It is utterly stupid that the way a person is treated is based upon the location in which their mother pushed them through the birth canal and into the world. We give lip service to freedom, democracy and the right to achieve lofty goals... as long as an individual is "American," "Canadian," "Swiss" and so on. If not, we push ethics aside and condone surveillance, drone attacks, assassinations, invasions and all manner of nastiness -- like a very large pack of wolves.

Har. Wouldn't Monkey model be designated T-72-O? Monkey in Russian is . ;)

... and the tab plans offered by Koodo and Virgin Canada are the worst in the business. They're advertised as simple and contract free, but the reality is that if you're on a $39/month plan, it will take 38 months for you to pay off your subsidy on Koodo. It'll take twice as long if you sign up for a similarly priced plan with a $300 Virgin Gold Plan tab. Both of these strategies will be illegal after December 2nd in Canada, because they're a horrible deal for consumers. Whoever came up with the 10% paydowns and 10% discount was absolutely brilliant. Instead of offering $10 to $15 per month in subsidies, the telcos were putting a positive spin on giving you $3.90.

If you re-examine the Cuban Missile Crisis and then Vietnam, I would humbly suggest that -- rightly or wrongly -- the USA was considered by many to be "the unstable whackjob with their finger on the button" in the 1960s.

He died on March 5, which is a tad over 13 weeks ago. It seems that your news feed is also running a few months behind. ;)

The halving-thickness of lead is approximately 1 cm. That is, it will block 50% of gamma radiation. A nice 10 cm lead plate will reduce your exposure to 1/1024th the original. Now let's try that with water, which has a halving-thickness of 18 cm. You'd need 180 cm of water to afford the same protection. I'll leave it to you to calculate the volume required to shield your craft. Once you've figured out how many thousands of liters are required, calculate the cost of lofting it into geosynchronous transfer orbit -- say $18,000 per kg. Once you've spent the equivalent of Denmark's GDP to launch your swimming pool, you'll have a few technical difficulties to resolve because space is really, really cold and water has a nasty habit of expanding when frozen. By about 9%, in fact. So either you have to keep your liquid shield from freezing and bursting the ship's hull, or you have to come up with extremely clever expansion tanks that ensure an even layer of ice around your vessel.

They closed the Kitsilano Coast Guard station which provided coverage on Vancouver harbour and English Bay, handling a few hundred distress calls a year. The nearest active station is Sea Island, which has slowed response by about half an hour. Lives will eventually be lost because of the closure of this "downtown" coast guard station.

You seem a bit confused. Netflix decides what platforms they wish to support and are responsible for writing their own apps. They chose not to support the Playbook because the installed user base was extremely small compared to the Android and iOS ecosystems, not because RIM was "clueless." I suppose RIM could have paid a number of key developers (Instagram, Netflix, Skype) to release apps for the platform, but that sets a dangerous precedent and probably wouldn't have helped the product's sales. It's interesting to note that both Skype and Instagram are already supported by the new Blackberry BB10 phones.

Microsoft was recently charging OEMs $30 for Windows 8 and office on sub-10.8" touchscreen machines, and there were rumors of $20 licenses for touchscreen notebooks with 11.6" and smaller screens. However, $20 is a significant cost when you're trying to retail an inexpensive machine. It could force manufacturers to offer $279 windows machines with the same hardware specs as $199 android units.

Niggardly is an adjective meaning "stingy" or "cheap." It has no racial connotations.

In Canada, Kobo has a much higher profile because their ereaders and tablets are marketed by Chapters Indigo, a major brick and mortar book chain. Kindle has made limited inroads here, and B&N doesnt have a physical presence to sell Nooks. The Kobo Arc tablet starts at $175 and is actually quite good (got my wife one for Christmas). The Kobo Glo and Kobo Mini ereaders were popular last Christmas, too. I don't think the company bought coverage, as others here suggest. I think they're just making an aggressive play to improve their ereaders for this fall.

I still receive the paper version of IEEE Spectrum. As a kid, I used to love reading Popular Science and Omni in the school library. My parents subscribed to a variety of magazines, but I didn't follow in their footsteps primarily because I lived in Canada, and subscriptions to American magazines cost more than twice as much as in the US. The discrepancy still exists today. Pop Sci costs $12/year in the US and $26 in Canada. The logical part of me understands that Canada doesn't have a heavily subsidized magazine postage rate, but the emotional side just gets angry when asked to pay twice as much for exactly the same product. That said, if prices were the same, I suspect I'd have let my subscription lapse years ago, anyway. Even though a well researched paper article is fun to read, nothing beats the immediacy of the web.

Brake is in the middle. The clutch is on the left. Otherwise you were sold an inferior vehicle.

Or perhaps I'm driving a Ford Model T. They sold millions of them with a brake on the right, reverse pedal in the middle, and the clutch on the left. The throttle lever is on the steering wheel.

I spent a few years as a contributing editor and translator for Berlin-based smallformat (the English version of schmalfilm). It was extremely sad to see how the European movie camera manufacturers had been completely unable to competitively shift manufacturing to Asia when the electronic revolution started to take hold in the early 1980s - we basically lost AGFA (Germany) Eumig (Austria), Beaulieu (France) and even the once-might Bolex SA ended up as little more than a repair shop occupying a small part of their old office tower. Here's an article about a melancholy visit to Bolex in early 2005 (originally in German): http://schmalfilm-shop.schiele-schoen.de/115/8170/smf2050748/WHERE_THE_BOSS_OPENS_THE_DOOR.html

... And China's inflation rate is climbing, with food costs up about 6% since last year. Much as it's nice to tout blistering GDP growth, it carries significant inflationary risk. The more important question: "Can or should governments aim for perpetual economic growth?"