... something went terribly wrong.

And I'd be pretty insecure if mine had a hole in them.

Not even considering how my image would suffer.

Reminds me of the story about the bigshot who was sitting in his office, shooting the bull with a client. Figuring he'd impress this guy, he reached over and hit the button for the intercom to his secretary in he outer office. "Get my broker on the line, hon'." She replied, "Which one is that, sir? Stock or pawn?"

It's more difficult to spoof voicemail than e-mail or text messages. Particularly if you know the sender. And generated spam robo calls aren't very convincing. So I'm going to trust voicemail a bit more than a text based message.

Local OTA programming doesn't have that large an audience. And yet they seem to produce their own content.

That's more a chacteristic of nationally syndicated programming. You can't sustain viewership across the country by doing pieces on the best places to shop in Seattle.

Local broadcasters who are down on their luck financially seem to jettison their own produced programming and replace it with national shows. This leads me to believe that the fees (if any) that the nationals charge OTA broadcasters for content is pretty low. They want the eyeballs for their ads. But repeat the programming on cable and all of a sudden the content owners see another income stream and (thanks to Congress) they want to grab a piece of the pie.

Instead of having the CIA/NSA/State Department file charges, they find someone to file charges on behalf of the American public. It would seem that these agencies have the duty of protecting the public and would be expected to file a lawsuit if justified. But then members of the agencies could be called in cross examination to testify as to the exact nature of the harm done. And that's the sort of thing TLAs hate to do on the record.

So, call up a buddy. Have him file suit. But he can't "spill the beans" on any internal processes or documents, since he has been retired for some time and not privy to current events.

Research published in lesser read journals gets fewer citations than elite ones. If you are writing your own paper, you might want to drop a few big names rather than some obscure ones to gain credibility. The initial reason for the elite journals' editors rejection may have little to do with an in-depth analysis of the research. So it goes on to some lesser publication.

From TFA:

That could be bad logic. The initial rejection by the editor of an elite journal may have little bearing on the quality of the research. But it does influence its subsequent exposure to the scientific community. That factor alone may cause it to be less cited.

I would expect that the study done on this topic does make some attempt to correct for this. But I can't be bothered to follow up on it as a new paper by Bennett Haselton on the distribution of ice has come across my desk and requires my immediate attention.

Four hours of H.P. Lovecraft will keep anyone awake.

I'm guessing that the gov't is leaning on ISPs to get an explicit buy in/out of filtering per customer. So that later on, when someone in the household stumbles upon that midget porn site, no one can claim shock and offense.

The down side (as others have pointed out) is that little Timmy might be the first one onto the family Internet connection one morning. And the "Do you want to watch porn?" might not get the response intended.

On the other hand, if I only had 6 months to live, the first thing I'd do is to get back together with my ex-wife.

That would be the longest 6 months ever.

Did they try turning North Korea off and then back on again?

Or give him a football scholarship.

... for my upcoming book, "Programming with Brainfuck".

And yet, my local OTA TV station seems to make a go of it. With a much smaller market available to spread the costs of their news anchors or local personality talking heads.

I think what you are hearing is the lobbying PR of the pay TV channels trying to protect one source of income that they had Congress write into law years ago.

Merely a technical detail of the implementation by Dish. And not really of concern to, or the business of, any outside party.

Tomorrow, Dish could lease bandwidth from some ultra cheap, high bandwidth satellite provider that would enable them to switch to video delivery via IP or whatever. That's not my business, or Fox's. The encrypted satellite up/downlinks are private communications channels for the exclusive use of Dish between their head end and set top boxes. What Fox, or Netflix, should pay for, is the service of delivering a video/audio stream to the HDMI port on the back of the STB.

The fact that Congress has a couple of morons who write laws based not upon a product or service, but one particular implementation of that is what hampers innovation.