You put words in my mouth. I said nothing about English and the Olympics at all.

You argued about a position you imagined for me. In fact a complete ad hominem attack on an imaginary me and my family. A me that happens to be of French Canadian descent, raised by a French speaking Canadian citizen.

What kind of blinders do you have on? Your head must be inside a cave like area, or perhaps you just like living in areas where the straw is piled high to make straw men out of.

Did I not say that Chinese has a better reason to be included? The topic of conversation was why french culture / society is always pushing for required french language inclusion. It was not about English, or the merits of it.

They only pretend not to know English when you ask them: "You speaka da English?!"

I always find it amusing that somehow it is described as the French "defending" their culture against the English "cultural imperialism" when it is the French who use the strong arm tactics to force people to use French who otherwise don't want to.

My son was bemused when the Russian Olympics featured French announcements. Why not Spanish or Chinese which have each have more speakers than French?

On the flip side, works coming into the public domain after a limited time of exclusivity, as the law was originally envisaged, isn't happening either.

Copyright wasn't intended to grant corporations an infinite lock on culture (literature, music, art). Copyright isn't working, there's no quid pro quo, so why shouldn't the public just walk away and say "screw this"?

Sure, and apparently Toronto also has trouble with snow and ice and traffic and commuter rail being shutdown.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2...

http://www.cp24.com/weather/cr...

http://www.thestar.com/opinion...

...and what kind of road congestion does Canada have?

The whole nation of Canada has 35m people. Metro Boston has around 5m. Metro NYC has 20m.

In Boston on a good day the roads are jam packed and your commute takes way longer than it should. Throw in an accident along the way and your commute can be a major pain.

Now consider dramatically slower travel speeds, a mere handful of fender benders. That commute is just not worth it. What's the point of having your 1hour commute turn into 2 or 3? each way.

overdraft protection is another loan sharking thing here in the US, outrageously expensive, and why should you incur that expense over a fraudulent transaction?

Debit and Credit are not the same vis-a-vis consumer protection.

Someone racks up a $10K fraudulent charge on your credit card? You call the card company and they can't make any attempt to collect it, it's as if it doesn't exist, until they investigate it.

Someone makes a $10K fraudulent debit on your bank account? Maybe you've been charged for overdrafts (incurring a fee), maybe you've had transactions fail (incurring a fee), sure the bank will investigate. Meanwhile you're out $10K and even if they eventually reverse the transaction, they don't have to do anything about any fees you've incurred while the money was missing.

Consumer risk and cost for debit fraud is much higher than for credit fraud. Which is why all the banks want their customers to use debit. It's better for them, not for you.

Even if you don't use checks, you can't pay an electronic debit / transfer without having a positive balance.

I think its a sad commentary that some of the posters on my comment have basically admitted that they have a debit card / account (that might get cleared out fraudulently) and another different (more secure) account that they keep cash in for their important payments that need to be made.

Might as well have one of those prepaid credit cards if you're going keep your money segregated like that into money you can be defraud of, and money you plan on keeping.

No one in the US uses a credit card at an ATM. You get better rates from your local loan shark.

Anyone who uses a debit card is a fool. Whether or not you are protected from a fraudulent transaction is fairly meaningless while you watch all your checks bounce and you have no cash because your account is empty.

I guess you didn't read the article I linked to. With Chip & Pin the banks claim there is no possibility of fraud (which isn't true), therefore when fraud happens the customer gets the shaft. Chip & Pin shifts the risks onto the customer, even if the overall occurrence of fraud is lower, the risk is higher for the customer with C&P than without.

Chip & pin has never been about security. It's about the ability for CC issuers to eliminate the repudiation of fraudulent transactions by claiming that their authorization system is fraud proof and therefore every transaction is a priori an authorized transaction: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Reading the codes for all your other two factor authentication accounts. Like your bank account, or your brokerage account.

There, didn't Facebook make life easy?

SMS to your phone isn't such a secure channel for two factor authentication if every other app has access to it.

What? And no one has mentioned the Heechee yet?

Yes they do. Especially when you require people to jump through hoops they do not want to jump through, like register to comment.

At my office there is some complicated password policy, and they expire every 90 days. No one at my location has been able to compose an acceptable password from scratch. The only thing that works is to to subtly modify your existing password.

We suspect that the unique password rule actually compares your new password against all passwords every used by anyone else in the company. Which is about as unfriendly as sites that give you no help in choosing a unique username ("Sorry 'xX_Bob246783_Xx' is not available, try again")