It also rarely matters what the total cost turns out to be, but rather the per-seat cost.

If you can get a big enough volume discount, $200 or so per seat doesn't look bad considering that it's a purchase (Office doesn't require yearly fees), and you get a lot more support overall (both official through MS and various help web sites).

If all the leaked photos are very "private", then I suspect they are fakes.

On the other hand, if there are lots of "boring" pictures, too, it's likely they are real.

I have an 8800 (and a 4400) and a low noise pre-amp on each. I didn't say OTA TV was unwatchable...it's actually quite good. Some signals are so strong that the antenna pointed 90 degrees from the source still gets a signal well over 24dB C/N. On the "proper" antenna, signals can hit 30dB C/N.

But, DirecTV still has fewer dropouts than even the strongest channels, since multiple reflected signals can wreak havoc, and stronger signals are often affected even more. I can't control airplanes, moving trees, or other intermittent reflectors, and these happen far more often than really thick clouds, so OTA fares worse than satellite.

For phone access, yes, since there are no ads even on the Google-supplied app. The same applies to the custom app for Windows, Mac, etc.

For web access, there aren't currently any ads on the Google Drive page, so, yes, for now. And, if Google changes this, there is always AdBlock.

If you had followed this case, you would know that this is exactly what the US tried to do.

The US asked an Irish court to issue a warrant to force production of the data. The Irish court refused to issue the warrant. So, the US issued a subpoena to Microsoft, who rightly told the US that although the data was on a Microsoft computer, the data was owned by a customer of Microsoft, therefore a warrant would be required. The US court then issued a warrant for Microsoft to produce the data. Microsoft refused, noting that the data was in a foreign country, and warrants are only valid when issued by a court that has jurisdiction over the location of the requested object/data/person. No US court has jurisdiction over Irish soil, thus we end up at today's story.

The actual point of Microsoft's appeal is that the US wants to have a court to be able to issue an order that has the all the advantages of both a warrant and a subpoena, while ignoring their limitatations. The problem with this is that subpoenas are allowed to be fairly vague and apply to anything that is "owned" by the target of the subpoena, regardless of where it is located. Warrants, OTOH, can force the target to hand over something they don't own but over which they have control, but can only request very specific items/data, and have to be issued by a court that has jurisdiction over where the item/data is located.

In addition, if you have set Windows Update to "download but not install", then it is possible that you don't have Internet access at the time you are thinking of applying the already-downloaded patch.

It depends on what you mean by "reliable". Able to withstand impact, yes. Able to keep bits intact when stored as they should be...both LTO6 and disk are about the same.

This is because the bit error rate on LTO6 is so high compared to something like the Oracle T10000C tapes. Statistics say you would need two copies of everything on LTO6 to make it as likely to not lose data as a single copy on T10000. We had to do the analysis on the best way to back up 12PB of data, and T10000 won if you were starting from scratch. Since the client already had LTO6 drives (and the silo), that tipped the scales back, but they still have to make two copies and send one offsite to meet the reliability requirements.

I haven't ever seen an ad when accessing Google Drive.

I don't see how they can ever serve me an ad on my phone since I use a third-party file manager app that uses the Google Drive API to seamlessly integrate GDrive to my phone file system. On the PC I use a web browser, which can be protected by AdBlock if they ever do start serving ads on the Google Drive page.

How is this any different from the police taking the phone and erasing the video? In order to get the information they need to "brick" the phone, they'd need to look at the phone, thus they would have it in their possession and could do anything nefarious that they chose. The only situation where the government shutting down an individual phone remotely makes any sense is if they believe that phone is a required part of a "people are going to die" plot.

The real problem with a mandated remote kill switch is that every script kiddie on the planet would want to break into whatever controls sending out the "kill" order so they could entertain themselves. With current systems where whatever method I choose to have this functionality is not known, and there are a great many options, it's far less likely that somebody will wipe my phone just for "fun".

And that's still a problem. If I call to have a problem fixed, then that's all they should do. The dozens of ads per day they insert into the video, the 2-3 pieces of snail mail I get per week, and the annoying calls that I can't stop because I have a "business relationship" with them are more than enough "upsell" for me.

Luckily, my providers (DirecTV for video and Verizion FiOS for Internet) don't do any a lot of this crap (DirecTV does insert a lot of ads for themselves). The only "upsell" I get from a support call to either one of these is a "is there anything else I can help you with?" at the end. I don't get any snail mail ads from either one, and neither call me. DirecTV tells me about new services by messages that appear on my STB (not intrusive...must be accessed manually via a menu choice), and at least one of which I have purchased.

I have several antennas (pointed at different cities), and so I can say with a lot of knowledge that you are generally wrong. I'm less than 30 miles from one set of towers and about 40 from the other, and I have far fewer dropouts from DirecTV than from antenna. Not that there's a lot on either, but OTA does have more uncorrectable errors over the long haul. For people farther away (but still in the same DMA, and still needing to get their signal from the same towers), it's even worse.

As for picture quality when there are no errors, DirecTV isn't a noticeable dropoff, now that every OTA station has at least one sub-channel.

There are OTA sub-channels not available on satellite, but many of them are available on the local cable provider (Comcast). I do watch some of these channels quite often, and they do offer programs I can't get anywhere else. That said, if I only had OTA, I wouldn't be able to watch most of the shows that I actually like.

Or, the ISPs can support being re-classified as "common carriers" by the FCC and then the DMCA requirement goes away, so Rightscorp wouldn't have any leverage of a lawsuit.

If you have more than one component in your configuration, you almost certainly need a universal remote, so the TV remote doesn't matter that much.

I've used the same remote through 2 TVs, 3 receivers, 2 DVD players, several media players, cable and satellite STBs, and even my HTPC.

Modern loss-less multi-channel codecs (Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA) have full-resolution in all channels, so software isn't a problem.

As for hardware, it is true that many installations use smaller speakers for the surround channels, but this does not mean they have generally lower resolution for the vast majority of the audio spectrum. Smaller might limit bass response, but much of the truly low bass is essentially non-directional and is handled by subwoofers instead of the surround speakers. Even so, it's not that hard to add one or two more subwoofers to restore the tiny bit of lost directionality from having only one.

Everything I noted applies only to home installations...professional installations almost always have all the required extras to make the surround channels the equivalent of the front.