YouTube videos are depressingly awful. They should allow users to submit high quality videos and charge extra for them. I would pay $10/mo for it.

For businesses, I can certainly understand the appeal of a BSD style license. The problem is that you will potentially end up with a situation like what we have with Apple - all of the work that went into BSD was stolen by Apple and Macs don't allow proper code sharing.

As an end user, I always want true GPL software so that I know it will be mine forever.

If I were developing software to integrate with some proprietary code, that would obviously make the decision a little more painful. Unless one is willing to make the full RMS kinds of sacrifices for freedom, the occasional BSD style of license will be required.

This is trivial, I use dvdbackup to do this. It is especially easy if you start with Linux Mint which pre-installs all of the dvd decryption and codecs you will need.

I went through this same agony a few years ago, and I ended up with an mencoder command line that does a good job.

The only problem is that it can't auto detect the media you are encoding, which is mainly a problem with frame rates. e.g. some are 30000/1001 and some are 24000/1001.

Under no circumstances should you bill for bandwidth used - this kind of gotcha capitalism is immoral.

You should, however, set up multiple tiers of service. For example, the entry level can be 256 kilobits a second, and for a little more money allow 640kbits etc etc. I would also do some limited QoS to limit the 256k users to maybe 128k if there is a lot of traffic.

Just don't have surcharges for bandwitch usage.

Sadly, without the ability to get HD channels like Discovery, HBO, etc, these boxes will always be at a serious disadvantage.

It is ridiculous that we let the telcos drag their feet so much.

We need to understand the failure of the Clinton/Gore attempt to wire the country with fiber, and make it happen for real. This will mean a lot of shared sacrifice for the local phone monopolies.

There is no way to prevent someone from doing something like taking a photo of all the pages on a screen and sending them to someone.

However, a product like Sendside will let you track everyone who receives, opens, and forwards a message that you send.

If you are really paranoid you can use encryption on the document and make all recipients provide their own encryption keys.