Is there a video game he is particularly fond of?

Games that are easy to hack and mod are a great start - they are tweaking something they already love. I wasted many hours of my elementary school days tweaking the rules.ini file to make command and conquer's AI a more capable opponent. That lead to scripting one player levels in an attempt to make my own campaign. That lead to...nothing at all....but it might be a start.

The tools available today seem a lot more complex, but also a lot more open than they were when I was young.

Good luck.

I've never used medicinal marijuana (or other prescription pain killers) first hand, but the general consensus I get from people who have is that when they are in genuine pain, the substances make them feel better. When the substances start making them feel high instead of better, they know they are on the road to recovery and can cut back the dosage until it hurts again.

Considering how overdosing on marijuana is impossible in practice, I don't see the lack of precision in dose measurements is a problem. Even if marijuana use turned out to be completely useless medically, it is harmless enough that it's use as a placebo should not be infringed upon.

Does this work backwards?

Does this mean that a 3db reduction in volume won't really be noticeably quieter, but would make the music about 8 times less damaging to my ears?

I'd start with the TNG episode I, Borg. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Borg)

Recap: The Enterprise adopts a stray young borgling and raises it aboard their ship, giving it a sense of individuality.

I've had 3 female roommates fall in love with this adorable character, and spark enough interest in them to watch a few more episodes - 2 of them are now hooked on Trek.

I don't want to make this sound like I am disagreeing with you in principle, because I do value software freedom, but when I get a tablet or a smartphone, I expect it to just work out-of-the-box. These things excel at being consumption machines, not production machines.

The target audience isn't necessarily a tech savvy one. The more the user is allowed to do, the higher the potential for mishaps. When you promise a customer a fancy piece of shiny hardware and advertise it like a high-tech toaster - "press here, then magic happens" they aren't expecting a full blown PC with all the associated quirks, tweaks, gradual cluttering/slowing down/ buggyness, etc. They are expecting a magic little plastic box that does all the things that were printed on the outside of the big cardboard box it arrived in.

Every additional copy of whatever-it-is is more junk, more clutter, more slowdowns, and the device will not run as advertised for long, by locking things down, it lets the manufacturer ensure the device works the way they want it to until they make it obsolete.
If I want a device that works the way I want it to, I stay away from Apple, tablets and smart phones, and get a real computer.

What about the part where he says Nokia is the largest phone manufacturer? Wasn't there just an article posted less than a week ago about Samsung taking the top spot from Nokia?

Harper is working real hard to change a lot of this.

I don't know if this is true elsewhere, but In Southern Ontario, Canada, the crime rate per capita is actually much lower in densely popular areas than it is in rural areas.

You are more likely to be a victim of crime if you live out in the country than if you are an urban dweller.

Of course, you are going to hear about far more crime happening in the big cities, because when you have 4 million people living in one place vs. 10,000, there is a higher total number of crimes occurring, but people can't do math (myself included) and fear the city and move out the country (I did the opposite)

I thought Bush was only actually elected once, for his second term... (As a non-American, I can't complain about his presidency too much, as his decisions made my country's economy much stronger by comparison.)

Same thing when I was living in South Korea. So much attention is paid to American politics. There were massive protests in the streets during August's protest season over some American policy.

I find it odd how defensive Americans get when we talk about their politics. Just because you happen live in an isolated bubble where other countries don't exist doesn't mean the rest of the world lives like that. We are saturated with your news, movies, music, tv, radio, products, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if a good number of foreigners were more knowledgeable about American politics than many Americans are.

Not only is the National Post a mainstream Canadian paper (one of the big 3 - The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post) but the National Post is the most conservative of the three.

Imagine the Star's take on this!

Why is the dumbing down of linux a bad thing?

You may not like unity, but if you look hard enough, you might eventually find someone who does, and for you, there are any number of other desktop environments to choose from, and switching between them isn't hard at all. Isn't that the whole point of linux: freedom and choice to make your system do what you want it to sudo.

computers don't have to be hard to use, they are tools that allow us to do work (and look at porn.) if a simpler interface aids anyone in getting their work done (or their porn viewed) how can it possibly be a bad thing?

I predict that this will be as successful as Microsoft's "ipod killer". What was that thing called again?

This looks like a solution in search of a problem. How often must someone go low-level with an arduino? It's the community, not the hardware that have made that platform successful. And if I need to do something, chances are someone has already written code to do just that, and made it available to the community. I don't have to code much of anything, only tweak what I find.

Reality is not racist; it simply is.

"Why go through the mess of transplantation of that magnitude?"

Do it for science.

If this is a world-first, regardless of the outcome, these doctors will learn from this experiment, and the body of human knowledge will grow. I think it's entirely worth it to do crazy medical stuff like this when people volunteer.

If we don't try, we won't ever know what' possible to achieve.

They didn't test BASIC? Lame...