Its like someone has a cron job that runs this every year that changes the year and adds a different reasons !! It's such old slashdot I start imaging a beowolf cluster running the job...

Its cheap and easy to get canada roaming added to you plan for a bit. I think it was 10 total per month when I did it two yrs ago. Worked like a charm.

Airlines long ago eliminated commissions for in-person travel agents because they had the market power and how were 1000's of mom and pop agents going to fight the airlines? Fearing dis-intermediation, the airlines continued to pay Expedia / Orbitz and the reservations systems such as Worldspan commission for deal flow but now the airlines have the market power with their own sites.

Its a hard dose of reality for the online sites, who don't offer much functionality above what you can get on Southwest.com. My mom is a travel agent- and while she is computer challenged she can run command line commands into Worldspan faster than I can login to Orbitz. I've never understood why someone would spend hours online finding a site when a travel agent can do it all for you for almost nothing. My mother selected 3 of the 4 hotels for my honeymoon, the other coming from the NY times travel section. Guess which one was the dump with paper thin walls and crappy beds?

This should make the band We Were Promised Jetpacks stop complaining.....

I have flirted with Linux for years.. Downloading it, installing it and hoping to use it. But alas, it NEVER worked (of course, I was too lazy/busy to RTFM). Compiling the kernel to get wifi was insane.

After my XP box groaned to a crawl, it was time to buy a new box (wife was always complaining about slow, dropped wifi, etc). Since I was struggling to find an XP box, I decided to make the jump to Ubuntu-- and I'll never look back.

Wifi card JUST INSTALLED. Printer popped up after plugging in and said it was "ready". Ubuntu is fast, works mostly flawlessly (people pine like XP is awesome-- its not without its problems). For programs that won't work in linux (Fujitsu snapscan) I open a virtual box and run Vista (a daily confirmation of my decision).

Lastly, besides learning curve for "where things are" my wife (a walking EMF pulse) barely notices the "computer" anymore-- it just works and she can do what she has too----