all it requires is that users sign in

Or, all your base is belong to us.

It's not clear if this will work post-Jobs. Jobs was able to get people to wear dweebish white wires hanging out of their ears. Tim Cook can't do the Reality Distortion Field thing.

Traffic balance is not the primary measure these days (from what I understand), it is just an economic decision. However, the Netflix case is interesting, because they were essentially used as a leverage tool by Cogent against the other carriers. Cogent has a long history of trying to get settlement-free peering, not meeting contract terms (whatever they are), getting dropped, and then blaming the other side. They have long wanted to be a settlement-free "tier 1" provider (which is a nebulous term, but go with it), but have generally not been. They sell bandwidth often at below-market rates in order to attract customers to leverage against the other "tier 1" providers. They saw Netflix on the rise and grabbed them, apparently selling bandwidth much cheaper than any other backbone (possibly at a loss even) in order to leverage settlement-free peering contracts out of other providers.

Any network engineering with a clue knows that you never buy bandwidth only from Cogent (or even Cogent and one other provider), because you _will_ get disconnected from somebody when Cogent gets in another peering dispute.

That would have zero impact. This is like the telephone company in city A have 96 channels to the telephone company in city B, but then 100 people try to make calls. Only some of them will go through, and that's a capacity issue, not regulated by Common Carrier status. They are not discriminating based on callers or anything, they are just "decliining" to upgrade capacity. In some cases, that could be regulated by state PUCs/PSCs, but AFAIK it is not normally. It is just up to the two carriers to reach an agreement.

This type of thing happened a lot in the early dialup ISP days, when telecom deregulation spawed a lot of CLECs that had to connect to ILECs to carry calls. The ILECs structured the contracts with settlement money for to flow to the destination of a call (thinking most of the CLEC calls would be _to_ ILEC users), but then the CLECs went and got all the dialup ISPs to move modem banks to them. Suddenly all the calls went _to_ the CLECs, and the ILECs had to pay (some did not and went to court instead).

Hulu recently pulled an interesting stunt. The've been running WGN's "Manhattan" series, about the original A-bomb program. Anyone could watch it free, with ads, after a few days.

Then, for the final episode, they forced people to register with Hulu or sign in with Facebook to see the episode. Their message says "This video is intended for mature audiences. Use your Facebook or free Hulu account to continue." I checked with WGN. Hulu is lying; the last episode is not for "mature audiences". WGN says they'll try to get Hulu to fix it, but it's been over a week and it hasn't been fixed.

Hulu is learning from the cable companies how to put their boot on the user's face.

Who _didn't_ already know he was gay? Show of hands...

Since getting rid of cable we've found ourselves actually engaging in our hobbies again, as opposed to just passively staring at the screen.

You can make the same case for anything in your life that isn't giving you a "return on investment": television, facebook, slashdot, people you don't want to spend time with anymore, etc. Eliminate the things you don't need and new (more fulfilling) things will spring up to replace them.

GP said they weren't in the US, so CableCard might not be an option. I am in Canada and nobody here offers CableCard, which is why we had to give up TiVo when it came time to get an HDTV. TiVo is CableCard only (and there's a good reason for it). The real reason they want to encrypt everything is to rent you the DVR.

When I tell people we don't have cable TV, and just stream, they're always interested in it, but few of them want to compromise. When I tell them you can't easily get sports though, then they usually say, "that wouldn't work for me." Plus, I know a lot of people that have tried streaming on their own, and they definitely end up on the "wrong" site and end up with a malware infested nightmare on their PC. We just stick with Netflix and Hulu mostly, with the occasional "rented" streamed new release and we have no issues.

The county had to buy a spare server and restore each monthly tape to it and manually pick out the email messages

It's a fucking computer. How do you not even try to automate stuff like that? How stupid do you have to be to not even write a script, but sit there and fucking vgrep everything?

The cost was not because of the documents being requested or that the county kept the records too long, the cost was that their IT department is run by retards.

--
BMO

That would be fantastic. However, the link appears to be created by file:///Users/lucasmearian/, and Lucas Mearian works at ComputerWorld, not HP.

Weather and climate prediction are two entirely different things.

Here's an analogy, it doesn't involve cars:

Take a pot of water and put it on the stove top, and turn the stove on. The analogy of the weather forecaster is that the weather forecaster is trying to predict every eddy, every bubble, every current in the pot of water. It gets extremely difficult to predict all the eddies even 10 seconds from now. The climate scientist on the other hand is just trying to predict the bulk temperature of the water in 2 minutes time. This is much easier to do and can be done with a lot more accuracy. In terms of global warming, the climate scientist is predicting how the rate of change will differ if you now put a lid on the pan, and what difference it will make if you (say) only half cover the pot versus putting the lid on completely.

Why would we end up with more arable land? Sure if you're used to looking at a Mercator projection map it looks like there's an awful lot of land above 60 degrees north, but simple geometry will tell you that this is not so, the horizontal distance shrinks in proportion to the cosine of degrees above the equator. For instance if you draw a square on a Mercator projection map at the equator, and this square is 1km x 1km and then moved this square up to 40N (where much of the arable currently is), the actual size underneath this square would now be 0.76km x 1km. Move this to 60N and it's now 0.5km x 1km, As you go further north, the horizontal dimension gets smaller at a much faster rate, go another 10 degrees north up to 70N and now your square is only 0.34km x 1km, so an area at 70N north that looks as big as an area at 40N is in reality only 45% of the area of the same sized looking area at 40N (and not only that you start running into the Arctic Ocean).

All-you-can-eat monthly subscription with download links for all videos (including commercial music videos) in various formats (mp4, mp3, ogg, etc.).