There's one reason why TVs should be "smarter", and that's the UI of the TV itself. I can't really figure out why all my devices--my microwave, TV, DVD player, coffee machine, whatever--need to be operated by pressing tiny buttons in some arcane manner, like I'm casting a spell or something. There is a Better Way.

It would be great if, in addition to having the remote+TV UI option that's standard with my TV, I could also use my iPad, computer, and/or web browser to configure my TV. Run Android or whatever on the TV and publish an API to the TV's internals, and you've made your TV a lot more usable.

I guess if people want to use this capability to create apps, great. For my part though, I'm happy just plugging in an Apple TV or whatever. This capability isn't going to go away (I hope!) with a smart TV, so you'll still be able to buy an external box for something down the road if you want it.

Judging from content restrictions and device manufacturers' generally terrible attempts at innovation in this area, I don't hold particularly high hopes that the reality of the future is going to match my rosy utopian vision of it.

Unless you pay for Evernote (which I do), all your transfers between your device(s) and Evernote are unencrypted. So, unless you pay $6 per month, or whatever it is, you're sending all of your financial data unencrypted over the internet.

Furthermore, even if you ARE paying for Evernote, all your data is stored in plaintext on their servers. If their server is ever compromised, or they have a rogue employee, you could be in serious trouble. If you choose to encrypt your data before putting it into Evernote, that reduces it to the point of uselessness.

A year or two ago, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSap S1500M scanner. While it's possible to mess this scanner up with extremely long or ripped up receipts, it takes almost anything I throw at it. It feeds pages of different sizes, auto duplexes when necessary, does colour or black & white automatically, does OCR, and comes with a version of Adobe Acrobat. This product really has exceeded my expectations.

DEVONThink Pro is good, but I suppose one mark against it is that I haven't used it to its full capacity yet. By this I mean that if it was better, perhaps I'd be using more than just a general store. On the other hand, I can always find a receipt in there if I need it.

The biggest problem is that despite all this, I haven't really been able to go paperless. According to my accountant, Revenue Canada still wants hard copies, so if I'm ever audited (which seems to be almost every year for some reason or another), paper copies must be produced. Plus, if I hand in 30% of my receipts in electronic format, and the other 70% in paper format, someone has to go through each of those and ensure that all the data is there, and weed out the duplicates. This means that despite me scanning all my receipts, I still have to hand in the paper versions, and I still have to go through my electronic receipts and sort out which ones are duplicates of paper ones, and which ones are strictly electronic. Then I imagine that the person going through all this at the accountant's office is probably just printing it all out anyway to save time. Going through a stack of paper receipts is still just easier for most people than a directory of PDFs. Therefore, if they aren't printing it out, I'm paying for the extra hours to cover their reduced efficiency.

The end version is, you can go to a lot of effort and implement all the technology you want to go paperless, but it's very hard and may not even be possible. I think it's still worth trying, though.

I'm not generally an advocate for lawyers, but the solution of getting rid of all them is worse than the problem.

If we wrote laws that were deciperable by the "average person", what about the approximately 50% of the population who are below average? At some point the laws will once again become indecipherable if you go down far enough. In essence, the problem is essentially the same except now it affects 35% of the population instead of 99% of the population. Those 35% who don't understand the laws are going to need someone to advocate for them.

IIRC it wasn't this way around at all. The US started requiring Canadians to have a passport to travel to the US. Canada objected strenuously, to which Washington said what Washington usually says to foreign governments' concerns. So Canada said that if Canadians needed a passport to travel to the US, then Americans would need a passport to travel to Canada too.

I can't be bothered to look this up, but it's what happened according to my memory of it.

The GGP said "modern world", which you're comparing to the "underdeveloped world". Therefore your response isn't really a fair one.

Maybe the point should be that only in the US do sick people undergo a lifetime of indentured servitude due to medical bills if they can't pay for insurance. In most other places, people don't have to bundle the choice to receive necessary medical care with the aftermath of crushing medical debt payments for the rest of their lives.

And yes, this issue does cause people to avoid the hospital until a little problem has become a big problem, in many cases fatal. Please refer back to Tsingi's "letting people die" comment. No medical system is perfect, but from my vantage point the American system is pretty messed up.

Just to show my own little pet peeve with TIOBE, it does a terrible job of handling ColdFusion. It looks for "CFML", which basically nobody uses when describing the language. Stackoverflow.com doesn't even have a CFML tag. However, if you add up the ColdFusion-related tags, you get:

Unanswered: 417 / 3,712 = 11.23%

TIOBE puts Lisp as #13, but "CFML" as somewhere between 51 and 100. If you go strictly by Stackoverflow.com questions (which I don't recommend either), ColdFusion is more than twice as popular as Lisp.

Yeah, it was a pretty myopic decision to choose to use C$ as their currency denominator, considering it's already used by that giant country to the north of them.

ColdFusion (it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since 1998) has had parameterized SQL commands for a decade. The problem is that there is still a high percentage of ColdFusion developers who are not educated enough to know what they are or why they should use them.

CFML is such an easy language to program in that it encourages people who have not taken the time to learn the appropriate software engineering basics. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, really. Also, there's still a lot of 10+ year old ColdFusion code out there that hasn't been touched in a long time because it "still works", except, of course, that it doesn't, as we can see from this example.

The first computer I ever used was a BBC Micro. It was around 1986 in a small private boarding school in the middle of the bush in Zambia. We were over an hour's drive from the nearest telephone. The school got one or two of these computers just before I left, and somehow they got me hooked on computers.

The only command I still remember was that you had to type "CHAIN" to run something. I've been curiours about that command ever since, but a quick Google search leads me to believe that it "chained" the LOAD and RUN commands together.

Nowhere did I suggest anything even remotely approaching "hurling oneself down a mountain". You'll see that I specifically excluded downhill skiing. Tobogganing can be as tame as going down a 1 metre tall hill with your toddler. I have child backpacks for hiking and plan to get a pulk for pulling kids behind me while (cross-country) skiing this winter. Most cities and towns where it's cold enough have well-lit indoor and/or outdoor skating rinks.

Far be it from me to tell you how to raise your children (really, I hate that), but my kids love all these activities. The trick is to do them in a way that's age-appropriate, fun, and safe. If you fundamentally don't WANT to go outside when it's dark and cold, fair enough. But then it's "I don't want to go out", rather than any of the other reasons you've given. The flip side of that is that if you really DO want to go out (I do), there's usually a safe and fun way to do it.