a3camero

In Toronto there's a giant cooling system for downtown buildings that uses cold lake water pumped downtown from 83m underwater:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Lake_Water_Cooling_System. It's being expanded to offer even more cooling with a low carbon footprint.

I'd like to take up a different view on this issue, in the hope that this discussion helps to understand this issue from a different vantage point. Neither of us make any rules for anyone else, so this is an academic discussion anyway. I hope you're not offended by the disagreement, as it's driven only by an interest in moving toward a better position on this issue, not internet points or personal malice (& you're using a pseudonym anyway). At the moment, I don't read in this comment what seems like the right answer, but it's also a short version, and maybe my own thoughts on this are wrong - thank you at the very least for posting this, as it's given me an opportunity to think more about a different position. Below is a different point of view.

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Many people do not even do the "bare minimum" as a member of society, and they should be treated, to the greatest degree possible, like the people who do the maximum, or even just the usual. High-tax paying people, beloved teachers, famous artists, despised criminals - they should all be treated as humans, with the appropriate medical treatment according to their human needs, not their moral failures or victories.

People are the product of society, and a component in it, and they should not be judged by stereotypes, or even judged at all, when it comes to responding to their medical needs. Ideally, we'd take this approach in every area of life, but this is especially justified when applied to injured and sick people. "Misguided" is a more useful frame for many people than "evil".

Triage by prior behaviour is a poor basis for healthcare. Everyone has their own group of people they like less or more, according to their prior experiences. More importantly, the time to judge someone's moral behaviour is not at the point of healthcare delivery. Even if mistakes never happened, and your moral views are correct and correctly applied, it wouldn't be right to apply this rule because it would be the first step away from neutrality.

The status quo of neutrality is a good rule, even if on rare occasions it results in seriously injured violent criminals receiving medical treatment ahead of sick nuns. Because almost all of the time it's the rule that is the most human, on our best behaviour. And especially so when we consider that many of our own views are not solely attributable to our individual choice but are in fact strongly influenced by our place in society. Once immoral individual behaviour is the yardstick for medical behaviour, perhaps based on views about groups, it's difficult to know when you've strayed off the moral path.

Some contract law is codified in the United States: the UCC.

There are other codes in Canada too, even outside of Quebec, like the Criminal Code of Canada.

Who not both? Just because it’s normal that low level workers are fired and get nothing doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be. Severance could be generous enough to make this work out.

They don’t even make most of that 95%. It’s licensed from wire services like Reuters and AP.

Searching by hash, where the hash is locally generated and then sent to the server, avoids this sort of surveillance issue.

It doesn't stop the issue of forced changes to code that impair that local hashing, but it's detectable by the user. Server-side encryption/hashing isn't detectable by the user, and that's an important consideration in any secure system.

Best of luck with your project.

The Supreme Court of Canada in 2009 specifically recognized a defence related to defamation as being one that's broader than "journalists" in the sense of employed people who work for the news media, and here's their explanation:

"In arguments before us, the defence was referred to as the responsible journalism test. This has the value of capturing the essence of the defence in succinct style. However, the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists. These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets. I agree with Lord Hoffmann that the new defence is “available to anyone who publishes material of public interest in any medium”"

Decision: https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/7837/index...

This explanation is an answer to the question of who's a "legitimate journalist", which is that it should be about what people are doing not who they work for. That's an idea captured in the above case, which reviews some of the laws of other countries on this subject too. It was in the context of defamation, but it's closely linked to your comments about accountability (since the everyday threat is lawsuits, not assault/arrest).

Wouldn't that be a great outcome? Cheap cars or cheap cola? That's better than more expensive products (because of the cost of advertising that's turned into billboards and banner ads.)

Rules on paper aren’t rules in reality. Enforcement of law, and the way it’s experienced (or not) is far more important than what’s written in the law books, and the enforcement part is much less transparent, and impossible to know at the time the rule is passed.

Neat idea.

Searching based on hashes of the words is one improvement on the status quo that you could do. Hash every token in the documents, then when a user does a search it hashes the words in their query locally and sends that to the server. This reduces the information communicated to the server and reduces the value to an attacker that gets the logs.

Companies buy a combination of goods and IP (patents and trademarks). The goods come from a developed country and the IP is licensed from a tax haven. The goods are sold at near cost with the markup being in the IP. The result is a supply of goods between countries that causes a significant diversion of the revenue to the tax haven. This is used by most big companies in tech, pharma, etc. The government can’t challenge these schemes because there is no open market for IP (because they’re monopoly rights) so there’s no way to argue that the price paid wasn’t the open market price.

Because everyone in charge owns a house.

“Transfer pricing” is why this doesn’t work out.

The "Personal Health Information Protection Act" (PHIPA) in Ontario: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/04p03.

I’ve done this over the last year on a tiny scale for my own needs: gorillafind.com. It’s from scratch and just for government sites to sidestep some of the challenges (but so far only has 50 sites). The cost per site is around $1/mo for crawling, indexing, converting file formats and then serving up results. It’s difficult but not impossible and very educational. If you’d like to hear more about doing it yourself and some of the challenges feel free to email me with the contact info on the site. My system isn’t open source but I’m more than happy to chat about the research I’ve done and how you can make one.

I’d start off with not doing state of the art because it’s overkill for an “MVP”. And if you don’t need proper browser rendering of pages, there’s open source crawlers out there like Nutch that might work. If you’re making one yourself, the outdated academic papers and presentations by search companies are a good resource as the basic ideas of crawling and indexing haven’t changed too much (even if ranking and other components have changed a lot). A search engine is really a set of related components and there are many examples out there to use as inspiration for your MVP.

This is an impression that TV and Twitter give. But politicians in all countries often say positive things about policies and ideas they like. But that’s not newsworthy so it appears to not be common.

Features: “map” of how keywords appear in results, screenshots, exact keyword matching using local hashes for greater confidentiality, not built on an existing index (doesn’t use Google/Bing).

I'm working on a search engine like this. So far just government websites but I think you're right about the need to focus on selected sites for some kinds of searches. For example, if you're looking for securities laws, you probably want to search government law sites and securities regulator sites. Maybe you want law blogs and law journal articles too, but you probably don't want Reddit or Hacker News.

Making a search engine for government websites. Not using someone else’s index. A full search engine, writing all of the components.

It's by H.L. Mencken (1915): https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken. https://books.google.ca/books?id=hXVHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Democracy...

Yes. I’m a Canadian lawyer who has corresponded with the author of that NDA. I pointed out the same language and he’s working on a version that’ll account for other countries. The author is keenly aware of this and wants to make it not US-centric.

Also Toronto now.

No. Many people are able to book visits with their family doctor (GP) on short notice (e.g. next week). Walk-in clinics are available and you can see a doctor within a couple hours, same-day, without an appointment (and without being registered beforehand, literally just walk in). These doctors are fully licensed.

Although it's not easy to find a good doctor that you like, there are family doctors available for new patients even in busy cities like Toronto. Specialists might take a while to book (assuming it's not serious). Emergency rooms are always available (although you may have to wait a few hours if it's not really time-sensitive). Labs can be booked same day and may have a bit of a line up but you can get those for free too (for most types of tests).

I would ask: who wrote the DAO code? Someone (or several people) tested, developed and then deployed the code.

That's a pretty egregious example but I'm sure that's not the only time that's happened with a law office server. This is a really good example to add for future presentations - thanks!

The (former) CEO seemed like a tech guy at heart and I think he was the CTO before being promoted. I met him a couple times at hackathons around 2009 and he was definitely not a suit guy. I doubt it was just lip service.

There are very few disputes about authenticity of records. And communication between lawyers is often done on a "without prejudice" basis where it won't be introduced later as evidence. And despite the love of paper, lawyers do most of their communications through email. The printed paper record is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to law.

Lawyers generally take physical security seriously but rarely give digital security much thought. They're often working on their own (somewhere between 1/4 to 1/2 of lawyers are independent/very small firm in Canada/US). This means they don't have the time, expertise or money to invest in knowing what to do or how to do it. But I've found they usually do want to know and that was the reason for this presentation.

This isn't a list of the best things to do, it's a list of some practical steps that can make things better. But ultimately the right level of security depends on the importance of the client communications. Some things are fine to do as Google Docs and other things you'll want to do with in-person meetings where no phones are allowed.