You can get an HDFury2 (converts HDMI to component) and then you're back in business, even if the component outputs on your cable box go away.

At least in my experience with Comcast DVRs, yes they are flaky, the interface is poor, the fast forwarding sucks, and it has had problems with just magically losing all recordings twice in the two years I used it.

Works well, although I'd recommend something like the HDHomerun (dual clear-QAM tuner box that plugs into your home network). At least where I am, I get pretty much everything on basic cable in 480p, and then the OTA channels plus a few others in either 720p or 1080i.

Beware that Comcast likes to leave their QAM frequencies undocumented and likes to map them to different channels periodically. So if you're using MythTV you'll want some familiarity with the database, particularly the channels and dtv_multiplex tables. That said, with the switchover to digital, I no longer have the ability to record analog cable and you may find the same problem in upcoming months. In particular, in my area, Comcast switched QAM frequencies last month (again) and is now using some of the area formerly allocated to analog.

Tivo is your easiest solution. Windows Media Center will support a CableCard but with some tweaking required (good writeup here: http://hd.engadget.com/2009/05/12/how-to-install-a-cablecard-tuner-in-your-diy-media-center/)

I don't know of a way to get MythTV working with a cable card and it seems rather unlikely because it is a hardware / vendor lock-in.

Either that or it was Taco Bell.

I'm not joking on this one. I have a quad Athlon 3.0ghz performing MythTV duties. It draws a lot of power when it needs to - for example, commercial flagging HD recordings. But I have it set up to conserve power when it's idle, which is most of the time. Two things you'll want to consider:

1) The easiest thing is to set up powernowd (simplest daemon IMO - but there are a couple alternatives). It drops the speed of your CPUs when they are idle - in my case from 3.0ghz down to 800Mhz. This reduces power usage, keeps your machine cooler and has zero impact on service availability.

2) Depending on what you use the machine for, you may want to set it up sleep most of the time. Then use wake on LAN, or ACPI / BIOS wakeup functionality so that it powers up on demand. The BIOS method is useful for things like MythTV that perform a lot of scheduled tasks.

Or make your site subscription-based. Of course you might want to talk with the guys over at Slate first to see how well that works out...

This is right on the money. Forza Motorsport 3 had to rely on a lot of Microsoft legal wrangling to get the car companies to even allow *limited* damage modelling in the game. The major auto manufacturers are VERY picky about how you can depict their vehicles. This applies to movies as well as racing games. Look at the blatant Audi product placement in Iron Man. I'm not talking about the R8 either. I'm talking about the family driving in their Audi towards the end of the movie in the last major fight scene. Thanks to our hero, and the excellent quality and performance of the car (gag) they get away unscathed even in the middle of the destruction and mayhem that's going on.

To repeat the question: how is that different than what we have today? Let's go over how the taxpayer gets screwed by uninsured people, or worse yet, illegals - right now:

Right now uninsured people use the emergency room for care because they cannot be turned away. And yeah doctors or hospitals may eat the cost like you mentioned. It also makes things even worse than uninsured clinic visits because it forces ER docs triage extra people, making it more difficult to quickly get to the serious cases.

But let me then continue to a case in my old neighborhood where it got so bad that they finally just closed the ER(!). A large majority of the cases were uninsured gunshot victims due to gang activity in the area. The hospital, doctors, etc got fed up and shut down the ER. What happened then? Yeah you guessed it - those gunshot victims were *airlifted* to a hospital an hour away. How's that for use of taxpayer money?

Bottom line is that the docs and hospitals "eat" the cost but it eventually gets passed along to you and me in the form of higher insurance premiums and higher taxes. And the result is more expensive than the initial case would have been in the first place.

All in all, I have little respect for anyone who complains about health care overhaul and offers the status quo as reasonable or preferable. Leaving a large segment of the population out of the system in order to make it cost effective for the remainder is neither acceptable nor effective. It simply causes more problems like what I mentioned above.

/rant off

Good thing I was successful in my Probability and Statistics class. I scored 31.2% on the final so I totally understood that.

If you took that thing and updated it to meet current U.S. safety and emissions requirements, you'd get nowhere near the same gas mileage.

Valve should thumb their nose at Australia's rating board and make the game freely available there.

Also for reference, the .edu namespace is neither older nor newer than the other generic TLDs. They were defined in October 1984 in RFC 920.

According to wikipedia:

symbolics.com is actually older than any currently registered edu domain, beating Berkeley by a month.
nordu.net was registered a couple months prior to symbolics.

I'm not sure about .mil or deprecated .arpa domains - they are hard to check up on.

In the quick test I did, the hijack occurred regardless of the "www" prefix being present.

I own it, so now you know 1 person :) I wouldn't call it the greatest PC game of all time. It was more like reading a novel. But it was worthy of a purchase.

I don't know what their claimed piracy figures were on that game. However, I do know that PC games ALSO suffer from poor price controls and shelf life, compared with console games. Not to mention back when that game was released, there weren't CD keys, online registration and whatnot in place, which essentially block first sale privileges. That made it easy for people to return the game to the store and/or resell it when they found out it wasn't what they expected. And frankly, I don't think it had mass market appeal.

Yes, I read it. Yes I understand the Nissan loan money is going towards one of their factories in the U.S. My complaint is that this is being done for a company *that is competing with U.S. owned companies* in a sector where we're struggling.