As a longtime Enlightenment user (since 0.9 I think!) I have seen a lot of changes to it's look and feel over the years. Has your design philosphy changed over time or is it more a matter of changes in technology?

And you think Bin Laden would have kept quiet if he hadn't been killed? He would have had one of his videos out pretty damn quick with a copy of the current New York Times and pointing to the date saying "Haha, sorry guys! Better luck next time!"

I am a farmer in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. I do not, and have never worked for Monsanto or any other pesticide company. I have in fact used pesticides including some of Monsanto's glyphosate products (Roundup, Rustler and most recently RT540). Rates of application I have used range from 0.5-1.0 liters (0.13-0.26 US gallons) per acre of product mixed in 5-10 gallons of water. My use, though, is restricted to pre-seeding burnoff as I do not grow any glyphosate-tolerant crops.

It brings a tear to my eye to see the "modest" and "100Mbit" used in the same sentence. Yes, I realize that compared to 4700Mbit it is but I just got upgraded to 5Mbit so I still think you're insensitive clods!

And yeah, I'm sure I could find a use for 4700Mbit.

I had one, too. It was my first "real" computer and I bought it at an auction for a farm equipment dealership that was going out of business in 1991. It was a cool machine with the CPU on a card plugged into a daughterboard. It aso has a 70MB hard drive which was pretty big for those days. I had to pull a tape drive to install a 3.5" floppy drive. I still miss the keyboard.

Do is this going to be the Teenage Mutant Alien Carebears?

This is so true. I live near a major highway and hear all the time about major drug busts that occurred because less-than-intelligent traffickers got pulled over because of something stupid like speeding. They never seem to learn. If you're going to haul a metric shitload of dope across the country, make sure all your lights work and stay close to the speed limit!

Damn. I could have sworn I was logged in when I posted the comment above. Sorry.

Agree completely. First I wanted a Nook Color. Sorry, not in Canada. Then I wanted a Kindle Fire. Sorry, not in Canada. If Kobo can get this thing selling in Canada, they might just get my hard earned money just to save me jumping through fire-ringed hoops to get one of the others.

I would be interested to know if the technology to boost bandwidth on copper might also help push bandwidth out further. A lot of us rural folk still don't have a lot of choices when it comes to broadband and all of them are expensive.

I've got two strikes against me before we can truly be free of subscription TV (BellTV satellite service). One, we're in Canada, so we lack much of the "Hulu-type" streaming options. Two, we're on a farm well away from decent bandwidth, stuck with satellite internet service. We do the best we can with torrents downloaded overnight (the FAP doesn't cut in in the middle of the night), Zip.ca DVD rental-by-mail and recently discovered there's quite a lot of true FTA content on the old C-band dish (using an Openbox S9 receiver) and have really gotten into watching the RTV affiliates that way. Emergency! and Magnum PI are far and away better viewing than Survivor and Dancing with the Stars!

So anyway, the BellTV subscription is just the minimum plus sports and threatening to quit made them give us a better rate for the next year.

I hope we don't find ourselves in a situation as we do with full-size computers where ads and sales-droids are telling us that SuperMultiCore Machine X is "perfect for email, web browsing and organizing your recipe collection". I don't want to see multicore phones trying to make up for sloppy coding and configuration.

Screw nature. I see enough trees and dirt every day. This kind of hike would be way more interesting!

I notice that most of your situations involve a semi at fault. I'd like to point out that more often than not it's the idiot in the four-wheeler who's at fault because he doesn't look before he tries to cross a highway and is plowed into by an innocent semi. Almost every fatality involving a semi around here comes from that situation. I'd be very impressed if Volvo can produce a car that allows anyone to survive that kind of "accident".

Back in 2006 I bought a semi truck to haul hay bales on my farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. I didn't have a Class 1A license yet (I think it's Class A in the US) that would allow me to drive a semi legally but I did it anyway. I had planned to take a course to get it that fall but figured I could get away with it for the summer. My neighbor's done it for many years without a problem.

Well, three months after getting the truck I'm crossing the Trans-Canada highway with a load. I'm pulling a 48-foot trailer loaded with a load of large round hay bales. Now, it's common for us farmers to haul hay unsecured (without straps) as it's often a short haul (for me about 10 miles) and figure we'll get a few more loads done without taking the time to strap them down.

You can guess what happened I'm sure. I got caught as I crossed the highway. Here I am without a proper license and an unsecured load. I figure I'm in for a significant fine. I play it cool. I'm respectful of the DOT officers but don't admit anything except the obvious which is the unsecured load, the reason they had stopped me. They also asked if I had a permit for an oversize load (I was 10 feet wide the way we load hay) and there was some concern over that but I was not travelling down a highway, only crossing them. They would look into that now. They go back to the car to write it up and call in my name and truck plate. I wasn't carrying my drivers license that day so they didn't know right away that I was only qualified for Class 5 (regular 4-wheel cars and trucks). Well, they come back and ask me what I'm doing driving a semi with only a Class 5. I admitted that yes I was cheating.

OK, here I am without a proper license, an unsecured load and no overdimension permit. How much worse could it get? Well, I lucked out this time. In the end I'm only charged with driving without an appropriate licence which carried a fine of $140Cdn, which they informed me was a lesser fine than an unsecured load fine. And I guess since I wasn't travelling down a highway they couldn't get me for not having a permit. I had the leave the truck there (only a couple of miles from home anyway) with a warning that if they caught me driving it again, they would impound it. We did sneak back after dark and get it home, but it did sit at home until I got my 1A that fall. Oh, and I throw a few straps over now, too, when I'm crossing a highway.

I think it helped that we were respectful of each other and I'm sure having farm plates on the truck and trailer helped, too. Law enforcement is usually are a little less strict with farmers.