I have thought about this with cell phone companies. I once got service from bell south, and hated it. I couldn't pick up a signal at home, or at work. Odds were that, I could find a pay phone more easily than an area where I could get service. I wasn't surprised when they changed their name.

The problem is that, now, I can't remember who they became. I could look it up, but it isn't that relevant. The part that matters is that, when xfinity comes to your town three years from now, and your friend told you how much Comcast sucks, and you have been reading blog entries complaining about Comcast's service, you may not immediately realize that it's the same company.

I've had Cox for coupla months now and I find it pretty hassle-free. Call their number, a person answers quickly. Phone and ISP service work as advertised. Their website seem bit flakey, but could be my browser setting. And no surprise in billing so far.

The other option is AT&T for my area, so it's no contest really, but I figure a little 'kudo' for decent business practice might not be a bad thing in this ocean of nasty monopolies.

We have used a lot of WD internal drives in our workstations for the last year (few hundred machines) and the reliability has been outstanding (especially compared to the Maxtors before that, but it was Maxtors worse period). However we have had very bad experiences with their external Mybook series. I spoke with a support dude for the biggest computer store in my home country and he said the same, the external drives are dying a lot. Probably it's the power supplies or heat as the drives in side them are the same.

There exists no consumer LCD device that can attain "searing levels" outside. Unless you mean outside on a moonless, overcast night in the wilderness.

All LCDs are way dimmer than the sun. They are not going to cause eyestrain from the brightness, unless it's for the lack of it.

Also, matte LCDs are crap outdoors because of the way they scatter the light. It's the same idea as why you can't see stars in the daytime. With glossy LCDs, you can at least turn or shade them.

I'd argue that TiVo is dying because the internet provides more options than it did in the first decade of this century. Hulu and broadcast television shows, not to mention YouTube Netflix provide far more "user friendly" options that can be watched in more places on more devices. I built a myth box but we never use it. We don't watch enough television to bother with it. When we miss something, we watch it online. The few exceptions to this are filled in by renting Netflix DVDs.

Yes a lot of people go ahead and pay for the cable company DVR, but most I know complain that they suck. When they see us watch what want online (1 day after it airs, usually) when and where we want, on whatever device, they generally do the same after that. I only know a few people actually still using true DVRs.

We're probably still an exception to the rule, but the numbers of people doing it this way are growing.

What, with real badgers?

That's part of the scientific exchange program, done on a squid pro quo basis.

You had a broken/faulty unit, this can happen with any kind of disk. Even cheap USB flash sticks easily last over a year of the kind of use you describe. Intel X25-M SSDs for example, are specced for 24/7 use with 100gb of data being written to disk EVERY DAY and this is a consumer MLC SSD. Enterprise SLC disks are much more resilient then that (albeit a lot more expensive).

Um... well, if you lie about being the copyright holder (or their agent) you've committed a criminal act (perjury).

People who lie under oath in court, even when their lies result in innocent people being punished, rarely face any sanction at all. If perjury in front of a room full of people is unlikely to result in punishment what is the risk to someone doing so in writing? (Especially if they are a great distance from the recipient.)

That's not how it works (from memory, so this may contain errors...).

If they fail to comply with the takedown notice, then they lose their safe harbour protection and become liable for any and all infringing content that they host. The person whose content they removed my file a counter notice, and then they can reinstate it. If the person issuing the takedown notice believes that it was valid then they can pursue the claim in court. If the court issues an injunction then, once again, Google must take the content down.

This is where it gets interesting, however. Both the takedown notice and the counter notice are issued under penalty of perjury. If you knowingly provide incorrect information on either then you are guilty of perjury. If you just made stuff up and didn't check whether it was true, you may also be guilt of barratry, fraud, or possibly both. I wouldn't like to be the IFPI at this point. I would love to be their lawyers though; they just charged their client for something that is going to generate them a lot more revenue in legal fees.

What's the cost of a good set of UPSes vs simply migrating to a Colo & fatter pipes? Datacenters (most of them anyways) promise at least a few hours of generator uptime, and it sounds like you're already using a colo somewhere (dns relocation, etc).

nope. google doesn't associate your name with mined data.

could they? sure. and if they did, eventually one of their 20k employees spread all over the world would blab, and google would be no more. they are a very rich company. if people lose trust in them and find out they are doing what you say, their core business goes down the tube. there's not motivation for them to do it.

All true. But a contractor knows that from the day he/she signs up.. his paycheck could end the next week.

I've been seeing something similar happen to the US Army. They have converted many jobs from military to civilian in the belief that they don't have to increase the size of the army, just get more people out from behind desks and into the field. More trigger pullers and less support folks. So now they have to drag overpaid contractors along to established FOBs to handle the higher level support functions.

The only solution i can think of is hiring these engineers and so on into permanent positions on the condition that they will have to move as the work moves.

Saying that "high taxes hurt small businesses" and saying "the complexity of the tax code hurts small businesses" are two different issues that should be dealt with separately.

You're thinking wrong. Don't think office, think K-12 education. This could save school districts $MILLIONS every year.