Dude your an idiot. A pocket knife is not a firearm. Most kids get pocket knives these days, boys, around 8-10. Its really not that different.

I would not let my children handle mercury, or lead, or really any heavy metals. This is because I am not a negligent parent, and have taught them that things can be toxic, carcinogenic etc because hopefully you can teach them some basic science and aren't just focusing on arming them for the apocalypse that probably isn't coming.

"it's no wonder I'm half an imbecile."

Sure, get some water now, and create waste that lasts for 100,000 years. Exactly the same kind of thinking that got everyone into the current environmental mess we are in, pass the buck to future generations.

Nuclear being safe power is a myth.

I for one don't want to fuck the future.

I really think that conservatives think; things are fucked up in the now, there is no hope for the future, so who cares about the lives of future generations! Similar to how religious people can write people off as "sinners" and dismiss them as real people. It is a pessimistic, myopic viewpoint driven by a false glorification of the past, and a true hatred of the now that they're afraid that they are not a part of.

"presumably because of the artificial increase in corn prices that 'environmentalists' spurred with alcohol-as-a-fuel initiatives."

I dont disagree with most of your post, but two things about this statement are wrong. One, if you remember your history of the last 40 years, corn turning into alcohol was a problem that BUSH (not an environmentalist) pushed as a political solution to foreign oil. Not to mention that because "corn must go in everything", the US produced way more corn than it could ever use. Those two reasons are why corn is turned into ethanol in the usa. You may want to look into the history of big business and sugarcane as well in the USA. There are a few reasons that americans produce much corn*, but predominantly because it is cheaper;

"The use of HFCS in the United States is partially attributable to government tariffs that maintain domestic sugar prices at above the global price and subsidies to corn growers that lower the cost of the primary ingredient in HFCS, corn."

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

9 out of 10 environmentalists you meet I am sure will tell you that they absolutely do not want food being turned into fuel for cars. They want to reduce peoples dependance on cars and that involves using LESS fuel, not more. Do you know any "environmentalists" at all?

*( the paranoid part of me thinks that the government wants you to eat more corn sugar so that you will get fatter. Fat people dont start revolutions )

I also try and avoid google products. I found that the transcoding works best on liveleak and dailymotion. The other free video hosting providers seem not to be able to handle 1080p very well...

And wireless support built in.

and TRIM support built in.

And the much improved power saving features that actually allow computers to resume from hibernation / sleep successfully most times.

and shadow copies.

and printer support with driver versioning

and driver rollback.

and all the new multi monitor features 2k didnt have.

and windows deployment services (remember ghost?).

and 64 bit support.

and the firewall, for those people connected directly to the internet.

and multi user logon.

and improved task manager.

2k is dead. I am still using a 2k interface (true classic, no effects with quicklaunch) , but there have been many many improvements besides the two you listed, or even the 10 or so i listed.
I upgraded from 2k to windows 7 on my personal machine and never looked back. Not once.

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)