They refer to it most of the time as 'the legal system' versus the 'justice system'.

Justice system is most often a misnomer. We can rarely provide any worthwhile justice. We can, however, enforce a code of laws.

I think the penalty here is vastly disproportionate. On the other hand, I do think the guy knowingly broke the law and should have suffered a penalty. Probation for two years seems reasonable. The fine should have been more in the $5-10K range as a 'hurts but won't kill you' fine. It has to be bad enough to deter reoccurence, but dropping a nuke($183K) seems overblown and not sensible.

I wonder if the severity of the penalty will help with any appeal?

Run a set of single wires, and remote switches. Put a switch/router in the middle (or a side) of the ceiling, and run a small number of wires along the walls to switches on the floor near where you have clusters of people.Running from the cieling to the floor, you can follow the brick mortar lines (you'll get half on the mortar, half on the brick.. you can spray paint the half running over brick the same colour as the brick -- this will break the lines, and camouflage what you're doing.

Put the switches inside of pretty, wood cases... with or without locks, depending on how much you trust the staff to play nice.

Unless you've got dozens of people running video, gigabit backbone runs should be enough... run multiple ggabit lines to the central switches if you have to, single gigabit to the floor switches.
Generally, bandwidth use tends to be sporadic, so network congestion shouldn't be that bad .. There's rarely any real need to run single gigibit lines from the server room to every client. For most services, 100Meg should be enough to the clients (helps to moderate burst loads), and gigabit for trunking.

I noted at one point that BC Tel Mobility (now Telus) had two COs located on different fault planes and hardened up with bunker-like security and power systems. They do think of earthquakes.

I worked on 3G/4G networks auth and policy enforcement software. It is hideously complicated. I'm surprised that anytime you make a call it goes through without any disasters.

Text delivery is not gauranteed. Nor is timeliness of such a transaction guaranteed. SMS is not a disaster-scenario tool. Nor is email. Nor are cellular phones as currently implemented.

I note they say that there is no 'cut off hand' tactic viable with this.

They don't mention how incredibly viable the 'pistol resting against the temple' tactic is. That one will still work. you can pull the trigger after they unlock the laptop.

And what happens if your hand gets mashed? It does happen. It's rare, but I'll bet that messes up the capillaries something fierce. Then... is there a way around this? Do you enroll both hands? (One assumes, just like you enroll multiple fingers)

And who can come along and perhaps hack the stored biometric data? Hmmm...... N....S.....ah they wouldn't do that would they?.....A.....

My tinfoil hat helps keep me warm in winter.

Most of the people I know who shoot (who are not military or police) hunt for food. I do not know a single trophy hunter. I do know people who, for a reasonable expense, bring home a fair value of food to their table. They would not dream of shooting an animal just for the fun or some wierd killing joy. It's all about putting food on the table, just like fishing.

There are probably instances where an animal brought down for food could yield a trophy antler rack or some skin or fur, but that's more in 'whole use' than 'hunting just for the trophy' thinking.

I suspect you've never hunted nor know many hunters personally.

Apparently even more effective: The primers used in modern ammunition. They are even harder to manufacture than good, clean gunpowder.

These politicos don't read the classics. You can't stuff Pandora (or William Shatner) into the box again....

Man, there were so many classics and little known gems... man I'm old....

Tempest (I was no good, but it was awesome even to watch a good player on that game)
Spy Hunter (mentioned below) was amazing (and Peter Gunn doesn't get old)
Karate Master (two player) - I could beat down other humans, but the damn flower pots and the bull were not my friends
Gauntlet - 4 players worth of sci-fi maze mahem (meta-game: If you got to the door and didn't have the key, block it and hope the boss killed the keybearer so you could grab it and go through for 1st slot)
Xenophobe - 3 players of sci-fi mayhem with hatching xenomorphs
Battlezone - Best early tank game
Space War - Two player, one ship looked like line art enterprise, the other a line art star destroyer, all sorts of space terrain and gravity effects could be thrown in
Galaga - more fun than space invaders, but 3 ships was too big (get two, be happy)
Joust
Head to Head Tennis - a great sit-down head to head game
Later on, John Elway's Football and MLB Baseball
The most glaring, super awesome omission: ROBOTRON!
Tron, both the first one with light cycles/tanks/spiders and the later deadly disk game, were amazing

From the list, Star Wars and Pinball get the nod

A hate on for: Dragon's lair and the hologram games with 'pick a path' modes that just sucked money with no real player skill if you knew the pattern

a company with a history of botching huge government contracts, gets another huge government contract -- and botches it.

I was wondering why this contract was costing so much to do so little.... It is all becoming a log clearer now. These people don't make money off of well managed projects (from the customer's point of view), they make money from BIG projects ... no matter how small they actually needed to be.

I'm sure that the botch is well documented ISO9000 style and all, but success was not necessary for them to get paid.

It's something of a chicken and egg problem. The presumption of Capitalism is that, as a company or business works to maximize it's profits, it will benefit society. -- The job of the government is to ensure that the rules are set such that, as a company's striving to maximize profit, it will necessarily benefit society. this was enforced by the principle of "one man, one vote".

The problem now, is that companies and their money are the primary contributor to election campaigns .. and this means that the politicians who control government are now beholden to the companies that they're supposed to be regulating. We've gone from one man one vote to one dollar one vote. This now puts the inmates in charge of the asylum of society.

yes.

If they're getting to you within minutes, then they're getting help from inside. It may be as simple as your router being configured for Dynamic DNS, or one or more of your machines is compromised... or -- as others said, they may be getting info from your game server.

Rather than paying gigabucks for a hardware router/firewall, take an ancient machine, add a second ethernet card to it and install OpenBSD onto it.OpenBSD will do you as well as anything hardware based, in terms of protecting your network -- even if it is bit more work to get properly configured. You can also then install stuff like Snort and wireshark to REALLY watch what your system is doing.

It won't take much in terms of hardware -- even a sub 1Gz machine will be more than sufficient for a 20 megabit feed.

Provide the option to disable the capability. Some distros will make it the default. Others won't... but it will ultimately allow users to decide -- which is the whole point of Open Source.

Just don't force people to hack the source juet to restore the capability.