revenues by about $3b, and increasing the federal rate from 16.5% back to (say) 24% would increase CIT revenues by some $15b — almost one per cent of GDP.
This is the the sort of answer ‘static analysis’ gives. In a world in which multinationals file 57,000-page tax returns, one can only marvel at the faith in human nature among those who would make policy based on the belief that the only behavioural change on the part of corporations to an increase in CIT rates will be to put larger numbers on the cheques they send to the Receiver-General.
Stephen Gordon, “How much new revenue will be generated by an increase in federal corporate taxes?”, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, 2012-03-11
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The hidden dangers of driving an antique BMW Isetta
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