Take a look at the bigger picture with the canadian economy. We never really had the same sort of crash as the americans in 2008. The middle and upper classes were insulated by artificially low interest rates and the encouragement to start flipping more and more property. Harper and his cronies dropped interest rates so low, and screwed with the housing market so much that the entire economy is now built on debt, subprime mortgages and oil.Oil is down for the count, people simply cannot take out more mortgages, and debt is at an all time high.

It is not a surprise to me that people have run out of debt now (despite a thoroughly panicked boc dropping interest rates AGAIN on the 15th of april or so I hear...). The dollar is tanking too if you haven't noticed, which really sucks for buying things from america. The american economy recovered, our depression was glossed over and hidden by the conservatives over the last 7 years with the stupid policy of low interest rates. Now they are desperately trying to bribe people before the election and are praying that the shit does not hit the fan before that.

The conservative government is all smoke and mirrors while they are here, and when they get kicked out, it will be someone elses mess to fix.

Futureshop and bestbuy are the same store and have been since 2001. The greatest trick they pulled in this country was convincing canadians that they had the ability to comparison shop for electronics by visiting just those two stores. They had a good racket going, but now the internet has come so far as to be the real competition. So yes the company is doing the right thing by consolidating brands, but harper has also messed up the economy so much, that people simply don't have any more money to spend. The retail sector feels that first, so they are the ones having to reorganize to stay afloat.

The canadian landscape is littered with large department store chains that have folded. I am old enough to remember shopping at towers, which was sold to zellers at exactly the same time as the last major housing correction. Funny how consumer spending and housing affordability is inter-related isn't it?

Well if you mean this mouse

Then im using that mouse right now. I thought I might want to upgrade to something better though. Through the comments it seems that there is nothing that truly stands out as a better gaming mouse.

The microsoft optical with one button on each side has been my mouse for 10+ years and still works great. I have had zero issues with it ever. I had one, then when that got grimy I found another one in a parts bin at work.

I was reading the comments, hoping to find a replacement for when this dies, as you stated, they dont seem to make them anymore which is a real shame. I guess they cant sell you a new mouse if your current mouse lasts 10 years.

A computer is not a smartphone. I guarantee kids today are not dissembling their smartphones, or writing code to try and figure out how they work. I have noticed that kids care far less about the actual technology now a days then we did back in the 70s-80s.

Kids today, and I have some, are playing games, and chatting. It is similar to what I did on bbs'es when i was the same age yes, i will admit it.
However, smart phones and social networks turn people into complete narcissistic zombies. They never turn off, and are instant. This is not limited to children at all, as you can see the smart phone menace in literally every place people are in society.

My children have strict rules about screen time, but can i control them when they are at school? Or with their friends? The article makes a good point. When I was a teenager I had to use the computer with my door open. A small pocket device is considerably more easy to conceal, and works perfectly outside the home, under the covers, whatever.

Smartphones are a menace to kids and adults alike until people learn to use them responsibly. I see 50+ year old people texting and driving these days, or ignoring people at the same table as them to take a phone call or message. Its sick. Is being sickened by society what happens to all people as they get older? Does society merely appear more and more sick, or is society really getting worse. Is it unavoidable to witness more and more horrors the older i get?

Lets see, you advocate using a payment system made by google (aka the NSA), that only works on $500 devices that track everything you do and say, everywhere you go, turn you into a zombie and go obsolete as fast as a trendy woman's hat.

Hmm I wonder why technology people would be weary of such a scheme...

the year 2000 called, it wants people to WAKE UP from this always connected zombie phone madness!

"I'm always amazed that they were able to build a civilization in such a thick jungle."

There is a theory that the jungle only exists today because of the cultivation of plants and leaving of waste by humans in the area previously. They say that the building up of human and livestock waste is what made it so fertile. I have also read that they had a different concept of farming than western civilization. They farmed with many different crops planted together, so that say one that gave back more nitrogen into the soil could fertilize other plants.

It is posited that this is why the jungle is so thick in parts of south america. It was somewhat engineered that way by man.

"Terra preta (black earth), which is distributed over large areas in the Amazon forest, is now widely accepted as a product of indigenous soil management. The development of this fertile soil allowed agriculture and silviculture in the previously hostile environment; meaning that large portions of the Amazon rainforest are probably the result of centuries of human management, rather than naturally occurring as has previously been supposed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Thought this sounded familiar.

There was an article in 2013 about the LIDAR system they used to find the city and the process of getting the government to agree to allow the mapping.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

While not as many nice pictures, I think it has more of a background on both the city, the state of the politics in honduras and more historical info.

I think the new one looks like 8-bit 'IT crowd' art. It's not bad, just bad in this context.

It is probably just a fashion, like windows 8 / office 2013 flatness. I doubt there is any practical reason for changing the icons to look ghetto'er.

Microsoft seems to have abandoned depth. Perhaps they are working toward a 'Pay for the 3rd Dimension' business model.

I had that bug too, and for sure it was a pain in the ass. I think they released an update in the last year or two which fixed it.

for all the non believers, here is a technet page with many people having that problem. might have required a renstall of the os to fix. I dont have the problem anymore anyways.

http://answers.microsoft.com/e...

http://answers.microsoft.com/e...

And as others say, it didn't always occur, but when it did, very annoying. For me it was in my downloads directory on a local hard drive. Annoying because I had to constantly refresh to see if things had downloaded yet.

I looked forward to shipping our dirty oil to the americans! Now it has to go east or west. Ontario is much too strong to let it go through there, and the people of BC will never let the pipeline be built to the west.

Boo! Canadians will hate obama because of this. It was such a great solution to our domestic tar sands blight.

All these replies, and not one person has said that they would stop.

I always stop if someones coming at me with a phone. 9 times out of 10, for whatever reason, they process a static object in-front of them differently and look up before collision. Most likely also apologizing to me at the same time.

If 2 walkers collide, it could be said that they were both negligent. If someone walks into you though, they look like a complete dumbass and cannot possibly blame you (after all you are simply standing there, already staring at them angrily)

We don't buy consumer displays at work for signage as they need to be on 14+ hours a day for years.

Commercial displays are what you are looking for. Sony has them, nec has some, im sure others. Prepare to pay more, double or triple the consumer cost. They are much more durable with prolonged use and you will probably not have to replace it for 10+ years. We have some plasmas from 2002 still running fine with the above dutycycle for instance.

They have features such as scheduling, remote turn on and are just simply built better. But you gotta pay.

"middle button = "paste selected text""

Didn't work in firefox or word, so i doubt it works in all applications.

Shortcuts are funny like that, some people find something invaluable that other people don't even know about.

I ctrl+c and then pressed the middle mouse button and it didn't paste so I dont know what you are talking about.

In firefox the MMB more annoying than anything, because if you accidentally click the middle mouse button, you get a kind of 'fast scroll' of the page instead of the mouse wheel.

"This is surprising to me, as I recall reading about plans for Canadian underground storage of nuclear waste back in the 90s. The plans then were to vitrify it - process it into a glass crystal"

The rather long article touched on this. The NNSA has tried to do this as well as create an MOX fuel reprocessing facility the same as the french, however the NNSA are trying to process weapons grade plutonium which they have not had any success with storing or processing safely apparently. The contractors that seem to be the main corner cutters and cause of failed plans in the article, have taken billions of government money and have so far come up with zero long term solutions. Except for this salt mine that is now unusable. The current solution seems to be shipping it to open pits in texas owned by some bush friendly billionaire.

The french and canadians do not use weapons grade fuel in their reprocessing and storage solutions. I am not sure if canada has successfully stored any radioactive waste LONG TERM either as I cant find any links saying that they have.

The closet I can find is the interim dry storage locations, which are all just concrete bunkers of some sort. http://www.nwmo.ca/wastemanage...

He uses the term "social media" a lot, for an unknown term 35 years ago. He name drops both bill gates and steve jobs. I call bullshit, this article was not written 35 years ago.

I thought it was a mass revolt because of privacy issues. Silly me, no one cares about that.

Just me and Kasabian...