If I didn't maintain burner email accounts with them out of sheer inertia, they wouldn't even be on my radar.

I'm in Canada and have a choice among several ISP's on the same wires - so you have MY condolences...

The last time I tried IMAP was about 8 years ago. I was told it wasn't possible to keep messages on both the server and my computer at the same time. If that's not true, then thanks - I'll definitely look into IMAP.

Funny, and at least a little bit true, yet you were modded down. That kind of makes your point for you, doesn't it?

They'll pry that from my cold dead fingers.

I use POP3, so I can have local copies of all emails. I keep messages on the server too, so it's easy to sync up several machines - that way I can have them on both my notebook and my desktop. All my music is local, and I keep local copies of any videos, documents, etc. that I care about. Occasionally I even save Web pages as HTML so I can have access to the content even after it changes in or disappears from the wild.

As far as I'm concerned The Cloud is a sometimes-convenient augmentation to local storage, not a replacement for it.

Mod parent up!

I'm a Canadian. Right now I use Bell because my GF wants to keep her Sympatico address. But I miss the days when I had an ISP called TekSavvy, which delivered DSL service via the Bell phone lines, while the phone service on those same lines was provided by Bell.

I wasn't totally satisfied with the service, (though I felt it was way better than Bell's had been), and was about to switch to another ISP when I ended up moving. But that was the beauty of it - I could choose from among several ISP's with just a few phone calls. (Plus a minor interruption of service while Bell 'accidentally' messed up the changeover).

I shudder to think of living someplace where I have NO choice of ISP, or am forced to choose between a 'wired' monopolist bully and a 'wireless' monopolist bully.

Subwoofers - causing annoying bystanders for over 50 years!

Don't you just love the playful ambiguities of the English language?

Thanks for the informative reply! I'll take that info into account during future rants. However, I'd still prefer there to be a greater awareness on the part of Joe Public that an electric car isn't magically an emission-free vehicle.

X-Wing deliveries?

Sorry, but that was just begging for a Star Wars reference.

One of the articles cited says the car "produces zero emissions". Perhaps we can coin a new phrase for electric cars: "zero direct emissions".

Most people reading this implicitly understand that if an electric car is charged using electricity from a coal- or gas-fired power plant it really doesn't have zero emissions. But a very large percentage of the public simply doesn't get that, and thinks of electric cars as an immediate way to address the greenhouse gas problem.

Sure, electric cars probably, (depending on a host of factors), result in fewer emissions per mile driven. But if every car in North America magically became an electric vehicle overnight, we'd need a huge amount of electricity to charge them all, and the energy would have to come from fossil fuel, (not zero emissions), or nuclear, (huge political problem) - never mind the insane costs of the required infrastructure buildout in either scenario. The general public needs more information to help them understand these things, not more "zero emissions" spin.

I'm Canadian, I like Quebec, and I've met some fine, fun people in Montreal, which is mostly pretty welcoming to Anglophones like me. But more than once I've gotten a surly "maudit Anglais" attitude from people in less populated areas when I stop at a gas station or a depanneur.

Bill 101 and its revisions, (Bill 14 in particular), can also be a sore point, especially when taken to the extreme of ordering businesses to translate English Facebook pages into French.

Way too obvious a troll - you're clearly an amateur. Come back after you've learned to bait a hook and cast a line without scaring off every fish in the lake.

Not to mention that these video cameras are, or will be, commodity devices; just have two cams on each cop. If one fails, meh - but if both fail: "Officer, you got some 'splainin' to do!"

I get what you're saying, and to some extent I agree. I'm just not entirely convinced that inertia fully explains what I perceive as a major drop in quality of education since I was a kid. I'd like to believe the problems are just a hangover from an earlier age. However, I've known teachers who would like to do an effective job but have had their hands tied by government-mandated curricula. I think that if governments aren't actively furthering that century-old agenda, they are at least knowingly allowing it to take its course and are only too happy to take advantage of its consequences.