The ace in the hole for net neutrality is the latest crop of cheap TVs with built-in Netflix and other online services. My in-laws just purchased one a few months ago and they use Netflix constantly. These are dye-in-the-wool, Ann Coulter-reading, FOXNews-watching Republicans. I mentioned to my father-in-law about net neutrality being a big issue. He had never heard of it. When I explained the ramifications for their Netflix usage, his response was to immediately support it. It will be interesting to see this shake out. This is another chance where we can see if FOX and Rush can convince more people to act against their own self interest in support of some bastardization of "freedom."

Not rosy. But I do expect CIOs to project a bit more foresight than this. But with all of the Chinese hacking and Wikileaks in the news, maybe it will fan the paranoia and knock some sense into them. I'd love to see "the cloud" go poof in a new Red cyber-scare.

Grid computing achieved buzzword status too...among suits. People dumped money into it and it fizzled. Who is still doing grid computing...except for SETI or Folding? Eventually, this will go the same way.

I suspect that it will take one thorough breach of just one of these cloud platforms to make everyone realize that this is bad bad idea. Even just one employee accessing "the cloud" from their home PC that happens to be rooted with a keylogger installed is enough. Then that delicious "access from anywhere" feature becomes a wicked liability.

What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?

GEOS was great on the C64, but the PC version was excellent. I used Geoworks Ensemble as an undergrad on my 286. It had a functional word processor and desktop tools. And it allowed DOS applications to run under it pretty smoothly...I remember using the symbolic math program Derive under DOS and then writing up the results in the word processor. It was significantly better than Microsoft's (or even Apple's) offerings at the time. Too bad it didn't catch on.

IANAL either, but it strikes me as odd that any lawyer can purport to represent me in some legal affair without some consent from me. Pursuing legal actions on my behalf without my issuing of power of attorney is, in fact, illegal. I have to sign over power of attorney to my accountant to have him interact with the IRS on my behalf. How is this any different?

I agree completely. I think, as a group, we should OBJECT to the terms of the settlement because as the aggrieved parties, we were never in anyway contacted by the attorneys in question, never gave implicit or explicit permission for them to represent us, and are currently sharing none of the windfall. Some lawyer among us should draft and official response that we can all cut and paste. Ten or twenty objections will be blown off. Ten or Twenty thousand will not.

Google has their fingers in a lot of pies, I know. But please pull resources from this crap and get some truly useful things workings, like the ability to import an existing phone number into Google Voice! That has been "on the way" for 18 months, and many many people will jump to use it. As it sits now, my GV number is unused and that makes GV mostly unused. If I could put my home/business numbers on GV, usage (and potential data for mining) will skyrocket for me and for a lot of other people disaffected by crappy phone companies. Imagine transparently picking up incoming calls to your REAL NUMBERS via VOIP, cell, or landline and swapping out destination phone with a few clicks on the setup page rather than enduring the porting process for the n-th time.

1 Gb is 1 gigaBIT. 2 GB is 2 gigaBYTES. So, to make 2 GBs, you need 16 of those $2 chips, not two. So, ~$32 for 2 GB of RAM, just for the chips. 2 GB DIMMs/SoDIMMs are in $35-$40 range on the site you posted.

If you want to roll you own, use XBMC on an Acer Aspire Revo R1600 ($200). It uses the Nvidia ION LE chipset that supports h264 offloading. I would use these myself, but I already have three Popcorn Hours.

PCHs are nice, quiet, and cheap, but the UI is awful. It will require some tinkering to make nice. YAMJ is your friend (Yet Another Movie Jukebox).

I've got that beat. Charcoal and a leaf blower!

http://tinyurl.com/2cajl24

Made for a fun afternoon a few months ago. I think we melted about 20 old hard drives in total.

Everyone packing up and moving their mobile homes. Yeah, that would be an interesting traffic jam a few hours ahead of the wildfire.

I've had a geothermal heatpump for almost 10 years. My parents for even longer. They are great, especially in harsh heating climates. We live near Pittsburgh, and they have proved quite affordable. Local contractors have really just started installing them...I had to really look around to find an installer. Most HVAC guys don't want to have to mess with a well-drilling sub and a maybe a backhoe sub to trench from the wells to the house. It is a lot more work, compared to an air-source unit...and far messier! Install an air-source unit, you will get a few holes in your foundation for coolant lines and power to the compressor unit...and then the normal ductwork, air handler inside and the air-source unit sitting outside on a drop-down concrete pad. If the ductwork is in place, it is a 1-2 day job.

With geothermal, (if it is done right) you will have a dozen or more holes in your foundation for the in/out of the loops from each well into a manifold in the basement. You WANT that manifold in case one of the wells dies. You will have trenches from the foundation to the wells...and the wells need to be 10-15 feet apart, so some significant part of your yard will look like hell. Mine took about two weeks to complete because the well driller broke down on the fourth well. And the backhoe operator came *this* close to putting the bucket through my foundation wall. It is a monstrous headache to do a retrofit install, but for new construction, it would be a bit easier. In any case, the cost for the loop install can be a back-breaker. The geothermal units themselves are IMO overpriced too, due to lower production volumes.

Capacity would be measured in kW or MW, not in kWh. Capacity is the amount of power that can be produced by the facility at any given time, not the total amount of energy that the facility could produce over its lifetime. Whatever the case, the numbers make no sense as listed in the OP.

I am a proponent of insulation and building a house from scratch make it possible. In fact, I'd argue FOR double framing walls with 2x4s outside and 2x3s inside with an insulation (and wiring and plumbing) gap, rather than framing with 2x6 (to code). If you stagger them, you can avoid the thermal bridging in the wall studs.

But I still insist that the doors and windows are more expensive and persistent problem, both thermally and economically. Maybe that R50/inch foam will fix the door issue. But the window problem is still there, unless you live in a cave.

And I think you will see that earth berming will help more than any of the insulation options you've mentioned. The proper goal for future housing should be figuring out how to get light and open feeling architecture that works with earth berming and working out cheap efficient dehumidification.