But, it's Silverlight-only, isn't it? That would be a deal-breaker.

You're correct in it being Silverlight only, of course that only affects you if you plan on playing it on a PC that doesn't support it. Just keep in mind that Netflix is enabled on many devices now, it works just fine on my X-Box, Wii, and the Samsung Blu-Ray player hooked up to the big-screen. Many Blu-Rays can support Netflix now and even older ones can do it with a software update, you'd have to check to see if your equipment is compatible.

You just listed about the best content on Netflix Canada. Didn't take very long did it?

You definition of "best" must be so narrowly defined as to eliminate just about anything because I have often found the opposite to be true.

The breadth of content available often leaves me paralyzed with indecision, there are so many good shows and movies to watch that I simply cannot decide what to check out on any given night. I have to actually force myself to pick something otherwise I'll sit there for hours trying to figure out if I'm going to watch this movie or that movie, or finish one of the shows I've started, or check out that documentary I've been wanting to see.

All for the price of a combo at Subway or a couple of Tim Horton's specialty coffees.

It certainly would go a long way to explaining why the Mexican's are in such a rush to build their own Racoon City.

The problem is that in practice it doesn't work.

During the dotcom bust I spent three years unemployed, it sucked graduating from college on an economic downturn. Sure, I had the odd job fed my way by the temp agencies I'd registered with but it was sporadic at best, a month here, six weeks there, followed by months of nothing; I ended up working 6 months out of every twelve, just enough to continue qualifying for Unemployment Benefits. No matter how many resumes, interviews, call backs, meetings, and hitting the job boards I did I got no nibbles. It was demoralizing as hell trying to find full time work.

Oddly though it was also the best part of my life so far.

I got up every morning and would check the job sites, call the temp agencies to let them know I was still available, comb through the newspaper, do my call backs, check my e-mail, set up interviews and then send out the next batch of resumes. Most days I was done "work" by 11:00 AM. Once I had done what I could to find a job I had the entire rest of the day to myself and damn, was that ever freeing. Knowing the unemployment cheque was still coming meant I didn't need to worry about the roof over my head or the food in my stomach, I actually got to live. One of my favourite things to do on a nice day was to sit under a shaded tree at the park on a weekday afternoon curled up with a good book, I'd watch all the worker drones quietly grumbling about how much they hated their jobs and would just love to take the afternoon off and curl up with a good book under a tree.

I got to catch up on my reading, watch movies and interesting documentaries, play games, try new recipes in a cook book, look up things online solely for the pleasure of attaining knowledge, etc... Hell, I even found time to use the workout equipment I'd bought when I was previously employed and was on my way to getting a six pack. I was technically "poor" but I was amazed at just how much living a person can do with a limited budget and loads of free time. With all that freedom, and keeping in mind my limited budget, I found I could do what I wanted when I wanted and not have to worry about my basic existence.

Once a person's basic needs are taken care of anyone with even the tiniest hint of imagination will be able to figure out what to do with their day and be fully and completely fulfilled with it. Up to the point of my unemployment I had never had as much satisfaction or enjoyment in my life as I did when I wasn't working. Now, I make enough money to be considered on the low end of the middle class and have all kinds of cool toys and tonnes of spending money but I'm not happy. I've tasted real freedom and now so much of my day is filled with doing things I don't want to do but need to in order to survive. If I knew I could collect a cheque that would keep my stomach full and a roof over my head and there were no strings attached, I'd quit my job right now and spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do when I want to do it.

And so would a lot of other people.

Until the day someone invents Star Trek replicators, giving people the bare necessities with incentives to work doesn't work. Someone will have to work to provide the tax dollars we're going to divert to those who are on the basic allowance, eventually we would have a very small number of the population supporting the majority. The people who are working are going to get angry at being the only ones working while every one else stays at home and lives a happy fulfilling life.

It doesn't matter if Boing-Boing sucks or not because for the purposes of this story it has a copy of the ad in question and was the first hit on Google, I literally found it in two seconds.

Yeah, gotta agree with you on that one.

Back in 1985, when I was twelve, I bought a good old Commodore 64. I worked on a paper route, about the only job they'd let a kid have in those days, for just over a year to save the nearly one thousand dollars I needed (fully tricked out: computer, monitor, printer, disk drive, joysticks, and a few games) to get one. The computer store was the last stop on my route and I was fortunate to get them to agree to put it on layaway for that long (found out much later my parents had to put a security deposit on it for them to hold it for the year it would take me to save up enough to pay for it) and I can still remember the day I went to pick it up. Everyone was there, even the people who had the day off showed up, everyone cheered as a I took possession of my computer.

The manager of the store was so impressed with my drive and determination he threw in three boxes of blank floppies, about 15 bucks each at the time, for free. Got a 1200 baud Commodore 1670 modem for Christmas that year and paid, through my parents credit card, for a membership to Quantum Link. It was monstrously expensive for a kid living in Canada, the exchange rate sucked horribly back then and I had to pay a 0.15 cents per minute charge (US!!) to access their network on top of the monthly fee, I used to check the exchange rate in the paper before calling to figure out how much an hour of time was going to cost so I could set aside that amount for my parents to pay the bill on their credit card each month.

All told I was only able to be on QLink for about 3-10 hours a month, there were times it cost over $15.00 an hour just to access the network!, but I was able to connect with people from all across North America and twice a year QLink would publish a listing of all the software available on the system with a brief description of what it did, I'd share that list with my local BBS groups to arrange trades for software that I wanted.

That Commodore 64 was my primary PC until the mid 90's when I upgraded to a 486, in fact it still works and I break it out of its sealed box a couple of times a year when I'm being all nostalgic and MacVice just isn't cutting it anymore.

Contrast that to today where kids honestly expect their parents to hand over an $800.00 iPad without any mention of them having to earn it and are just as likely to get it.

Its three needlessly long paragraphs reiterating what was said in the summary and contains links or scans to the ad in question. How did something like this get voted to the front page?

If you're going to link to a site talking about it, at least link to a site that has the ad! Two seconds with Google people, was that really all that hard? I just wish these guys would have mentioned in the ad the combined net worth of all their companies and contrasted it to the net worth of the media empires trying to ram this shit through. Would have really gotten people talking and asking the hard questions.

Robin Williams - Mork and Mindy

In my experience ergonomic all too often means "uncomfortable as all hell". Find a chair and desk where you can sit pain free for a while and, like the poster above suggests, get up and walk around.

My in office set up gives the Ergonomic Coordinator fits but it's comfortable for me and, assuming I take regular breaks, I suffer no joint or back pain.

In other words, do what works for you; chances are something similar to what you use at home will come out on top.

That first link, http://cryptogon.com/?p=25289 , holy shit!

The fist Apple video talking about the Knowledge Assistant was so creepily prophetic that when the guy says "Get me the data from 5 years ago." and the computer is all like "Checking records from 2006." I had a tiny freak out. Here its 2011 and a long forgotten Apple tech vision video talking about the kinds of things computers should be able to do in 2011, and seeing them about to be implemented, is amazing. Get Siri on the iPad and accessible during a video chat, you're pretty much there.

Damn... Colour me impressed.

We should merely shoot the lowest 10% every year to weed out those who are holding the others back!

Not to mention solve the problem of those damned bullying jocks that make school life a living hell for so many.

Though to be fair to the 10%, and give them a second chance at life, we should have some kind of sporting event for them. On the last day of the school year we put them in a ring and let them battle it out for a crystal trophy in the middle, first one who gets out of the ring with it intact gets to live. The people who come to watch will undoubtedly sit in rapt attention ringside, cheering for their chosen combatant, while chants of "Renew, Renew, Renew" fill the air as way of communal encouragement.

Thanks for this, I haven't heard this song in years! I've got it on a cassette tape around here somewhere, but I haven't broken out my cassette tapes in years. Hmmm... I wonder what other gems I have in that box under the stairs, I'll have to go check, I just hope my old Milli Vanilli tape is still there! :-D

This means TFA is advertising download speeds of up to 12.5MB/s, not 100MB/s.

And with latency, network congestion, and signal quality that means an internet user with a 50GB cap will blow through their entire months allotment in around 90 minutes. With the cost of overages being so absurdly don't be shocked if you start seeing the telco's and cableco's be super eager to spend the money to get this into homes quickly.

Its a veritable cash cow waiting to happen, especially as hi-def streaming sites get more and more common (which would be even more the case if you could 100Mbps speeds became common).