It's not just that job search sites don't work well over dial up. You can't even keep up with security patches on your PC over dial up. I've got a relative that only has dial-up access and limited hours per month. Every time she turns on her PC, the patches start downloading and take over the phone connection. The only practical solution for dial-up users is to turn security patching off and that SUCKS. By the time you add up Window security patches, your Acrobat Reader security patches, and your antivirus patches, you'll easily consume hundreds of MB per month.

Not even close. You can't get a smartphone from any of the large retails for under $60 per month and that's to talk for 5 hours per month. MANY US citizens are not in an area where smartphone access is even an option - a vast majority of the central plains is dead.

A landline is cheap and gives you unlimited minutes - simply purchasing a dumb phone with unlimited minutes is going to cost easily 5 times as much. Data is significantly more.

I remember this going to court in Calgary, Alberta, around 1990. Somebody had a T-Shirt that said "Fuck off and die" on it and was arrested. The judge's decision at the time was that "fuck" could no longer be considered obscene because it had become everyday use. He did say the wearer demonstrated poor taste but it was unfortunately legal. And this was 20 years ago!

Even single-head sewing/embroidery machines for home use have floppy drives. We've got one and it would cost us easily several grand to replace it with a newer model that uses USB sticks instead.

...their IT folks are not smarter than their 5th graders.

Not all geeks with bad eyesight can wear contacts. My eyeballs have a funny shape and I'm not a candidate for Lasik nor contacts. 3-D movies with glasses make me want to throw up although I have no problems with 2-D movies. For me, I will *never* watch a 3-D movie.

To create an "open source game", you're giving your customers a license but you would be given them a license for something you KNOW you don't own. You're setting yourself up for a world of hurt. Not only can the original copyright and/or patent holders come after you, but every single one of YOUR licensees could come after you for damages as well. Whether or not you charge a fee has absolutely no bearing on the matter. The real question you need to ask is not whether you'd be in the right or wrong but whether or not you can afford the legal bills if somebody does go after you. You, and you alone, need to decide if you are willing to take that risk. Is the game THAT important that you'd be willing to risk thousands or tens of thousands of your own money on legal fees?

Mobile phones are a lot of things, but being cheaper isn't one of them. We talk to Canada for over 1000 minutes per month. I can easily afford to pay for my Qwest landline with unlimited calling to Canada for just those long-distance charges. Any time you get into many minutes for multiple people, cell phone plans start to suck.

Sounds like a Usenet to email gateway to me!

Herein lies the issue. If they go with the artist numbers, then revenues might be small. Punitive and compensatory damages will likely be small as a result. However, if they want to claim higher numbers, then the artists will turn around and sue them for the stolen revenue. They're caught between a rock and a hard place, and that's good...

RAID 5 will not protect your data. The odds are extremely high that if you lose a drive in a 12TB array, you *will* get an error during rebuild. RAID 5 on an array this large is for those people who don't do storage for a living.

RAID 0? Let me simply repeat what that 0 is for: the percentage of the data you will get back if anything goes wrong.

Any time I see somebody build this kind of uber-cheap setup reminds me of a simple formula: good, fast, cheap. Pick any two. Yeah, you've built cheap, and maybe fast, but it isn't any good.

I have rebuilt cheap 12TB file systems that have gone corrupt. I've seen double-disk failures on RAID 5 sets. More than once. I still see people suggesting RAID 5, naively thinking that they'll survive disk failures. I see people putting crappy, unsupported file systems on big arrays. I see people putting non-journaling file systems on these arrays. I see single stream benchmarks, or benchmarks that make no pretense of mimicking a production workload.

As an IT guy, you can appreciate basic math. If you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you burn more than you eat, you will lose weight. Eat the right foods that aren't just a waste of calories - there are a gazillion references to what these are. Don't eat more than you can burn. If somebody brings in donuts at work, take a pass. Drink lots of water, not caffeine-laced drinks. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Park at the parking spot the farthest away from the door. Remember, you have to burn calories and every calorie helps. You can also search online (wikihow for example) for lots of exercises that you can do while sitting at your desk or while driving.

When all newspapers become pay sites, you'll see where they're adding value - by bringing you the news in the first place.

Ads are no longer a viable revenue source for most of the providers.

Perhaps you'll trust the news being broadcast from around the world by free broadcasters. Others won't and will expect CNN or AP to send professional reports to the events and provide professional analysis. We'll see where the value add ends up.

You can see it today - who do you go to for your political coverage? Your sports coverage? How about your technical coverage? All of those have "amateur" coverage, yet here *you* are, on a site managed by professionals. Something has to pay the bills.

For brevity, a book I once read had this nice farewell "letter": "Upshove job asswards".

It doesn't need to say any more after that...

With that attitude, you'll always have mediocre U.S. citizens. You get better through experience and if you need to retain the Americans, you'll be more likely to train them.

Disclaimer: I came in to the US on an H1B back in 1997 and now have permanent residency. My company spent a lot of money advertising for my position but nobody would take it. They then went to Canada to get me.