Laptops, like most other hardware has it's quality rise and fall. One year Dell is good, the next year it's Asus, and so on and so on. I used to be a big fan of the Dell Latitude D630C laptop with a business class extended warranty, oops it fell out of the back of the truck and put a big crack in the LCD while i was unloading luggage at the airport, no problem sir, we'll get that fixed right away are there any other items on the laptop that are cracked / broken / missing screws, etc. Things change over time, a company that gives great support today, might be absolute shit in a years time due to budget cuts, etc.

Yes, this, however should Ebola ever mutate into an airborne variant, watch them freak out :)

One could say this, one could also say that American mass market programming a) just appeals to the lowest common denominator (reality crap, game shows, manipulated news programs, etc etc) b) is so overpowering and invasive that it's like the kudzu of the media world.

The US has a much larger budget for the production of TV shows, music, etc, that a country with a population that is only slightly more than 10% of yours (35.3M vs 317M) just plain and simply can't compete, so we know this and have simply enabled laws to protect our culture in that regard. Imagine what a movie like Avatar would look like if instead of of a budget of $237M it had been created with a budget of $23.7M (please note, I'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not it was a good movie overall, but it had pretty damn good special effects). The difference would have been night and day, lesser known actors of probably lesser caliber (Sigourny Weaver earned $8M on her own for her role, with a budget of just $23.7M no way would they have gotten her), much poorer special effects (think the Scorpion King in the Mummy 2 and how bad he looked), etc etc.

Just because we tend to consume more US culture, art, music, etc than our own, in no way means ours sucks, just yours is more shiny.

Hanging chads were again the result of a solution to a problem that didn't exist, Hole punch vs pencil

Treat it like jury duty, randomly pick 100000 people nationwide who are required by law to show their faces, or grab a bunch of inmates, many of them are already doing hard labor for next to no pay, a day in the polling station might seem like a tropical vacation ;)

Shaw has 2 major locations in Calgary, the only people effected are those that use the downtown site

Warehouse 13 is ok, as is Alpha's, but you are right, their programming has decended into the realms of WTF!

Unfortunately, the proposed law you're discussing was from before our last election (elections kill any bills on the table). There is a new bill now, Bill C-32, which has some good points, but unfortunately, they are massively outweighed by the bad points, and because we now have a majority government, unless something completely unexpected happens, it will be law whenever they get around to it as the opposition can't simply block it, they can only delay it.

You can watch pretty much whatever you want, except Game of Thrones ;)

BTW, would you be willing to pay a few cents to read a book that you own to your kids before bed? IT'S THE SAME DAMN THING!

Incase you don't realize, next to none of this money will go to the artists. This is the Copyright Board of Canada doing this, the same group of people that demand huge amounts of $$$ from colleges and universitys in Canada because a student MIGHT want to photocopy an article from a book so they can do a report. Their mandate according to their website
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The Board is an economic regulatory body empowered to establish, either mandatorily or at the request of an interested party, the royalties to be paid for the use of copyrighted works, when the administration of such copyright is entrusted to a collective-administration society. The Board also has the right to supervise agreements between users and licensing bodies and issues licences when the copyright owner cannot be located.
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So even if they don't know who the owner of something is or can't reach them (ie they're work in the journal / book / magazine / etc was anonymous), they're still going to charge you. Guess who gets that money, not the artist / creator.

Grab the base google app for iPhone, it has goggles built into it

hmm, not sure why that's posting as AC