Charlize Theron is, in the literal sense, an African American. But I'd never refer to her as such, because, well, 'African American' carries as much preconceived baggage as 'black 'does.

Well there's your problem. if I had to call up my ISP every time I wanted to patch windows I'd be screwed.

Part of the problem also comes from the support model. If you have a problem with Windows or your Dell PC, you don't call your ISP and expect them to resolve it.

Yet in the phone world, if you have a problem with Android or your Samsung hardware you call Verizon/Sprint/etc.

The last two (European) carriers I worked for would have more than happily passed handset customer support to the OEMs but, unsurprisingly, they didn't want to take on the massive expense to do it.

Sorry just seen your reply and not much I can do to help I'm afraid. I know the pain about W7MC being derelict, I was hoping for great things with W8MC and nothing came.

One possible workaround would be to not set the HTPC to sleep when it's idle (since, for me, Remote Potato won't work when it's sleeping) and, instead get it to go to sleep at a fixed time, wake up at a fixed time (using a scheduled task) and then immediately reboot.

In my set-up, I have a task that runs at midnight which checks if nothing is recording and, if not, puts the computer to sleep. I then have a scheduled task that runs at 7am in the morning (so forcing the computer to wake up), waits 10 seconds and (if nothing is recording) reboots. I'm happy to share the scripts with you if you want, but I'm pretty sure you can work it out yourself.

This isn't quite as power efficient as your current set-up but ... the handshake issue will go, you'll have a stable platform (since W7MC seems to need a reboot to run okay) and you'll still have 6 hours (25% of the time) where the box is drawing very low power.

Might be better than nothing?

Breaking a cease fire? Absolutely. Breaking an Armistice? No.

Armistice: Agreement to peace, with penalties should you decide to go back to war. I.e. "If you, NK, invade SK, you agree that the UN, can come in and bitchslap you, with tanks."

NK cannot now say 'we pull out of that agreement. Now we get to invade SK, and the UN has to just sit there writing stern letters.'

I'm tired of using Windows Media Center due to bugs and other problems, but since the channels are flagged it is the only option.

I'm reading at +4 and haven't really seen many possible solutions. How about looking at it another way ... what exactly are the "bugs and other problems" you're having?

Maybe we can resolve those so that you can continue to use WMC?

You thought wrong:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/05/the_outrage_of_the_week.html

Sheila Kaplan has been on this since federal child provacy laws were relaxed to permit it in 2011. She launched Education New York's National Opt-out Campaign to alert parents to their rights under FERPA to restrict third-party access to their children's information and encourage them to review their school's annual FERPA notification at the beginning of the
school year. Here's her website:
http://www.educationnewyork.com/about.html

and a parent information page
http://educationnewyork.com/optoutnow

Haven't logged into Slashdot in just short of forever, but I see that you're my foe. To the death!

I know, right? Being valued at $410 billion -- on the backs of two consumer products in a very fickle market -- is just brutally punishing, treating them like some fly-by-night nobodies. How grossly unfair.

What if phones came in a range of shapes and sizes so you could choose the size that suited you.

Unfortunately this isn't quite so rosy when you find out that all the Android phones with screens under 4.2" are generally gimped.

Want a 4" Samsung phone that is more powerful than the Galaxy S3 Mini? No such luck.