Questlove. Musician, drummer for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon house band. Relevant here because he appeared in a commercial for the Kin.

Occasionally, Netflix has newer stuff via special deals with the distributors (Whitest Kids You Know did this for their newest season, for example). Mostly, though, no: it's best used for older titles, as it's rare to find an instant watch show or movie not also out on DVD.

So yes, I supplement Netflix with Hulu to watch new stuff. But that's the thing, here: Hulu Plus doesn't affect new shows, based on their press release. It's just to watch the older stuff. Hell, two of their own examples - Buffy and the X-Files - are already on Netflix instant watch, with the other one being available on DVD. So for a dollar more per month, you get roughly the same content as Netflix, plus ads, without the DVD rental part. I can't fathom how they intend to compete.

I can imagine you getting a papercut and going to the emergency room, screaming "it's the beginning of the end!"

So, what's your proposed solution to this grand miscarriage of justice?

a) Only agree to settle out of court for a higher amount
b) Insist every case go to court, no mediation accepted

OF COURSE they offer to accept lower damages if they don't have to go to court. That's not extortion; that's common sense. Who would settle for less than their court payments?

If the individuals being sued had simply downloaded the file from an FTP site or something, I'd agree. Stealing the movie from a store cost them whatever lost sales it represents (and yes, I agree that this is a smaller than 100% percentage) plus the physical cost of the disc, whereas downloading it was merely the not-quite-one-copy lost sale. However, and this is important, they uploaded the movie to others. If you insist on using increasingly outdated brick-and-mortar analogies, it's like stealing the movie, making a hundred copies, and then getting all your friends together to stand on every street corner and hand out free copies.

The people who argued "it's not thievery, it's copyright infringement" throughout the RIAA's antics were right, but doesn't always work in your favor: a bitTorrent download is many times more damaging than a stolen copy.

*sigh* So when they went after file sharing sites, people whined that they were just facilitators, not themselves guilty of anything. Fair enough. "Punish the actual infringers!" slashdot cried.

Then they went after the programs and tools themselves, and people whined that they were just tools, and had perfectly legitimate uses. Very reasonable. "Punish the actual infringers!" slashdot cried.

Now they're flat-out targeting people who actively infringe copyrights. These people are BREAKING THE LAW, and more importantly, doing something immoral: they are taking someone else's work and not merely using it without due compensation, but helping others to do the same.

I'm sorry, I'm out of excuses; I'm out of pity. We won the important war. BitTorrent thrives as a legitimate tool, and merely linking to something bad is usually not itself cause for litigation. My moral outrage stops at those caught red-handed, hands thoroughly lodged in the cookie jar (and no, "someone else could have being using their personal IP or broke into their house and used their computer" is a flimsy argument at best.)

After years of reading what passes for writing on blogs and forums, I'm not at all surprised to discover that the public actually finds punctuation offensive.

I had a similar but more frustrating experience about a month ago when a storm took our connection down for about a day. After the loooong timeout period, I was given a dialogue box option to "retry" or "go offline." I selected, of course, "go offline," but after another long delay, I was told the action "could not be completed without a network connection" and for more information, I was to "visit the following webpage" (HA!).

Complaining about this issue brought a lot of fanboy cries of it not "working as intended" and "to be fixed in a patch," but some searching revealed it's also not an unusual or new problem. Indeed, I can find bug reports of this exact issue so old that the pessimist in me wonders if this "flaw" is purposeful. They've got the best of both worlds: their fans reply to all complaints about the service with "you can always use offline mode," and meanwhile, there IS no functioning offline mode due to a "bug." Anyone who tests it to "prove" you're wrong will have it work because they actually have a working network connection.

Short story shorter: despite Valve's claims to the contrary, if your connection dies, Steam may very well flat-out refuse to start.

You are presented with evidence of a possible global catastrophe in a few hours. You can do one of two things:

1) Quit what you're doing, go eat a pizza or something for your last hours alive. Maybe spend it with your loved ones.
2) Take advantage of the panic to make a profit.

Now, there are two possibilities here, resulting in four outcomes: a) the world ends, b) the world doesn't end.

1a) You're dead. Who cares?
2a) You're dead. Who cares?
1b) You had some pizza, kissed your kids, but hope they don't want to go to college 'cause you're broke.
2b) I'M RICH, BITCH!

So option 1 has outcome of x% dead, y% poor. Option 2 has outcome of x% dead, y% rich. Clearly, option 2 is the better solution.

(Yes, I know many will opt for option 1 anyway, particularly the "spend time with family" part. These people don't work on Wall Street.)

^^^ People who responded to my above post saying that this would never happen, behold: the mindset of a parent. THIS is the kind of thought process that would, given half a chance and with the best of intentions, vote the Internet into a bland, filtered, kid-friendly paste.

I'd much sooner accept that, though of course it opens up a bit of a can of worms with the "who filters," "who pays for the people filtering," "what criteria do they use," etc. After all, a whitelist is the only really effective form of filtering (aside from, of course, a parent in the room).

And if you think ISP's are going to do this filtering, you're out of your mind. What are they going to do? Start requiring you to register your children with your ISP?

If they're smart - and I'm not so certain they are, particularly in Australia - no, the ISP's won't be the ones doing this. Nor do I think anyone will have the balls to tell you what you can and can't filter in your own home, directly.

BUT: If a social worker is ever given reason to visit your home, even for a false complaint, how will "doesn't block XXX sites on house computer" look on their report? How many Fox News reports on people losing their kids because they "let them watch smut" before parents get scared? With the possibility of losing your children in play, how many parents will block .xxx "voluntarily?"

And even if ISPs don't outright filter said content, I could see them charging an increased rate for access to the XXX domains. Or, more likely, providing a cheaper "business tier" service with those already removed. After all, XXX means movies and other large content; it's only logical to charge less for those people who use less bandwidth, while at the same time handling the filtering for people not familiar enough with routers to do so on their own (though of course, that does mean the whole connection is filtered, not just the kids' computer, but ah well). And then, at home, people getting service will basically be asked, "do you want access to porn? It will cost more." And just like that, the Internet falls into de facto filtering, not by any grandiose legal procedures but simply because a) ISPs are businesses, b) people are cheap, and c) people are too embarrassed to admit they like porn to a CSR rep. Combine that with the inevitable snowballing of more and more conservative definitions of "pornography," and there you go: a nation restricted to the blandest, least offensive version of the Internet.

Is it a slippery slope argument? Oh, absolutely. But look at the individual steps: do any of them seem all THAT far fetched in the modern US's political climate? Censorship is a lot like a boiled frog that way: you never see it coming when it's done so very gradually.

How did your post hit +5? You've missed the point ENTIRELY. The reason the domain is a bad idea is because once you've set off a designation for "porn," the next logical steps for the puritanical minority are clear:

  - demand that ALL sites with pornographic content be stored under the XXX domain. "The pornographic industry can either self-regulate using the tools we've given them or the government will have to step in and do it FOR them. You don't want that, do you?"
  - demand that all work/government/public/houses-with-children computers hard-filter out XXX. "After all, it's explicitly for porn! What, do you want your kids reading porn? This just makes sense!"
  - demand that any site with nudity be classified as "pornographic." Art, medical textbooks, pictures of the diagrams included with the space probe, whatever. "Adults on their own time can access these materials just fine. It's not hard to get around these things on a personal computer. If you need to see them at work, ask for a special exception."
  - bad language and violence are moved into the designation. "We have an opportunity here to create a kid-safe Internet. We're not censoring these things, of course; we're just classifying them!"
  - multiple heavily-conservative foreign nations ban the XXX domain entirely. "We don't feel this sort of content is appropriate for the mental well-being of our constituents. In the name of their safety, the People will block the people from viewing them."
  - major websites begin to heavily censor their content to avoid being banned in entire countries and inaccessible from most terminals. "It's just a few pages cut. When we're only accessible to 10% of the computers out there, our ad revenue no longer supports the site."
  - any and all content that in any way offends anyone or doesn't immediately appeal to the international lowest common denominator of "good taste" is relegated to a tiny, much-maligned red light district of the Internet.

The XXX domain is scary because it's essentially the beginning of an attempt to make the Internet look like broadcast television, only worse.

Agreed. Apparently, this guy thought when people say they're selling speakers that "fell off the back of a truck," it was a valid legal argument.

I have several complaints about BofA, but their handling of fraud isn't one of them. I've had my debit card stolen by Gypsies (yes, really) while in Europe, had it exposed by an online store's security compromise, had an Ebay transaction go very bad, and had it once used to buy $50 worth of gas 100 miles away where I never traced the angle of attack. In every case, I had the funds back within hours and a new card within the week.

Actually, I did have one complaint: when they stop a potentially fraudulent charge, an automated system calls YOU and asks for the last four digits of your SS to "confirm." I hung up and called the number on the card; they confirmed it was a real call and couldn't seem to understand why I thought that was insane.

But there's something else I learned about BofA recently: they're actually a number of smaller franchises pretending to be one unit. Though they appear unified, accounts are specific to your region/state/branch. I discovered this problem after moving cross country, when a bank manager very politely informed me that he could make zero changes to how my account was set up short of himself calling the same number to which I already had access. So the differing stories might be because we're actually dealing with different banks entirely.