YEGmann

Involvement of the CPC could have been suggested if the riding were promissing for the conservatives. In Guelph, conservatives had very little chances. This is exactly what 22-year-old prankster could do. I think Elections Canada has very little against Sona. Mainly, his talks about to do such things. Elections Canada hopes that under pressure Sona will tell them something new and implicate somebody else.

Do you realize that it's an equivalent of a city like Montreal or Edmonton receiving $10 billion per year? Of taxpayers money. Every year. I think something is wrong with your accountability. And if I am not mistaken, the town receives millions of dollars from a mining company. How come do they have living condition problems?

Question was, what difference did they do. It seems, they were wasted.

What evidence?! There is no any evidence. The situation is very simple. The CoC is arguing that Election Canada might find some evidence for them in future. Conservatives say, let's start the trial. Proceeding with this frivolous case just indicates the sad state of the Canadian court system. No evidence required. Accused must wait indefinitely for the accuser to present his case. A miniscule probability of wrongdoing is addmitted by a judge as a proof of guilt.

You simply have no idea what you are talking about.

It was a subject of discussions at least fourty years ago: the budget of Ministry of Defence in communist countries was a small fraction of the total defence spendings. Military spendings were spread among many other ministies. Some had funny names, like "Ministry of General Machine Building", "Ministry of Medium Machine Building". Of course, there were "Ministry of Heavy Machine Building" and "Ministry of Transport Machine Building". All had their own budgets. This was a principal difference with Western countries. That's why the MoD budget of the USSR was relatively very small. I think the same is applicable to China.

I am affraid you mixed the problems. The operating cost in this report is an equivalent of our maintenace cost, i.e. $6 bln, which are included in CF-35 procurement budget. An equivalent of our operating cost at DND (salaries etc.), i.e., the $10 bln. in question, is nowhere in the report.

Have you ever seen a document like "Statement of Operational Intent"? I do not need the BS you refered to. I read the requirements for the 5th generation fighter on the DND web-site. They have little, almost nothing to do to the actual requirements or documents circulating in tenders. And from the Solomon's citation it's clear he is talking BS.

Applying exactly your logics, only inversed, it is much more plausible that you are not sitting in the front row because you don't understand the rules of a MP. Having a conflict of interest without having any interest - this is definitely a progressive step in Canadian "popular justice", I think. Didn't Consrvatives always say they wouldn't fund the Quebec arena?

You and the others similar to you cannot understand one simple thing. The war is about to kill AND to avoid to be killed. There is an enemy with his sophisticated killing machines too. "A modern Multi-purpose fighter" gives you 50/50 chances of survival. The 5th generation is about to shift the ratio towards something 90/10. There are only two planes that can do that: F-22 and F-35. F-35 is not simply a new aircraft. It's new quality.

Solomon is absolutely incompetent. He invented these "requirements", he invented "non-compliance". It seems he's got some preliminary analytical document. Operational requirements, aircraft design specifications are secret documents. I hardly believe a journalist can get them without explanation. For people who are in the business, Solomon's mumbling is ridiculous. Actually, I can say Solomon is lying here. The helmet issue has been known for some time. It works as specified. The problem is a time lag between receiving signals and dispalying the information. The lag is about 0.2 sec now. It's a new gudget. Nobody knew what the lag should be. Now the goal is to reduce the lag to something less than 0.1 sec. In no way this means the aircraft doesn't meet performance requirements.

This is your wild fantasy... The ethic commitioner DID NOT say Paradis used his influence on decisions of bureaucrats. Paradis could not know he was violating the ethic code. It took two years for the Ethic commisioner to dig out a clause in the code to interpret possible actions of bureaucrats (which never happened) as "preferential treatment" due to the fact that Paradis recommended them simply to hear what Jaffer proposed.

Absolutely agree. Now you have to show what public money were allocated or would have been allocated in the cases of Paradis. Without showing a link to the public money all leftist posturing is just pathetic blah-blah-blah...

Sorry, you don't have a slightest idea what you are talking about. Russia now has no more than an empty flattened tin barrel they call T-50. In no way it is a 5th generation fighter. It is not even a fighter yet (no proper engines, no radar, no avionics, no weapons). And even this empty can cannot fly. Out of three "prototypes" one is already broken and is cannibalized to allow imitating test flying to a single plane. F-35A is in a low production rate state now. The end of testing is visible now. Yes, some ultra-fancy gadgets like the mentioned helmet visualization system require improvement, but none aircraft has these gadgets anyway.

What are talking about??!

Ha-ha! The new Watergate dream is so elusive for Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor...

You cannot substantiate your statement. All calls made by "Pierre Poutine" have been traced. Almost all of them (over 5,000) were made in the Guelph riding. The other calls constitute about 100 in several ridings in Ontario, made obviously by some mistake, because they sent voters to the poll station in Guelph (an existing poll station by the way).

Very explanatory. [quote name='cybercoma' What was the statistical significance of her findings. Tell me. 5%. So what? It could be any. In her paper it would only affect extreme numbers of the "suppresed" voters.

It's not a very promissing beginning... Sure, it's not a scientific conference here. Your addition of the word "highly" does not change the fact that the correlation can be poor. This is something new for me in regression analysis... Let me guess, a correlation coefficient is unnecessary also? It's absolutely not the case in the paper. I am afraid many people would not agree with you. Your eyes may be not so good to tell a difference of 0.5% in the correlation coefficient, but they are the best tool to do a sanity check. You cannot be for real. What confidentiality are you talking about for results of voting and voter turnout in 27 ridings? The main point is, despite all professor's fancy methods and numbers, her result is either self-contradictory or non-conclusive. The result is not supported by evidence. According to the professor, we must have at least 30,000 voters who did not vote because of robocalls in these 27 ridings only. And the number can be as large as 100,000 voters. Please show me one person.

This one is just the most obvious. If you establish a correlation between two (or more) variables you must show how good the correlation is. The professor did not do that. You always can calculate regression coefficients, but this doesn't mean you've got a meaningful relation. Her result is counterintuitive and self-contradictory. The most important, it is not supported by observed facts by this moment.

Not true. Please use "search" in the paper. You are wrong. Please read what I actually claim. Do you mean there is no direct link to Bob Rae?! Citation: "List of 27 electoral districts where Elections Canada received reports of false or misleading phone calls during the 2011 General Election, as released by interim Liberal Party leader Bob Rae on February 26 2012." Sorry, you are not very good for a discussion. As for the scientific quality of this paper (not published though,) I am amazed how she managed to avoid providing a single correlation coefficent or R-square in a the work establishing correlation between various factors. I saw no single chart with any scatter of data shown. Her main result - two lines of the "drop in turnout" intersect! This usually means no certain difference.

Please, don't be fooled. The professor clearly states the suppression did happen. She simply tries to pretend she is objective and not interferring into legal aspect. I read her paper completely. This is a typical pseudo-scientific crap coming from a professor of sociology (I know she's in the economics dept). But her conclusions are stunning. In each of the 27 ridings, on average about 2500 non-conservative voters did not show up. It's 67,500 people! She "proves" that the 27 ridings were selected strategically. Implication is - by the Conservative Party. This must be a well organized nation-wide campaign. Supressed were only non-conservatives. Pro-conservative voters showed up in record numbers in those ridings. I don't want to talk about flaws in her analysis, they are big. But why have not we seen a single person who said "I did not vote because of robocalls"? Out of 67,000? By the way, the 27 ridings are those submitted by Bob Ray.

Who are the people you are talking about? If you spent, say, 15 years in a business, wouldn't you be able to sniff a BS from the abstract?

Who "talked of laying off 70,000 people"? Government?!

I've got the study. http://www.sfu.ca/~akessler/wp/robocalls.pdf Ms. Kessler wants to show that the robocall suppression works. Somehow she collected and sorted data. Fine. Unfortunately for her, turnout in ridings with robocalls was higher than that in the robocall-free ridings (p. 6). But nothing can stop a true researcher. With some creativity, "empirical strategy", and "intuitive" (citations) methods Ms. Kessler found a winning regression equation (p. 7). There are three independent variables and somehow two "error terms". After some machinations (I haven't read whole paper attentively), Ms. Kessler concludes that robocalls did negatively affected the turnout by 3%. Don't warry that she regularly obtained stan. deviations comparable or even greater than the respective coefficients. A typical university scientific-like paper with zero relation to reality. As usual in pseudo-statistics using a regression analysis, a "proper" selection of affecting factors and the equation allows you proving vitually everything. The beauty of this technique is that the author never bothers to verify the results by some kind of experiment. Monte Carlo method rules!