Here in Canada, you have to be a licensed P.Eng to call yourself a software engineer. Even though I have an MSc from an EECS program, I would have to satisfy all the academic requirements of an undergrad engineer, work as a supervised engineer-in-training for between 2-4 years and pass a professional practice exam to qualify.

No. It looks like a wasteland of Walmart parking lots and awfully designed suburban tract housing. We should fix that.

US Immigration has facilities and staff in major Canadian airports. Passengers flying to the USA pass through border inspection in Canada, which allows the flight to be treated as domestic flight when it arrives in the US -- you just walk off the plane as if you arrived from Newark or San Jose without the need for immigration staff. It makes sense because there are only a dozen or so key airports in Canada with flights to hundreds of US destinations. It's also a lot cheaper to deny entry into the country before a passenger sets foot on US soil.

Honestly, don't bother. Technology changes so quickly that anything you install now will look daft in 3 years, let alone a decade. My 5-year old house has hard wired Ethernet running into every room, but it simply isn't used because everything has wifi. Ditto for power drops - the family tends to wander around the house with tablets or notebooks, so we don't need a handful of extra plug ins for printers, massive monitors, and whirring server behemoths. And thank god we didn't install a flat screen monitor or two anywhere, because we'd be digging under-spec'd old plasma screens out of the wall and trying to figure out how to install something a bit larger.

From the source of that post [9to5mac.com]: "We created the likely pricing matrix for the smaller iPad shown above."

In other words, it's just a wild guess by a blogger to attract page views for his site. Everyone keeps repeating it as if it's an official document.

A quick glance at Apple's pricing shows that they strongly prefer prices that end in 49 or 99 for the iPod and iPad lines (the cellular equipped iPad is an exception). I'd expect to see an 8GB iPad Mini at $249 or $299, but it won't be a big seller. In fact, Apple may severely constrain supply to push buyers to a more profitable price point, while the media loudly touts "A breakthrough $249 iPad" that is almost impossible to get. Most buyers will opt to spend another $100 for an extra $10 worth of flash memory, especially if it's available for immediate purchase.

And, unlike this retarded tablet that autocorrects my slimy screen taps into a weird ESL interpretation of what I meant to write, the damn thing actually has a keyboard.

Unlike previous iterations of ChromeOS, this version allows at least a semblance of being able to work offline - there's an offline email client and you can use Google Docs without an internet connection. That said, I'm not sure it matters much because I suspect that very few typical users actually work offline much. Access to the web, email and social media pretty well requires a connection.

The really cool think here is that we're seeing the impact of Moore's Law in new direction. ARM-based hardware in its various guises (cheap notebooks, tablets and smartphones) has ushered in a wave of inexpensive machines that has been made possible by the availability of incredibly cheap chipsets that are just good enough for the task at hand at prices that are absolutely astounding (I remember carrying a work-issued laptop in 1996 that cost almost $3,000).

Morten et al recently examined DNA in 158 bone fossils and determined the half-life of DNA to be 521 years in their sample. Even if Martian DNA functioned in the same manner, the idea that environmental conditions on Mars were suitable to sustain life as late as the year 1491 is ludicrous. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10/05/rspb.2012.1745.abstract?sid=abb89d94-00f1-431b-8863-c62996e35478

When your competitor has OWNED the market for several years, you don't MATCH their price, you blow it away.

You mean the way Apple blew away Nokia's pricing model by introducing a single handset that cost more than their most expensive model? ;)

I think you mean cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. He was the dude who passed along stuff he heard from the Archangel Gabriel, who was Allah's PR guy.

My 10 year old loves The Scratch programming environment from the MIT Media Lab. It's free from http://scratch.mit.edu/ -- there's an online community that lets kids post their projects, and my kid was highly motivated to enter and win several little community competitions. The graphical coding interface is easy to tweak and allows clever kids to push things a bit more than you might expect. One essential aspect of the experience is that you can download the source scripts for the projects, which is a fantastic way to speed learning (one of my favorite ways to improve my code is to see how others tackle similar problems).

Take a look at this chart of the political opinions expressed by world leaders: http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/internationalchart.png

Hugo Chavez is left wing. The Dali Lama is left wing. Romney and Obama? On the broad global stage, they're both sharply right wing. The fact that their campaigns have you believing they're worlds apart is simply not reflected in their actual policies and rhetoric.

The Kobo Arc looks decent for $199. It's built on Android 4.0x, has a 1280x800 IPS display and 1.5GHz A9 processor.

The idea of giving a child a five cent balloon that's filled with regular old air has obviously escaped you. They're far more fun than the helium-filled variety because they don't just soar to the roof if you let go and you can play games with them. Nice, atheistic physics games.

Try the Ainol Novo 7 Aurora II (with IPS display and 16GB flash). You should be able to find it in the $110-$120 range with (slow) free shipping at an online site.