I know this won't help the OP now, but If you live in a disaster-prone area and you could ever be hours away from a sudden evac, consider setting up your hardware as if you were doing a mobile installation. 19" rack cabinets on casters, which can be quickly pushed to a truck. Note: just because you have wheels on your rack doesn't mean they're meant to be moved when loaded down with equipment. But the appropriate equipment. If you want to see something like this in action, go to a major televised sporting event a couple of days before the event starts and ask nicely to talk to the tech manager.

If "el-cheapo" refers to MVNO operators like Virgin, Boost, Page Plus, etc., they're cheaper, but they're just resellers of the big four. As soon as they're seen as a threat, their carriers will up their wholesale costs and MVNOs will be forced to charge rates matching the carriers they're reselling.

But why does this announcement surprise anyone? Let's not forget, the subscribers are not the customers -- the shareholders are. Until there's a carrier where those two parties are one and the same, the subscribers will always, always be on the losing end of the deal.

They're telling me to bring the ID, not that they're going to record the info from my ID. If they simply want to *look* at my ID, e.g. to verify that I'm the purchaser, that's fine with me. Entering that info into their database(s) is NOT fine with me.

Liberal return policies make customers more likely to buy items due to the perceived safety net of said policy, resulting in greater sales, driving down prices for all of us. Plus, restocking fees exist expressly to discourage those who "borrow" items. The only time ID should be requested is when the customer cannot present a receipt.

You're talking about using NTSC/PAL analog video here -- which is completely inadequate if you'd need to actually identify someone. Even if you're lucky enough to get the perps face(s) looking straight into the camera (which you won't -- the angle you're going to have the cameras at will make it more than likely their faces will be covered by a baseball cap or something), there just isn't enough going to be the resolution necessary to be able to ID them, especially with cheap cameras from DX over long runs of cat5. Maybe IP cameras at higher resolution would be better? Just don't cheap out with low end toys (e.g. the Dlink DCS-903L I have has disappointed me).

Best Buy recently bought MindShift, a managed service provider (e.g. mail hosting, "cloud" services, etc.). I promptly "shifted" myself away from them -- no way in hell I'm going to let Best Buy host my email! But this just goes to show you that they're going to be making themselves over as a services company. It's only a matter of time before they purchase Sprint or T-Mobile.

B&H's salesforce won't give you the time of day until you're ready to spend $5k+. I could barely get them to point me to the right end of the store, never mind answer questions I had, when I was after a $100 item. I can only imagine they'd simply stop talking to you and walk away if you mentioned the words "price match". Personally, I'll never do business with them again. They are the definition of a pre-sales showroom in my book.

Consider holding the video conference using the lowest-common-denominator, e.g. Skype, but having the remote party also record it locally using a higher quality codec with standalone video recording app. Once the interview is over, have the remote party compress the file (Handbrake is easy to use, even for non-tech minded) and transfer it using conventional means (FTP, etc.). Though this might mean you'd need two cameras at the remote location (unless you have a way to split a video device to two different apps), it will eliminate network bottlenecks, latency, and resolution constraints.

I was thinking the same thing about Speex, but...
From Wikipedia:

Granted, It's not x86, and the cpu is significantly slower, but with h.264 accelerated decoding, HDMI, small footprint, low cost ($25/$35 for the board!), a focus on Linux support (and therefore, hopefully, robust drivers), and boot from SD, the Raspberry Pi should be able to put a serious dent into Via's HTPC market. It has a LOT of potential, and this is only a 1st gen device.

Let IBM's Watson analyze the interview for a while to come out with the killer app for the iPhone 5: Stevie. It's just like Siri, expect now YOU'RE the personal assistant.

So if it's the oxygen we need to worry about destroying our optical media, how about storing discs in a case which we can fill with something that's not oxygen? Better yet, a light-tight, insulated container with a mechanism to replace the oxygen with, what, nitrogen or something. Would this solve the problem of degrading DVDs?

Zimbra is owned by VMWare now. They have a history of providing free versions of their software (e.g. VMWare Player, ESXi free), so that's a good sign. But I still feel that it's a strange fit.

No kidding. Just this morning I was sending an email to my boss, and sure enough it couldn't find "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" in the dictionary. What a piece of junk!