Around here, they account for under 0.1% of all generation, and cause all sorts of problems. I suppose it's nice if you live in a part of the world where you get lots of sunshine or something, but you start approaching the northern latitudes and all bets are off. Wind farms are the big thing up here(ontario), and we only pay a "mere upto 0.83c/kwh" for them to generate power.

Yeah you guys in the US by definition of who you elected decided you didn't want our "dirty oil." That's fine we'll sell it to asia and europe.

Quite often they're not even unlocking anything. Rather they're doing a dirty hack to change the bios information of the card to display something that it isn't. This isn't all that unfamiliar to those of us who were in the industry back in the mid to late 90's when scammers were resilking(cpu info used to be silk screened on, to counter this it's why all cpu's are now stamped) Cyrix cpu's as AMD and Intel. You only found out what the CPU actually was, when you plugged it into the board and it said "cyrix." And while there are cases of people doing this to binned parts, most of the time the links to enable those pathways are cut before they're made into a gpu to stop people from doing exactly that. And if you're wondering why, it's because Intel ran into a massive problem where fly-by-night companies would unlock the binned CPU, and then actually flashing the microcode to change what the CPU was.

The cheap and dirty way to unlock CPU's during that time period was to use a graphite pencil across a unfinished path. I think it was pin 14 or 23 on the board. Very nasty problems with Slot 1 cpus.

LED's I've yet to have a problem with. CFL's, I've had nothing but problems with, ranging anything from massive flicker bad enough to cause migraines to them going up in smoke in a matter of months even in your standard lamp base. It seems to me that manufactures the first couple of years after CFL's became common started cutting costs by reducing the quality of the components themselves. Leaving you with a good glass fixture, and cheap ass electronics. Most of the failures I've seen after pulling them apart fail on resistors or capacitors. Lot of the people saying "the caps are over heating" to me, in all the cases where I've seen a capacitor fail, it's followed the same path as the "bad cap" scandal that hit PC motherboard makers in the early 00's. That is, fake caps.

It's not the people "toting them around in public" it's the cultural problem with particular segments of the population. Have you ever questioned why "fergison" was such smashing news, or the zimmerman trial, when not a weekend goes by in Chicago that 10-40+ people are shot, with 1-20 fatalities.

You should spend more time researching this.

Sure, and it's full of abject poverty, petty dictatorships, and in many places has an education level of where the western world was ~1000 years ago, sometimes earlier. And while "not all people in africa are starving or at war" large segments of it are. The same large segments can't produce enough food to feed itself, and every time a country or person tries to fix it, it becomes a tribalized mess.

I think Africa has more serious problems besides "can I check my email" and "where can I buy a coke."

You mean like that wanna-be 17 year old terrorist who stabbed two officers and ended up getting shot for his trouble? Seems to me that they did the right thing in that case after all, but let's look at europe. France has no-go zones, norway has them, sweden has them. Of course we can't forget the rape jihad either, and it's even hitting the courts where the defendants are claiming it's "part of their religious duty to do so." I believe you had one in Australia a few months back, might have been last year.

After all here in Canada we've had 18 muslims who wanted to cut the heads off of everyone in parliament, another muslim that wanted to let off 50+ bombs in Ontario, another muslim that wanted to derail a VIA train. The three teens from london that ran off and were nailed at the oil refinery somewhere in Africa. Then we've got the mosques indoctrinating youth, and they go off deciding that they want to fight "for an islamic state" so far we're just revoking their passports.

Yeah it seems like we don't have any problems or anything. I'm not saying what they did was right, but pretending that there aren't issues with the muslim communities is just burying your head in the sand.

Except if you actually look into the numbers it's easy to disprove. inb4 lul aei, except that they explain their methodology. And try as people might, they've yet to successfully disprove it.

Oh noes...guns. So we've got guns in Canada, and guess what? We don't have the murder problem, what you have in the US in a culture problem. Or rather a culture problem with sections of your society, should I just point out the obvious? Well what the hell I've got karma to burn. If you remove black gun related crime guess where the US would sit in terms of gun violence? Not much higher than most countries in Europe. You can bury your heads in the sand, scream "zomg racist" all you want and the longer you continue to do so, the longer the problem remains unresolved. It's the same in Canada with drinking and driving, and aggravated assault. The vast majority of these cases resolve around two groups: Jamaicans and Natives. With Jamaicans it's mainly around the drug trade, especially hard drugs and Natives it's DUI, and violent altercations while intoxicated. That's why they're the two most represented minority clases in our prisons.

I'm sure someone will trot out the "but countries that have banned guns..." yes indeed, they have pretty much eliminated gun violence. Of course criminals moved onto knives, bats, and other things. Which is why in a place like the UK if you're under 18 you can't buy a knife easily, and why assault with a weapon is the most commonly laid charge with "blunt force, or lacerations" being the primary indicator in cases of death or AS.

I'm sure someone with an agenda will start modding this into oblivion, and I say "disprove it." The stats are out there, you can see them yourself on wikipedia and can order them under FOIA/Open Access in various countries. You don't like it? Tough, it's reality. You want it changed, fix the problem.

If the only thing you can get out of that is "godwin" you need to update yourself on the topic. That is, fascism always marches towards disarming a population in order to further it's own agenda. A disarmed population is a cowed population.

Same reason why those of us who take tramadol go through serotonin withdrawal.

Don't worry, your rates aren't going to go up AND you can keep your doctor too.

You're right, the only reason they don't is because the channels that are canadian get overwritten by the cableco/satellite provider when it's also broadcast on a US channel. So they get their "canadian content" that way. The only way to get a US channel in Canada that isn't simulcast is by OTA.

You've got no idea of what you're talking about. The biggest reach that politicians have on this is being able to threaten to take their mandate away on broadcast regulatory issues. And it has nothing to do with libertarianism, this is due to excessive regulation not too little. And why is this happening? Because the CRTC is packed with suits from the major telcos, cableco's, and industry insiders. I'm sure someone will scream "lulz harper" but I'll point out now that this is how it has been since the CRTC got started.

The CRTC mandates: internet, pricing controls for the internet, third party pricing controls for the internet, cancon, who can or can't have a broadcast license, telephone, telephone quality, and several other things. Industry Canada on the other hand their biggest reach is spectrum.