We haven't had cable in our house for 10+ years now. The local cable company, Charter, is really expensive and doesn't offer internet service. Our telco, CenturyTel, offers the only available internet (10Mbit DSL) but their TV offering is a partnership with Dish Network and that's a deal breaker.

Recently we found out we could watch NetFlix through our Wii for $9/month. We can watch a lot of the BBC programming we love and a ton of movies. The user has control over what and when they watch programming. Not everything is available for streaming but more and more seems to be added all the time. This is how cable should have been all along. Now if only the services of NetFlix and Hulu could be combined it would be perfect.

Does removing PowerPoint make the presenter any smarter or the presentation they've done any clearer? Somehow I doubt having it drawn out on paper will make it any easier for the good general to understand. :p

From TFA:

When I was serving in the US Navy I don't remember over-head presentations from photocopies of "well written briefs" being any more entertaining or any easier to understand. Sometimes the situation or mission is complicated. There isn't anything you can't write on paper that can't be put in a presentation or it's accompanying printed notes. This sounds a lot more like finger pointing due to failure or incompetence in the field than it does a software limitation. I find it ludicrous that the blame is shifted from incapable leadership and poor communication to a software tool (take special note of the third to the last paragraph). I also find it boggling that the US military can't figure out how to use both presentation and word processing tools at the same time. Is there a reason a five page report can't be written to accompany the presentation? And they wonder why upper level logistics are a mess.

I have a FB account. I have reestablished contact with old friends and very distant family members I didn't otherwise have contact with. The alternative to finding someone you have lost contact with (if your other close family and friends don't know where someone is or how to contact them) is by searching Google and hoping you find a reasonable match. Even then most sites that find a person for you want an idiotic amount of money and a buy in to their scam service to get the contact info. Then there isn't a guarantee that it is the right person or the contact info is still relevant.

People do use FB for more than asking someone to fertilize their crops or signing some mob-mentality world solving petition. It's possible to use social networking in a responsible manner. Facebook does seem to have a blatant disregard for their users and it's possible that a better service will come along and people will move to it. Another point condescending pedants might be missing is the exposure of security and privacy risks can help to educate people who might not otherwise even know about them. That is, just because people aren't using social networking doesn't make them any more safe on the internet. There were plenty of online scams and security risks before social networking; at least now people can communicate the nature of them and educate users how to safeguard themselves. One of the first things I did after seeing that CBS news story is post it on FB so that people could change their FB and email password info.

Torchlight is a single player action RPG from Runic Games. It's made by the creators of Diablo and Fate. It has random levels. There isn't anything incredibly different about it, but I think it's loads of fun.

It's often messy, but doesn't have to be. For that matter AJAX can get ugly and messy at times.

I think the good point to take away from this, that many sites seem to have tossed away, is to provide a way to interact with the site if a user has Javascript disabled. One thing /. pedants often harp and bark about is how they have Javascript disabled and their shock that everyone doesn't. Maybe site owners and developers aren't interested in providing their pages to those who won't allow them to run JS, but that doesn't mean this isn't a useful lesson to those who might like that.

No, it's not AJAX. That is, I think, his point. the point. The point of the demonstration doesn't seem intended to replace AJAX, but to provide a graceful degradation for those with Javascript turned off.

I was wondering why I got a busy signal through my DSL router this morning.

It doesn't.

-- Off Topic --

Uh oh, I replied in the same topic (posted just above) as the person I stole the sig from. I didn't see your post until I had hit the submit button. That has to be like crossing the streams.