Central Canada (ontario) has experienced three multi-day widespread power outages within recent memory - two of them during the winter.

If a reliable and robust electricity grid is important to you you should look somewhere else.

That's OK, parent was offtopic too. And hasn't the slightest clue about what Canadian Content Regulations were, or the impact that they had.

Then again, who needs intelligence or knowledge when you can write (scribble?) "BARF CHUNDER PUKE FART, HAND ME a shotgun and that big fat reefer, I think I need a toak of some good stuff man."

Or really, anything from NASA or the ESA that's sending back pictures.

On a regular basis I hear from people exhorting me to abandon Amazon.com and only buy books at my local bricks and mortar retailer.

Although quaint, the truth of the matter is that my local bookstore a) doesn't have what I want, when I want it. b) may or may not be able to order it reasonably quickly and c) has higher prices.

Amazon has succeeded where most other on-line retailers have failed because of one thing: they are very, very good at giving customers what they want. They mastered long-tail retailing before most people had heard the phrase. I can return to their web site after a year or two and they'll usually manage to actually suggest items that I would want to purchase.

Plus, and this is the big plus, they manage to make it really, really easy to find what I want and buy it.

Plus, and this matters at least as much as service, I actually trust Amazon to give me good service, not pass my credit card number on to random Russian mafia, and to take care of me if I have a problem.

(OK, the trust issues are pretty subjective, and for sure someone will jump up to say "Yeah, but this happened to my buddy one time...," but that's the point of trust: if you've got it you can move past the glitches that happen.)

(And given the seemingly endless string of credit card data breaches, it's probably good to not trust Amazon with that info either)

Also unlikely that minimum wage employers (aka "Scumbags") are hiring people with degrees. Those sorts don't want to hire people who are a) smarter than them b) more educated than them or c) likely to leave for a better job or understand local employment laws.

This is almost like how pharmaceutical scientists keep having to modify and discover new antibiotics. The current batch of drugs eventually becomes less and less effective and the bacteria become resistant, prompting us to constantly evolve the offerings.

Damn - I missed your troll.......

I can't imagine there an easy fix to this. Is it time to go to yet another browser?

Obviously what we need to be really secure is a Open Source browser.... uh... oh... never mind....

The whole notion of automatic updates just doesn't make any sense.

Please assure that you're not one of those people who complain about users running unpatched Windows boxes because they turned off auto-update.

For the average non-techy user auto-update is the one thing I'd say is essential. They're not in any position to judge what parts of their system need, or don't need updates, and I'd rather that they trust in Google, or Microsoft, or even Canonical to decide for them.

Now, you can debate the fine points, about whether minor plug-ins should auto-update, or ask why Java on Windows boxes seems to want to update every third day, as does Adobe Reader, but in general I'd still argue that auto-updates are good security practice.

And thirty years on many people in Canada are still charged extra each month for "touch-tone service."

Aha! Weather in some places that's colder or warmer than others! With stuff happening on the Sun.

Obviously Global Warming is a fiction created by neo-Luddite Green party members.

And communists. Yeah. Communists.

#4: speaker quality (if you care about music or videos)

If you care about the quality of the music you're listening to you'll understand that it is impossible to achieve anything reasonable with a sub-one inch speaker.

Somehow I envision a Wikipedia of maps, with boundaries and street names changing at random if two groups can't agree.

Sure it may not happen in downtown Topeka, but imagine to geo-edit wars that will happen in the Middle East or other disputed territory.

Damn you dbill, using that so-called "science" stuff to win an argument!

Just to save time, let's all agree that wind power could never, ever, ever work in North America. Or solar. Obviously the blah blah blah mumble mumble obfuscate is so different here that it would be impossible.

Also, North American wind is like TOTALLY different from European wind.