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Comment Re:How about that! (Score 1) 257

Canadian Politicians know most Canadians would never vote for anyone threatening their healthcare.However, I think there is more to this, and it's about the Canada Health Act itself:

The Canada Health Act is all about money.
Failure to comply with it means that the federal Government will not give any money out to the Provincial Health Authority.
Canada Health act on Wikipedia

PURPOSE
Marginal note:Purpose of this Act
4. The purpose of this Act is to establish criteria and conditions in respect of insured health services and extended health care services provided under provincial law that must be met before a full cash contribution may be made.

Canada Health Act

tl;dr
I think that The Alberta Wildrose Alliance stance on Healthcare is more because they are catering to a Canadian population and making sure they continue receiving Federal Funds rather than whether they lean Left or Right.

Comment Re:BLECK! (Score 1) 647

A Few More Tricks:
ctrl+click on an icon in the favourites section --> Opens a new instance of the application in the workspace you are currently working in
middle-click on an icon in the favourites section --> Opens a new instance of the application in a new workspace

Comment Re:For you, maybe. (Score 1) 647

What really bothers me is that the generations before them at least made an effort to learn from the engineers who came before them. But this new generation is just going to repeat all their mistakes, because they don't seem to have made that effort. Or seem to even have a desire to.

What comes to mind is the ageism trend in the technical community.
I always think about how fast the next generation of technically minded people will come up out of nowhere and immediately begin disregarding the perceived 'obsolete' members of their own community.

Maybe a reason the young generation doesn't seem to make an effort to learn from the older generation is that there isn't anyone in their workplace capable of doing the teaching?

Comment Re:Wow, when you can't trust CNET (Score 1) 397

I had an urgent need for a piece of software and downloaded it from C|Net late on Friday night. I stupidly did the very thing that most uses do, the thing I almost never do -- I "fast-clicked" through the install process. I ended up with a BHO search toolbar promoting Bing that I had to figure out how to remove[..]

Typical /. user.
It's a late Friday night, and the only thing that got intoxicated was his computer...

Comment Does everyone on /. live alone?! (Score 1) 372

Whenever I come across the weekly article on slashdot that brings up the data cap debate, I always see the same comments:

  "Ohh, who would ever come close to this cap of x? I never come close!"

That's great, it's difficult for one person to reach that cap alone... but what happens when there are more people in the house using the internet too?

I'm a student that lives with 5 other students, and with all the youtube we watch, online games we play, and other things we do on the internet instead of homework or sleeping, I'd say that we could easily exceed that limit, and that's with minimal p2p use.

Although, I can't wait for internet that fast to be offered. 105mbps / 6 means that video streaming speeds won't take a peculiar dip at 11pm.
I have yet to discover the root of this problem.

Submission + - favorable APIs (slashdot.org)

An anonymous reader writes: There was that software company in the 80s which provided the so-called disk operating system, with vital parts of it under undocumented function calls, leaving competitors with crippled options (technical or business wise). I was reverse engineering much code at those times, only to find out that they were using the undocumented calls (see INT 21,58), games were using them, any virus around was using them, ONLY competitors were left in cold!
Undocumented APIs -or, poorly documented"- are still happening 20 years later, wasting our systems:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/08/02/28/2339246/Mac-OS-X-Secretly-Cripples-Non-Apple-Software
Which other stories do you have to share about less-than-desired APIs, which honor hints of advantage to their designers?

Data Storage

Submission + - Failing Hard Drives and the Freezer Technique Revi (dtidata.com)

lilraveybabe writes: "Normally you would put the drive in the freezer for about an hour. This was a common hard drive recovery trick called a thermo challenge. The only real worry was condensation either on the circuit board or even worse inside the drive itself. This used to be a viable way to recover data. In fact I had a whole system built to ensure that I could run the drive in a very cold environment. This would ensure I would not get any shorts in the electrical components of the hard drive. That being said those days are all but gone.
For many years the internet has been filled with information and success story’s regarding freezing your failed hard drive to temporarily repair the drive and enable you to pull small amounts of information from the drive.
I would like to revisit my experiences with this technique as a data recovery professional of more than 11 years.
The first thing we need to look at is:
Can freezing your hard drive actually repair your hard drive?
The answer is:
YES! In rare and particular circumstances it is possible. Especially on specific drives whose size are under 10 GB. The reason for this is that certain drive manufacturers used material to fabricate platters that would swell in extreme heat. Placing the hard drive in the freezer would cause the platters to shrink to their original specifications."

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