If you're still interested in coding, learn Scala! You'll leverage your existing JVM knowledge, and have exposure to a few currently-hyped trends: Functional programming, actor-based concurrency, etc.

I logged in just to say the same thing. I love this story.

Unfortunately I don't think the whole Australia/Utopia aspect of it is very likely... The dystopian part seems like where we're headed though.

Maybe there's some way to set up a trillion-dollar escrow fund though... I'd pledge my $1k.

A short video on the decline of english in quebec:

http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/language_culture/clips/15097/

Except that english is not doing well on it's own. In 1950 quebec city (800 000 people ) was 50 % english, now it is down to 2%. Similar stats for many smaller towns. Montreal (3.7 million people ) was 16 % english in the 1050s, it is down to about 8 % now and is not expected to survive this generation. Quebec has lost about 400 000 english speakers since the 1970s.

I am a web developer from english canada ( BC ) that has been living here for 4 years. My website must be in french only because I am doing business in quebec. If I pass out a business card in english, i am subject to a $1400 fine. If I put an english sign on my balcony I will be forced to take it down by the police. Inspectors come into my work on a regular basis to check that my documentation is in french and to check that I have signed the appropriate documents to have my computer in english. My friends from the US are not allowed to send their kids to school in english. If I want to see a movie that is not available in french, it is only allowed to be played in one movie theater in the province for a maximum time period as a "film festival" exception to the language laws. Go rent it? All films must be approved by the goverments and have a sticker approving it, blockbuster is not allowed more than one copy. That is if the movie is available, trailers for english only movies are also illegal on TV. And that is just the law, never mind the attitudes of the people I have to deal with all the time. My first christmas dinner at my boyfriend's house was turned into a buffet because his brother refused to have his children sit next to an english person. I can rarely have a conversation in english in a bar in my neighbourhood ( the plateau ) without getting harassed.

Before I moved here, I went to bilingual school in BC, and was proud to be bilingual. If I would have known what I know now, I would not have wasted my time learning about a language and culture that does not respect mine as equal.

Well they got you there too. These laws come from l'Office de la langue francaise. This same legal body defines the french language as spoken in quebec, tells us what is legally a word, and what is not a word.

Perhaps I should have been more precise. Canadian banks are more consolidated than the US banking system.

Canada has roughly 1/10 of the population of the U.S. When I see canadian government expenditures, for example, I am in the habit of multiplying be 10 and looking for similar expenditures in the U.S.

According to this rule, in order for Citibank to be as influential in the U.S., it would have to have revenues of $240 billion U.S. to compare to our Royal Bank.

I am quite sure that Royal has more bank machines per capita than Citi, which validates my earlier point.

The old way wasn't that different, really: you pay to see the movie, and in return you get to take a copy of it out of the theater with you, encoded in your brain with a highly abstract lossy codec.

When you rip rented movies you're just using a better codec and space-shifting the bits from your brain to your flash drive.

Personally I don't see a problem with it either way especially if you aren't distributing derived works.