Shame on Canada (not industry related)

Good post AmCan I was unaware of this law. As antoine suggested maybe a good loophole for not paying taxes. Perhaps maybe getting reimbursed for the taxes already paid?

greek39

Living so close to the US and being influenced by them politically, we can sometimes forget what normal behaviour is, i think that story is a good example of just that, common sense should tell you what’s right and wrong, not some piece of paper.

On another note, i found this pretty cool story by following the link to the story above…Just goes to show you, nobody really cares what the US government thinks is right, or is bowing down to new US laws like our fellow patsy online gambling folk, yeah you know who you are…

Ever since i was a young boy, i used to pick on bully’s, i hated em, and used to stalk them, waiting for the moment to catch them alone, then i’d pounce on them with swift brutality, but that’s my problem(psycho), anyway, back to the story, check out Chino here, too funny, he’s got his own version of Space Invaders going on

Those damn commy reds look like they’re gettin ready to kick some serious US ass, that is not pleasant news, cuz you know who always gets the lumps when peckerheads with big guns lose their cool, yep, joe average livin 9 to 5 like a slave, never done nothing to no one guy, and poor Chino living on his boat with a sack of rice chasing fish all day, it really makes me sick to see how poorly people are treated by those they entrusted with their future and well being, i don’t know what is up with the decrease in assasinated politicians numbers, it has me a bit worried.

REALITY CHECK: Robert Sheppard
Does China’s space blast herald a new arms race?
January 23, 2007
CBC News
You would think that blasting away a piece of your own unwanted junk, even unwanted space junk, wouldn’t bring the wrath of the world down on your head.

But, China’s dramatic destruction of a defunct weather satellite earlier this month — an act that Beijing has yet to formally recognize — is certainly setting the diplomatic world on edge.

Even Canada, now, after a slight delay, has joined the army of condemnation led principally by the U.S., Britain and Japan. (The reason for our delay may have had something to do with the fact that we had two senior ministers, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Trade Minister David Emerson, in China trying to mend fences.)

At the very least, the world is saying, China pulled off an irresponsible stunt by littering the lower reaches of outer space, a high-traffic region called the Low Earth Orbit, with tens of thousands of tiny shards of busted-up technology.

At worst, it may be sparking a new arms race in outer space if Washington moves to beef up and defend its own legion of high-flying military birds.

With Beijing holding its silence – word of the Jan. 11 blast has only recently begun to leak out — the rationale for the hit is unclear.

All that is known about this act is that China has now moved into the very elite rank of nations able to take down an orbiting satellite, in this case one that was barely a metre wide, with a ballistic missile launched from a thousand or so kilometres away.

Sitting duck
Only two other nations have blasted satellites from the heavens — the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. And neither have done this since the late 1980s.

What’s more, both the U.S. and the Soviets used air-launched missiles to first track and hunt down their prey. China’s feat is much more impressive in that it is believed to be the first to use a land-based missile, in this case launched from a military base in Sichuan province.

Though the fact that Chinese technicians probably knew the exact position of its old weather satellite made the target something of a sitting duck.

Weapons experts are speculating that China used what is called kinetic kill technology to smash its old satellite: That refers to a missile without a warhead that, using sophisticated tracking instruments, accelerates to speeds approaching one km per second as it homes in on its target.

The resulting impact, in this case, may well have produced about 40,000 space shards of between one and 10 centimetres in diameter as well as about 800 fragments larger than 10 centimetres, according to estimates from the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists.

These fragments will be now floating at high speeds in Earth’s low orbit, about 800 to 1,000 kilometres above the Earth, where many low-flying military and weather satellites are located. (The International Space Station is lower still, about 400 kilometres above Earth, although it could be affected at some point by falling debris.)

This low orbit is an area that is already festooned with what NASA scientists and others have called an already critical amount of space junk and where an estimated 60 per cent of space crashes are said to occur.

The major broadband and GPS (Global positioning satellites), particularly the ones the U.S. military uses to guide its cruise missile, are in much higher orbit still — about 36,000 kilometres above Earth. So it would take a projectile with much greater power and precision to reach them.

Why now?
There are many reasons why China might want to show off its increasing military sophistication. Last summer, it reportedly bathed a U.S. satellite with a laser from Earth, apparently to show it had the technology to defend itself against suspected spy satellites.

The China editor for the Asia Times has suggested that this latest Star Wars act was really aimed at Taiwan, to show the sometimes secessionist Taiwanese that they don’t necessarily want to depend on America’s high-tech superiority in the event hostilities break out with the mainland.

That may well be the case. But there are a couple of other, albeit contradictory, reasons that stand out.

One is that Beijing actually wants to stop the militarization of space by showing the U.S. it is willing to raise the stakes (and while Washington is otherwise occupied in Iraq).

Chinese President Hu Jintao has talked of China’s “peaceful rise” to prosperity and world influence. And for years now, China and Russia have been pushing a treaty to ban space weapons, fearing the Cold War-like cost to their treasuries if they have to go along with a new U.S. Star Wars scheme.

New Scientist magazine reports that the U.S. is in the midst of developing a number of anti-satellite technologies of its own, including a robotic spacecraft that can approach a foreign satellite to check out its signals and then zap it if it is deemed to be counter to U.S. national security.

This latest Chinese adventure, then, can be seen against a new, if little publicized, U.S. space policy, promulgated in October by the Bush administration, which declared “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.” The policy paper also specifically rejected new international agreements that would limit U.S. testing or even using new space weaponry.

China’s new satellite killer can also be seen, though, as a move by its shadowy generals to flex their own muscles — despite the peaceful-rise sloganeering of their political masters — even if only for internal pride of place.

No outsider really knows if there are power struggles going on inside the Chinese leadership. But it is this possibility, more than the worrying amounts of tiny space junk, that is the ultimate concern of this so-called provocation, and Beijing’s long silence.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/realitycheck/sheppard/20070123.html