The doctor has me on a severely restricted diet you insensitive clod!

I wish I had mod points. The parent is spot on.

What is effectively "more secure" is dependent on many, many variables that, ideally, should be mindfully evaluated by the end-user in real-time (and this includes accepting user-error as a risk--even the best fuck up on occasion).

Why be redundant? You already mentioned the source was Wikipedia.

1.42 stop bits? No wonder it was so slow, the poor computers were confused.

"They've probably got cable modems, which they'd have to give up if they got rid of cable.."

This is plain FUD! I have a cable modem with no cable television and have had it that way for years. Maybe some companies force a bundling but many do not. I'm not even sure that would be legal in the U.S. (but IANAL so maybe it is--still it's a bad business decision).

Sure I would get a discount if I bundled the two but I have had no interest in cable TV since the mid to late nineties. For a while I preferred satellite because the quality was much better (inexplicably--in theory the cable companies have a much larger tube into my house) but eventually the cost became a burden as I found myself going online more and more for content. Eventually the only thing I ever watched on satellite was NASCAR races (let the flaming begin) and there are only 12 races a year not shown for free in HD over-the-air. This worked out to be around $30-40 USD a race which isn't worth it (seriously, I got to where I never watched anything else on satellite).

These days I prefer a combination of Hulu and TVTorrents.com. My "television" is now a second display for my PC.

So, your issue is that their player doesn't do 720p content smoothly on your setup? What I want to know is where is this 720p content on Hulu? The best I can find is 480p and it works just fine for me.

Nice theory but it was persistent across reboots. This was a filesystem issue hands down.

I've been an SA for long enough (and had been way back then too--I'm no spring chicken) to know about stale file handles. Thanks for you advice though.

The rep didn't need convincing that this was causing us problems. His argument was simply that it was working as the code was written and thus the problem was ours and not the vendor's. He sure as hell had that right.