AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Apparently if people are caught protesting, they lose all the cheddar the government may have loaned to them, and the student association they are part of will be penalized whether it organized the protest or not.

The strike has been going on for three months now and the government has never tried to negotiate with students. They say picket lines are anti-democratic because students who don't want to protest can't enter their colleges/universities, but there is no picket line unless it has been voted by the student assembly, which is democratic.

Students are protesting because the gov wants to raise tuition fees by 80%. The only time the gov pretended to negotiate, they only talked about monitoring how universities spend their cheddar, and in the end they decided to raise the tuition fees even more, but over 7 years instead of 5.

The former Minister of Education quit last monday because she felt she couldn't solve the problem. The new Minister seemed a little more open at first, but that special law passed before she could do anything (not that she would have done anything anyways).

The opposition voted against the law, but the elected party has the majority, so of course it passed.

Even the courts warned the gov that this law was against civil rights, but they just don't give a shit.

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

Looks like thing are going to get worse before they get better.

People have been talking about elections for about two months now, and the Opportunist Party promises to cancel the special law if it's elected. I think they would be a lesser evil, but I can't tell if we can trust them. The other parties are either right-wing, or not mainstream enough to stand a chance.

I want proportional representation!

Obnosim wrote:Even the courts warned the gov that this law was against civil rights, but they just don't give a shit.

Does that mean if a student body were arrested/fined for breaking this new law, and took it to court, they'd end up winning? Would it be worth going to court if they could basically rule the law unconstitutional? Not saying it would work exactly that way, but I think you understand my meaning.

I don't know how that works in Canada, but here the last time a law was deemed unconstitutional, every effect of it had to be righted retroactively. It was a law about saving telecommunications data, so they had to immediately delete it all afterwards.

The law will be evaluated and judged constitutional or not in a few days I think.

Isn't the elected majority within quebec the NDP?

There is no NDP in Quebec. It became the Socialist Democracy Party in 1995 and merged with the Progressive Forces Union to become Québec Solidaire in 2006.

The elected majority is the Quebec Liberal Party. They have been there since 2003, but only have the majority since 2007. The population has never been satisfied with them and they have been caught in many scandals. For years, they refused to back off on a project to build an LNG terminal not even a hour away from the capital city, and then they tried to sell a national park to real estate entrepreneurs so they could build luxurious condominiums and sell them. In 2009, it was revealed that builders' syndicates, municipal and provincial politicians and the mafia were all involved in a corrupt system designed for funding the Liberal Party (and other parties too, but to a lesser extent IIRC). Since then, everybody and their mother asked for a public inquiry, but the Prime Minister refused to start one until October 2011. In 2010, we learned that the government sold private prospecting companies the right to prospect for shale gas anywhere they wanted, including next to houses. People were irate because nobody was ever informed beforehand and almost nobody knew anything about shale gas anyway. Again, everybody asked for a moratorium, but I don't think it has been done. Retired politicians still often end up at the head of the board of directors of propecting companies, so it is obvious that they facilitated these companies' job to get more cheddar for themselves.

The only serious alternative to the Liberal Party is the Parti Québécois, the sovereignist party (the one I called the Opportunist Party in my previous post). The problem is that its members spend too much time fighting each others over unimportant stuff to do anything constructive and they are taken less and less seriously by the rest of the province. Last summer, several influent party members left in the funniest shitstorm I have ever seen. Day after day, for like three weeks, members would leave the party and blame the leader for everything, and the leader would say everything was fine and dandy. Since 2003, the Parti Québécois says whatever it thinks will get them elected (well, evenmoreso than regular parties).

There used to be the ADQ (slightly right-wing), but it merged with the CAQ (right-wing in denial). They don't even have a definite ideology, they say what they think people want to hear, and, sadly, it works.

Wow your politics are even more fucked up than ours. Didn't think that was possible.

This is the kind of copyright bullshit that needs to end.

I read about that. Patent laws are essentially real-life trolling.

Also, from the article, Motorola has patented technology that is used for 'secure wireless communication and transmission of video content between controller devices and game consoles'. This makes it sound like the Xbox controller can stream videos sent to it wirelessly from the Xbox itself, but again, the article also says that not many people really understand what Motorola is claiming patent on.

Also, the Xbox systems in dispute are the latest Xbox 360 Slim versions, the 4GB and 250GB models.

Otherwise known as the only models Microsoft sells. They discontinued the fat bastards from last generation.

Madican wrote:This is the kind of copyright bullshit that needs to end.

I dunno, this sounds like it could be legit. But it's not like we can judge anything since it's all behind closed doors.