What are these multiple providers of which you speak?

Where I live we have the choice of Time-Warner cable or no cable, and there's no sign of that changing in my lifetime.

Did you just describe IF Strips without using the term?

Actually they pay whoever owns the publishing rights, whether they wrote any music or not.

But radio isn't paying royalties or licensing fees or whatever you want to call it on their performance, they're paying it for the having composed it part, so whether the composer is a recording artist is irrelevant to that.

...short story "I Always Do What Teddy Says".

Hardly seems worth the bother of going to all the trouble that would be necessary to put the media server in one of the worst possible and least accessible locations one could choose.

I'd almost rather put it in the attic. It would need more cooling, but at least you could get to it.

Is your crawl space accessible from inside the house?

...that certainly bites.

It's like there's an entire industry convinced that listener fatigue is a good thing.

...to include TiVos and their power supplies, then "capacitor plague" is an even bigger factor, although, again, hard drive problems are prominent as well.

...I suspect my results would have been quite different, especially with regard to Pentium II era motherboards.

I tend to re-lube fans with a mixture of light grease and light oil, and that seems to extend their life considerably.

But the biggie is hard drives.

The club or dance hall or whatever paid to license the music for people to listen to while dancing, but they didn't pay to license the music to be used in recordings of that activity, so the person recording the activity gets to pay (one way or the other).

Post the videos without a soundtrack if it's just the dancing that's important.

They have to find a way to remove all the Obama cooties from it, in a way that lets them brag on themselves and vilify him, without actually getting anyone angry enough at them to get out and vote for someone else, and they have to keep their corporate masters happy at the same time.

...that the last thing the insurance companies want is to be deprived of all of those new customers they recently acquired.

Look at it from their point of view. People have to buy their product, and if necessary the government will help them to pay for it before it lets them not buy it.

Atlas and Fountainhead a decade or two ago, and was struck by how someone had managed to get comic books published without any pictures.

I think a certain Florida congressman summed up their health care plan quite succinctly.

"And the municipalities are nullifying the will of private citizens."

Every time the politicians running a municipality enact something desired by less than 100% of the residents it's "nullifying the will of private citizens", but it's also enforcing the will of other private citizens. If it does something which nullifies the will of a majority of the residents, said politicians will find themselves replaced come the next election.

Almost all of the members of the NC legislature are not residents of Wilson and I daresay the ones who voted for that law were more concerned with what TWC wanted than what Wilsonites did.

I feel reasonably sure that the elected officials in Wilson who got Greenlight started were residents of Wilson and a lot more in touch with the wishes for faster broadband of their fellow residents, wishes which TWC and Embarq weren't interested in dealing with until Wilson started Greenlight, and then, as I recall hearing at the time, all of a sudden they started whining about how they were going to "real soon now".

In my neighborhood in a different NC city, where we're only about 3 blocks from a switching station, I heard "real soon now" about DSL as Carolina Telephone and Telegraph became Sprint became Embarq became CenturyLink. At some point I gave up and went with cable modem.