GP said they weren't in the US, so CableCard might not be an option. I am in Canada and nobody here offers CableCard, which is why we had to give up TiVo when it came time to get an HDTV. TiVo is CableCard only (and there's a good reason for it). The real reason they want to encrypt everything is to rent you the DVR.

When I tell people we don't have cable TV, and just stream, they're always interested in it, but few of them want to compromise. When I tell them you can't easily get sports though, then they usually say, "that wouldn't work for me." Plus, I know a lot of people that have tried streaming on their own, and they definitely end up on the "wrong" site and end up with a malware infested nightmare on their PC. We just stick with Netflix and Hulu mostly, with the occasional "rented" streamed new release and we have no issues.

I'm pretty sure you're talking about the article on how to get your video rental late fees removed from Blockbuster by impersonating a clerk from another store. FWIW, it's the only article I can remember reading from 2600 during that era, and it's a good lesson in how *not* to structure your corporate-wide system between all your stores. :) Sorry it cost you your job, but if that was you I appreciated the article.

Obviously when I said the mother "refuses" I don't mean she legally keeps him from taking any, I just mean that she "discusses" the matter with him and explains why she'll be taking all or most of it. Sheesh.

The 12 months includes the 6 weeks or whatever of pregnancy leave, as far as I recall. So the father can't take all 12 months, there is a minimum that the mother takes. However in almost all cases I've seen, the mother refuses to give up any of her 12 months. There are certainly lots of fathers taking some of the time, but it's still a minority. When I discussed with my (female) boss about taking 6 months of leave she looked literally horrified, and then proceeded to tell me a story about how she was back at work days after having her first kid. There's still a lot of pressure on professional men, in Canada, to avoid taking time off for this, unfortunately.

I agree that most people have just seen the act before. However, your idea that it's all common sense isn't correct. No first-time traveler is going to assume the life vest is velcro'd under the seat, and the seat belts don't work the same as the ones in cars. Plus, have you ever read the safety features brochure? The instructions for opening a hatch and deploying the slide/raft is not 100% common sense either.

So who's going to reset the first circuit breaker that trips, huh? I kid, I kid... :)

There should be a visible counter. "Vehicle payment overdue. Ignition will be disabled in 72 hours 00 minutes..." That would solve most of these problems and make it fair.

Ok, thanks for making me refresh my memory. I went and browsed this again. Take a look at page 10, and "The Feynman-Wheeler Interaction Theory". While physicists initially renormalized the mass to get rid of the infinity, what Feynman-Wheeler did was confirm that there is no self-interaction of an electron's charge on itself, and that the observed radiation resistance could be accounted for by the interaction of an electron and its' future self. Cool stuff. So anyway, that got rid of the scary infinity from QED.

QED provides answers that are confirmed very accurately by experiment. Also, that infinity you're talking about was, I believe, gotten rid of by dividing both sides of an equation by an equal term, even if it was growing to infinity. That's not completely crazy. We haven't directly observed black holes. If we had much better observations, we might be able to confirm relativity, but the prediction of a real physical infinite density should make us a little skeptical.

We have two theories: quantum mechanics and relativity, and they disagree about what happens when really massive stars collapse (or relativity predicts a singularity and quantum mechanics doesn't have much to say about what happens at those energies). The relativity answer seems impossible because when you get infinity out of an answer in physics, your math is probably wrong. Quantum mechanics only covers the 3 other forces, not gravity. So really we know that we probably don't know what's going on with this phenomenon. The term "black hole" is a little bit like "dark matter". It's a placeholder for what we don't know. We have observed evidence that there are extremely heavy and dense objects affecting nearby stars, but we can't observe them directly. So, what we've observed is not necessarily exactly what relativity predicts is there. This paper is offering a different theory (which may or may not be more correct).

Hey I'm skeptical too, but batteries are recycled, not just thrown in the trash heap. Plus, given the expected lifetime of a car, you'd only expect to replace the batteries once. It's not that crazy. After that the other components will be wearing out too.

I don't follow this logic: in countries that ban guns, violent offenders use knives? Doesn't that prove that it works? The total damage inflicted by a deranged lunatic with a knife has to be, on average, a lot less than a deranged lunatic with a firearm. That chinese guy who went berzerk with a sword on the same day as the elementary school shooting a little while back... didn't it end up that nobody actually died from that?

First of all, it can't determine if you're a driver or passenger, so it will then disable your phone if you're a passenger. Not a huge deal if this is just a punishment, I guess. However it's still easily defeated by getting another phone. The right solution is to take away their driver's license for a period of time (2 weeks to start, and increasing amounts after that). Use your phone all you want, but don't drive.

I don't know if this is too beginner level, but I think it's worth a mention: Snap Circuits. It's kind of like those old learn electronics kits with the spring connectors, but in this case they snap together with magnets. I would think if you went through all the kits you would learn all the basics pretty quickly, and then you'll be more comfortable moving on to the arduinos, etc.

Also checkout RobotShop for more advanced stuff.