That's a lot of annual fees! I've had CCs for 13 years now, and have paid maybe $20 in interest and $0 in annual fees. I have, however, received several hundred dollars from various 'reward' CCs plus I've used the extended warranty coverage provided by many cards. CCs have saved me a nice sum over the years.

This is the only appropriate way to use CCs IMO. You already pay a ~2% credit card tax when you purchase anything in retail, since the retailer has to pay that percentage to the CC company for the privilege of accepting those cards.

Maybe he didn't disengage his parking brake fully before setting off. I did that once and was mighty surprised by the brake pedal going almost to the floor and not doing much of anything. Add to that a stuck throttle (floormat or otherwise) and an idiot who can't think to turn off the ignition or put the car in neutral behind the wheel, and there's your accident.

"I've had power steering suddenly fail on me. It is not easy to drive a car in that condition, and trying to drive it in an emergency situation?"

Please. The only time power steering is useful is when you're turning the wheels while stopped or going very slowly. Losing it doesn't make a car difficult to drive. Hell if 8000lb UPS trucks can manage without it, a little passenger car sure can.

I have stood next to a tower. A whole field of them, in fact. It was windy that day, I would say about 35-40km, so the wind noise itself was considerable. I could hear the light swish of the nearest (about 15m from the base) turbine, and that was all. No other irritating noise from the more distant turbines, nor any noise from the generators themselves.

There's no reason why wind turbine designs can't differ drastically enough from mfgr to mfgr and from one generation to the next to account for the difference in our experiences.

By the way, the place I was at was the northwestern tip of Prince Edward Island.

Oh please, noise pollution and an eyesore? You sound like those rich guys who don't want an offshore windfarm spoiling the ocean view from their villas. Even in relatively high winds, all you hear standing outside, maybe 15m from the base of the tower, is a light swish as the blades pass by. Not a sound that should bother anyone inside their house.

As for the eyesore aspect, that's purely subjective. I personally find wind turbines (especially the newer ones, with the long blades and slick-shaped nacelles) to be quite graceful and relaxing to watch.

So long as North American (and especially Canadian) ISPs continue to choke the upstream bandwidth on consumer 'net connections to the point of uselessness, no one will be replacing the HD with cloud storage anytime soon.

Wait, you're complaining about those connections? You're saying that 3Mbps and 64Mbps upstream rates suck? Let me tell you about Canada. To get a 50M/2M (yeah, 2, not 20) cable connection costs $150/month and there's a 175GB cap. $60 will get you 10M/1M with an 80GB cap.

DSL's even worse - with resellers (i.e. anyone NOT Bell Canada) the most you can get (at least in this tri-city, 750,000 population, area) 5 or 6M/800k. Bell Canada themselves has a tier that offers as much as 16M down, but you simply cannot get more than 1M upstream (1.5M for business class DSL connections). The caps are also insane, with the top 16M/1M tier being limited to 95GB.

I think you would find that if we had your options here, the current carriers would find themselves out of business very quickly.