This is how it will play out in the end:

Let's say you have a current cable package for $40/mo and you get 80 channels

The new system will only bundle the less popular channels in the cable package and the popular channels will be separate. Want FX? Extra. Want Comedy Central? Extra. Want Cartoon Network? Extra.

So now your cable package is still $40/mo, but you only get 50 channels, and not any good ones. Each of the other 30 channels are now an extra $1-5/mo each.

So you might not have to subsidize sports channels, outdoor channels, christian channels, and so forth if you don't care about them, but the de-bundling will end up costing you more.

At first they may lull you in with a discount on the basic bundles to make the a la carte seem like a better deal, but give them a year or two and you will be paying out the nose, and if you complain about it then people will defend the cable companies by saying that cable prices would have gone up anyways, maybe even more-so, if they still did the old bundle method. There would be no way to absolutely prove price gouging due to a la carte.

I always preferred "private beta" and "public beta" vs. "closed beta" and "open beta", but both are correct. I agree that nobody should be confusing this with closed- vs. open-source in this context.

There is a counterpoint to your link: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4658/its-not-qualcomms-fault-dispelling-touchpad-myths/2

If Android does get ported to the TouchPad then the performance being a hardware vs. software issue may finally be answered.

If used as a replacement for Neilsen Ratings then I would actually be all for this, as long as the data was properly anonymized (or only searchable/exported with an obscure TV ID or Viewer ID, and not easily identifiable information). I don't mind advertisers knowing which shows are more popular, but I'd rather that neither they or any other entity tracks all my TV viewership for the sake of either custom-tailoring ads/junk/spam at me or monitoring me specifically.

Judging by what is on TV right now, I think we need to try an alternative to Neilsen Ratings to see if that fixes anything ... or at least confirms that humanity isn't worth saving.

Google+'s biggest strength is that it puts circles front-and-center so that you can control who sees your posts on a per-post basis. Yes you can do the same in Facebook, but it is a tedious workflow in Facebook.

I am starting to think this may be Google+'s biggest weakness as well. Now that people can share posts with sub-sets of their friends list with ease, Google+ overall feels less active. I wonder how much of that feeling of inactivity has to do with not being aware of private, walled off conversations between members of your circles. Honestly, how many close friends do you have on Facebook or Google+? It is more than likely that the bulk of your friends lists / circles are acquaintances or friends of friends and those are the people that you are less likely to share posts with ... and vice-versa.

They were referring to about:troubleshooting in the mozilla.dev.usability discussion linked in the article summary. I think it is the "Help > Troubleshooting Information" page (about:support in Firefox 5). Either they have plans to rename about:support to about:troubleshooting or add a new about:troubleshooting in the future ... or they misspoke in the conversation.

Now people will think their addons break at random. I doubt the typical user will ever look at about:troubleshooting

Mozilla needs to rethink a lot of things about addon support before pushing their new release and version philosophy any further.

I'd rather they add some easy way to let users install addons that say, "Does not support Firefox x.x". They can put a big disclaimer/warning/alert to make sure the user knows what they are doing, but with the Firefox rapid release schedule I am tired of having my addons break because of version string issues.

One example is the Stylish addon. I am using the Firefox 6 beta in Ubuntu 11.10 alpha and Stylish refuses to install due to the version string. The addon info says it supports Firefox 3.6 - 6.0a2 (key part being "6.0.a2"). That tells me that it should work in later alpha/beta version 6 builds.

Firefox really needs to address the issue of how addons determine whether or not they are out-of-date. The browser version is no longer a useful metric for that.

Chromium is open-source, which is what Chrome is built upon. I haven't paid close enough attention to know the differences between Chromium and Chrome, though.

I am not a lawyer, but if ISPs go this route then won't they lose common carrier status? Will they open themselves up to lawsuits if illegal content is found to be traversing their infrastructure? If a guy gets caught uploading or downloading child porn, then can family-focused or religious organizations sue his ISP for allowing child porn to be transmitted on their network? The ISPs will be monitoring traffic, so they can't play ignorant about what is being sent across it.

I use self-signed certificates on pages hosted on my intranet and all the major browsers throw a major fit about them. If I ever have guests over that want to utilize my intranet web apps then they have to approve and add exceptions for my self-signed certs. The browsers act like my certs are shady or suspicious and if I didn't re-assure my guests then they wouldn't have added the exceptions.

I haven't tried going to a site with a domain mis-match or expired cert, but I would assume browsers throw a fit about those too.

In Thunar (or Nautilus) you can click on "Go" and "Open Location" and type in "smb://..." and it will browse to remote shares. I have never tried "fish://..."

Gnome 3 and Unity both have a hard-on for tablets. It is as if the people behind the projects think desktops and laptops will disappear within the next couple years and everybody will either be using tablets or smart phones instead.

I haven't used KDE lately, but I've heard that they are moving in the right direction again after taking a bad turn in the past.

Gnome 3 and Unity are currently in the middle of their bad turn. Whether or not they veer back out of lala land remains to be seen.

I switched to Xfce because Ubuntu is switching to Unity and ditching Gnome 2.x in the next release.

I must say that Xfce is really nice, and isn't much of a step down from Gnome 2.x

In fact, I managed to style Xfce to look nearly identical to Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x in 11.04. The one missing feature in Xfce 4.8 is the ability to manually sort taskbar buttons, but they have added that back in to 4.8.5 (I'll wait for Ubuntu 11.10 for this feature, as I don't want to hassle with getting 4.8.5 on 11.04 and end up in dependency hell)

Xfce could be a little more customizable, but it is not bad and I'd rather they keep doing what they are doing and not try to please everybody and end up with a lot of cruft.

KDE is getting their groove back, but I ultimately think Xfce will be the big winner of Gnome refugees.