Yeah, but Alaska and Hawaii haven't changed status in that regard. They knew they weren't connected when they signed onto the deal. Also, going across a border to effectively travel between 2 places in your own country makes things problematic. You now need a passport just to drive from one end of the country to the other. What about shared resources like power plants and bridges that exist between the two countries. New agreements will have to be written up for how they are maintained and how they are policed. There's thousands of people who commute between Ottawa and Gatineau that would have to move to one country or the other. All the government offices in Quebec including the main tax center in Shawinigan as well as countless other buildings would have to be moved. It would not only be a major burden on Quebec, but on the rest of Canada as well.

With the existence of Outlook you really can't depend on somebody's email client being able to render HTML. Just about the same time when IE got a passable HTML+CSS rendering engine, they started using the Word HTML engine for Outlook. The result: completely terrible support for normal HTML in Outlook. The better solution would have been to incorporate the IE rendering engine into Word and Outlook. But for some reason, they made the exact opposite decision and decided to keep using the MS Word rendering engine, and switch Outlook to use that. So it's probably not a big deal that Thunderbird has a few small problems rendering HTML.

This is always the problem. What happens to those who don't want to separate? What happens to those who are cut off from the rest of the country by a nation in the middle of 2 parts of the same country? As a Canadian, this constantly comes up. If Quebec separates, what happens to the Atlantic provinces (PEI, NB, NS, NFLD)? What happens to the people in Quebec who voted against it? The people who voted for separation get what they wanted, but there's no compromise to satisfy those who wanted things to stay the way they were.

Ideally all this would be handled by the XBox itself. Developers shouldn't have to deal with what happens when the storage device is disconnected when trying to save a game. The XBox OS (whatever it is) should have a function to write out a saved game. It should be transactional so that even if it breaks part way through writing, you can still just use the previous version. All saved games should be "signed" so that they can detect if the file was corrupted or tampered with. This would prevent bugs in reading saved game files that were tampered with from allowing exploits in the system (this happened on Wii, allowing modified save games to execute code). Also, all saved games (every transaction) should be backed up to the cloud so that the user can recover their saved games if the storage media becomes corrupted or malfunctions. Saved game data is so small that all this should really be easily possible.

Sure they have a right to self governance, but with the country being so split, it's hard to make such a case. I could see if 80% of the people voted in favour of independence, but the split seems to be somewhere very close to 50-50. People have jobs, homes, and friends. It's not so easy to just pack up and move if you don't agree with the idea of independence. In cases like South Sudan, where the result was over 98% in favour of independence, it makes complete sense.

This is an issue that I've had to think about a lot being a Canadian, and Quebec constantly talking about separating. There doesn't seem to be a real consensus in the citizens that they want to separate. And I can only see things going downhill financially for them if they choose to separate.

then you also have to handle the case where the data is corrupted

. No matter where you are storing the data, there's always a chance of the data being corrupted. And as far as users removing the storage card, computers have had that problem since as long as there have been personal computers. I'm sure most people could deal with it. People understand that they shouldn't just pull the card out randomly. If they lose their data by being stupid, then that's their own fault. They shouldn't cripple the entire user base because some users may do stupid things.

But it shouldn't cost $100 for the difference between the two anyway. It's a $650 phone. It should have 64 GB by default, or have 32 GB and have the option of an SD Card. You only say that 16 GB is fine because it's $100 for the next level up. That's almost the same price as a 128 GB micro SD Card (currently 109.99). There's no reason why they should be charging you $100 for 16 GB upgrade in the first place.

I guess if you have the 64 GB or 128 GB version of the device this may be a problem, but most people won't install so much stuff that they need folders inside folders for launching their apps. Every level of folders you add requires another tap to bring up the folder. And there's more taps if you end up going to the wrong folder. I really like the Android/Windows model of just listing everything in alphabetical order and giving you a way to add a quick launch of the stuff you really need to access all the time.

I know there's a lot of hate for Windows 8, but the onscreen keyboard for my Surface 2 (RT) is probably the best on screen keyboard I've ever used. I simply can't stand my Android phone keyboard anymore. I don't have an iDevice, but whenever I go to use my wife's iPad, I cringe at how bad that keyboard is. Always showing the keys in capitals so you can never figure out if you are typing in capitals is probably the most annoying part. Having left and right arrow buttons on the default keyboard for the Surface helps out so much. Also, having Ctrl key is extremely nice because I can use Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, just like I would on a regular keyboard.Tab needs 2 clicks, but it's still much easier than clicking on the next form field. You can switch to the full keyboard for those times when you really want access to all the keys, although I don't use it all the time. The iOS and Android keyboards might work OK on small screen 4-5 phones, but on a 10 inch tablet, where you have the extra room, there really should be some extended functionality. The iPad keyboard really needs to be different than the iPhone keyboard.

Eggs and milk have a pretty long expiry date. Worst case scenario is I buy eggs/milk that I wouldn't have needed until next week. Or I don't buy them and then I have to do without, or I decide I really need milk now, and I go out to the store again. Sure it's a "problem" but I'm not sure if I'd qualify that as a "first world problem". Maybe it's a "zeroth world problem".

The only reason I could see it being truly useful is if the fridge knew I was low on milk, and watched the sales prices at the stores so that I could always take advantage of the sales price, and it would order the milk from the store for me, and it would be delivered for free, and there would be a robot in my house to receive the order and put the milk in the fridge and I'd never have to think about whether there was enough milk in the house. That would be true home automation. My fridge telling me how much milk is in the house is kind of step in the right direction, but it's kind of useless on it's own.

Well, as far as safety goes, if you're going to be killing people, killing Nazis is about as safe as you can get without offending anybody. Once they realized killing Nazis was received well, they moved to Doom, where they were killing demons.

I can't speak for the original Surface RT, but I actually like my Surface 2 (RT). As long as you go in understanding that it is not a replacement for a full Windows machine, but rather something to compete with an Android tablet or iPad, you should be OK. Apart from the lack of apps, I haven't had any problems with my Surface 2. The lack of apps isn't much of a problem either, because I haven't found anything that I would want to do on a tablet. And it can actually do many things a lot better than an Android tablet or iPad. For instance, because it has a traditional Windows file system, all the apps can access network drives (or MS OneDrive) without having to write special code to handle connecting them.

I'm not sure if it's all that weird. I'm not sure if they thought an ultraviolent game would be so well received when they did Commander Keen. It certainly would be a big risk to spend all that time programming a game and have people reject it. Commander Keen came out in 1990, Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, Doom in 1993, and Quake in 1996. Maybe they wanted to wait until they had a popular game under their belts before they tried to risk it with something so violent. Maybe having such a success with Commander Keen gave them the freedom to work on a game like Wolfenstein or Doom without worrying about how well the public would receive it.

Just because computers are ubiquitous does not mean that programmers are ubiquitous. It's like saying that because everybody owns a car that everybody knows how to fix them.

I would say that there are fewer people who know how to fix a car/be a mechanic now than who did in the 60s. At least in terms of percentage of the population, if not in total numbers as well. There used to be a lot more people who would change their own oil or do their own brake jobs as opposed to the number of people who would attempt such a task today

The same goes for programming. There are a lot more people who own computers, but very few of them actually know how to program them. And of the people who can "program" them, for many their knowledge does not extend beyond writing a simple PHP page.

Not only that, but I imagine that COBOL isn't a fun course you can take to easily increase your GPA and I don't think there would be many schools that would make COBOL mandatory. Even if you don't end up going into finance, the kind of person who would take COBOL as an elective course is probably the kind of person who works hard and actually is interested in programming. People who elected to take COBOL as opposed to JAVA or C probably did so because they already learned those languages in their spare time when they were 15 and didn't feel they needed a course on it. People who are actually interested in programming end up becoming much better programmers and will be the people who make more money at it. Also, some of the people taking COBOL might have been already been working in the industry, and went back to school to get their degree. They might have already had a job where COBOL was important and took the course because they already knew the material.