It is also nearly impossible for any equipment of any origin to deliver descent content given the crap that is the available content. We have an HD setup, but I do not recall watching any content in HD other than the demos, cos there is nothing we want to watch! We have just cancelled our Sky subscription cos we were not actually watching anything on Sky.

Some people just don't want to watch Hollywood stuff or the Bellisario family products, or sport. It seems there isn't much else, and if there is, its in plain old PAL anyway.

Point of order, the annual average humidity is lower in Dallas than it is in LA.

A human adult with average vision can't distinguish anything much above current HD resolutions from normal TV viewing distances at typical physical TV screen dimensions either. This is one of the big problems all the businesses creating flashy new 4K TVs haven't quite worked out how to deal with yet.

Meanwhile, plenty of people still have DVD players rather than Blu-Ray, because even moving to HD doesn't make much difference for a lot of material in practice, and the old "get them to buy Star Wars for the seventeenth time two step" has run out of music.

Then you have to consider the rise of on-line sources and the generally poor experience of the physical disc systems. Most of that poor experience isn't actually because of swapping discs. It's because of all the other silly things that all legally manufactured players are required using tortured legal tricks to implement, preventing otherwise obvious improvements in competing devices such as skipping to the !~%# movie straight away.

So personally, I'm expecting 4K and other very high resolution formats to flop outside of niche markets, like say luxury home cinema systems with a projector and a screen several metres across. Even where they do get adopted, I'm expecting the market to demand less messy distribution, which would make any sort of disc-based successor to Blu-Ray even less likely to succeed.

The gag is that the seriously wealthy aren't worried about Obama's new tax policies, because they can afford a tax lawyer who can prove that they earn nothing.

If you haven't been paying attention for the past few millennia, the purpose of government is to transfer resources from the masses to the few. I know, they don't tell that to the masses in their indoctrination centers, but if you look at all available evidence, it's pretty clear.

Sure, they throw a few bones to the dogs to make sure they don't turn on their owners, but look at every available trend and analyze the data.

Let's just enforce existing laws and get dangerous drivers off the road.

Correct.

THERE IS NO RIGHT TO DRIVE.

Stop acting brainwashed. The Right to Travel is a fundamental human right. Go check out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that your government probably signed on to if you don't believe me. It does not mean that humans have a right to crawl through the muddy forests to get from place to place - it means all humans have the fundamental right to travel in the common manner of a society. Whether that's a donkey cart or an SUV with DVD Entertainment System or an Airbus A340.

There are even places where automobile travel is the only allowed method of travel - we have an area around here where the local road was taken over for an Interstate and the only way in or out is an exit.

If you are a dangerous driver you can and should be taken off the road.

Correct. There's a mechanism for that.

No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

The Right to Travel is a fundamental liberty and we have a way to deal with taking away liberties for the protection of society. It doesn't require parroting some bullshit statist rhetoric your phys ed. teacher told you in high school.

Now your insurance company - they ought to have a lot to say about your competency as a driver. Sadly, they almost never do, except in aggregate, such as very high insurance rates in MA where the passing grade on a DMV test is 60%. You ought to be able to save $400 a year if you score 95% or better, but no ... that wouldn't be _fair_. Regulators gotta regulate, whether it does harm or not, so everybody pays high rates and the incentives to improve are eliminated.

Long before those things ever existed people weren't buying SkyMall's useless, overpriced crap.

Obviously false, since people don't stay in a business for decades just to piss away money.

However, the economy is the worst it's been in 60 years (vis-a-vis age-discounted labor participation rates) and so there's just less of a pool of money to waste.

Skymall took some cream off the top but we're down to whole milk now.

Smartphones might have helped it along, but there are people posting here about reading the catalog for entertainment because they couldn't figure out how to bring a book with them on the airplane. Those people aren't planning ahead on their phones either.

And if anyone thinks they should be, let them and their loved ones be the first victims, for "their cause".

That's certainly a risk. Not a huge one, but a real one. One in a million is not zero.

This is why freedom requires courage and bravery, and an acceptance of personal responsibility. To be sure, such concepts are anathema to many individuals.

Then perhaps the rest of us in the world can then live better lives.

You mean to say 'safer' lives. A life without freedom is never better for people who value it.

It may be that we'll all be happiest if people who do not value freedom separate themselves from those who do. If only there were a Natural Rights Republic somewhere that the freedom-loving people could flock to ... maybe China will take those who want a centrally-planned society.

Got stuck with Vipre at work for a few years. It was nothing short of a complete disaster, to the point where on some systems, it just had to be shut down completely so the systems would function. Combined with the latest ratings from AV Comparatives (lol @ 88% detection rate and huge false positives) and I'd say nobody should ever run that garbage. It's truly terrible.

ESET's NOD32 is good and Kaspersky is very good. Nothing else has been consistently good for quite a while.

Sadly, this seems to be the case for many recent sexual harassment cases, which is bad firstly because it turns innocent (not necessarily morally good, but criminally innocent) people into victims of the system and secondly because it muddies the water when it comes to real cases. Too many of these "angry ex-lover" cases, and people will tend to believe that actual cases are of the same kind.

You can feel very trapped in relationships, ask any of your married friends. ;-)

Seriously, over the Internet, when it's not really an actual relationship - yes, she does have attachment issues.

Psych problem or not, when you're sending nude pictures to someone who's not your significant other, and you're not in the sex industry, then you should realize that something is not as it should be.

I only remember Raiders of the Lost Ark. What are these "Indiana Jones" titles you speak of?

OK, lets reword it:

You are free to work at Disney without a vaccination, but if you infect a bunch of kids, you agree to indemnify Disney against the inevitable lawsuits for tens of thousands of wrongful deaths, when those you infect, go on to infect other unvaccinated morons across the world.

Tell that to the millions of unvaccinated in the world, there simply is no mass extinction from measles. You are fear mongering.

You are the classic moron. There may be no mass extinction from measles right now, but before there was vaccination, huge numbers of people died or were permanently damaged by it annually.

You are relatively safe for the monent, because the vast majority of people are vaccinated, even in developing countries, except where stupid CIA trickery has discredited the health profession. Don't expect that to last if you manage to persuade many people with your stupid ideas.

which due to tachyon flux has evolved into a catch-phrase spewing mascot with the power to float just out of reach.

How many tabs did you take?

A lot of these guys get caught because they open their yaps. A lot of us old timers from the early days never got caught. When the 414's were taken down I know several people that avoided it simply because they actually listened to the "trust no one" mantra. Just like how the guys that took over WTTW never got caught because they did NOT open their big fat mouths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

So a tip from someone old..... earning "cred" is for noobs. Keep your mouth shut and you really reduce the risk of getting caught.