If your girlfriends are Canadian and haven't heard of Lush in the last 20 years, I would question their Canadian credentials. There have been Lush stores in major cities for at least 25 years. Hell, if you get within 50 meters of them you can find your way there with your eyes closed by following the increasingly overpowering soapy aroma of their bath bombs.

Way to completely twist and misinterpret what I said AC.

It's hard for a community project that doesn't have any revenue to "play the 'pay me' game". Plex is a commercial product.

To do my job I both need access to the corporate VPN as well as certain Windows programs. There have been tons of times it would have been more convenient for me to use my tablet instead of dragging out my laptop on the train in. The Surface Pro 3 is a very good in-between device that also fills the tablet role nicely. It's not for everyone of course, but my use case it would be very convenient. Unfortunately I am not going to spend $1000 out of pocket on a work device and my company laptop isn't scheduled for EOL for another year so for now I have to just think envious thoughts about it.

Go install a Windows application on the iPad. Or VPN into your corporate network on it, or play Skyrim on it, or install a dual boot and run Linux on it.

Oh wait... you can't do *any* of those things on it. That's what the extra $500 is for.

By "outside the city" do you mean the burbs or actual rural locations? Rural locations people will still own cars and trucks at the same rate, but the burbs are where this will explode in popularity. Co-op programs have a problem with reaching into the burbs because of sprawl and lower density which makes getting to a co-op staging area for a car a problem. But putting staging areas a 5 minute drive or less away from customers where autonomous vehicles can congregate until they're called will drastically improve the service's reach. And they don't necessarily need to drive you into town, just to the closest subway, train or LRT station.

Think about it, you're getting ready in the morning, just about to take out the trash to the corner and have your last sip of coffee. You hit the "call" button on the app, the car wakes up and heads to your house while you finish the garbage run and put your coffee cup in the dishwasher. By the time you have your coat and laptop bag sorted, the car is already outside waiting for you. The app on your phone could even have a countdown timer until the car's arrival to allow you to plan every second.

"You know what, 30 years ago I could have also said the same thing about flying cars or Mr Fusion, and I'd still be 100% correct."

Yes, because fusion tech doesn't work as of yet, and flying cars are expensive as hell and also have huge regulatory problems. Autonomous car tech on the other hand is here, works and is getting cheaper every single day. You are comparing apples and oranges.

We aren't going to replace ALL of the cars on the planet. Hell, we're not going to replace all of the cars in the first world. We don't NEED to. Car ownership is going to decrease as a result of this tech. Car co-ops are already taking off in many major cities, and this tech also eliminates their single biggest Achilles Heel - positioning empty cars for use. With self-driving tech, they don't need to be positioned. A co-op user just whips out their cell and hits the "call car" button and the closest available vehicle starts up and drives over. The user hops in, goes for a ride and exits. Car goes back into the available pool for the next user.

Things will dramatically change. Taxi companies will pretty much go extinct. Businesses and shopping malls will need a lot less space for cars to park. There will be fewer vehicles on the road, and a considerable percentage of the vehicles will be owned by individuals, instead being rented by the trip/hour from a service. It's going to be a very interesting future.

Corporate culture is corporate culture. Location is largely irrelevant.

People wouldn't try to build up job security like that if there weren't potential threats, like say having your job outsourced to foreign H1-B visa replacements. Companies reap what they sow.

Variants are known as ScottyTime or the Scotty Principle. Especially important in jobs where ad hoc troubleshooting of critical problems is a common function. If you don't Scotty Time most of your day to day task estimates you'll be working 12 hours+ regularly with emergency items thrown in.

The "cost effectiveness" he's talking about is that rather than hiring more 911 operators and emergency staff to handle the additional volume (and create jobs at the same time), they instead look at eliminating all calls from NSI phones to keep volumes manageable, at the cost of cutting some legitimate users of 911 out.

That's a great plan. Then she could instead be fired for not taking calls from customers 24/7 on the phone in the tin box instead. Brilliant!

So if you came down with cancer and the treatment had a 1% success rate you'd just not bother?

No offense, but Stephen Hawking thinks it's worth the bother, and some guy on Slashdot named itzly doesn't. I'm going to go with Hawking's recommendation

http://www.space.com/8924-stephen-hawking-humanity-won-survive-leaving-earth.html

They were able to survive *some* of the huge impacts. There were a few, including the one that created the moon that would not be survivable by any digging. But it's not just impacts. There are a whole host of other disasters that could take out a one planet humanity.