Or maybe they were just eating rat?

oh and fourth: Not everyone can get quality internet. Netflix on a 3Mbps radio with the tower 4km away is impossible.

Digital streaming is without a doubt more convenient from a certain standpoint, especially a short term view. There are several reasons DVDs are important to some as well as a longer term view. For basic consumption it's great, not so much for ownership and control.

First, there's the human aspect to it. Many like to collect objects - from stones to Elvis memorabilia to various forms of culture and everything in between. There's a certain satisfaction to owning a physical object like a DVD or book. While it can be taken to unhealthy extremes, for most it's just a hobby.

Second there's the long term view. Digital streams, cloud based collections, etc are all temporary. No one owns anything and are at the mercy of corporations as to whether that item will stay viewable over the long term.

Third, not all services are created equal. While I can buy just about any DVD I'd care to, when it comes to Netflix the offerings are pathetic simply because I'm above the 49th parallel. I'd be paying the same amount for a fraction of the content simply due to my geography.

This point has been gone over and over... main drive failure at exactly the same time as a house fire/flood/etc at your secondary location? HIGHLY unlikely.

TOR is one idea but I think this would be a perfect place for the EFF to step in. Hosting full disclosure on their site would likely limit the legal harassment and is inline with their mission.

Communism would work if we turned control over to our automated masters.

And game traffic which is even more time sensitive is somehow different?

The fact is that Netflix drives demand for AT&T's services - especially the higher capacity ones. They're bitching about having to invest in more capacity even though they're able to oversell what capacity they do build. Someone has to pay for this investment, that is true, and it's the customers who are paying $65/mo for 45Mbps connections and the $10/50GB beyond the cap. Interesting fact though, according to AT&T themselves:

"In fact, less than 2% of AT&T High Speed Internet users utilize more than 150GB per month." - AT&T Broadband FAQ

So, if the vast majority of users are using less than 150GB/month that means, on average, it's less than 5GB/day of traffic - by their own advertising that means that they are serving 98% of their customers at full capacity for 16 to 232 minutes a day (16mins@45Mbps, 232mins@3Mbps).

^this is infinitely better than the summary/article linked to.

:D

In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate. The linked article is a bad rehash of 3rd party information - it's generic mainstream "news" to sell ads to people who can't tell the difference between a well researched detailed story and a piece of abstracted reworded junk.

If only it matched up to a great story. Anyone have any geek news?

This is the kind of geek info I expect on Slashdot, not some crappy slate article. Thank you!

The 9x figure was a rudimentary calculation that didn't factor in all costs, just estimated a $65 1TB drive with a 5 year lifetime. $120*5 years = $600 / $65 = 9.23. Factoring the electricity costs (which I over estimated for my region - actual cost is 7c/h for most of the day, 12.8 during peak times and 10ish during mid-peak hours. Also the cost of the drive was over-estimated, actual drive on newegg.ca was $60 for a toshiba 1TB drive)

$47.45*5 + $60 = $297 - so it's twice as much. 1.68 times if you factor a 2nd backup drive.

the Dell was just an example. PSUs are far more efficient than they were 4-5 years ago - even the cheap ones.

50 watts extra? for what? You're not running a monitor, no extra PCI devices, no DVD/Bluray, etc, not even a keyboard/mouse. Maybe if you're using something built in 2009 or earlier... Take a Dell Optiplex 990 (Win7)- 33-37 watts under moderate usage. 28 while idle.