They can't do all of Doctor Who, the BBC literally doesn't have all of it anymore due to a series of purges of their collection of old content in the seventies.

If you're into British TV and are willing to try sitcom-type dramas, look at As Time Goes By. Judi Dench is at the top of her game and it's very amusing, and not nearly so implausible as storylines go as many other sitcoms. I also recommend the Granada Television version of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, the vast majority of the episodes are quite good. We've also found a liking for New Tricks, Inspector Morse, and Inspector Lewis.

You can have my Laserdiscs when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!

Seriously, we collect media and have for a very, very long time. We have about 800 titles on VHS, close to 550 on Laserdisc, several hundred DVD, and probably 80 Blu-Ray. We also have a smattering of S-VHS stuff that I recorded from broadcast that we occasionally watch. We're somewhere over 1500 titles once redundancies across formats are eliminated from consideration.

As much as I wish that I could simply subscribe to a service to get all of the content that I want, there are too many conditional things going on, like a content provider having content seasonally blocked (recent issues with Grinch come to mind) and having titles withdrawn after awhile. Sorry, I want to be able to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, with no revocation or special conditions upon my watching. Similar reasons are why I'm hesitant to hostile to medialess books and music. I don't want my music collection to go away simply on account of a hard disk drive failure (a'la iTunes) or for my books to go away because the reader croaked, and I don't want a company being able to censor me (like the irony in the withdrawal of 1984 from readers) because of some company-to-company dispute.

You compare certificates as-recorded by your computer with certificates retrieved by third-party sites. If they don't match then there's probably this kind of thing going on.

How about Dance, Monkey Boy!

It's not "the only way". And people on here should really have the knowledge to secure their networks that does not rely on some cheap piece of foreign junk where they spend longer designing the case to look snazzy in your living room than they did writing the firmware containing the firewall.

You know, I tried a commercial-grade NAT-capable router, designed with two WAN ports with the ability to do routing to different networks, or failover, or load balancing, and the thing had a firmware programming error that made it fail to handle full-motion video streaming correctly. By contrast, the "piece of junk" that I still use has no problem with routing-through any content that I choose to download.

Why not freshman? Why not even earlier? I learned how to do cleaning and cooking by the age of 8. Long before Home Ec was offered in my middle school (I took wood shop, instead, but I had already learned a lot of that before, too).

Because normally students only get one semester or one year of Home Ec, and since after that year it's most needed for real, it makes sense to teach it then put it into immediate practice. If one doesn't put it into practice then one tends to forget, and as freshmen, sophomores, or even juniors, students have a lot of opportunity to fall into previous practices (ie Mom and Dad do it) as opposed to being forced to continue the new ones.

No, it isn't. To use your car analogy, computer programming is more like designing the engine or the transmission or brakes or some other component of the vehicle. Learning how to install software and how to maintain the operating system, reading the logs, and uninstalling or reinstalling software or installing software updates is analogous to understanding the "clunk-clunk-clunk".

It's also wise to remember how Apple has fared over the years when it attempted to follow mainstream practices. Those years were usually when Steve Jobs wasn't involved and the management attempted to follow the business practices of others. On ended up with a company that tried to be SGI and Packard Bell at the same time, with predicable results.

Cook appears to have learned at least a bit of the lessons of those eras. He doesn't have to do what the alleged professionals in the business community claim to be best practices; Apple has made a lot more money over the last fifteen or so years by bucking the trend and continually changing. Don't get me wrong, my ownership of Apple products is limited to a few castoff keyboards and I'm certainly no fanboi, but they've managed to build a successful, profitable company by doing what their customers, not necessarily the business community, wants.

It's kind of like how Costco is doing well, by paying employees actual living wages so those employees work at the stores until retirement as opposed to being bled dry by corporate interest. Costco still makes money, Costco is popular among customers, employees are happy, owners are happy, and things will continue to be long-term stable for them.

If Cook manages to keep Apple going strong in the wake of Jobs' demise then this will be interesting to watch.

Home economics is about learning your way around the kitchen, basic financial stuff, etc, so you don't crash and burn immediately after 18. The equivalent to home economics isn't programming, but basic computer literacy.

And I believe everyone should take some form of home economics, and that it should not be a freshman class, but a senior one. One needs to be able to cook, clean one's living space, take care of one's clothes, handle one's personal finances, pay one's taxes, and do all sorts of other personal-life tasks. I did not take Home Ec, and I struggle with cooking and keeping my house clean and organized. My wife describes as a college student having to teach other college students how to do their own laundry when they got to the dorms and apparently never learned that basic skill. This was at friggin' MIT. They were book-smart and real-life stupid.

By contrast, computer programming is useful to only a fairly small subset of the population of even computing professionals, let alone humanity-at-large. Computer repair/desktop support technicians, network infrastructure specialists, network engineers, and even many application-support specialists won't benefit particularly from in-depth programming knowledge as they won't really need much programming in those roles, and the programming that they need can probably be gleaned from O'Reilly books and other sources. I certainly don't need a semester or year of programming in order to do shell scripting.

Basic computer usage skills do make sense, but those developing the curriculum will have to be very responsive to industry changes, which makes it difficult for such an education to be terribly practical in this era of the commoditization of computers and electronics.

For great justice

Isn't this similar to keeping COBOL code bases going as they still work even though the really good developers are dying off? At least with a codebase when things break there isn't an international emergency...

The air traffic control system used at international airports in the United States begs to differ...

Would a gaggle or reactors work better?

How about a murder of reactors?

First, they came for my tacos. But I did not speak out because I was not a taco...

Then they came for my tequila drinks. But I did not speak out because I was not a tequila drink...

Did you mean JSF, not JSOC?

The A-10 is on the chopping block, as is the U2. What I don't get about the elimination of those is that one has proven itself extremely cost-effective in close-quarters ground support (as in using bullets, rather than relying on rockets and bombs) and extremely durable when taking fire (flying back with a wing missing) and the other has been extremely effective for quick-turnaround intelligence.

Both programs are effective in the kind of engagements that we've found ourselves in during the last couple of decades and both are paid for. It's maintenance only, as opposed to development.

Far fewer gaming options on linux

How do you get Quake 3 to run on Linux, anyway?