The stats are out there but the stats don't back you up. Checking the UN's Intentional homicide, number and rate per 100,000 population For 2008, we have Canada at 1.8, the UK at 1.3 and the US at 4.6. So yes, not allowing people to walk around armed to the teeth really does seem to help.

Well since you asked so nicely.

The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.

Once the contract is done with, it should be your phone and not the telco's phone and that is all these laws are demanding. I can still go to most countries in Europe and get a phone on contract, but as soon as the contract is finished they are required to unlock the phone and to me, that seems fair to both sides..

Lets see how this compares to Canada's new anti spam law since EA has offices in Vancouver and Montreal.

10.(3) A person who seeks express consent for the doing of any act described in section 8 must, when requesting consent, also, in addition to setting out any other prescribed information, clearly and simply describe, in general terms, the function and purpose of the computer program that is to be installed if the consent is given.

(5) A function referred to in subsection (4) is any of the following functions that the person who seeks express consent knows and intends will cause the computer system to operate in a manner that is contrary to the reasonable expectations of the owner or an authorized user of the computer system:

(a) collecting personal information stored on the computer system;

(b) interfering with the owner’s or an authorized user’s control of the computer system;

(c) changing or interfering with settings, preferences or commands already installed or stored on the computer system without the knowledge of the owner or an authorized user of the computer system;

(d) changing or interfering with data that is stored on the computer system in a manner that obstructs, interrupts or interferes with lawful access to or use of that data by the owner or an authorized user of the computer system;

11 (5) A person who has the express consent of an owner or authorized user to do any act described in section 8 must

(a) for a period of one year after any computer program that performs one or more of the functions described in subsection 10(5) but not referred to in subsection 10(6) is installed under the consent, ensure that the person who gave their consent is provided with an electronic address to which they may, if they believe that the function, purpose or impact of the computer program installed under the consent was not accurately described when consent was requested, send a request to remove or disable that computer program; and

(b) if the consent was based on an inaccurate description of the material elements of the function or functions described in subsection 10(5), on receipt within that one-year period of a request to remove or disable that computer program, without cost to the person who gave consent, assist that person in removing or disabling the computer program as soon as feasible.

20 (4) The maximum penalty for a violation is $1,000,000 in the case of an individual, and $10,000,000 in the case of any other person.

Any Canadians affected by this feel like filing a complaint?

I doubt it. You don't get a lot of men being asked If the carpet matches the drapes I think the real problem with gamers in general is that you get a lot of "type A" competitive personalities without any social skills to temper their behavior. Throw in the fact that, for a lot of gamers their only actual experience of actual females is either from watching porn or interacting with booth babes and they just don't realize that both are fictional.

Been there done that, I sat down with a friend who was dropping AOL because the computer store he bought the computer from never mentioned that "3 free months of Internet" meant that they took his credit card and signed him up for AOL. The credit card company started from the assumption that since AOL was an established company that they would not need to charge back and we should talk to AOL about it.

Que an endless "no sir we had no way to know you never used your account since we don't go into customer accounts without permission"

The credit card companies are not always on your side.

Have you actually read the law? This seems like a ton of FUD.

At any rate some Canadian companies have behaved horribly when it comes to email. I have had problems with companies refusing to change a mistyped email address unless I was the confirmed (with security questions) account holder and some not even bother to check if the recipient mail server even accepted the message for over a year.

Opposition to immigration tends to spike every time there is a recession. The reality is that without immigrants, the older generations of both the EU and north America will not have enough of a population left to maintain the economy once they start to retire.

RTFA, It only randomizes on scan and goes back to the original MAC address when it connects.. You are correct that it is easy to change the MAC address, but that doesn't change the fact that randomizing the mac address on connect would break things like DHCP reservations or MAC based white lists.

Better yet you can use an app like Sygic that downloads the maps in advance. At least this way, you don't care if you are roaming or even if you have a signal at all.

Agreed. I have seem some devs treated badly who turned out to be pretty good developers once people stopped treating them like crap. I also had one kid fresh out of university who needed some hand-holding for his first few months while he gained some experience and gained some self esteem who turned out to be a one of the best programmers I've ever worked with.

I am thinking that has more to do with the massive advertising/FUD campaign they were running. When I was in Spain, for several months the Metro (subways for you Americans) were covered with ads for the Nokia phones and I had friends tell me that they bought the Nokias because the sales reps at the store told them that Android had a virus problem. Now the campaigns have been cut back so the sales dropped right off.

For 6 gb transfer per month? In my country, it is more expensive.

It is proprietary in that it will only talk to GM's (expensive) service rather than a more general purpose device where you could slot in your own sim card. $5 a day? That's well over double what I would pay my local cell phone provider for the same service.

Better would be to start actually selling things people want in Blu-Ray format. I refuse to buy DVDs of a series I just watched in HD and quite often series releases are still DVD only and so I buy nothing instead.