I just recently started using my Xbox 360 for streaming Netflix, primarily because it supports 5.1 sound but also because of the better interface. My blu-ray player will do streaming also, but is rather more limited and only does stereo. The downside though is that Microsoft requires you to have an Xbox Live Gold account to do this, which is a whole other subscription on top of the Netflix subscription.

And here I was wondering what exactly a $12.5 bill looked like. Or if it was a custom bill printed just for this transaction, with someone from Google instead of a U.S. President.

My price dropped $4/month by switching to a DVD/Blu-Ray only plan, getting rid of the streaming option that I never actually use. The streaming was too annoying for me to use in practice, really. Thank you Netflix and Slashdot!

This just validates my long held view that DC never publishes much of anything worth reading in the first place.

Case in point: The Alamo Drafthouse. They play first run movies (as well as cult films and other such), serve food and alcohol, and have actual pre-show video entertainment (not commercials). If a movie isn't playing at the Drafthouse, I generally don't bother going. It's not worth putting up with general obnoxiousness of the large corporate theater chains like Cinemark.

Almost everything inside my house is still running at 100Mbps (or less, over 802.11g/n wireless bridges). And even then, my router still melts if I actually let BitTorrent run full out. I sense a lot of upgrades needed before I could even come close to taking full advantage of a 1Gbps line.

$87k here, and no degree either (I dropped out of college three separate times). Finding that first programming position was quite difficult. It was mostly a matter of finding a company willing to pay me little (~$30k) in exchange for the fact that I had no job experience and no degree. Once I had two years work experience there (with a couple of raises), I moved to another company and doubled my salary overnight.

The lack of a degree never really came up again, once I had a good amount of work experience. There are some positions where having a degree is an absolute requirement, but most of them are with state level government or similar... and are probably places I wouldn't really want to work anyway.

Why would I need to do any of this? Cast members are performing on stage in a public place, with no reasonable expectation of privacy whatsoever. Audience members are allowed to take all the photos they like as well. Should every audience member also be required to jump through these hoops before being allowed to post photos they took online somewhere?

I'm a long-term Rocky Horror Picture Show cast member, and I run a web site for our local cast in Austin. I've been running this web site for over a decade now.

Cast members are frequently very interested to see photographs of themselves performing in the show. And since it's Rocky Horror, they're usually wearing lingerie of some sort. At the time the photos are posted, they're invariably very excited about this. Especially because I take pride in my photography, and most people haven't seen photos of themselves prior to this that someone had actually put significant work into.

A few years later though, these same people have frequently quit the cast, possibly graduated from college, and moved on to other activities. They may decide they want to apply for jobs in education, as music minister of a church, etc. They do some vanity searching on Google and are shocked... shocked I tell you!... that the Rocky Horror cast web site is still online and kicking with what had been posted some years previously.

Now keep in mind this is a hobby web site that I do purely for the enjoyment of myself and other cast members. It's done in my spare time, and I've always paid for it out of pocket.

I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself. I get probably a half dozen requests per year on average at this point all basically saying the same thing: "Take down my photos now! You're causing damage to my reputation!". At some point I just had to say to hell with them all and whip up a form letter response saying "Sorry, but I'm just not going to do anything about it".

With the board game you basically have to search for the Chinese and/or Korean name equivalents instead, which are "weiqi" and "baduk". Perhaps Google Asia can can come up with different names that people can actually search for also...:-)

Why the hell would adding draconian laws favorable only to certain industries be called "reforms"?

I'm a bit younger (34), but yes... I've never used cursive as an adult. In fact while I was still in high school I stopped competing in UIL spelling contests because of the requirement that all the words you spelled be written in cursive. If you printed the word (and spelled it correctly), it was still counted as wrong. I thought that was insane, so I stopped bothering with it.

If it weren't for the deal that J.R.R. made with Saul Zaentz way back when, we wouldn't have any of the Lord of the Rings movies in the first place. Nor the Lord of the Rings Online game (which I happen to play). Nor any number of other things that may have first turned people on to Tolkien, including the old pen and paper Middle Earth RPG system.

Christopher Tolkien has had control over the rights to things like The Silmarillion, and is notoriously limited in what he'll allow people to do in relation to it. I'd hate to think of what would happen (or more to the point, not happen) if he were able to somehow get back control over The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings also.

IE7 doesn't run on Windows 2000.