I interpreted that as meaning "Homeless/Drug Addicts" when I read it. We have our Urban Culture here in my town too. Often seen screaming at the top of their lungs, walking haphazardly across the street in front of traffic and most popularly crouched by the side of the street sorting out endless reams of shit in whatever bag or backpack they are carrying.

But a little while ago they were planning to raise their data rates, which meant *everyones* data rate was going to go up, no matter what their service provider, because Bell owns the vast majority of the internet lines across the entire country.

They *are* effectively a monopoly, just as our cellphone carriers (Bell included) charge roughly the same high rates (Canadians pay some of the highest fees in the world) because there is *no* real competition, just the appearance of it. Most of the smaller providers actually belong to one of the bigger players for instance. Their sole purpose seems to make it look like there is more choice, but its a sham.

Sounds awfully Utopian. I find it much easier to believe in a future where the very very very rich run just about everything according to their tastes, the rich serve their needs and get elected to run the government according to their instructions, and the rest of the population is either starving in crime infested ghettos, or serving time in the state supported corporate prisons.
For robots to be worth using, they have to do the labour cheaper than slaves^HH^H foreign employees can in say Thailand or China. If a robot can do it more effectively and cheaply than slave labour then it will replace the slave labour, otherwise major corporations will continue to exploit the poor in foreign countries as they do whenever possible these days. In either case the number of jobs that pay a fair wage by our standards will only decrease over time.
The corporations are winning, humanity is losing, generally speaking.

Marriage vow, pah! You will have to agree to the EULA :P

See Heritage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage

Specifically "the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society: man-made heritage"

I wasn't using "belongs" to mean ownership and you were completely aware of that, but chose to speak like a fucking moron instead.

The Prenda porn is only *gay* porn? So you mean I didn't have to delete all my porn collection just in case.... cries :P

Most of the posts in response to this story seem to focus on
* Bad Grammar
* Bad Jokes
* US Politics (how the fuck everything can be related to US politics is beyond me)
* Ethnic Slurs (including of course the obligatory insults to Muslims that must appear in any article on anything these days. Keep up the hate guys, its only helping your reputation with the rest of the world).
* Lastly, and apparently leastly, some outrage at the destruction of a part of human history, thus lessening our understanding of the same by some degree. A site like this belongs to all of humanity, its our heritage, its a way to understand where we came from and thus perhaps where we might be going. The people who knocked this temple down (and the owner of the company responsible) should be in prison for the rest of their lives.
Hopefully this at least serves to make governments all through the region aware of the need to protect heritage sites like this. Without our history, we are *nothing*.

But with more people being diagnosed as mentally ill, and thus more people receiving prescription medicines, the profit margins of Big Pharma (tm) will only go up!

Will no one think of the major pharmaceutical companies?

I don't think its a vast conspiracy, so much as generations of doctors being educated that drugs are the solution to mental problems, and that all mental illness can be treated by some drug treatment. Also this wacky idea that we all have to match some theoretical norm of some sort. "When all you have is a hammer..." etc.

My friends and I (about 8 or so of us) tried WOW when it was in beta. We signed up for the first month, then pretty much all of us except 2 quit the game before the month was up because it was far too easy and boring. I am always stunned to see how many millions have played it when at least to me, it was so unremarkable a game and a worse time sink that most of the other MMOs I have played.

Also Athens at its height was around 20,000 citizens (plus women and children who didn't count) and over 100,000 slaves who actually did all the work. In effect all that democracy and philosophy we treasure was brought to us by elite misogynist slave owners :P

If they do replace it all, I bet they opt for the top end HTML5 driven solution - resulting in a problem for those who don't have computers modern enough to run an HTML5 browser :P

Just make your fucking websites using bog standard HTML forms, zero javascript and everyone can be happy except the designers who were hoping to charge extra for all the unnecessary bling enabled by javascript.

Ah but for me, every day is "Don't buy an EA game day" already. Likewise anything from SOE :P

Excellent point. Thank you for brightening my day :P

So is the differences in sounds distinguished by listeners. Its called "Canadian Rising" and is uncommon with US speakers unless they are near the border but common in Canada. Its what makes US speakers who do not hear the difference, think we are saying Aboot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_raising

Except the first thing that banks would be required to do would be to furnish records of the transactions to the government. In order to verify a unit of currency you would need a tool to check its cryptographic validity, and that would need to be certified, meaning its location would be included most likely and then there would be a way to track the currency again.
I don't think it can be anonymous in a way that prevents undesirable entities from gaining information about it and you.
Thats the nice thing about paper money. Once you have it you can spend it without it being traced - unless you put in the hands of a bank, or transfer it electronically etc. As paper its pretty anonymous - but of course subject to counterfeiting etc.