Man I hope this covers the local cable VOD channels also, when I change the channel to the ON DEMAND movie channel the people that are talking about the new movies that are on are not only so LOUD, but also so happy and irritating about everything it is disturbing.

I have two Sharp Aquos TV's a 65" and a 46" and both have been great TV's, it would be sad to see them fall I think.

Yes but this is stolen gear, and I have never worked for a company that did not have service contracts on all the gear they have with live customers on it.
It would ne hard for a bigger company to tell its employees to not open a ticket on certain gear because its stolen.

I have been doing this same procedure with Cisco for years an years, When a card breaks in the feild and you do a RMA on that part (which can happen allot if you have lots of gear) you get the new replacement part in the mail right away, you then have a certain amount of time to return the old bad part.
If Cisco does not receive that part in a certain amount of time they will be contacting your boss or someone until they get that part back.
I have had Cisco say I did not return a part that I did return and finally figure out where it was later, but its a big deal to them, these cards I replace are atleast 40K a card. Since then I started keeping all receipts from UPS to cover myself.
Also who can you sell these cards too anyway? they all have built in serial numbers and small companies would normaly not need them, its mostly only used in equipment used by bigger companies. These type of companies would normaly not buy something they can not open a Cisco trouble ticket on because when they see that serial number a flag is going to go up right way I would think.

"Maybe it takes more than 4 years to completely turn around a huge economic downturn that the entire world is still suffering from"

I would argue it sure does, and the idea that giving these companies tax breaks will make them hire more seems crazy, most of Wall Street is doing very well right now, many companies are sitting on lots of money. The problem is that companies do not hire because they have money and want to be nice, they hire to fill a need.
The real issue is that people are out of work and times are tight, people are not buying, and at times like this, companies cut employees not hire them. A stimulus is one way to get the ball rolling again, just long enough that people have money to spend and companies have to hire to keep up again.
But the real issue is that during the Bush years middle class incomes stagnated, and instead of helping the middle class we decided to give tax breaks to big companies, and then we fixed the game to help these big companies in ways that they had just no chance of real failure, and contrary to popular republican belief instead of them deciding to hire people because they are making so much money they put it in their pockets, again because demand did not really rise that is just extra money made.
At least Obama has been pushing the right direction, and would have done more if he could have.
I think there could be some really good stimulus ideas, training people for jobs in the United States Army Corps of Engineers or something that would not only provide some money during the time the train, but mostly get them ready to be hired again. Sure better than paying people not to work.

The fact that cable companies still have customers with MPEG2 boxes just shows they are cheap and soaking every last dollar before they upgrade.
They bitch that bandwidth costs money, then refuse to upgrade to MPEG4 video because they would have to give customers new settop boxes!
SDV is a joke, it’s a bad idea that saved them again from switching to new settops in the house and using IP to the settop to just do multicast joins and unicast VOD, instead SDV with its dynamically assigned QAMs is a mess, and a huge waste of money, when eventually they are going to want to be at IP to the settop anyway. Allot of these cable companies own their own backbones and bandwidth is cheap, but I know many are still talking about billing per used bandwidth! I know TWC in my area will start putting your used bandwidth per month on your bill, but not charging yet for it, they just want to let you know they are watching! I would say this had tons to do with them trying to figure out how to make you not want to use bandwidth watching TV on the internet, instead of them figuring out how to compete and provide better services, its game based on how to hold on to more for longer. And yes you subsidize they guys with your tax dollars!

Might have been fraud, but it shard for me to feel real sorry for someone that sold their company for nothing but stock in another company. If it was me I would have made damn sure I am getting something tangible out of a sale that big. And I would be looking for people to try to screw me over, even Goldman Sachs.

“what? how cool would it be to be the very first person born on mars?”
Hmm, if I was born on Mars I might be pissed about it when I saw how great earth would look on video and TV. In fact the thought of having a baby on Mars bring some serious moral issues with it. What if we realize they all are going to die from some upcoming event, like running out of air in a couple months, you would feel bad about the people who choose to go there, but what about a baby born there? Would be feel more compelled to rescue a baby or child that was born there?

From this link http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ispplan.pdf

Subsequent alerts may include notifications in the form of pop-ups or redirection
to a special page displaying the alert. Failure to respond to these alerts will lead
to additional steps designed to ensure that the account comes into compliance.
These steps, referred to as “Mitigation Measures,” might include, for example:
temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the
subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some
educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may
deem necessary to help resolve the matter. These steps will only be taken after
multiple alerts and a failure by the subscriber to respond. This system consists of
at least five alerts.

I do not see it in this artical, but from previous articles on this subject it made it sound like this process if different and instead of a email being sent you would get a browser pop up that would tell you the site you are going to, or the file being downloaded is copyrighted and illegal to download. Not sure how that would work for things like torrents, but I would asume you would get a notice when you go to the site that lists the torrent to download.

I was amazed the first time I found out that local cable companies pay to rebroadcast a local station over the cable system, to me it seemed like a win/win and no one would need to pay anyone. If anything you would think the cable company is helping get the station to more people and that creates more customers watching comercials. I think many cable companies do insert their own comercials thou, but only in some places, so I can understand paying for that. It sounds like Aereo is just wanting to make money getting a broadcast to someone outside a certain area, you would not think they would have to pay anything to the broadcast provider, but some people jsut do not like the idea of anyone else making moeny off something they feel like tehy created I guess.

Ok well to truly document your network I would say Visio some kind of visual application is going to be the best tool. I don’t use it to document client ports but all the big inter connections between routers and switches to give you a good understanding of what is going on. Using a spreadsheet only is not going to be a good way to document anything, I visual representation is always going to be better to get a good understanding on what is going on. Sometimes I do put notes on what kind of client ports connection are hanging off a certain devices. The spreadsheet work I do is IP address allocations and descriptions of what is using that space where. I have had to deal with nightmare scenarios many times were wiring was a big clustered mess of spaghetti, but instead of documenting anything before hand, I just unplugged one port at a time, and watched to see what port went down on the other side, and ran a new cable to replace that connection and make sure the switch/router port descriptions were well documented after that.

Agree with you 100% people with this idea of having zero government regulations are mad! The world would be ugly without someone to set some rules. Free market competition to keep prices competitive is great, but bringing up the Bank bailouts when anyone with any real sense would have had to do the something to help the banks out in some manner, unless you want to watch the whole US economy go to totally shit while you were in charge just because you stand by your ideals far too idealistic to be a real leader. And something tells me these same people would be the ones pissed off the most if nothing had been done and the financial system had collapsed while on Obama’s watch.
There is also nothing wrong with the government saving the car companies. Sometimes things have to be done, and the government is the only one that can help. The Government is sometimes the one entity that can save something so big and vital to the country like this, they also are the only ones many times that can push a new technology forward by spending enough money to advance that technology years ahead of other countries, because the actual business model takes way too much money up front and the payoff is way too far away for most business’s to take that much risk. But a country like China will have no issues spending that money to eventually sell us, for example, solar technology once they spent the money to get ahead in 2 years what would take us 10 with a normal business models.
But some of that might be called socialism and that’s close to communism and that’s bad and the devil blah blah blah.

Shit you right, it was Tina Turner! Aretha is a push over anyway!

There is no Free Market, The Free Market is handled in back rooms and the winners are the ones that fix the game. If we lived in a free market, things would look like Mad Max and Aretha Franklin would rule us all!