Legacy? 5 years ago we had to interface with a bank who used XML with EBCDIC fields.

This is news to me. My main PC (debian jessie) has four cifs mounts on startup and they all come up with no trouble. The only systemd issue I've had so far was a minute and a half hang on startup that I couldn't spot but that was fixed by the latest debian update making the startup process actually tell me what it was doing. Turns out I had a swap entry in /etc/fstab from an old drive I removed ages ago and systemd was giving it a full 90 seconds in case it was slow to initialize rather than not there.

I like Mac hardware a lot less when they disable hardware when they detect a non Apple OS

You know what they say: "The plural of Anecdote is not Data". Windows Phone sales decline as share shrinks to just 2.5 percent

You have hit the nail on the head. There is a massive group of self identifying Christians who never attend church and never read the bible for themselves but call themselves Christians because their parents (or some family in the past) were Christians and since they outnumber Christians take their faith seriously, it has produced a lot of statistical noise and now we see clumsy attempts like this to work around the problem.

It is more than just pressure. There is also a support network of close friends and any good church will offer marriage counselling to try and sort out problems long before it gets to divorce.

I am not running Google Fibre but even with the 120/20 cable connection I have from Teksavvy, the firewall I built using two PCI Gigabit Ethernet cards and an old Pentium 4 (Debian/iptables/Unbound) is a huge a huge improvement over the AP that was there before. I disabled NAT on the AP and set it up to route from WIFI over the new firewall and even my laptop and cell phone run faster.

The stats are out there but the stats don't back you up. Checking the UN's Intentional homicide, number and rate per 100,000 population For 2008, we have Canada at 1.8, the UK at 1.3 and the US at 4.6. So yes, not allowing people to walk around armed to the teeth really does seem to help.

Well since you asked so nicely.

The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.

Once the contract is done with, it should be your phone and not the telco's phone and that is all these laws are demanding. I can still go to most countries in Europe and get a phone on contract, but as soon as the contract is finished they are required to unlock the phone and to me, that seems fair to both sides..

Lets see how this compares to Canada's new anti spam law since EA has offices in Vancouver and Montreal.

10.(3) A person who seeks express consent for the doing of any act described in section 8 must, when requesting consent, also, in addition to setting out any other prescribed information, clearly and simply describe, in general terms, the function and purpose of the computer program that is to be installed if the consent is given.

(5) A function referred to in subsection (4) is any of the following functions that the person who seeks express consent knows and intends will cause the computer system to operate in a manner that is contrary to the reasonable expectations of the owner or an authorized user of the computer system:

(a) collecting personal information stored on the computer system;

(b) interfering with the owner’s or an authorized user’s control of the computer system;

(c) changing or interfering with settings, preferences or commands already installed or stored on the computer system without the knowledge of the owner or an authorized user of the computer system;

(d) changing or interfering with data that is stored on the computer system in a manner that obstructs, interrupts or interferes with lawful access to or use of that data by the owner or an authorized user of the computer system;

11 (5) A person who has the express consent of an owner or authorized user to do any act described in section 8 must

(a) for a period of one year after any computer program that performs one or more of the functions described in subsection 10(5) but not referred to in subsection 10(6) is installed under the consent, ensure that the person who gave their consent is provided with an electronic address to which they may, if they believe that the function, purpose or impact of the computer program installed under the consent was not accurately described when consent was requested, send a request to remove or disable that computer program; and

(b) if the consent was based on an inaccurate description of the material elements of the function or functions described in subsection 10(5), on receipt within that one-year period of a request to remove or disable that computer program, without cost to the person who gave consent, assist that person in removing or disabling the computer program as soon as feasible.

20 (4) The maximum penalty for a violation is $1,000,000 in the case of an individual, and $10,000,000 in the case of any other person.

Any Canadians affected by this feel like filing a complaint?

I doubt it. You don't get a lot of men being asked If the carpet matches the drapes I think the real problem with gamers in general is that you get a lot of "type A" competitive personalities without any social skills to temper their behavior. Throw in the fact that, for a lot of gamers their only actual experience of actual females is either from watching porn or interacting with booth babes and they just don't realize that both are fictional.

Been there done that, I sat down with a friend who was dropping AOL because the computer store he bought the computer from never mentioned that "3 free months of Internet" meant that they took his credit card and signed him up for AOL. The credit card company started from the assumption that since AOL was an established company that they would not need to charge back and we should talk to AOL about it.

Que an endless "no sir we had no way to know you never used your account since we don't go into customer accounts without permission"

The credit card companies are not always on your side.

Have you actually read the law? This seems like a ton of FUD.

At any rate some Canadian companies have behaved horribly when it comes to email. I have had problems with companies refusing to change a mistyped email address unless I was the confirmed (with security questions) account holder and some not even bother to check if the recipient mail server even accepted the message for over a year.