No.

It's because they cost hundreds of dollars.

I want an open source phone, I really do, but I can't justify spending 500 on little more than a PDA + phone. I already had a PDA once, hardly used it, and phones that just work as phones are less than a hundred these days. Make an open source phone that's a reasonable price and I'll buy it.

"lock down" was meant to imply "crash", sorry for that misunderstanding.

Probably just an incompatibility with my KVM.

P4V and Cisco VPN commonly steal focus when disconnected. Many, many other apps steal focus for other reasons. Not commonly first-party, but still frustrating as hell coming from XFCE wherein I can block it almost entirely.

Cisco VPN _works_. I never meant to imply that it does not. It's just _frustrating_. It'll steal focus, but then P4V will do the same. If I'm happening to use multiple workspaces then the alert window for Cisco VPN can get buried on another page. Clicking the icon does not recover the VPN dialog, instead seeming to do /nothing at all/. I end up having to page through workspaces and perform a manual search for it.

Ooh, polished.

For a good example of apps which can lock down a modern OSX system look no farther than Screensavers. Should one of those fail (like, say, Electric Sheep) then short of rebooting there doesn't seem to be a good way to recover. Incidentally, it's why my Mac doesn't have the screensaver enabled anymore.

It's brittle as in the software doesn't stand up to pressure. The hardware, meh. The mushed in corners you mentioned tend to not occur on machines which are not made of malleable metals. Just about every other Mac owner I know has suffered a terminally clicking DVD drive and prematurelly failed hard disc. Anecdotal, sure, but enough to keep me from buying one again.

Anyhow, stating that the likes of VPN & SCM clients not being developer... Really? Really?! C'mon.

I've done that. Appears to have no permanent effect.

Ugh. Macs.

Disclaimer: I've been a Linux user since 1994.

For my recent position I decided to try full-time development on a Macbook Pro. Things have been... Less than pleasant.

I'm not used to a single application taking down the entire system, or frequent and unpredictable focus-switching. Those irritants came quickly, in the first few weeks. Common dev apps like the Cisco VPN, P4V, et al, behave very poorly in a Mac environment. Not an indictment of apple, for certain, but still a real irritant you end up having to cope with.

The hardware has been shaky as hell, too. My partition table got nuked after a standard update recently. The display frequently refuses to change brightness. Hell, I can't even use the damn thing as a laptop because when running a VM and a few idle applications the CPU cranks up and the heat hits 70C.

Not to mention the highly variant battery life. Sometimes it lasts unbelievably long, other times it fails to properly enter standby and it drains away without warning.

Now, trying to plug in peripherals has been a pain. The Microsoft Ergo keyboard I have ends up with a bizarre Command key mapping, and there's no clear way to define a per-device mapping. Now that I've remapped it the OS absolutely /refuses/ to revert the mapping. So now Alt and Command seem permanently swapped on the Macbook's integrated keyboard.

Sounds like I got a nightmare Macbook, eh?

Well, I had a Ti Powerbook a ways back too, ended up giving it away due to similar ongoing nuisances.

At least MacPorts brings some sanity to the package management...

Macs are beautiful. Hardened beauty like a finely cut diamond, and just as brittle too.

It varies. Usually between $0.06 and $0.08 per kw/h.

The city is also the local utility, acting as a broker of sorts for the provincial utility BC Hydro. Here's the related bylaw:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:lXaNBxkSEuMJ:www.newwestcity.ca/cityhall/Leg_Info/Electronic_Packages/2009/0420_Apr20/CW/Reports/cw13.pdf+new+westminster+electrical+rates+kw/h&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a

Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) my monthly bill is about $22. I use electric baseboard heaters, too!

Is this so different from licensing people to read books?

There's plenty of dangerous information in your local library that can be used for nefarious means...

Why isn't it valid?

This bias would also affect the PS3 and Wii stats. Being that the bias is universal, then shouldn't we be able to state that it's non-discriminatory? We can just state:

54% fail for 360
11% fail for PS3
7% fail for Wii

Caveat:
Sample may be biased to frequent gamers

But then... They've likely used the machines the hardest. If it doesn't fail for them... Kind of like those automatic chair testers in Ikea.

I wish I had mod points for you.

+1 Insightful

You have it correct.

There's been a few cases surrounding this now that have developed some interesting precedent. IANAL, but IIRC there was a fairly high-profile early case of a holocaust denier who managed to evade the consequences of our hate speech laws until he stupidly called for violence against Jews. Likewise, in Richmond and Surrey there were a few Imams calling for violence against Jews and Christians in Canada who came under criminal charges as a result.

But in each case it was quite clear that their offense was directly inciting others to commit violence. Saying things like "We'd be better off without " or "All should die" is ok, as long as you don't say "Go forth and be violent against ".

Where it gets tricky is in the act of random violence. In Vancouver and recently Courtney there have been random beatings against Blacks, Homosexuals, and Sikhs which have been hard to pin down as "Hate Crimes". From what I understand it requires that a witness can verify that in some way the aggressors targeted the individual because of race/sexuality. It seems like this is very, very hard to do. Even with video showing a group beat-down and witnesses verifying racial-motivated threats and slurs.

Atheism is an act of faith as well. There's simply no way to test the veracity of the continuance of consciousness after death or the existence of meaning in the development of our universe. Or the lack thereof. There very well could be that my qualia is an expression of a force that I cannot test for. But it's totally inconsequential and meaningless to consider that without a meaningful way to observe its existence. But saying there -isn't- is kind of like kind of like the 18th century belief that atoms were indivisible.