I find I'm very productive when I focus on short tasks and switch between them (sort of like how co-routines work).

I'm not productive when I'm doing more than one thing at a time.

No, it's spelled globalization in Canada. Canadian English is a hybrid of British and American English. We do spell color as colour though....

Actually that does not include Hong Kong. The report says Hong Kong is a moderate proficiency state, while India and China are both low proficiency nations. However the original point I was trying to make was that on average, China and India aren't too far apart in terms of English proficiency, despite what most people believe.

Of course, the report is talking about averages (I suspect the standard deviations are quite large). In terms of the number of *proficient* speakers in English in those countries, my sense is that India > Hong Kong > China.

p.s. in my experience, most Hong Kong people actually speak English poorly or not at all. The folks you met may have been from certain echelons of society that happened to have had good English instruction. The only nation with a majority Chinese population that speaks English reasonably well is Singapore, and even there, the distribution of fluency is largely skewed toward the highly educated.

Conventional wisdom has it that China lags India in English proficiency, for obvious reaons. However, this report says:

"Asia’s English proficiency scores show that reputations are not always accurate. Take for example the nearly equivalent scores of China and India. Despite its British colonial legacy and reputation as an English-speaking nation, India is today no more proficient in English than rapidly improving China."

http://www.ef.com/sitecore/__/~/media/efcom/epi/pdf/EF-EPI-2011.pdf?ctr=ca

Are you sure you want to do that? I can understand typesetting math in the browser, but typesetting entire TeX documents?
There's already an AMS-endorsed way of typesetting TeX math (Javascript-based) called MathJax (http://www.mathjax.org/), and it works pretty well (well enough for sites like http://mathoverflow.net./

What puzzles me is that there is no confirmation step required in these contactless payment systems.
When I buy stuff with my chip-based debit or credit card, I'm asked to enter a PIN. Else, I have to physically swipe the card to ensure there is no ambiguity as to whether or not I meant to pay with my card of choice.

With a contactless system, I could be wanting to pay with my credit card, but if I accidentally held my cell phone too close to the reader, it would debit the amount from my phone instead of my card. Why can't there be a screen that pops-up on the phone that says "Touch button to confirm payment"? This seems to me to be a major design flaw.

Actually Canada isn't as metric as you think. Due to our proximity to the U.S. (and our historical use of Imperial units), we've adopted a kind of a schizophrenic approach to units, and we've grown comfortable with it. Yes, we measure temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, but I'm sure you've noticed that produce/meat/fish are quoted in lbs (some grocery stores use kg, and a lot of people are thrown off by that). We measure distances in meters and kilometers, but colloquially, we say a person is 6"2' 180lbs (very few people know their height and weight in cm and kg). Our air conditioners are rated in Btu's rather than Watts. Canadian football fields are measured in yards. We buy 2 x 4s from Home Depot. And while our store bought beverages are in 350ml packages, at a bar we buy our beer in pints. Flat screen TVs? The Best Buy brochure says they're 52" instead of 132.08 cm.

In engineering, imperial units are still widely used. In engineering school, we spent 1/3 of a course in first year becoming familiar with both the SI and Imperial systems, and learning to convert between them (i.e. dimensional analysis... it's not as trivial as you think when you have to convert vapour and liquid compound properties, e.g. from SCFM to m3/s, you have to know what the standard conditions are). I think personally it's great that Canadian engineering graduates are trained in both systems.

The fact is, imperial units are just more natural for some things and less so for others. The same can be said of metric... especially for very small or very large quantities (e.g. Intel's 45nm process instead of 1.77165354e-6" process).

Oops I meant 500 tons/hr, not 5000.

Most snow melters work at very high thermal efficiencies (90 - 98%). Typically, one ton of snow requires 1.5 US gallon of diesel to melt. Remember, snow is not ice -- it's far less dense.
http://www.snowmelter.com/en/snowmelters_faq.php

Snow melters can melt anything from 20 to 5000 tons of snow/hour, depending on their design capacity. Airports already use this technology extensively -- it's nothing new.
http://www.snowmelter.com/en/clients.php

When I read the phrase English Shell Code, the first thought that came to my mind was:

% Oh I say, can I see a list of files, old top?

-rwxrwxrwx 1 alfred staff 192 7 Mar 2008 teacosy.txt
drwxr-xr-x 37 alfred staff 1258 25 Nov 2008 cricketscores
-rwxr-xr-x 1 alfred staff 260 28 Aug 2008 cucumbersandwiches.py

% Spiffing, just spiffing. Shall we have a peek at the processes?

    PID TTY TIME CMD
    380 ttys000 0:00.01 -bash

I did read the summary. I passed on information on a remote wipe service, which is one of the many options for doing what the poster wanted.
What part of the summary did you have trouble understanding?

Website: http://www.absolute.com/products/lojack
FAQ: http://www.absolute.com/resources/public/FAQ/L4L-FAQ-E.pdf

Costs $59.95/year for the premium package which supports Remote Wipe. Embeds itself in the BIOS/EFI. Supports XP and OS X.

Well, all that would be unnecessary if server-side gzip were turned on. I consider that a type of web page optimization, and you don't really have to anything special with the HTML.

I believe there is a case to be made for compression even for very dynamic websites. It works very well for mobile devices like Blackberries.