Universal health care, cure French girls, good restaurants, great culture (ok ok immigration problems but hey, habla espagnol?)

France is not as bad as depicted, especially when you compare CURRENT standards of living in the US, not the ones that were true 5-10 years ago

The problem will be that for security systems you're gonna be the "guy that doesn't have a chip" and you will get much more attention that regular people.

Just like we associate drug dealer with someone that would pay a laptop cash for when it's perfectly legal and you could have legitimate reasons to do so.

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With the crypted Echelon IP I just published, if NSA has a way to decrypt the message and want to track me, Slashdot will be offline in 5, 4, 3...2......1

Someone plugged an home router into the government office where I was doing consulting. (he wanted a switch to plug a networked printer)

The router started giving 192.168.x.x IP to everyone on the floor, soon including a few servers (including the Lotus Notes one)

Took 3 days for the admins to find out the source of the problem and where the router was... abysmal loss of productivity needless to say I gave them a good speech on not routing 192.168 packets on the network and isolating their networks.

Users tend to stay in the same area most of the time so they could cache the user's gmail account that is seen into the specific region. No need to cache foreign accounts locally. No need to cache the entire account, just the last 2-3 days of email... I rarely read my old stuff

You could also cache the most popular youtube videos at the resolution that is used on cell phones (that would save LOTS of bandwidth) thus freeing the available bandwidth for other needs. Don't need to cache everything.

There is a LOT of optimisation to be done without caching the entire internet. I think that if Google is doing it, it's because they calculated their stuff and it's benefical for the money invested.

This name is so cheesy!

It would be interesting to see the evolution of the department's budget in the last few years.

It wouldn't surprise me that they got ride if their best assets and replaced them with cheaper guys with less than the required experience just to "reduce operating cost". They may have saved a few dollars during a year or two doing that but the shit had to spread one day...

In other news, Baidu implement a website to download MP3s
http://mp3.baidu.com/

WRT160NL with a bonus USB port for your external hard drive (who said cheap media server?)

http://gizmodo.com/5301321/linksys-wrt160nl-is-fully-linux-powered-80211n-and-acts-as-media-server

2 Weeks ago, I had to hire someone... at least 30% were lying.

Strong SQL skills and can't do a select query or join tables... they probably spent the last 10 years reading Slashdot at their workplace

My bill in Vancouver is like 13$/month for my appartment but heating is included.

I use 2 computers and my projector all the time + kitchen stuff, microwave

If you don't know how much time is remaining in the empty spot, you'll get another time slot. That's the way it works in Montreal. Also, you can't add more time to an existing parking. You need to buy a new ticket. 2 hours remaining, want to add an extra hour NOW well, pay for 3.

Yeah Alberta you're so great. You have oil in your backyard and it gives you lots of money. Turns out we have water in ours. We'll see in 100 years if oil, if any is left and you didn't destroyed completely your environment is of any value. On the other side, you will be welcome to drink my water because we're a united country and even if we whine a lot, we do care of the rest of Canada (well... at leat 51% of its people!)

btw I lived in Calgary half a year for work. I know the place and the people. While I admire some of your traits, others or just as dump as ours.

As a quebecer, I was so fed up with this crap that I moved to BC.

Movies are better in their original language. I watch french movies in french and english movies in english.

Same for books.

Same for any technical profession where you have to talk to someone or learn cutting edge stuff not yet translated.

The french language is beautiful but not that useful and people fail to recognize it.