Back when CPU speed was in MHz and not GHz I purchased an ABit BP6 dual socket motherboard and a couple of 300 MHz Celeron CPUs. Those particular ones were just fine to overclock to 450 MHz. So I had a 900 MHz dual CPU machine running Linux back when most were running Windows95 on a single CPU machine at less then 500 MHz. Didn't take long before the advances in hardware caught up and I replaced it. But it was fun to build and tinker with and was still being used by my kids 10 years later.

When I code at night (away from my day job) a beer an hour is what I use to control the amount of code I write. Not enough to alter my thinking or dexterity, but after about 4-5 hours I'm either getting too tired from the beer (going to bed) or I've had enough to want to stop coding and focus more on the drinking. I use to drink coffee, stay up for hours and code but then I was no good the next day. This way I can get some work done but it also lets me have some fun (or a good nights sleep).

I was in a boardroom on the 6th (top) floor of our building for a 1:30 pm meeting and just as we're getting underway the table and chairs were shaking. Was pretty heavy for about 20 seconds and then faded off over the next minute. We're a lot of government buildings so the policy is to evacuate. We actually tried to continue our meeting but then they finally got to our floor to check it out they found us and told us to leave. As you can guess, no more work is really being done today. It's pretty exciting for us as we don't get this here.
One interesting note, when I did go outside most everyone was on their cell phone and several were stating that they couldn't get service. I would guess because of the increase in volume at that time.

A centralised gov't database? There is no centralised database in the gov't. Every department has their own and to get them to share data is a challenge.

Then think of the amount of data that would be collected. How many TerraBytes would be collected in just one week. How are you going to structure it and then try and do any kind of data mining. Currently just between Canada & the US there are millions of commercial crossings and tens of thousands of traveler crossings per day. The border agencies (CBSA & CBP) need to validate and screen these passages. Already a tonne of data to process. I can't imagine adding every other type of movement and transaction to that. Thinking of the scale and volume of data I just don't think the current infrastructure of government agencies can do this.

And as for the benefit of EDL, it's a volunteer (you have to want to sign up for it) program where extra screening is performed to validate citizenship. This involves the collection of extra data beyond that of the regular driver's license. Now suppose you want to keep that data only in Canada, how do you propose to perform real time (when the car is at the booth) secure lookup into the Canadian database? The CBSA doesn't have this data from what I read, it is the province. Are the US CBP going to be willing to hit each province's database to retrieve info (probably a photo & basic tombstone data). Expensive and complex (different protocols, databases, etc.) and I can't see a transaction like that happening in fewer then 10 seconds. That's increasing the border wait times which are already slow. This is a pilot program (when you read a select group of 500) so at least give it a try and see if it works. The privacy commission is there to make sure our rights are protected, put a little faith / trust that they may get it right.