We already have a great example of this being a bag of crap. CBC created an online music service that has been a financial disaster. So let's look at a Canadian Netflix. It would be endless drivel from Mary Walsh, Rick Mercer, Cathy Jones, All year Anne Murray Christmas specials, and over acted Gordon Pinsent nostalga crap. Who the hell would pay for that crap? Oh and I forgot about the minorities. They would then send a huge amount of that money to add content by aboriginals with everything having an injection from whatever Toronto minorities have the most influence. So as programs were made they would insist that the full rainbow of Canadian multiculturalism be on display in order to get some funding, low levels of funding so the lighting would look florescent and the sound would be hollow and everything would look like it was filmed on 1980s Betamax.

Basically what this twerp is thinking is that he could somehow bend reality and make us choke down the same crap that we were force fed in the 70s; a time when we basically had no choice. But don't think that Canadians will take the Beach Combers for 1 second when we have tasted Netflix.

But the most ironic joke is that let's say that he managed to force Netflix to add a bunch of third rate Can-Con excrement; the Netflix algorithms would realize that nobody wanted it and automatically stop recommending it to us. A few things might actually not sink like a turd like maybe old episodes of Kids in the Hall. But I don't think that the Littlest Hobo would ever show up in the "Popular on Netflix" column.

So what this really boils down to is that this asswipe is going for a cash grab so that he can wield some power as he dribbles out some money to those who kiss his ass and finance his party to his satisfaction.

I would simply VPN my router through a server/service I set up in some other country and forget that this regulation even existed.

Next week he will introduce measures to support the VHS tape industry.

At least he will now be remembered as one of the stupidest politicians of his generation. It is good to be remembered for something.

I second this, Lead and mercury really screw up people (especially children) at pretty much any level; and it isn't just the home owner who gets to make the decision but he would then be deciding for future owners and unknowing tradesmen who are either applying the product or later sanding and drilling where it was applied. The rule is the less the better as opposed to some level being fine. For instance with arsenic they are finding that a tiny tiny amount is probably good for you. But I have never heard of this with Lead or Mercury.

Were the latex paint people jealous of the oil based lead paint people and all the attention they were getting? Lead and mercury have been known to be hazardous for decades prior to the 70s. Why in a million years would they think that it was a good idea. Minimally with the late 60s and 70s being a huge eco movement time any company would think twice before potentially attracting the attention of a combination of the health authorities, the eco crowd, and shows like 60 minutes.

I wonder if the huge crime spikes of the 60's and 70's had this mercury as another contributing factor?

They could look where companies didn't participate in this crime. Look at the top salaries(over the time period), subtract the salaries that people affected did get, multiply that by 60,000, multiply that by some punitive number, tag on a hefty percentage to make up for the lawyer's fees, and Bob's your uncle.

So let's say the top competitive salaries were $150,000 and that people got $100,000 (probably a much larger spread), and that this all went on for an average of 5 years. So:

5*50,000*1.5*1.3*60,000 which works out to around 29,250,000,000 or basically 30 billion dollars.

Considering the amount of money these companies make from each employee this is actually a fairly reasonable number. Considering that this is 60,000 top tech people who then often lived in very expensive parts of the US their losses from these illegal actions were not insubstantial.

My above numbers also assume a $50,000 dollar gap. Often with stocks and bonuses companies that weren't part of this cartel paid much higher, I know one top tier school math grad who is earning solidly in the $300,000 plus lots of perks and bonuses right out of school working for a large SF tech company.

To put the $324.5 in perspective, a top employee who comes up with a cool feature or new product line could easily have generated that much profit for any one of the larger tech companies. An interesting example of this was in the history of GTA (which I recently read) where the original game had you playing the cops. It was apparently boring as hell. But some enterprising employee swapped it around and it was instant fun. That one guy effectively put the company on the map. The other game might have sent the company into the dusty shelves of mediocre game history.

It is not that all 60,000 of the people in the lawsuit would generate that much money but that I suspect at least one of them did.

I actually wasn't suggesting bypassing IT being the problem, as I agree IT departments are often terribly run and often sclerotic. It would more bypassing management. The president, the CFO, etc. More like going to the board of directors and having them suddenly suggest strongly to management that by not following "Best practices" that they are jeopardizing the company. Or going to the marketing department of the company and arranging a juicy sale that is contingent upon the company switching to some product. This creates bizarre incentives where you might have one of your own marketing people politicking for a $10,000,000 software solution to be implemented so that he can get a $5,000 commission on the juicy sale they have been offered. And the last thing you want is your own marketing department trying to sell an outside product within your own company.

But back to the IT; often these vendors will do their damnedest to end-run any technical people CTO included as they know the guy will point to their existing solution and say, "It works better." or the guy will say, "If we are willing to spend that kind of money there are a many better solutions that would be far better use of that money."

A great example of that was a client we had mid project absolutely insisted that we switch the core technology that we were developing to a major software vendor. We told them that it would provide no value and cost quite a bit and that they should get a quote from the vendor before we went ahead. A few days later they said that all was good and that we should go ahead with the switch. We were comfortable with that particular software solution so we made the switch and were done a few months later. Then a few days before deployment they got the quote as to how much the software licence was going to be. They basically lost their minds, it was more than they were paying us (a lot) by nearly double. So they begged us to switch to the original technology (open source and better) as fast as we could.

We never figured out how that software vendor was able to convince them to make the switch in that how did they even know the project was happening. Our client was a mega company in its own right.

My 1% was referring to the individual's commission. I worked for a consulting company that hired me out to be a technical consultant for one of the mega software companies. The ironic thing was that they they (unknowingly) brought me along on a sales call to my brother's company. This way I got to see the whole show from both sides. They were 100% certain that their product was a terrible fit, yet they put together a whole bunch of very slick presentations and tried a few very interesting angles to see if they could weasel their way past the main IT people who knew their product was BS.

My brother thought it would be interesting to just watch and see how a vendor like this actually functioned with zero intent of making a purchase. Basically they found their weak point and were an inch from a sale when I passed this along before a contract could be signed by someone who shouldn't have been signing contracts let alone one for an IT product.

The mega company sales people were royally pissed that they had come so close only to be "somehow" found out. Again they knew that their entire pitch was BS, the person they were dealing with was incompetent and that the contract was laden with landmines and gotchas that would have been horrible.

Years later I was running my own business and talking to a client who complained that the sales people from that particular mega company were some of the sleaziest sales people around. So yes, a directive saying that if you talk to them that you are fired is actually quite reasonable.

I am singling out this unnamed company but every large software company that I ever dealt with must have drawn their sales people from the ranks of used car salesmen who were fired for having lousy ethics.

Most governments have some sort of independent auditor. Add this to their list of things to investigate.

I am not saying that some individual can't go out and buy a copy of whatever they were looking for but that nobody can talk to a major vendor. It is not Best Buy that needs to be worried about but the guy in the $2,000 suit.

There is actually one problem with opensource and that is that your organization will be attacked by proprietary companies that are freaking out. But this problem can be turned into an asset. The idea is to identify the ways that the proprietary companies manage to insinuate themselves and eliminate those paths. So if an organization suddenly finds a few of their IT people cheerleading some company like Microsoft, then there should be a thorough investigation as to how they have been turned, was it "free" training? Was it some new head of IT who needs to be removed?

Then these tactics need to be published so that other organizations can watch for these fifth column attempts and whatnot.

Often with these situations the company will have salesmen who have commissions well in excess of 1%. So if they can lie, cheat, bribe, or blackmail their way into a organization-wide sale then they could be looking at commissions well into the millions.

And this is where Open Source generally has a huge weakness; no sleazy salesmen. But that is also where it is very attractive. Most heads of organizations hate how much time they have to waste fending off sleazy salesmen doing underhanded attempts to end run them. Either through the ground floor (converting some IT people) or going over their heads through a board of directors. And never mind those situations where one company will insist that in order to do business with them that they are a "Microsoft Shop" only. So they will do something like insist on work orders be placed through an outlook only system or some stupid sharepoint crap.

If I were in charge of something like the city of Munich I would put out a memo that says, "If you talk to a large software vendor then your continued employment is unlikely."

The whole point of nuclear weapons is not to get what you want but to prevent others from threatening you with them; hence MADD. But the moment you pull out your nuclear weapons and wave them in people's faces you have lowered yourself to the level of some street punk with a gun looking for respect. I really hope that the Russians realize that win or lose Crimea that this type of risk to world stability just isn't worth it.

Using the logic that they are trying on for size any nuclear power could wander around saying, "I'll take this, I'll take that." I think the US would like Jamaica, and I hear Spain is nice this time of they year, they should take that too.

Too me this is a very simple situation. There are parts of Crimea that are very very Russian. There are parts that are not. A referendum that was well monitored by many different disinterested parties would generally be accepted by most. Then there would be Crimea that could have a love in with Russia, and the Ukraine that could have a love in with Europe for a while until they remembered that they did have a big neighbour called Russia that is still there and speaking a very similar language with a very similar culture. At this point the Ukraine might find itself in a very favourable position where it could happily participate in both worlds.

The key to getting any separation right would be to make things very black and white. No Kashmirs left behind. Also there shouldn't be any cheating. If there is cheating then people would be far less likely to accept the result even if it largely was a real result.

You would still need the power to transmit a live feed from multiple cameras and sensors. That will still take a battery with some grunt.

I am a firm believer that the end design for most robots will be a combination like you suggest. That the robots will be fairly stupid and controlled by a central powerful computer. But if the robot is moving with any haste then it will need instant feedback loops running between its sensors and motors.

But even in this scenario on a farm the central computer will ideally be battery powered even if it isn't mobile. In this case I could see it also being solar powered. Just sitting way out in the field directing and fuelling a bunch of its little mobile friends.

Also there will be other uses for robots where transmitting to a central powerful computer isn't really an option. Robots that are sent way out into the field. Say water quality sampling along a river or flying huge distances doing air quality surveys.

So autonomous robots will really come into their own when they have the portable power to actually do stuff without breaking the bank.

I build robots and they all suck, they suck because they don't have enough power. I could potentially load them up with $1,000 worth of Lithium based batteries or two tons worth of lead acid batteries but for a robot that I want to follow my cat I am not sure that it is worth it. If I want to build a real robot that will go out in to the real world and do real things then I need batteries. It is one thing to have smooth rolling robots running over a smooth surface and not using much power. But to have an agricultural robot weeding its way through a clumpy muddy farm right after a heavy rain, I need some serious power.

So batteries force robot designers to make many compromises: They can compromise sales by making the robot too expensive, they can compromise how much work it can do by a small battery, they can compromise the computing power to save power, they can compromise functionally to save power.

Of all the problems the one that bothers me the most is compromising computing power; it is very nice to have two or more HD cameras feeding their data to one or more GPUs that crunch what the robot is seeing in real time and plan the optimal solution also in real time. Also other sensors such as radar or laser scanners can be energy gobblers.

For instance I would be curious to find how much Asimo's battery cost, and how long it lasts.

So it is battery technology that is the last piece of the puzzle to adding independent robots to our lives in a substantial way.

When these were first released they were silverlight only. I wanted to watch them but there was a zero percent chance I would use silverlight. It is wonderful that these are now available for all the sensible people who don't drink the microsoft koolaid.