You'd think that a past candidate that didn't succeed would be flagged by their system and not necessarily called again.

One issue that I think has been missed here is how common (and restrictive) manufacturers warranties are. For many things that are electrical or mechanical, if you attempt even the most rudimentary repair, you void the warranty. Not very helpful if you muck up the repair.

Now get off my lawn!

Is anyone really surprised here? A technically inferior product has become so cool that people are willing to pay a premium price for it. Apple has been making money hand over fist in the cellphone market for years with this strategy. Of course I'm going to get a bunch of people replying with that tired old saw that vinyl has a certain "soul" or "character" to its sound. They are like the people say they like the iPhone because it "just works" but are really too embarrassed to admit they've paid a premium price for the "cutting edge" of yesteryear. Face it, the hiss and crackle and lower fidelity of vinyl was surpassed two decades ago with CDs and the quality just keeps improving with the digital formats of today.

This sounds like the T-1.

How is this a different situation from the US? Big telecom owns most of the content (or conglomerates own both telcos and content production as subsidiaries).

My DSL started out at $39 in 2012 (not counting the new subscriber discount), and has steadily increased about every 6-8 months to its present price for roughly the same level of service.

Wow! That is a good deal. Out of curiosity, what is the non-roaming coverage like for Wind outside of major urban centres like Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Toronto? Also, is the 4G/LTE coverage fairly consistent?

We pay the price for the bit of regulatory advantage we have. I see US commercials for home internet and mobile data and am blown away. Data rates are so expensive up here in Canada compared to what is advertised in th US. My cell bill is 80 bucks a month, and I get a measly 1 gig a month shared with my wife's phone - she still has to pay 65 bucks for her phone service itself even though she shares my data (granted we get unlimited nationwide calling and texting, but this seems to be the norm for most plans). My DSL internet is 63 bucks a month at 15 mbps speeds and a 150 gigabyte cap (it was 60 gigabytes until six months ago). Don't even get me started on the cost of TV...

Well my experience is certainly different. We were taught with Pascal and C++ in the intro courses, and then we ended up using languages like Python, Assembler (at least two architectures), Haskell, C, Java, C#, and Ruby -this is not an exhaustive list. My point is it should not matter which language is used - if the intro courses are well taught, they can be foundational to a well-rounded CS education.