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Comment Re:Pleased to hear this (Score 1) 142

In Ontario you cannot touch a phone while driving, red light or not.
Period.
The fine is going from $140.00 to $280.00 on March 18.
There are no points, but the insurance company WILL surcharge your insurance if this shows up on your abstract.
You must use a bluetooth handsfree device. Simply touching the phone to mute the ringer will result in a fine.
A motorist challenged the law and lost where he did just that.
Its absolutely the right thing to do. If you are driving, them drive; not eat, preen, read, or pick your nose.

Comment Re:Happy Canadian (Score 1) 415

A visit to the optometrist is around $50.00 here in sw ontario. That isn't expensive. If you're a diabetic, its still paid by ohip. A visit to the dentist isn't that much more expensive if you have no cavities. Most decent jobs provide benefits, so you're only going to pay the co-pay or deductible. Definitely not expensive.

Comment Re:It was inevitable ... (Score 1) 146

BBM is not a proprietary version of sms, its different. SMS is limited to 140 characters while BBM is not, you can send as much text as you want, including pictures, voice notes, files, gps locations (including map), contacts and appointments. BBM uses your data plan so you wont be charged extra to send/receive sms or mms messages (sms/mms messages charges when compared to data are ridiculous), and yes I know there are plans for sms.
The most important reason BBM is better than sms is that you can see the delivery and read of the message in real time. No D for delivered beside the message - it's waiting for delivery because the phone is off or out of the service area, and when the D shows you know the chime has gone off to say a bbm has arrived. When the recipient opens the message you get an R. No guessing like sms messages.
I can turn my phone off during a meeting, and the moment I turn it back on, instantly all the pending bbm messages arrive, not when the sms system gets around to sending it.

Comment Re:Depends on the source (Score 5, Informative) 749

I will tell you now that the average person cannot hear to 20khz. Young children can. Anybody who has listened to loud music for any length of time have blown away the top couple of khz of their audio range.
If you have ever gone to a rock concert and been near the front or gone to most dance clubs and you will have sustained hearing damage. If you have ever left one of these venues with ringing ears, or been around loud machinery and noticed the same, then you have sustained hearing loss. Your hearing will recover mostly after the trauma and that will be indicated by the subsiding of the ringing of your ears.
If you want to find out how your good/bad hearing is, spend the money and see an audiologist. You will be surprised on to find out what your hearing is really like.

Comment Re:That was Caterpillar's doing, *not* CAW. (Score 1) 674

Umm, how are laws, in either Canada or the US going to stop a multinational from pulling jobs out of either country and shipping them elsewhere, such as Mexico or China.

We certainly can't ban Caterpillar from shipping their machines into Canada in "retaliation" for closing a factory, the NAFTA would pose severe sanctions on Canada for that kind of behavior.

Its simply boils down to this: if your company's stance (caterpillar) is not to deal with unions, and you buy a company that is already unionized, workers at the acquired company should expect that it will be shut, and a new factory will be built in a state that is pro right to work, and anti union.
Caterpillar has done this time after time after time. If you want I'll give LOTS of citations.

Comment Same thing happened in Canada (Score 1) 674

GM Diesel spun of its locomotive division to Electromotive. Electromotive was bought by Caterpillar. Caterpillar said that they were paying too much in union labour costs. The labour contract was up December 31 2011. Caterpillar locked out the union January 1 2012 and said they could keep their jobs if they took a 33% wage cut. The union said go to hell. Shortly after Caterpillar purchased Electromotive, they spun up a factory in Muncie Ind., with hungry workers willing to work for minimum wage. Caterpillar closed the plant and shifted the jobs south. The union fucked 400 workers so that it could play hardball with the big 3 auto makers in Canada and "win" higher wage jobs for auto workers. Good work CAW.

Comment Blackberry is the right choice (Score 3, Informative) 229

The combination of Blackberry and BES is the correct choice if you want a secure enterprise solution. With a BES server you have complete control over the phones. Policies allow logging of everything that the phone does, including if you want all incoming and outgoing text messages, push and pull apps and calling restrictions.
The difference between consumer and enterprise blackberry is that the BES server has a secure key that you create and is unknown to blackberry, bis is controlled by blackberry and is snoopable by governments.
I've found that the battery life is better on a blackberry, but the browser isnt the greatest, but has improved in the newest models. Another thing to keep in mind is the battery is field swappable, so if the battery wears out, YOU can switch it out, or carry a spare.
Blackberry made the mistake of getting into consumer phones, but for enterprise situations, blackberry is the best way to go.
Image

IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail 347

aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."
Hardware

Startup's Submerged Servers Could Cut Cooling Costs 147

1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags."
Music

Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57

At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"
Mars

Submission + - A proof of life on Mars - at last? (spaceflightnow.com)

siddesu writes: Compelling new data that chemical and fossil evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars was carried to Earth in a Martian meteorite is being elevated to a higher plane by the same NASA team which made the initial discovery 13 years ago. Time to bow to our Marsian overlords?

Comment Re:Time service (Score 2, Informative) 105

Actually not so. I had to have a survey done to mark some specific spots for calibrating our gps receivers for dgps. He used a Trimble receiver to mark the spot. The spot was within +/- .1 inch and he verified the accuracy using the Russian GLONASS system. I was quite surprised that he actually did this. He said it was standard company procedure.
There was a point in time where the Russians didn't have the money to maintain the system, however that has changed, and I believe they have been adding sattelites to bring it up to full capacity.

Comment Re:I swear to you (Score 1) 200

I was moving (NEVER use UHAUL) and informed Bell of the move. They said no problem. On the day of the move my old line was cut and I plugged in the phone at the new location and it didn't work.

Big surprise there.
I called up Bell repair and told them of the problem, to which I was told "didn't you know we're on strike?" No, not really. Then I was told it would be no more than a week, as management was doing the repairs.
Meanwhile Rogers had been and gone and my cable and internet were working great.

After a couple of weeks of hassling bell for phone service and the queue going from a week to a month to at least 3-4 months, I told them to forget it at got Vonage that afternoon.

Been a very happy Vonage customer ever since.

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