This one could be considered the opposite of the rant in the tarticle. Why in Canada with Bell on my land line am I NOT ALLOWED to dial 1 before a local number, yet I HAVE to dial 1 before a long distance number? I DON'T CARE if it's local or long distance! I can afford the $0.04 per minute or whatever. Just let me make the call without having to hang up and dial again with or without the magic prepended 1.

At least my mobile phone just tells me it's local/long distance and puts the call through anyway. It's an improvement.

I switched from Bell to TekSavvy for my home phone a few years ago. I thought TekSavvy might make this problem go away then but it didn't.

</rant>

No they can't really. The article is really about the reinsurance companies. These are the companies from which the insurance companies buy their insurance. Insurance company X maybe doesn't have $10B in the bank to underwrite all their policies. They may be bringing in $100M per year in policies, and pay $75M per year to underwrite their policies from reinsurance company Y. Note that I'm not in the business and I'm pulling these numbers out of a hat.

An established company is probably running similar risk numbers to everyone else and reaching similar conclusions. An upstart insurance company betting against global warming and offering lower policies is unlikely to have the cashflow to purchase their more expensive reinsurance. They're also the ones most likely to need reinsurance as they don't possess any significant assets to underwrite their policies themselves.

I live in the region, and right now I'm glad I work for a startup based in another country. There's going to be increasingly fierce competition for those open positions around here over the next few years. Of course, I'm good enough that it wouldn't matter to me personally ;-)

We'll see what, if anything, it does to the real estate market.

That's been the problem with GM for as long as I can remember. They make cars that (they think) people want to buy.

The problem is, that people in general aren't thinking of the future. Most of us aren't very bright, and we want something big and shiny that we thought was pretty cool a few years ago when we first saw it. We also don't consider the true cost of our purchases, only thinking of the up-front costs. Most people when it come down to it also hate cars and hate driving, and don't really care directly about safety or fuel economy. So, GM ends up with vehicles like the H2 and the Escalade EST which are essentially automotive dinosaurs from a company that hadn't yet realized they were extinct.

GM needs to be (slightly) in front of the market if they truly want to be successful. Sadly, that just isn't their way.

I think you a word there.

I'm aware of the fact that there are people with faster internet speeds. The main point of my comment was the second last sentence.

I just tested my internet connection this morning at home and got 143.25 / 9.13 Mbps. While I probably don't need all the download speed, I work from home and I find it just amazing that I can get this here. Less than a year ago I was getting 5/0.6 and thought that was the best I could get. Yay me.

Why are you telling me to "stop buying shit laptops"? I'm not sure why I'm bothering to respond to this, but in the last decade I have bought six Mac laptops for my family and zero non-Mac laptops. I was just trying to point out a piece of information to the GGP.

PROTIP: MacBook Air batteries aren't removable (in that sense).

Can we please stop linking to IBITimes articles until they remove auto-playing video/audio ads? Together, we can make it happen.

Don't forget the crap they just throw onto your driveway that has nothing to do with Canada Post.

If only that was true. I'm mysified how it's legal (in Canada) for people to dump piles advertising printed on dead trees on my driveway several times a week. Why is there no opt-out of that, or better yet, opt-in?

Will Quebecois programmers have to use .pfk as an extension?

It seems like you and your poster children have missed the "swab the door handle" comment. The police are allowed to knock on your door and politely ask you for something. IANAL, but I'm sure they're also allowed to swab your door handle as it's on the OUTSIDE of your house. If they find the DNA on the door handle, it would be easy to get a warrant based on that evidence.

Please stop linking to IBITimes until they remove video advertising.

Could we please stop linking to ibitimes.com? Am I the only person here to be so annoyed by their automatic audio on the site that I never want to go there again?