I'm sure the meetings with the record companies went something like this:
Apple" iTunes has 65% of digital music sales. With iRadio, listeners will be able to buy a song directly in the player. Failure to allow us to spin your records in iRadio will cost you money".
Record execs: "Where do we sign???"

Except Pandora is pretty much US only, and even though Spotify is available in about 3 dozen countries or so, still doesn't have a user base of more than 20 million. I suspect iTunes Radio will be available for every market where there's a local iTunes music store. A much much much bigger possible market.Will Pandora survive? Probably, though it will probably lose listeners. Spotify may not. In either case, I would think that iTunes radio would have a much bigger userbase than both combined.

People said the same when Google came along. It won't be long until it dies and something better comes along.

Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, they were just part of a cycle. Another search engine will come along to supplant the dominance. The life cycle for a websearch engine was about 3 years back then. How long has Google reigned supreme?

Things aren't like they used to be. These types of things tend to either die out fairly quickly, or stick around for many years. I don't think Facebook is in a situation where they'll die off any time soon.

This may sound like a stupid question to some...

When going to Europe, I would get a burner phone as it was cheaper than paying roaming/data fees. Since they must now unlock the phone (in my case, an iPhone), does that mean that when I now go to Europe all I need to do is buy a SIM card/service from a local cell provider and stick it in my iPhone and it will work?

She didn't become the Doctor, she partially became a Time Lord. Not at all the same thing.

The mother to be of course wouldn't be forced to have an abortion, nor would she not be given any time off. What it does mean however is that she can't collect any EI benefits and probably no income topoff from her employer, so you get 0$ for the time she is off. It would end up being an unpaid leave of absence.

There's really no such thing as a 'maternity leave payment'. It's Employment Insurance, but instead of collecting it because you got laid off, you're collecting it because you gave birth. And by law, your employer must have the same or similar position available to you upon your return.

This exact thing happened to my wife's acquaintances. She ended up pregnant 3 months after the birth of her first child. It was pretty tough for them for a couple of years.

You require to work at least 6 months (37.5 hr work week) between maternity leaves in Canada. Since a good portion of maternity leave is EI, you have to meet the minimum amount of hours worked to be able to claim it, regardless of the cause. If memory serves me right the number of required hours is around 900 hours. A little more than just a few weeks.

If you're employer tops you up on top of EI, they have their own guidelines too. I know in the case of my wife's employer, she must work at least a year to be able to get her maternity leave topped up again.

Google Docs is only dropping support for old formats (Office 97-2007). Old applications that haven't been patched in how long? No reasonable business that requires documents should still be running on those old versions anyways. You can only keep backwards compatibility for so long before things start to get bloated and buggy.

We Canadians, you're neighbours to the north, also recorded record heat and record (lack of) rainfall in July.
Hopefully August will be better. As I type this, it's been raining heavily for the last 20 minutes. We've had more rain in the last 20 mins here in Ottawa that we've had the entire month of July. I'm pretty sure I heard my grass cheering.

Pressed music CD's DVDs are not the same as the ones you use to burn. Pressed CDs/DVDs are not made of the same materials as those used for burning, and will last decades if properly taken care of.
For CDs/DVDs used for burning, the first couple generations of these (when you were paying 2-5$ A DISC) were made of much thicker material and most of the stuff I burnt in the 90s on these types of discs are still readable today. However, with cheap discs came cheap/slim material, which are greatly affected by disc rot. I have some CDs and DVDs that I burnt just 2-3 years ago that are unreadable due to disc rot. If you hold them up to a light you can see the holes.

That being said, you can buy archival DVDs & CDs. The companies claim they will last 100 years if stored properly. I use them to back up my pictures. Those should be sufficient for the time capsule. Burn 3 or more copies to ensure greater chances of being to read everything.

HBO, Nick and Food Network are Canadian versions of those channels. They're not the US feeds. HBO is broadcasted by TMN with some canadian content. I believe Food Network Canada is owned by Rogers. I'm not sure who owns Nick. There's also no Canadian provider that carry SyFy. There is Space (Canadian channel, owned by Bell) which has a lot of the same programming, but again, it's not the US feed you're seeing.
 

That would be because the levy on media is for music only. Movies, games, software, books etc.. do not fall under the blank media levy, and are still very much illegal.

I used Costco (Canada) to have my digital pictures developed. Their online service is very simple to use, and you can even directly import your pictures from Facebook and Picasa. The prices are very reasonable, at 8 cents for 4x6. If you want more than pictures, they also turn your photos into photobooks, canvases, etc...
I've been using them for years and haven't had any issues whatsoever.

I used to play 3-4 hours a day. But then I got married, bought a house (which requires some work apart from the usual), had a kid (now 2) with another one on the way. Although I greatly enjoy video games (mostly of the MMO/RPG kind), if I can play 2-3 hours in a week I count myself very lucky. I think it's been over a week and a half since I last played. Once my kids are a little older, I'm hoping it's something that we can do together.