Psst, 1 GBP = 1.5271 USD. We aren't in 2008 anymore.

You and your wife should read this Wired article. While it's a bit heavy-handed, it has a lot of good information about the widespread misconceptions about vaccines.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/all/1

The bottom line is that there is risk in everything and the dangers from getting a disease are much, much higher than any possible dangers from a vaccine for that disease.

Perhaps you are going to bad doctors that aren't doing there job. However, there is one problem with your analogy between doctors and computer technicians. Computers don't sue you when you try to fix them and you accidentally make things worse.

When I worked at Xoom.com (of the "free homepages" fame ala geocities) over 10 years ago, we had several people on staff with the same job. But instead of 'porn cops' we jokingly referred to them as 'porn whackers'. The biggest reason for having people paid to go through this stuff was to remove kiddie porn and report it to the FBI.

I always wondered what type of people run Gentoo. Now it makes sense. I guess if I was planning on living forever I might not mind wasting all that time recompiling every fucking package. :-)

I have read Outliers, but haven't yet read Blink or the Tipping Point, and I have to say that your assumptions of how Outliers is structured are spot on.

As a human, I found many of the anecdotes in the book very interesting and they all seemed to confirm the point that he was trying to make. But as an engineer, I found it unfortunate that he spent almost no time critically evaluating any of his points, even when there were obvious objections or alternative explanations that could be explored and possibly debunked, making his point that much more convincing. Instead, he spent lots of time setting up these somewhat weak arguments and moving onto the next point without playing devil's advocate at all.

I think this lack of vetting ultimately hurts the points he tries to make in his book, but I think overall that the anecdotes are interesting enough to make the book a worthwhile read. If he was a scientist attempting to convince other scientists of his theories, I would say that he failed miserably. However, Gladwell is not a scientist, he's an author trying to write an entertaining non-fiction book through storytelling, and I think he successfully achieves this goal.

Unfortunately their restrictions aren't arbitrary, they are likely contractual. TV has 50+ years of history of complicated content distribution rights. They involve lots of contracts and lawyers who make sure everyone involved in creating a TV show get paid. In general all of these contractual rights get in the way of things like newly emerging technologies, but without these contracts we probably wouldn't have any of the rich content available on TV today.

Content producers make new content. Then they sell the rights to TV networks to broadcast the content over their TV networks in contracts in which all of the writers, actors, crew, etc. get paid every time that show airs. Within the last 5 years or so content producers are also selling Internet broadcasting rights to Hulu and other websites, but the economics are quite different because you can technically watch any show at any time on demand over the Internet. Not to mention the immaturity of Internet video advertising which likely makes the pricing of the ads much different as well.

Now when there is an easy way for an Internet broadcast to show up on someone's TV (like with Boxee), all of a sudden there is somewhat of a gray area as to what contract should be honored and what residuals should be paid. When the contracts were made the content producers were probably thinking, "OK, I get paid X when someone watches my show on TV and Y when someone watches it on a computer." When they found out that people could watch an Internet broadcast easily on their TV in their living room, they probably had their lawyers call Hulu's lawyers so that they could work out the details. Hulu's lawyers probably came up with the idea that the easiest thing to do in the short term was to attempt to disallow the easy way for people to watch Internet broadcast content on their TV. No this isn't very friendly to the viewer, but they are likely more concerned with their contractual obligations with the content providers than they are with pissing off a small set of tech savvy viewers.