Depends at what level it's used. If it's "soft" persuasion like this you can counter it up to a point by being aware of the mechanisms being used. Things like making a physical contact with your clients, etc all help.. that is unless the other party is aware of it. Now it just pisses me off when say the car salesmen touches my shoulder or try various bullshit tactics.

Well to be fair, quite often, it was more of a confused apologies on my part to my american colleagues ;). Different cultures I guess but they called their cannuck counter parts walking HR disaster zones.

Well, you know us Canadians, dirty oil is kind of our specialty :). Happy to ship it to you guys any day!

I used to be a big fan of Hadoop until I gave Apache Spark a try. My god, the speed, ease of use and install simplicity was just ridiculous. I mean, words failed me the first time I used it, I got it installed and working under 2 hours and it was so blazing fast, it was just a joke.

For people who took a look a few years back, it has matured a lot from an interesting prototype to something I now use in production on my clients data. Documentation is still a bit sketchy for niche functions but it's improved a lot also.

https://spark.apache.org/

That's because you're being too difficult :)

Well, as you might've guessed I'm from Quebec, so I'll fully admit that I knew Hydro One was state owned but I wasn't aware it was problematic.

I've just looked it up and ouch Ontario power is twice as expensive as Quebec. The only place where it's more expensive is Nova Scotia and PEI ( which is normal I guess ): http://www.ontario-hydro.com/i...

Still, the point stands that state owned and run power *can* be done right.

But, but, it's not *me* being tortured, what are you trying to get at??

That's amusing, I assume you don't know much about your marxist neighbor in the north, that is Canada. For example Hydro Quebec, which has been nationalized since 1944 has been a great success: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.... We have some of the cheapest residential power in North America AND we're making a tidy profit selling our fairly important over capacity to our neighbors in the states: http://www.hydroquebec.com/pub...

On behalf of Canada, I apologize for destroying all your capitalists wet dreams with our mixed economy. Sorry, sorry!

That's amusing, I assume you don't know much about your marxist neighbor in the north, that is Canada. For example Hydro Quebec, which has been nationalized since 1944 has been a great success: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.... We have some of the cheapest residential power in North America AND we're making a tidy profit selling our fairly important over capacity to our neighbors in the states: http://www.hydroquebec.com/pub...

On behalf of Canada, I apologize for destroying all your capitalists wet dreams with our mixed economy. Sorry, sorry!

Depends on your situation, last time I was in Vegas, we were 6 people. The shuttle was 13$ per person but the limo was a flat fee which we split 6 way.

The limo driver was really desperate to have us as a fare so I don't know if that's standard, he lowered the price once before we even started listening to his pitch.

I solved that problem for good, I swapped my factory battery for a 10000mAh ( more than 3x the original capacity ). Sure, my phone is thicker now but usually I couldn't go through a day with my Samsung galaxy without recharging, now it's 3-4 days without a charge.

I got it from zero lemon, their prices are good and both batteries I've bought from them are 2 years old and still going strong. The only thing is you really, really have to follow the special charging instruction, which I did not after a few months and it really impacted the batteries max charge. It regained it's higher max charge after a week of doing it the right way. http://zerolemon.com/product/z...

I'm not sure how being a well educated corpse will have helped ;)

Bah, we have more than enough time to work out a fix for that one! Let's work on immortality for me and then maybe rising sea levels or something, we'll get to that one in a few million years.

There are many full time employees working for the Mozilla Foundation. It's not exactly a bunch of people doing it in their spare time for the love of open source at this point. I assume it's going toward paying for operation costs and maybe some new project/ideas.

I mean, sure bury a time capsule on earth, it's cool for the kids and stuff and we can all reminisce about the good old days when you open it up but it just seems like such a waste to send one all the way to the moon as a PR stunt.

It gets worse when they explain it, it sounds like a scam: "His idea is to charge people £50 or so to place a sample of their DNA, in the form of a strand of hair, in an archive to be buried on the moon,..."

And then: "The catch? He needs at least 10 million earthlings to do this if he's to generate the £500 million the moon shot will need."

I mean, I'm sure you can chop up strands of hair pretty finely and he probably doesn't plan on generating £500 million through the time capsule but you can only fit so many of them on a moon probe while keeping costs realistic. Just from an engineering point of view, imagine trying to chop up 50 000 hair strand as finely as possible. Do you A: Develop a machine to do it / B: Rely on people to chop them and do their best to make the smallest possible cut. Then don't even get me started on the really careful manipulation involved to not lose one of those super small cut of hair.