This must have been written by someone who is surrounded by like minded people and out of touch with Joe Sixpack. People watch ghost hunting shows thinking that finally this one will have some solid evidence. Gamblers laugh in the face of math and talk about patterns with zero statistical backing (I usually win on rainy days).

We have spent a long time evolving into superstitious creatures so anyone who genuinely believes in evolution should understand that unless, in the next 15 to 30 years, there is massive selective pressure against superstitious people that we will be lucky to be much more than a step or two forward. Maybe education might evolve into something better but keep in mind it is the same dolts shaping education that watch the ghost shows.

Money pit, good one. Yes 30G would be pretty dumb but out of say the last 20 laptops non techy owned that I have seen maybe 3 have gone much over 30G. Thus the difference between 500G and 750G would be meaningless for most people. If they discover torrents then boom headshot the drive is filled (and then the laptop is crashing) regardless of size.

Where this size unimportance becomes important is when advising a non-tech type if they are picking a laptop with an SSD. It typically will be smaller which is not usually a problem and results in faster boots, more drop tolerant, and prolongs battery life which are all good. Thus for most people an SSD has no downside and lots of upside. Also I should add to my earlier suggestions that SSD is a sign that the machine is not bottom of the line and indicates that the manufacturer gives a crap.

A sure sign of a crap laptop is the half sized left shift key. This is to make the keyboard for other languages a snap for the company but it is crap for the user. The next test is to shake it. Crap laptops sound like a baby rattle with all the keys and innards shaking about. Good laptops should make little or no noise. Next look for where the air intakes and exhausts are. How would they fare with the laptop sitting on a pillow? Craptops tend to have them in places that are suffocated by sitting on a pillow.

Don't stick with a brand in that most brands vary so much from model to model to make this near useless. That aside don't buy a brand you haven't herd of.

Boot time. What is the boot time from zero to hero. This shows if the laptop was designed this century. Sub 15 seconds is good. Over a minute is something from when Vanilla Ice was hanging upside down.
Lastly I like the youtube test. Does the machine run an HD video really well? That is a good overall test that any laptop should pass in that it should have enough power to do whatever most people want.

As for SSD, memory, CPU I say blah; most people need less than 30G of HD. 2-4G of memory and any half assed CPU. More important than the CPU would be the quality of the battery as to how many times it can be charged before it dies which is something that is beyond mere mortals to test.

Then you wipe all the bloatware off and wait for the person to break the screen.

I'm OK not having a good signal in Upper Bum Wash Manitoba when I am prospecting for mosquito resistant rock. But to support my Jamaica example it is a mountainous country with most of its population in a few spots. The north coast is pretty empty outside the resorts. The parish of Trelawny has a population of around 73,000 and is pretty big. Good modern coverage for all but the jungliest bits. Keep in mind that this is a country where they don't even seem to build overpasses (four lane highway and then red light, four lane highway, red light).

Nearby the Domincan Republic is in the same boat. Most of its population is concentrated in one place and the rest is pretty hilly. Pretty good coverage. This is impressive in a country that has trouble keeping the lights on. The power in DR is only somewhat reliable shortly before an election. (Outside the resorts). These are not modern countries in so many ways. Yet they manage to have a competitive, cheap, and reliable cell system. If you look at their plans they don't have all these complicated 3 year contracts, with incomprehensible (for comparison) weekend and minutes, friends and family, a-la-carte feature nightmares that could only come from the mind of an MBA who actually hates their customers. The majority of people in these two countries are on some version of pay as you go. I would say the only oddity in Jamaica is the high cost of the phones but that is probably due to tariffs and other taxes.

Minimally Canada needs to simply ban the larger telcos from being able to buy out any other company as so far this seems to have been the anti competition pattern. Twist CRTC into preventing competition, if that fails and new company becomes pain in the ass, sit on it, and if that doesn't work, eat it. That is really what they need the billions for.

Lastly as for the vastness of Canada, I suspect it doesn't take much to provide two moose and a raccoon with 3G. Push the old crap equipment into the boondocks as you upgrade the downtown core to 4G or LTE.

As for the companies spying I suspect that this is to allow for the argument that then they can shut down the competition to their TV services really quickly if they already have established a precedent of spying on customer transmissions.

Nearly all the major ISPs in Canada are also supplying traditional content. Some are even creators of that content. They are the last companies that want to see the internet become a pipe.

All of these companies need to be forced to separate their old business from the new business with the understanding that the new company's goal is to be the best pipe possible and not to try propping up their old business models. Otherwise the interests of these companies is in direct conflict with the interests of a modern Canadian population. Check out the rates and services of 3rd world Caribbean countries and it is mind boggling. Jamaica offers 6Mbs unlimited cellular Internet for $40 US a month. The sell a D-Link router for you to have Wi-Fi for all the devices in your house. Canadian companies get all wound up about tethering your smart phone to a laptop because you might actually use some data that way.

Their arguments keep going on and on about how they need to spend so many billions on infrastructure and these high rates are justified to pay for that. I guess we need the Jamaicans to come up and show us how to do it right.

I will tell you which side I am on now. I dislike using fossil fuels. My dream car would be battery driven with at least a 100 mile range, covered in solar cells, and have a tiny generator(say 5hp) to get me out of trouble if I can't get a charge. Oh and the fuel would be a bio based fuel from something like algae or some non food crop. I would love to get my house off the grid. All this is due to my first priority that the oil companies are evil and that the countries that provide oil are often evil. Second I don't like pollution, I would love to not breath exhaust as a condition of living downtown. Third Alberta's oil is now distorting our economy by something known as the Dutch Effect. Fourth global energy independence would probably be a huge step to the nebulous goal of world peace.

And a very distant sixth is a nagging thought that if the climate people are right that it could be bad.

But from a sales point of view just tell people that they could stop buying gas in their cool solar/grid powered cars and you will get 10x the support from people than some debatable (in the public's view at least) and distant future issue.

So no I don't believe the highly biased views of the oil types but I am not buying into what Al Gore has on offer either as neither are that important to me. Issues such as my gas bill, oil wars, pollution, and influence peddling by the big money of oil all are much more in my face. So if I truly were Emperor of Canada I would have a raft of X prizes for solar, wind, battery, nuclear, bio-fuels, etc and then right or wrong CO2/methane production would be taken care of.

To use an example of the horrible GW science in the press I read an article where windmills can cause local Global Warming. Local Global?

Pi=3

First I will not say which "side" I am on as that is unimportant as my total climate knowledge is based on grumbling about weather. But this whole discussion has gone off the rails in that regardless of what scientists think or know the public is turning against man made climate change. Want to lose an election in North America then propose a carbon tax or something similar. Al Gore got people cheering one side of this issue but being Al Gore managed to alienate and effectively create an opposing side. While healthy discussion in science is what science is all about people on both sides have begun to turn this into a religion with people calling for firing of scientists who they disagree with and another person calling for burning others houses down.

A much better example of good science was the recent discovery that neutrinos were going faster than light. Turned out to be wrong but most people were sort of excited as this would potentially be a huge change in physics. Another good example of the separation of science and policy would be nuclear weapons. Nuclear reactions are cool; nuclear weapons are not. But very few people criticized the work Niels Bohr for bringing the world to the brink of total destruction. It would have been a crap argument to say his work was the beginning of a science killed a whole lot of Japanese and thus was invalid. His models of how atoms and whatnot worked have changed significantly enough that they could almost be just called all wrong. But as will all good science people expanded and improved his work.

Where I am going with this is that the hysteria of dragging the scientists out for trials in the court of public opinion not only doesn't help the climate people get on with their research but it opens up other areas to the concept that somehow public opinion can shape science. Opinion does not change a fact. Opinion is to be used to decide what to do about those facts. Both sides on this issue are getting into the realm of those fools who try legislating that =3.

I suspect that the system could easily be gamed. You notice a bunch of farmers blah blahing about a farmer's market so you ask for a building permit on the "Carrot Friendly" building. The computer puts two and two together and poof you have building approval with the computer thinking it has solved two problems. Or you pay 100 people to write in and say there aren't enough stripclubs replacing playgrounds. Bang the computer rezones a playground. I would love to see an smart system provide an independent report as long it was more of a reality check. The city where I live (Halifax) banned chickens. A 5 year old could have told you that this was a case of some squeaky wheel hypochondriac worked up over bird-flu and not a serious problem for the 99.999 percent of the population.

Then there are the programmers or the company that makes the system. I can then see the system continuously suggesting intelligent this and that which IBM also is a provider of. Not to mention that if I were the programmer I could certainly use it solve some neighbourhood problems.

Science fiction writers (fundamentally artists) rarely write about a poem or some business major (businessman maybe but not an MBA) who changes the world. It is most often some cool technology. If you look back into history there are undoubtedly influential works of art, like it or not writings like the bible have had a profound effect. But the reality is that inventions like electricity, medicines, etc have changed the world for the better over and over. Right now the technology is computers and their related technologies like robots that are setting the world on fire.

The primary focus of any healthy society should be to churn out the most skilled STEM students possible. We still need barbers and bankers but keep in mind that Taiwan churns out something like 55,000 Electrical Engineers a year. I have no idea if they are glorified electricians or the next Tesla but it certainly shows that they know where to focus their efforts.

Plus look at what happened to the world economy when it had too many MBAs around?

The mere thought of cutting the CS department shows the thinking of a group of weak minds. These are the sort of people who don't save any grain for the next spring's planting.

This is not so much isolated to the TSA as it is the government not being monitored. The knee-jerk reaction of all government people is to hide information. Organizations like the TSA think they can use "Security" as their reason for hiding information. But that hiding what they do combined with the fact that the public is there interacting with them every day is why we know they stink so bad. I can't imagine the waste, rot, and wrongdoing that takes place within the CIA and the NSA as we neither encounter those organizations and they really get to hide behind security. The FBI is probably not so bad as defense attorneys have at them all the time.

So keep in mind that while we get to see the TSA acting like they only hire from the head injury pool that is only because we are getting a behind the curtains taste of what is going on. The entire government hires from the head-injury pool and the few gems are inside a head-injury designed system.

The simple solution to the TSA along with all other government organizations is to open up their records. In this day and age it would be of little effort to post all internal documents, emails, phone records, etc. As for any security/privacy concerns: any "enemies" already have the information, and a tiny few exceptions could be made such as medical records. But otherwise if you deal with government then expect to have it on the public record.

The TSA does tests where they slip crap by their screeners. They hold on to this information dearly, not to keep it from the bad guys but to keep us and our elected officials from laughing them out of existence.

BTW someday somewhere the baddies will strike again and the TSA will say "See you interfered with our ability to do our job and look what happened." They seem to forget that they themselves have become the baddies. I feel zero threat from baddies but I can feel my blood pressure rise from the tension of what ludicrous encounter I might have with the TSA. Also this has resulted in my cutting back on travel to the US by a huge amount. Not only because of the TSA themselves but because of the huge security fees on any flight to the US. This has made flying a huge distance the same price as a short hop to the US. Security types don't seem to realize that this sort of cost (a small price to pay) is compounded. Year after year, decade after decade of making people miserable and avoiding your country will add up to the US falling behind the rest of the world. And guess what a poorer unhappy population is probably more likely to engage in the very activities that you are trying to prevent.

The worst part is that the US population is developing a "They're just doing their job" attitude and get upset when videos of people given viper checkpoint thugs a hard time. You read the comments in any posted video and a good half are "Why didn't the douche just answer the cop's question." after the guy repeatedly asked something like "Am I being detained?" If most people didn't cooperate at all and only voted for the politician who promised to eliminate these McCarthyist institutions they would be gone in no time. But instead I hate to say it but you deserve the government you vote for.

Nope. I would be willing to say every cashier that I have ever seen manually do math has failed. If I pull a stunt like handing them a 20 and then a dime for something that cost 19.01 they are often lost calculating the 1.09 change if they had entered 20 into the till. Another store's till broke and the cashier was nearly in tears trying to work out tax with a calculator, and this was a single item sort of store.She was taking say a 25 dollar purchase and applying 15% tax and coming up with a total purchase price of 8 dollars. Car salesman take advantage of this every day. They will sell you a car and tell you that it is one price and you are getting it at a certain interest rate and your monthly payments will be another price. But if you do the math it will usually turn out you are paying a grand or so more. They know that 99% of people can't work out loan payments.

I don't know how exactly the schools are failing but almost regardless of the level of grade school math education people are usually unable to apply math to real life. Tell them that half the population is below any average and they will tell you that you are below average. Show them that the fees in mutual funds work against the whole idea of compound interest and they stare at you like you are speaking Greek.

For all the Teaching Company fans out there, it is ironic that Bruce Edwards makes some of the best Math lectures available around. So there he is moving education into the 21st century when the same university he teaches at is forgetting that the 21st century is going to be a mix of computers, robotics, and biology. I wonder what their stance on evolution is?

It would be funny if they Open Sourced it.

I have had to block yandex from all my servers as it indexes sites oddly.