This will not end well for this company once Verizon and AT&T get in on the act.

Sorry, but policy has much more to do with it. The prevention of regular logging operations due to bogus environmentalist claims has a great deal to do with it. National forests that currently have 250 trees per acre used to have around 50 per acre only a few decades ago which keeps fire from spreading and the forest healthier. There are those who think we shouldn't remove dead trees because the birds won't be able to eat the bark beetles (Yes, this B.S. was on NPR). The only problem with that theory is that the bark beetles don't inhabit dead trees. They inhabit live ones until they kill the tree and leave the tree when it dies. As a matter of interest, the Wallow Fire in Arizona wiped out 841 square miles. That will take generations before it returns to a healthy state. That fire also wiped out the bulk of the spotted owl population. The anti-loggers end up torching that which they are trying to save.

Progress in battery tech is so far behind the rest of technology. You really need a battery that exceeds that of gasoline in terms of energy density. Then you need one that can go from empty to fully charged in 5 minutes without needing exotic infrastructure to do so. It needs to have a really low self-discharge rate, again, exceeding the decay rate of gasoline. And it's got to survive a few thousand charge-discharge cycles.

When I was in college, the dorm I lived in (co-ed by floor) has a 8 to 1 female to male ratio. I used to say that some asswipe dude had 16 of them.

Need I say more?

A) You should because it's indicative of the human behavior of successful people throwing road blocks in the path of anyone trying to do the same.
B) Irrelevant to my point. He's already made his pile so he doesn't care if it costs him more. People trying to break into the business without the benefit of a large fortune to draw from are now less able to do so. Some won't even bother which works to his advantage because somebody will drill for it.
C) You're assuming that the higher tax rate prior to 1995 was the sole inhibitor to success. Government regulations in the 60s and 70s were few and far between by comparison and the EPA hadn't really gotten going in the 80s so the guy had a much easier time of it early on.
A guy like this can afford an army of lobbyists to encourage regulation and taxation be written to either favor him or to hinder others.

And what are they going to do with the tax money anyway? Do you really think it's going to go to better schools? That's what they said about tobacco money. Didn't work out too well. And then there's the unintended consequence of feeding more government with the drug of more tax money which will become very difficult to eliminate down the road. "*GASP* WE CAN'T LOWER THOSE TAXES BECAUSE OUR KIDS WON'T BE ABLE TO GO TO SCHOOL!! OMFG!!!!! HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT YOU CHEAP BASTARD!!! Oh, btw, vote for me because I'll make sure the money keeps flowing."

Not an unexpected proposal from a guy who already made his pile of money. Close the door behind him so nobody else gets to play by the same rules he did. I'd like to know how much money he would have had to pay in taxes if this were implemented when he was starting out.

And needs to be retired to the bit bucket. Need I say more?

That's exactly it. Most people who are in jail talk themselves into it. These guys were stupid.
That said, it's the black-hat hackers and criminals in general who don't engage in bravado are the ones you need to worry about.

Government bureaucracies already run about the same speed as a 300 baud dot matrix printer. They won't notice.

What I'm asking is whether or not these specific viewing groups are included in the headline numbers. If they are and you separate them then does the sales pitch of "We have hundreds of channels to watch" become total b.s.? What does that say about one group having to subsidize another? If you allowed for a la carte channel lineups, how many channels would suddenly find themselves in financial trouble and more interestingly, which ones?

But think about the amount of money spent to create and maintain 36 separate shopping channels and the amount of money spent to produce long infomercials and then think about the fact that there are enough people buying all this crap to not only pay for all of that but to turn a profit. Barnum was right.

So what if this is a ruse to get people to change passwords on the one day that security exploits are in place to capture the new passwords? Buck the trend and change them some other day or not at all.

Does this number include the duplicate HD channels, the spanish channels, the religious channels, or the pay-per-view channels? 36 shopping channels? Really? REALLY PEOPLE?!? AMAZON ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YA?!?!?

Not so much with OSX. Might happen once a month or so if that. Linux, sure. Lots of components seems to get updated frequently. When I run Windows, it seems like every time I boot there is some sort of update. But not really my point. If Microsoft is going to brick the machine because an earlier update failed, that's bad.