This article embodies the general tone in schools and universities over here. Profs aren't allowed to think too hard, or else they will ruin the illusion of conformity the WASPs so desperately crave.

Looking back at my education, I can think of maybe... 5 profs that actually knew their stuff. Okay, 5 and a half, because I forcefully enlightened one of them. The other hundred-ish ? Mindless imbeciles, going through the motions, reading from cue cards, collecting their extortionate paycheques. Like any organisation, the larger it grows, the lower the common denominator. Of course, the cue card readers hated the real profs like a redneck hates an educated black man. "How dare they rock the boat ?"

If they want to ban Wi-Fi in the classrooms, they can knock themselves out. It will only make it ever so slightly more obvious that our educators are a cabal of imbecilic swine.

In the few places where such a policy applied, I had to run things by the legal team. In most cases, they just wanted to ensure I wasn't abusing insider info, or associating their brand with mine, and once their concerns were addressed, I was free and clear. There was one job where they threatened to sue me and appropriate my IP if I dared invent something cool, that had nothing to do with their line of business. So, I did it anyway and put it in my partner's name, and when the company started getting too nosy, I went on "stress leave" and found a better gig elsewhere. Well, okay, I really was stressed out and depressed from that shitty job, but I did it out of spite.

This isn't fucking China. Your employer does not own you. If you are truly concerned, seek (outside) legal counsel to find out if your employer's policy is enforceable, in many jurisdictions there are laws against this sort of thing. If you are a creative guy like me, you will want to be more mindful of these overreaching clauses in your future employment contracts.

Okay, I'm being an irresponsible arse here, but maybe - just maybe - those other muslims around the world, you know, the "moderates", should think about distancing themselves from the barbaric ones. If your frail mind cannot live on without religion, then at least splinter off into something that does not carry the weight of homicidally intolerant pre-civilized cultures.

Yeah, I'm an atheist, but I can respect freedom of faith. I just don't respect the use of that faith as an excuse to murder your fellow man in cold blood. I've known my share of muslims over here, and while they seemed a bit stuck-up against my amoral libertarian lifestyle, they did not express any desire to harm me for sharing my tales of rock-star antics. I would dare say they had a more progressive outlook on humanity than most of the purebred white folk I grew up with. Sure, there was this one guy who pulled a gun on me because I said he looked hot... but he went right the fuck back to Lebanon a week later.

What I'm saying is: faith is just faith, a belief system that breaks your fall when life knocks you down. The problem with the middle east is not Islam, the problem is their intolerant backwoods inbred leaders twisting that faith into a weapon of self genocide. Get rid of those charismatic leaders and the problem will resolve itself.

They're consoles. The whole point is to have a consistent hardware base, so developers can custom tailor their code to the platform, leading to simplified testing and improved stability. One CPU, one memory spec, one GPU... the key parts are consistent.

You want to upgrade your console ? Trade it in for a new one! Or, if you're like me, you put it away and take it out from time to time for nostalgia.

Only problem was the "popular shit" wasn't always popular. If your authentic song dared reach the first page in its category, you'd almost immediately get a flurry of inflammatory comments from the guys trying to game the system and basically libeling you on your own pages.

Botting.

The PfP idea was fine, and I made a few bucks from it, but there were some very obviously shit tunes that got ridiculous numbers of plays/downloads because people were gaming the system. Their metrics were flawed and little was done to curb this cheating, which was quite disheartening to us since all uploads were supposedly reviewed (to avoid copyright infringement). They had all this manpower making sure you didn't upload commercial music, but nobody monitoring the fraudsters. Then the site just went to hell, was sold to CNet who promptly threw everything out and turned it into yet another shitty CNet site.

So it was a combination of PfP cheating and good ol' dot-com bubble pump-and-dump that killed mp3.com

And, by "people", I mean idiot stoner kids with zero music appreciation.

FUCK NO SON! More like the opening scene in Back to the Future :)

Actually I am planning to make a satirical Dubstep tune just to piss people off...

I've seen that AP weirdness on some models, can't remember which ones though. I've never gone for the WiFi modems anyway, I just want a box that demuxes the coax into ethernet, and I provide my own router. My guess is the ghost SSID is some sort of tech support backdoor. I do something similar when I deploy a server with IPMI, I'll create myself an extra admin account, write the password somewhere, so when (not if) the client calls for help we don't need to fuss with passwords. The difference, of course, is I disclose this practice when I sell the equipment. Rogers techs probably don't even know the WiFi password anymore... ;)

I'm getting 24mb down, 1 up, and no cap. I am an extremely heavy internet user as I work from home. My cell phone is elsewhere, and we don't bother with TV nor a conventional phone. I have a dirt cheap VoIP setup and the wife gets her TV fix from streaming sites and the occasional torrent.

What you're getting with Rogers sounds like a promo deal for new clients. I used to be on the same Express plan (which is now 12mb down), and the cap is still 60gb today as it was two years ago. Once you're of the promo, you'll be paying $48.99 + $7.00 modem rental, + tax so about $63, roughly the same I'm paying for the highest tier of Teksavvy cable. With Rogers though, you're probably getting a package discount for your TV and phone service, which makes the effective price difference quite negligible.

One important difference to me is that TekSavvy's cable service does not filter packets. Rogers and Bell do this to curb file sharing (they call it network management). For one, this made all torrents slow to a crawl, including World of Warcraft patches and other MMO's that use peer-to-peer techniques, but the biggest nuisance was that it interfered with online gaming, such as Xbox Live. On Rogers, playing something like Call of Duty meant I'd get booted out of every other match, because if the game randomly decided it was my turn to host, Rogers' filter would forcibly kill the connection. The only solution was to disable UPNP (or NAT), but then since I was technically unconnectable, I had a 50/50 chance of not being able to join my friends' lobbies nor chat with them. HUGE pain in the ass! With Teksavvy it all works flawlessly, plus you can run torrents and other peer-to-peer apps at full speed. No bullshit.

Bottom line, if you're happy with Rogers, you should probably stay with them. The activist in me wishes you wouldn't, but that is a purely political argument. For myself, even if Rogers were cheaper than Teksavvy, I'd still pay the premium to support a company that fights against discriminatory legislation like UBB.