That is essentially it, as long as the value proposition (works like a DVR, commercials don't run longer than skipping through commercials on a DVR take, the price is the cost of internet access instead of internet + TV) then migration will happen;

Let say a reasonable HTPC w/ 1080p display costs $1500 and cable with a DVR costs $60 a month, hulu pays for your HTPC w/ new HDTV in about 2 years; Add to that a $5 a month fee for what used to be $15 a month HBO and hulu charging for premium content: Hulu w/ service, after the second year, saves the consumer ~ $850 a year

I have always disliked getting coffee in a styrofoam cup that is way too hot to drink. I always drink my coffee black, so nothing is added to cool it down. The styrofoam cups at fast food places keep the coffee way too hot, much longer than a ceramic coffee cup would have. If the coffee at an ordinary restaurant is too hot, it will quickly cool off somewhat in the ceramic cup and saucer they use.

I do not like having to sit around, for a few minutes, waiting for the coffee to cool down before I can drink it. After several minutes, I usually get impatient and start cautiously trying to sip the still way too hot coffee. The next day, I have usually discovered that my tongue was sore from having been burned by the super hot coffee. After a couple of days, the soreness of portions of my tongue and roof of my mouth, goes away.

Usually, the way too hot coffee from fast food places smells disgusting. Instead of having that wonderful rich coffee aroma, it usually has that strong disgusting overcooked, burnt smell, typical of coffee made several hours ago, but constantly kept hot for several hours. When I finally get around to cautiously taking my first sip, I usually discover that it tastes even worse than it smells, so I throw it away. People who use cream or sugar, might have possibly have been able to make it taste minimally acceptable.

If fast food place can not provide fresh good smelling and good tasting coffee, I wish they would just not even offer it on the menu.

A few years back I did this with a colleague, we actually investigated 3 solutions; 2 commercial and one linux script based, in the end the one that won easily was the Linux script.

Basically using iproute2 and some nice scripts gives you the ability to load balance your outbound packets and then using some relatively simple scripts to monitor each remote peer for automatic failover.

A quick google turns up this blogger who sounds (from a quick skim) like he's doing the same thing: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-load-balancing-failover-with-dual-multi-wan-adsl-cable-connections-on-linux/

Unfortunately I can't remember the commercial solutions we tested (this was 4-5 years ago!), but although they did exactly what you wanted perfectly, our problem was that we were doing this for a managed services company who ran 150+ IPSEC VPN's over those (at the time) 3 bonded ADSL connections, needless to say the commercial solutions had never imagined anyone trying to statefully balance that many VPNs! However with some tweaking (to be honest a LOT of tweaking) we got the Linux solution working a treat, even with nearly seamless failover.

Google is your friend on this one.

The more there are pie-in-the-sky technologies out there that have been researched over many years, the more promising and immediately useful (if currently marginally feasible) technologies there will be on hand to frantically improve at the last minute when ever-growing demand for energy peaks and readily available oil has become unaffordable for less important applications. Algae is particularly promising because it relies on a billion years of evolution focussed on minimal-energy solutions to extracting power from sunlight, and because it has relatively little background pollution associated with it (as compared to the array of toxic chemicals used to manufacture solar cells, for example). Plus, understanding of genetic engineering can only improve greatly.

I still strongly prefer nuclear energy (safe fission designs for now, fusion later if that ever gets off the ground), but the political controversy surrounding nuclear power plants appears set to make nuclear energy a minor part of future energy provisions. Algae looks to be uncontroversial and usable everywhere there is decent sunlight, with almost no toxic chemicals or proliferation concerns.

The point isn't whether the flu vaccine is necessary or not. The point is you are mandated to get it if you work in a NYS article 28 facility (section 205 of the NYS public health law specifically) you are forced to get this shot if you want to keep your job. This includes care agencies, Hospitals, Nursing homes etc...

Is the vaccine safe, who knows? They just started clinical trials. This is the problem Health care workers are being forced into the clinical trial. I know for a fact that it is not FDA approved yet, and because it is a vaccine for a "pandemic" disease it is allowed to bend the rules of acceptable ingredients. The mercury content of the vaccine is higher than normally allowed. available here While a healthy male may have no problem with this, how about a pregnant female? Some of the ingredients are known to worsen thyroid conditions . The problem is no one really knows what will happen.

Also why mandate the swine flu shot but not the regular flu shot. 12% of people die from the flu every year (CDC reports) yet as of June of 2009 the swine flu has about a 6% mortality rate (Again CDC reports).

This disease is less deadly than most other strains of the flu yet there is panic over it. The big deal is while the normal flu may put you out of commission for 3 days the swine flu can knock you out for 6 days to 2 weeks.

The CDC is not mandating health care workers get the shot, only NYS is. Plus you have to sign multiple wavers that you won't sue anyone should you end up sick from it. Basically you are given the choice of playing Russian roulette or lose your job. You have a 1 in 6 chance of getting the bullet but if you get the bullet your chances don't matter you are stuck with the reality. A lot of the people educating people on the Vaccine when asked if they will get it, turn around and say no. How can they truthfully educate people on how safe this vaccine is if they refuse to get it?

I know in Manhattan on Oct 13 an injunction is being filed by PATRICIA FINN on behalf of all health care workers, and it may go class action suit if the injunction is approved.

Fyi I just gave a lecture on swine flu and have a ton more info if any one wants it, most of it is available off CDC websites though.

EM is all fine and good, but you cant just stick things into it like you can a light microscope. Sample prep is very complex. Unless these kids have several rather nasty solvents to fix the sample, and a high-pressure liquid CO2 bomb to remove excess liquids, not to mention a sputter-coater, there is nothing you can do with it. Sounds like a waste of money for schools to buy this. Better to buy 200 decent light-scopes and let kids play with it individually than watch the teacher put a prepared sample into a tube and look at a computer screen.

Yeah, it's better to stick to properly designed web pages like *cough* Slashdot?!?!?

I was a TEM operator about twenty years ago. We didn't have any special floor and the vacuum was drawn with an Edwards High Vacuum roughing pump that plugged into the wall and the final vacuum (10E-7 torr) was drawn with the internal diffusion pump. It was a Hitachi 600AB that could do about 100,000X magnification, but we only used it to about 4,000X or so for our purposes. This was a two ton, seven foot tall scope. We didn't use it for high magnification, but for x-ray diffraction crystallography and EDS identification of elemental composition. We also has a Phillips SEM. I'm sure we paid far less than $60,000 for it -- we bought it used. Even the TEM, which we bought brand new, was only about four times as expensive as the TM-1000. However, neither of these scopes could ever be used in most homes due to power requirements and their sheer size.

I think the big deal here is that this one (the TM-1000) fits on a table top, weighs 200 pounds, and doesn't require liquid nitrogen. BTW, the EDS detector available for this unit is pretty lame and is only able to detect elements from sodium up.

Gartner is the National Enquirer of the computer trade magazine industry. It's the bottom half of management that keeps them in business.

There's a small percentage of the population for whom [almost anything] will cause an adverse reaction and possibly kill them.
It isn't a matter of "more science" or "big pharma needs to try harder"
Human physiology is just so variable that there is nothing to be done about it.
Our best effort is to identify risk factors and keep those people away from [almost anything].

"In short: It is possible to diagnose a computer entirely from software."

Tell me a piece of software that'll expose a dying capacitor, please?

That's not the point... It's NOT about reviewers. It;s about all the paid trolls kiving items 5 star reviews because they were paid to, so other people thing its a good product and buy it.

Blog and Blogger do not require a definition. Simply, ANY statement of endorsement in print, media, or on the web, where ANY form of payment, discount, freebie, etc was given, with or without a request for a favorablke posting, requires disclosure.

Also, since the penalty is not necessarily on the blogger, but on the company they're blogging on behalf of (if we can find the blogger, they get punbished too), the companies themselves will be seeking a bit more documentation to ensure anyone given a freebe, and especially paid endorsements, are explicity told they have to disclaim so. Companies that have the product wonp;t want negative FTC attention because people are illegally posting reviews of their stuff...

I don't really have much to say on this, but what the hell, I'll say it anyway.

Walled gardens result from the natural desire of business operators to hold on to customers once they've spent a remarkable amount of money per head to get those customers. That the tactics they use, including purposeful obstruction of data migration, are often appalling is simply irrelevant. Ethics can be hard to define for such a relatively nebulous matter as data storage formats, and most people aren't all that ethical about money with which to begin, especially in a poor economy.

This situation will continue until there is a sustained and vigorous effort on the part of customers to insist that businesses use a standard, probably XML-carried, format for customer data, preferably with legal sanctions such as fines for businesses that refuse to play ball. I've thought on this sort of thing for a few years, but don't yet have a more specific proposal. One thought is to make customers the sole legal owners of their own information, with all that implies.

> Considering what an effect and what a huge fanbase the programmes have, I can't help wondering why no-one has ever tried to make any more.

And why don't people make some more Beatles songs while they're at it?

It's nice to see a politician who can actually pass the Turing test.