RE: As Alberta gets richer, what happens to Canada (Maclean's Magazine June 2005)

I sent this to Maclean's magazine in June 2005, some of it was published as a letter to the editor. It still sounds useful, so:

Alberta is getting richer, Quebec is still getting special treatment,
the Maritimes are getting energy royalties and Ontario is getting sick
of the squeaky wheels, this sounds like a nightmare for Canada. The
June 13 article about Alberta getting richer reminded me of
"semi-autonomous units" in a business. My company used this idea for
many years, creating a SAU of each acquisition they made.
Unfortunately this created huge political infighting between units and
the company has suffered as a result. The same thing is happening to
Canada and we need to fix the problem quickly before Canada is
internally compromised. How? Create visible connections between the
people and Canada rather than the provinces, the Canadian legal tender
is a good example of this. Unfortunately drivers licenses and health
cards are still created by the provinces (and they're still separate
cards in Ontario, ugh). To associate with Canada rather than a
particular province you should be able to move to another province
without having to change any government information other than your
address...

Netbooks v2.0 - remove the internal drive, add more SDHC and USB slots

Netbooks are intended to be lightweight computers with basic functionality and access to the web with more powerful functionality supplied by the 'cloud'. Based on this definition, why do netbooks have internal drives? The OS and applications needed for such a device should fit on a simple 4GB SDHC card. For user files, an SDHC card or USB key would suffice. Rarely used files can be stored in the cloud.

Such a system would be cheaper and have a longer battery life. The system could be thinner, or have a larger battery. The OS/applications could be sold separately (delineating the cost structure) and later re-sold privately. In fact, the user could easily try multiple OS/application setups.

Perhaps people are already ignoring the internal drive; using a netbook with a USB key for portability and a desktop at home/office/school seems smart to me, how about you?

Parts of this were printed in PCWorld November 2009, see page 9 in:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20918212/PC-World-Magazin-November-2009