You're leaving out one important (to me) detail about that setup. SD fullscreen flash runs like CRAP on my lowpower dual core AMD HTPC under Linux. Boxee is totally hamstrung by this, but MythTV can decode full HD on the fly in the gpu, h.264. Flash is completely hamstringing my setup from doing what I would like it to for No Good Reason. I have a hardware h.264 decoder in my gpu. I can use it to playback local file beautifully and no, the "latest flash" doesn't play them back using my hardware and the OS that does what I want with the rest of the hardware.

They can consider it patentable all they want, but to patent something (which I have done) you MUST file before you exhibit it publicly. If you exhibit a technology publicly before filing a patent, you lose the right to patent it. What could possibly be more of a public exhibition than releasing an implementation's source code under a public license?

Making available and exhibitions of products

Publicly available products also count as prior art, even though it may be very difficult to determine exactly what the product is made of or how it works. If a device is put on the market before the patent application filed on a feature in that device, the feature is no longer novel. Usually, the sale or other disposal of the product is enough to make all its features prior art for later filed applications. If the product is not sold, but only demonstrated to the public, then only those features which the public could observe count as prior art.

http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/

IANAL, but, wouldn't that make a good case for estoppel? Saying that there were well known, visible implementations of this technology in the field for years, and the rights holder waited until commercial viability and adoption to give economic incentive to litigate. Seems like the definition of estoppel to me (in my NAL understanding).

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

-Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

-John Adams (letter to Thomas Jefferson, Sept. 3, 1816)

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.

-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church.

-Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

He was a Deist. The Jefferson bible removed all supernatural and mythical features of the scriptures and focused on the moral teachings of Jesus.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/11/1440206/Oil-Leak-Could-Be-Stopped-With-a-Nuke?from=rss

Actually, there is, the soviets have used this method five times. Next objection?

I've found that's one of the best things about a large company (you're already in the door, so if you want to do something outside your degree field its usually relatively easy).

No marketing drone makes "hundreds or thousands of times" what a sewer worker does. Get a sense of proportion dammit. Yes, lets say a marketing drone makes $250,000 a year and the sewer worker makes minimum wage (both wrong in all but extreme cases). $250,000/year -> $125/hr, minimum wage is $7.25/hr which is a ratio of 17.2. Get real and drop the hyperbole. I even estimated in your favor in both cases. Sanitation workers tend to be paid relatively well and market droids tend to top out in the low sixes.

How is it hard to know that in advance, exaclty:

http://www.bls.gov/emp/

Then they can offer it for download just as easily. Anything that applies to DVD's applies just as easily (actually more likely easier given the lack of physical media production). If they recoup their costs from advertising, then great, put it up the next day for download/streaming at a reasonable price and cash in even more. I would be SHOCKED if they were getting anywhere close to $1-2 per viewer per episode in ad revenue.

Yet somehow they can afford to stuff that same show onto DVD's and nice fancy printed packaging for the same price. I can usually find a season of whatever show I want to buy for around $20 for a 22 episode season. Not too far off... seems like they can afford it, especially when the marginal price they're getting for the product now is $0. People always want to take the reverse view of reality. I say you should pay $$ for it so you should. Wrong, learn about the free market, supply and demand applies even if the supply is simply convenience and risk/reward.

So, you want to completely deny the coercion of the tobacco companies who knew the facts on nicotine addiction but continued to advertise them as a lifestyle enhancement and deny the health implications? You want to ask Native Americans how much of a choice alcoholism is? Have you noticed where the subsidies from the USDA go? We, economically, make it such that if you are lower middle class, the only nutrition you can afford is of such poor quality that you are just about guaranteed to either be starving or obese, not healthy. Its hard to not be sedentary when you're either dealing with malnutrition or horrid side effects from the onset of diabetes due to our ag system being a subsidized corn syrup production model.

Learn a little bit about the socio-economic factors and the serious corporate corruption in our system that cause these things before you start immediately blaming the "lazy poor". How many poor people do you know? I grew up wondering where the next meal was coming from and it wasn't because my mother wanted to work two jobs and never see her kids.

Why not just use the coax to pull cat5e/cat6 along the same runs? You're making it more complicated than it is, I think.

I don't bother with cable. The few things I want to watch are on hulu. I watch a few shows on delay via Netflix.

That's great and all, but I'd really like to watch all the online video available to the rest of the world rather than pay $80 a month to have a proprietary set top box stream the same crap at slightly higher quality to a buggy pos dvr box that I don't own, control, nor can I access the content as I please. I hate having to rely on cpu rendering when I want to build a low power quiet box and use the goddamned gpu hardware h.264 decoding to get deinterlaced rendered video.

This is why my htpc frontends will be moving to windows 7 in the very near future. MythTV backend, MythWeb for setting up recordings, browsing schedules, etc, and boxee as a frontend on top of w7 with hardware decoding!