Actually within Canada, at least in BC, there are overtime pay exempt positions. Included in the category that cannot be payed overtime is High Tech professional. "The hours of work provisions of the Act, including those governing meal breaks, split shifts", minimum daily pay and hours free from work each week, as well as the overtime and statutory holiday provisions, do not apply to “high technology professionals." Labour BC

You should go read the follow up post on the Building Windows 8 blog. It covers a lot of the probabilities assuming 1, 2, 5, or 10 points of interest in a pictures.

Thanks for posting that. I am in Canada and had never bothered looking at what Speak-Out offered. That looks very tempting if I decide to buy a smartphone outright.

This article is from 2007, since then all of the consoles have undergone significant revisions. Then XBox360 has moved to a smaller manufacturing process, the PS3 as well I believe. Also the PS3 Slim was introduced and just a few months ago underwent another revision that further reduced power usage.

So in short, I agree that the set-top boxes will be less power hungry, the statement comparing the Wii to XBox 360 and PS3 seems to be out of date.

What if the protests are considering it to be a civil war? Then does the Geneva Convention kick in?

But with all those gusty extra-solar winds, who knows where the electrons will end up if we don't keep them in an enclosed space.

I too am completely amazed that the Voyager is still sending back useful data after all these years.

Sometimes I wonder how much further ahead humanity would be if we built everything with the need to have it last decades before becoming nonfunctional, then I realize that with the rate technology has advanced, that is just not possible. Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles. So much of the global economy is dependent on people buying more things.

It is almost like these data centers are designed to server data to remote computers.

Are you implying that there is no case for a good optical zoom? Or maybe you think manual focus or aperature/shutter priority are useless on a point and shoot camera? Do you want to be tied to MMC cards or do you want to be able to use SD cards? Maybe AA batteries rather than a L-Ion pack is better because you expect to be away from a charger for long periods of time.

Saying skip all the features is ridiculous, there are features that may not be beneficial to you, but saying skip all the features is not a good way to look at buying cameras.

If you don't think you will get really serious about photography, then skip the DSLRs.

Once DLSRs are out of the picture you have to decide what kind of optical zoom you are looking for. Up to about 10x optical zoom can be had on a reasonably compact camera, anyting over that you are likely getting into the mega-zoom class of cameras that are quite deep because of the monster lenses on them. I have a Panasonic Lumix FZ-18 with a 18x optical zoom and find that the camera really is just a bit too big to carry around all the time.

If you want some of the more custom controls, such as manual focus, you will be looking at the higher end of the Nikon Coolpix range, or the Canon PowerShots. I personally have been looking at the Nikon Coolpix P7100, and while it is not a small camera, it is also not a huge camera, but it has a great feature set and a slightly larger sensor than the pocket sized cameras.

All of that to say that you really need to decide what features you are interested in first, then you can start doing full research. I found Digital Photography Review to be a good reference.

The twice-a-day is from BCHydro's web site. "Smart meters are active for an average of one minute per day. Residential smart meters are active for a total average of one minute per day, which includes the relay of information that may be required for data transmission and coordination between meters. In fact, the exposure to radio frequency from a smart meter – over its entire 20-year life span – is equal to a single 30 minute cell phone call." BC Hydro FAQ

Does that mean that the Kessel Run is a measure of time?

If so then running it in less than 12 parsecs may not be impressive as it would be setting the upper bound on the distance covered in a given amount of time.

Very true, also, the number of nuclear plants in the world pales in comparison to the number of coal powered plants/mines. As the number of nuclear reactors increases the likelyhood of a high impact accident increases.

I am looking at a wireless speakers/distributed sound set up and think I may just have to save up the money and go with some of the Sonos devices. Nothing else, excepte maybe SqueezeBox, seems to be as versatile.

According to BC Hydro, the new smart meters we are getting only broadcast twice a day with each broadcast being less than 30 sec. I have no reason to not believe them, and have not had any wireless device issues in the 4 months since my neighbor hood got the smart meters. I suspect there are a lot of different models with a lot of different broadcast patterns and levels which makes this article way to general to be of any true use.