We dumped our DirecTV after a 2 year contract last year. We use a Roku and have a Netflix and Hulu Plus account. I also had an Amazon Prime account so that automatically gives us the free streaming that was added last year. But the content is largely the same as Netflix so we only really use Amazon when we actually want to buy something. We also subscribe to Mog for music.

That's about $22 per month and we can watch or listen to as much as we like. That's about $100 less than I used to pay for a premium satellite package. When we want something random, I play music with the Pandora / Slacker / or Shoutcast channels. When I want news, I just put on Democracy Now.

But it isn't all perfect. You need to be willing to give up some of the benefits of cable / satellite and really learn how to make the most of the Roku. There will be shows that you might want to watch that (legally) will not be available for another year or so. There are a lot of streaming channels that you can't even use yet without a cable subscription (like HBO Go). Amid the myriad of crap that is on TV, there are a handful of shows that you might miss. Ultimately, they make it to Netflix or Hulu but you just have to wait it out.

That said, if you can dig through these streaming services, you will find things that you like. Many things that you might wonder why you hadn't seen them when they'd aired on TV. There is a lot of value in the current streaming offerings but there are still a lot of things that are missing. It will be a few years before streaming TV becomes the norm and people forget about cable completely.

If you can learn to live and watch TV in a different way that you have, then Roku (or similar) can be a great alternative to traditional cable or satellite. If you rely heavily on TV then you may be really disappointed. I've considered the cord-cutting experience to be somewhat life changing. We don't spend much time in front of the TV anymore. But we still generally find quality material to whatch when we do. It can take some adjustment and experiementation, but can be worthwhile and a substantial money-saver.

What euphemism would you rather people use, milady?

(Remember the time when people didn't automatically assume they were qualified to speculate as to others' motivations, and found better things to do than bicker over semantics?)

It's within my "rights" to call you a simpering faggot with a Napolean complex, but that doesn't necessarily make doing so the right (and/or moral) thing to do.

Maybe you should quit jerking off over these purely semantic notions you seem to have acquired, pull your head out of your ass, take a good long look around you, and form a spontaneous conclusion or two, based not upon "given Deeply Held Value x and stimulus of situation y ergo z", but rather "situation y is bullshit, pure and simple, ergo it is wrong, and if Deeply Held Value x contradicts this basic notion, then Deeply Held Value x must itself be less than fully correct, full-stop, end of sentence, end of chapter".

Here's the thing. The government really doesn't like going to court.

Requesting extradition means that the Feds are dead serious about prosecution.

Plea bargains are much less common - and much less generous - in the federal system.

Foreign based intrusions on US military networks do not get the kid glove treatment - no matter how trivial.

Is that the entire basis for "it was 14-year-old Willow whose dignity was flung in the mud,"? It sounds to me like the joke was clearly a reference to the daughter that got knocked up.

The fact that that daughter wasn't even present at the game is hardly relevant, considering it's obviously a joke and not a credible claim.

Any real criticism that Sarah Palin has had about her daughters was, as far as I know, all concerning how her family values apparently included getting knocked up before marriage.

Simple:
when trying to remove the last character, print the character to the screen

The underlying quantum state *is* observable. Why wouldn't it be?

If you RTFA (and not even the paper is necessary for this), you will see that they are limited by the fidelity of their setup, ie. signal to noise. Hence, when they improve their apparatus, they will get more accurate results.

"The result sets are independent of each other."

Yes, that's why he could just multiply them like that.

The cynic in me thinks it will go this way: They make this announcement today. For the next few months, they do absolutely nothing. Then, they fabricate a bunch of data, and announce that they've determined that 99% of all P2P traffic is protected by copyright. Authorities cowtow, and those "three-strikes" laws get put in place (and enforced) everywhere.

It doesn't matter that the data was faked...they expressly stated that it would all be anonymised and not linked to any specific customer...so how can anyone prove it's been faked?

When you steal something from a store, you are necessarily depriving some other person of that particular item. If I walk into Best Buy and walk out with a stolen eMachine, that's an eMachine that somebody else will never have. Granted, I'm sure there are those who would classify depriving somebody of an eMachine as "good Samitarianship" - but you get my basic point.

It should be needless to say, but by downloading the game through piratebay, I am not directly depriving anybody of that game*. So the two cases are different enough that you can't really take a "good for the goose, good for the gander" approach to this.

* - I suppose one could make the argument that by grabbing a working CD key and registering it online, I may be depriving somebody of that CD key. It'd be a technicality, but this is slashdot, after all. What remains, though, is that the eMachine in the above example is a limited resource by its very nature. The CD-key is an artificially limited construct, and while perhaps similar, I still do not feel the two situations really equate.

Twist it around. By not pirating the game, you're putting some trust in Rockstar to attribute the shitty sales of the game to the copy protection, rather than one of the myriad "'old Hollywood' style" excuses of the past ("they didn't like it because the lead character was from Eastern Europe / because the packaging contained too much muave / because they were confused by the "open world" / because it was released on an odd-numbered day"). By not pirating the game, you're trusting Rockstar to get over the perhaps-well-intentioned but certainly-shallow advice of the suits. By not pirating the game, you're trusting the little guys of Rockstar to strike a blow for common sense, rather than go all Milgram on our asses. By not pirating the game, you're trusting Rockstar to give a fuck.

Why should we, the potential consumer, trust Rockstar, if that's how the majority of large game companies act?

Awesome, so Rockstar has the chance to get your $50, then have a shot at busting you for piracy as well? BONUS!

One man's "intellectual honesty" is another man's "simple mindedness". Just look at the hard-hitting "intellectual honesty" of the far-Right.