Google phone: a good reason to merge Canada and U.S.

Alas, it's been a crazy couple of days getting ready for the Consumer Electronics Show. I spent yesterday getting up early to get to Las Vegas, getting registered and acclimated and all that jazz, and thereby ran out of time to blog. So's I got nothing for ya today.

I can promise I'll have some great stuff in the days ahead - some of which may have to be posted after CES is over, but it'll be worth the wait. In the meantime, if there's one early observation I can make, it's this: while the pace of technological change is exponentially accelerating every year, it sure seems like we're getting less and less of it in Canada. The latest example is the Nexus One, the "superphone" announced by Google yesterday. People in Hong Kong and Singapore are getting it, but not Canada, where we supposedly have four of the world's most advanced cellphone networks.

Google told the Montreal Gazette it's because they want to get their billing systems sorted out before expanding to Canada. Uh huh. Sure. Because everyone knows that if you want to test your billing system for bugs, you should try it in Chinese.

Anyhow, that got me thinking: with the Canadian government approaching farcical proportions and our dollar near par with the American greenback, what exactly would Canada lose by finally agreeing to become the 51st state? At least we'd get the latest technologies in a timely fashion.

Okay, I'm really exhausted...