Some of these fundamentalists are cruel, angry, lets be honest - evil people
Right. They were the ones carrying signs "Kerry = Hitler" in the last campaign. Oh,
wait, it was the others who were carrying signs saying "Bushitler" wasn't it?
Have you ever seen the rabid ferocity of women demanding the right to 3rd trimester abortions? They practically foam at the mouth because they're not willing to go through 2-3 months of discomfort to give a baby life.
And these same people claim they are in favour of human rights, but were perfectly willing to abandon Afghan women to a Taliban regime where a girl walking alone could be beaten with sticks, or Iraqi people to a murderous dictator whose sons repeatedly raped women and killed people.
But it's the fundamentalists who are cruel and evil. What an amazingly informed world view you have.
We are not going change what people think it says unless we start acknowledging what the constitution actually says.
Teaching or establishing religion by government is unconstitutional
This betrays a complete lack of understanding about what the "establishment" clause was meant to prevent. In England, the Church of England (CE) is the "established" church; the monarch has to be a member. If Queen Elizabeth II suddenly decided to convert to Catholicism or Islam, she would be deposed. This came about because the Pope wouldn't give Henry VIII a divorce, so old Hal just invented a new church and threw the Catholic one out. After Elizabeth, James and Charles tried to re-establish the Catholic church. But after William of Orange came over from Holland to kick some British butt, a variety of acts of parliament including the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Act of Succession 1707 were brought into force to ensure the monarch would remain Protestant and a member of the CE. Ironically, the honorific "Defender of the Faith" was originally conferred on Henry VIII by the Pope, and rescinded when Henry broke with Rome. It was later restored to Henry by an act of Parliament, and has been adopted by most kings and queens since then.
Since many of the Founding Fathers and original settlers from England were religious dissenters such as Quakers, they were determined that the Constitution would prevent any future government from selecting one church as the "established" church (for which JFK was doubtless grateful). But teaching creationism is not selecting a church; it is common to Catholics, all the different Protestant churches, Jews, and Muslims. Therefore, it is not, in the strictest sense, "establishing" a church. In fact, due to a number of wrong-headed decisions by SCOTUS, there is now an "established" church in the US called "secular humanism".
I agree we should learn what the Constitution actually says, and how to interpret it.
I just have one comment on this debate. If mankind has evolved from apes, how come in the 5,000 years of recorded history, there has been no record of an ape even becoming homo neandethal, let alone human? From what I've read, neanderthals existed in Europe some 50,000 years ago, and were completely gone by 30,000 years ago. The oldest homo sapiens fossil in existence is dated 34,000 years ago. So in the relatively short evolutionary time of 4,000 years, homo sapiens completely replaced the neanderthals. Why did more monkeys not evolve into homo erectus during that time, and then to neanderthals? Every time I ask an evolutionist this, they dissolve into bluster and invective. If evolution is an on-going process, why are there not monkeys constantly evolving into hominids? Shouldn't there be a continuum of species? Why did the process come to a shuddering halt 30,000 years ago? I'd like to hear an answer for that.
To me, this is just like the global warming scam - despite Gore's 'A Convenient Lie', the Antartic ice shelf is about the same size as it was 100 years ago. Sea levels have not risen any where near the level predicted. The Earth has actually cooled over the last 4-5 years. I'm an engineer, so I know all about the scientific method, and when the theories completely fail to predict the observed reality, I tend to think they are completely wrong. And when you read how Mann of the famous "hockey stick" chart cherry-picked and manipulated his data, and then refused to release the data for a number of years - well, that doesn't sound like science to me.
I agree that creationism shouldn't be taught in science class, and that other religious and cultural origin myths should be given some time. I remember reading as a child about the Greek (or was it Egyptian?) myth that the world rests on the back of four elephants, who are standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming in an endless sea. But let's remember the Old Testament is a holy book for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who make up about 55% of the world's population, and more than that percentage in North America, so it has a larger significance here. I'm not a biblical realist; after all, it was written by men, not God. But Deuteronomy is interesting for the operational wisdom it dispensed in a time of no refrigeration and poor sanitation, and there's still a lot of truth in Proverbs. Ecclesiastes in the King James version is simply beautiful literature. Why should my children be denied this great history and literature in favour of "I Have Two Mommies"?
I'd like to learn the Hindu, Buddhist, and Chinese myths; I'm sure they'd be interesting. I read today about a woman in NYC who claims to be a lesbian, vegan, and believes in a Flying Pink Unicorn; I don't think that would be worth spending more than a minute on. i'm sure the world would be a nicer place if we understood more about the cultures of others. But please, no Scientology.
No one wants to think that astronomical time charts, combined with arcane arts, trig, vector analysis, probability and statistics and more is what goes for Astrology.
I don't know; this doesn't sound any more absurd than Xenu and his rocket powered DC-3's that Scientologists believe in. And they don't seem to have trouble getting members.
Reminds me of the old joke:
Man says to God: "Lord, is it true a million dollars is like a penny to you, and a million years is like a second?"
God says "Yes, that's true."
Man "Lord, may I have a penny?"
God "Sure, just a second."
You might want to check your history, friend. JFK/LBJ got America into Vietnam; Nixon got you out. Nixon opened the door to Red China. Nixon began the "detente" process with the USSR, and concluded the SALT 1 treaty. He had some significant foreign policy achievements that the saxophone player never came close to.
That said, Nixon had deep, serious flaws. Never mind Watergate; Agnew was taking cash bribes sitting in the VP's office. For Nixon to choose someone like that as his running mate shows a serious lack of judgement. But let's not throw inaccurate slurs at him as well.
better hurry. The Canadian government has introduced a bill regarding digital copying that looks like it was written by RIAA and MPAA on a very bad day....
Well, maybe there's something in the Oregon air that just makes people stupid. Here in Toronto, we have mandatory recycling as well, but only ONE truck is needed to pick up the papers, plastic, and glass - it just has three different compartments. The trashmen put paper in one, plastic in another, and glass in a third. What's so hard about that?
I was born in Montreal. I still bear a scar on my head from when I was three years old. Two of my French "friends" broke a pop bottle, and cut me with it - and they were also three years old. You don't know how wide the division is between the English and the French. If you're in the downtown core, or the western part of the city, it's easy to get along in English. Move east of St. Laurent, and you encounter scorn and ridicule, regardless of whether you can speak French. Most Canadian kids learn some French in school, but it's Parisian French. In Quebec, they speak a dialect called joual. When you try to speak your French to them, you can see a barely disguised sneer, and if they need help from another person, you will invariably be referred to as "l'anglais".
Montreal is a great city to visit, but most young English people are leaving. The English population is increasingly aging. Luckily, the current Liberal government is friendly to the English community. If the Parti Quebecois gets re-elected, you can be sure the hostility to the English community will increase.
Well, it's an $8 billion industry, and Coke's Dasani is now number two in the industry, after less than 10 years in existence. Compared to Evian, Perrier, San Pellegrino, and others that have been around for many years, I'd suggest that shows Coke has done an excellent job of marketing their product.
Remember, the discussion is about who has the best brand power, not the sense of selling water. (And I'm not above buying a bottle of water before my 1 hr commute home.) The fact that Coke can charge a premium over many of the generic varieties, and can displace well known brands like Perrier, et al is evidence of brand power.
I was born in Montreal; you don't need to educate me about the city. But you should know if you move to Quebec, and you weren't educated at an English school there as a child, all immigrants have to send their children to French language schools. And that's "newspaper" singular, as the Montreal Star shut down years ago. Don't get me wrong - I love the city, and our family cottage is 40 miles south on Lake Champlain; I'm suggesting the culture shock from some guy from SoCal or Texas would be immense.
But if you're going to pick Montreal, why not pick, say, Bangor, Maine? Same latitude as Montreal, no cross-border hassles, and since it's not near a large body of water, it actually gets colder in winter than Montreal does. Plus land prices are a lot cheaper.
Maybe female genital mutilation doesn't happen in Afghanistan, but girls as young as 12 are traded by opium farmers to make good on debts when they have crop failures (or their fields are eradicated by the UN program). And of course, under the Taliban, girls couldn't go to school, couldn't walk the streets without a male relative present on pain of being beaten with sticks, and couldn't appear in public without being completely draped.
What bugs me about liberal ass-hats is they preach "human rights", but when it comes to making changes, they sit on their hands. What are liberals doing about Tibet, Darfur, Burma, or Zimbabwe? About 1/10th the whining they do about how awful the US is. Hypocrites.
I love my morning newspaper. I have a 1 hr+ commute to work by public transit, including the subway where wireless signals basically suck. A newspaper section is a lot lighter and easier to handle than a laptop, and don't ask me to download news to a handheld; I don't want to hit the scroll button every five seconds.
I enjoy the opinions of various columnists, and the letters to the editor, as well as the mixture of local, national, and world news all aggregated together. Studying the financial pages is a lot easier with the newspaper - when you open up the two page spread, you get an information spread about twice the size of the average computer screen, which you can scan more quickly than the computer.
Finally, my paper includes a cryptic crossword,sudoku,bridge problem,and chess problem. The only one of these I've ever found online is sudoku, and I find working them with pen and paper is much quicker than doing them online. So I get a lot of value for $16/month for 24 papers.
I agree with your definition of brand power, and I think it has lessened in recent years as people are able to do more research on the net, and have gained experience with store and generic brands, and found them to be of similar quality at a much lower price. For example, when I'm lazy and tired at night, I will make a bowl of canned spaghetti. I tried Heinz (OK) and Chef Boyardee (awful). One day, I tried the house brand, and it was just fine at half the price. I bought a "Danby" (who are they?!) microwave at Wal-Mart for $59, and it works just as well as the $200 Panasonic friends have. But I agree with a previous poster - there is no substitute for Heinz ketchup!
Oh, please. "No Logo" was a biased and blanket condemnation of global brands as if they were some giant conspiracy to separate people from excessive amounts of money. Naomi Klein is a left-wing whiner.
My first car was a Honda Civic in 1975. Let's see - the paint all rusted, I had to spend $500 on transmission repairs, and the car finally died on the highway when it popped a piston rod through the engine casing. My next two cars were Fords - a Mustang and a T-bird. The Mustang lasted five years with only basic maintenance, and the T-bird lasted nine. Then, in 1994, I bought a Chrysler Concorde, and it only died in January of last year.
My wife works for a Toyota dealer, and she gets a new car every three to four months, so she never has problems. But for our nanny, she bought a PT Cruiser (used) some four or five years ago, and we haven't had any problems with it either.
Malcolm Gladwell had an article on this in the New Yorker a few years ago. It was the time of the "Pepsi Challenge", and Coke was getting creamed in it. The Pepsi people were using the results of the test to convince restaurant chains to switch to Pepsi from Coke.
But as Gladwell explained it, Pepsi was sweeter than Coke. Since people only got a very small cup in the challenge, the initial sugar hit was more attractive, but when people were given a full glass, most preferred the relative tartness of Coke. Coke management was misled by the Challenge results, and decided to sweeten the formula. When New Coke was released, and people started drinking full servings, they found the sweetness too cloying. The rest is history. But to Coke's credit, they reacted quickly to the problem, and that's what sets them apart from other companies, such as a certain software giant that regularly releases product months after their promised release date, and then find it's full of bugs and problems.
And we saw the results in the latest blow up on Wall Street. The guy drives Merrill Lynch into near bankruptcy, and he gets a $100 million severance. And the "results" they reported were based on smoke, mirrors, and fiction but they got paid anyway. Same thing with Bear Stearns. It's the shareholders who end up holding the bag.
But Coke has been innovating. Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Dasani waters, new flavours of Fresca and Sprite, and I believe I read somewhere they are working on a coffee based beverage (not certain about the last one). They have added a whole bunch of new flavours under the Minute Maid juice brand. As the population ages and becomes more health conscious, Coke is trying to keep up with the demand for healthier drinks. They'll never abandon the flagship product, that's true, but I haven't had a regular Coke in 15 years - it's just Diet for me. (And don't talk to me about Diet Pepsi, which is one of the vilest beverages I've ever quaffed. When I go into a restaurant now, my first question is "Coke or Pepsi". If they say Pepsi, I order club soda.)
I'm running Windows XP on a Dell, and the only times it has crashed on me are when we get a power outage. I'm not saying other OS's aren't better, but I really haven't had any major problems in over 3 years. Firefox occasionally craps out on me, but rarely, and then as you suggest, I just restart the program. And to be fair, I think half the time it's my ISP not being available.
Oh, and I downloaded Open Office, and have gone back to Excel, Word, and Access. I find OO takes forever to open - like five minutes. Too aggravating!
I'm a Robbers customer in Richmond Hill, and I notice that there seems to be some kind of monthly limit. At the beginning of the month, downloads run pretty quickly, but by the end of the month, they are crawling.
Except the Quebecois are among the most culturally insular people in North America. Where are the geeks going to live? In a company dorm, shunned by most of the people in a small town? Where they would have a hard time ordering dinner in a restaurant, or buying a pair of shoes? Again, I don't think the average geek wants to live in a town of 2,000 where he can't speak the language, feels ostracized, and couldn't pick up a girl to save his life. Oh wait, I guess that last one applies pretty much anywhere.
Er, where exactly? Even in Edmonton, which is the northern most major city, temps still get up in the 90's in the summer. And Albertans are worried about water supplies - the oil sands and farming suck up a lot of it.
You could suggest Yellowknife or some other spot in the Northwest Territories, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of geeks moving to a spot where it's practically dark for 3 months at a stretch, staples like milk and sugar are almost twice as expensive as elsewhere, and the cultural facilities consist of five bars, a theatre, and watching drunken aboriginals fight on Saturday night.
Man, I had no idea there were that many cables. Neal Stephenson wrote a great article in Wired a few years back describing the problems laying cable underseas. It's pretty daunting. But I guess this is why we can call the Philippines from Toronto for four cents a minute.
Don't forget the agri-business complex. A recent piece in the NY Times tells how farmers in the midWest who might like to produce local fruits and vegetables in addition to their main crops of corn, wheat, and soybeans are forbidden to do so, on pain of losing all their federal subsidies. This benefits the large fruit/vegetable farm businesses in California, Texas, and Florida (and isn't it amazing that those are three of the most populous states in the nation?). And don't get me started on ADM and Monsanto.
I'm Canadian, and we practice equally stupid things up here. Western Canadian farmers must sell their wheat to the Canada Wheat Board, a government controlled entity that does a spectacularly bad job of getting good prices for the wheat, while farmers in Ontario and Quebec (and isn't amazing those are the two most populous provinces in the country?) are free to sell their wheat to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, "marketing boards" for milk, eggs, etc. in Eastern Canada prop up prices for farmers while raising costs to consumers. My wife makes regular trips from Toronto to Buffalo to shop, and usually comes back with 10-15 lbs. of butter, which she says is half the price there, 25-lb bags of flour, 6-9 dozen eggs, etc. (she bakes a lot!)
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Right. They were the ones carrying signs "Kerry = Hitler" in the last campaign. Oh, wait, it was the others who were carrying signs saying "Bushitler" wasn't it?
Have you ever seen the rabid ferocity of women demanding the right to 3rd trimester abortions? They practically foam at the mouth because they're not willing to go through 2-3 months of discomfort to give a baby life.
And these same people claim they are in favour of human rights, but were perfectly willing to abandon Afghan women to a Taliban regime where a girl walking alone could be beaten with sticks, or Iraqi people to a murderous dictator whose sons repeatedly raped women and killed people.
But it's the fundamentalists who are cruel and evil. What an amazingly informed world view you have.
We are not going change what people think it says unless we start acknowledging what the constitution actually says. Teaching or establishing religion by government is unconstitutional This betrays a complete lack of understanding about what the "establishment" clause was meant to prevent. In England, the Church of England (CE) is the "established" church; the monarch has to be a member. If Queen Elizabeth II suddenly decided to convert to Catholicism or Islam, she would be deposed. This came about because the Pope wouldn't give Henry VIII a divorce, so old Hal just invented a new church and threw the Catholic one out. After Elizabeth, James and Charles tried to re-establish the Catholic church. But after William of Orange came over from Holland to kick some British butt, a variety of acts of parliament including the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Act of Succession 1707 were brought into force to ensure the monarch would remain Protestant and a member of the CE. Ironically, the honorific "Defender of the Faith" was originally conferred on Henry VIII by the Pope, and rescinded when Henry broke with Rome. It was later restored to Henry by an act of Parliament, and has been adopted by most kings and queens since then. Since many of the Founding Fathers and original settlers from England were religious dissenters such as Quakers, they were determined that the Constitution would prevent any future government from selecting one church as the "established" church (for which JFK was doubtless grateful). But teaching creationism is not selecting a church; it is common to Catholics, all the different Protestant churches, Jews, and Muslims. Therefore, it is not, in the strictest sense, "establishing" a church. In fact, due to a number of wrong-headed decisions by SCOTUS, there is now an "established" church in the US called "secular humanism". I agree we should learn what the Constitution actually says, and how to interpret it.
To me, this is just like the global warming scam - despite Gore's 'A Convenient Lie', the Antartic ice shelf is about the same size as it was 100 years ago. Sea levels have not risen any where near the level predicted. The Earth has actually cooled over the last 4-5 years. I'm an engineer, so I know all about the scientific method, and when the theories completely fail to predict the observed reality, I tend to think they are completely wrong. And when you read how Mann of the famous "hockey stick" chart cherry-picked and manipulated his data, and then refused to release the data for a number of years - well, that doesn't sound like science to me.
I agree that creationism shouldn't be taught in science class, and that other religious and cultural origin myths should be given some time. I remember reading as a child about the Greek (or was it Egyptian?) myth that the world rests on the back of four elephants, who are standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming in an endless sea. But let's remember the Old Testament is a holy book for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who make up about 55% of the world's population, and more than that percentage in North America, so it has a larger significance here. I'm not a biblical realist; after all, it was written by men, not God. But Deuteronomy is interesting for the operational wisdom it dispensed in a time of no refrigeration and poor sanitation, and there's still a lot of truth in Proverbs. Ecclesiastes in the King James version is simply beautiful literature. Why should my children be denied this great history and literature in favour of "I Have Two Mommies"?
I'd like to learn the Hindu, Buddhist, and Chinese myths; I'm sure they'd be interesting. I read today about a woman in NYC who claims to be a lesbian, vegan, and believes in a Flying Pink Unicorn; I don't think that would be worth spending more than a minute on. i'm sure the world would be a nicer place if we understood more about the cultures of others. But please, no Scientology.
I don't know; this doesn't sound any more absurd than Xenu and his rocket powered DC-3's that Scientologists believe in. And they don't seem to have trouble getting members.
Reminds me of the old joke: Man says to God: "Lord, is it true a million dollars is like a penny to you, and a million years is like a second?" God says "Yes, that's true." Man "Lord, may I have a penny?" God "Sure, just a second."
That said, Nixon had deep, serious flaws. Never mind Watergate; Agnew was taking cash bribes sitting in the VP's office. For Nixon to choose someone like that as his running mate shows a serious lack of judgement. But let's not throw inaccurate slurs at him as well.
better hurry. The Canadian government has introduced a bill regarding digital copying that looks like it was written by RIAA and MPAA on a very bad day....
Well, maybe there's something in the Oregon air that just makes people stupid. Here in Toronto, we have mandatory recycling as well, but only ONE truck is needed to pick up the papers, plastic, and glass - it just has three different compartments. The trashmen put paper in one, plastic in another, and glass in a third. What's so hard about that?
I was born in Montreal. I still bear a scar on my head from when I was three years old. Two of my French "friends" broke a pop bottle, and cut me with it - and they were also three years old. You don't know how wide the division is between the English and the French. If you're in the downtown core, or the western part of the city, it's easy to get along in English. Move east of St. Laurent, and you encounter scorn and ridicule, regardless of whether you can speak French. Most Canadian kids learn some French in school, but it's Parisian French. In Quebec, they speak a dialect called joual. When you try to speak your French to them, you can see a barely disguised sneer, and if they need help from another person, you will invariably be referred to as "l'anglais". Montreal is a great city to visit, but most young English people are leaving. The English population is increasingly aging. Luckily, the current Liberal government is friendly to the English community. If the Parti Quebecois gets re-elected, you can be sure the hostility to the English community will increase.
Remember, the discussion is about who has the best brand power, not the sense of selling water. (And I'm not above buying a bottle of water before my 1 hr commute home.) The fact that Coke can charge a premium over many of the generic varieties, and can displace well known brands like Perrier, et al is evidence of brand power.
I was born in Montreal; you don't need to educate me about the city. But you should know if you move to Quebec, and you weren't educated at an English school there as a child, all immigrants have to send their children to French language schools. And that's "newspaper" singular, as the Montreal Star shut down years ago. Don't get me wrong - I love the city, and our family cottage is 40 miles south on Lake Champlain; I'm suggesting the culture shock from some guy from SoCal or Texas would be immense. But if you're going to pick Montreal, why not pick, say, Bangor, Maine? Same latitude as Montreal, no cross-border hassles, and since it's not near a large body of water, it actually gets colder in winter than Montreal does. Plus land prices are a lot cheaper.
What bugs me about liberal ass-hats is they preach "human rights", but when it comes to making changes, they sit on their hands. What are liberals doing about Tibet, Darfur, Burma, or Zimbabwe? About 1/10th the whining they do about how awful the US is. Hypocrites.
I enjoy the opinions of various columnists, and the letters to the editor, as well as the mixture of local, national, and world news all aggregated together. Studying the financial pages is a lot easier with the newspaper - when you open up the two page spread, you get an information spread about twice the size of the average computer screen, which you can scan more quickly than the computer.
Finally, my paper includes a cryptic crossword,sudoku,bridge problem,and chess problem. The only one of these I've ever found online is sudoku, and I find working them with pen and paper is much quicker than doing them online. So I get a lot of value for $16/month for 24 papers.
I agree with your definition of brand power, and I think it has lessened in recent years as people are able to do more research on the net, and have gained experience with store and generic brands, and found them to be of similar quality at a much lower price. For example, when I'm lazy and tired at night, I will make a bowl of canned spaghetti. I tried Heinz (OK) and Chef Boyardee (awful). One day, I tried the house brand, and it was just fine at half the price. I bought a "Danby" (who are they?!) microwave at Wal-Mart for $59, and it works just as well as the $200 Panasonic friends have. But I agree with a previous poster - there is no substitute for Heinz ketchup!
Oh, please. "No Logo" was a biased and blanket condemnation of global brands as if they were some giant conspiracy to separate people from excessive amounts of money. Naomi Klein is a left-wing whiner.
My first car was a Honda Civic in 1975. Let's see - the paint all rusted, I had to spend $500 on transmission repairs, and the car finally died on the highway when it popped a piston rod through the engine casing. My next two cars were Fords - a Mustang and a T-bird. The Mustang lasted five years with only basic maintenance, and the T-bird lasted nine. Then, in 1994, I bought a Chrysler Concorde, and it only died in January of last year. My wife works for a Toyota dealer, and she gets a new car every three to four months, so she never has problems. But for our nanny, she bought a PT Cruiser (used) some four or five years ago, and we haven't had any problems with it either.
But as Gladwell explained it, Pepsi was sweeter than Coke. Since people only got a very small cup in the challenge, the initial sugar hit was more attractive, but when people were given a full glass, most preferred the relative tartness of Coke. Coke management was misled by the Challenge results, and decided to sweeten the formula. When New Coke was released, and people started drinking full servings, they found the sweetness too cloying. The rest is history. But to Coke's credit, they reacted quickly to the problem, and that's what sets them apart from other companies, such as a certain software giant that regularly releases product months after their promised release date, and then find it's full of bugs and problems.
And we saw the results in the latest blow up on Wall Street. The guy drives Merrill Lynch into near bankruptcy, and he gets a $100 million severance. And the "results" they reported were based on smoke, mirrors, and fiction but they got paid anyway. Same thing with Bear Stearns. It's the shareholders who end up holding the bag.
But Coke has been innovating. Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Dasani waters, new flavours of Fresca and Sprite, and I believe I read somewhere they are working on a coffee based beverage (not certain about the last one). They have added a whole bunch of new flavours under the Minute Maid juice brand. As the population ages and becomes more health conscious, Coke is trying to keep up with the demand for healthier drinks. They'll never abandon the flagship product, that's true, but I haven't had a regular Coke in 15 years - it's just Diet for me. (And don't talk to me about Diet Pepsi, which is one of the vilest beverages I've ever quaffed. When I go into a restaurant now, my first question is "Coke or Pepsi". If they say Pepsi, I order club soda.)
I'm running Windows XP on a Dell, and the only times it has crashed on me are when we get a power outage. I'm not saying other OS's aren't better, but I really haven't had any major problems in over 3 years. Firefox occasionally craps out on me, but rarely, and then as you suggest, I just restart the program. And to be fair, I think half the time it's my ISP not being available. Oh, and I downloaded Open Office, and have gone back to Excel, Word, and Access. I find OO takes forever to open - like five minutes. Too aggravating!
I'm a Robbers customer in Richmond Hill, and I notice that there seems to be some kind of monthly limit. At the beginning of the month, downloads run pretty quickly, but by the end of the month, they are crawling.
Except the Quebecois are among the most culturally insular people in North America. Where are the geeks going to live? In a company dorm, shunned by most of the people in a small town? Where they would have a hard time ordering dinner in a restaurant, or buying a pair of shoes? Again, I don't think the average geek wants to live in a town of 2,000 where he can't speak the language, feels ostracized, and couldn't pick up a girl to save his life. Oh wait, I guess that last one applies pretty much anywhere.
You could suggest Yellowknife or some other spot in the Northwest Territories, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of geeks moving to a spot where it's practically dark for 3 months at a stretch, staples like milk and sugar are almost twice as expensive as elsewhere, and the cultural facilities consist of five bars, a theatre, and watching drunken aboriginals fight on Saturday night.
Man, I had no idea there were that many cables. Neal Stephenson wrote a great article in Wired a few years back describing the problems laying cable underseas. It's pretty daunting. But I guess this is why we can call the Philippines from Toronto for four cents a minute.
I'm Canadian, and we practice equally stupid things up here. Western Canadian farmers must sell their wheat to the Canada Wheat Board, a government controlled entity that does a spectacularly bad job of getting good prices for the wheat, while farmers in Ontario and Quebec (and isn't amazing those are the two most populous provinces in the country?) are free to sell their wheat to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, "marketing boards" for milk, eggs, etc. in Eastern Canada prop up prices for farmers while raising costs to consumers. My wife makes regular trips from Toronto to Buffalo to shop, and usually comes back with 10-15 lbs. of butter, which she says is half the price there, 25-lb bags of flour, 6-9 dozen eggs, etc. (she bakes a lot!)
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"