TGsPlace

Does Whistle+Blower seem like a boring topic to you?
As Johnny Carsen used to say * Think again, oh martini breath.*

Looking at just the first few thumbnails after entering Whistle+Blower at

http://www.Technorati.com/

You find the most interesting topic points:
Able Danger for example. What an eye opener. CIA leak , Nurses protected , Games software firm *Blizzard* sneaking invasive spy ware.

Judy Miller, reporter, Israeli Nuclear Tech, Best damn interview ever, Rove & Libby , FBI whistle blower threatened & fired , George W Bush, Able Danger again, smearing Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a whistle blower.

Not so boring now… eh?
You are bound to be surprised that there are some 3,922 entry returns.

WB protection is not only an essential in government, but in fact it reaches into every sector of our lives.

WB law is hated and resisted in both the US and Canadian Governments. The obvious reason is that it would severely limit the * * borrowing * of public funds for *special projects*.

The United Nations , [ they are all too honest to ever be concerned about WB law]., Oil for food , millions re-directed, children dying. That couldn’t possibly be related to the UN , could it? [It's in the works there also ]

There are even suggestions that Whistle-blowers be paid for their trouble and risk - taking. Especially where they expose and protect millions of our national revenues wealth

Our Government, hanging on to power with white knuckle desperation, is in a vunerable position and our WB Bill C-11 is moving ever so slowly ahead. Hopefully the bill will have penalties severe enough to deter Tin-pot bosses from firing employees who expose corruption. 73s TG
Canadian Whistle-Blower info at: http://BendGovt.blog.ca

An interesting & Intelligent view
============================
Comment by PineKnot on SDA today

I honestly feel sorry for you Canadians. I'm a retired U.S. Naval Officer. I always thought the parliamentary system of government was slightly superior to ours, ie., the majority party got to govern, and, on a vote of no confidence, parliament got dissolved, and
elections gave the people a chance to 'throw the bums out'.

Reading this and other Canadian blogs the past few months, after Captain's Quarters got me hooked on your problems, has caused me to change my mind. You certainly need a written Constitution, and all your governmental officials in the Parliament need to be required to stand for election, on a regular basis.

How did your country get to be such a mess? I admired the Canadian Navy Officers I spent time with (on a U.S. Carrier), back in the late 60's. They seemed to be very professional, sensible people, and I based my opinion of Canadians on my observations of them, and the ex-pat Canadians I met while stationed in California in the 70's.

Maybe, you all need to demand a do-over, and get it right this time.
Posted by PineKnot at October 18, 2005 08:19 PM



My humble attempt to suggest something of an answer.

Sir PineKnot,

Your first paragraph suggests that you always thought that on a vote of non confidence, parliament got dissolved, and elections gave the people a chance to *throw the bums out*.

In your first few lines, you have zeroed in, knowingly or unknowingly, on the exact crux of where things snapped. The precise moment of where our system, as you correctly understand it, was allowed, by unaware or unknowing Canadians, to go completely off the tracks. Canadians were on holiday or at the beach then.

The moment you allude to, * vote of non-confidence and dissolution of parliament*
Came about when Ms Belinda Stronach, CPC member, crossed the floor of the house and became both a Liberal Party member and a Minister of Industrial Human Relations in the Liberal government without having been voted to that post by a Liberal majority or by the Canadian people.

This moment; the moment when the spirit and purpose of the Non-confidence vote was so clearly trampled upon by obvious vote buying, is when the Governor General of Canada, Ms. Clarkson was, [my term: criminally remiss], in her sworn duty to dissolve parliament and call an election.

Ms Stronach has a vested interest in dozens of scattered Magna auto parts manufacturing plants where there is a concerted effort to convert long time employees to part time status so the employer is free from pension, and employee benefit obligations. The ministry that Prime Minister, Paul Martin handed over to Ms Belinda Stronach is the very ministry that decides legislation on those employment conditions.

There was a second opportunity and obligation for Governor General Clarkson to dissolve the house. That was when the Grewall tapes were proven by experts to be authentic and admissible proof of influence pedaling and vote-buying.

Once again Ms. Clarkson failed to carry out her sworn duty and obligation to Canadians.

The most lucrative advertising account to Canada’s Main Stream Media is the Liberal Government. This is obviously part of the reason the Canadian public was not properly alerted to this miscarriage of justice.

Also, these matters took place during the summer holiday when weather was warm and most Canadians were at the beach and in no mood for the *dirty and tiresome*, business of politics.

Your views, Sir Pine Knot, where exactly correct, but like most Canadians, time did not allow you to follow events from moment to moment and so there were pivotal moments missed, making a logical asessment difficult.

This may shed some light on what went wrong. Discussion of working towards solutions from this point involve Whistle-Blower Protection law, Bill C-11, but will be saved for another time. 73s TG

Ever Say YES! To a good Idea?

*The kids love having an audience, she said. Parents, teachers, students and sometimes complete strangers from as far away as Brazil will respond to the blogs with comments. And depending on the tools they're using, student bloggers can track how many times people have clicked on their entries. In an effort to build a following, they often clean up their grammar, stretch their vocabulary and generally write more creatively, Meeler said. "They take a lot of pride in it," she said. "They have to write a title that gets attention, or people won't leave comments or come back." *


As a middle-school teacher in SnowLake Manitoba, Clarence Fisher is used to spending some time each evening grading papers and reviewing lesson plans. But this year he's got an additional after-school task: updating his students' blogs.

[CnetNews.com] = http://news.com.com Are Students ready for blogging 101?

Now, is this a good idea or what? Just watch young natural writers, politicians, technical types, spin doctors, journalists, lobbyists , and speech writers blossom in this setting. Working for an audience at this young age, may well give us some very sharp thinkers in very quick time.

You put the fun into learning by doing, and the sky is the limit.teachers , parents , TG

Heaven help us if we commit all our history to digital storage. There is data that Nasa could use from the 1970s, but because the keys are sort of...lost, the data is now out of reach. It seems that the equipment, the ICs [chips] and the older file retrieval codes make up an unintended tri-plex encryption. Lose any one of those three parts and History becomes Mystoory.

Bill Gates, please, paper provides better than 500 years of data security, while Digital records security of from 5 to 20 years is away below par. This problem has to be addressed properly and the keys for digital security must be spread out to everyone. Any bottle neck to data access held in the hands of a few people would be a unfair secret weapon for exploitation.
[Maybe obsolete Dos6 and Extended Basic skills will give me code-breaker statu..eh?]

Here's the lowdown from people more informed than I.
============================= TechnologyReview.com ======

But far worse is yet to come. "Once you begin to understand what's going on at a more technical level," says Smith, "you realize that what's lost could be catastrophic." We can count on paper documents to last 500 years or longer, barring fire, flood or acts of God. But digital things, be they documents, photographs or video, are all created in a language meant for a specific piece of hardware; and neither computer languages nor machines age well.

databases , database , The amount of material at risk is exploding: the volume of business-related e-mail is expected to rise from 2.6 trillion messages per year in 2001 to 5.9 trillion by 2005, according to IDC, an information technology analysis firm. Maybe most of those messages deserve to be rendered unreadable, but critical documents and correspondence from government and private institutions are in just as much danger of digital obsolescence as spam.

Then there are databases, and software, and images, all of which are in a constant state of change: JPEG, for example, the standard many digital-camera users rely on to store family photos, is already in the process of being outmoded by JPEG 2000, a higher-quality compression standard. "Unless we do something drastic," says Margaret Hedstrom, professor of information at the University of Michigan's School of Information, "in one or two or five years it's going to be very difficult for people to look back and see the photos they took."

Proposed solutions include migration, which consists of updating or sometimes entirely rewriting old files to run on new hardware; emulation, a way of mimicking older hardware so that old software and files don't have to be rewritten in order to run on new machines; and more recently, encapsulation, a way of wrapping an electronic document in a digital envelope that explains, in simple terms, how to re-create the software, hardware or operating systems needed to decode what's inside.

All three solutions, however, have the same sticky problem: the fixes themselves are time-bound, able to work only for several years, or perhaps a few decades, before another fix needs to be made. They also require us to act now to preserve what we think might be important to the future. "We have the problem of how to preserve digital media-hard enough to solve-and we have the additional, impossible responsibility of deciding what to save," says Smith. "Nothing will be preserved by accident."

A newly proposed solution, ironically enough, might make use of a very old technology: paper itself. Not to preserve all the digital documents we are creating in hard copy, but rather to preserve the specifications for a decoding mechanism-a kind of "universal computer" defined by a few hundred lines of software code-that will allow the documents to be deciphered in the future. Archived on paper and across the Internet, the mechanism would be guaranteed to survive for centuries. Proponents of such an approach say it will make it possible to preserve everything-a complete record of humanity. Maybe then history can finally stop repeating itself.
== http://cache.technologyreview.com/articles/02/10/tristram1002.1.asp =====

Bill, this is all making us very nervous. We can't just keep bounding ahead, willy-nilly. This would be a good time to sit back a little and enjoy all the great electronic toys we have, without you forcing new versions of Windows upon us and shortening the life of our computers and cameras before we can really get used to them. TG

About CD Baby... http://www.CDBaby.com

Who/What are we?
CD Baby is a little online record store that sells CDs by independent musicians.
[In•de•pen•dent: (adj.) Not having sold one's life, career, and creative works over to a corporation.]

We're just a few people in a cool Portland, Oregon, CD warehouse that looks like a playground. We listen to every CD we sell before we sell it, so we can help you find other albums you'll like.

We only sell CDs that come directly from the musicians. No distributors.
Musicians send us CDs. We warehouse them, sell them to you, and pay the musicians directly.

Cool thing: in a regular record deal or distribution deal, musicians only make $1-$2 per CD, if they ever get paid by their label. When selling through CD Baby, musicians make $6-$12 per CD, and get paid weekly.

In business, and thriving, since March 1998. We're the largest seller of independent CDs on the web.

History:
I was just selling my own CD in 1997, making my living by touring and doing sessions, and asked some fellow musicians if they'd like me to sell their CD, too. It was supposed to be a hobby. (Making music was my real career!)

For the first year, CD Baby was just me. I'd put the day's orders in my backpack and ride my bike down to the post office..

But then friends told friends, and now my little hobby has sold over $15 MILLION in independent CDs to people around the world.
Current Numbers:
108,201 artists sell their CD at CD Baby.
1,839,758 CDs sold online to customers.
$18,734,154.67 paid to artists.

CD Baby Privacy Policy
We NEVER give or sell your personal info to any other company - EVER! (No, not even your email address!)
Only the musician whose CD you buy will know who you are.

If you don't even want the musician to know about you, just say so at the bottom of your order form.
Your credit card info is never stored, and never seen by anyone. We don't store it in your permanent customer info. The card number is erased immediately after the sale, for extra protection. There is nothing of yours here to steal.

Yes this means you'll have to type your card number again when you return, but we hope you appreciate the extra safety and privacy it gives you.

Tech things:
Our servers are running FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, and MySQL.
No Microsoft products were used in the creation of this website.
Full 128-bit secure SSL connection protects all of your private information from snooping eyes. Our secure certificate issued by Thawte - a division of Verisign.

We try to stay HTML 4.0 compliant. No special web browser needed. (I recommend the FireFox and Opera web browsers for their speed and standards.)
CD Baby website (front end and back end) made by me - Derek Sivers. It's my favorite hobby.

Most important of all...
You can reach us during Pacific west-coast business hours at (503)595-3000 or email cdbaby@cdbaby.com anytime. Derek Sivers