AFAIK, there was no $500 option after VS2010 Pro. That was the last version you could buy without having to buy a mandatory MSDN subscription, so the base price was up around $1200 after that.

Cameras are a problem, but it's not just cameras anymore. Nest thermostats, for instance, have occupancy sensors and they connect to the internet to work. So your thermostat tells a server on the internet if anyone's home (potentially). Smart meters have similar problems. We recently bought a temperature sensor (AVTECH brand) for our small server closet, and it automatically connected to GoToMyDevices.com as soon as I got it on the network, and started uploading sensor data. There was nowhere in the device's built-in web interface to enable or even disable this "feature". Nothing in the documentation. I looked online and found a forum where it explained that you had to telnet to the device, and at the main menu you had to select a hidden menu item, and then type a command to turn off this feature. It's that kind of absurdity that makes the whole "internet of things" just a house of cards waiting to collapse.

I thought this ship was suborbital. Re-entry isn't a big huge deal if you're not going multiple km/s sideways. The red bull space dive thing just had a guy in a spacesuit.

I'm a Canadian who, for a time, worked in the US and had a US health insurance plan (early 2000's), before the ACA. I paid for that health care plan because it had a drug plan and the Ontario health coverage does not. A few times it was convenient to go see a doctor in the US because it was close to the office, and I clearly remember wondering what all those people were doing behind the desk of the doctor's office. In Canada you might see 1 or 2 people in the administrative side of the office, but in a US doctor's office, there seemed to be an army of clerks. I looked into it and it seems like it was all to do with handling all the paperwork due to everyone having a different insurance company. In Ontario there's only one health insurance... the government one, and they just pay for exactly what the doctor bills, there's no "is this covered, is this not", etc. The administrative overhead is much, much lower. The ACA can't possibly have fixed this problem, so you're still paying a lot more overhead for your health care in the US than we are in Canada. Remember, the only "service" an insurance company provides is dividing the costs of a group of people evenly over that entire group. A publicly run insurance scheme doesn't need to pay for advertising, salespeople, lawyers or lawsuits. It's very inexpensive to run, and a lot less hassle for the people who use it.

Yes, we went to a Rogers HD DVR for a while after TiVo and couldn't believe how much the UI sucked. I never really learned how to use it well, and relied on my wife to do the various incantations to get it to record what we wanted. A lot of the menus made no sense, especially trying to get it to not record something, or to wait and not switch the channel when it wanted to record something. Then we got rid of cable and first tried Boxee, then finally broke down and just put a PC there. Best decision ever.

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.