I recently left Seattle after 4 years, and I hail from Ottawa. I remember about 10 years ago Seattle/Vancouver had something like 60 days of overcast weather-- highest suicide rates that year. I really didn't think the weather was affecting me significantly until I moved to Salt Lake City. Almost immediately my energy level went up, I was sleeping better, my focus was through the roof. Now I know it's also situational (going from a cube farm to start up as well as a change in my personal life), but under no circumstance am I moving back to Seattle.

what about reading what established authors in the field consider to be good science fiction? James Blish was famous for this, even to the point of being a critic of his own work. He wrote for a time under the pen name William Atheling Jr in several science magazines. His articles are collected in the books "The Issue at Hand" and "More Issues at Hand".

Robert Silverberg wrote "Science Fiction 101: Where to Start Reading and Writing Science Fiction" which is an awesome (and humble at times) look at what made his fiction better, what he learned in the process of writing it, and what he thinks are great stories by other authors.

Two favorites on the subject from Ursula K. Le Guin are "The Wave in the Mind" and "The language of the Night".

And finally, "Zen in the art of Writing" by Ray Bradbury.

If this were a class I was teaching, I'd have the class read some of the stories mentioned by the above authors, then go on to read what the authors thought of them. Granted, the class may not be about writing, but it does help build an appreciation of the craft to be able to follow the various styles of writing them, the processes involved, etc.

A couple of months ago, I noticed that Facebook started telling me that I needed to turn on Javascript, even though I had facebook.com in my allow list in NoScript. I noticed that there was now a second server required, http://www.fbcdn.net/ (I checked CIRA's WhoIs and facebook.ca was snatched up by someone else in 2005). I was recently in the states, so I disallowed fbcdn.net in NoScript (just to see), and there were no complains about my Javascript setting until I returned north of the border.

This seems to imply that there are separate servers running for Canadians accessing Facebook, so at a minimum, that would give some leverage into forcing them to follow Canada's rules. Now, if those servers are physically located in Canada (no, I haven't bothered doing a traceroute to find out where fbcdn.net ends up), that would definitely force them to follow those rules.

Slightly OT, but in my current job and we recently went looking for a new hosting company to host our database (which has a fair amount of private data in it). Because my company gets a large amount of our budget for the federal and provincial governments (it's a non-profit) we like to abide by as many of the federal government rules when it comes to IT and data privacy. One of those rules is any private data must only be hosted in Canada and it can not leave the country. A few companies came to us as "the Canadian branch of hosting company X". The conversations went like this:
Me: Where are your datacenters?
Them: We have them all over the world.
Me: Ok, but in which of those datacenters is our data going to be physically hosted?
Them: We can do distributed hosting so it's in many different datacenters
Me: Yes or no, Are these datacenters in Canadian territory?
Them:
Me: So, I'll take that as a no, which means that you know we can't host with you because of the government ruling about hosting private data outside the country.
Them:
Me:

More and more Canadian companies are taking the approach of hosting only in Canada, if only to ensure that they know the rules for data privacy and know there won't be a conflict between Canada's and the other country's.

What I found interesting is the total lack of understanding about the technologies involved. NOTHING that was listed is "high-tech" in terms of only being available to the US military. For instance, infrared cameras, both near and far, have been in use around the world for the last 10-15 years. You can modify most any CCD camera to see in the near infrared range by removing the filter element that blocks IR. For far IR you can use the CCD cooling kits available in astronomy magazines (along with suitable optics). I don't know about AIFEX, but the CBR suits they dragged out of storage for us to use were about 10-15 years old and not in that great of shape. I'm sure much better suits can be had abroad from chemical supply companies. One of the reports I read also brought up the attacks where forces dressed up in stolen US uniforms to bypass security and initiate an attack inside a base (I forget which). Because we all know the opposition forces inside Iraq are using EBay and Craigs List to buy US Army uniforms shipped from the states, instead of having an agent swipe them out of a warehouse INSIDE Iraq. Same with the IR goggles, MREs, CBR suits, etc if they wanted 'em. I have to agree with the posters that mentioned this as being a fear-mongering attempt. The problem is, the frumpy old non-technologically inclined representatives of our government will agree with this nonsense when spoon-fed to them by "experts", and will follow right along with the party lines of "something needs to be done!". I expect any day now they'll react in shock and dismay to the revelation that Iran has access to "them there inter-tubes" as well.