Agreed, I read the article about required internet connection and people post things at the bottom saying that's if you can read the article then you can surely connect your XBOX every 24 hours, and let the nerd tears flow! These people have obviously never lost a internet connection before, I have had my cable connection down for over a week once, and the cable company could not figure it out for that long, I also go on vacation to a beach house that has no Internet and also other remote places, and I bring my console to keep me sane. These people either do not think of these issue because they are to young and spoiled, or are just trolling. I also worry about the constantly connected camera, and even thou you can throw something over the lens, the mic would always be on, even if Microsoft did not abuse this, it does not mean some hacker wont. I will not let a camera sit in my living room constantly on, connected to the internet, period!

This mentality is not just about the Xbox, I was just arguing the other day that I was upset that allot of the new Android tablets had no SD card slot, and also everyone responded that you can use the cloud to stream all your audio and video! so why would you need more local storage, WTF? I even have a unlimited 4G wifi puck that I carry around and I can not stream video in all places I might want to watch it, and imagine if everyone wanted to stream HD video via the cell phone network all the time. I was also just arguing with Amazon.com the other day because I accidently 1-clicked a digital video and bought it, even thou I have 1-click turned off in my settings, the guy at Amazon told me that 1-click was always on for digital purchases, because its digital, and is bought right away (like that makes any sense) and then when I explained that I was just trying to get to a screen that explained if I could download a copy of the video, he asked my why I would ever need a local copy, when you can just stream it!
This cloud mentality is scary, if you ever lose your internet (cable) connection you will have nothing to do at all I guess, no games, no movies, nothing.

I actually have a PS3 and XBOX360 and tons of games I almost never finish, but buy them only when I go on vacation and take a console. I always play PC games when at home.

Except it is impossible to multicast across the internet to individual subscribers, while maintaining the benefits of multicast, you can use a VPN type connection for multicast across the internet, but then your back to a point to point connection.

It seems to me with Amazon.com doing so well and only getting better, UPS is making more and more money and sense as a way to get goods to houses in as little as 2 days.
I am not sure why the USPS jsut left this market alone, my they did not try to compete in this area.

There are many reasons for a death penalty though, many times people that might have cared deeply for the deceased might not themselves outlive the person that did the crime, so this way they know that justice is served and the person is dead beyond the point of getting let out of prison. Also while many think only of themselves when they as jurors have to decide if a person lives of dies, I personally would take it as a slap to the face to a parent whose daughter was raped and killed if you told them you did not want to be responsible for putting someone who killed their daughter to death for instance. If I was the father of a girl that was raped and killed I would personally want to see them dead not in jail, just in case I was to die unexpectedly and not able to be sure they died in jail.

Man I hope this covers the local cable VOD channels also, when I change the channel to the ON DEMAND movie channel the people that are talking about the new movies that are on are not only so LOUD, but also so happy and irritating about everything it is disturbing.

I have two Sharp Aquos TV's a 65" and a 46" and both have been great TV's, it would be sad to see them fall I think.

Yes but this is stolen gear, and I have never worked for a company that did not have service contracts on all the gear they have with live customers on it.
It would ne hard for a bigger company to tell its employees to not open a ticket on certain gear because its stolen.

I have been doing this same procedure with Cisco for years an years, When a card breaks in the feild and you do a RMA on that part (which can happen allot if you have lots of gear) you get the new replacement part in the mail right away, you then have a certain amount of time to return the old bad part.
If Cisco does not receive that part in a certain amount of time they will be contacting your boss or someone until they get that part back.
I have had Cisco say I did not return a part that I did return and finally figure out where it was later, but its a big deal to them, these cards I replace are atleast 40K a card. Since then I started keeping all receipts from UPS to cover myself.
Also who can you sell these cards too anyway? they all have built in serial numbers and small companies would normaly not need them, its mostly only used in equipment used by bigger companies. These type of companies would normaly not buy something they can not open a Cisco trouble ticket on because when they see that serial number a flag is going to go up right way I would think.

"Maybe it takes more than 4 years to completely turn around a huge economic downturn that the entire world is still suffering from"

I would argue it sure does, and the idea that giving these companies tax breaks will make them hire more seems crazy, most of Wall Street is doing very well right now, many companies are sitting on lots of money. The problem is that companies do not hire because they have money and want to be nice, they hire to fill a need.
The real issue is that people are out of work and times are tight, people are not buying, and at times like this, companies cut employees not hire them. A stimulus is one way to get the ball rolling again, just long enough that people have money to spend and companies have to hire to keep up again.
But the real issue is that during the Bush years middle class incomes stagnated, and instead of helping the middle class we decided to give tax breaks to big companies, and then we fixed the game to help these big companies in ways that they had just no chance of real failure, and contrary to popular republican belief instead of them deciding to hire people because they are making so much money they put it in their pockets, again because demand did not really rise that is just extra money made.
At least Obama has been pushing the right direction, and would have done more if he could have.
I think there could be some really good stimulus ideas, training people for jobs in the United States Army Corps of Engineers or something that would not only provide some money during the time the train, but mostly get them ready to be hired again. Sure better than paying people not to work.

The fact that cable companies still have customers with MPEG2 boxes just shows they are cheap and soaking every last dollar before they upgrade.
They bitch that bandwidth costs money, then refuse to upgrade to MPEG4 video because they would have to give customers new settop boxes!
SDV is a joke, it’s a bad idea that saved them again from switching to new settops in the house and using IP to the settop to just do multicast joins and unicast VOD, instead SDV with its dynamically assigned QAMs is a mess, and a huge waste of money, when eventually they are going to want to be at IP to the settop anyway. Allot of these cable companies own their own backbones and bandwidth is cheap, but I know many are still talking about billing per used bandwidth! I know TWC in my area will start putting your used bandwidth per month on your bill, but not charging yet for it, they just want to let you know they are watching! I would say this had tons to do with them trying to figure out how to make you not want to use bandwidth watching TV on the internet, instead of them figuring out how to compete and provide better services, its game based on how to hold on to more for longer. And yes you subsidize they guys with your tax dollars!

Might have been fraud, but it shard for me to feel real sorry for someone that sold their company for nothing but stock in another company. If it was me I would have made damn sure I am getting something tangible out of a sale that big. And I would be looking for people to try to screw me over, even Goldman Sachs.

“what? how cool would it be to be the very first person born on mars?”
Hmm, if I was born on Mars I might be pissed about it when I saw how great earth would look on video and TV. In fact the thought of having a baby on Mars bring some serious moral issues with it. What if we realize they all are going to die from some upcoming event, like running out of air in a couple months, you would feel bad about the people who choose to go there, but what about a baby born there? Would be feel more compelled to rescue a baby or child that was born there?

From this link http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ispplan.pdf

Subsequent alerts may include notifications in the form of pop-ups or redirection
to a special page displaying the alert. Failure to respond to these alerts will lead
to additional steps designed to ensure that the account comes into compliance.
These steps, referred to as “Mitigation Measures,” might include, for example:
temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the
subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some
educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may
deem necessary to help resolve the matter. These steps will only be taken after
multiple alerts and a failure by the subscriber to respond. This system consists of
at least five alerts.

I do not see it in this artical, but from previous articles on this subject it made it sound like this process if different and instead of a email being sent you would get a browser pop up that would tell you the site you are going to, or the file being downloaded is copyrighted and illegal to download. Not sure how that would work for things like torrents, but I would asume you would get a notice when you go to the site that lists the torrent to download.