That's a good one! That's tantamount to putting a 'keep out' sign on your front door :)

DALEK: Daleks are supreme. Humans are weak.

could translate into:

MICROSOFT: Windows is supreme. Linux is weak.

Same here in Canada. We have had debit/credit for ever with chip and pin for years. Debit/interac RFID enabled cards are in the majority of cardholders now and about 1/3 to 1/2 of all vendors take all formsbof payment. The US is behind the times and still allow mag stripe credit payments as the primary payment.

My Google Nexus 4 (LG makes it) has never been that good with battery life. I've owned it for close to 2 years now and it's only gotten marginally worse than when it was new. I charge it each night fully, and get about 14-16 hours of life before it's in the red (warning comes on at 14%). That's with:
- Checking it regularly for slashdot, emails, messages, facebook, etc, for short bursts of 1-2 minutes.
- Probably put about 1-2 hours of internet browsing on it (mix of wifi and cellular) during lunch or before bed when I read news
- The occasional 10-15 minute phone call to my wife. I hardly talk on it ever, and never for very long.
- Leave Bluetooth on so that it syncs up with my Ford Sync automatically
- Leave off GPS to keep Big Brother from tracking my movements unless I need mapping.

I have run into the same issue with my cable ISP. I run a voip setup using voip.ms as my provider and have my ATA connect to their servers. I have been plagued with random audio dropouts, talk-off and the occasional robot voice problem. After much research, troubleshooting I determined that the issue with jitter my ISP. Most pings to a know good server like Google DNS (8.8.8.8) averages say 40 ms but occasionally (say every 30 pings) the time jumps up to 800 ms. This happens regardless of the server I ping and also occurs when I ping my ISP's gateway address. This tells me that the problem is internal to my ISP and not an external routing problem.

The reason why is what is called Node Congestion. Most North American cable ISP's use DOCSIS with hybrid-fiber nodes located through the geographic area. Nodes may start off with 100 active users on it meaning all 100 users are sharing that piece of the pipe. As time progresses, traffic changes, people ditch their cable tv for Netflix. All of this has a huge impact on congestion and bingo as a result ping times suffer. The average person will never notice but with any time sensitive service like voip and some gaming, you will notice it.

There is not much you can do other than a) complain to your ISP (good luck) or b) find another that's not just a reseller of your existing cable's infrastructure. I'm not sure if DSL suffers the same issue as the shared cable plant.

Makes me very very very happy I completely switched to Mint a year ago and am loving Linux! It's amazing how much you start to realize how crappy Micro$oft products are when you work with Linux products every day also. Micro$oft is very good at producing so-so products that are 90% complete, but they fail to achieve the other 10% which is the most important part! Everything with Micro$oft is like a mishmash of products, technologies, standards all mixed together when nothing really works as efficient as it should. I keep both of my PC's as Mint/Win7 dual boot but dread having to boot into Windows for the odd situation. Just yesterday I booted into Windows to use iTunes. The GUI looked so harsh, the responsiveness was horrible, and at some point between my last boot (months ago??) and yesterday my taskbar notification icons have gone corrupt! I noticed all of this after the 30 second complete hard freeze (mouse frozen too) that occurred when I was looking up how to fix the taskbar problems! I decided to forget and rebooted back into Mint where that machines stays running for months on end!

It is a similar situation here in Canada. You have the historic "ma bell" aka Bell Canada who installed all the POTS lines, and build their DSL infrastructure. Then along came the cable companies who build up their old coax to hybrid fiber/coax about 15 years ago. In Ontario, now sure about other provinces, you have exactly one choice of which cable company you want. There are almost zero overbuilds so depending on where you live you either have Rogers, Cogeco, Shaw or some other small company. About 5-10 years ago the CRTC (our regulating body similar to the FCC) decided that the telcos/cableco's must lease their services to 3rd parties who act a resellers. I believe the CRTC also has to approve the rates at which the lines and access are leased for. So as a consumer you do have choices between either ONE big telco or ONE big cable co, or many small resellers who just lease the lines from the big guys.

The DMCA is one of the single-handedly most stupid laws that has ever been passed in the US! Pretty much every stupid lawsuit and dumb statute you guys have falls under the DMCA! It's clear that lobbiest really did get to the government to pass this dumb act!

Hahahahaha - Expand Capability!

This goes against every morsel in every cell in the body of the board members of almost any company! The last resort is to ever invest in capital to improve the service unless you fall behind your competitors. Also, remember that terms of service agreement that you signed when you agreed to your contract? Well, they get you there in the small fine print too! Most companies are in the business of making as much money as possible using any means that 'legal'.

Interesting musings but the first thing that came to my mind is the reverse - is Google sabotaging the search results? I know this sounds a bit strange but could it be possible that Google is being 'creative' with the raw Google Analytics data. Would it not serve Google's best interest to fudge the results to make Apple look bad right around the time of one of their releases trying to drive people to Android.

My $0.02

I was going to ask if they had anything to protect them like the US constitution or more similarly due to history and the parliamentary system, the Canadian Charter and Rights and Freedoms in Canada (our constitution). In Canada, theoretically, all laws passed by any government must pass the Charter and not infringe on them. It's a shame, but no surprise, that our fellow citizens of the UK have no such protection from their own government. Not that the US or Canada is much better but at least there is some due process to ultimately challenge and make known this crap is happening, as both the US and Canada can challenged at their Supreme Courts, respectively.

I'm Canadian and I agree with you on all of these points. When I visit the US I find it annoying that a) your paper money is such crappy quality, and b) it all looks the same making it harder to tell the difference in my wallet. I always end up with a million $1 bills because out of habit I end up breaking 5's, 10's and 20's to pay for things. In Canada, up until 1996 we still had $2 bills before the toonie (the $1 bill was changed to a loonie some time in the 80's).

The penny round just started a few years ago and nobody missed a beat! It only applied to cash transactions (not debit or credit, as those are billed in exact amounts). If I'm not mistaken, the cost to produce the penny is more than it's face value.

I have never understood why the US treasury doesn't just stop producing $1 bills and force a coin into circulation. That's what Canada did - nobody had any choice and it was preceded with much education about the new coins making sure people understood the coins were legal tender. $1 bills are quite rare now, as are some $2 bills, both of which are still legal tender. I remember when the toonie was introduced, NOBODY would give you funny looks and everybody accepted it. I suppose it's one of those funny differenced between our cultures like opinions on guns and public healthcare.

As someone who has been coding non-professionally for 20+ years as mostly a hobby (though I have developed a few apps to make my life easier at work) here is my advice:

I started coding as a kid with QuickBasic, them moved on to VisualBasic (pre .NET), did some x86 assembly too. Back then I tried and tried to learn C/C++ over the years but never really liked it for some reason. I finally started with VB.Net 10 years ago. Initially I found it hard to make the move to .NET, but grew to really like it's power, bells and whistles. I didn't code for a few years, but did tinker around with PHP/Javascript which is a C-like syntax. This forced me into getting used to such simple things like brace brackets, semi-colons, etc, and I began to really like finding that switching back to the VB syntax was a bit of a pain (I kept adding those damn semi-colons at the end of each line!!!)

About 5-6 years ago I finally started to make the switch to C#. I started with re-writing an app entirely in C# (previous version was in VB.NET). This allowed me to translate/transfer my knowledge to a new syntax as they are both very similar thanks to the CLI. Eventually I had completely moved over to C# and was loving it. Over the last few years I have been into programming in C/C++ for the Arduino/Atmega, which has taught me a huge amount about embedded programming and mostly how C/C++ manages memory (gotta love pointers). Nothing (except maybe assembly) forces you to understand memory management like coding in C/C++. I am by no means an advanced C/C++ coder, but I am getting stronger every day and love just how much control I have with it!

Now my actual advice:
Start with C/C++ because in my opinion it's the hardest to master and teaches you the 'nitty gritty' of coding without all the crutches of the other language like garbage collectors, type safety, exception handling, and fancy libraries. If you can learn to code in C, or more specifically C++ you will be able to learn anything easy. But do it the other way and you may struggle due to bad habits and crutches the other languages teach you! I wished I had started out with C/C++ way back when, however hindsight is always 20/20!

I was going to post about this but you beat me to it! Each and every time I see those stupid Progressive commercials or similar I always think the same thing. Sure it seems innocent now, a reduction of 10-20% in your insurance rates now (woo hoo). But then next thing you know you are speeding (5-10 mph over) through a GREEN light with the flow of traffic and get T-boned. Now the person who T-boned you will likely get charged, and you will get off without a charge because you didn't cause the accident. The cop never caught you speeding so in the eyes of the law you are ok.

Now comes the Progressive monitoring device. Your insurance company has a policy (that you agreed too when you signed up with them) saying that they can pull the data from the monitoring unit at any time. Maybe it's even automatic telemetry where it get's reported in real-time. Your insurance company pays to have your car fixed, and all appears well. Six months later you notice your premiums go up drastically even through you were not at fault and were no charged by the police.

What has happened? Your insurance company has looked at the data and decided that because you were speeding you breaking the law and thus a higher risk driver! Bingo your rates increased and all because you VOLUNTARILY gave the insurance company the ability to monitor your every move. Insurance companies do NOT have your best interests in mind - their primary goal like all for-profit corporations is to MAKE money. They simply can't be trusted.

People say, yes but if I have one of those units and I never speed! I say, BS! I have very rarely met anybody who drives perfectly in the eyes of the insurance companies or the law. It's human nature to occasionally (or always) speed and break minor traffic laws.

Mark

I have a Dell 2005FPW 20" LCD that I bough in 2004. I believe it was the first series of widescreens from Dell, this one being 16:10 with a res of 1680x1050. I remember when I first used it with Windows XP I had issues with Dell's drivers no supporting the WSXGA+ resolution correctly. It has support for VGA and DVI, plus a composite and s-video inputs too. I have thought about replacing it with a newer LED monitor but the damn thing wont die (knock on wood) and works just like the day I bought it!

Mark