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Comment Re:Welp. (Score 1) 268

I can second that.

A couple years back a week before christmas my uncles place burnt down in the middle of the night.
Everyone always said that because of the historic covered bridge from the road to back where those few homes were, that everyone best not have a heart attack or play with fire because no emergency vehicles could possibly get there...

Fortunately they both got out unharmed - but at that point with no worldly physical possessions except his truck (which I can't say was the bestest idea to go back in the garage to get) and the PJs on their backs.

To this day the things they miss the most are the few old family hand-me-downs, and the massive amounts of photo albums they had amassed.
Including family hand-me-down albums, over a hundred years worth of memories were gone just like that.

As my imediate family is only two people (my mother and her brother/my uncle) - a total of two people asking for computer help is far from problematic for me and so of course I still do.

Somewhere between un-oem'ing his laptops windows install and handing the thing back to him, I set him up an ssh account on one of my servers and a winscp dropbox style icon on the desktop for offsite backup purposes.
But every picture from 1920 to 2009 is now gone and gone for good.

Us "youngins" have a wonderful advantage with digital media that naturally affords us easy copies and easy backups, up to ridiculous extents that simply wouldn't be possible with physical items.

There is no excuse for us not to avail ourselves of them, file format be damned.

In retrospect I now kinda feel bad for the joke I made about the offsite storage thing (long before the fire however)
I told him that machine was "only" backed up to servers in three other states plus a backup server in my basement, but with a slight config change I could add his homedir to be copied to my non-us servers as well - resulting in the possibility of our data out surviving all of us if ww3 happened...

But my point with that is that it is so cheap and easy to fling data around these days that having only one or even two backups is only slightly less painful to hear than someone who has no backups, and the slight time investment most people would need to recover and the relatively tiny cost for something that was literally impossible to do not two generations ago - there is just no excuse not to.

I would even go so far as to say a pirated movie collection would deserve some redundancy right next to personal data like home pictures and movies - and the barriers to doing so are so tiny that they truly are not worth even thinking about at the "yes or no" level.
Only the higher up level of how many copies is worth pondering over (Ex. I don't really feel its worth having a copy of the matrix 2 spread over 8 machines and multiple countries for example ;P )

Comment Re:Wow (Score 3, Insightful) 81

Man, when personal citizens' rights and powerful corporate interests align, amazing things can happen.

Now if we could only get powerful corporations to do the same thing on NSA overreach, CIA overreach, money in politiics, ...

If the majority of people would vote (at the ballot and with their wallets) for their own rational self-interests once in a while, and not what the silver-tongued TV sound bite sold to them, this would happen much more often. My cynical side tells me that few will ever appreciate the value of abstract principles in and of themselves, but the self-interest angle should be at least achievable.

Comment Re:Traditional crimes (Score 1) 140

Also, this guy is NUTS for pleading guilty - the law is a complete violation of freedom of expression rights.

So if I was to repetitively punch you in the face until caving your skull in, you are perfectly OK with that and me being allowed to do it?

After all, I am just flexing my freedom of expression rights by executing a public performance play. It's hardly my fault the plot results in your characters death :P

Comment Re:containment (Score 4, Funny) 296

Why not just fill the whole data center with helium... that way, if any gets out of the drive, it's quickly refilled from the outside :-)

Yeah, that will work.... until the data center floats away.

Sorry boss, as much as I've tried to fight the fad, our data center is now in the cloud...

Comment Re:so don't use them! (Score 4, Funny) 230

Don't use random hot spots. It's like safe sex, only for your computer.

[me] Aight baby, play with that packet. You know how I like it
[ap] tee hee *beep*
[me] oh yea, deeper inspection, deeper inspection! oh yea!
[ap] *56k carrier sound*
[me] That's what I like to hear! Now, I put on my robe and wizards hat
[ap] ... *stp-broadcast* ...
[me] baby-aye-pee you still there? Where'd ya go??

Comment Re:A tepid defence (Score 1) 184

I think regulating Google and Netflix is a really bad idea but I think there's a defensible motive in trying to promote Canadian content and defend Canadian content providers.

I can't speak for all video streaming services, but does not netflix canada already make the same percentage of canadian content available as required by the network broadcasters?

Personally I have no issues with making such options available, and while part of me wishes it was not required to force anyone to do it, but not enough broadcasters willingly would do so, and as you say there are problems with culture and identity being overtaken (although personally I think that's already happened - but not saying that's an excuse to stop trying)

What I do have issue with is forcing extra money out of non-canadian content producers to show their content in canada.

On TV I can change channels to find whichever media I'm wanting at the time, be it canadian or american. I appreciate the option being there, but would very much resent being forced to watch something against my will.

The thing with sites like netflix (and this may just be my usage) I typically know what I want to watch before hand and am only going there to specifically watch that.
This current plan sounds an awful lot like trying to force me into watching something canadian I don't want to watch at that moment and forcing others to not allow me to watch content from elsewhere at the same time.

A lot of canadians, or at least the younger generations anyway, already seem to identify mainly as americans do. Forcing content on them they don't want to watch will at best make them turn off the TV/PC, and at worse build anger and hatred towards these very regulations.

While this specific case is nothing more than one existing monopoly trying to get more money at the expense of everyone else, it's still worth thinking about continuing to make canadian content available to those that want it, while not forcibly blocking all non canadian content at the same time.
Sadly however, this doesn't appear to be the solution.

Comment Re: ELI5 please (Score 1) 354

Wolfe contributed code under the GPL license. He has every right to send takedown notices against distributions of his code that do not follow his license.

Untrue. You must be within your own legal rights first to even be able to apply a license, including GPL.
Wolfe is not legally able to GPL his code, since his code is itself a copyright violation. You and him can claim it is GPL all you want, but that doesn't make it so logically nor legally.

If you still think you are right and I am wrong, then lets put your money where your mouth is.
Under your definition of copyright, I now claim DPL (dissy protective license) copyright over your body, mind, and all resulting work (including your slashdot posts)

You specifically claimed I do not need any rights to your body mind and resulting work to apply a license legally, so there you go, I own you and anything you do.

Now get on a flight over here, because my grass needs mowed and my trash taken out :P

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