@Bonch: Congratulations, you are officially the Grinchy douche on Christmas.

OP: Great questions, I can not wait to see answers. Would love to hear more about what your software solution is for encoding, I've got a bunch of DVDs & Bluerays I would really like to get on the network, but a streamlined rip+encode+publish I have yet to achieve :-/ What are you using on the frontend? I've got various iDevices roaming about, and a Roku that does 720p for the projector, but haven't had much luck with mt-daapd so far.

I do not trust wireless for my projection room, I ran cat 6 everywhere when I moved in as nothing beats the reliability of copper. I've got a basement, so I put the server is right by the patch panel in the furnace room. Noise is definitely an issue. The only thing that scares me about the garage is bugs and what not gumming up the cooling enough to cause catastrophic failure. With a bunch of drives you need a bunch of airflow to keep everything cool, I can just imagine the intake fan sucking up mosquitoes, and coating the CPU cooling block with my dog's blood.

As far as rack vs tower, I started with a rack and ended up with towers. The rack systems just took up way too much floor space, and that space was poorly utilized to boot. It made a very large utility room feel much smaller.

Dirty hippies all over the world vow to not bath again until travesty corrected. How is this newsworthy? Business stay in business by making money, Canonical must start sometime.

You are mostly correct, abandoned works should be in the public domain after a reasonable period. I do not doubt that project G is in violation of the letter of the law, but is it really in violation of the spirit of the law?

I was in London last year and took quite a few photos with an DSLR. Hell, I even got a bobby to pose for me.

There is little time left. Fortunately it is August and those in North America have the beach. For many, there is something surreal about watching a sunset over the water. It is an experience that crosses many personal divides. Spend what time you have left smiling my friend, you will thank yourself later.

Yes, the copyright laws need to change, I admit it. They need to change back much closer to what they were originally, about seven years. That would give artists time enough to make a living off their inventions. The perverse indefinite extension of copyright has enabled the masses to rationalize their actions. They are right, as are you. The artists must concede that they are not the new nobility, due to be rich for the actions of their grandparents. Resistance is of course futile.

I agree, Flash has been trash from the get go. The sooner it dies, the better off we all are.

HTML5 FTW

yes we are.

no we're not.

no we're not.

no we're not.

cheers from europe.

Guns are scary, especially those evil 'semi-auto' ones.

Cars aren't guns so they aren't scary and cars totally aren't multi-ton murder machines.

Blowing it up in the area of geo-stationary orbit would be the most stupid thing to do.
"Have a nice new dark-age!"

We need a crash course:
make a probe with arms and an engine to get sent up, grab onto it, and take it down into the drink.

Yeah, harvesting this stuff would be better, but that ain't gonna happen.
Sure, you could have it bring dead sats to a landing vehicle to do reclamation,
but old owners who had written them off as dead would bitch for their bit,
and add in astro-preservationists... "it's a bit of space history, it HAS to stay up there".
(OK, for some early sats, fine; most of what's gone up in the last 30-40 years, probably not).

>>>Yeah, millions of dollars in fines vs. billions of dollars in profit really dissuades those naughty contractors

It does actually. My company was fined ~700 million about three years ago, and now they come down hard on the employees to charge time precisely. Even if we take a barthroom break, we're supposed to subtract that 0.1 or 0.2 from the government project and put it in an overhead account. My company doesn't want to be fined again.

Way to not read the guy's WHOLE message. His point was even about that. His point was that Cars are more dangerous than guns, and yet we let car drivers operate their equipment with minimal oversight.

I have run Linux on my desktop since RH 4.2 and have not used Windows seriously since NT4. I program in a dozen languages well enough to have a significant patch in the Postgres optimizer. My phone is four years old, I've replaced the screen once and the battery twice. I'm about as geeky as they get, but certainly not a gadget or Apple freak, and yet I bought an iPad yesterday.

Why? Because my wife's ancient iBook G4 is on it's last leg, and we have really come to love casual browsing in the living room. The iPad is not a computer, it is not terribly useful for general computing tasks. Anyone who has used one would understand this. It is however a gorgeous device that is braindead simple to use for its intended purpose. So much so that my 72 year old aunt, who refuses to touch a keyboard, actually surfed the web for the first time yesterday, and enjoyed the experience.

Hate on it all you want, but in ten years the only people with clunky old computers with keyboards will be those who write for a living (code or otherwise).

Amen.

Does Win7/Vista still hang for a few seconds every time you click on the empty optical drive in Explorer?

Besides, my gigantor monitor is a Samsung.

I watched the Lynch movie as a teenager back in the late 80s long before I read the book. Therefore I did and do not have the book snob attitude to pre-judge the movie by. I only read the book because of the captivating feel of the movie and the intriguing storyline. The made-for-TV remake was closer to the book, but far from enthralling.

I think Lynch is a lot like Kuberick. You either love his stuff or hate hate it, there is little in between.