VLC 2.0? That's nice. I'll keep using my even lighter weight video player that plays even more "darn near everything" than VLC.

Even the built-in filters for MPC-HC are very good, but extending it with Haali's Splitter and ffdshow or CoreAVC results in even better performance.

Raise rates how, exactly? I've been on the same $40 cell plan through Verizon since early 2005. Every 2 years or so I just renew the same plan I had before. The only change is I added the $25 unlimited data this summer. I also know someone that is a tech for Verizon, and he informed me that they don't throttle or cap data overage, even for the unlimited plan.

The problem is that rates in the US overall are far higher than most other places. My friends in Europe tell me they pay something like 15-20 euros for the same unlimited data plan.

Early on something like Lego Mindstorms is good, as others have mentioned. A good thing a bit later on may be experimenting with one of the many free game design engines out there. Something like the Unity engine has a great drag-and-drop IDE compatible with Mac and PC, and supports programming in multiple languages. Simple mini-games and platformer shooters would be a great way to pique their interest if they are so inclined.

I worked at a Fedex sorting facility for 2 days through a temp service. I can assure you the same type of manhandling occurred there as well. Guys were heaving boxes out of the trucks sometimes up to 5ft through the air before they hit the belt and tumbled over several times.

Ironically enough, 35% of what we unloaded that day were PCs and monitors from the vendor I had worked for that past summer. We wondered why we kept getting customer complaints of unseated video cards, HDDs, etc. I went back the next summer and told them about what happened at Fedex, and was told there was nothing they could expect to change except extra securing for the innards of the PCs...

The 2008 Olympics had a website with most events viewable on-demand. In the US I believe it was provided by NBC, and ran on Silverlight technology. I can't remember exactly, but there may have been a premium streaming package you could pay for as well. I would imagine similar will be available for 2012.

I was actually disappointed that the 2010 Winter Olympics didn't feature the same sort of streaming coverage. Unless you had a cable package you were SOL outside of the limited primetime coverage from NBC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAKNjEi3Xao

It's technically true. The "best" kind of truth.

Just not for anything BUT smartphones I guess...

I'm glad to see the NY Times is able to make some good revenue off their site, but this probably only works for the larger papers.

Large influential papers like the NY Times and Wall St. Journal have a certain level of clout and original content that people are willing to pay for. It's highly unlikely that your local newspaper is going to make any reasonable amount of money off of creating a paywall. Most local papers feature largely wire stories you can find online from thousands of other papers. More circumstantial -- but it's also been my observation that the "younger generations" increasingly don't care about local interest stories or Prep Sports that may be in the local papers -- which is usually the only original content they offer.

So in the long run, I can see this saving a handful of the largest national papers, but I feel most local papers will be in even more trouble in the future.

Can't you just renew your plan or keep it going? It was my understanding that as long as you don't adjust that part of your plan coverage, you get to keep it going. I've had the exact same mobile plan from Verizon for going on 6 years now and it's never changed even in the periods between me renewing the 2year contract. Unless something is changed you should be able to just renew another 2 year contract or stay month-to-month and keep the unlimited data.

I always take pleasure in seeing if anyone is looking at the AV cable section at Best Buy and informing them they can get them online for $4 instead of $40.

So essentially they want to charge a monthly fee for stat tracking and pre-match chat? HLstats and similar stat trackers have been around for the PC market for over 10 years now. Pre-match chat isn't exactly a new novelty either.

Yet another example of a greedy company charging for "features" that have been around free for years...