It sounds like I dodged a bullet 3 days ago by switching to MSE. AVG had nagged me too much to upgrade my home PCs, including a 64-bit Win7 PC.

I hadn't played FPS games for quite a few years but I credit the skills they developed for successfully navigating autoroute 40 in Montreal. Noticing relevant signs while dodging cars just a half meter away got my family through alive. No achievements awarded (except being alive and not trading paint), but autoroute 40 is definitely the expert level, compared to easy level aka autoroute 20. I'm an experienced Toronto driver, but things are different enough in Montreal to make you have to fall back to skill sets learned in twitch fests. No offense to Montreal drivers; I'm sure if one is familiar with the driving culture it all makes sense, but, damn, cut the folks with the Ontario plates some slack :)

Fifth Element, Zorg

I imagine there has been no decent money in it for at least 10 years. The end user cost of phone and data service is probably not far above the production cost, which means these services are mere commodities, like gasoline. How many different gas companies do we need when they all sell the same thing for the same price and make the same tiny profit? When prices for data services change I'm sure it's because the production cost has changed, like gas, and not because of "gouging". Data and phone access services are so marginally profitable for the big companies that they don't even compete on customer service (again, like gas stations :). The real profit is in those things that cost comparatively little to produce, like text messaging and voice mail (or ring tones, according to Chris Rock :). This will probably be the final stage of consolidation of the data access service industry in Canada.

Yes, the infrastructure was built partially with public money through subsidies. Does that mean we, the people are forever and always entitled to do what we want with it? If that was the plan then the government should have built it. If you let a private company (i.e. not government run) build something, sorry, it's the company's property. I can get a tax break to put solar panels on my house. Do I owe you some of my electricity? No. You get a side benefit, which is (theoretically) cleaner air. We've reaped the benefit of the subsidy in that we have phone lines just about everywhere, which is something given the vast sparely populated areas of this country. (I haven't visited all of Canada so I don't know if this is literally true. There are probably people in northern communities still waiting for phone service.)

If I'm right that data and voice service is totally commoditized then the wholesale resellers aren't necessary. They either currently resell service at a price higher than it needs to be, or the wholesale price is artificially low to ensure are profitable. I'm not in favor of paying more than I need to, and I'm not in favor of things that distort prices. At this moment in 2009 I think this is a good decision.

Since hardware items seem acceptable... the pop and snack vending machines at my university accepted our meal plan cards, which worked like debit cards. The pop was all the same price so you swiped your card, money was debitted, you made your selection. No big deal. But the vending machines, which were the rotating-coil-full-of-things type, had items of varying cost. So the sequence went 1. swipe card 2. make selection 3. money gets debitted. If you interrupted the machine before it sent off the debit transaction by, say, unplugging it just as the coil started to turn, it would loose the transaction. But when you plugged it back in it would finish turning the coil and you'd get free chocolate. We weren't greedy and would just take a few items each a couple of times a week from one of the machines. Then some other fool cleaned one out and made what probably looked like an accounting error an obvious bug. They stopped allowing meal cards in snack machines after that.