Last year I had my 15" Macbook Pro fail, about 3 months out of AppleCare. The GPU died, and the computer wouldn't boot. I called and took it to three different authorized Apple repair facilities and was told the same thing: they wouldn't replace it because it wouldn't boot.
Now I read this story, but my dead computer has crossed four years old in the meantime. It's still sitting in my office as I haven't gotten around to doing anything with it.
I felt screwed over at the time, and I feel even more screwed over now. I guess I should have gone to court. Instead, I ponied up for the new model as I had an international trip to make in 4 days and no laptop.
Well, you're right that I'm not looking very hard. Actually, I'm not looking at all. Also, I didn't state anywhere in my post that ALL American milk contains rBGH. The difference is that in the US you may have rBGH in your milk unless the labelling specifically states otherwise. Even then, I believe there have to be FDA/Montsanto weasel words stating that the FDA thinks you should drink rBGH milk and be happy about it.
In Canada, because rBGH is outlawed, you can buy milk without having to read the label to find out exactly what you're getting. I haven't lived in the US for a few years and things are probably changing, but to generalize, the cheaper the milk you buy, the more likely it is to contain rBGH or to be produced at that price point by cutting other corners. This is why organic milk generally costs more.
If you want American milk, go get it from the US. There are a lot of really good reasons why Canada has a dairy quota and why we don't import American milk. I'll give you one: rBGH. That's "genetically engineered bovine growth hormone". Yum. You can keep your cheap American milk.
I don't think the folks of Mount Forest will mind the "hypnotic" or "strobe-like" effect of a few wind turbines that much. After all, their motto is "High, Healthy, Happy".
I'm certainly bothered by the anti-wind turbine rhetoric in south-western Ontario right now. I drive by farms littered with signs saying "Wind turbines affect animal health" and other slogans like that. However, they state no basis for their position. There's not even a web site or toll-free number listed to call. I realized a couple months ago that I actually know the owner of one of the most egregious examples of this, but I haven't seen him to ask him about it since then.
I have no scientific evidence for this, but the only credible argument against wind turbines I've heard around here is that the vibrations tend to kill or drive away the worms. This could certainly affect long-term yield around a wind turbine. However, what it seems to really boil down to is NIMBY, which is pretty selfish if you ask me.
You're a pretty funny guy. FYI the C$ is currently worth slightly more than the USD.
I've never encountered a vending machine in Canada that takes US coins. Then again, I don't really use vending machines. In general, Canadian stores will take US coins without blinking an eye, at least when it comes to pennies and dimes. I wouldn't try to use a US quarter in Canada, so I don't really know what would happen. In the US, I've never knowingly handed a cashier a Canadian coin and had it accepted. Here, US/Canadian dimes and pennies seem more or less interchangeable. Generally, American cashiers won't accept a Canadian penny if they notice it.
Huh? A quick search of the RIM jobs site lists openings in TX, CA, FL, GA, IL, WA, SC, NC, and CT. And that was just until I got sick of listing states. The real point though is that the University of Waterloo has one of the most highly regarded Computer Science programs in the world. At one point, the Math & Computer Science facility was also the largest in the world. I don't know if it still is. International corporations are the ones coming to Waterloo to recruit grads.
UW of course isn't the only game in town (OK, province). Queens, U of T and lots of other schools have great computer science or engineering programs. RIM is easily geographically positioned enough to take advantage of international talent, and they're placed adjacent to arguably the best university in the country. I don't think RIM's problem right now is access to talent. It's more likely to be convincing qualified individuals for those few jobs that are actually open, that they should consider RIM as an employer. For example, a few months ago I was looking for a different job. I got a couple calls from Yahoo for a "Distinguished Architect" position. I ended up saying no and taking a different job with a much less fancy title, with a much smaller company. Working for Yahoo would have meant moving, and I wasn't sure I'd be employed three months later once Yahoo went through its next "re-org".
It's a complex issue, which is why there's no consensus on the appropriate resolution. In addition, Africa is a large politically, environmentally, culturally and economically diverse area, so there's no single solution. I'm not an expert, nobody (except you) is reading what I have to say anyway, so I wouldn't attempt to provide a categorical position.
I do agree that it's hypocritical for the west to tell Africans not to do something when they are doing it themselves. That position is not incongruent with the opinion that a "non-sustainable" farming technique is by its very definition a bad long-term idea.
To restate my earlier point, the only use I see for current non-sustainable farming techniques are applying them as short-term fixes. Surely you can agree that if this is done, due to their immediate benefits there's a danger that they'll be left in place longer than they should be, to the detriment of the region's long term success. One has only to look at nearly any economic activity with harmful environment results to see this attitude in action.
Did you read my post? I wonder especially about the part where I said "Perhaps unsustainable techniques are the short term answer to kick start production".
So-called "sustainable" approaches are called that exactly because the current large-scale farming system is viewed by many to be unsustainable. For instance, if you look at the topsoil depth of the American midwest over time, you'll see that it's growing shallower and shallower. If nothing changes, this land will eventually become unfarmable. This type of farming is borrowing against the future to pay the present.
You can copy what "has worked", but there's a significant amount of evidence to show that it won't work long term and will be detrimental to long term productivity. Perhaps unsustainable techniques are the short term answer to kick start production, but then you have the problem that it will stay in place far longer than it should because nobody has the motivation to make difficult changes. This is an opportunity for governments, scientists and farmers to locally take control of their own destiny and learn from the mistakes of others. It's also an opportunity to avoid ceding yet another local resource to a powerful multinational.
How in the world did this get modded up? "The church" is not a single entity with a single viewpoint. The Catholic church officially stands against contraceptives, but in most places they are also not the majority.
I just did a quick search and came up with this excerpt:
The total number of American catholic missionaries in Africa in 1963 was 901... By the 1960s, some 9000 Protestant American missionaries were working in Africa... Of the Protestants, one-quarter were ordained clergy; 1,000 were medical missionaries; and the remainder were "general" missionaries or instructors in industrial, agricultural, and other subjects.
I posit that the percentage of Catholic missionaries overall might have been higher once you factor in Europeans. However, you can see that from this small sample at least, the significant majority were Protestants, most of whom are not against contraceptives at all. They'd still be likely to be pushing for abstinence outside marriage, which in turn means historically that they'd be less likely to be promoting contraceptives outside marriage.
I've been working from home for most of the last decade. Some people on here say you need an office with a door, and others say you don't. I guess that means that we're all different, and take the advice that works for you. Here are some of my observations and experiences.
If you have a stressful home environment, you won't get any work done. If you're in a bad relationship, are caring for an ill or elderly person, or have other stress like this at home, it will be very very difficult for you to concentrate on work. At least, it was for me. You might just need to get an office outside the house.
I have a supportive wife, which is helpful. However, she says that she doesn't know what I'm doing and whether or not she can interrupt me. Sometimes (like now!) I'm not working when I'm supposed to be working, and I don't care if she bothers me. However, basically when my office door is closed, that means I'm working and only interrupt me with the sort of things you'd call me about if I was at work.
My office is in a bedroom which is integrated right into the house. It works, but with two young kids at home almost all day, it can be a challenge to keep my work quiet when they're napping, and keep the phone muted when I get a call and they're running around being kids. It works, and I find that my clients generally understand that I'm a human being and have a life. This isn't a problem as long as I am available for them and do my job. However, if/when we move, one of my main goals will be to have an office that isn't integrated right into the living part of the house. One of my friends spends hundreds of dollars a month for an office outside the house. For me, I would rather be a little less effiicent, make less, spend less, and have the time at home. I'd rather put that money onto my own mortgage. But, whatever works for each person is good.
I spend time and money to make my work environment the way I want it. I have a fast computer with nice monitors, and I pretty much just buy what I want (within reason!). I spend a huge amount of time sitting here, so I want my interfaces and environment to be pleasant. I go to some clients' offices and see dumpy little monitors sitting on noisy ancient HP computers, uncomfortable crappy chairs, dirty carpets, whatever, and it makes me very thankful for my work environment here.
Communication is important. I am very proactive with my coworkers and boss with regards to what I'm doing, and I make sure I send detailed status updates regularly. I make sure that people know if I'm going to be out for an extended period, and I try to be available during working hours for phone, videoconferences, IM or emails. I want people to be really impressed with how easy it is to work remotely with me, not to think, "yeah he's good but it's hard to work remotely with him." As much as possible, I try to be the one who bends my work hours to fit others' time zones so that my location isn't an issue.
My family and I enjoy travelling. I have a backpack which contains my "mobile office", and it's almost always ready to go. I just need to slip my laptop in if it's not there already. That way, I can go to a coffee shop if I need a break from here, and have everything I need. We've gone on multiple international trips that have been part work and part vacation, and overall they've gone really well. I know that if I have my backpack with me, I can respond to any work issues that come up. On the other hand, when I'm on vacation, I'm on vacation. People know that I probably won't respond to an email or phone call unless it's really and truly and emergency.
Overall, I really enjoy working at home. I get to be part of my kids' childhoods in a way that I could never be if I worked somewhere else. It's great for my relationship with my wife too. Those minute-long interchanges through the day are invaluable. I can go down and get a glass of water and admire my daughter's drawing, or give her a hug. You can't do that from the office.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I find that what I eat for lunch has a large effect on how tired I become mid afternoon. If I eat foods like white bread or rice, with simple carbohydrates, I crash in the afternoon. If my lunch is more "complex", I do better.
I'm fortunate enough to be self employed, so I can often take my tired feeling and use it as an excuse to go for a run or a bike ride.
There's one reason why TVs should be "smarter", and that's the UI of the TV itself. I can't really figure out why all my devices--my microwave, TV, DVD player, coffee machine, whatever--need to be operated by pressing tiny buttons in some arcane manner, like I'm casting a spell or something. There is a Better Way.
It would be great if, in addition to having the remote+TV UI option that's standard with my TV, I could also use my iPad, computer, and/or web browser to configure my TV. Run Android or whatever on the TV and publish an API to the TV's internals, and you've made your TV a lot more usable.
I guess if people want to use this capability to create apps, great. For my part though, I'm happy just plugging in an Apple TV or whatever. This capability isn't going to go away (I hope!) with a smart TV, so you'll still be able to buy an external box for something down the road if you want it.
Judging from content restrictions and device manufacturers' generally terrible attempts at innovation in this area, I don't hold particularly high hopes that the reality of the future is going to match my rosy utopian vision of it.
Unless you pay for Evernote (which I do), all your transfers between your device(s) and Evernote are unencrypted. So, unless you pay $6 per month, or whatever it is, you're sending all of your financial data unencrypted over the internet.
Furthermore, even if you ARE paying for Evernote, all your data is stored in plaintext on their servers. If their server is ever compromised, or they have a rogue employee, you could be in serious trouble. If you choose to encrypt your data before putting it into Evernote, that reduces it to the point of uselessness.
A year or two ago, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSap S1500M scanner. While it's possible to mess this scanner up with extremely long or ripped up receipts, it takes almost anything I throw at it. It feeds pages of different sizes, auto duplexes when necessary, does colour or black & white automatically, does OCR, and comes with a version of Adobe Acrobat. This product really has exceeded my expectations.
DEVONThink Pro is good, but I suppose one mark against it is that I haven't used it to its full capacity yet. By this I mean that if it was better, perhaps I'd be using more than just a general store. On the other hand, I can always find a receipt in there if I need it.
The biggest problem is that despite all this, I haven't really been able to go paperless. According to my accountant, Revenue Canada still wants hard copies, so if I'm ever audited (which seems to be almost every year for some reason or another), paper copies must be produced. Plus, if I hand in 30% of my receipts in electronic format, and the other 70% in paper format, someone has to go through each of those and ensure that all the data is there, and weed out the duplicates. This means that despite me scanning all my receipts, I still have to hand in the paper versions, and I still have to go through my electronic receipts and sort out which ones are duplicates of paper ones, and which ones are strictly electronic. Then I imagine that the person going through all this at the accountant's office is probably just printing it all out anyway to save time. Going through a stack of paper receipts is still just easier for most people than a directory of PDFs. Therefore, if they aren't printing it out, I'm paying for the extra hours to cover their reduced efficiency.
The end version is, you can go to a lot of effort and implement all the technology you want to go paperless, but it's very hard and may not even be possible. I think it's still worth trying, though.
I'm not generally an advocate for lawyers, but the solution of getting rid of all them is worse than the problem.
If we wrote laws that were deciperable by the "average person", what about the approximately 50% of the population who are below average? At some point the laws will once again become indecipherable if you go down far enough. In essence, the problem is essentially the same except now it affects 35% of the population instead of 99% of the population. Those 35% who don't understand the laws are going to need someone to advocate for them.
So the only way the US can actually "require" you to have a passport is if the government has convinced Canada to refuse admittance without one.
IIRC it wasn't this way around at all. The US started requiring Canadians to have a passport to travel to the US. Canada objected strenuously, to which Washington said what Washington usually says to foreign governments' concerns. So Canada said that if Canadians needed a passport to travel to the US, then Americans would need a passport to travel to Canada too.
I can't be bothered to look this up, but it's what happened according to my memory of it.
The GGP said "modern world", which you're comparing to the "underdeveloped world". Therefore your response isn't really a fair one.
Maybe the point should be that only in the US do sick people undergo a lifetime of indentured servitude due to medical bills if they can't pay for insurance. In most other places, people don't have to bundle the choice to receive necessary medical care with the aftermath of crushing medical debt payments for the rest of their lives.
And yes, this issue does cause people to avoid the hospital until a little problem has become a big problem, in many cases fatal. Please refer back to Tsingi's "letting people die" comment. No medical system is perfect, but from my vantage point the American system is pretty messed up.
Just to show my own little pet peeve with TIOBE, it does a terrible job of handling ColdFusion. It looks for "CFML", which basically nobody uses when describing the language. Stackoverflow.com doesn't even have a CFML tag. However, if you add up the ColdFusion-related tags, you get:
Unanswered: 417 / 3,712 = 11.23%
TIOBE puts Lisp as #13, but "CFML" as somewhere between 51 and 100. If you go strictly by Stackoverflow.com questions (which I don't recommend either), ColdFusion is more than twice as popular as Lisp.
Yeah, it was a pretty myopic decision to choose to use C$ as their currency denominator, considering it's already used by that giant country to the north of them.
ColdFusion (it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since 1998) has had parameterized SQL commands for a decade. The problem is that there is still a high percentage of ColdFusion developers who are not educated enough to know what they are or why they should use them.
CFML is such an easy language to program in that it encourages people who have not taken the time to learn the appropriate software engineering basics. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, really. Also, there's still a lot of 10+ year old ColdFusion code out there that hasn't been touched in a long time because it "still works", except, of course, that it doesn't, as we can see from this example.
The first computer I ever used was a BBC Micro. It was around 1986 in a small private boarding school in the middle of the bush in Zambia. We were over an hour's drive from the nearest telephone. The school got one or two of these computers just before I left, and somehow they got me hooked on computers.
The only command I still remember was that you had to type "CHAIN" to run something. I've been curiours about that command ever since, but a quick Google search leads me to believe that it "chained" the LOAD and RUN commands together.
Nowhere did I suggest anything even remotely approaching "hurling oneself down a mountain". You'll see that I specifically excluded downhill skiing. Tobogganing can be as tame as going down a 1 metre tall hill with your toddler. I have child backpacks for hiking and plan to get a pulk for pulling kids behind me while (cross-country) skiing this winter. Most cities and towns where it's cold enough have well-lit indoor and/or outdoor skating rinks.
Far be it from me to tell you how to raise your children (really, I hate that), but my kids love all these activities. The trick is to do them in a way that's age-appropriate, fun, and safe. If you fundamentally don't WANT to go outside when it's dark and cold, fair enough. But then it's "I don't want to go out", rather than any of the other reasons you've given. The flip side of that is that if you really DO want to go out (I do), there's usually a safe and fun way to do it.
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Last year I had my 15" Macbook Pro fail, about 3 months out of AppleCare. The GPU died, and the computer wouldn't boot. I called and took it to three different authorized Apple repair facilities and was told the same thing: they wouldn't replace it because it wouldn't boot.
Now I read this story, but my dead computer has crossed four years old in the meantime. It's still sitting in my office as I haven't gotten around to doing anything with it.
I felt screwed over at the time, and I feel even more screwed over now. I guess I should have gone to court. Instead, I ponied up for the new model as I had an international trip to make in 4 days and no laptop.
Well, you're right that I'm not looking very hard. Actually, I'm not looking at all. Also, I didn't state anywhere in my post that ALL American milk contains rBGH. The difference is that in the US you may have rBGH in your milk unless the labelling specifically states otherwise. Even then, I believe there have to be FDA/Montsanto weasel words stating that the FDA thinks you should drink rBGH milk and be happy about it.
In Canada, because rBGH is outlawed, you can buy milk without having to read the label to find out exactly what you're getting. I haven't lived in the US for a few years and things are probably changing, but to generalize, the cheaper the milk you buy, the more likely it is to contain rBGH or to be produced at that price point by cutting other corners. This is why organic milk generally costs more.
If you want American milk, go get it from the US. There are a lot of really good reasons why Canada has a dairy quota and why we don't import American milk. I'll give you one: rBGH. That's "genetically engineered bovine growth hormone". Yum. You can keep your cheap American milk.
I don't think the folks of Mount Forest will mind the "hypnotic" or "strobe-like" effect of a few wind turbines that much. After all, their motto is "High, Healthy, Happy".
I'm certainly bothered by the anti-wind turbine rhetoric in south-western Ontario right now. I drive by farms littered with signs saying "Wind turbines affect animal health" and other slogans like that. However, they state no basis for their position. There's not even a web site or toll-free number listed to call. I realized a couple months ago that I actually know the owner of one of the most egregious examples of this, but I haven't seen him to ask him about it since then.
I have no scientific evidence for this, but the only credible argument against wind turbines I've heard around here is that the vibrations tend to kill or drive away the worms. This could certainly affect long-term yield around a wind turbine. However, what it seems to really boil down to is NIMBY, which is pretty selfish if you ask me.
You're a pretty funny guy. FYI the C$ is currently worth slightly more than the USD.
I've never encountered a vending machine in Canada that takes US coins. Then again, I don't really use vending machines. In general, Canadian stores will take US coins without blinking an eye, at least when it comes to pennies and dimes. I wouldn't try to use a US quarter in Canada, so I don't really know what would happen. In the US, I've never knowingly handed a cashier a Canadian coin and had it accepted. Here, US/Canadian dimes and pennies seem more or less interchangeable. Generally, American cashiers won't accept a Canadian penny if they notice it.
That's OK. We'll just continue to use American pennies. Thanks, guys!
Huh? A quick search of the RIM jobs site lists openings in TX, CA, FL, GA, IL, WA, SC, NC, and CT. And that was just until I got sick of listing states. The real point though is that the University of Waterloo has one of the most highly regarded Computer Science programs in the world. At one point, the Math & Computer Science facility was also the largest in the world. I don't know if it still is. International corporations are the ones coming to Waterloo to recruit grads.
UW of course isn't the only game in town (OK, province). Queens, U of T and lots of other schools have great computer science or engineering programs. RIM is easily geographically positioned enough to take advantage of international talent, and they're placed adjacent to arguably the best university in the country. I don't think RIM's problem right now is access to talent. It's more likely to be convincing qualified individuals for those few jobs that are actually open, that they should consider RIM as an employer. For example, a few months ago I was looking for a different job. I got a couple calls from Yahoo for a "Distinguished Architect" position. I ended up saying no and taking a different job with a much less fancy title, with a much smaller company. Working for Yahoo would have meant moving, and I wasn't sure I'd be employed three months later once Yahoo went through its next "re-org".
It's a complex issue, which is why there's no consensus on the appropriate resolution. In addition, Africa is a large politically, environmentally, culturally and economically diverse area, so there's no single solution. I'm not an expert, nobody (except you) is reading what I have to say anyway, so I wouldn't attempt to provide a categorical position. I do agree that it's hypocritical for the west to tell Africans not to do something when they are doing it themselves. That position is not incongruent with the opinion that a "non-sustainable" farming technique is by its very definition a bad long-term idea. To restate my earlier point, the only use I see for current non-sustainable farming techniques are applying them as short-term fixes. Surely you can agree that if this is done, due to their immediate benefits there's a danger that they'll be left in place longer than they should be, to the detriment of the region's long term success. One has only to look at nearly any economic activity with harmful environment results to see this attitude in action.
Did you read my post? I wonder especially about the part where I said "Perhaps unsustainable techniques are the short term answer to kick start production".
So-called "sustainable" approaches are called that exactly because the current large-scale farming system is viewed by many to be unsustainable. For instance, if you look at the topsoil depth of the American midwest over time, you'll see that it's growing shallower and shallower. If nothing changes, this land will eventually become unfarmable. This type of farming is borrowing against the future to pay the present.
You can copy what "has worked", but there's a significant amount of evidence to show that it won't work long term and will be detrimental to long term productivity. Perhaps unsustainable techniques are the short term answer to kick start production, but then you have the problem that it will stay in place far longer than it should because nobody has the motivation to make difficult changes. This is an opportunity for governments, scientists and farmers to locally take control of their own destiny and learn from the mistakes of others. It's also an opportunity to avoid ceding yet another local resource to a powerful multinational.
I just did a quick search and came up with this excerpt:
The total number of American catholic missionaries in Africa in 1963 was 901 ... By the 1960s, some 9000 Protestant American missionaries were working in Africa ... Of the Protestants, one-quarter were ordained clergy; 1,000 were medical missionaries; and the remainder were "general" missionaries or instructors in industrial, agricultural, and other subjects.
I posit that the percentage of Catholic missionaries overall might have been higher once you factor in Europeans. However, you can see that from this small sample at least, the significant majority were Protestants, most of whom are not against contraceptives at all. They'd still be likely to be pushing for abstinence outside marriage, which in turn means historically that they'd be less likely to be promoting contraceptives outside marriage.
I've been working from home for most of the last decade. Some people on here say you need an office with a door, and others say you don't. I guess that means that we're all different, and take the advice that works for you. Here are some of my observations and experiences.
If you have a stressful home environment, you won't get any work done. If you're in a bad relationship, are caring for an ill or elderly person, or have other stress like this at home, it will be very very difficult for you to concentrate on work. At least, it was for me. You might just need to get an office outside the house.
I have a supportive wife, which is helpful. However, she says that she doesn't know what I'm doing and whether or not she can interrupt me. Sometimes (like now!) I'm not working when I'm supposed to be working, and I don't care if she bothers me. However, basically when my office door is closed, that means I'm working and only interrupt me with the sort of things you'd call me about if I was at work.
My office is in a bedroom which is integrated right into the house. It works, but with two young kids at home almost all day, it can be a challenge to keep my work quiet when they're napping, and keep the phone muted when I get a call and they're running around being kids. It works, and I find that my clients generally understand that I'm a human being and have a life. This isn't a problem as long as I am available for them and do my job. However, if/when we move, one of my main goals will be to have an office that isn't integrated right into the living part of the house. One of my friends spends hundreds of dollars a month for an office outside the house. For me, I would rather be a little less effiicent, make less, spend less, and have the time at home. I'd rather put that money onto my own mortgage. But, whatever works for each person is good.
I spend time and money to make my work environment the way I want it. I have a fast computer with nice monitors, and I pretty much just buy what I want (within reason!). I spend a huge amount of time sitting here, so I want my interfaces and environment to be pleasant. I go to some clients' offices and see dumpy little monitors sitting on noisy ancient HP computers, uncomfortable crappy chairs, dirty carpets, whatever, and it makes me very thankful for my work environment here.
Communication is important. I am very proactive with my coworkers and boss with regards to what I'm doing, and I make sure I send detailed status updates regularly. I make sure that people know if I'm going to be out for an extended period, and I try to be available during working hours for phone, videoconferences, IM or emails. I want people to be really impressed with how easy it is to work remotely with me, not to think, "yeah he's good but it's hard to work remotely with him." As much as possible, I try to be the one who bends my work hours to fit others' time zones so that my location isn't an issue.
My family and I enjoy travelling. I have a backpack which contains my "mobile office", and it's almost always ready to go. I just need to slip my laptop in if it's not there already. That way, I can go to a coffee shop if I need a break from here, and have everything I need. We've gone on multiple international trips that have been part work and part vacation, and overall they've gone really well. I know that if I have my backpack with me, I can respond to any work issues that come up. On the other hand, when I'm on vacation, I'm on vacation. People know that I probably won't respond to an email or phone call unless it's really and truly and emergency.
Overall, I really enjoy working at home. I get to be part of my kids' childhoods in a way that I could never be if I worked somewhere else. It's great for my relationship with my wife too. Those minute-long interchanges through the day are invaluable. I can go down and get a glass of water and admire my daughter's drawing, or give her a hug. You can't do that from the office.
The capital city of Zambia is Lusaka, not Lasaka. I realize this is a copy/paste from TFA but I thought I'd point it out anyway.
This app isn't available in Canada, so I presume it's only available in the US. The rest of us can tune out.
It's a shame, really, as I would have liked to try it out.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I find that what I eat for lunch has a large effect on how tired I become mid afternoon. If I eat foods like white bread or rice, with simple carbohydrates, I crash in the afternoon. If my lunch is more "complex", I do better.
I'm fortunate enough to be self employed, so I can often take my tired feeling and use it as an excuse to go for a run or a bike ride.
There's one reason why TVs should be "smarter", and that's the UI of the TV itself. I can't really figure out why all my devices--my microwave, TV, DVD player, coffee machine, whatever--need to be operated by pressing tiny buttons in some arcane manner, like I'm casting a spell or something. There is a Better Way.
It would be great if, in addition to having the remote+TV UI option that's standard with my TV, I could also use my iPad, computer, and/or web browser to configure my TV. Run Android or whatever on the TV and publish an API to the TV's internals, and you've made your TV a lot more usable.
I guess if people want to use this capability to create apps, great. For my part though, I'm happy just plugging in an Apple TV or whatever. This capability isn't going to go away (I hope!) with a smart TV, so you'll still be able to buy an external box for something down the road if you want it.
Judging from content restrictions and device manufacturers' generally terrible attempts at innovation in this area, I don't hold particularly high hopes that the reality of the future is going to match my rosy utopian vision of it.
Unless you pay for Evernote (which I do), all your transfers between your device(s) and Evernote are unencrypted. So, unless you pay $6 per month, or whatever it is, you're sending all of your financial data unencrypted over the internet.
Furthermore, even if you ARE paying for Evernote, all your data is stored in plaintext on their servers. If their server is ever compromised, or they have a rogue employee, you could be in serious trouble. If you choose to encrypt your data before putting it into Evernote, that reduces it to the point of uselessness.
A year or two ago, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSap S1500M scanner. While it's possible to mess this scanner up with extremely long or ripped up receipts, it takes almost anything I throw at it. It feeds pages of different sizes, auto duplexes when necessary, does colour or black & white automatically, does OCR, and comes with a version of Adobe Acrobat. This product really has exceeded my expectations.
DEVONThink Pro is good, but I suppose one mark against it is that I haven't used it to its full capacity yet. By this I mean that if it was better, perhaps I'd be using more than just a general store. On the other hand, I can always find a receipt in there if I need it.
The biggest problem is that despite all this, I haven't really been able to go paperless. According to my accountant, Revenue Canada still wants hard copies, so if I'm ever audited (which seems to be almost every year for some reason or another), paper copies must be produced. Plus, if I hand in 30% of my receipts in electronic format, and the other 70% in paper format, someone has to go through each of those and ensure that all the data is there, and weed out the duplicates. This means that despite me scanning all my receipts, I still have to hand in the paper versions, and I still have to go through my electronic receipts and sort out which ones are duplicates of paper ones, and which ones are strictly electronic. Then I imagine that the person going through all this at the accountant's office is probably just printing it all out anyway to save time. Going through a stack of paper receipts is still just easier for most people than a directory of PDFs. Therefore, if they aren't printing it out, I'm paying for the extra hours to cover their reduced efficiency.
The end version is, you can go to a lot of effort and implement all the technology you want to go paperless, but it's very hard and may not even be possible. I think it's still worth trying, though.
I'm not generally an advocate for lawyers, but the solution of getting rid of all them is worse than the problem.
If we wrote laws that were deciperable by the "average person", what about the approximately 50% of the population who are below average? At some point the laws will once again become indecipherable if you go down far enough. In essence, the problem is essentially the same except now it affects 35% of the population instead of 99% of the population. Those 35% who don't understand the laws are going to need someone to advocate for them.
So the only way the US can actually "require" you to have a passport is if the government has convinced Canada to refuse admittance without one.
IIRC it wasn't this way around at all. The US started requiring Canadians to have a passport to travel to the US. Canada objected strenuously, to which Washington said what Washington usually says to foreign governments' concerns. So Canada said that if Canadians needed a passport to travel to the US, then Americans would need a passport to travel to Canada too.
I can't be bothered to look this up, but it's what happened according to my memory of it.
The GGP said "modern world", which you're comparing to the "underdeveloped world". Therefore your response isn't really a fair one.
Maybe the point should be that only in the US do sick people undergo a lifetime of indentured servitude due to medical bills if they can't pay for insurance. In most other places, people don't have to bundle the choice to receive necessary medical care with the aftermath of crushing medical debt payments for the rest of their lives.
And yes, this issue does cause people to avoid the hospital until a little problem has become a big problem, in many cases fatal. Please refer back to Tsingi's "letting people die" comment. No medical system is perfect, but from my vantage point the American system is pretty messed up.
Just to show my own little pet peeve with TIOBE, it does a terrible job of handling ColdFusion. It looks for "CFML", which basically nobody uses when describing the language. Stackoverflow.com doesn't even have a CFML tag. However, if you add up the ColdFusion-related tags, you get:
Unanswered: 417 / 3,712 = 11.23%
TIOBE puts Lisp as #13, but "CFML" as somewhere between 51 and 100. If you go strictly by Stackoverflow.com questions (which I don't recommend either), ColdFusion is more than twice as popular as Lisp.
Yeah, it was a pretty myopic decision to choose to use C$ as their currency denominator, considering it's already used by that giant country to the north of them.
ColdFusion (it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since 1998) has had parameterized SQL commands for a decade. The problem is that there is still a high percentage of ColdFusion developers who are not educated enough to know what they are or why they should use them.
CFML is such an easy language to program in that it encourages people who have not taken the time to learn the appropriate software engineering basics. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, really. Also, there's still a lot of 10+ year old ColdFusion code out there that hasn't been touched in a long time because it "still works", except, of course, that it doesn't, as we can see from this example.
The first computer I ever used was a BBC Micro. It was around 1986 in a small private boarding school in the middle of the bush in Zambia. We were over an hour's drive from the nearest telephone. The school got one or two of these computers just before I left, and somehow they got me hooked on computers.
The only command I still remember was that you had to type "CHAIN" to run something. I've been curiours about that command ever since, but a quick Google search leads me to believe that it "chained" the LOAD and RUN commands together.
Nowhere did I suggest anything even remotely approaching "hurling oneself down a mountain". You'll see that I specifically excluded downhill skiing. Tobogganing can be as tame as going down a 1 metre tall hill with your toddler. I have child backpacks for hiking and plan to get a pulk for pulling kids behind me while (cross-country) skiing this winter. Most cities and towns where it's cold enough have well-lit indoor and/or outdoor skating rinks.
Far be it from me to tell you how to raise your children (really, I hate that), but my kids love all these activities. The trick is to do them in a way that's age-appropriate, fun, and safe. If you fundamentally don't WANT to go outside when it's dark and cold, fair enough. But then it's "I don't want to go out", rather than any of the other reasons you've given. The flip side of that is that if you really DO want to go out (I do), there's usually a safe and fun way to do it.