It doesn't matter who *wrote* the cable so much as for whom the cable was written. Specially, these cables were for the state department as a whole. That's clearly government and it reasonable falls into an area (diplomacy) that US Citizens have an interest in understanding what their state department is doing on their behalf.

How can you claim that there isn't a lot of discretion with the leaked documents?

Assange has requested support from the US Govt on redactions; he was rebuffed[1]. He's provided the cables to newspapers and has only released a small portion of documents that they've felt were important. To date, were talking ~1% of the total documents.

None of this sounds like someone who just dumped the whole lot without a care in the world besides total transparency.

1. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2033771,00.html

Maybe it wasn't shocking to you, but I consider things like lying about military action (Yemen, Pakistan), coercion to prevent prosecution (Spain, Germany) pretty big deals. I can't say that I'm shocked, but you can't say there aren't huge huge stories included in just the first 2000 (1% of the total volume) documents that have been released. A small list of those here:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/24/wikileaks

and more exhaustive list here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak

Just take 5 minutes and read through those lists and come back and tell me nothing shocking, surprising, or unlawful behavior is included.

Don't disagree that good character, to the best of your ability to judge is a good idea, but the whole point of elected officials and transparency is that those in power have demonstrated time and time again that we just can't trust them. The US constitution was written to enshrine this idea. We don't have to trust officials because we're in control and demand accountability through elections.

So folks get up-in-arms about a 100k email addresses leaked by AT&T api but never mind the *millions* of emails, email contents, phone conversations, irc chats, *everything* that we've sent over the intertubes that AT&T, for the last 8 years, shuffled to the NSA? Really?

Awesome, have the government archive my internet content just don't send me SPAM?

That's a very fair point on stability. Boxee certainly could use something that can restart it when it crashes; mythtv frontend makes a nice place to do that.

Not sure why it fails for you, but I have a fully populated Movie and TV browsing in Boxee -- I never use Browse because everything is in either Movie or TV. You may want to look at the boxee forums on media naming conventions to ensure it can classify your local media correctly.

Other than the livetv part, there isn't much to love in mythtv. Mythvideo is *horrible*. It doesn't have much in the way of automatically finding and acquiring metadata around your local media. The navigation menu assumes one big flat folder with everything in it. While it does work with directory trees, you end up having to click through that to get the video. Boxee really shines here -- it separates TV series from movies, and for tv shows, groups them according to season. This was exactly what I wanted. When you add new media, in myth you have to go an select scan from the setup screen while boxee is always watching for new media and it just shows up under the recently added section.

While the alpha does crash every now and then (the 0.12 has improved a lot for me) what I'm struggling with is the need for the fglrx -- the LTS fglrx support on my ati 9500 pro was horrible (freeze the screen, took 5 reboots to get stable from power on) -- I'm currently on 9.04 with xorg from 8.10 and that's been working out quite well now.

I tend to agree that the "social" aspect of boxee is a bit in the way in the main interface, but what the reviewer didn't mention is whether zinc or hulu do anything with local media. From the zinc website it seems like it too can scan local media like boxee, what I would have liked in the review is some coverage over how well each one worked. In my experience, boxee does a really good job at this and includes a built-in interface for correcting the mistakes (aka Wrong Video link). I do agree that boxee could use a global search, however, I'm quite happy with boxee having just converted away from a mythtv setup.