1) Another Canadian DMD dad here. I almost hope that Deflazacort doesn't get approved in Canada. I couldn't afford it then! 2) My son is eligible for Etiplirsen - but there's no way I can afford $300k+ per year. My health care insurance only works on drugs available in Canada. 3) I've testified at the FDA Adcom for a drug in this rare disease world. What a headache. The degree of profit mongering, paperwork generating hurdles that are out there are mind blowing. I don't know if it's corruption, the free market gone wild, self-important bureaucracy, or if the circus was in town. But I can tell you that the FDA process ESPECIALLY for rare drugs is screwed up. I don't have answers. I do have a couple of thoughts though. 1) Hug your kids. Time can be short. 2) Point all the fingers you want at the Canadian medical system - I'm not complaining. (and I see a LOT more of it than 99.99% of the people whining and complaining about it) For the most part - I get to make life altering decisions for my family without having to worry about the bill.

"The closest bathroom is a quarter-mile away" and "I bring a water jug to campus and fill it up" pretty much says it all.

If the NSA is reading my e-mail, they will quickly discover that I "ne3d t0 lern to satisfy my w0man" and that my "pen!s is 2 small" and I need to buy some "v!agra for cheep!". I hate that. An invasion of my most intimate privacy.

This is a winner. Last Christmas, I put "spend $25 doing something nice for a complete stranger" on my Christmas list. Best Christmas gift I ever got. A couple stories of people who had something done for them for no reason at all. The stories were priceless, and made the turkey taste all the more better. If the poster doesn't send you his contact info, prove your geekness by tracking him down yourself.

Had a client that had some outsourced rack space. They had spent some time ensuring relatively HA for their cluster. They chose a hosting provider that provided redundant network connections, UPS, etc. This is what happened: - There was a fire in the power conduits under the street taking down a big piece of the electrical grid - UPS kicked in - servers stayed up - Building was on a generator, so when power to the building when out, the generators kicked in - (lots of fuel for the generators) - Fire department showed up, and started to put out fire under the street - Hydrant use dropped water pressure - Reduced water pressure dropped cooling ability of the generator - Generator shut off to prevent damage - UPSs ran down quickly - Servers crashed hard Nobody included the city WATER supply in the redundancy plan.

I've been thinking about this topic for a while. It almost always degenerates into a "I paid for X mbps, I should get to use it 100% of the time" vs. "You're killing my connection, and my XYZ traffic is getting hit even though I'm a good consumer, we should pay for each bit we use, and let the market sort it out." What if we implement a QoS service level based largely on the existing pricing model. When you subscribe, you get a certain bandwidth of traffic that you are (almost) GUARANTEED (as if you were (almost) leasing a T1 to yourself) The ISP doesn't mess with it. The rest of your traffic is "best efforts" at between X and Y mbps. Let the ISP shape the "best efforts" bandwidth in whatever way they feel brings the best average consumer experience. Let the customer choose if they want to use their guaranteed traffic to surf the web, run VOIP, Games, BT etc. That way I'm not limiting your BT, and your BT isn't killing the voice quality of my phone. Everyone talks like QoS, shaping, and throttling is a bad thing. I've used all 3 tools on my own LAN to IMPROVE the connection of my network for ALL it's users. Sure some HTTP traffic gets delayed while Voip jumps the queue, and when there's heavy surfing, BT slows down. Network bandwidth is a finite resource. Burning it up like fossil fuels in the 60s is a bad long term idea. I can't afford a guaranteed bandwidth connection at home. I'd much rather participate in a MUCH bigger shared and shaped pipe than be stuck with what I can afford to buy all for myself.