Emphasis mine:
Thank you for taking an interest regarding the CRTC’s decision on user-based billing for internet services. Thank you for taking the time to raise this important issue with me.
I believe in an open internet that promotes fair competition and access for all. For that reason, I have taken a strong position in support of net neutrality and wholesale access, and remain opposed to any rulings or regulations that would limit either of these objectives in the sphere of internet services. In this case, the CRTC’s decision clearly limits competition and choice for consumers.
Echoing the concerns raised by my colleagues, I believe that the high prices Canadian consumers pay for internet services are an impediment to competitiveness. As such, it is my belief that concrete proposals must be advanced to lower prices for internet services for Canadians. One of those proposals relates to the implementation of regulations for wholesale internet services, which encourage investment in internet infrastructure and helps keep the prices incurred by consumers to a fair level.Models from countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia can provide suitable inspiration, as these models have been successful in fulfilling the prescribed objectives.
Additionally, as of February 1st, the Liberal Party has officially announced that it will stand up for Canadian consumers by opposing the CRTC’s decision. My party and I will bring the fight for an open and innovative internet environment to Parliament, and will lobby the Minister of Industry, Hon. Tony Clement, to reverse the CRTC’s decision. If you are interested in taking action in opposition to the usage-based billing decision, or simply wish to stay updated on the Liberal Party’s efforts to have it overturned, please visit http://lpc.ca/ubb.
Once again, I wish to thank you for writing to me on this important issue.
So Australia, which has low caps and censorship, is a model to the liberals. And the NPD wants us to pay tons of money on storage to compensate artists.
What Alexandra Mendes, M.P. (Brossard-La Prairie) had to say regarding broadband in September 2009. Elections now please!
I wish to acknowledge receipt of your e-mail urging me to look into the recent CRTC decision, which clearly fails to understand how important these services are, and how vital it is that we have the benefits of competitive service providers. Thank you for taking the time to write to me.
Under the current Conservative government, compared to other developed countries, Canada’s quality of service and accessibility to high-speed internet declined. Canada also has some of the highest-cost internet access compared to other developed nations. May I remind you that in 2002 Canada ranked 2nd out of 30 OECD countries in number of broadband users per 100 inhabitants. In 2007 we dropped to 10th. This is unacceptable.
I agree with you that we need more competition and better service for Canadian consumers. We need to lower the price and improve internet service for Canadians. My party, the Liberal Party, pledges to take steps to increase competition and look at how we can change Canadian law and programs to get more investment into internet infrastructure, to lower prices and improve internet service for all Canadians. The economy of the future will be very dependent on digital technology and it is imperative we invest in broadband infrastructure today.
Once again I wish to thank you for taking the time to bring this important matter to my attention.
Please accept my kindest regards,
Alexandra Mendes, M.P.
Brossard-La Prairie
In an attempt to see if it was worth it to switch to Google’s DNS, I made a quick performance comparison.
Using DNS Performance Test (DPT) , a tool that uses a random list of domain names, I tested performance over 500 (502 to be precise) queries. First, to my ISP’s servers, then to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s).
This test is far from scientific as I ran both test back to back, didn’t try multiple periods in the day, etc. But whatever, it’s fun !
ISP / Google
Worst Query time: 1166ms / 880ms
Average query time: 167ms / 145ms
Timeouts: 8 / 4
So it would seem that for now Google is slightly faster. However, this is probably nowhere near enough to convince me to give Google some even more logs to profile me, no matter what the privacy policy says..
Pocket Informant is a wonderful tool on Windows Mobile, and an iPhone version was just released. It doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles (yet), and suffers from the heavy restrictions and lack of functionality in the iPhone OS version 2.
Two particularily annoying restrictions are the fact that it can’t sync with the iPhone’s calendar, which would’ve made it easy to sync with your desktop, and it can’t ring alarms if the app isn’t on. And to think that a decade ago, Pilot 1000s could ring even while the device was off…
To be able to sync my iPhone Pocket Informant to my work Calendar (Outlook) and home Calendar (iCal), and to retain alarms, I use this scheme:
Here is what you will need to do, and in what order.
1. Open a Google Calendar account. It should be noted that this is stored on Google’s servers, so this solution may not be the best if you treat your calendar info as super private or if it contains confidential information. It might also be a very bad idea if you schedule crimes using your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.
2. Backup your iCal and Outlook calendars, or really any other application you will sync with Google Calendar. The calendar will get wiped from your iPhone so make sure that the info is already somewhere else.
3. Download and install the Google Calendar Sync tool. The options are very straightforward:
Enter your Google credentials, and set the sync to 2 way. Test the synchronisation, verify that your Google Calendar now reflects what is in your Outlook calendar.
4. Download and install the Google Calaboration Utility to Configure Google Calendar as CalDAV Calendars in iCal . Again, the options are pretty straightforward, though the first sync will get the data from Google to your iCal in a new calendar. You will to create new appointments in the proper calendar. I’m no big iCal user, I barely use it in fact, so you may know a way of merging your calendars. Test creating an appointment, see if it got created on the Google Calendar, and then force a sync in Outlook and see if it made it there.
5. Buy, download and install Pocket Informant on your iPhone. Under Settings / Sync / Google Calendar, set the Sync to Active, enter your credentials, and force a sync. See if everything is now in Pocket Informant.
6. Disable calendar sync in iTunes.
7. On your iPhone, follow these instructions that explain how to setup your Google Calendar to sync over the ActiveSync (Exchange) protocol. This will wipe any calendar info from your iphone. Force a Sync, check if your iPhone calendar got updated. This will give you alarms !
8. Bonus option for jailbroken phones: Install Lock Calendar , available in Cydia, to display calendar info on the lock screen.
You now have a decent calendaring solution for your iPhone, hopefully, some of these steps will be redundant with version 3 of the OS and future Pocket Informant release.
Known issues:
There is obviously a pretty long delay until all parts are up to date. I set the sync on my iPhone to 30minutes (I don’t use push), and to my outlook to 30 minutes, so if I’m not lucky it can take quite a while to be everywhere.
Items added from Pocket Informant with “Alerts” don’t seem to sync properly to Google, and therefore doesn’t get synched back into the iPhone calendar properly. So for now, until a workaround is found (there are quite a few different alert types in PI, maybe one of them works), you’re better off creating items that need alerts somewhere else.
Pocket Informant’s sync is not super reliable right now, should be improved soon.
ToDo:
You can use the same process with a ToodleDo account. I myself simply use Toodledo with the Firefox sidebar, and sync my Toodledo account to Pocket Informant and the Toodledo app for iPhone (Great value, by the way).
There’s some buzz around “Cuil”. Oh, it has the biggest index of pages!
Oh, they want to beat Google!
Oh, they have some super wise intelligent technology so the results are better!
Wait a minute. Has anyone ever been able to actually FIND something using Cuil? I mean, at first I didn’t even want to try it because the name sounded stupid, but I forced myself to try it in case it was good. I mean, the homepage is pretty clean, which is nice.
So, at one point today I wanted some details about a group policy setting versus how it affects Internet Explorer precisely. So I “Cuiled” this:
Group policy prevent save username Internet explorer
And got THIS:
No results were found for: Group policy prevent save username Internet explorer
If you’ve checked your spelling, you could try using fewer or different keywords to broaden your search.
Still no luck? Send us your feedback: noresults@cuil.com
Ok, so you didn’t find anything, and you want me to go through the trouble of SENDING YOU AN EMAIL? Are you nuts? I want to find stuff, not email you ! What are you going to do, email me the results back?
I tried a few other searches, and I either got no results, or got a ton of results which were mostly spam.
I don’t doubt that they have some “Cuil” technology over there, but it isn’t nearly ready for prime-time. Re-launch in a year and we’ll see.
Did anybody get good results using it? Seriously?
