While I love and appreciate Tor as a means to remain anonymous online, I work for a company that's the victim of quite a bit of "comment" spam hailing from among other places Tor. The spam ranges from individual businesses promoting themselves for their own benefit under false pretenses, all the way to professional spammers gaming the system (mostly locksmiths). I hope if the Tor network expands the list of exit nodes remains maintained so I can continue to blacklist content from those sources... it's heavy handed but beats swimming in spam.

Unfortunately, you're assuming they will adhere directly to the spec. I happen to have first hand experience at dealing with HP's horrible firmware and can say this will be among the most locked down PCs you can possibly own. Like putting in your own network card, 3G modem, or anything else? Not without HP's blessing you can't. Good at modifying a BIOS? Hope you can break their RSA 2048 bit lock they put in place...

ISPs have no competition, but Youtube, Facebook and Wikipedia do. The only thing those sites would do is shoot themselves in the foot while trying to force an immovable object to bend to their will. Lobbying the FCC on the other hand, that could actually affect change. It would be in the best interest of everyone (excluding short term investors in the various ISPs), with networking equipment manufacturers poised to win the biggest. I think it's all moot though, as Comcast is reportedly very far into their IPv6 rollout, as is Time Warner Cable (I have full dual stack at home with my TWC service). AT&T reportedly has rolled theirs out too, but some customers have experienced issues as the MTU setting is different on IPv6 as it is for IPv4. I also know first hand that Verizon Wireless runs dual stack over their LTE network. At this point, I think it's really just getting the proper equipment in the hands of customers that is the hindrance.

U-Verse is an H.264 IPTV solution (which doesn't support third party hardware, sadly). Most cable operators however still only transmit MPEG-2, though a few are rolling out some channels in H.264.

Texas's income tax rate is 0. Their sales tax rate however is 6.25 to the state and up to 2 percent more for the city and county (just about everywhere in the state charges around 8.25 percent).

Will this "copper wool" be as flammable as steel wool? If so, that could spell trouble.

Breaking even for them is more along the lines of a 7% profit. Anything below that is a loss. If Amazon makes 0.7% profit investing in itself or makes 7% investing in the market in general (like an S&P 500 index fund which averages year to year around 7%), 0.7% represents a loss of 6.3% not a profit of 0.7%.

After having written numerous letters to him, I can assure you Ted Cruz is looking for any and all available means to allow TWC and AT&T to bend you over and give you the business. At best, the man is ignorant when it comes to technology policy; his stance on Net Neutrality is "the internet has always worked fine, leave it alone" which ignores the fact that from its inception until 2005 providers were common carriers, and from 2005 through January of this year providers were under open internet rules from the FCC. At worst, and what I think is the case, is that the man is corrupt and receives a great deal of money from companies to do or not do specific things in the senate. His #1 donor by industry is the oil and gas industry, which I'm sure influences heavily in his refusal to accept global warming as the solid science it is. He gets plenty of money from telcoms too to do their bidding.

While I wish Aereo had won, I can see the argument against them as a "re-broadcaster". If the OTA signal comes in encoded digitally as MPEG2 and is then re-encoded to MPEG4 to make it use less bandwidth, that is in a sense rebroadcasting. If they transmitted the data from the antenna down the wire using the much less efficient encoding option it might have been different in my view. I do believe, however, that Aereo acting as a re-broadcaster is entitled to the same statutory license as all cable and satellite companies, and if they pay re-transmission fees they should be allowed to run their business as they had done before. I just hope Aereo offers a package soon that includes traditional cable channels. When this happens, we'll see exactly why the cable companies have fought against common carriage laws and net neutrality laws; they seek to prevent anyone from competing with their traditional services.

Nothing is proportional to murder. That's what makes it such a terrible crime; there's really no way justice can ever be served since it's impossible to repay the cost of a human life. Some people try with the death penalty, but to me it just reeks of vengeance, not justice.

Not as bad as when Verizon started an LTE rollout and called it 4G (somewhat egregious) then AT&T simply renamed it's HSPA+ network 4G (very egregious) so it looked better when you compared "4G" coverage.

A TiVo might be about as close as you're going to get... for now. One of the models with an ATSC tuner anyway (the 2 tuner Premiere or the 4 tuner Roamio). It requires pyTiVo on another machine to stream your own videos to it, and lacks Amazon Prime streaming. It does have Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, and can record whatever show you want. If your cable company does pull the plug the shows you recorded still work (you just can't record new ones obviously). I just wish they weren't so damned expensive ($550 for the Roamio for hardware and lifetime) and had more services, say nothing of their closed nature.

More Firestone jokes? Let's not tread there guys.

I'm not sure Nobel would be turning too much. His whole goal of the Nobel prize was so people wouldn't look at his legacy harshly considering he invented dynamite (at the time what could be considered a terrible weapon of war). Instead of associating his name with death and destruction, we associate him with great feats in science or humanitarian work. Looks like he got exactly what he wanted.

Great question. Even if you format the drive and load a clean copy of Windows, you still can't get the HP crapware out of the firmware. You know, the one that blocks you from putting any wireless card you want in a laptop... The truly evil part is that they RSA sign the firmware so you can't modify the hardware whitelist away. Seriously, stay away from HP.