“We uh, we have uh recently switched to drinking water bottles out of uh, water out of uh, when we have water bottles out of uh plastic, sorry, away from plastic towards paper umm, like drink box water bottles sort of things,” -Justin Trudeau

I'm a fan of jeejah, the term used by Neal Stephenson in Anathem.

In anticipation of the release of part 2, I'm re-reading Harbinger by Ian McKinley

Amazon link

Ya, it's a self published fantasy book. But it's not your run of the mill high fantasy. The author calls it "fantastic realism" where it is a fantasy world, but there isn't some stupid powerful magic to save the day.

I live in the South near the U.S border in a relatively small community. Recently we were told that we are getting fibre. This is good for the 4,000 people who live IN the community but yet less than 0.5mi down the road from where I live the only viable option is Satellite or some other form of P2P connection. Infrastructure could easily push to these areas but yet they chose not to and leave a chunk of people unable to get any sort of decent connection. No DSL, Cable, or fibre. Heck I can get faster speeds on my LTE device than my friend down the road gets on his crappy satellite connection (and I get more Gigs too). There were attempts to lay fibre up north in Canada but teams gave up and contracts expire due to expense, brutal working conditions, and narrow time frames to work in. I can't imagine its easy to push fibre through permafrost or muskeg. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I think the superpower reference is based the volume of recoverable oil in Canada. In particular the bitumen in the oil sands, but also conventional oil and natural gas elsewhere on the prairies and off Newfoundland.

Throw in the existing hydroelectric, and potential for a lot more.

We won't talk about all the coal. Coal is bad... m'kay? :)

Shouldn't we do a more thorough job of checking the place out for life, before we start painting the landscape with our most powerful weapons?

We should have waited.
~Saxifrage Russel

In my city, we have a community group that takes hand-me-down computers from corporate and government sources, refurbishes them, then makes them available to schools, other community groups and needing individuals. For example, their computers are in the local senior drop in centres, boys and girls club, and I know a few families who've taken computers home.
Perhaps your city has a similar organization.

I've always thought fuel cells would be a good option for extreme northern and southern communities.

Solar is nice and all, but less useful the further you are from the equator. Whitehorse Yukon (60.7^ north latitude), for example, has a shortest day of less than 6 hours. Also, winter sun is low in the sky passes through a lot of atmosphere to reach your solar panel, so I imagine efficiencies would be sub-optimal.

But if you could use solar all summer to produce hydrogen that your fuel cell could run off all winter, I think you might be on to something. Remember 6 hours of daylight in December means 18 hours of daylight in June (when you're using little if any lights and heat)

I just don't know if the inherent energy costs of splitting water vs energy gained in a fuel cell would let this be a viable idea. And I wouldn't want to think about paying for such a system.

This is next weeks episode of CSI:CYBER - they're looking for opinions to see if they can improve realism. Or maybe its a story board for Scorpion. Either way - mildly entertaining. ;P

Basically, if the ISP's are managing service based on content, they are no longer a neutral service provider ("common carrier" like the post office).
Therefore they can be held responsible for the content they're providing. (Hey, they're TAKING the responsibility, we're not dumping it on them)
Therefore the ISP should be charged with trafficking in child pornography the next time one of their users is charged.

I have no doubt that the lawyers will find a way to get the charges dropped, but it should make for some mighty interesting headlines until they do.

Just kill off the 32 bit version of the o/s and I'll be happy. Seriously, stop it with the 1990's technology, already.

Ya, ya, ya... legacy apps and hardware (drivers). You've got till 2020 when win7 dies to upgrade. Fair-thee-warned.

Even up here in the land of the actually free, police are starting to wear cameras (http://globalnews.ca/news/1093386/canadian-police-forces-looking-to-arm-officers-with-cameras/)

In my opinion, a camera on a cop is nothing more than an accurate, verifiable eye witness. It won't see or hear anything the officer won't already see and hear. Much better than an officer's memory and notebook.

Using google glasses... good. It won't provide any more information than the officer already has access to, or that can't be mined off a conventional camera's video. It may just provide the info quicker, when the officer needs it.

Maybe it's because I'm a white guy with a job. Maybe it's because I'm Canadian. But as a rule, I trust cops. Sure you get the odd bad cop, or a good cop making a mistake or having a bad day, but that happens with all people. Giving the cops a tool that provides information that might help reduce mistakes, and provides evidence both for and against them, to me is a good thing.

I'm not sure that you actually looked at the item I linked to.
Asus T100 "book" is a new product, only been on the market a couple weeks (local retailers here in Alberta got their first shipment last week). Its not the old android transformer that you may be thinking of.
-10" 1388x768. maybe a smidge bigger than the EEE
-full windows 8.1 32bit (not RT), comes with Office 2013 home and student. So it'll run just about anything
-quad core modern atom processor, 2 gig ram, Intel HD graphics. Office, netflix runs just fine. BF4 won't run, but a few games might be playable (look for demo's on youtube, decide for yourself what's playable).
-comes with the keyboard, MicroSD, mini-HDMI, USB3. Ya its a tiny keyboard, but tactile buttons make it quite usable for my small hands to touch type.
-supposed to have an 11 hour battery. Haven't clocked mine yet, but haven't had to recharge during the day yet either.

32gig model cost me $400 (Canadian), so its a bit more than the EEE was back in the day, but still half the money of a Surface Pro (which doesn't come with the keyboard). Home and student goes for $150 around here, so makes it a much easier pill to swallow.

I'm still getting all my tools loaded, but this is my new always handy laptop replacement. Very much what the EEE tried to be.

10" are not gone, just changed.
http://www.asus.com/in-search-of-incredible/us-en/asus-transformer-book-t100/