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Comment Re:Why do Democrats hate America? (Score 1) 398

The Democrats can't do anything about this as both the senate and the house are Republican controlled. It's not until Thursday when a new congress is sworn in that Democrats take control of the house. The last 2 weeks Trump has been blaming Democrats for not funding the wall when it fact it's been the Republicans.

Comment Re: Clearly not the answer? (Score 1) 575

I find it a little suspicious that an account with a 7 digit UID that has never posted a comment before suddenly posts 3 comments in this story. Sorry, but it makes you come across as a shill. If you're a legit new user try spreading your comments around particularly in less politically active discussions.

Comment Clearly not the answer? (Score 3, Insightful) 575

"clearly not the answer for Ontario families."

Except it isn't clear that this isn't the answer. That's why this was a pilot project in the first place. Ontario should just spend the money (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget) and prove whether this works or not. If it fails then move on and try something else.

... Unless of course you don't care if UBI works or not you just oppose it on philosophical grounds. Then the best thing to do is cancel the pilot.

Comment Re:A simple improvement. (Score 3, Interesting) 198

Operations in multiple states is an easy one, but there are regulatory barriers in many industries that require a firewall between groups which are difficult to achieve without separate corporate structures. It can also make it hard to spin off or acquire another line of business.

One could argue that limiting the size and scope of how big and individual entity can get would be a good thing though.

Comment Re:Truss Bridge Self Supported. Not Cable Stayed. (Score 1) 276

This sounds more like a problem with this technique in general. There should never be any confusion about whether something needs to be done. Especially when doing it twice will lead to a catastrophic failure. With car tires you can measure the current pressure and there is a label on the tire indicating the maximum pressure. Is there nothing similar for post tensioning?

Comment Re:All large companies go through this (Score 1) 392

A wise old business man once told me that companies are like people. They're born with lots of energy then go through growing pains as they mature, but they all eventually grow old, become set in their ways, get hardening of the arteries and pass away.

Comment Re:Most likely it's just for fun (Score 2) 155

How the "your" got inserted is a slight mystery but it's possible that either people are typing it that way or google is somehow inserting the your for some reason.

I think Google was truncating longer search terms into a common root suggestion:

  • how to have sex with your kids in the house
  • how to have sex with your kids at home
  • how to have sex with your kids asleep
  • etc.

I've seen it before for long queries where suggest doesn't seem to come up with a complete query that anyone would use. Although in this particular case they picked the worst possible place to truncate it. Maybe because they're actually were a couple of searches for "how to have sex with your kids" and then all the non-pedophile versions just added to it's popularity.

Comment Re:How many people lock their door? (Score 4, Insightful) 357

It's fairly common for rural people where their house can not be seen from the road to not lock their doors. The logic being that if someone drives up to your house with the intention to rob it having a locked door just means you'll get robbed AND have to fix your door. In the suburbs it makes more sense to lock your door as a neighbour might notice someone carrying a crowbar up to your front door.

Personally I live in the suburbs and lock my door even when I'm home. There have been a couple of cases over the years where local teens will wonder the neighbourhood quietly opening doors and then stealing wallets and car keys near the door. My neighbour left his back door unlocked when he went on holidays once and kids stole the beer out of his fridge. Locking your doors will eliminate these crimes by the local kids but a locked door won't deter a professional thief.

Comment Shared Source Short Copyright (Score 2) 87

I'm not sure if anyone has tried it but perhaps a good compromise between open and closed source would be:

1) Publicly available source code - so that customers have the option to fix bugs or apply patches made by the community
2) Proprietary license - customers pay an annual fee and in exchange get all bug fixes and new releases
3) Short Copyright - after 6-24 months the software reverts to a BSD style license. The term is meant to be just long enough that customers want to pay you for a more up to date version. However, it's short enough that you aren't locking customers in.
4) Free for personal/non-profit use - This is optional but it might make sense to only charge businesses since they have deeper pockets and are less likely to pirate the software

The idea is to try and strike a balance between making people pay you to write code, collecting code submissions for the community, putting together builds, etc. yet still have the code return to the public domain so that people are free to fork it and start an open source project or competitive business.

Comment CBC also has a story (Score 5, Interesting) 215

CBC recently had a story on the 5 Canadian diplomats and families affected. They also speculated that since Canada has better relations with Cuba it's unlikely the Cuban government is behind this. The story also mentions that since Russia has a large diplomatic presence in Cuba, has been known to harass foreign diplomats and also has the know how to possibly develop this kind of high tech weapon that they are a possible suspect.

Comment Re:The payphone isn't the important part (Score 2) 197

What I find the most ironic is the videophone. Everyone in the 20th century just assumed that we'd have AND use videophones. Little did they know that people in the 21st century would have videophones but would use them to send old style telegrams. The camera on your videophone would just be used to take pictures and home movies.

Comment Re:Netflix logevity? (Score 1) 37

The issue I've run into (Canadian as well) is the new rating system. Netflix has always had a large catalogue of stuff I've never heard of but the old rating system let me quickly weed though it and find the good stuff. The new rating system seems to match almost all Netflix original content in the high nineties even the stuff no one including myself likes. The other stuff seems to have a bit of a random number assigned to it which doesn't correlate well to how I'll end up rating it. I find that I now have to google each of the shows to get the IMDB/Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic rating before watching it. But with this extra hassle and uncertainty I often just do something else instead.

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