I am told that another example of anachronistic measures are houses in Japan. Despite the fact that Japan is as firmly entrenched in the metric system as any country in Europe, houses in Japan are still measured using traditional units based largely on human dimensions (similar to the Imperial system's feet and yards and the like). Someone wrote a book on the subject. The entire first chapter is dedicated to examining the measuring system for Japanese domestic architecture.

But is that your birthplace? Were you actually born at home?

I wasn't. I can tell you the +/- 5 miles to my parent's house, but I would need google maps to tell me the distance to the hospital where my mother gave birth to me.

I mostly agree with the folks who suggest using the coax to pull cat 5 cable as a replacement strategy.

But I would be remiss to not mention MoCA, which aims to standardize home networking over coax in such a way that existing cable TV or terrestrial antenna signals will still work.

Can you say "ad hominem?"

I thought not.

You know, folks like you told me over and over again during 2008 that if I voted for McCain that we'd wind up having more troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were absolutely right. I did vote for McCain and sure enough.

There is a precedent for Nobel prizes to other than natural persons, and for the prize to not be awarded in a particular year. There's no reason they couldn't allocate the prize money back into the prize fund (like they did in 1972) while issuing a proclamation praising the Internet for whatever they like.

The alternative would be to award the prize to DARPA, which is probably not really in keeping with the spirit of the award.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Censorship is bad when the government does it or requires it. A merchant is within his rights to decide what he wishes or does not wish to stock in his store (modulo anti-trust concerns, which do not even come close to applying here). Calling an exercise of that right "censorship" is an insult to censors.

Satie is a fictional character, of course, but it's likely that he was speaking about government censorship. Until and unless Apple can put people in jail (or worse), I'd say that such implied comparisons are at best overblown.

And if anyone makes a "there's an app for that" joke about jail, they probably should be sent to one immediately.

Not really. The quote in the .sig is ironic, but you probably have to know who Montgomery Burns is to get it.

Did he say anything about the legality of it? He said that the sports bar owners should be compensated (yes, he actually put the words in your mouth, but that's beside the point) for encouraging lots of people to watch ad-supported content. Everything you say about that not actually being the case is true, but is orthogonal to his point that it should be.

I'm not saying I agree with him. I'm just saying that you missed his point.

He didn't say that they do not have that right. He either said they ought not to have that right or that they ought not to exercise it, depending on how you interpret what he wrote.

Hear hear! ... Or are you saying that the end of TV is a bad thing?

No it isn't. It's trademarked. Different thing.

Look! There's footprints in the snow ahead!

It amazes me how many people seem to find this concept shocking.

Prime time hour long dramas are something like a million dollars per hour to produce (that's a reasonable average - the spread is fairly broad). Those that air first-run on broadcast TV are free to the viewing public to watch - despite the fact that the electricity alone to run the transmitters costs tens of thousands of dollars (nation wide).

Cui bono?

Irony. It's what's for dinner.