Stickers are just status symbols. A long time ago we use to smear dyes and goats blood on our chest to show our tribal identification. Less painful and itchy this way.

Times up on this though because recently I got laptop stickers promoting some IBM product to suck up your departments budget. Clear sign the kids will move on as they did when their grandparents friend-ed them on Facebook.

AI won't be taking jobs soon, but automation will. It does't take AI or machine learning to replace the majority of any office work. In my department there are about 1000 people. Most of them are just reading from one screen some data to pass off to another person will copy and paste to the next. With some intelligent scripts automating things I could reduce the department size down to 50 people. My boss usually tells me not to say these things out loud.

I remember more a few classes in high school and college that would have been better off without the teacher. Just leaving us the text book and materials would be better than subjecting us to the uncommunicative twat writing on the blackboard.

I have no doubt that you could save hundreds of billions, possibly trillions over the years if smart agreeable people get together and figure it out. The problem is at some point you need to include others and then the trouble starts. Any organization over with more than 100 people run into this. The more people and departments the worse it gets. I am older now and I have seen smart ideas pass from their creators to the masses of underlings and watch it get mangled beyond belief. Your trillion dollar savings will be eaten up by those underlings a hundred fold.

As opposed to the opposite crime where you spend years in requirements and nothing gets done. I worked in one company where the technology group was tasked at building an system to replace an analyst spreadsheet. They said it would take 1 year and a million dollars, it actually took over 5 years and 30 million dollars and the test output still doesn't work. But they passed rigorous technology audits every year with flying colours! They have lots of documentation.

The average person can speak MUCH faster than they can type (250 - 300WPM), and as long as that statistic rings true

Are you for real? You actually speak 5 words every second? There is no study that claims any such thing. In fact all the studies I have seen show the fastest is thinking and then typing. Speech is the slowest form of communication. And that's not even considering the ease of editing what I type as opposed to speaking into a world processor.

"The problem is, finding a place that has near-constant wind in a known or semi-known direction, near no one who minds and yet still near something so that power can be put back into the grid. Oh, and you have to avoid major fault-lines and tornadoes. A tough set of rules to follow..."

The perfect spot would be lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Lake Erie was designed by God as one long wind tunnel to blast the city of Buffalo with crappy weather for the horrible sin of being Buffalo. But putting turbines in the middle of lakes is a lot more money and the Ontario government didn't want to do that. Better to have them near roads where citizens could see what their tax dollars were being spent on, next to the sign telling them what their tax dollars were spent on.

No, they are protesting their location as well. It's been a hot topic in Ontario for the last few years are rural areas have fought against them being built in their back yard. Everything from noise issues (whirling of blades keeps people up at night) to destroying bird species (it's a massive bird strike zone) has been raised.

The only other way to transfer money out of a country is by converting it to something physical that you can stuff in a suit case and carry across the border. It is a really big deal to get cut out of the SWIFT. Carrying bricks of gold or other tangibles across borders just doesn't work for serious amounts.

Any new system won't be able to connect to the major currency markets or any of the major financial institutions is doomed to fail.

Well said sir! And if I may add to that the constant fetish with these new movie style games. I am tired of games that are a barrage of cut scenes with a few moments of some joystick routine I need to master before I get the next set of cut scenes. If I wanted a movie I would rent one.

You can not convert it back to cash, only for products in a MS store. You can not convert those points into Euro's, or Austrailian dollars on any currency exchange. Your local grocery store is not legally obliged to accept your MS points to pay for purchases as stipulated by government laws determining what legal tender is. Central banks do not recognize nor accept MS points as capital. The bank teller will laugh in your face if you try and deposit MS points.

Face it, it is not a currency and any one who has taken economics 101 knows this. It should also be pointed out that the MS points in the link you provided and not real points yet. They are vouchers to activate for real points. You can not un-activate those points back into cash or a card that can be sold. Once that card is activated you can not un-activate it and sell it for more cash.

Because there are many laws in many nations one what can be called currency. You can't just start a new currency and expect it to interact with the current financial system. There are a sh*t load of other laws and regulations, especially if you are engaging in deposit taking or credit lending. You need the appropriate approvals and must conduct your self like other financial institutions do.

Microsoft can get away with points because it's only a one way exchange. You buy MS points to get stuff on the X-Box. You can not convert MS points back into cash.

Piracy here is definitely a problem as I have many friends constantly encouraging me to get my media it the down and dirty way. I have stubbornly been trying to do it the legit way for a long time now. The latest is in trying to get Dexter season 4 and up. Season 1 to 3 is on Netflix Canada but I will be damned if I can rent seasons 4 and up any where. I solved this by using a VPN proxy to the U.S. and some gift card trickery on Amazon to watch it online. I lied to pay for it instead of pirating it.

There is a crap load of content we can never get because some rights holder here in Canada won't allow it to be shown at all here. That's why we can't get Pandora or Spotify. I've seen Canadian indy musicians have their stuff available on iTunes U.S. long before it's available in the Canadian store.

How long do I put up with this before I become a total pirate? Right now I pay a proxy service to pretend like I am American so I can buy the content. I want to pay and be legit but at some point it's just easier to pirate the stuff.
 

" Canada, as a raw material and energy exporter, needs to allow its currency to be set by the market..."

What the hell are you talking about?!? Canada's currency is a freely floating one and has been for a few decades. It's one of the few countries on the planet that has a completely floating exchange rate. As for natural resources we have a time honored tradition of selling it abroad. The oil sands in Alberta being the latest.

Why don't people look in the history books of computing. If they did they would see that in the before the 80's everything was in "the cloud", except back then they called it servers. They rented these servers and the storage space from IBM, Digital, HP and a few other server providers. The personal computer came a long and data started shifting on to local hard drives and WIntel or Novell LAN servers.

Now they have the problem of trying to maintain every spreadsheet and Access DB sitting on a managers laptop. To solve this they are going back to the future and storing stuff back on servers sold to us by young people who never knew what DASD is. Controls and audits will demand restricted access and rules be put in the cloud for protection just like before. After about 10 years we will all be bitching and complaining about the cloud and praising local storage for it's ease of access and not having our data held hostage by providers. Lather, rinse, repeat.

There is nothing new under the sun people, just move along.