There is an actual Canadian Pirate Party http://www.pirateparty.ca/ And personally, i think they could make a huge statement in Canadian politics, with enough support.

Well, instead of worrying about whether we should let current society collapse, we should start investing time and effort into coming up with ways to create sustainable off-world colonies. Of course, first we would have to actually have the technology to get back into space...

Without a majority government, the our parliament grinds to a shuddering halt, and zero decisions are actually made. Hell, wem can barely pass a federal budget without the threat of a government collapse during a minority.

It depends on the school and the program. I attend the SAIT up in Calgary, and we use laptops every single day in class. I'm taking Software Development, and it's invaluable for us to have access to personal computers at any time of the day. The school also made it clear to us at the beginning of the course that since we were paying for the program, we should use the laptops to stay on task, and most of us do. We usually talk to the couple of people who end up being distracting to the rest of the class, and this system tends to work more often than not. I'm fairly positive the course could not work the way it does now without letting us have access to our own laptops. This course has a 98% employment rate, and a 95% pass rate as of last year, so it seems to be working for them too.

Personally, my program wouldn't work nearly as well without the use of laptops. I'm currently taking Software Development at the South Alberta Institute of Technology, and we make regularly use of laptops in almost every single class. Of course, only "e-learning" courses are supplied with school laptops, but we were told at the beginning of the course that we were expected to us the laptops professionally. This way, we have all of our code handy all of the time, so we don't have to worry about making copies and carrying all of our school work around with us on a flash drive. Some people do abuse their laptops, with gaming an internet browsing happening almost everyday, but when something is important, most people in my program actually respect the work, since they are paying to attend the class.

If you hang out with the right kind of people, everything is a game.