Umm, they did exactly that. Check out the last four pages of the article. Basically, T-Mobile is really good if you live in the middle of no where (until AT&T buys them that is).

I was more or less in the same boat. Here is what I did:

No home phone (why do you really need that anymore anyway, I guess that could very for some).

Cell Phones, Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V. It is a great android phone and my monthly service is $25 for unlimited texting, unlimited data, and 300 minutes. They have higher minute plans if needed, but going over minutes isn't very expensive and you can restart a plan early. My wife and I were on a family plan with AT&T, but two VM plans is cheaper. After the initial cost of the phones, we are coming out way ahead and get a lot more.

TV: We were spending about $100 per month with Dish. Bought a Roku box for living room, put the Wii in the bedroom and got a $9 Netflix streaming plan. Got a $3 a month (averaged out) pandora paid subscription for music. Put a $45 antenna in the attic. I now get better quality HD locals than with Dish (I also have a computer setup to record if desired, but that admittedly does add extra expense) and we watch everything on Netflix or Hulu. Sure, we don't get to watch everything we did, but there is plenty for us to watch (including our daughter) and we shouldn't be watching so much TV anyway. Plus, the way I put it to my wife was "Is $1000 a year worth it to watch House Hunters on HGTV"? I think when you put it in terms like that and realize that if you give up a few shows to save a lot of money, it is an easy decision. Also, I tend to find that for most people that have "can't miss shows" after a few weeks of not seeing them, they don't really care about that show anymore. All they really want is a few hours of mindless TV entertainment and the exact show doesn't always matter.

What about the Asus Transformer? It is $400 (equivalent iPad 2 is $500) has the internal memory, a dual core tegra chip, same gorilla glass ips screen, etc. It also has Flash, you don't have to use iTunes, and there are a lot more apps/options in general than iOS. I have one and love it.

The problem with that is that there are not dangerous amount of radiation leaking into the environment. For a good, more informed, less bias summary, read here:

http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/53461/fukushima-nuclear-accident-simple-and-accurate-explanation

No one has died from radiation poising, and as of now, it doesn't look like anyone will. The major concern right now is a financial one, not an environmental or safety one. If they wanted, they could let the "cores melt down" and nothing really bad would happen. The cores would be contained in the designed containment chambers. The only downside is that you loose a lot of really expensive uranium and can't really put a new plant right there anymore.

Also, take this into account, Chernobyl, which by all accounts was worse than Japan's situation could turn out to be killed between 28 and 700,000 people (depends on who you ask, but lets go with the "long term effects, people who got cancer in their 70s that maybe wouldn't have and use the 700,000). Each year in China alone, 700,000 die from air pollution related causes, mostly from coal power plants:

http://www.pri.org/business/global-development/thousands-of-deaths-because-of-china-s-coal-energy2500.html

In addition, on average 30+ workers die in China's coal mines each year. 28 workers total died in the Chernobyl meltdown.

Coal kills way more people than nuclear energy has. It is kind of like terrorism in America. Everyone is going through crazy steps like the TSA to prevent another terrorist attack, even though your are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist (in the USA).

Is nuclear 100% safe, no it isn't. Neither is walking down the street or drinking water. The fact is we need energy for the world, to provide heating and cooling, to help produce food, and to help our economies grow. With the technologies out there right now, nuclear is, in my opinion, by far the best option. It is cleaner and safer than coal and is about the same cost per kwh. Hydroelectric would be better, but it is limited as to where you can put it. Solar and wind are great future technologies, but until efficiency is greatly improved and/or better storage techniques are developed, they can't supply the power requirements we have right now, much less in the future.

This isn't exactly true. For reference, I am in Texas. The cheapest landline I can get is about $20 a month. The cheapest dial-up I know of, is about $8 a month, so $28 per month total.

For an initial investment of $150 (I know, that is kind of a lot, but it might could be saved for), I can get an LG Optimus from Virgin Mobile. I can then pay $25 per month and get 300 minutes of calling, unlimited texting, and turn my phone into a wifi hotspot with unlimited data with about 700 kbps - 1.1 Mbps download speeds (aka much better than dialup).

So I would be paying about the same (or maybe less) than a phone line and dial up, and getting much better service. The only hangup would be the initial $150 for the phone, and I could see how that could be the deal breaker for some. On the other hand, if you managed to buy a say $300 computer to need Internet access, you should be able to find a way to buy a $150 phone. That said, it could even reduce the barrier of entry to things like email since you could just start with the phone and have reasonable email usage without a computer.

Checkout Virgin Mobile. If you have good Sprint coverage in your area, it is great. You can get an LG Optimus V, with Android 2.2 for $150, and then get monthly service with unlimited data and texting for $25 a month, no contract.

Really though, there are alternatives out there. Like I posted above, I just got a LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile for $150 with no contract. It runs Android 2.2 and is really nice. My monthly service is $25 and I get unlimited data and texting. I am also not locked into any contract. I can use my phone as a wifi hotspot to get Internet access from just about anywhere on my laptop.

I thought this as well, for a long time, until about two weeks ago. That was when Virgin Mobile came out with the LG Optimus V (I swear this isn't an ad, I just love this phone). The phone itself cost $150, no contract. My monthly service costs $25 a month and I get unlimited data and texting. I can now listen to Pandora in my car, get my email quickly and easily wherever I go, monitor my Nagios installation constantly, and it even turns into a WiFi hotspot at the push of a button if I need to use my laptop for some "real work". I agree the $500 iphones with $100+ monthly contracts for 2 years are crazy, but for $150 upfront and then $25 a month that I can quit anytime I want (plus I need a cell phone anyway), it is hard to pass up.

You just need a better credit card. There are tons of cards out there, with no annual fee, that let you create virtual account numbers with set dollar and time limits. For example, I have the Citi Forward Visa that has no annual fee, pretty good rewards, and free, unlimited virtual account numbers.

Anytime I need to pay for something on a site I am not that sure about (sometimes due to shadyness, sometimes due to hard to get out of auto-renewal), I create a virtual account number online, set a limit at or maybe $5 over what I need to pay them (in case tax works out differently or something) and set a time limit of a month. Then I give them a one time use number and limit my liability to just the amount I want to pay them, for the shortest time possible.

Thanks for the blog post, random guy.

These are all available. Buy a Roku Box for $60 and you have all the things you mentioned between Netflix and Amazon VOD. With Netflix, you have a $9 a month subscription fee with "instant movie rental" of whatever you want.

With Amazon VOD you have a la carte (just get one episode of a TV show, one movie, etc), pay per show per season (most TV shows are between $1 USD - $3 USD per episode, or you can get a discount for buying the whole season), and instant movie rental (pick your movie, pay a reduced fee, "rent" it for 24-48 hours, depending on the movie). Most things come in SD and HD with no commercials.

Its out there.

I more or less have this same setup. I have a small AMD Athlon X2 machine/case with large/quiet fans that I built that runs ubuntu, but basically just boots into freevo. I have my video files directory nfs mounted at boot up and freevo just sees them as if they were on the local machine. I have another old laptop in the bedroom that is under my dresser that does the same thing. I bought two USB remotes from dealextreme.com for like $9 each and hooked them up. I had to create custom modmaps for a few buttons, but other than that it just worked. The setup was a little bit of a pain, but now that it is done, my wife (non-tech) uses it with no problems. The other plus is that since it uses VLC, Xine, and/or Mplayer to play the videos (you can configure it based on file extension), it can play pretty much anything without having to worry about going from one thing to another.

Get a Sansa Clip+. They are about the same size as a Shuffle, play just about any format of music file, have great battery life, a lot bigger internal memory for the price, plus a microSD slot to expand their capacity. The battery life is great. There is a small glowing screen, but it dims/turns off after about 10 seconds without a button press. I honestly don't understand why people by Apple music players (ipod, shuffle, etc.). I'm not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't get it. The Clip+ doesn't even look ugly. What could the Shuffle do that it doesn't, except maybe have perfect integration with iTunes, which is a horribly bloated program anyway (and which will sync to a Clip+ as well).

As a lot of the above posts say, you are thinking about HDCP, not HDMI. There is on copy protection built into HDMI, just like there is no copy protection built into DVDs. Copy protection can be added (HDCP for HDMI, CSS for DVDs), but it isn't required. The cables don't really matter. Even with HDCP, they don't do any decoding/encoding whatever. They are just glorified strips of metal with plastic insulation around them.

I disagree. The search bar (or whatever its proper name in) in Windows 7 is amazing. I can't tell you how many people's computers I have worked on that have so many things in their "Start->Programs" menu that you can't even see them all. Couple that with the fact that they don't resort them (and if you do, they can't find anything anymore and yell at you), I have spent many minutes hunting through the long list of programs to find the one I needed.

With the Windows 7 search, all I need to know is a little bit of the program name. I click the Start circle thing and just start typing. By the time I have two or three letters of the programs name typed in, it has shown up. If it is the top result, I can just hit enter and it will run. If not, I just click it from the short list of apps/files.

Maybe it is because I use a Linux desktop at work all day, mainly CLI stuff, but once I upgraded to Windows 7 and got this feature I couldn't stand to use XP anymore on my home machine. Vista tried to have the same thing, but their implementation was so horribly slow (at least last time I tried a Vista machine) that it was next to worthless. Windows 7 it great.