I like Canada a lot, have a lot of relatives there (hence the Canadian citizenship). I wouldn't mind living there, other than the cold.

However what with all that, I understand some of the downsides. There are things which aren't as good there as in the US (Internet is one of them in general, cellphone service another). There are some that are better. There are others that are kinda a wash, in that the problems are different than the problems in the US.

I find that people who have never been there, only been there only briefly, have a much rosier opinion of the situation in Canada than I do, or than my family that lives there does.

But are we willing to take that risk?

if (!steam_is_available) panic();

If the game relies on steamworks cloud saves etc and doesn't gracefully run without them that's not DRM any more than this is:

if (!sound_card_is_available) panic();

Its lazy at worst, but its not DRM.

What Bundy did, using someone's property without permission..

Property that you just said is owned by its current owner because nobody else wants it and that the current owner couldn't give away?

Maybe the government should have just said, "Wait, what, you want this land? Great! its your land now. We've forwarded you title, and you can start paying property taxes on it."

Our one example hasn't really been around for very long though, all estimates of the Sun's life cycle indicates Earth should remain habitable for another billion years or more. Where were we even a thousand years ago? It doesn't matter if the technology isn't ready until 3014, it's still a blink of an eye on the time scales we're talking here. And there's already semi-realistic craft designs like Project Orion that'll take hundreds of years to reach the next star, not tens of thousands. Unless the world goes for WW3 and a new stone age, it seems plausible that the technology will be available in a thousand years.

But what would really intrigue me would be if the new MacBook Air was running iOS 8... Why not just make one?

Witness "convergence" in Windows 8! Nobody has figured out how to support both a Touch interface and a WIMP interface well. Each app(lication) is made with the assumption of one or the other. Touch applications don't even have a mouse cursor. Even after somebody figures out the UI metaphors (and Microsoft is getting a lot of expensive bruises doing that), it will be an entire generation of apps before they are written convergence in mind - if it ever really catches on.

For the moment, I think Surface Pro should just have two separate modes - if you open a .docx without the keyboard folded out, you get a simplistic viewer with a little editing enabled (no change tracking, document merging, etc). If you open a docx with the keyboard enabled, you get real Word.

Apple hasn't taken the convergence plunge yet at all (that we know of), so it would have to switch between OSX and iOS entirely.

Well that's the price for being ahead of the curve, recently I was sending a file to a friend and his 40 Mbit download was the limiting factor not my 100 Mbit upload. But it's been this way since we had modems, only now it's a thousand times faster. So what? When I'm on gigabit then 100 Mbit will be normal, 10 Mbit slooow and 1 Mbit stone age. Besides, it will probably mostly be burst transmissions. During "The Gathering", a huge LAN party with 6000 participants - obvious all at their computers most the time - they saw up to 14 Gbps of traffic total with 30 Gbit capacity, in 2012 they had 200 Gbit just for show but it was never close to being used even when they tried to get everyone to do a stress test. Of course people are there for all sorts of nerdy events not just to leech off that pipe, but still.

If you take the people there to be above average interested and above average active compared to the average person on an average day, it's still only about 2.3 Mbit/person. Imagine you had a gigabit line, bought a 20GB game on Steam? Okay it's done in less than 3 minutes but then you're probably going to play it for hours. Download a BluRay? That's 7 minutes but probably 1:30-2:00 hours run time. And that's only when you have actual leisure time, if you're asleep or at work or school or doing housework or hobbies those hours are already filled. I already download everything I want, gigabit would only enable me to do it faster getting back to idle.

So go to your preferences and turn it off. Or uncheck the 'also share on Google+' checkbox when posting.

And relearn how to do that every time google changes anything. Possilby needing to learn new permissions models and settings and interfaces on Google's unpredictable schedule.

Take a look at Facebook's permissions settings history for an example.

Seriosly, This isn't hard.

It's harder than it needs to be.

Separate the accounts entirely that aren't linked to something with your real name eliminates unintended mistakes no matter what google does with the interface tomorrow.

No, because its no trouble to carry more than 1 SD card should I ever have the need.

Why not a raspberry pi + usb3 hard drive to give you terabytes of storage in a portable hotspot; all accessible at once instead of having to swap cards to get at different files. And now again your phone has access to effectively 'unlimited' storage, without an SD card.

What scenario are you really envisioning where a bag full of tiny $100 SD cards is REALLY better than a multi-terabyte hotspot/NAS (that you can have with you or leave at home and still access from most places) for under $150?

Isn't that counter to the point? I thought the whole idea of Lego was to be able to buy many instances of a few standardized, interchangeable components and assemble them into anything you want.

If you had a machine that could print custom Lego parts, wouldn't you just skip the Lego entirely and just 3D print whatever the final thing is supposed to be?

Sorry, I didn't play much with Legos and I'm not part of Lego culture. I infer from reading Slashdot that people really enjoy making unlikely things out of them, for the lulz, which is cool. So I apologize for being naive, but I don't understand why you'd want custom Lego parts.

I *do* insist that the problem is with the voters. If the voters were that irate about the politicians, they'd vote them out. Even if the new ones were just as bad, the voters would express their ire by voting them out, too.

Political donations don't buy votes. No politician is going to risk going to jail for taking bribes.

What political donations buy is the election of candidates who are sympathetic to you without having to be paid. They can't give money directly to the candidates anyway. The unlimited funds go to "uncoordinated" separate groups who spend it not on limousines and fact-finding tours to tropical islands but on campaign ads.

That's the point of connection. They're not buying the politicians. They're buying the voters. And they're buying them not with money, but with whatever tools of mental manipulation the ad-makers can dream up. They spend the money to blanket the airwaves.

All the voters have to do is to think, question whether the ads are telling the truth, and wonder why if they can form an objective picture from two biased, manipulated sets of mutually contradictory ads. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but the fact that the incumbents are repeatedly returned to office is a strong clue that they're not.

Maybe it would be futile and ineffective to keep turfing out politicians in favor of new ones. But it's not an experiment the voters have tried. If they did, maybe the politicians would change the way they operate; I don't know. I do know that your picture of how the process works is deeply flawed, and most voters seem equally uninterested in actually learning how it does work.

Your outrage at the politicians is too easy. They're doing what the voters tell them to do. If the voters are doing what the money is telling them to do, don't tell it to the politicians, or to me. Tell it to them. If you can figure out how to get them to listen, I'm all for it.

Yeah, that's exactly what i was thinking. It looks exactly like the tangles my corded desk phone gets.

It isn't quite as good as people think with regards to money and politics, and certainly not with regards to the Internet. Canada's 'net speeds vs costs do not compare all that well to the US's.

Canada is a very nice (if cold) country that I visit every summer (I'm a dual citizen) but it isn't the utopia some Americans seem to think it is.

Your logic is all based on the assumption that a phone that supports SD necessarily also has a smaller (read: inadequate) internal space for just apps, when comapred to phones without SD slots.

While your logic is all based on the assumption that a phone that supports SD necessarily supports SD cards big enough to hold ALL your media, and has big enough internal storage for your OS to live comfortably.

That is no more an arbitrary scenario than mine is. And that's my point. Your SD card scenario is different, and may in some cases be better, but is just as likely not to be.

I don't think that is even close to true.

And yet the Galaxy S5 really does have only 16GB storage + SD card support*, while this Oneplus one or whatever comes with up to 64GB internal. My hypothetical scenario actually exists.

Which of those 2 memory configurations would you prefer?

I don't dispute that 64GB internal + 128GB SD card support is an even better option, or that 256GB internal would be even better than that.

But if your choice is 16GB + 128GB SD or 64GB internal which would you choose? This is a real choice between real phones.

* yes in theory there is also a 32GB samsung s5... but its not actually available from ANY carriers here so it may as well not exist.

Not as far as I'm concerned. My whole point is that I have a 2 generations old phone that nothing newer can compete with, because most don't support SD.

The S3 only takes a maximum 64GB card. Assuming you bought the 32GB S3, you have a maximum 96GB storage.

There are already 128GB internal memory phones on the market. (Admittedly they are still rare.) But surely that would also be better than your S3, despite not having an sd slot.