The dreaded Broadcast flag is a technology designed to regulate the use of digital content on your electronic equipment—everything from computers to televisions to MP3 players. The idea is that unless you’re authorized to watch that DVD on your TV or rip that copy-protected CD to your computer, you won’t be able to do it—and you wouldn’t be able to buy equipment that didn’t recognize the broadcast flag or hack around it, because the RIAA, MPAA and other related lobby groups want to make the broadcast flag part of American federal law.

But two U.S. senators have done the unthinkable: they’ve made informed comments about legislation regarding new technology! And wait until you find out who’s decided the Broadcast flag legislation isn’t a good idea: John Sununu (R-New Hampshire) and the infamous Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Yeah, the guy who wants so badly to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge also wants to be able to record radio shows and listen to them on his iPod, broadcast flag be damned.

I’m so conflicted. ANWR on the one hand, anti-copy-protection on the other… Ted Stevens, I wish I knew how to quit you.

So HBC has agreed to a takeover bid by an American investor, contingent on two-thirds approval by shareholders. Naturally, a lot of people aren’t too happy about this latest development. Seeing Canada’s oldest company turned into just another storefront for an American owner is a bit disheartening. But HBC has been in trouble for a number of years now; before Zucker, it was Target who was rumoured to have considered a takeover. And HBC is the last of the great Canadian department stores. There was no suitor waiting in the wings to save Eaton’s at the eleventh hour; not even the power of aubergine could keep the name from fading into oblivion. And lest we forget, two decades ago there were still Simpsons stores across the country. No longer.

Even American department stores have struggled as of late, thanks to the decline of the suburban mall and leaner, meaner competitors like Wal-Mart and power centre stores. This is a continent-wide problem, if you can call it that; personally, I never had much use for department stores, and even two decades ago they seemed like relics from a kinder, gentler age. The flood of discount department stores like Woolco, Woolworth’s, K-Mart and Zellers didn’t help matters; all it did for me as a kid was associate the entire shopping mall experience with rickety shopping carts, cut-rate clothes falling off hangers, and hospital-grade fluorescent lights reflected off shiny vinyl floors with half-hearted tile patterns cut into them.

The department store, for better or for worse, is past its prime. An entire generation is growing up in the age of Wal-Mart and retail specialization, where if you’re poor you buy everything—including groceries—at the local Wal-Mart Superstore, and if you’re rich you buy your electronics, your clothes and your groceries at specialty retailers. And then there’s the rise of internet retailing, which will probably never quite replace the bricks and mortar model but is definitely here to stay. What room is there for Hudson’s Bay at all in this new future? And should we be so sad about a great Canadian institution going to the Americans when the alternative is to end up like Eaton’s? When it may very well end up like Eaton’s anyways?

Tomorrow morning, we might all wake up to find soldiers on our streets, gays and homeless people rounded up, and a new Ferrari in the driveways of every household with a six-figure income. But more likely, we’ll wake up tomorrow to find that the sky hasn’t fallen, and that it’ll be largely business as usual in Canada. The prediction of a Conservative minority was spot on, and in fact the Tories won more seats than electionprediction.org projected—and yet it’s a slight disappointment for them. The biggest news is the Conservative breakthrough in Quebec, shockingly taking support away from both the Liberals and the Bloc. But the hoped-for breakthroughs in Ontario and the Maritimes weren’t nearly as big as they could have been, and the big winner in British Columbia was not the Conservatives—though they retain the majority of seats—but the NDP, who quadruple the number of ridings they picked up.

With very few close races still in contention, it’s unlikely the numbers are going to change much: 124 CON, 103 LIB, 51 BQ, 29 NDP, 1 IND. So what does this mean?

• There is no easy majority. Unless the Tories and the Bloc join forces—especially unlikely now that both parties are in the fight for the Quebec vote—there’s no way the numbers add up to give any coalition a majority of 155 votes in Parliament. This is perhaps the only disappointing news for the NDP, who for the second time have to walk away without retaining the balance of power position. Under such circumstances, there’s going to be less party-line voting, which means contentious votes like the promised free vote on revoking the right of same-sex marriage (and yes, it’s phrased intentionally as a revocation of a civil right) will be even less predictable. And whether the Conservative budget will pass as-is or not is also in doubt; I don’t imagine anyone will block the reduction of the GST, but how the rest of the tax cuts fall out isn’t clear, not to mention new spending.
• The Liberals have been punished. That much is obvious, but the flipside is that the Canadian populace, by and large, weren’t all that disappointed in the Martin government’s actual performance. There were a lot of groups that had certain bones to pick, of course—the Liberals under Martin were never going to be able to bring the West in, for example, and a lot of people in the resource industries didn’t appreciate Martin’s leanings towards an arms-length relationship with the U.S. But it’s always hard to argue too much with a government able to deliver economic growth and balanced budgets. So now that the Liberals have been punished with opposition status, voters won’t necessarily be so quick the next time around to vote against them. This is especially true now that a lot of the big players of the Martin government, especially Martin himself, are on their way out of the party. Harper’s smart to recognize that the voters he gained tonight are not necessarily loyal ones.
• The NDP have made some amazing gains. This is easily the best news of the night, especially the NDP’s renewed success in the GTA—which was expected—and the BC interior—which wasn’t so much.
• There’s an urban/rural split, but with a Canadian twist. The Conservatives have swept Alberta, meaning both Edmonton and Calgary are Tory blue. There are certain issues that all large metropolises have to deal with, and Calgary in particular has thrown in its lot with the Conservative philosophy. Meanwhile we have Mayor David Miller urging GTA voters to consider the harm a Conservative government would do to Toronto. Conservative supporters would call this yet another sign that Toronto is out of touch with the rest of the country, but consider the political makeup of three major Canadian cities. Despite NDP gains downtown, the greater Toronto area is still a Liberal stronghold. Calgary is reliably Conservative, and Vancouver is an interesting mix of NDP and Liberal supporters. Toronto is a relatively mature city, but Calgary and Vancouver are still growing, and arguably their best days are ahead of them. Which city will fare better, and how much will each city’s political makeup affect the outcome?
• The West is in—and that’s a good thing. Anything that brings the country closer together is a good thing, and there shouldn’t be any reason why the west should feel the alienation that they have for at least the past decade, and many would argue much longer. I would like to think that the needs of Ontario aren’t so incompatible from the needs of Alberta, and the next government will be an experiment to see if the Conservatives will be able to heal some of that rift.
• I forgot how awesome CBC Vancouver is. The Vancouver anchors are running the late-night election show, and they’re so much cooler than the anchors out east.

Above all else, there’s a sense of resignation and caution. But now that a Harper government is a given, it’s easy to see the silver lining. Harper and his Conservatives will be on a tighter leash than the Bush government in the States; the runaway abuses of power that right-wing administration has gotten away with is hard to imagine here. Even the fact that we can give parties a limited minority mandate here—an option that also reflects the political situation in the States better than the “50% plus one takes all” system—is a sign of hope. The strength of the NDP and the Liberals, the fragility of the minority government and the nature of representative parliamentary politics are all firewalls against the Bush-led nightmare so many Canadians were afraid of when they first considered the possibility of a Conservative victory.

Harper, to his credit, has made all the right moves so far, right up to his victory speech earlier tonight. If he continues to make the right moves as leader of the ruling party, maintaining the party’s focus on fiscally conservative policies and parliament accountability and sidestepping the controversial socially conservative stances on same-sex marriage and abortion, then the Conservative label may once again be a label to wear proudly throughout the country, and not just in the West. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll have to eat my hat when I said a Conservative merger would be bad for the country.

But we’ll be watching, Harper. We won’t lose our country to the radical right the way the Americans have.

This is my new favourite thing. It’s fun trying to figure out how you know the woman whose favourite swear word is “shitface.”

And, uh, if anyone happens to know who that woman is, you could spill the beans.

Today on Ask Metafilter: Need pick-up lines for human powered laundromat.

So the big news was the new Intel-powered Macs: the iMac, which very few people bother to get excited about anymore, and the Powerbook, which everyone has been waiting for. Only it’s not called Powerbook anymore, but—get this—MacBook Pro.

Yeah, the MacBook Pro. I can hear it now: an old, grizzled Shakespearean actor enters stage right, yelling at the top of his lungs in a lusty Scottish brogue: “MACBOOOOOOOOOK!”

Alright, silliness aside. The MacBook Pro replaces the 15.4″ Powerbook G4 (the 12″ and 17″ models are no longer). The 1.67GHz model will retail for $1999 (that’s $2299 CAD) and the 1.83GHz model goes fo $2499 ($2899 CAD). The low-end model comes with 512MB DDR2 RAM versus the high-end’s 1GB; both use the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 for graphics with 128MB and 256MB of video ram respectively; and the low-end model has a slightly smaller hard drive. Both are purported to be up to four times faster than the Powerbook G4, and are only about $200-400 more expensive. Fine.

But now that the MacBook Pro is running on an Intel platform, direct comparisons to other notebooks suddenly becomes much easier. So how much bang for the buck do you get with an Apple laptop? Hard to say. Caveats before we begin: first, Apple is launching the MacBook Pro very early in the Intel Core Duo game, so notebooks with similar specs have only recently been announced—last week at the Consumer Electronics Expo, actually. Prices and configurations will probably change, and there’s the obfuscating factor of street price versus MSRP to deal with. Second, blah blah blah Mac OS X is not Windows XP blah blah blah far superior to Windows blah blah blah if you use Windows you have the IQ of a small volcanic rock blah blah blah. Not that I think Mac OS X isn’t any good, or even that Windows is any better. It’s just that Apple fanboys are in a special league of their own when it comes to fanaticism, right up there with Joss Whedon fans and Linux apostles. (And for the record, I love Firefly, so get off my back.)

Alright. The Acer Travelmate 8200 is one of the new Intel Centrino Duo laptops introduced at CES. (Centrino Duo, as far as I can tell, simply means Core Duo dual-core processors plus whatever wireless connectivity Intel deems suitable for the Centrino Duo name, probably 802.11b.) Prices are said to start at $1999, according to PCWorld. Specifically the quote says “configurations of the dual-core Travelmate 8200 are expected to start at $1999,” implying more than one model; the Acer website, however, begs to differ. If we make the assumption that the one configuration listed on the Acer website will indeed retail for $1999, here’s what you’re getting for your money:

• 2.0GHz Core Duo processor versus the MacBook Pro’s 1.67GHz Core Duo processor;
• 1GB DDR2-667 RAM versus 512MB DDR2-667 RAM (though the Acer and PCWorld sites says 2GB, this doesn’t seem likely for a $2000 laptop—in any case, I’ll give Apple the benefit of the doubt);
• ATI Mobility Radeon x1600 with 256MB video RAM versus 128MB video RAM;
• 15.4″ display capable of 1680×1050 resolution versus 1440×960 resolution;
• 120GB hard drive versus 80GB;
• Bluetooth versus Bluetooth 2.0, a higher-bandwidth revision of the Bluetooth standard.

So far it’s Acer 1, Apple 0. As for ancillary features, both laptops have built-in webcams but only the MacBook Pro has that nifty magnetic power cord that’ll release easily if someone trips over your power cable—not a big feature, but one that could potentially save your laptop from an expensive or annoying trip to a support center. The MacBook Pro also has optical digital audio inputs and outputs, a backlit keyboard, a trick scrolling touchpad and motion detection that’ll lock your hard drive heads in case of sudden shock; the Travelmate definitely doesn’t have the digital audio jacks or the keyboard, but I don’t know about the other two. Finally, the Travelmate is a bit larger (about an inch larger from hinge to front edge), a bit heavier (about a pound) and a bit uglier (eye of the beholder). So it’s the usual Apple story: lean on raw performance, pretty good on the intangibles. I should note that Acer claims its laptop’s batteries are good for 3.5 hours, while Apple makes no claims for the MacBook.

I should note again that the Acer information is not concrete by any means; particularly troublesome is the fact that Acer’s site doesn’t list an MSRP for any of their laptops, making it hard to confirm whether PCWorld’s report of a $1999 price tag is correct or not. Other reviews I’ve read of similar laptops (this PCWorld review of offerings from HP and Dell) lead me to believe that aside from the 2GB RAM, the rest of the Acer specs aren’t ludicrous for the price. Watch this space.

Update: It appears the Travelmate will have 2GB of memory, but at a $2499 price point. No word on whether the reports of a $1999 configuration are true, or what that configuration might look like. Note that even at $2499, the Travelmate’s specs would beat out the comparably priced MacBook Pro, though by a much smaller margin (2.0GHz versus 1.83GHz, 2GB versus 1GB, 120GB versus 100GB hard drive, same display resolution and Bluetooth difference).

“They told us they didn’t have good news,” said one man who was at the briefing. “Everybody is stunned and sick to our stomachs. We feel like we’ve been lied to, we’ve been lied to all along … This is probably the most horrible thing that’s ever happened to me in my lifetime.”

Late last evening, the story out of West Virginia was being described as a miracle: 12 workers trapped in Sago Mine survived 41 hours underground, despite high levels of carbom monoxide and the discovery of a body closer to the mine entrance. Early this morning, something unthinkable had happened to that story. A horrible mistake had been made: there weren’t 12 survivors, there were 12 dead.

People cling tightly to stories of hope. In the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center towers, rumours and wild stories surfaced about people who had survived against the odds. One such story that I’ve never forgotten involved a man who managed to walk away from the collapse of one of the towers by surfing on a wave of rubble as the tower came down. It’s the sort of story that, in earlier times, might have become a legend: an ordinary man performing an unthinkable feat in the face of overwhelming horror. It was also the sort of story that couldn’t possibly be true, except that it very well might have been.

But people also remember stories like this one, the exact opposite of the man who fell to earth and lived. It’s almost too perfect in its reversal of fortune, in the way it has stripped an entire community so thoroughly of the belief that they had been spared. Few stories have a final act so cruel and devastating as this, and Tallmansville is doubly stricken for it.