The average person makes $115 per month. You ARE the 1%. Realizing that, you can quit complaining, asshole.

I chose your random location for you, using random.org to generate latitude and longitude. You're going to Savinki, Ukraine, where the average income is $405 / month. You'll get to meet some nice Russians while you're there. Enjoy your trip.

"cable (DOCSYS 3.0), are not enough, The maximum speed a DOCSYS modem can achieve is 171/122 Mbit/s"

Ho-ly crap. This must have been by the most spoiled, self-centered, self-indulging, entitled little spoiled brat in California. You have no idea what life is like for 99.99% of the world, do you? Here's a clue - your housekeeper may well be a "one percenter". The other 99% (aka almost everyone) doesn't have Netflix and they don't have a computer. They have a small plot where they try to grow enough food to eat, and they have a need for shoes - not they want another $250 pair of Nikes, they have no shoes.

If 170 mbps just isn't enough for you and you're crying about it, you're seriously in need of some perspective. Go live like an average human for two weeks. Seriously, you need to go into your dad's reading room, spin the globe, and without looking stop it and put your finger in a random place. Get a big map of that country an toss a dart at the map to hit a random place. Then go there. Not to the nearest big city that you've heard of at a charity ball, but to the exact place where dart hit. Go there and find the closest person working. Do their work with them for two hours, then ask where is the NEAREST place you can rent a room. Not the nicest place, the nearest place. Don't reject the room just because it doesn't have a toilet, you're going to live like the average human for two weeks. When you get back, 170 Mbps will be more than enough. After you live like an average person for two weeks, your life back home will be so.awesome you'll never complainabout anything again.

> How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?

I wouldn't. Pushing for "your" solution rather than the right solution is being a fan, not a professional.
I would instead work with them to come up with a list of requirements. Note that that a requirements document is needed in order to do either correctly - to either build or buy, you need to know what features the solution needs to have. Applying a "checkbox" style to the list might be a good idea, to visually emphasize that the right solution is that one that checks off all of these needs.

Then with the requirements list in hand, you look at each option - the existing one, off-the-shelf solutions, and a schedule / quote to build a a custom solution.
If an off-the-shelf solution meets al of the requirements, you show them that - here's the list of 20 things we figured out you need, and this solution checks off all 20 boxes. If no off-the-shelf solution can check off all of the boxes, you ask if any of them can be customized to check off all of the boxes. If not, you must either build custom or revise your requirements.

This process will find the right solution, rather than convincing them to do it your way, against their better judgement. Remember, there's at least 50/50 chance that you're wrong. The other people are just as likely to be right as you are. Listing the requirements as a checklist will answer the question, in a clear, convincing way.

I once asked a couple of friends who'd heard me argue a proposal whether they thought I had done a good job arguing my view. They surprised me when they answered by shrugging and saying "well, you were right. I don't think you did a god or bad job of convincing us, it just became clear that your view is correct." When you present a clear set of facts showing which way is right, you don't need to "convince" anyone to do it "your way", you've simply demonstrated which way is in fact the right way to go.

That subject line should say DAC, not FAX.

I like the way you put that. I'm going to steal that phrasing.

Indeed it has improved considerably. The basic security model went from "don't show other people's files unless you click the C: drive" to actually denying access to other people's files. Currently it has what has traditionally been considered a decent model, discretionary access control very similar to the classic Unix model.

On the other hand, Unix used that model in the 1970s. Linux moved to a more secure mandatory access control model ten years ago, around the same time that Windows was finally getting DAC. The weaker model is also the simpler and more convenient model, so this doesn't necessarily make Linux BETTER, it's more secure, but less simple and convenient. Choose your own priorities.

I did say Windows IS, not Windows ARE. :) Lexan windows are pretty tough, and the front door windows of some cars are tough, with the ability to bend a bit rather than break. On YouTube there is a funny video of a reporter trying to break a car window with a hammer.

I've said that same thing before. I happen to BE competent professional in certain security matters, so that affects my point of view.

On the other hand, the most popular locks, Kwikset and Master lock, are obviously not designed to be secure against a knowledgeable or determined advesary. They are designed to discourage your neighbor from casually getting into your stuff, and that's pretty clear from looking at the product and feeling how lightweight it is. Maybe that's what people want most of the time - a lock sufficient to make it rather inconvenient for the average person to walk in, not something that's going to keep the locksmith out when you lose your key.

At the other end of the spectrum, for $10,000 you can buy a heavy duty safe made of steel and concrete. For $32, I can rent a demolition saw designed to cut through concrete and steel. Since physical security costs about 300 times as much as breaking it costs, perhaps the primary goal is to not be low-hanging fruit. I've watched a car burglar go from car to car, stealing stuff from the ones that were unlocked. He skipped the locked ones, which all had very breakable windows.*

* Redundant. Windows is always easily breakable.

Exactly, that's precisely what the majority of stoned people at Burning Man will say. Of course, that's because they aren't so good at arithmetic and even worse at history. Since 1967, when the census bureau began tracking it, there has been exactly one instance of real median income falling over any five year period. That's the last five years. Every other period in American history has seen median incomes are increase. It's just these last five years that Damon republican in the Whitehouse has fucked it all up.

Your parents and grandparents actually worked, hard, in the heat, to afford an 800 square foot home. Today's young leftist mooches live in their parent's 800 square foot basement, working part time and complaining about how tough it is.

    Get off my lawn - or mow it. The Mexican who came to my door unable to speak English couple of years ago pushing a broken down mower now arrives in a $30,000 dually. Because he worked for it.

It's not just programmers that think in terms of effincident please processes, in fact I'd say that's more the domain of the business person. You can get a degree in how to most effectively and efficiently run an operation to deliver goods to customers, that's called a mba. MBAs, and MBA style thinking about efficient process, is not popular with the burning man crowd.

The pdf linked in the article mentions a few points. The following is my understanding of what they said. It doesn't represent my opinion.

    The commenters generally agreed that patent trolling isn't currently a big problem in Canada. Canadian companies are affected more by US trolls, because the Canadian system already handles it pretty well. Therefore "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Any change will have good and bad consequences, and Canada doesn't need much good consequences.

Universities were given as an example of institutions which do real, valuable research and development, but don't manufacture products. They license their technology, so they are non-practicing entities. How do you legally distinguish a research institution and a company who licenses the results of that work vs a troll?

I happen to know that the vast majority of trolling is done by four companies. Hundreds of thousands of people have patents. The challenge is to target those four needles in a very large haystack. When you're targeting a needle in a haystack, and want to destroy the needle (troll) without harming the hay (inventors etc) you want to use precision tools.

Good (or pedantic?) point. Since I come from a country where the head of state, head of government, and head crook are the same office, I tend to think of all national heads as "head of state".

Yeah the same thing bugs me when watching football (handegg ). I get excited for half second when the announcer says Manning just set a record, then goes on to say it's the record for most completed passes in the first quarter of a home game in Denver against a team with a winning record on the road. Wtf.

For many decades now we've had female heads of state (ie Thatcher), female Supreme Court justices, female CEOs of top companies (ie Whitman). At this point, women have done pretty much everything men have done. It's not 1940 anymore. Isn't it time we stop the sexist talk about "female astronauts", "lady lawyers", etc and just talk about astronauts and lawyers? Do we really need to call one of our national leaders a "black woman senator"? She's senator, period. She's neither less than or better than another senator based on her genitalia or her complexion.

The other day I was watching TV and they were talking about the "first black female Puerto Rican pole vault champion" or some such horseshit. She's not the first pole vault champion, nor the first woman, or even th first woman pole vault champion, so give it a rest already. Will you leftists never see beyond anybody's genitalia and complexion?