• Charge something reasonable, say $5/mo
• Make it all commercial free
• Put all episodes back up for the shows that are available. No more of this 'only 5 episodes of American Dad' crap.
• Allow products like Roku and PS3 to put it on their devices so we can watch it on a TV instead of a PC

Do the above and consider me a customer.

Can you explain why Linux would be better suited for this?

Streaming is neat and probably what everything will convert to eventually. I just got a subscription for Netflix, and while being able to stream movies or tv shows on demand is really cool, they just don't have a big enough streaming library. With these types of services I don't really see any one service becoming dominate anytime soon. For example, Fox doesn't seem to stream anything on netflix (can't find king of the hill, simpsons, american dad, house, etc) but all their stuff is on Hulu. Well that's fine, until Hulu starts charging access fees too; now you have to buy subscriptions to two different companies instead of just one. Maybe that's not a huge deal, but it's annoying and will turn people off; I'd rather pay twice as much to access everything in one place than have to constantly guess which service I need to view X, Y, or Z.

On top of this, you have ISPs who want to cap your bandwidth. Comcast says 250GB/mo. Sure that's plenty now, but in 2-3 years when highdef streaming becomes much more mainstream, 250GB might be nothing. Now you've got an awesome (unlimited, for netflix anyway) service you can't use to its full potential because the company you pay to help deliver it from that other company you pay to your house doesn't want to (not unlimited).

I think that the challenges in bringing streaming services to the web are great enough that physical media isn't really going to go away anytime soon. Sad really, it's a damn cool idea and works pretty well.

Pick your ISP?

I only have one broadband option available to me (that I know of). Unless I want to go back to dialup or get some ridiculously expensive air card or satellite link, I'm stuck with just one service provider: our local cable company.

The cable company decides to implement a cap or traffic shaping/policing to reduce throughput? I've got no choice other than drop them and go with some other even worse option. I suspect many people are in the same boat.

Are you implying that no other operating system has bugs, or that open source guarantees bug free code? I'm pretty sure you'd be wrong.

(Disclaimer: I love Linux and have been using it at home for years, but I'm sure as hell not going to go around and tell everyone that it's rock solid and bug free just because it's open and I like it.)

id is small. They used to have a list of everyone who worked there on their site, but I can't find it anymore. It was no more than a two dozen people, most of which were artists.

All My Circuits: The Movie

• Directed by Directing Unit 4
• Written by Writing Unit 5 and Writing Unit 12
• Based on Original Characters by Original Character Unit 17

I don't understand why the ISP companies aren't excited about this.

If their network utilization is increasing then they must be doing something right as their customers are using their service more. Any other business would be thrilled about this.

Instead of limiting what their customers are able to do, they should invest more in building their infrastructure to accommodate the increase in demand and grow their business.

Instead they opt to shoot themselves by limiting their service and hinder growth so that they can make slightly more money now rather than potentially much more later on.

Also, why aren't we hearing more from the services you mentioned (hulu, google, netflix, etc) about bandwidth capping?

lxdvdrip is a one line DVD5 ripper.

1. Put DVD in drive.
2. Open terminal.
3. Type "lxdvdrip"
4. Press enter.
5. Wait a while.
6. Done.

It will rip it as a DVD5 and also offer to make a backup copy (or copies) at the end if you wish. I just keep the DVD5 stuff it makes and don't make copies though since I'm just using it for central storage.

One thing I did notice though is that I can't even play some DVD's on my linux box, so how can I rip it? Even with the patched libdvdread I get some DVDs that are just all scrambled and I can't make a backup. Oh well.

When Pakistan decided to block youtube they inadvertently caused a global routing blackhole. The internet is built with the BGP routing protocol, which is based on trust. You trust that your peers will advertise correct routes. If they don't then you get misinformation like in the Pakistan/Youtube situation and it spreads, pretty soon everyone thinks going through Pakistan is the best way to reach youtube so all traffic (or almost all) goes there, then Pakistan simply drops those packets.

Of course this was an accident, but a malicious attack could simply advertise lots of incorrect routes and hose up everything ... at least for a little while.

I thought the same thing. If he's still a developer, he really missed a huge opportunity. On the other hand, he can still say that some of his work was used in a commercial game for the iPhone, selected by Carmack himself, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to put on your resume.

Does it involve any type of yo-yo's?