I'm a US citizen that moved to Toronto because I loved the city. What I found is that the tech jobs just don't pay there, while the city is rapidly increasing in price. My understanding is Vancouver isn't much different. I took a pay cut to move there, and ultimately left for a Seattle-based job. After the exchange rate, my salary in Seattle is double that of Toronto - while the cost of living isn't that much more. I talked to many tech people in Toronto, and never found someone who was making 6 figures Canadian even.

I would love to move back to Toronto, but the low salaries, high cost of living, and poor benefits (most companies only wanted to offer 2 weeks of vacation time, and my company didn't even offer retirement plans) made it a poor financial decision for me. If Canada wants to stop the brain drain, they need to fix the salary problem.

That means he still has to pay income tax on $200,000

You say that they run a dating site targeting HIV+ individuals like it's a bad thing. The reality is that the majority of HIV- people in the world are woefully under-educated about HIV and the ways it does (and does not) spread. This causes many HIV- people to refuse to date HIV+ people. In turn, many HIV+ people prefer to date other HIV+ people as they know their date won't reject them due to their serostatus.
Regarding incompetence, it's not always that way. Certainly in many cases it is, but I have a friend that was in a monogamous relationship with one person. That person cheated on him, contracted HIV, and passed it along to him. Please explain how my friend got HIV through his incompetence.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I frequent a local scrapyard (electronic/industrial, not car) and in their mind, everything they get is just being shredder and recycled. I come in sometimes, buy stuff, and sell it on eBay/craigslist. I've bought thousands and thousands of dollars worth of computers, LCD monitors, etc, literally for a few cents a pound.

The amount of stuff (LCD monitors and TVs in particular) I've seen there that almost certainly worked when they got it, but they literally just threw it into a bin and cracked the screen, is insane.

My insurance covers the cost completely, except for a small co-pay. Gilead (the maker of Truvada, the pill for PrEP) has a copay assistance card, available at https://start.truvada.com/indi... which covers my co-pay, so the only cost to me is my doctor's copay when I get labwork done. If you don't have insurance, Gilead has an assistance program also available, though I don't know the details of that.

My understanding is that because PrEP is approved by the CDC as preventative, insurance companies have to cover it.

It already is. It has been approved by the CDC since May, 2014 for about a year as a preventive (for HIV) drug. I've actually been on it for about a year (I'm in the US).

Henry Ford may not have, but Tesla started by building a supercar

Trademarks are per-industry. I could freely sell Apple toilet paper, Microsoft cookies, Sony faucets, etc - without the permission of the companies we typically associate with those brands.

And how do you suggest I pick the time to set my timer to, given that drying time is variable when I use the dryness sensor of my dryer.

If you don't want to pay for it, buy a cheap dryer. I'd rather have a high-end one.

Disagreed - I DO want an intelligent dryer. That's not to say I want a heavy-weight OS or the ability to browse the internet on it, but my dryer is in my basement and I can't hear the buzzer. I DO want my smartphone to notify me when the cycle is done so I can go get the clothes. Nerd-things, like being able to see current temp/humidity inside would be a bonus, but just to know when it's done would be a huge selling point.

Disclaimer: I haven't shopped for a dryer in a few years - perhaps this exists now. It didn't when I last looked.

I work for a small company that manufactures things. We have had the same product build by 3 different Contract Manufacturers (CMs) - 1 in the US, 1 in India, 1 in China.

India CM:
Downright horrible. Build quality was horrible. Constantly missed deadlines and turned small problems (that were known ahead of time) into crisis by not telling us until it was too late

US CM:
"OK" - better than the India CM, but still had manufacturing issues. Most expensive

China CM:
Very good - cheapest and best quality

We are a US based company, FWIW. The language and time barriers can be challenging, but we have gotten the best pricing and build quality out of China.

I work for a company that does this for one of our products (not our main product, but a mobile app) simply because the app would otherwise be unprofitable. We typically sell the app or $3, and this app is to control an external device (not ours), so can require some configuration of the customer's environment. It's not something simple like a game, but it actually interacts with other things on the customer's network.

It's not a great situation, but there's just no way to support the users that need help setting up port forwarding on their router, re-configuring AV software, etc, on a $3 app. If we provided regular 1:1 support on a $3 app, it wouldn't make business sense for us to sell the app. If we raised the price to something like $20, I'd bet no one would buy it and we would STILL have many customers that want their hand held through everything.

Funny...you think tech companies drug test. I worked for MS for 5 years - I *NEVER* heard of an FTE there getting a drug test, even on hire. I never took one. I've since left and work for another tech company. Most of the owners (it's a ~30 person company) know I smoke, and I've smoked with some of them. I have friends at Apple, Google, and Amazon. Again, no drug tests.

Tech companies basically can't drug test - they would have to fire 1/2 of their employees.

Coreboot still applies microcode "binary blobs" from CPU vendors, so this still isn't truly free - http://www.coreboot.org/FAQ#Is_coreboot_applying_x86_microcode_patches.3F

I own an Asus WinRT tablet - I actually love the tablet software, but hate the hardware. I say this as a person that owns multiple other tablets (2 Android tablets, a HP Touchpad, and brought but returned an iPad) WinRT is "enough" Windows to be useful that I can use it in place of a laptop in a pinch, but still enough tablet. My beef is the Asus hardware sucks, such as:
Poor design (dock connector digs into my hand, needs adapter for USB port, etc)
Poor reliability (3 warranty repair trips, including one time it didn't even work when it came back)
Poor support (Warranty turnaround time slow, have to provide my own box/pay for shipping, etc)

I very much like Windows RT, but hate the Asus tablet and wish I bought an MS Surface. Asus, you're the problem on this one, not MS.