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Comment Re:DSL (Score 1) 353

My workplace is smack in the (south) center of the city (of over a million people), but due to it being in an "industrial" area, there is absolutely NO high speed available. We're stuck with a $1200/month 5/5 wireless solution.

The local telcos and cable providers will gladly service us for about $50/month, after we spend $60,000-$80,000 to trench to the area (after which everyone else* in the neighbourhood will get to piggyback). Oddly enough, we're not jumping at this...

Comment Re:Question for NYCountryLawyer re illegal downloa (Score 1) 146

If this were the case, they would have simply looked at what her ratio was set at (most people have it at about 2, if I recall correctly). Therefore Jamie should be on the hook for 48 tracks, worth approximately $50. Instead, the RIAA folks want to punish her for every* illicit download of those tracks, making her an example. I would argue that this is still unconstitutionally excessive.

Comment Re:Med School (Score 1) 454

After working for a couple years in the aeronautics industry, with a sister who is a nurse and therefore in the healthcare industry, I have concluded that the maximum allowable work hours per (unit of time, ie, hours/day, hours/week, days scheduled in a row) is directly proportional to the likelihood of killing someone.

I was appalled to realize that you could be scheduled for 33 days in a row as a helicopter pilot, after which the regs stated that you are required to give 4 days off. Not counting travel time- often pilots are at least a day's travel out from home/civilization, which would eat up 2 of those 4 days off. My sister used to be required to work 24h shifts with astonishing regularity, and as far as I know that is still the norm.

Comment Re:DaisyChain (Score 4, Informative) 405

DON'T DO THIS.

We did this exact thing using WD Green drives for our 18Tb backup problem. Got two of 'em, planning on using their built-in rsync for onsite/off siting the data. Unfortunately, the units never broke 1MB/s transfer, and no amount of work with Drobo yielded faster performance reliably. Both of our units are now sitting unused, ($2500 each!), and we put the drives into a RAID-50 8 bay USB3 enclosure. The new unit runs about 150x faster, and ended up costing $400 (prices are for enclosures only, drives were additional).

Most disappointing was Drobo's support- they just seemed to shrug a lot, and were hyper-agressive about closing trouble tickets.

Comment Re:Henry the VI, Act IV, Scene II (Score 1) 597

I've maintained for years that due to the inherent self interest of lawyers to making law inaccessible to non-lawyers (ie, convoluted law that requires a lawyer to understand), anyone who holds a law degree / has passed the bar should be prevented from ever holding public elected office where they can enact laws.

On a related note, one of the only places where we let people set their own salaries is politics too....

Comment Re:Why would it need studies? (Score 1) 345

Here in Canada there are vast areas that can only be accessed by plane or ice road, so all the heavy hauling of equipment, gear, and non-perishable food gets set up in the winter. And yes, there are numerous vehicles sunk (though fewer than you'd think)- the semi's create a dip in the ice that can fracture when approaching the bank if you go too fast.

Comment Re:Yeah, Canadian democracy at its finest (Score 2) 53

Actually, I'd argue that the Alberta provincial PC Party has moved (comparatively) centrist with their new leader. So much so that the more right wing elements were up in arms enough to do the usual take-their-ball-home conservative political party split (Alliance, Tea-Party) and formed the Wild Rose Party, a super-right wing party that basically said that they'd crap all over the urban centres to please their rural neocon masters.

Polls had them getting a solid majority, with up to 40% popularity, right up until the recent election. Fortunately for the rest of us, the 'undecideds' came out en mass and thumped them soundly, giving the PC's the province once again... hooray for reasonableness. Though I can hardly believe I just used the word 'reasonable' in describing any modern political process or outcome...

Comment Re:why are we even using this word. (Score 3, Insightful) 112

It's almost like the legal system is set up to generate more and more lawsuits, isn't it? It seems like the people who are in charge of creating the laws have some sort of vested interest in keeping the legal system complex, thus requiring more and more specialists in law (I dunno, I'll use the term "Lawyers" to describe these specialists).

Remind me, what percentage of politicians are lawyers?

:-/

Comment Re:Trial and extradition were never the goal (Score 1) 345

So your response to an individual who says that he doesn't trust someone who puts aside rational, scientific thought for a belief system in the "sky daddy" is that the rationalist is a "worshiper of selfishness" and that "Bit picture thinking is clearly out of the question for you." And you conclude with "You can thank the Sky-Daddy for some future event that hasn't happened yet."

You sir, are exactly the sort of anti-rational thought individual who is fighting tooth and nail to hold back progress of society and harm everyone* for your personal belief in a bunch of fairy tales told by a group of iron and bronze age desert wanderers. YOU are the problem- smell yourself before you start attacking others for not sharing your personal belief system.

Comment Re:Use Linux (Score 1) 235

We got nailed with a BSA audit, and we dutifully complied. We counted up all our licences, did a full systems audit, etc, and found we were out by 1 licence, which we purchased and listed as such on the audit. Note that the audit requires you to do a complete licence count back to Windows 95 and such- things that are 15+ years old.

The BSA's response? "We don't like some of your keys, so trot out all purchase records back to 1998." This was two years ago. We keep financial records for 7 years, as required by law, so we did not have receipts back that far. According to the BSA, we are therefore out of compliance, and have to repurchase the software.

We said to them, "we're done with this, this audit has cost our company thousands of dollars in effort, and will no longer comply with your requests." Haven't heard back from 'em since.

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