Complacency of the subscribers is the bread and butter of the Verizon's and AT&T's of this world. Say the carrier subsidized your phone, knowing well that, at the end of the contract, they will have recouped their subsidy. And also knowing well that, you will not jump ship on the 2 years + 1 day point in time, while they are still charging you for the same rate that provided the subsidy payback to them. So, as long as you stay with the provider past your contract end, they are doing a double whammy. And most of the people fall into that category. Take me for instance, it took me a 9 months before I cancelled my service with VZW after my contract with them ended and go with Virgin Mobile. And I am a price conscious customer, who happens to be a nerd, a geek, a technologist. So, I have no excuse. If I am like that, think of the average Joe. He is hopeless and the cash cow for the carriers.

Well, to give you an example, I came here on an H1B visa in '96 (I'm not an Indian national or look like one) via one of the worst H1B abusers and in 2 years, they hung me out to dry when they lost contracts in my area. I found a new employer on my own, who was willing to take over my H1B and they did. I was paid handsomely and was being paid as much as my US citizen counterparts were making. The thing is, that employer was clamoring to find more people like myself and getting no traction. I have brought in my 3 of my old colleagues to that company, none of which were H1B holders. So, even though it is rare, there are companies out there who has the need and who are wiling to do the work to get an H1B holder to fill their positions. But, thanks to the Indian owned outsourcer vultures, they don't get a chance to get an H1B when they need it, because, those quotas are running out 2 hours after they are issued for that year. This is rotten.

I was going on the tangent that they really can not find any qualified candidates in their local area or anyone to relocate there, say Alaska for instance, wit not too many people to take the plunge and relocate there. As long as the need is legitimate, I have no problem with bringing in an H1B candidate. I am against Indian outsourcing firms, abusing this visa class and in turn US employers' using it to drive down the wages,

Since you are so offended by the response, I am assuming you are in the non-college-grad crowd. Together with not being a guarantee for a grad to be better than everyone else, there is a very good chance that, it can teach the principals of critical thinking, which makes you a better analytical person in turn. And I have to agree with the post you are responding to, at a certain level. Not necessarily the college dropouts or high school students but a whole myriad of people who think they can code, but in reality can't, are the reason why there is a profession called Information Systems Security. Why, because those who can't code but still do, open up the floodgates to all the malfeasance of the internet. Who do you think coded the application, which lead to stealing of millions of credit card numbers from Target stores, not too long ago ? I bet dollars to your pocket lint, it was a so-called programmer, who had no business coding the leaky application. Most probably a "java guru" working for equivalent of $5/hr in an office building, in some sordid corner of Mumbai, India, who has a shiny CS diploma hanging on the wall behind him or her.

There is no way to know how many developers had flopped, with respect to the flappy birds, or angry birds developers of the app wars. No programmer will admit defeat publicly and come out saying , "I have worked so many hundreds of hours on my game/app and realized that I can not make it marketable or make money out f it anyway, so I abandoned it". We all are spoon-fed by any media outlet, how great this app or that game is and at 99 cents-a-pop, it is a steal. And oh-by-the-way, the app developer got crazy rich, selling the stupid game. Which basically primes the inexperienced new-comers, thinking into, they will be the next shiz-nit of the app world. And when the failure strike, they will never admit to defeat. Hence we will never know what the real ratio of success over failure will be. Although, anyone with a smidgen of common sense, can say it is very close to ZERO. Reminds me the Big Bang Theory episode, in which the nerd crew decided to develop an app for solving quadratic equations that one snaps the picture of and Howard saying, "to make that kind of money, we have to charge $12,000+ per copy of the app".

So, I wish good luck to the new comers to the wonderful world of IT, who are expecting to strike it rich by coding a few hundred lines and create the next killer app. Real life slaps you hard and good.

Problem is the "selective" market space. You know, every channel that satellite service provider beams up to the sky, is occupying certain bandwidth, which, otherwise, can always be used for something more profitable, which is something that the provider has a finite supply of. So, let's say they provide free (adv. supported) local channels to Los Angeles, 5 total channels, it might be sustainable by advertising. But the same 4 or 5 channels beamed for Boise ID, definitely, will not be.as profitable and will be the money pits. As a matter of fact, outside few select mega-metro areas of US, this is the case. So, since providing free channels to certain demographic (which probably needs them the least, due to the average income levels of residents living in these mega-metro areas), will bring wrath of FCC ov er them. They already have enough legal issues at hand and are better off without any additional ones in my opinion.

For the techies like me, and may be yourself too, it might be a boon to get local channels, crystal clear without paying anything and using that money to enrich my tech arsenal, but I know it will not make a lick of business sense to those at the helm of satellite companies. Heck, some people are getting sattellite to get clear local channels and whatever else is coming down n the beam is just the gravy. Give them free local channels and you will never see that income again.

Also, about the advertising revenue, Directv and Dish, just like any local cable TV provider, have a certain time allotted to them for "local" advertising in between shows. So, you pay a fee to watch those channels but they double dip by forcing you to watch commercials as well. So, why go down to a single stream of income while they can have two. Needless to say, with the progress in the DVR technology, I think, the conventional advertising is going in the way of dodo birds. WHy would any company invest in any technology on a dying breed of income streams ?

As a former employee of one of the Satellite Broadcasting companies, I know how costly to put one channel onto the airwaves and in no way they can recoup their money from advertising or equipment costs. The only thing they can do is to change the device requirements every couple of years and upcharge you for those cheap Chinese plastic things, which will drive the customers away.

I am not even going to go into opening the doors for legality of stealing signal with the argument "if it is free to receive from the air, I can do anything with it" stupidity.

So, it is a no starter...

In Turkish, there is a saying:

In Turkish, "Eceli gelen it, cami duvarina iser." which can roughly be translated as, "The dog, whose time to die come, goes and pees on the wall of the mosque (desecrates the holy grounds, punishable by death in sharia law or something like that).

Mullah tayyip is dropping plunkers in the middle of the prayer hall. But, don;t get your hopes too high, He will defect to US when he no longer is able to suppress all the people in Turkiye, as I feel, an uprising is coming very soon. I believe, him and his children, own property somewhere on the Northeastern part of United States.

Your ignorance is blinding my eyes. Americans calling Turkiye as Turkey, doesn't necessarily equate the quality of those people to that of a stupid bird. Not untill too long ago, Beijing, the capitol of China was Peking.

I don't want to hijack the discussion, but I noticed nobody mentioned anything about watching video streams on Linux. My mom, 85 years old and not an anglophone, uses her computer to read newspapers and watch online broadcasting TV channels from the homeland, here in the United States. Her laptop has win 7 on it but due to being 4 years old and only having a Intel core-2 duo processor, the effects of aging started to manifest themselves with a lot of freezing while she is on firefox, watching a tv show (in some sort of shockwave plug-in) and I noticed with the lot of updates pushed by micro$oft, the boot times are getting lengthy or feels liket hat to me. I want to be proactive and nip it in the bud before it blooms into a full fledged problem. I am also considering Linux but due to her extensive use of streaming videos, I can not decide which distro to go with, if any.

Suggestions ? I'm all ears...

I am a type-2 diabetic for the past quarter century and most probably I have used any glucose measuring device ever manufactured in the US. Even the minimal intrusion ones are not fun to deal with and to carry around. This contact lens device, which is always on, would be a god sent.

I wish I were working for google and could participate in the "beta" testing phase of it :)

That is absolutely right. They are not bitching about spying. They are bitching about America has too much power to do spying and them (Finnish people ??) NOT! If the balance was tilted towards their side, do you think they would complain this much ? I think not...

Also, I'd prefer American's do the spying instead of Russians or god forbid Mujaheddin army from the garden variety of middle eastern kingdoms/banana republics. I am not a born American by the way, if you are going to try flaming me with phrases starting with "You, Americans always say it like that....blah-blah". It is common sense. Regardless how bad the freedoms are in this country, I'd rather not be anywhere else at this moment in time.

I don't put a date as the start of anything. It is the number of people having this mindset, getting to a critical mass and changing the landscape. I know one of those people very personally, my significant other's daughter. All she does is consume information but haven't seen her making a slight contribution to anything online and I know (from her words that is) her friends are of the same mindset.

In my time, I mean, when I went online in late 80's, almost everyone online, including myself, were building "The Internet". In the course of so may years, I don't know how many personal websites I have started for a garden variety of reasons, or how many blogs I have had. Today, the youth, whom are supposed to be the next wave of people to take the proverbial torch from our generation, are only interested in what their "facebook friends" are doing, wearing and sharing. In my opinion, again, "OMG, I am having a wonderful day" facebook status update is not a meaningful contribution of information for anyone.