I just took the "defensive driving" course here in Arizona because I had the option of doing that rather than paying the ticket, and ironically it's 90% just explaining the driving laws and safe driving habits. So it really IS a refresher course.

Carter, I can see my house from here!

I'm sure that's at least partially because the show got cancelled and they needed an ending fast.

I'm confused... what do they need webcams for in this project? I actually read the article and it didn't mention what they were for either.

This actually reminded me of the mini-series The Triangle a few years back.

As the other poster pointed out, MythTV works quite well and the hauppage cards are quite good. The pcHDTV card from http://www.pchdtv.com/ also works well from my experience, I've used both. But Windows Media Center also works surprisingly well. I switched to that so I could move the PC to another room and only have my Xbox 360 hooked up to my TV (actually, I had a projector, but that's beside the point) and stream the video to that.

MCE is a little less useful than MythTv because it adds DRM to your recordings (though I hear its not too hard to remove), but if all you're planning on doing is watching it and then deleting it, then it works beautifully. It has the added benefit of it "just works" with the Xbox 360 and its remote (My experience with getting a remote to work with MythTV was less than pleasant).

Of course, I recently broke down and got DirectTV because (ironically) when the digital transition finally happened, my reception of the digital channels (in my apartment) suddenly became less reliable.

I saw that episode: Carter discovered that the asteroid was composed of mostly Naquadah, and that detonating the bomb would cause a chain reaction and destroy the entire solar system. They managed to use the hyperdrive on the cargo ship to safely make the asteroid pass through to the other side of the Earth and thwart Apophis' latest plan...

That's a little unfair: I'm sure there are plenty of people that want to manufacture a device like that, but they aren't allowed to (by the media companies). This is why you can only get Cable Cards in "approved" Microsoft machines (at least last I checked).

I built a MythTV box several years ago with a lot of hard drive space for many of the same reasons that you described, I'd record stuff in full HD from the OTA broadcasts and do whatever I wanted with them. It worked great, but eventually I got an xbox 360 and it was more convenient to put Windows Media Center on the box and and use the extender. And really, I've come to realize that I don't even tend to keep stuff around very long anyway, and delete most stuff after I watch it the first time. If I want to watch it again, I can usually watch it online, or if its a show I really like I will support it by buying the DVDs/Blu-rays when they come out.

Cats want cheeseburgers, not fish!

Did I say that I was a fundamentalist, or that I agreed with that opinion? No, I did not.

So after looking up what (wikipedia says) "Intelligent Design" means, I realized it wasn't what I thought it was. We need a new name for what I had been thinking it was: The belief that the universe was created by an intelligence (i.e. God), but which doesn't violate our existing scientific knowledge. (Perhaps there is a name for this and I just don't know it).

I don't think its a stretch to think that the universe could have been created by God, rather than some random events. We simply use science to understand how God created it.

Well, fundamentalists would try to argue that "evil" created it and God simply allowed it to happen. But I think there are other explanations such as: maybe things like that exist to challenge us and push us to create solutions, or perhaps God is a scientist himself and we're all part of his elaborate experiment and tampering with it to much would taint the results.

After all, if there were no disease and no problems and everyone was peaceful and happy there wouldn't really be any motivation for us to better ourselves and a complete lack of anything bad would more or less prove the existence of God, which would negate that whole "free will" thing.

I have the Dell mini 12 (Dellbuntu version), and it has the Intel GMA 500 chipset which is designed for playing h.264 and indeed it does work quite well. I can play 720p videos on it and the (6-cell) battery still lasts approximately 5 hours (down from the estimated 6). I recently watched a good portion of the "Band of Brothers" miniseries while on a cross-country flight.

Of course, the drivers for this chipset leave a little to be desired (outside of Dell's version of Ubuntu), but that's another issue.

I just tried that add-on because it looked really cool, but I couldn't seem to get it to work. It claims it works with google, but it never loaded the next page. Is there some sort of trick that I am missing? (I even played with the settings, but that proved to be futile as well).