Well, I can't speak for the Canadian coasts, but for the 'sunny' prairies, it has to do with snow cover for 25-40% of the year combined with the economics of abundantly available fossil fuels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary#Climate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin#Climate

If I link to the Foxconn clip on the Canadian affiliate of the Daily Show, I do not believe Americans will be able to view it, so in this case, yes it does matter.

The Daily Show had a recent segment on a Foxconn superfactory in China.

Disclaimer: I'd like to link to the actual dailyshow website instead of a pirated youtube clip. But as a Canadian, and because of archaic television distribution rights, I can't access their website.

I do like online privacy. I like anonymizers too. I love encryption.

But then, I am actually a terrorist. Checkmate, freedom advocates.

The Genesis myth claims that light, the sun, plants, fish and birds, then animals were created, in that order. This is wrong on any timescale. The book goes on to explain that suffering exists because a talking snake tricked a woman.

Genesis is simply not compatible with reality, literally or metaphorically. You are trying to square a circle, sorry.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The contents of Algebra II are more-or-less integrated throughout the 10/20/30 level highschool courses, at least in Alberta. I can't see things being radically different nation-wide. I think you are confusing algebra with 100-level calculus.

It's possible your colleagues were baffled because your statement is a non sequitur. The fact that wolves were domesticated by man does not automatically imply that this act was beneficial to humans.

Perhaps a more general rule of "domestication of animals is helpful" provided an overall benefit in spite of the costly affair of feeding stray wolves specifically.
Perhaps wolves managed to hijack our innate tendency to like small furry animals http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/why-are-animals-cute/
Or perhaps, as you say, domestication of wolves provided a benefit in terms of guarding, or tracking large game animals, etc.

Probably all three, to an extent. If you still disagree, apply your same logic to cats and goldfish :)

having read the article, I feel inclined to sadly report that no one has found any shiny new apple 'pr4ocessor' technology at their local bar, which would have been much more exciting than a fat-fingered r key.

guess I'll go RT4FA

TFA states that the amount of foreign DNA (inserted by retroviruses, etc) in mammals has been decreasing since a few million years after the K-T extinction event. Seems to me that the enormous number of new niches opened up to mammals following the decline of the dinosaurs would have allowed species to thrive in spite of harmful foreign DNA manipulation. Then for the next 60 million years or so, the detrimental effects would slowly be pruned by natural selection.

Disney is to culture what getting hit by a car is to metabolism. Am I doing it right?

That's engineers for you