10 Gigabytes is small. Today. I have a 2TB drive that is massive enough for all of my current personal needs, but I remember a few years back when I bought a massive 200GB drive to supplement the 40GB internal I had in my laptop, and those were more than I needed at the time. Before that, I had a massive 8GB drive in the machine I used for everything. Before that, a massive 80MB one that handled everything I threw at it. Before that, I had a massive 40MB drive that exceeded my needs. That's as far back as I go, I'm afraid, but I would never say that any of the drives I had were small. In fact, if I had to choose a word, it's quite obviously "massive".

Exactly correct. If it's not their smartphone of choice, it'll be doodling in the notebook, playing word games on paper with their neighbor, doing the sudoku or crossword puzzle, or some other distraction of their choice.

Speaking personally, I had a laptop on which I took notes for my classes during my first semester of college, and I was faithful about doing so. I was required to take an intro PoliSci course, however, and just couldn't give two licks about the material, so I was constantly playing various games on my old Titanium PowerBook G4 (mostly Escape Velocity; Nova and Super Mario 64 via emulation) whenever the professor started going off on tangents. I'd still come out with almost a page of notes by the end of each lecture, but I was definitely distracted in that class (I was good about staying focused in the others, however).

What I didn't realize was how much I was distracting others. We had assigned seats for the exams in that class (400+ students in the class), and when the first exam came up, I sat down in my assigned seat next to a guy I had never met before. He took one look at me and asked me why I stopped playing "that space game" since it was a lot more fun to watch than Super Mario 64. Turns out that even though I was sitting on the aisle about halfway back in the class, over a 100 students could probably still see my laptop and were being distracted on a regular basis.

In a moment of cosmic irony, that first semester went VERY poorly for me...in the classes that I actually focused in and studied. My best grade of the semester actually came from that PoliSci course that I could've cared less about.

On the flip side of things, I eventually did develop a healthy respect for the attention of others and made a point of trying my best not to distract other students. I even went so far in several classes as to simply turn on a text editor, turn off the screen, and touch type for the entire class with the screen closed part of the way. Again, however, in an additional odd twist of irony, my touch typing ended up being a distraction for several students sitting behind me who thought I was just goofing off and playing at taking notes, wondering why I kept up the charade for the semester. Apparently the students in that Intro to Architecture class (that's architecture of the Greek and Roman variety, not the computer variety, mind you) hadn't seen someone who actually knew how to touch type before.

Annnnd...of course, as soon as I posted this, I wish I could take it back. After all, Apple doesn't create its own content, but merely publishes that of others, so the case I just argued is a weaker vertical model than what you were describing.

Because clearly the iTunes Store selling music has been harmful for both the music marketplace and consumers? It's one of the few entirely vertical markets I can think of, but I would hardly call it harmful to either side. If anything, it's proved to be a benefit to both, since it seems to be allowing the RIAA to stay afloat while losing CD sales, promotes distribution of (and payment to) smaller labels and artists, and gives consumers a place to buy individual tracks or albums conveniently and at decent prices. Win-win. That's not to say that all cases of content and distribution being joined are a good thing, mind you, but rather that this generalization regarding vertical models always being bad is incorrect.

The sun's just doing its part to slow global warming.

I think you mean 12 parsecs.

Ah, see, I'm not really a sports fan, nor do I live with any, so I got off easy there. For someone like you, I could definitely see why it would be a lot harder to ditch TV. I know there are some places where you can find live games online, but I don't know much about them, honestly, nor do I know how reliable they are.

As for HD, honestly, you're right. Watching SD content on an HDTV is definitely a waste. That said, I've found that it doesn't really matter in the end. For the HD content I own, I have the HDTV and can enjoy it in its full glory. For content that's SD, I find that I tend to forget it's SD after a few minutes anyway (assuming I even take note of it at all), and can enjoy it just the same (so long as there aren't nuisances like visible compression artifacts or the like). Now, sure, I likely would have had more enjoyment were that content in HD, since I'd have been able to have appreciated more detail and would have been more immersed, but I find that SD is more than sufficient for me with most things. That said, there is one giant caveat: sports. I may not be a sports guy, but even I can appreciate just how big of a difference HD makes with sports. I consider it a necessity nowadays.

I might agree that more, as opposed to most, people are informed via TV news than other sources of information, but to dismiss the impact of Internet news sites, Twitter, Facebook, word of mouth, or bloggers seems a bit rash. Plus, even if TV were the only source of information in the world, it wouldn't support your claim that this seems to lean towards the side of causation, since other (and more credible) studies have indicated that people choose news sources that match up with their thinking. If anything, the viewers are molding Fox News more than Fox News is molding the viewers.

Alternative answer: Slashdot comments.

I realized that I was watching TV, not so much because I was actually interested in anything that was on it, but rather because I just wanted something (preferably with moving colors and shapes) to stare at while I didn't think. Pretty much anything can substitute for that. So, for those few shows that I did find interesting, there's still Hulu, Netflix, and the network websites, all of which allow me to watch shows whenever I want, rather than on someone else's schedule. You also have the benefit with Netflix of saving almost 15 minutes every hour just by ditching the commercials, which means that you suddenly have a lot more free time to use on more TV or other activities. That said, you'd be amazed at just how few shows you are probably actually interested in once they're not being advertised constantly and they're not in front of your eyeballs by default when you come home each night.

Otherwise, there are plenty of ways to fill time if that's your sole objective. I spend more time with friends and family, play through more games that I actually wanted to enjoy, read through a few dozen RSS feeds, and have even started doing some reading of actual books (not many, I assure you, and I wouldn't recommend the practice for everyone, since these archaic devices require user interaction that is not for the faint of heart), which I hadn't done for fun in a long time. But it all comes at the steep cost of having to make an actual choice of what I'm going to do. I can be lazy if I want to be still, but lazy is no longer the default. I like it better when I think.

Yes, well, at least they can spell "reinforced". Last I checked, people that watch Fox News weren't having their preconceptions policed repeatedly, as you indicated. If they were, then we could hardly hold them responsible for being misinformed, after all, and the headline would be much less divisive.

If we vote with our wallet when we buy things, and we vote with our eyeballs when we choose a channel, then may I remind you of your right to abstain? Cut the cable. Choose none. Ignorance is bliss. I hate to say it, but I've definitely been happier since we cut cable TV to our house and I stopped watching the news. If something is important, I'll hear about it secondhand from friends, bloggers, aggregators, or some other method. News that's actually important will get to you one way or the other. And when it comes to being informed in important matters, a few minutes of research online will serve you far better than the hours of spin, propaganda, and advertising that you're getting now from the boob tube.

...that subconsciously thinks it's Jimmy Wales that wrote each article whenever his pleas are at the top? For some reason, having a giant image of him at the top instantly makes me interpret it as an image of the author, just as you'd see pictures of authors at plenty of publications, and I start to think of the articles I read as being written by him. It's very weird, and I keep having to snap myself out of that thinking every time they run these requests for donations. That may also be why I've had this nagging feeling that Wikipedia is suddenly a whole lot less respectable and authoritative than the used to be, now that I think of it...

Likewise. Back before I started using a password generation/management tool, I produced and memorized my passwords by trying "1337" variations of misspelled words (ones that wouldn't be in a dictionary) with some special characters mixed in somewhat randomly until I found a sequence that was easy to type and "felt" right as I typed it. I'd then toss in camel-cased capitalization based on when it was natural for my hands to hit the Shift key, rather than picking them arbitrarily. There were a few legitimate times where I had to give someone my password, and I almost always had to seek out a keyboard to do so, since I simply couldn't remember where all I had things capitalized or even which order the characters were in.

Nowadays, however, I just use 1Password. It handles all of the remembering for me, stays in sync between all of my computers and my phone, and since I can use separate and complex passwords for every site while only having to actually remember one password for myself, I'm much more secure should a particular site have a breach of security. Plus, I dare say, it's much easier and faster than outright memorization, since it takes me a lot less time to hit the hotkey for 1Password to fill in my login info than it does for me to enter my login credentials at a site.

Of course, I'm still hoping that something better will come along eventually. Passwords, at best, are a stopgap measure until we find a better way of securing information. Perhaps one of these days we'll all have unique private key storage devices that we'll use to identify ourselves, much as we have house keys or car keys? So long as it can be used for any service and can be "re-cut" if divulged, it seems like it'd be a better means of authenticating the user. Of course, there are issues with this idea too, to say the least...

i'm pretty sure somebody would have caught that example you gave have it been deployed in the wild.

after all, a compiler IS a program where people do pay attention to binary code generated by it.

i'm pretty sure it would fail the very first unit test the devs have in place before accepting the proposed patch.

please, stop being so naive.