$17/month, not $77/month. At that price, watching 3-4 movies is a bargain. The nearest rental place to me costs $4-5 per DVD. It's also about an hour round-trip on bike (1.5-2 if I'm walking). It's worth it, if only just for the convenience. Buying the 3-4 DVDs a month is going to cost me more than $17, not to mention that some movies I have no intention of seeing a second time.

What part of Wisconsin? Madison is a genuinely nice place to live. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the rural areas live in "willful ignorance".

Indeed. 50-60 years ago, a "computer" was a person or group of people performing computations.

I used to get 4-5 hours of life on my laptop battery (T42, the larger battery), but now I only get about 10% of a full charge. The cost of replacing it just isn't worth it.

OGMRip has been my favorite for a while. The only downside, as of now, is that you have to manually tell it if the video source is progressive/telecined/etc (the author is working on that feature). However, I might have to try handbrake again. When I last tried it, there was no good Linux GUI.

4chan?

Think of the naked 13 year old

Nice try, FBI. I'm not falling for that one again.

What the hell was going through these peoples' minds when they deemed a strip-search was necessary to determine if the student had ibuprofen? Did nobody involve think "hey, now, this isn't this somewhat excessive"? She said she didn't have the ibuprofen - since ibuprofen isn't really a threat to the safety of anybody (unless she deliberately overdoses), why are they searching her possessions solely based on the accusation of another student They're treating this as a Fourth Amendment issue, which it is. However, strip-searching a student is wrong and should be considered illegal, regardless of the Fourth Amendment. Doing it because you think she has ibuprofen is just ludicrous.

I liked Serenity not because of the show, but because it fits well with the other two modules Unity and Harmony. If this were the first to be named, I'd definitely advocate honoring a scientists, but as sysadmin knows, having a consistent naming scheme is nice.

Net Applications, the site that ITPro is using as the source of its numbers, lists Safari's market share as 7.42% - a decrease from last month, when it was at 7.7%. Am I missing something, or is ITPro just doing a shoddy job at citing its source?

This. Companies only care about my personal life so they can make a profit off it. It's also often in their interest to have a somewhat reasonable privacy policy, or customers might avoid them. I also have a choice not to use Facebook, host my own email server, and only use prepaid mobile phones. As pieisgood says, the government only cares about control and to restrict my liberties. I can't easily hide from or opt out of the government.

No anonymity on the Internet? China, North Korea, and other totalitarian states would love this.

Gnome has GVFS. It's somewhat recent, but it allows network transparency similar to KDE's. Unfortunately, since it is still somewhat recent, apps have to be GVFS-aware to take full advantage of it.