Cable providers will simply bundle and resell subscriptions to these services (along with the live channel feeds) at a "discount" (compared to buying them individually, not compared to actual value for what you use), and link your Comcast/Charter/Cox account to your HBO GO/etc. accounts seamlessly.

It's already happening. Just one of dozens of recent, disturbing datapoints to crop up in the last few weeks, but free content on thewb (and elsewhere) is diminishing. For example, the first 10 episodes of Fringe Season one went away this weekend...probably doesn't matter to most, but since I was out of the country when the series started, and just happened to discover it a couple of weeks ago, and since they're not available on Netflix, I'm either going to have to skip episodes 3-10, or pay for them at an inflated rate / episode on the iStore or Amazon (or even worse inflated rate on Vudu), or buy the blue-ray set for season one (which ironically is cheaper than the streaming rental on a per episode basis).

Less and less content available via a general web interface ... first steps toward the crappy iStore model of shit, where you download the WB or Fox app, or worse, have to download the Fringe app to watch the show. I curse Apples contribution to this ... the endgame is a walled garden worse in every respect from the one that existed with CompuServer, GEnie, AOL, and other dialup services before the Internet became common.

Welcome to your lobotimized world. Not government or big brother, but big content Apple, all driven by megalomaniacal monopolists that make Bill Gates look positively benign in comparison.

I think in some ways the UK police are as bad as anything the US can bring. Note the OC mentions kettling. This is a very distinctly European (and especially London/British) police behaviour and terminology.

You know, having lived for years in both countries, and being a dual citizen, I can unequivocally say that the police in the UK are nowhere near as bad as the police in the US.

Not even in the same universe, much less the same ballpark.

Yes, UK police use kettling, yes, they shoved a newspaper man to the ground (but did not subsequently beat to within an inch of his life) whose internal injuries from the later killed him, yes, they are imperfect, and can be as myopic or provincial as anyone. Yes, the chief of police can get buy for years with flagrant corruption and keep his post long past his sell-by date by deftly playing the ethnicity card over and over again, until a victim of his own ethnicity finally outs him in court, yes to all of that.

But that pales in comparison to the harshness of the US police that is part and parcel of daily policing here. Unarmed people here are shot dead in their own home, with alarming regularity, and the police get away with it by saying they 'thought he was armed.' There was just another instance of that in the tri-state area this past week, and dozens more in the 18 months or so I've been back in the states.

The UK police can be criticized plenty, but until you've lived on this side of the pond, you really don't know how good you have it. Your police are positively humane and polite, sometimes to a fault, by comparison.

First, put together a resume of your marketable skills. Then contact recruiters in the region you would like to work in (they can often be found via LinkedIn, careerbuilder, etc.). Research potential employers. Do not go into interviews to discuss "open source" or your philosophy, go in with the intention of leveraging your skills to deliver real value to the organization.

"Open Source" covers a lot of area. Are you a C/C++/Java/Whatever language-de-jour developer, a system administrator, a web developer, a network engineer, ... ?

I've been everything from a developer to a sysadmin, an engineer to an architect. While I have worked in environments heavily biased toward Linux and Open Source (management burned by too many orphaned 3rd party libraries and apps), in my experience most environments are heterogenous, and will have some combination of Windows & Linux Desktops, Linux and Solaris servers, with a smattering of Windows servers. One environment I've worked in was heavily biased toward Windows on the server side, and while they lived to regret it, they did not change direction as a result. The reality is you cannot dictate platforms, and your recommendations should be driven by value to the business, not personal bias or philosophy, however galling you may at times find that to be.

Ja, genau das glauben wir. Und morgen glauben wir es noch. Oder wir werden es glauben, falls wir noch klug genug sind, ueberhaupt was zu glauben. :-)

Essentially every point in history, with a significant uptick since the late 70s. Numerous studies have documented this, not that it's really needed, since all you have to do is turn on a radio or television to see the demaguagary against non-believers in general and athiests in particular. See for example this and this as but two of many, many studies on the subject.

It is an axiom that we must "respect" other religions, no matter how absurd or disrespectful they are to others. In other words, it is not considered politically correct to go after Christianity, or most other religions for that matter. No such tolerance of athiests exists however, even though the religious will, with the very next breath, try to define athiesm--the absence of a belief in one or more gods--as a religion in its own right! Classic double-think.

Except Republicans, conservatives, Christians, people who respect the constitution. They're all free game.

Oh, cry me a river. If you think the last 6 or 8 years have been bad for the right, try the last 30 as a liberal, socialist, or (the group most discriminated against of all) an athiest. Republicans and evangelists got a free ride for 20+ years spewing hate but receiving mostly reason and thoughtful discussion in return. Eventually they abused their position too much, and triggered a small taste back of what they've been dishing out since the early 80s, if not earlier.

Hating anyone on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, political stance, etc. is wrong, but for you to wax self-righteous over the backlash against the group most responsible for delivering such hatred (c.f. just about any talk radio, not to mention fox or the politicians themselves, e.g. Mr Frothy Mix Santorum).

In short, Republicans, conservative, and Christians like to dish it out in droves, but can't take the heat when they get even a tiny percentage of it back. As for your disingenous "respect the constitution" crap, they only respect their one narrow interpretation of the constitution, no one else's. Not unlike certain organizations who interpreted the bible one narrow way, and fought a hundred-year war to burn everyone else as heretics.

The very act of providing copyrighted material for download without permission from the copyright holders is prima facie copyright violation in almost all legal systems that have copyright systems in place.

The pirate bay has done none of those things.

This argument that you and some others are making is stupid on its face, and frankly dishonest as well, the equivalent of a looter saying "Oh yeah? Prove that this stuff isn't mine".

Actually, your comment is what is stupid (or at least ignorant, as in, completely uninformed). The pirate bay posts links to 3rd party sites that may or may not contain downloadable content that is being made available in violation of copyright.

If you are going to target the pirate bay, you must also target Bing, Google, and every other search engine out there. It's a dangerous precedent, one that threatens the entire Internet as we know it.

And I say that as one who (1) does not use the pirate bay (but has looked at the site to see what the fuss is about), (2) creates copyrighted material myself, and (3) values both the Internet and freedom of expression it facilitates over short-term tactical moves trying to reduce copyright violations. Even if they were effective the price in terms of our freedoms wouldn't be worth it. The fact that they are so ineffective as to be laughable, shows either the stupidity of those promoting such methods or, more likely, as these people are generally not stupid, the underlying agenda they are pursuing that has nothing to do with copyright violations and everything to do with suppressing speach within western democracies while maintaining plausible deniability with the wider, uninformed public. ACTA and SOPA are the logical next steps in this progression, at which point it won't be irresponsible sites like the pirate bay that are at risk, but any site, anywhere, where anyone says anything the content cartels don't like, including probably just about any criticism of copyright law, present or future (or for that matter, anything any ruling government or influencial corporate cartel doesn't like).

It's nearly game over dude. Live in denial at your own risk.

Having lived in Germany, England, and the United States, and used all three, I can say that while the NHS may not be perfect, it is lightyears ahead of even top-end private care in the United States (which I've also used). The UK would be complete fools to follow the US model (as some conservatives in government seem to want). People complain about 2-week waits in the UK for elective non-life threatening procedures, while in the US somone in my family had to wait 6-8 weeks for an angiogram after failing an EKG and having acute symptoms of heart trouble, and another waited 5 weeks for an appointment with a neurologist after having what may have been a mild embolism, complete with excruciating headache and shockingly low body temperature.

Americans who think our "free market ueber alles" system works better than Germany's strictly regulated market, or the UK's (or France's, or Canada's) are either idealogically blinded idiots, or have never taken a serious look beyond our borders. And I say that as one with a "cadallac" level of insurance in the US, which pales compared to what we had with the NHS when we lived in England (and what I received from the German system when I lived there).

So you're a teenager?

Not everyone has experience hiring or seeking jobs in international markets. In some parts of the world, such as Canada and the US, the term resume is used to the exclusion of CV, in other parts of the world (e.g. the UK) it's the other way around. Plenty of people working and living in one market will not have heard or recognize the term used in the other. Particularly if they are not in management or HR.

If you fight against Sopa, you fight against Sinde. At this moment united states it's still strong (China and other countries are coming), but I hope you can imagine why is there such a strong anti-American feeling in a lot of people of Spain. I personally don't, but this ingerence in our liberties may lead to change my mind.

Hate our government as much as you like. We do. And we're as much its slaves as you or anyone else.

And yes, I still vote anyway, because as bad as things are, if the other crowd gets in, they can get a whole hell of a lot worse. And probably will, if not in this election cycle, then in the next, or the one after that. You are watching the final decline of a modern day empire, and it isn't pretty for anyone, on either side of the frontier.