I'll bite, where are all the old missile silos in Canada?

Even worse, it's a French Canadian death ray.

Speaking anything other then English is a little suspicious, if you ask me those guys are up to no good.

The legal system constrains judges by design.

If you give them too much leeway they might abuse it, not enough leeway and they are forced to do nonsensical things (insert favorite mandatory minimum story here).

The legal system has been trying to find the right balance for a long time, the system we have in English speaking countries is a bastardized mongrel that has been evolving since the Norman Conquest.

Until you find a way to make that show up on next quarter's balance sheet... no-one making the decisions gives a rat's ass.

If it's really old kit you might be able to underclock the CPU and still have enough balls to do what you need. Newer stuff will self-throttle at higher temps.

If I was building one today I'd be highly tempted to boot it from a USB thumb drive instead of a mechanical HD anyway, you're only writing a few KB a day to /var.

Your closet must have newer junk then mine...

For me, nothing beats the Flintstones cigarette ads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAExoSozc2c

Exactly.

Predictably, I think you foreigners are doing it all wrong and you'd benefit from doing things more like we do. Predictably, foreigners find this opinion annoying.

There was a thread a few months ago about quality of cell phone service in the US or something, and dozens and dozens of Yanks were defending the good ol' US of A's poor numbers. People who normally HATE their cell phone providers were patriotically explaining how it really wasn't that bad, and it was all a plot to make the Fatherland look bad.

Why bother having that conversation on Slashdot of all places? I reply to you because you took the time to write a reasonable reply.

The line is generally determined by doctors, although there are cases of such-and-such expensive cancer drug not being covered by the healthcare system, and people suffering from whatever kind of cancer will organize and lobby gov't to cover the drug.

I just looked up "death panels" on the government web site, oddly enough they're not listed.

What kind of downtime are we talking? There's a big difference between a 5 hour total outage or 5 hour loss of connectivity to a small town DMV office.

But I thought the magic pixie dust of free enterprise would make outsourcing something to the private sector cheaper, more efficient, and better in every possible way?

It's been years, I don't remember if the import worked that first time or if I had permissions to the data or not. I was blindly typing in commands from a crib sheet, I'm far from a mainframe expert.

My point is that some places log everything, and more importantly they have someone who actually bothers to read the logs and follow up on them.

A couple of jobs ago, one of the tasks was a monthly data update to a tool our users had, basicly download a certain file from the mainframe and do some tweaks before importing it into a GUI front-end.

The first time I did it without help (i.e. logged into my own account), the next day I got a phone call asking why the hell I was looking at such-and-such business data, as an IT guy you have no need for that. Turns out my boss didn't sign the right form or something, got him on the phone and all was resolved.

I guess my point is that this level of scrutiny has been around for decades, at least in some shops.

As a Canadian, I'll resist the urge to get drawn into a conversation about the US health care system.