This is not true. One of the problems with Pittsburgh is the number of people who work in the city but don't live in the city, so they can't charge them income tax. For example, the income tax in the city of Pittsburgh is 3%, elsewhere in Allegheny county it's 1%. I know lots of people who live just outside of the city (for example, Wilkinsburg) because it saves them 2% of their paycheck. It's also interesting that Pittsburgh only taxes income that is taxable by the state, this excludes grad student stipends.

The only way around this is to levy a non-income based tax on workers. Which is what they do with the stupidly regressive occupation tax that knocks $52 off everyones paychecks throughout the year. This is actually becoming almost standard in western PA with Robinson and Washington County recently adding it.

I'm not saying this occupation tax is fair, in fact, I think it's stupid and backwards for Pittsburgh, but there are lots of problems with the Pittsburgh tax base. Of course, when your mayor is, well, less than stellar, that causes problems.

Apparently upgrading your computer can cause all sorts of strange problems that the OS developer couldn't have anticipated. Why just last night my Ubuntu box ate itself when I upgraded to Karmic. Oh wait, this is supposed to be an attempt at a Windows bashing story circa 1998. Okay, move along with the reality distortion field...

Seriously, this passes for news? One support firm says to wait until Windows 7 SP1? The same firm will probably say wait for Windows 7 SP2 once SP1 comes out. In fact, they'll probably caution people against Windows 7 SP1 because of the upgrade process (remember XP SP2 and SP3?). Also, have folks actually looked at this support firm that most people have never heard of? Their web page (http://www.rescuecom.com/) doesn't inspire the greatest confidence. Love the stock photos and the fact they say they'll hook me up with anything.

The fact is Windows 7 is one of the best operating systems from Microsoft ever*. It's solid, it works, it's fast, it's pretty, it has the best multimedia support of any OS, and like it or not, it's going to be the new standard. However, a legacy of bad decisions by partner companies, manufacturers, and even Microsoft has left existing systems with problems -- drivers with memory leaks, crapware, and the occasional security hole. Moving your grandma to Linux because Windows 7 had problems installing on her crapware loaded PC isn't the solution, nor is moving her to a Mac, plan9, haiku, inferno, *bsd, OS/2 warp, xenix, dr-dos, vms, minix, or system z.

Although, if you migrate your grandma to System Z please provide a writeup of how you managed to do it. I've been trying to get my grandma to understand the z/vm hypervisor for years...

* If it helps out, feel free to insert the phrase "Imma let you finish, but..." prior to this sentence

The subject basically says it all. If you're conducting a study, either for academia or industry, do yourself a favor and take a good research methods class. I can't count then number of promising studies I've rejected for publication because their methods were poor. While Dr. Jacobson makes some good points, most of them are pretty obvious to anyone who has taken a good class on creating experiments with humans -- for example, deception is a cornerstone of many human studies. Also, for you budding young scientists, make sure you get IRB approval before conducting your study. I reviewed a paper where the authors were clearly from a University and I had questions about the ethics of their methods so I asked for the IRB data for the study...whoops, they never got it. The paper was withdrawn by the authors shortly after.

The OP misspoke slightly, but sometimes stuff can get confusing. The iPhone is the biggest selling phone in the United States, yes, even more than the freebie RAZR (cite). They had 28% back in February of 2008 and now have 30% as of December 2, 2008 -- although the later figure seems more suspect (cite, cite). The supply drop of iPhone-2Gs in the 1Q diminished their numbers quite a bit. Also, the market is smart phones, not just touch screen ones. The largest player in smart phones in the US is Blackberry -- which, well, has been having a less than stellar time with the attempt at the touch screen Storm.

cable company is REQUIRED by fcc to give customers cable boxes with firewire out.

myth tv can control almost all firewire boxes just fine.

While it is currently true that the FCC has regulations regarding the availability of firewire controllable cable boxes, the regulations do NOT state that the encryption level must be changed. I used a cable box with firewire for two years in MythTV setup. The only channel I received over firewire that was not available via unencrypted QAM was Universal HD, and I'm pretty sure that was a mistake. All the other channels that were encrypted over QAM were still encrypted on firewire.

The only alternative that you have right now is the Hauppauge HD-PVR, which captures analog component and transcodes it to H.264. Of course, this device isn't fully supported yet. It's an exciting future, but not quite there.

Even at the point that where the HD-PVR becomes fully functional, you'll still need to drive it with a cable box.

There is also question about how long the firewire "standard" will remain. At the recent FCC hearing on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, Intel made it very clear that they were pushing for IP based technologies and thought that the firewire standard had failed.