As disconcerting as the story is, I don't think it's all that much of a concern that this will become the norm across the US. It's just simply unsustainable. Going to a theater is a leisure activity, and it's subject to strict competition. Not just from other leisure activities that audiences can opt for, but also from option of watching the very same movies at home. Theaters owners, of all people, should be well aware of this, as they've seen their audiences decline significantly as home theater systems have improved and grown cheaper over the past decade or so.

Even now, I regularly opt to wait for a film to be released on DVD rather than take the chance of having to deal with a bad audience in a theater. While strict security measures may stave off lawsuits from the MPAA, it's only going to push audiences away from the theaters that choose to implement such policies in the long run.

So it's $80 billion? Did everyone else fail to notice the other number in TFS? Total defense spending is $664 billion, which leaves $584 billion on non intelligence related defense spending. How much of that $584 billion is spent on military forces meant to defend against a cold war style enemy vs the kind of threats the US faces today? My guess would be a large portion of it. Of the $80 billion on intelligence, how much is appropriate for the kinds of threats the US faces today? My guess would be a significantly larger portion than the rest of the defense budget.

Would I like to see a significantly lower defense budget for the US? Absolutely. But intelligence seems like entirely the wrong portion of our national defense to cut it from, given current conditions.

I would suggest getting a Roku. You can pick one up for as cheap as $60. It will stream Netflix, Amazon VoD, and (soon) Hulu+. Not only that, but their channel store has content from most of the major video podcast producers, including Revision3, TWiT, and Whiskey Media.

This was my experience as well. My wife and I both watched BSG religiously through the entire series. When they announced Caprica, it didn't really sound like what I was looking for after BSG ended, but since I liked BSG so much I decided to give it a shot. My wife made it about halfway through the first season before giving up on it. I stuck it out to the end, hoping that it would eventually pick up. It never did, and I didn't come back for the second season.

Caprica failed because it was a bad spin-off that had almost nothing to do with the original show that it was supposed to be based on, not because of anything to do with cable TV as a business model.

Why not? We grill it into everyone's heads that it's their civic duty to go out and vote, but why? You're supposed to vote because "it's the right thing to do". But why is it the right thing to do?

Look up "rational voter theorem". The probability of your 1 vote impacting a national, or even state, election in a nation of >300 million people is incredibly minute. The outcome of an election has to be immensely valuable to you for it to actually be worth your time to go down to the polling station and cast your ballot.

The logical thing to do is not to vote. Not only do you not waste your time, but in doing so you increase the value of the votes of those who actually value the outcome and are more likely to be informed on the candidates and their issues, and thus make the "correct" choice.

We often do, just only for local positions. The structure of the US election process, coupled with the size of the voting base, makes anything other than a two party system difficult to support.

A good analogy is the "pick a number between 1 & 10" game, and think of the numbers as the spectrum of US voters ranging from 1, extreme left wing, to 10, extreme right wing.

If one candidate chooses to position their platform at "4", then a second candidate is going to rationally position their platform at "5", to capture anyone to the right of them. A 3rd candidate would rationally position their platform at "6" to capture the largest voting base available. So you end up with a situation where only two candidates can really capture large enough votes to really contend. Any serious 3rd candidate usually just ends of splitting the vote for their closest rival on the political spectrum, actually making their constituents worse off since the candidate on the other end is then more likely to get elected.

At the local level this is easier to overcome, since campaign budgets are smaller, and most voters are more informed about the issues and candidates. But on a national, or even state, level the budgets and voting base are just too large.

I can think of two reasons right off the top of my head.

1. There's a big difference between moving from a completely locked down system (nearly all cell phone development prior to the app store) to a slightly less locked down system and moving from a completely open development environment to a more locked down one.

2. Apple does not command the mind and market share in the desktop sphere that it does in the mobile sphere, and thus cannot dictate the direction of the entire market the way they do in mobile.

ooh just thought of a third one..

3. Lower barriers to exit in the desktop space. No ETFs and no cost at all to switch to Linux. Even an OEM copy of Windows is only half as much as even a subsidized smart phone. Also, no need to switch hardware as both Windows and Linux will run on what you have if you're switching from a Mac.

I used to read maybe 6-12 books a year. More than the "average" American, but still not all that many. Since I switched to ebooks though the number has gone up significantly. Last year I finished 48 books. This year I'll probably end up somewhere in the 30's. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I just have so many more opportunities to read now. With a physical copy, I can only read when I think to bring it with me. With ebooks, if I've got my phone with me (which is always) I read whenever I have the time. Reading on my phone might not be ideal, but it's far better than reading the stuff written on the door of a bathroom stall.

The other reason I read more is I'm a lot less picky about what I read. Picking out a physical book is a funny thing, because it's not just about whether or not you're interested in the book. It's also about what the book says to the people around you about you. I know I'm not the first person to pass up a promising Sci-Fi or fantasy novel because I was worried what friends and family might think when they saw the cover art. With an ebook, that's never a concern. So while a lot of what I read these days might not be quite as high minded as the ideal would be, it's generally stuff that I find much more enjoyable, and therefore I get through books faster.

I see this argument a lot, and while it makes sense on the surface, if you actually sit down and do the math it seems pretty empty to me. Take a top game from ten years ago, I'll go with Deus Ex for an example. Looking at Amazon I see I can buy a new copy of Deus Ex for a low as $17. I think it's safe to assume that this is a fairly typical price drop for a game over the course of 10 years. Now $17, while cheap, is still a bit too much money for us to simply write off completely. However, we're not spending this $17 today, we're spending it 10 years from now, which means we have to discount it. Inflation typically hovers around 3-4% and the rate on a relatively risk free investment (your opportunity cost for that $17) is historically around 5-6%. So for the sake of simplicity, let's just assume a discount rate of 10%.

If you do the math, that puts the present value of having to repurchase that game you're so afraid of losing at about $6.50. But wait, we're not done yet. That's the value if you're absolutely 100% certain that you're going to have to repurchase that game, which we're not. To figure out that real cost of "renting" that game, you'll need to multiply your present worth by your expected probability that Valve will actually go out of business, and not unlock your games before doing so. So if we think Valve has a 50% chance (a fairly high number IMO) of going out of business, then the present value of the expected cost of re-purchasing that game is only about $3.25. If you think Valve has a 20% chance of going out of business (probably a more realistic number), then the value drops to $1.30.

Call me unconvinced that an expected $1.30 is something to get all up in arms about, especially when it's probably less than the tax I pay if for some reason I decide not to buy on STEAM.

I see a lot of hate for STEAM in game reviews on sites like Amazon, but step into any PC gaming forum and almost everyone there practically refuses to use anything but STEAM. I have to admit I'm in the latter category, but I find the polarizing nature of STEAM to be rather fascinating.

I can somewhat understand the haters' point of view. If all you want to do is simply play the game you bought, then having to install and run 3rd party software might seem a bit frustrating to me. However, I've always found the benefits of STEAM vastly outweigh the potential drawbacks. For starters, let me just say that if you're purchasing boxed copies of games that require STEAM to play, you're doing it wrong. Not only you missing out on one of the biggest things that makes STEAM so great, bypassing the retailer and downloading straight to your hard drive, but games are generally cheaper on STEAM as well, sometimes even shockingly so.

Throw in a built in community, no need to keep track of CD keys, automatic patching (and now driver updates if you have an AMD/ATI video card), cloud support for game saves, and pre-loading for day one purchases, and the benefits start outweighing the costs pretty quick.

And of course the biggest argument in STEAM's favor actually has little to do with STEAM at all. Simply put, in a day and age when it's rarely ever a question of if a publisher will require some sort of online authentication for their game, but more a question of what form that authentication will take, STEAM is far and away the least of all evils.

Have you used it? Because I have and after doing so I prefer the second of those two options. The problem is that many sites that support HTML5 (which works find on my Droid) default to Flash (which in my experience is every bit as bad as TFA makes it out to be) if they detect it to be installed. I'll take halfway decent HTML5 on a fraction of the sites I visit over what I've experienced with Flash any day.

This has been my experience as well with my Droid. I realize that the droid is a bit slower than other Android phones, but I hadn't had any trouble with watching HTML5 video on it, so I expected similar results with Flash. I was wrong. The few times I did get it to play, after let the player buffer for several minutes (on WiFi) it played in the single digit frame rates. I uninstalled it after a few days, as sites that had HTML5 video available still defaulted to Flash if they detected it. Having access to HTML5 video on only a portion of sites is preferable to me to having Flash for Android available on all sites. That should say something about just how bad it is.

I didn't say this was a good thing. In fact in my OP I specifically say that it is a problem. But it's not a problem that falls within the domain of net neutrality. Once again, net neutrality is not a catch all for all ISP regulation. Its purpose is to correct a specific market failure. That doesn't mean that there aren't other problems, but trying to lump them in with net neutrality doesn't help the discussion, and only gives opponents more targets.

But, in regards to net neutrality, the question is whether or not AT&T objects to the FCC requiring them to be neutral in the way they implement "paid prioritization". As long as all other streaming video services on their network are subject to the same fees, then it's still neutral. The purpose of net neutrality is to address specific conflicts of interest that ISPs, especially the cable cos, face between providing Internet service to their customers and selling their own services on their networks. It's not a catch-all for network regulation that so many people seem to interpret it as.

The point of net neutrality is not to do away with differentiating levels of service. It's to prevent ISPs from charging others for access to those tiers, while giving themselves or preferred services access to those tiers for free or reduced prices. The main fear is that a company like Comcast might offer a streaming video service over their network for a fee, then charge other services, like Netflix, a quality of service fee that makes it prohibitive to compete with Comcast on their own network and prices them out of the market. AT&T objections here, while worrisome on their own, don't necessarily conflict with the principles of net neutrality.