And since the white season can take up to 6 months, not only are people experienced with driving in such conditions, but they are also choosing their vehicles according to their winter driving experience and skills.

We'd like to think so, but I live next to a stretch of highway 401 that's been shut down about 3-4 times this week due to major accidents. There was a 70-ish vehicle pileup yesterday, and a 15-20 vehicle pileup Monday. I've driven past something like 15 vehicles that went off the road the few times I've went out since Monday, and there's many more tracks in the snowbanks and ditches where someone spun off and got hauled out.

The roads haven't been great, but you can generally get around okay if you aren't doing anything stupid and keep speeds reasonable (which, actually, isn't much below the speed limit), and be aware of the crazy amounts of blowing snow.

But people are doing stupid, stupid shit, getting into accidents, and I'm pretty sure most of them are Canadians.

If Amazon wants a 'Kindle Couch', $300 is silly high, given the very very strong odds that it would be a screenless or screen-reduced variant on a relatively cheap mobile design.

How about $300 for a Kindle tablet integrated with a decent HDMI media dock? Functionally, something like a Nexus 7 plus charging dock and a Chromecast (which, coincidentally, totals about as close to $300 as my caffeine deprived brain wants to count at the moment), but with Amazon integration and maybe a little more hardware polish.

Fair enough. Although I'd say that offering "root access" is a tremendous understatement in the context of a complete operating system replacement.

Of course, most Cyanogenmod installations currently exist on rooted phones...

Yes.

It's not clear to me what your point is. Are you suggesting something about root (which I generally don't use on my devices), or about having to install CM in order to get some kind of permissions controls?

the next step is that applications start crashing when you revoke their permissions, or the authors simply refuse to let them run.

A good sandbox makes it hard or impossible to find the sides of the box.

The way things are implemented by Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard, the application gets an empty data set and has no way to know if the permissions have been revoked. In the context of text messages, it might not even be able to tell the difference between having permissions revoked, being on a tablet without SMS, and being on a phone that's never received a text.

And then they look at you as if you were retarded.

... and yet, it's far better than saying "I've been thinking of going into politics".

Are they weird because they've never met bacon, or are they weird because they don't like bacon?

Most likely because they don't like bacon enough, but trying to understand the motives of anti-bacon people is futile. I mean, can you believe that there are people who don't eat bacon simply because they heard that some dude in the sky tells them they're not allowed to eat it? Madness. And don't even get me started on vegetarians and other health nuts...

Have they never met bacon?

Which part of "People are weird. Really, really weird." did you miss?

How does that compare to slurping some soylent ?

People are weird. Really, really weird.

I've known people who consider eating little more than a chore of cramming calories into their gut, and would probably go for something like this at least two meals of the day.

I've also known people who prefer heavily processed foods because of a sense that there's more consistent quality control. Seriously. One guy flat out said he preferred to go to McDonalds where he knew the staff couldn't mess with his burger than eat the shawarma the guy at the Lebanese restaurant a few doors down makes every day, because "who knows what he might be doing behind that counter? What if he's not washing his hands?"

I'm quite sure the larger contributing factor to the flu spreading is people going to work while sick, not a suppressed fever.

They aren't necessarily unrelated. If you can't suppress symptoms enough to be functional, going to work while sick is a lot more difficult. I'd hope the study accounted for that effect.

Anyone who resorts to violence over somebody who is simply being annoying...

That's not the point.

The point is that if you have behaviour that is known to pretty near universally annoy the shit out of people, and that behaviour isn't a consequence of some kind of necessity (i.e. the reason we cut crying babies a lot of slack), and you combine that behaviour with a pile of stressed out people in an enclosed, unescapable environment for a few hours, then you're inevitably going to have some nasty situations.

No, that doesn't excuse people resorting to violence, but so what?

The fundamental goal of flight safety is to take reasonable steps to prevent problems from happening in the first place. I'd like to think that something like this is a no-brainer for the airlines, but I'm not entirely sure I trust them not to fuck it up somehow for reasons involving money (i.e. "yeah, you can talk on your phone, but you'll have to use our premium wi-fi calling service at $x/minute").

Should the FCC deal with BO as well?

I said FAA, not FCC.

But yeah, you could also just let the airlines deal with it. I don't know how much I trust them to get it right, though.

AFAIK they don't allow weapons on planes, so I doubt that will be a real problem.

They don't allow most lethal weapons on planes. Plenty of other weapons are available. Fists, feet, luggage straps, pens, etc.

We don't need the FCC legislating cell phone use in movie theaters and cell phone use in planes can be dealt with the same way

Well... I'd like to think the FAA should become involved. Allowing behaviour which is pretty much guaranteed to piss of passengers and crews to the point of pulling out weapons (i.e. that shooting in a Florida theater the other day over texting) should be considered a flight safety issue and should be regulated by air safety authorities.

Yeah, here in NE Ohio we're expecting lows about the same as we saw in 1994, while this is an unusual cold pattern it's not like it's unprecedented.

Here in eastern Ontario, we're expecting lows roughly the same as the highs we saw last week. If it weren't for all the #$^*@! ice it'd actually be a nice week.