I was in the market for a fresh grad, someone who is a good programmer, but also a solid investment, because as a company, we would be dumping a load of effort into someone.
Without any significant experience, the only thing that differentiates people is their pedigree, ie. the school them come from. It is a differentiator. If I get a resume from San Jose State or Chico and then someone from Berkeley, I will be much more interested in someone from Berkeley. It takes significant amount of effort to get into Berkeley, so it already shows something about the person. Sorry, but that's how life works.
School projects are mildly interesting, but you have to realize that no matter what you do in school, it doesn't matter because it doesn't hold a candle to working in the "real world".
The primary reason for this is that in a real-world environment, you have to work with and get along with a large number of people, and intangibles count. Being organized, being easy to get along with, etc are pretty damn important, too, and this comes out with experience.
Wrong. You can take pictures of whatever you want that is not copyright-protected, and you can sell them, display them, etc, as long as it is done legally. You cannot copyright-protect a fucking tree for fuck's sake. It's a tree. No one can prevent me from taking a picture of that tree and selling it. That is clear-cut law because it was not a work produced by a person, it is nature. I can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and sell it if I want, because it is so old you cannot copyright something like that to prevent people from taking pictures, etc.
However, a particular instance of a picture can be copyright-protected. So, for example, the one picture you see of Mona Lisa is the same image, probably for Corbis, ie. Bill Gates. Corbis has deal with the Louvre so that only they were allowed to photograph the Mona Lisa in a particularly high quality way, the only particular picture of the Mona Lisa. If I went to the Louvre and took a picture, I could use that, however, the Louvre won't let you take a picture of the same level of quality as Corbis. This is how they have "hacked" the on things that normally cannot be copyright protected.
I can take a picture of whatever public structure I want. Barbara Steisand tried to stop people from posting a pic of her house, but she was denied in court. The exact same verdict would go against UCSD if these guys had legal support. It's pretty clear-up law that you cannot copyright or trademark something like a picture of the library that they themselves took.
(Full-disclosure: I am going to vote for Nader, I hate the Democrats and Republicans equally)
Have you seen the lies and half-truths and propaganda spread by the Republicans? Zen Miller, Dick Cheney, the dishonorable ridiculing of Kerry's Purple Hearts? Did you see the Republicans wearing little bandages on their faces with purple hearts on them to mock John Kerry's war record? How stupid is that??? How insulting is it, since he actually went to Vietnam, and he actually saved people's lives... because he didn't die, or get a grave wound, it discounts his heroic actions?
When firemen go into burning buildings and save peoples lives, but they don't get burnt, should we not consider them heroes?
All the lies and spins that the Republicans are spreading is no worse than what Michael Moore is doing. Yes, what he says has a total slant towards the image that he wants to represent, but so what? He is doing EXACTLY what other politicians do, yet the politicians turn around and have the nerve to say that he is wrong. Politicians don't just speak lies, they breathe lies. That is their nature.
The only way to fight them is fighting fire with fire, and I say good for Michael Moore... give ALL these politicians a taste of their own medicine. The only difference is that he is much, much better at it than them.
And enforced with a EULA and through DMCA, too
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
If terrorists decide to hack into the reactor by using something like, say, a jackhammer, then the DOJ will go after them using the DMCA.
Brilliant! They can sue those damn terrorists till they have no money left!
I thought the original post on slashdot said something about finding a collision with MD5 using a simplified version or different initialization numbers or something like that.
Since when did SCO start giving out dividends? Microsoft only recently started giving them out, and they make billions of dollars per month. I checked the stock pages, and it lists SCOX as not having any type of dividend at all.
I'm sorry, but no matter what OS these devices are on, WTF are they doing on a generally available network where they can be crashed and where security updates are necessary? They should be completely isolated!
This is not so much a Windows problem as opposed to a lazy network admin's problem.
Isolate those damn machines!!! Don't have network ports just opened everywhere! Come on, this is why network admins get paid the big bucks!
1) Good! This means people have to think before spending their savings on investing in Google. Don't do it if you can't afford to lose your money. As well, the price completely eliminates day traders. Great move. 2) Great! You obviously don't know that most media companies are structured this way. I trust those guys more than I do Bill Gates, Ted Turner, or Jeff Immelt, so I have no problems. 3) No one said Dutch auctions were new. As well, the auction process that Google chose was the lowest price that would sell all the shares, so it's different than what you stated above. 4) $3B or $30B? Search market is cooling down????? Says who???? Why? Because of interest rates???? As the internet gets bigger, you need a search engine to find what you want, it's impossible otherwise. So unless the Internet reaches saturation, Google will continue to grow with it. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't use Google as their primary search engine for everything.
They want to get rid of the day traders. That's it.
The normal mantra of the day trader is to buy and sell in lots of 1000. They usually go for the lower priced stocks that have high volatility. By pricing the shares > $100, it means that most day traders will not be able to day trade on Google's stock.
Good for them! The day traders are the ones that usually ramp a stock up and down, especially the IPOs during the dot-com boom.
As well, by pricing the stock so high, they are really forcing people to think twice about investing in Google. Again, good for them! They have said repeatedly in their prospectus that the price of the stock could go down after the IPO, and I believe it.
I'm going to by 25 shares at the IPO, and see where the price goes. I'll top up to 100 shares either way, but I don't want all my eggs in the IPO since I believe that the price will drop.
As well, I hope they do as what was rumored and never split the stock, a la Berkshire Hathaway. In 20 years, I'd love to see the stock price in the thousands.
Not only is this laptop so damn beautiful, but on the regular batteries, I can get over 5 hours. I bought it specifically for things like long plane flights so I can play nethack and kill time.
It has a killer sharp widescreen, and comes with basically everything you need.
With the larger battery, you can get 7-10 hours.
I was going to get the Dell 300m, until I found out that it doesn't come with a DVD player built-in. Who the hell wants to deal with a modular DVD player on a plane? Hell no!
I like bash, but the one thing that it doesn't support (out-of-the-box anyway) is auto-completion a la W2K. In NT, when you hit tab, you can cycle through all the words that can complete the letters you typed... on bash, it shows you a list.
Is there a way to make bash behave more like W2K in this sense?
You mean how Apache has been so greatly destroyed because it hasn't adhered to the GPL. I mean, it only has 60% of the market for web servers, but if it were GPLed, my god, we're talking about close to 100% marketshare.... right?
In California, you can't prevent someone from moving around to competing companies in their field of work. Even if Buyukkokten signed 100 agreements saying he wouldn't develop another social networking product for another company, the contract is deemed invalid under California law.
What he can't do is reveal trade secrets to the new company, or if it is reasonable to expect that he will divulge such secrets in the normal course of his work.
So the fact that he signed agreements saying that he wouldn't create a competing product is 100% baseless. He can do this, even if he agreed not to.
It is up to him to ensure that he didn't steal any code or use trade secrets from AE in his work at Google, and an independent source code review would reveal this. If he did steal code, then he's up shit creek. If he didn't, then the whole thing is just to extract money.
I'm pretty sure that Google would have already gone through the due diligence to ask this guy if he did steal the code. He would be **really** stupid to deny it if he did because so much is on the line. I think if it has gone this far, Google is fairly confident that the code was new work.
I bet AE is delaying the neutral code review in hopes that Google will just pay them money to go away before their IPO.
I don't know about you guys, but my desk at work is a mess, with papers, books, cds, and stuff all over the place.
Based on some of the screenshots, it looks like I can finally emulate my own physical desktop with my virtual desktop... and with it all the benefits of "security through obscurity". For example, I leave my paycheck stubs all over my desk but I'll be damned if someone would bother to put the effort to try to find it!!
I bought a shitload of 3DFX stock back in the late 90s because they were the king of 3D. I remember walking into a computer store, and seeing something on the screen... I thought it was clip from a movie, but they told me it was Mechwarrior 2 (I think 2) playing on a Voodoo card. My mind was blown. How they got movie-like graphics onto a computer was beyond my capacity to understand. I dropped the $350 and bought one immediately and played with it and loved it.
Then, after a while, I thought, 3DFX is the king and they will never die. I put my money where my mouth was and forked over my entire savings to buy 3DFX, around $15k. There-in I learned a few great lessons:
1) The best technology doesn't mean the best company. "Good enough" with a better run company will usually blow you away. Ask Microsoft or nVidia (well, at the time nVidia wasn't the top runner that it is today).
2) No matter how great of an explanation you make, the stupidest things like 16-bit color vs 32-bit color can kill you (22-bit color just doesn't cut it to the dumb-ass consumers). It's better to just cross your t's and dot your i's in the first place so that you don't have any such vulnerabilities.
They went tits up, and I basically lost my money. nVidia bought the remaining pieces of 3DFX, and that includes all their patents. I'm not surprised they went SLI, and for companies that use it like 3d effect companies, it will probably save them bundles of time.
Now, all of a sudden people are so concerned about Microsoft's welfare that they're trying to warn them not to shoot themselves in the foot?
Come on, this is just another case of someone trying to point out how Microsoft is wrong so that this person can show how smart he is.
The simple fact is this: Someone is going to be the first mover. I didn't hear anyone complain when PS2 went into production. The fact is that they were backwards compatible with PS1 which was considered revolutionary at the time. If PS3 were the first movers, do you think these same people would be complaining that it would be too hard to handle both PS2 and PS3 at the same time? No.
They are going to be first movers, and yes, people are going to be taking advantage of this. I will probably buy an X-box 2, if it is better. The games will be there, and if the software shop is good enough, Microsoft will PAY them to develop for X-box2, so don't worry about them.
I haven't heard that X-box 2 won't be compatible, so unless they are really stupid, they won't need to worry about compatibility issues.
I think what they need to do is:
1) keep the hard drive. The main reason why I buy games for X-box when multiple versions are available is because the hard drive makes saving and accessing games so much faster, and when you are playing things over and over again, you don't have to wait for the damn memory card to write. 2) Make the console smaller and lighter. It is a brick, and it's too big and hella ugly. I guess if they want to make it a PVR as well, then it will need to be bigger and heavier, but maybe they should use laptop technology to make it more user friendly.
You definitely don't need any type of RAID solution because it doesn't offer you what you really need. You say you want RAID, but what you really want is backup.
All RAID solution deal with disaster recovery, but they don't deal with the situation where you accidentally rm -rf a directory that you wanted. If you mirror or RAID 5 your drives, you're still hosed because both drives will delete the files. In the end, this is more important and much more convenient.
Instead, go with a better approach which is copy or tar your files every night (or every week) to a backup drive, preferably over the network on a completely different machine. This will prevent the problem of a power surge or accidental shutoff from corrupting both drives at the same time.
I love Mozilla and I actively evangelize it to all my friends and my co-workers. All my co-workers are programmers and extremely technically savvy.
It has so many features that people should be using, like the password manager, the higher security, the better e-mail, etc.
No one cares. The only person I know who uses Mozilla is my wife, and that's only because I hid the IE icon and installed Mozilla.
Every chance I get, I bring up Mozilla. I made sure that our company went out of the way to add Mozilla support. But no one cares. It seems like the simple act of going to mozilla.org and installing is too much of a hurdle for most people, even programmers and developers.
It's sad, but I think the vast majority of users look at computers as utilities, and don't have the passion that the best and brightest have such as the Mozilla developers.
I guess it must be like those ultra movie-buffs that love to point out different camera angles, and how it emphasizes this or makes that significant, but is lost on the rest of us that don't take movies and directing so seriously... we just want to be entertained for 1.5 hours.
Does this need more power? I'm afraid as it is about using cell phones so close to my head (Richard Brandon, owner of Virgin refused to use a cell phone without a headset, and he has done stupider things like trying to balloon around the world!).
I guess the only mitigating factor is that you generally won't be using the 4G features with the phone pressed against your head....
My credentials: -Canadian-born citizen -been working in the US for the past 5 years in Silicon Valley -worked at two large corporations in Toronto
Almost perfect description, except for health care.
I'm using Kaiser Permanente in California, and it is an HMO. As a Canadian, you hear the absolute worst things about HMOs, but frankly Kaiser is heads and tails above anything I would ever see in Canada.
Things like medical tests, responsivitiy, etc are far better here than in Canada. My other Canadian co-workers told me tales of their parents being told to wait for cancer treatment in the East coast, and how pregnant women get way less ultrasounds than here. My own parents wait 3 weeks for their own tests such as looking for things such as colon or stomach cancer. In the US, there would be no such wait, at least with my HMO.
Canada's health care system is breaking down, and something really needs to be done to fix things.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the market for a fresh grad, someone who is a good programmer, but also a solid investment, because as a company, we would be dumping a load of effort into someone.
Without any significant experience, the only thing that differentiates people is their pedigree, ie. the school them come from. It is a differentiator. If I get a resume from San Jose State or Chico and then someone from Berkeley, I will be much more interested in someone from Berkeley. It takes significant amount of effort to get into Berkeley, so it already shows something about the person. Sorry, but that's how life works.
School projects are mildly interesting, but you have to realize that no matter what you do in school, it doesn't matter because it doesn't hold a candle to working in the "real world".
The primary reason for this is that in a real-world environment, you have to work with and get along with a large number of people, and intangibles count. Being organized, being easy to get along with, etc are pretty damn important, too, and this comes out with experience.
Thanks Mozilla for remembering a title I of an comment I submitted months ago.
Wrong. You can take pictures of whatever you want that is not copyright-protected, and you can sell them, display them, etc, as long as it is done legally. You cannot copyright-protect a fucking tree for fuck's sake. It's a tree. No one can prevent me from taking a picture of that tree and selling it. That is clear-cut law because it was not a work produced by a person, it is nature. I can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and sell it if I want, because it is so old you cannot copyright something like that to prevent people from taking pictures, etc.
However, a particular instance of a picture can be copyright-protected. So, for example, the one picture you see of Mona Lisa is the same image, probably for Corbis, ie. Bill Gates. Corbis has deal with the Louvre so that only they were allowed to photograph the Mona Lisa in a particularly high quality way, the only particular picture of the Mona Lisa. If I went to the Louvre and took a picture, I could use that, however, the Louvre won't let you take a picture of the same level of quality as Corbis. This is how they have "hacked" the on things that normally cannot be copyright protected.
I can take a picture of whatever public structure I want. Barbara Steisand tried to stop people from posting a pic of her house, but she was denied in court. The exact same verdict would go against UCSD if these guys had legal support. It's pretty clear-up law that you cannot copyright or trademark something like a picture of the library that they themselves took.
(Full-disclosure: I am going to vote for Nader, I hate the Democrats and Republicans equally)
Have you seen the lies and half-truths and propaganda spread by the Republicans? Zen Miller, Dick Cheney, the dishonorable ridiculing of Kerry's Purple Hearts? Did you see the Republicans wearing little bandages on their faces with purple hearts on them to mock John Kerry's war record? How stupid is that??? How insulting is it, since he actually went to Vietnam, and he actually saved people's lives... because he didn't die, or get a grave wound, it discounts his heroic actions?
When firemen go into burning buildings and save peoples lives, but they don't get burnt, should we not consider them heroes?
All the lies and spins that the Republicans are spreading is no worse than what Michael Moore is doing. Yes, what he says has a total slant towards the image that he wants to represent, but so what? He is doing EXACTLY what other politicians do, yet the politicians turn around and have the nerve to say that he is wrong. Politicians don't just speak lies, they breathe lies. That is their nature.
The only way to fight them is fighting fire with fire, and I say good for Michael Moore... give ALL these politicians a taste of their own medicine. The only difference is that he is much, much better at it than them.
If terrorists decide to hack into the reactor by using something like, say, a jackhammer, then the DOJ will go after them using the DMCA.
Brilliant! They can sue those damn terrorists till they have no money left!
I thought the original post on slashdot said something about finding a collision with MD5 using a simplified version or different initialization numbers or something like that.
Is tried-and-true MD5 broken?
Since when did SCO start giving out dividends? Microsoft only recently started giving them out, and they make billions of dollars per month. I checked the stock pages, and it lists SCOX as not having any type of dividend at all.
What is this guy talking about?
I'm sorry, but no matter what OS these devices are on, WTF are they doing on a generally available network where they can be crashed and where security updates are necessary? They should be completely isolated!
This is not so much a Windows problem as opposed to a lazy network admin's problem.
Isolate those damn machines!!! Don't have network ports just opened everywhere! Come on, this is why network admins get paid the big bucks!
1) Good! This means people have to think before spending their savings on investing in Google. Don't do it if you can't afford to lose your money. As well, the price completely eliminates day traders. Great move.
2) Great! You obviously don't know that most media companies are structured this way. I trust those guys more than I do Bill Gates, Ted Turner, or Jeff Immelt, so I have no problems.
3) No one said Dutch auctions were new. As well, the auction process that Google chose was the lowest price that would sell all the shares, so it's different than what you stated above.
4) $3B or $30B? Search market is cooling down????? Says who???? Why? Because of interest rates???? As the internet gets bigger, you need a search engine to find what you want, it's impossible otherwise. So unless the Internet reaches saturation, Google will continue to grow with it. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't use Google as their primary search engine for everything.
They want to get rid of the day traders. That's it.
The normal mantra of the day trader is to buy and sell in lots of 1000. They usually go for the lower priced stocks that have high volatility. By pricing the shares > $100, it means that most day traders will not be able to day trade on Google's stock.
Good for them! The day traders are the ones that usually ramp a stock up and down, especially the IPOs during the dot-com boom.
As well, by pricing the stock so high, they are really forcing people to think twice about investing in Google. Again, good for them! They have said repeatedly in their prospectus that the price of the stock could go down after the IPO, and I believe it.
I'm going to by 25 shares at the IPO, and see where the price goes. I'll top up to 100 shares either way, but I don't want all my eggs in the IPO since I believe that the price will drop.
As well, I hope they do as what was rumored and never split the stock, a la Berkshire Hathaway. In 20 years, I'd love to see the stock price in the thousands.
Not only is this laptop so damn beautiful, but on the regular batteries, I can get over 5 hours. I bought it specifically for things like long plane flights so I can play nethack and kill time.
It has a killer sharp widescreen, and comes with basically everything you need.
With the larger battery, you can get 7-10 hours.
I was going to get the Dell 300m, until I found out that it doesn't come with a DVD player built-in. Who the hell wants to deal with a modular DVD player on a plane? Hell no!
I love the Sony TR3.
I like bash, but the one thing that it doesn't support (out-of-the-box anyway) is auto-completion a la W2K. In NT, when you hit tab, you can cycle through all the words that can complete the letters you typed... on bash, it shows you a list.
Is there a way to make bash behave more like W2K in this sense?
RTFA.
This is for DirectTV subscribers only. They do not have the option for lifetime subscription.
You mean how Apache has been so greatly destroyed because it hasn't adhered to the GPL. I mean, it only has 60% of the market for web servers, but if it were GPLed, my god, we're talking about close to 100% marketshare.... right?
Wrong.
In California, you can't prevent someone from moving around to competing companies in their field of work. Even if Buyukkokten signed 100 agreements saying he wouldn't develop another social networking product for another company, the contract is deemed invalid under California law.
What he can't do is reveal trade secrets to the new company, or if it is reasonable to expect that he will divulge such secrets in the normal course of his work.
So the fact that he signed agreements saying that he wouldn't create a competing product is 100% baseless. He can do this, even if he agreed not to.
It is up to him to ensure that he didn't steal any code or use trade secrets from AE in his work at Google, and an independent source code review would reveal this. If he did steal code, then he's up shit creek. If he didn't, then the whole thing is just to extract money.
I'm pretty sure that Google would have already gone through the due diligence to ask this guy if he did steal the code. He would be **really** stupid to deny it if he did because so much is on the line. I think if it has gone this far, Google is fairly confident that the code was new work.
I bet AE is delaying the neutral code review in hopes that Google will just pay them money to go away before their IPO.
I don't know about you guys, but my desk at work is a mess, with papers, books, cds, and stuff all over the place.
Based on some of the screenshots, it looks like I can finally emulate my own physical desktop with my virtual desktop... and with it all the benefits of "security through obscurity". For example, I leave my paycheck stubs all over my desk but I'll be damned if someone would bother to put the effort to try to find it!!
Ahhh, what sweet memories.
I bought a shitload of 3DFX stock back in the late 90s because they were the king of 3D. I remember walking into a computer store, and seeing something on the screen... I thought it was clip from a movie, but they told me it was Mechwarrior 2 (I think 2) playing on a Voodoo card. My mind was blown. How they got movie-like graphics onto a computer was beyond my capacity to understand. I dropped the $350 and bought one immediately and played with it and loved it.
Then, after a while, I thought, 3DFX is the king and they will never die. I put my money where my mouth was and forked over my entire savings to buy 3DFX, around $15k. There-in I learned a few great lessons:
1) The best technology doesn't mean the best company. "Good enough" with a better run company will usually blow you away. Ask Microsoft or nVidia (well, at the time nVidia wasn't the top runner that it is today).
2) No matter how great of an explanation you make, the stupidest things like 16-bit color vs 32-bit color can kill you (22-bit color just doesn't cut it to the dumb-ass consumers). It's better to just cross your t's and dot your i's in the first place so that you don't have any such vulnerabilities.
They went tits up, and I basically lost my money. nVidia bought the remaining pieces of 3DFX, and that includes all their patents. I'm not surprised they went SLI, and for companies that use it like 3d effect companies, it will probably save them bundles of time.
I am thinking about setting up my own personal mail server for my small business.
Is there a guideline that can help me figure out what steps I need to take to harden my mail server?
I will be using either Postfix or Microsoft Exchange.
Now, all of a sudden people are so concerned about Microsoft's welfare that they're trying to warn them not to shoot themselves in the foot?
Come on, this is just another case of someone trying to point out how Microsoft is wrong so that this person can show how smart he is.
The simple fact is this: Someone is going to be the first mover. I didn't hear anyone complain when PS2 went into production. The fact is that they were backwards compatible with PS1 which was considered revolutionary at the time. If PS3 were the first movers, do you think these same people would be complaining that it would be too hard to handle both PS2 and PS3 at the same time? No.
They are going to be first movers, and yes, people are going to be taking advantage of this. I will probably buy an X-box 2, if it is better. The games will be there, and if the software shop is good enough, Microsoft will PAY them to develop for X-box2, so don't worry about them.
I haven't heard that X-box 2 won't be compatible, so unless they are really stupid, they won't need to worry about compatibility issues.
I think what they need to do is:
1) keep the hard drive. The main reason why I buy games for X-box when multiple versions are available is because the hard drive makes saving and accessing games so much faster, and when you are playing things over and over again, you don't have to wait for the damn memory card to write.
2) Make the console smaller and lighter. It is a brick, and it's too big and hella ugly. I guess if they want to make it a PVR as well, then it will need to be bigger and heavier, but maybe they should use laptop technology to make it more user friendly.
If I remember correctly, the steering wheel buttons are:
1) Smoke screen
2) Oil Slick
3) Machine gun
4) Rockets
Of course, you also need the button to properly dock with your trailer so that you can be loaded with the supplies.
I'm surprised that after 20 years, it still looks like Darth Vader's toilet!
Don't get too fancy with yourself on this one...
You definitely don't need any type of RAID solution because it doesn't offer you what you really need. You say you want RAID, but what you really want is backup.
All RAID solution deal with disaster recovery, but they don't deal with the situation where you accidentally rm -rf a directory that you wanted. If you mirror or RAID 5 your drives, you're still hosed because both drives will delete the files. In the end, this is more important and much more convenient.
Instead, go with a better approach which is copy or tar your files every night (or every week) to a backup drive, preferably over the network on a completely different machine. This will prevent the problem of a power surge or accidental shutoff from corrupting both drives at the same time.
I love Mozilla and I actively evangelize it to all my friends and my co-workers. All my co-workers are programmers and extremely technically savvy.
It has so many features that people should be using, like the password manager, the higher security, the better e-mail, etc.
No one cares. The only person I know who uses Mozilla is my wife, and that's only because I hid the IE icon and installed Mozilla.
Every chance I get, I bring up Mozilla. I made sure that our company went out of the way to add Mozilla support. But no one cares. It seems like the simple act of going to mozilla.org and installing is too much of a hurdle for most people, even programmers and developers.
It's sad, but I think the vast majority of users look at computers as utilities, and don't have the passion that the best and brightest have such as the Mozilla developers.
I guess it must be like those ultra movie-buffs that love to point out different camera angles, and how it emphasizes this or makes that significant, but is lost on the rest of us that don't take movies and directing so seriously... we just want to be entertained for 1.5 hours.
Does this need more power? I'm afraid as it is about using cell phones so close to my head (Richard Brandon, owner of Virgin refused to use a cell phone without a headset, and he has done stupider things like trying to balloon around the world!).
I guess the only mitigating factor is that you generally won't be using the 4G features with the phone pressed against your head....
My credentials:
-Canadian-born citizen
-been working in the US for the past 5 years in Silicon Valley
-worked at two large corporations in Toronto
Almost perfect description, except for health care.
I'm using Kaiser Permanente in California, and it is an HMO. As a Canadian, you hear the absolute worst things about HMOs, but frankly Kaiser is heads and tails above anything I would ever see in Canada.
Things like medical tests, responsivitiy, etc are far better here than in Canada. My other Canadian co-workers told me tales of their parents being told to wait for cancer treatment in the East coast, and how pregnant women get way less ultrasounds than here. My own parents wait 3 weeks for their own tests such as looking for things such as colon or stomach cancer. In the US, there would be no such wait, at least with my HMO.
Canada's health care system is breaking down, and something really needs to be done to fix things.
I have enough trouble getting 5 people to agree on where to go for dinner or for which movie to go see... and we're all friends!
These guys want to get 30 companies to agree to one specific file format that would probably have an impact on the work they do???
Good luck!