I Already Googled It

In response to this:

It seems that experts in certain fields – such as the Canadian Medical Association – cannot resist the temptation to attempt to exert power beyond their field.

Medical experts are not political experts.  Accordingly they not experts in the causes, effects, and moral justification (or lack thereof) for public policies.  They should therefore respectfully abstain from mixing their field with fields in which they are not experts.

Knowledge of the salt content in food in Canada is certainly useful, and we should be grateful that the “international team” gathered and published this information, but we should reject their calls for government intervention.

If I choose to chronically consume high salt foods, then the consequences will befall me, and no one else.  Why is it any of the government’s business if a place of business wants to sell me high salt foods which I want to buy?  Why should the government tell me that I can’t indulge in this habit?

Because it’s bad for me?  Isn’t that my choice to make?

If you own something, you can choose to destroy or alter it.  You may renovate your own house, or you may tear it down.

If self-destructive habits – such as high salt foods – are regulated to prevent us from destroying our bodies, what does that say about our ownership of our own bodies?

In response to this:

“[I]nnocent until proven guilty” is one of the most comforting aspects of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  You can’t lose your freedom or your livelihood until your accuser can prove that you’re guilty.

Or can you?

If we scrutinize the story of the Monkey Tree Daycare, we find that Douglas Ralph Page is merely accused.  Charges have been sworn, but the man has not been found guilty.  The acts “allegedly” took place, we don’t know that they actually did.

Yet under a government which requires licenses and permits for every conceivable action – rather than leaving us to our own liberty – this is irrelevant.  Celia Armstrong’s daycare can be shut down and her livelihood stolen based on “conditions” that the government imposes on her use of her own home.

Her daycare was fit enough that parents decided to send their children there, and she was willing to exchange her time for their money.  How is this the business of the government?  If parents had a complaint, why not simply inform the other parents and let them make the best decision for their children?

Trading with one another is the means by which we survive.  If the government can require that we obtain a license or a permit, and revoke this license or permit willy-nilly, how “free” is our “free country”?  Should we so casually accept this intrusion, or should we see it for what it is: Government asserting partial ownership of our possessions by fiat?

Something useful that I use pretty regularly (I have a bootable, labeled thumbdrive for installing both OSes mentioned in the title on my desk at work).  Very useful if you have a laptop — or other computer — with no optical drive — something that’s becoming more and more common.

Probably works with Vista/2008 (non-R2) as well, but I haven’t tried it so I make no claims.

You’ll need a copy of the OS-in-question — mounted ISO or actual disk — and a thumbdrive at least 4 gigabytes in size.

Open the command prompt (as Administrator if you have UAC enabled) and run “diskpart“.

Type “list disk” to get a listing of the drives attached to your system.  Pick out the number of the thumbdrive — you can identify it by its size.

Type “select disk #” where “#” is the number you discovered in the preceding step.

Type “clean”.

Type “create partition primary“.

Type “select partition 1“.

Type “format fs=ntfs quick“.

Type “active“.

Close the command prompt and copy all the files from the disk — or mounted ISO — to the thumbdrive and you’re golden (robocopy is useful for this, use “robocopy X:\ Y:\ /S” where “X” is the disk/mounted ISO and “Y” is the thumbdrive) (you may be able to use WinZip or something equivalent to extract the ISO to your thumbdrive, but I’ve never tried this).

When booting you can either go into the BIOS and set the thumbdrive to first in the boot order, or hit the hotkey (typically F9 or ESC) to get the boot menu and boot off of it once (the latter is the method I prefer).

Worth noting that while some BIOSes claim to support booting off your thumbdrive, they won’t for no reason.  I’ve only had this problem with a netbook, but there may be other culprits out there…

Specifically in response to this, but more of a critique of the DriveABLE program — which tests seniors to see if they can keep their licenses — in general.

Rejecting just one part, or some parts – race, gender, etc. — of discrimination is logically bankrupt.  We must either reject all discrimination or none.

While discrimination once commonplace — racism, sexism, etc. — may have all but vanished, the controversy surrounding DriveABLE reveals that the thought pattern which underpins discrimination of all kinds – judging people based on circumstances beyond their control (people can’t choose their race or their gender, for example) – endures.

“Ageism” is the word which means discriminating against people because of their age, and it’s a problem young and old face equally.

If adults were compelled to attend an institution — in this case, school — for many hours per day we would be outraged.  But because the people thusly compelled are between the ages of 5 and 17 people accept it — the punishment for being young is political impotence.

Increasingly the punishment for being old is a continual, institutionalized questioning of your faculties and competence.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees that we are presumed innocent until proven guilty.  I propose a corollary: People are responsible and capable until their irresponsibility or incapability has been proven.

The onus should lie on the state to prove — without unusual limitations or scrutiny – that certain seniors can’t drive, not on these seniors to prove that they can.

That should be considered no less than common decency and respect.

In response to this:

When comparing ourselves to “progressive European nations”, it would be wise to remember that the latter are bankrupt.  There’s a sovereign debt crisis wracking Europe, and it’s precisely because they’re “progressive”.

Whenever you implore the government to pay for something you can’t — health care, education, et cetera — what you’re asking is that you be allowed to become a burden on everyone else.  No matter how well you mask your point with rhetoric, you’re asking to be allowed to leech wealth you did not create and which you do not own.

What’s the endgame?  Do you expect those being sucked dry to pay forever?  Do you expect their resources to last infinitely?

Education isn’t a “right”.  This becomes clearer as time goes on, teachers’ unions strike, and tuitions — and thus student debt — rise.

Life hasn’t gotten more complicated since those who needed it could work themselves through college/university, the government’s just become more involved with student loans and other funding.  You don’t need “higher education” for most jobs, but because the government’s making post secondary “accessible” it’s become expected.

For most jobs 12 years of education — elementary and secondary — is enough of a waste, both of time and resources.  Paying for everyone’s “higher education” would simply compound the problem.

We should come to our senses and reverse the trend of government-funded/-subsidized education, rather than marching onward and mortgaging our children for educations they don’t need.

In response to this:

“Proportional representation” has become the battle cry of not-Conservatives everywhere, embittered by the Conservative majority enabled by a simple plurality of the vote.

But this isn’t just about “democracy”, this is about the very nature of federalism.  Canada isn’t one country, it’s ten provinces and three territories.  We don’t elect one government for ourselves, but rather as regions elect representatives to be our voice in debates of national scope and importance.

This is what has been lost in the battle for majority governments to impose country-wide “solutions” to “problems”.

“Proportional representation” would reduce the power and influence of smaller provinces even further, and it would silence purely regional concerns.  It would also exalt parties — the collectivization of political will and power — above individuals.

The problem isn’t first past the post, the problem is the power that parties and their whips wield in Canadian politics.  We should be able to vote for the man — a single voice for our regional concerns in Parliament — not the party.

The solution to the collectivization of our politics under the rule of parties and their whips isn’t to collectivize them further, it’s to decollectivize them – to emasculate parties so that our regional voices can be heard through our representatives loud and clear.

I was attempting to write a script at work today that would alter the default user’s registry, so that each new user created on the machine (by logging in for the first time) would have a RunOnce that would fire the first time they logged in.

The first challenge was finding out where the registry hive that each new user’s HKCU is based off is stored.  That was accomplished easily enough: It’s in C:\Users\Default\NTUser.dat.  You can mount unloaded registry hives using reg.exe load and unload them (after you’re finished modifying them) with reg.exe unload.

The next challenge was that I wanted to copy a file to this new user’s %appdata% directory, but using xcopy just wasn’t working.

The not-so-obvious problem was that when RunOnce runs something, it isn’t running within a proper COM interpreter shell, so things you’d expect to work — like expansion of “%appdata%” into something more meaningful — don’t.

The solution is to give the command a COM shell by invoking it with cmd.exe /c <command>.

Another useful tip: If you want a command window to persist after the command finishes — for debugging, for example — use cmd.exe /k <command>.

So after letting it stagnate/grow haphazardly, I finally decided that it was time to upgrade/reorganize the core of my — perhaps excessively – complex home network.

Here’s some “before” pictures (the rack that I have everything in was stuck in a closet barely wide enough to accomodate it):

As you can see, very crowded, very disorganized. The contortions required to get behind the rack (and thereby do any real work) was ridiculous.

Plus the switching infrastructure was just daisy chained D-Link consumer switches I bought off the shelf.  Not a lot of throughput, a lot of bottlenecks, et cetera.

It was time for a change.

The closet was unfinished, to begin with, so in order to facilatite work in there, the rack had to come out.  However, all the network drops for the whole house came to that closet, so we’d have to run network lines from the closet to the rack’s new location, so I bought 31m of network cable from Home Depot, and colour-coded keystone jacks etc. from Monoprice.

Next was the issue that without the rack there, there was nowhere to put the crappy D-Link switches.  I solved this by buying 2ft patch cords off Monoprice (to patch in the network drops neatly), and by having plywood put up on the wall the patch panel is on now (allowing greater flexibility in surface mounting).

To rectify the switch infrastructure situation, I bought a D-Link DGS-1100-24 (about $300 from NCIX) and a D-Link DGS-1100-16 (about $200 from NCIX).  This blow was softened because I had a $100 NCIX gift card from a friend in Nova Scotia, payment for a Linode (fremont.rleahy.ca/ns1.rleahy.ca) that we share.  These are managed switches, with rackmount ears, that support 802.1Q and LAG (whether 802.1ax or their own proprietary solution — or both – I don’t know).

Surface mounting all of these things in the closet on the plywood allowed me to greatly neaten that area up, while reducing the number of switches by using the VLAN features — one VLAN for LAN, DMZ, and WAN — of the DGS-1100-24.  I ran four lines through the wall to the location of the new servers, which were aggregated and plugged into the DGS-1100-16, which I rackmounted in the rack, giving me 4gbps of bandwidth between the “core” and the servers.  All three VLANs are trunked across this aggregated link.

I took the opportunity to recable the entire rack — using pre-made cable bought cheaply from Monoprice — reducing the spaghetti to something manageable.

Here’s the “after” shots:

Very pleased with the way that it turned out. Looks a lot better, throughput is going to be a lot better, design makes a lot more sense, going to be a lot easier to work on.

Now the trick is keeping it as neat as it is…that’s always the problem…

The best part of the whole thing is that thanks to careful movement of the rack (it had to go down a step, we used a plywood ramp) and the UPS, I didn’t compromise my uptime moving the servers, even though they were disconnected from AC power and the internet:

Thanks to my Dad for helping me move this stuff around. Also thanks to this blog post for letting me know how to get images side-by-side in WordPress.

In addition to the Conservative Party of Canada’s call for Senate Reform (which they haven’t followed through on yet), now the provincial government is agitating for Senate reform of some kind.

A letter of caution:

While the Senate of Canada is outdated and irrelevant, it’s important that we consider the principles of federalism in considering its reform, and that we not move too hastily towards electoral selection of our Senators.

A bicameral legislature — which we enjoy federally – should afford representation to both territorial governments – in our case the provincial legislatures – and the people.

The United States’ abolition of state selection of Senators (until the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913 United States Senators were selected by the legislature of each state) was a contributing factor to the disastrous, top-heavy centralization they’re suffering from today.

In reforming our own Senate, we should be careful that the power to select Senators is vested in the provincial legislatures, to delegate to the people if they wish.

Removing the check of the “upper” house leads to more central programs, central spending, and one size fits all regulations, which become nigh impossible to reform or eliminate.

When power is kept close to the people — at the provincal level — they can easily and effectively shape it to their needs.  At the federal level this is much more difficult as individual or regional voices and concerns are diluted.  We must insure that the Senate is a check against federal overreach, and not an enabler thereof.

Hopefully in the coming years we can have a nationwide conversation about reforming the position of Governor-General as well.

In response to this:

Angel Sampson — an “early-childhood educator” – posits that “[d]aycare services [...] should be free“.  But I imagine that were the government to tell him that he must work for no pay — i.e. for “free“ – that he would feel wronged.

So what does “free” mean, if the people providing the “free” services are still paid?

It means that the government should pay for these services.  How does the government pay for them?  Taxation.  Which means that they’re not “free“; everyone is expected to pay for them, just not at the point of use.

But some people choose not to have children.  Why should they be expected to subsidize the lifestyle of those that choose differently?  Why should they be expected to pay for a program from which they derive no benefit?  Why should the government establish two classes of citizens: Those who have children (and receive handouts), and those who don’t (and are forced to provide the handouts)?  Why should parents enjoy services at the expense of those who do not choose to become parents? 

If parents want to have a career and children that’s their right.  But if they can’t afford it they should exercise foresight, not expect a taxpayer-funded handout.

“TANSTAAFL [There ain't no such thing as a free lunch]”
–Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966

Appended to the letter:

Note: In the letter (specifically the first paragraph), the masculine pronoun has been used as in English it may be used in lieu of a gender neutral pronoun.