Linux and Mac users are more likely to be OS zealots willing to spend money to prove how much better they are than Windows users. It was pretty clever of them to make it into a competition between OSes, actually. I'm sure that was quite effective to drive sales.

Well...You'd think so, but what ends up happening (as in Canada at the moment) is the government becomes entirely focused on surviving for the next few months and there's little in the way of long term thinking. Our Conservative party has become disturbingly adept at machiavellian political manoeuverings that have kept them in power for an impressive length of time. Unfortunately our main opposition party is so intellectually bankrupt that their platform consists of "elect us and you'll see" and do nothing but go on about the same 3 scandals ad nauseum trying to win short term political points. We're in this hell where the politicians are focused entirely on popping their polling numbers 3 points so they can trigger an election, and nobody is doing anything that the voters actually care about.

It's not an improvement over their current practices. Bell can charge you $100 a gig if they want. You've always been free to buy cheaper service from a competing ISP. Except now Bell is requiring competing ISPs who lease their DSL lines to charge the same rates as Sympatico.

Bell Canada is imposing their caps and pricing scheme on customers of all independent ISPs selling DSL connections. So say an ISP is selling an account with a 200 gig limit for 30 bucks. Now Bell is saying that each ISP must pay them a $21 fee for leasing the DSL connection and a surcharge of $1.25 for every gig of usage above 60 gigs. The numbers are approximate but they're close enough.

Actually that's not true. Canada has a human rights commission that runs tribunals for suspected hate speech. These guys get to set the definition of hate speech and enforce rulings from tribunals that require a significantly lower standard of evidence than normal courts.

In any event, the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms contains a notwithstanding clause that allows laws to be passed that will deny any of the rights in section 2, 7-15 of our charter. That's actually extremely frightening when you read what those are. Theoretically Canada could legally reproduce the holocaust, but we can't take away your right to speak French.

The Canadian "Eh" is equivalent to the American use of "Huh"... So we might say "That's cool, eh?" while you might say "That's cool, huh?".

Canadians don't say aboot, but depending where the person's from, he may abbreviate the vowel sound such that it sounds that way to somebody expecting it to be drawn out more.

The rest of the US delivery systems should just be mothballed so they're not paying to staff and maintain them. I suspect that's pretty much the point. They don't really need to keep around 5500 weapons they'll probably never use.

They need to add a button to Facebook so that if anybody feels like they're going to get the clap, they can push it and immediately generate a medical response.

China doesn't have the capability to attack the US militarily but it can cause a significant amount of damage by attacking the US economy and promoting anarchy amongst the US population. The bonus is the possibility of carrying out this attack anonymously. Once the electrical grid is down, not only does the US economy take a hit but people start rioting and looting. The police and military would crack down on its own population and start fueling rage directed towards the authorities. Instead of everybody coming together against a foreign military, the population would focus their anger against their government and each other. Don't forget that the USSR was brought down by having its economy slowly crushed and having the people turned against the government.

The big mitigating factor of course is that China's own economy and foreign reserves depend on the health of the US economy.

A bad Bitdefender update prevented all Windows binaries from running a few months ago. It would start popping up errors saying all my services were failing and wouldn't launch any applications. I actually formatted and reinstalled my laptop because I thought the whole thing was infected with a virus. What a pain in the ass.

I like how there's this assumption that Google was somehow oblivious to what kind of content was actually posted on youtube. That's just a pretense user-generated content providers maintain in the hopes of getting out of legal trouble. It's like the Pirate bay half-heartedly trying to convince a jury that they just host Linux distributions. If somebody with an IQ of 60 can figure it out how to find pirated content on youtube, then so can the collective executive and legal team at google. The only question is whether there's documentation that proves they actually knew.

Look, if you're running a web site that makes its money from ads, you have to understand the problems with your own business model. You have to understand that people can and will block ads, and factor that in as a risk to your business. If ad revenues are dropping and you have to lay off staff then let me get out my little violin because that happens for a multitude of reasons across the entire business world. Simply find a way to make it work -- find a different way to make money, cut costs, make it difficult to block your ads, etc. The customer/reader is not beholden in any way to keep you in business by behaving the way that you expect them to. If your web site fails, it's because you're a poor business person and not because of the world around you.

Here in Ontario, Canada we must send our children to the closest school in our chosen school board (secular or Catholic). My parents had to fight to send my sister to an English-only school when she wasn't doing well in our designated school, which was French immersion.

Why would a terrorist even have to do that? You can opt for a pat-down search instead. Has security started groping people in their underwear area?

This is Amsterdam we're talking about. My guess is they'd toss any pot they found in the bin with the water bottles. The Americans have drug dogs on the exit ramp of that flight so anybody that gets caught with their pot in Amsterdam should probably be considered lucky.