Sports is what kept me on satellite for years. About 2 months ago I said enough - added Netflix, a Roku3, and a HD antenna. Borrowing a login of a friend so I can stream some of my sports. There is enough other stuff to keep me busy if I can't get a specific game.

The cable companies know live sports is a game changer, so they likely work it into the contracts that the networks have to go through them, and any streaming needs to include a cable/satellite login. One day (hopefully soon) some of the leagues/networks/conferences will see that some percentage of US households don't have paid TV programming, and that they have a new target audience ready to directly pay them lots of money to get streaming live sports. What percentage of households need to cut the cord for this to be lucrative enough to outweigh the potential flood of more people cutting the cord when this happens? That is the magic question. HBO recently saw the light... hopefully others do soon.

Indeed... I believe the count is 4 our of the last 8 Illinois Governors (dating back to the '60's) ended up in federal prison. I'm amazed they found anyone to run for the office last year - it's like a 50/50 chance if you are elected that you will end up incarcerated. And that's just counting the ones doing stuff openly enough to get caught...

So... a micro-machine sized Delorean? Or a 1:20 scale model of the TARDIS?

This is the one and only reason I still pay for TV. Virtually all my regularly scheduled programming I watch comes from the internet, and have for many years. But between the NFL, NHL, MLB, and NCAA basketball/football, the only way to get more than a couple games a year via broadcast networks is to pay for cable/satellite. For the teams I watch, I would need online access to the ESPNs, WGN, Comcast Sports Net, NBC Sports Network, Big Ten Network, and the broadcast networks to see 90% of the games. For those networks that do have online components, you need to login with your cable/satellite account to get access. Even if a network or two added an online only subscription, I would still be stuck with the rest of the networks.

It always amazes me how obnoxious TV is when I actually watch sporting events live, since that is the only content I watch on my TV that still has ads. Maybe one day I'll just decide it's not worth it and stop watching sports.

I thought SimCity was about building cities, then demolishing them.

FTFY

Depends on how you define streaming. If streaming only includes stuff arriving from the internets (netflix, amazon, pandora, hulu, etc.) then maybe 10% - mostly audio. If streaming includes playing back audio/video from my local NAS box, then it probably around 90%. Only a small amount of my media is played back on the same device that it is stored on, but very little arrives from the cloud.

I tried something like this in the past. I had a root phrase I used, and added some other things like certain characters from the URL at the beginning/end. A few common issues with this. Say you want to use the last character in the company name as a modifier for your base password. For Dish Network, do you use h for the last character of the URL (dish.com) or k for the full name (dish network)? Some of the sites I have accounts with have an obscure, seemingly unrelated website/URL for their billing and such. Do you use that URL or the company name you think of typically? If you use the URL, what if they change the URL on you (say from dish.com to dishnetwork.com)? Also, there are outliers. Some require capitals, lowercase, numbers, and/or symbols. Some don't allow symbols. Some have minimum character lengths, others have maximums. If one of them requires a password change quarterly, do you change the root phrase and change all your passwords 4 times a year? This sounds good, but in practice it can be problematic when dealing with dozens of passwords.

Have you seen Illinois (or many other states for that matter)? Most have no idea what a balanced budget is. Here's an excerpt from some random google search:

Top 5 State Debt Per Capita
Alaska $40,714
Hawaii $33,111
Connecticut $31,298
Ohio $27,836
Illinois $24,959

Personally I find Illinois a bit amazing, since it is also the fifth most populous state based on the 2010 census.

So in a few years referring to a women as a "material girl" could be considered an ethnic slur?

Reminds me of zip drives... hey - we've got a new 750MB model! By that time the market had already moved on to CDs and USB flash drives.

Pretty much all of my audio, pictures, and video lives on my NAS. It almost seems quaint when I have to fire up the DVD player.

Modern HVAC controls are much more than thermostats. There are typically resets for supply air temperatures based on outside air conditions and time of day, and boiler water temperature setbacks based outside air conditions. Fan and pump systems can get feedback from the positions of dampers/valves throughout the system, and the VFD can slow down to minimize energy usage based on the feedback from the worst-case zone in real time. The list goes on, but all of this energy optimizing relies on lots of real time data, and the easiest way to do this is on an ethernet network.

Many large clients, particularly those with multiple locations like school districts or big box stores will hire a controls company, and pay them a bunch of money to save a target dollar amount or percentage amount on their energy costs. This is typically done through an online interface to monitor multiple locations simultaneously, and keep them all operating the same way. The user doesn't typically care how the contractor sets this up, they just want the savings. The cheaper the contractor can get to the target the more money he makes, which can lead to corner cutting by the contractor.

Some people (government, some Universities) tend to make the controls sub-contractors install a second, independent TCP/IP network for their equipment. But this security comes at a cost premium, particularly in existing buildings that already have a network in place for their computer needs. Most places I have seen don't bother with this due to the cost and the general availability of network connections in today's world. If the security is setup properly this shouldn't be needed, but we all know how often proper security is overlooked.