If you use Windows and all of your important applications are open source and cross platform then you have an easier time replacing the operating system. I doubt that is the goal of the VLC developers, but it is a nice side effect.

I sure hope not. I decided to give Blizard the benefit of the doubt and bought D3 despite the always online requirements. What a waste. I won't get into the launch day/week problems because those have been mentioned enough already. I'm a morning person and I don't get to play games too often. A few times now I sat down to play single player but I couldn't because it was Blizards maintenance window. If this is the future of gaming, then I'm done with computer gaming.

If you're going after true no-risk investments, stick to CD's. At least they're backed by the FDIC. MMF's are reliable, but not truly no-risk.

Unfortunately any return less than 1% means that you're losing purchasing power to inflation. It's not quite as bad as stuffing your money under the mattress, but it's close.

The Ryan plan won't gut Medicare for those people already on Medicare, such as his mother.

HBO is owned by Time Warner, so I would not count on this happening any time soon. This explains why HBO is going in the opposite direction that you want by keeping all of their content off of Netflix streaming and delaying Netflix's access to DVD's.

Make sure you try one out before buying one. I bought a 3DS on launch day and then I found out that the 3D effect gave me a headache within minutes of play.

You can watch the Olympics the same way I'm watching them, for free in HD OTA.

Don't forget about Windows XP. XP doesn't support DirectX 11, and a PC game developer would be crazy to ignore the entire XP base by making a game which required DirectX 11.

Doubtful. That particular game cannot be played without an account and active connection to their servers.

I'm in the same boat. The only time I see 24 Mbps is when I go to a test site, otherwise I've never seen over 1.2 Mbps sustained (and usually less than that).

The letter to the investors went into much more detail, and that's what caused the recent share plunge. A couple things stuck out - churn rate is up, they lost more customers than expected, they expect to continue losing customers into the next quarter, and they spent more than double the amount on streaming content.

From Q3'09 - Q2'11 Netflix added between 500k - 3M customers a quarter, so losing 800k customers in a quarter is a huge change. Especially when costs for new content are climbing.

The $9.99/$15.98 plan is for streaming with 1 DVD at a time. Other plans allowed for more DVD's at a time and blu-ray. The letter mentioned that they had customers who had, but did not use, streaming. These customers dropped down to the cheaper DVD only plan after the price increase.

This is anecdotal, but the Netflix customers I know, including myself, all changed to cheaper plans. In short, they're hurting.

The confusing part to me is that he is even trying to compare 3 SSD's to 60 HDD's. He must have sacrificed capacity, reliability, or both (most likely) on the SSD side of things for this test. I could not find any mention about the RAID level or capacity of his tests in the article. The results are meaningless without that information.

I've had awful luck with Netgear. Twice I bought a consumer level Netgear router, and each time it would lose its net connection and need a reboot after a day or so. I never had that problem with Linksys.

I've been running a WRT54GL with Tomato for a few years now without any complaints.

Raising the debt ceiling was never a "to the wire affair", it was always handled as routine. In fact, S&P specifically mentioned using the debt ceiling as a political bargaining chip as part of their rationale for the downgrade.

You've got that right. The vast majority of the requests for my employer's web page come from Windows XP, and the site is only of interest to businesses. Here's a rough breakdown:
80% - Windows XP
11% - Windows 7
4% - Windows Vista
3% - Mac OS X
2% - other (Linux, other Windows version, etc)