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questcequecest?

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  1. a run-on post by Canned Beats? never. you reap what you sow my friend!
  2. such sad news. i met marcel at ghost town, and always looked forward to the next time i'd see him. it was a pleasure to run into marcel at a handful of shows each year... but never enough. rest peacefully marcel.
  3. any shows in particular? i've memorized quite a few you know.
  4. the dishes are done and the results are in. it's good! :thumbup: thanks again cyberhippie
  5. thanks a bunch. i only recognize a handful of tracks off there... should be some good dishwashin' music ...on pot!! throwin 'er on now.
  6. in today's K-W Record **************************** [h2]Raw milk: Public service or outlaw act?[/h2] TAMSIN MCMAHON WATERLOO REGION (Dec 13, 2006) It started with one person who came to Marvin Weber's St. Jacobs farm looking for milk straight from the family's lone dairy cow. The Weber family, who run a beef farm, didn't see any harm in selling a few litres of milk they had been drinking all their lives with no ill effects. But word spread about the farm north of Waterloo, which would sell unpasteurized milk to desperate customers, a practice outlawed in the province since the 1930s because of health concerns. People began showing up daily. The milking operation expanded to five cows, and the family sold as much as 80 litres of milk a day to meet the demand. Customers were calling ahead to place their orders, and dropping by on day trips from as far away as Toronto. Even the Webers' family doctor bought their raw milk. "Before you know it people are coming here and asking for it, begging for it," Marvin Weber said. "You can barely get them off the farm without giving it to them." Most of the customers were immigrants who were used to drinking raw milk in their native countries and wanted the product to make their own cheese, Weber said. "They say they get sick from the stuff they buy in the store from everything that gets put in it." Then in June, a 15-year-old Kitchener boy was hospitalized because of an E. coli infection local health officials believe was linked to milk bought at the Weber farm. The infection was caused by the same strain of E. coli that tainted water in Walkerton, killing seven and sickening thousands, in 2000. Two health inspectors and a Ministry of Natural Resources investigator shut down the Webers' raw-milk operation. Although Weber disputes the allegation the milk caused the E. coli infection, he and his mother, Lucinda Weber, pleaded guilty and were fined $2,500 for selling unpasteurized milk. The region ordered four other farms to stop selling unpasteurized milk and products such as butter. They stopped and were not charged. Health inspectors called in the Natural Resources Ministry because they suspected the Webers' farm was part of a larger raw-milk distribution network linked to a spate of illnesses in Toronto and Barrie. Investigators eventually determined it wasn't, said Rodger Dunlop, supervisor for agricultural investigations in the Natural Resources office in Guelph. Farm fresh milk has become a hot-button political issue after police and Natural Resources officials raided Michael Schmidt's Durham farm for illegally selling the product. About 150 people have paid Schmidt to own part of a cow, which he contended legally entitled them to buy the raw milk. One of the buyers was the wife of Ontario Finance Minister Greg Sorbara, who last week backed a Conservative private member's bill to look into legalizing the sale of raw milk. The bill was defeated. Only the Dairy Farmers of Ontario association is allowed to buy raw milk, which is pasteurized in licensed plants. Farmers can drink their own raw milk but cannot let it leave the farm. The Webers have stopped selling raw milk since being charged. It hasn't had much impact on their income, Weber said, because at 60 cents a litre, raw-milk sales were never about the money. Weber feels he was doing a service for people who came to his farm in search of a product that had strong cultural ties for them. "We've had to chase a lot of people away. You can barely get them off the farm. They don't understand why we can't give it to them." Unpasteurized milk can carry bacteria such as salmonella E. coli and campylobacter, said Chris Komorowski, a food safety and infection control manager with the regional health unit. Such bacteria can lead to serious stomach illnesses and in some cases kidney failure and death. The elderly, children younger than five and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk. Along with the Kitchener teen whose illness was linked to Weber's farm, a nine-year-old Waterloo girl was hospitalized this summer with kidney failure after eating raw milk cheese contaminated with E. coli. The cheese was given to the girl's family as a gift and wasn't linked to any farms in the region. A third child in the region came down with a serious stomach illness caused by campylobacter after consuming raw milk this summer, Komorowski said. Last year, two-year-old Cyrell Watson-McBride died of an E. coli infection. The child's death wasn't linked to raw milk, but Komorowski said the E. coli was the same strain found in the non-fatal cases this summer and underscores how serious infections from tainted milk can be. For each reported case of serious food poisoning about 10 to 15 cases go unreported, Komorowski said. "What you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg." Whatever the health benefits from drinking raw milk might be, they are overshadowed by serious risks, he said. People have died in states that have legalized the sale of raw milk in the United States, he said, and people will likely die if raw milk is allowed to be sold or distributed in Ontario. "There is this underground culture when it comes to unpasteurized milk," Komorowski said. "People out there think it's got some healing powers or something. But they're misinformed. "The risks far outweigh any benefits. It's not safe. It would be a step backward if it ever got deregulated." Farmers are getting mixed messages from governments, said Jeff Stager, past president of the Waterloo Federation of Agriculture, whose 700 members represent about half the farms in the area. He said government responded to crushing competition from heavily subsidized food imports from the U.S. and Europe by encouraging local farmers to find other markets, such as agri-tourism and specialty products. But when farmers like the Webers or Schmidt found a new market, they faced stiff penalties. "It seems odd that the government tries to encourage farmers to find niche markets and then shuts them down when they do," he said. Stager is hoping the courts or lawmakers can step in and sort out legal issues surrounding selling raw milk to willing customers who beg farmers for the product. link: kw record
  7. i don't understand what's so special about an $800 guitar. sounds pretty standard to me. possibly even on the cheap end. my most expensive footwear ever was probably my first (or second) snowboarding boots. airwalk halfpipe's, about $200US. ..bought 'em at the b side in burlington, vt. back in highschool. i still have those fuckers and i still use 'em. i need new boots.
  8. my cbc contact is like so: Firstname_Lastname(at)cbc.ca
  9. no plans yet. betcha 5 bucks it's better than tiesto! ewwwww...
  10. an article in today's K-W Record [h1]Spam, spam, spam, spam[/h1] The scourge they can't stop NEW YORK (Dec 6, 2006) Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write "It's me, Esmeralda," and tip you off to an obscure stock that is "poised to explode" or a great deal on prescription drugs. You're not the only one. Spam is back -- in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone's minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet. Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 per cent to 45 per cent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says. The antispam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge. It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. Three years ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairperson, made an audacious prediction: The problem of junk e-mail, he said, "will be solved by 2006." And for a time, there were signs that he was going to be proven right. Antispam software for companies and individuals became increasingly effective, and the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which required spam senders to allow recipients to opt out of receiving future messages and prescribed prison terms for violators, gave many hope. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the volume of spam actually declined in the first eight months of last year. But as many technology administrators will testify, the respite was short-lived. Antispam companies fought the scourge successfully, for a time, with a blend of three filtering strategies. Their software scanned each e-mail and looked at whom the message was coming from, what words it contained and which websites it linked to. The new breed of spam -- call it Spam 2.0 -- poses a serious challenge to each of those three approaches. Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy -- analyzing the reputation of the sender -- by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam "botnets" each day. The sudden appearance of new sources of spam makes it more difficult for companies to rely on blacklists of known junk e-mail distributors. Also, by using other people's computers to scatter their e-mail across the Internet, spammers vastly increase the number of messages they can send out, without having to pay for the data traffic they generate. "Because they are stealing other people's computers to send out the bad stuff, their marginal costs are zero," said Daniel Drucker, a vice-president at the antispam company Postini. "The scary part is that the economics are now tilted in their favour." The use of botnets to send spam wouldn't matter as much if e-mail filters could still make effective use of the second spam-fighting strategy: analyzing the content of an incoming message. Traditional antispam software examines the words in a text message and, using statistical techniques, determines if the words are more likely to make up a legitimate or spam message. The explosion of image spam this year has largely thwarted that approach. Spammers have used images in their messages for years, in most cases to offer a peek at a pornographic website, or to illustrate the effectiveness of their miracle drugs. But as more of their text-based messages started getting blocked, spammers searched for new methods and realized that putting their words inside the image could frustrate text filtering. The use of other people's computers to send their bandwidth-hogging e-mail made the tactic practical. "They moved their message into our blind spot," said Paul Judge, chief technology officer of Secure Computing. Antispam firms spotted the skyrocketing amount of image spam this summer. A technology arms-race ensued. The filtering companies adopted an approach called optical character recognition, which scans the images in an e-mail and attempts to recognize any letters or words. Spammers responded in turn by littering their images with speckles, polka dots and background bouquets of colour, which mean nothing to human eyes but trip up the computer scanners. Spammers have also figured out ways to elude another common antispam technique: identifying and blocking multiple copies of the same message. Pioneering antispam companies like San Francisco-based Brightmail, which was bought two years ago year by the software giant Symantec, achieved early victories against spam by recognizing unwanted e-mail as soon as it hit the Internet, noting its "fingerprint" and stopping every subsequent copy. Spammers have defied that technique by writing software that automatically changes a few pixels in each image. "Imagine an archvillain who has a new thumbprint every time he puts his thumb down," said Patrick Peterson, vice-president of technology at Ironport. "They have taken away so many of the hooks we can use to look for spam." But don't spammers still have to link to the incriminating websites where they sell their disreputable wares? Well, not anymore. Many of the messages in the latest spam wave tout penny stocks -- part of a scheme that antispam researchers call the "pump and dump." Spammers buy the inexpensive stock of an obscure company and send out messages hyping it. They sell their shares when the gullible masses respond and snap up the stock. No links to websites are needed in the messages. Though the scam sounds obvious, a joint study by researchers at Purdue University and Oxford University this summer found that spam stock cons work. Enough recipients buy the stock that spammers can make a five to six per cent return in two days, the study concluded. The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought dozens of cases against such fraudsters over the years. But as a result of the CAN-SPAM Act, which forced domestic e-mail marketers to either give up the practice or risk jail, most active spammers now operate beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Antispam researchers say the current spam hot spots are in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. Some antispam veterans are not optimistic about the future of the spam battle. "As an industry I think we are losing," said Peterson of Ironport.
  11. cool. up to now, this read like a review by Basher. glad you had fun!!
  12. for me, it was somewhere between Panic! at the Disco, and Ultra Mega Technobandið Stefán that I lost faith in Shain's taste. niether of these bands are the *next best thing* ...not even close. in no particular order, here are a few of my picks o' the year: Beck - The Information Outkast - Idlewild Springsteen - Seeger Sessions OCMS - Big Iron World
  13. i don't know you, that's my purse!! happy birthday
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