There is one, simple, crucial fact that the right is missing in these debates. There is no free market in broadband access. If you are extremely lucky you can pick between your telephone company and your cable company and they tend to not compete on either price or service and quickly move to adopt the same draconian policies introduced by their "competitors" -- and again, this is if you're lucky, most people are stuck with their cable company. Not even the right will argue against regulating monopolies, we all realize that in the absence of competition monopolies will provide poor service for rates that border on extortion.

If you want to win the net neutrality debate with the right then offer a simple concession: IPSs which open up their network to third party providers can operate without regulation. Those providers that have no competition or only one competitor must put up with regulation.

You can also remind everyone that the government invented the internet (arpnet was a darpa project) so the Internet was never created to be run by businesses anymore than the national interstate system was, but that doesn't resonate nearly as well as shifting this back to a monopoly vs. consumer debate.
 

Ripping a blu-ray is a hellacious experience. Once you rip the disk to the hard drive you may have totally unprotected data but figuring out how to package that data can be a real challenge. A dvd can barely hold a movie, a blu ray can hold a movie and features that are as long or more-so than the original movie, so you just can't pick the file with the longest play-time. Getting sub-titles and chapters involves using several ( let me stress several here ) user-un-friendly programs in a long-tedious and very error-prone workflow. And the studios haven't even begun to exploit java to further obscure how to piece together the myriad bits and pieces of 50gigs of data into a single movie file.

Now someone can build a little PCI card with an HDMI in jack, press play on your player software, press record on your computer and ~2 hours later you have a perfectly encoded movie file that can be a perfect copy of the original.

Unfortunately it will take an act of a luddite congress to make accessing your video collection as painless, effortless and legal as accessing your music collection.

The new format is a bit more adventurous than it looks at first blush.

You're correct. Some t-mobile phones have UMA which allows calls to route over wi-fi and do not count against your minutes. I have no idea why there's a big push to femto-cells (sp) when this technology is available -- it guarantees perfect calls in the home regardless of your distance from the towers and it's a win/win for the customer and carrier since they're not burning limited air-time to handle the calls.

Someone already got Wing commander but Origin had some GREAT franchises before EA just let them all die on the vine. Privateer had a succesful reboot with microsoft's freelancer, but even that franchise is outdated now.

Ultima (before it went all mmorpg on us) was great and I'd like to see some off-line adventures return. It's STILL fun to boot up the old icon based 1-2-3-&4 occassionally.

And this was never a franchise but Archon and M.U.L.E. are two definate old school games that deserve to be introduced to a new generation!

I'm using a windows home server (HP but Asus started making them too). Basically it's a little box that's barely taller than the 4 hard drives it can hold. It's quiet and power efficient. It can centralize and store media files making them easy to share throughout the house but it also backs up the other computers in the house -- in fact it will even wake up a sleeping or hibernating laptop in the middle of the night to do the backup and then put it back to sleep when its done (something that just blew my mind when I first realized what was happening).

WHS doesn't have a concept of "raid" but you can flag folders to be duplicated and WHS will ensure that if it's possible they will be duplicated across hard drives. Adding hard drives is fairly simple. When you add a new one you can chose to add it to the storage pool or to use it to back up the WHS itself. The storage pool is pretty cool, there really aren't letter drives, WHS just maintains a giant pool of storage made up from all the connected hard drives so if you're running low on server space just add another hard drive.

Generally I'm happy letting the WHS backup my laptop and game machine. If anything happens to them the WHS can rebuild them. If anything happens to a drive on the WHS the folder redundancy will keep things healthy. I'd basically have to have a simultaneous, catastrophic loss of two or more hard drives on the WHS to start losing data and the odds on that are pretty long. One of these days I might build a small raid to backup all the media on the WHS but that's low priority right now.

For businesses Windows server 2008 has much the same capacity although it supposedly does image based backups (ie norton ghost, but WHS will do ghost backups as well with service pack 3). And of course apple's solution is time machine.