Personally, I like the idea of that. It encourages and funds a lot of Canadian artists that might otherwise get swamped out of the market by monied American interests.

Personally, I would much, much, much rather the CRTC enforce rules for true network neutrality for Canadian internet users and find some other way to promote Canadian content.

Or, more accurately, for someone else to force the CRTC to go that way, because there's pretty much zero probability that they'll do it without coercion.

The problem with relying for support for separation from the younger generation...

Well, yes. It still takes at least a generation for them to work it out of their system. 40 years might do it, but seeing where we are now in Canada I think it's going to take another 20 or so before we can really feel comfortable that separation is truly dead.

The reality is that there's more people in the RoC (Rest of Canada) who would vote to kick Quebec out than there are Quebecers willing to pull the trigger on separation.

Oh, definitely. And to some degree, I think the growing understanding that Quebec wouldn't be able to unilaterally dictate the terms of a separation actually proceeded is one of the biggest factors in killing the movement.

Apple also sells music in its lossless format, and there it's hard to get "robust" without annoying the listener.

No argument that it's hard.

But if Apple (I highly doubt U2 is directly involved in the research itself) did manage to develop a robust audio watermark that doesn't suck, it's understandable how someone would get the impression that it might result in an "unpiratable" format, at least within the bounds of the Apple walled garden.

The separatist movement here has burned itself out, the generation who were pushing for it being seen as burned-out old farts. Go back to the UK in 40 years and tell me that everyone lost.

From what I read of the demographics, it's mainly the younger generation of Scots that supported separation. They're pretty much at the stage of Quebec in the 70's.

I wonder if this will silence or encourage the separatists that want Quebec to leave Canada?

Encourage.

The margins are way too close. If it would've been more like 75% against, the Quebec separatists might have taken a bit of a morale hit, but 55% ? That's a "Please Play Again" for a separatist. The 1980 referendum was 59% against and it certainly didn't stop them.

The real question is whether the Scots are going to be smart enough to tar and feather the next bunch of politicians that decide they want to run a country? I'm not optimistic.

Because it shows that neither know what they are talking about. If I can HEAR it, I can copy it. And the quality can get pretty damn good depending on how the sound is captured.

The only way I can see something like that working is a robust audio watermark containing the purchasers iTunes information. Won't stop copying directly, but would theoretically allow them to go after a "source" and possibly publish revocation lists that some devices could support to suppress "pirated" music.

Of course, that would only be applicable to online stores (I assume the record companies would force other stores to toe the line on the technology) and likely could only be enforced on iDevices. It obviously could be trivially defeated by ripping the music from a CD (for that short while we still have mass-pressed anonymous, physical media), pirates buying music using throwaway store accounts, or other peoples accounts being hacked.

But, let's face it, at this point the best they can hope for is deterrence rather than outright prevention.

I think you're overselling it somewhat. I've tried the swype systems, and I always devolve to just tapping. Same with my friends that have access to it. Out of 4 of us, all of us hate swype based systems. That's not data, obviously, it's just an anecdote.

I think the GP is overselling it a bit too, but I've been using the standard Android keyboard for a bit now, which includes swype-like typing, and I'd have a tough time switching back to just tapping. It's substantially faster and generally as accurate as tapping and quite a bit better than any miniature hardware keyboard I've tried. I don't know that if it wasn't built if I'd have bothered downloading Swype or Swiftkey, but it's nice to have the option.

In some ways, it reminds me of the difference between Newton HWR and Palm Graffiti; you had to learn some new patterns to use Graffiti, but when you got used to it, it was light years ahead of the performance of the natural handwriting recognition of the Newton.

Well... Yes. All technology corporations try their best to bring technology to more people than before.

I couldd swear that Microsoft has been trying hard at the exact opposite...

People ***HATE*** "Windows". Windows is associated with work, pain, crazy difficulties, nerds and viruses. The brand name has negative value.

True. But it still gets more respect than "Windows Phone".

Well, that would explain why my language center pretty much seized up trying to make sense of that.

On the one hand, I can't blame notch, because if Microsoft offered me enough cash to retire, I'd sell out. But on the other hand, notch is already a millionaire, right? It's not like he needs the money.

He might be a millionaire, but there's a subtle qualitative difference between retiring comfortably versus buying a large Pacific island, having an army of minions carve it into something that looks like a Minecraft world, and retiring comfortably.

If my wife is driving and I am riding then what?

It's supposed to be applicable to people caught (and, presumably, convicted) of texting and driving. I'm sure being stuck as a passenger with no interesting distractions other than the company of the driver and other passengers might be considered a living hell by some people, but such is life.

Several years ago, a kernel developer submitted a patch that greatly increased Linux performance for desktop-oriented tasks

Well, sure. But that'd be a kernel fork.

Here's the problem... I'm not clicking on an infoworld link, so I can only go by the summary, which clearly talks about forking Linux distributions, not the kernel. And I assume the submitter is a professional infoworld writer, so the emphasis on distributions must've been intentional (since, it being slashdot, it's not like an editor would ever actually do any editing).

Now, someone could fork the Linux kernel according to workload, but any sane distro would just handle that scenario with a linux-image-server and linux-image-desktop packaging option and maybe a few meta-packages to sort out any other distinctions. Not unlike the -smp and -bigmem kernels that were typical until multi-core multi-GB desktops showed up.

In other words, even if the article-I-won't-read is talking about a kernel fork, the conclusion in the summary doesn't necessarily follow.

I assume that this is yet another click-bait blog-spam article, because I can't imagine that anyone who knows jack about Linux distributions wouldn't be aware that server and desktop variants of various distributions have been and still are done.

More to the point, anyone who wanted it done that way would've or could've already done it. That the more popular distros don't generally make the distinction or don't emphasize it should be taken as a fairly solid answer to the question posed in the headline.

Actually, after learning about the ridiculous access privileges the Facebook app requires

Cyanogenmod with privacy guard locks Facebook down enough for me, but yes, that's the main reason I'd be using a browser otherwise.

The main advantage of using the app is smoother performance, bandwidth use seems somewhat lower (hard to tell for sure since if you use the browser it's aggregated with all the other browser traffic), and uploading things like pictures and video is far less hassle.

But generally speaking, I agree that if you don't have some way to restrict apps, you should either switch to the browser version of Facebook or put a decent ROM on your phone.