Slashdot's getting punk'd?

Wondering if someone is punking the internets.

Not really. The blog post on thehill.com is equally deficient in citations. I'm sorry, I'm not buying this one until I hear it from original sources There's nothing in the House proceedings about it, nor has Cantor gone on record with it.

Glad I'm not the only one that thought that.

Naming your company something that sounds like a failed Amway rebranding: FAIL #1.
Not checking to see who was using that brand name as a twitter ID: FAIL #2.

I'm guessing that the CFO recommended spinning off the DVD business ASAP before it bled the entire company dry. I give it 9-12 months.

May need to iron out the kinks a little and fine-tune the dollar amount, but conceptually, this is a workable idea (and surprisingly so, coming from the music business!). We've been screaming at the music industry to come up with ideas to allow them to adapt to and survive the new internet reality, and they're delivering on it.

It's not unlike the monthly license paid by commercial entities to Muzak and its ilk for playing background music in public locations or some of the licenses paid by churches for displaying lyrics.

The benefit to end users is the get-out-of-jail-free card for downloading all manner of content. Conceivably, on a package that includes the music/video license, QoS tagging could be implemented to improve the experience, providing the value add to the user. On the flip side, the benefit to an ISP is that they wouldn't have as much administrative headache of dealing with the copyright cops for that class of users. If ISPs have a way of identifying these sorts of users to content providers like Pandora, those content providers could provide a different tier of service, since they wouldn't have licensing to deal with either.

I think it's certainly an idea worth exploring and refining.

Kansas City Power & Light has been doing this since 2007.

USAA has allowed this from their iPhone app for over a year now as well.

I'll second the Xirrus arrays. They're absolutely amazing for high-density wireless. If it's a one-time event, you may be able to get Xirrus to sponsor it by providing the gear, especially if it's a gathering of geeks.

Traveling Wave Tubes have been a mainstay of microwave communications and radar systems for the better part of a century. They're a very efficient way of amplifying microwave signals to the very high power levels needed to cross long distances.

"f you blow away the 16th Amendment [usconstitution.net], you can repeal the entire IRS, and the cell phone tax en piss-ant."

While taking a leak??? Really?

I'm pretty sure that you can't repeal constitutional amendments in the men's room.

What did you REALLY mean?