Bill Hicks said it best I think: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

If you choose to see the negative in everything, negative you will become. Christmas for me is about taking time out with family and having a good time. I'm sure thats what it is for the loads of non-christians I work with that also celebrate it. If you dont like the commercialist aspect, (as I don't) there are a number of options to do the giving thing, ie. gift spend limits, secret santa etc. Just get drunk and have a good time man. Chill, be happy :)

IETF has a working group called P2PSIP which is basically the same thing as mentioned here except over SIP. Basically it is an extension to SIP called REsource LOcation And Discovery (RELOAD), and it allows people to make and receive telephony/video calls over SIP/RTP over a completely decentralized infrastucture, ie. without the phone company. 911 and other stuff hasnt been worked out yet so I dont see it replacing the incumbent telcos at this time, but at the very least it seems like a nice anonymous and open alternative to Skype. What I find interesting is that the AD for this WG is Gonzalo Camarillo, a research guy for Ericsson. I can't see Ericsson or any of their customers getting too excited about any RFC's coming out of this WG. https://ietf.org/wg/p2psip/charter

Good quality instruments and recording gear are still very expensive and very necessary to sound good. Sure you can rent but at that point you're better off heading to a studio who can provide an engineer and all the gear. I think the studios might get simpler/cheaper but you still need a good desk, mics, acoustic space and instruments.. not to mention the technical expertise and experience in your engineer and then yes talented artists help a little too.

Wrong. Cellphones and cell networks are reliant on centralized nodes like RNC's, HLRs & MSC switches to setup calls and these are almost always overloaded during natural disasters. Carriers are only willing to spend enough to cover a single node failure, otherwise known as an N+1 redundancy model. With this model, a natural disaster affecting a geographical area with high population density (lets say a 'big one' earthquake in SoCal) the volume of calls that are triggered, which is vastly non-emergency "Hey Mom are you OK?" type traffic, is usually enough to prevent even 911 calls completing for an entire cell network (nationwide outage). You can experience this phenomenon each year on Dec 31st at 11:59pm when SMSCs are consistently overloaded with "Happy New Year Bob!" SMS messages. Dont for a second think that your cell phone is going to save you in any large scale emergency situation such as this.

Its Irwin not Irving you twadwaffle.. and yes he suffered one of the only ever recorded deaths caused by a sting ray ever. If it was going to happen to anyone it was gonna be him. A national hero and a pretty decent surfer too, zoo keeper uniform and all.

I usually just use the SSH interface to the ILO and drop to a console from there. Its the same as serial, but with the added advantage of not being serial (9600bps sucks!) Of course you could use IPMI/SNMP/WBEM and code up a tool if you want to be more efficient, but realistically how often do you need to do this? ILOs usually provide good event logging capabilities as well so you can see what happened, when.

Im a little lost.. why not using ILO/ILOM/DRAC etc.. its all the same thing. Just give each ILO IP a DNS address and ssh to it, log in and there you have all the tools you need, a way to access the system console, power on/off remotely, check hardware events, hell it can even send SNMP traps to a NMS so you get alerts even if the OS dies! Using serial is so old hat, and clunky. Why on earth would anyone be using it at all these days? Serial! LMAO *scoffs*

You need to go watch Bowling for Columbine. Australia is a good example of low gun crime, for whatever reason. Maybe the USA can have a look and see whats being done right? Martin Bryant contributed to it, no doubt about that. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

The LI implications of this are pretty stark. Forget advertising, what about activist groups that the government doesn't take a liking to? Any data collected by the carriers is fair game to RCMP/CSIS/CSEC

How about we publish a Wiki page which names and shames said PR companies and their clients! That way we know exactly what products and services to avoid.

I get shit done.. loads of it. Without others around to disturb me with their constant interruptions, I am super productive! The downside is not getting home in time to see my kids before they go to bed.