I think balkanization is the way it's going to go. It may suck in some respects, but if I end up paying $30 or $40 a month, but it's made up of programs I actually have to watch, as opposed to flipping through dozens of channels filled with duplication or crap I have no interest in, for double that price, then i'll be happy.

And frankly, the studios should start getting worried. With Netflix producing and buying original programming, with HBO bringing its own suite to streaming, you can be sure players like AMC will be close behind. The traditional production and distribution model is beginning to break down. It may take a few more years, but you will, in a decade, have companies like Netflix and HBO as online behemoths, and the studios will find themselves the poor cousins.

For me it's never really been about price. I've started using Google Play to rent movies and episodes of TV programs. I won't pay $18 for a brand new movie, so Google can get stuffed on that, but $4.99 isn't too bad.

Just buy a Chromecast and deal with it. I stopped caring about DRMed video a long time ago. All I care about is that I can watch Netflix with my tablet as a remote control. If HBO works on Chromecast, I'll be the first guy in line to buy a subscription.

Will someone just tell me if it's time to panic or not?

That depends. Are you bleeding through every orifice yet or not?

Years ago I took one of the Windows server 2008 courses. While I did learn a bit on how to manage CAs in Windows, all in all, it was a tremendous waste of time; equal parts obvious crap and annoying horn tooting ("Windows Server 2008 is the best server operating system on the market today" was literally one of the statements in the intro). It was an utter joke and worst of all taught very little that couldn't be find in other, more definitive sources. At the end of the whole process, I decided that Microsoft certifications were in some ways more of a marketing ploy than educational tool.

Else all this is going to prove is whether you paid the tithe to oracle or not.

I thought that's what certifications were pretty much for.

Do you do online banking and shipping? Same tubes.

So your advice is what? That women should hide their sexuality because there are deviants who will try to rape them or break into their cloud accounts?

A free society must protect the right of people to enjoy their freedoms, and where some small group of criminals and sociopaths attempt to destroy that freedom, the first words out of a free people's mouths shouldn't be "Well you had it coming you slut!"

That ideal world is a lot more distant of we just shrug and suggest people live in an live in an underground bunker if they want to be safe.

Not using antiperspirants ain't so good for the air either.

As I wrote in another post, the evidence all points to art and other forms of symbolism evolving among modern human populations prior to their departure from Africa. The Blombos Cave site suggests the first use of pigments at least as far back as 70,000 years, and perhaps as earlier as a 100,000 years ago. The cognitive rewiring seems to have been completed in Africa.

Neither is the oldest evidence of symbolism. The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, where the first evidence of the use of pigments (in this case ochre) are at least 70,000 years old.

Actually, the Indo-European peoples arose somewhere around 5000 to 6000 years ago. The first cave art in Europe predates Indo-Europeans by tens of thousands of years. If you buy into Nostratic, maybe the people that made the European cave art spoke some language ancestral to that group, but the Indo-European language group, indeed likely any of the language families spoken in the last 10,000 years, had not evolved yet.

Well, actually there is some significance here, in that it suggests that the neurological innovations that lead to modern human behaviors like art and symbolism arose among the ancestral populations to both the first modern humans in Europe and in Asia. If nothing else, it falsifies the few remaining wingnuts who believe Europeans are somehow unique.

Chimps kill young chimps. When tribes make war on each other, the killing of enemy tribes young is well documented. Chimps are pretty much as brutal as humans at the game of war.