Actually, netflix is coming to canada with only the streaming service: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20010936-17.html

Not to nitpick, but if you tell someone from Newfoundland they're from a maritime province you might be in for a smack. Better off using the term "Atlantic Provinces".

Well, this all sounds a bit overkill for childrearing, but as a 26 year old university student who knows exactly nothing about raising children as a single parent, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

At any rate, all of the internet scheduling/cutting off can quite happily be done by any router running DD-WRT. Pick up an old Linksys WRT54G somewhere and you'll be fine. Set it up to use OpenDNS to filter any bad sites.

Scheduling of Virus Scanning is obviously a no-brainer as any virus scanner worth its salt will quite happily do that automatically. It's probably blaspheme around here, but for those friends with windows machines that I've had to help fix, I've actually had good luck with Microsoft's own free scanner.

As far as the hardware monitoring/log emailing, maybe just drink a beer on the porch and relax instead. Too much worry is bad for your health.

well I do 99% of my surfing with my laptop trackpad, so I'm not sure how well this works, but maybe give it a shot...

Smooth Gestures

So help me god this thing better have multitasking

FWIW I have this same phenomenon, where my heart will seem to skip a beat and then beat hard for a few seconds. It is disconcerting as hell, but according to the doctors I've talked to about it, its not a big deal. For me, it does seem to be loosely related to my stress level.

I'm 26 and I run 40km a week or so, so I'm in pretty good cardiovascular shape.

It has nothing to do with Hulu not wanting to figure out an advertising strategy for countries outside of the United States. Hulu is a business, and if there is money to be made then they will do their best to make it.

The issue is that the networks who produce these shows enter into contracts with the networks who air those shows in foreign countries. So for example, here in Canada, CTV airs a lot of american network television shows, and in buying those shows they stipulate that they have the exclusive rights to make money off of those shows in Canada. So unless CTV and Global and the other Canadian stations enter into a partnership with Hulu, or come up with something similar themselves, then we Canadians are SOL.

500 words is (was) the maximum length, not the minimum.

Only for a little while longer though, come January the Conservatives will no longer have a minority in the Senate.

This argument gets used a lot, especially with regard to the discrepancy between the U.S. and Canada. I'm not saying its wrong, but I've also never seen convincing evidence that its as big an issue as people make it out to be.

The thing is, taken on the whole, Canada certainly does have a staggeringly small population density, but it's not like we're all evenly distributed up here. According to National Geographic, 75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border, and in 2006, 80% of us lived in urban areas.

Having driven across most of Canada, including about as far north as one can drive, I can assure you that the telecom companies out here aren't spending a whole lot of money to provide service to the huge swaths of empty land. Driving from Ontario to Alberta results in nearly two full days without cell phone reception... at least the last time I did that drive (2007).

And believe me, in Canada we would kill for cell phone pricing on par with the U.S. Hell, even just two year contracts would be a treat....

Clouds are gay martians?

My old university bookstore was one of the first places to get one of these machines, and the sales pitch was that it would be cheaper to get some textbooks from the machine than off of the shelf.

I left before I got a chance to see if that was the case, but people were excited about it.