Problem with A La Carte is that the bottom lines always ends up with more dollars spent per channel then you do under the bundles. And you can expect all your favorite channels to hit prime fees while NPR withers a dies.

You might not like NPR, but what will happen eventually is the programs will become even more ratings driven then they are today. Which means the really bad things that have happened ABC, CBS, NBC will be propogated throughout the rest of the channels. Which also means they will converge into the same mindless one liner drivel that they all do with no attempt to market specialization but market capture by shooting for the Least Common Denominator (drinking, sex, hot rods).

TV will fade away as a good idea gone bad and webcasting will form the new media, with commercials, lots of them.

Under webcasting they can do tiered pricing on how many commercials you want to pay not to see. Which can also get really expensive.

Public Library. Good stuff.

So let me get this straight. They want the best hackers in the country to walk right up to their front door and say, "here I am".

Over the last 10 years the tone has been if you even express knowledge in this area, let alone demonstrate capabilities, they do everything possible to lock you up. Considering the erratic and back-stabbing behavior of the current administration I can't imagine that this will be a good career move.

Even if it is a great move and they pay you big bucks, you can probably never leave. If you quit, then you are out of their control. But now they know who you are.

Either way, unless you make this a lifetime commitment, you are screwed.

You have to understand that for the nearly 90 years this has been a Welfare/Warfare state. It's been a great recipe for centralization of power into the government starting with the New Deal and World War One.

With the evil commies, terrorists, nuclear radical states the government has a clear excuse to listen in on it's civilians, oppress freedom of speech (Sedition Act). Through the cause of keeping you secure they can do anything up to putting you in a bubble wrapped box for your own good because presumable you don't know what's good for you.

How many people, if put on a plane over run by terrorists with box cutters, wouldn't opt to just over run them and kill them in a suicide rush rather than be killed in a targeted attack? What might happen today if someone sitting next to you decided to light their shoe?

But we aren't capable of protecting ourselves like we have in the past. The government, with all their inefficiencies and PAC groups will always do so much better. Same with the economy. That's the idea behind the Welfare/Warfare State.

I admire the creativity to see and pull all these bits together into a single piece. Particularly when all of these people were doing something individually.

It's not the future of music or the future of entertainment. But it's a wonderfully creative picture of how people can watch 8-12 videos and orchestrate them into bits 'n pieces that form a complete piece.

For what he did here, I think it's great! It's not a replacement to anything as it's completely reliant on people making music like they always have. But it's a very creative extension of The Jam.

Well, I guess it might be OK just so long as he doesn't pitch the planet into eternal darkness because of all the shadowing solar cells. Perhaps they should set them up on a exterior ring to capture the light that hasn't landed on the planet.

But that would be a rock solid business model: We'll capture all the suns energy and sell it back to people so they can have light and heat.

The other concern is the debris. Aren't these things going to be pulverized by all the debris that we have up there? This is becoming a real factor to shortening life expectancy. I think it might be a bigger problem with these satellites since they are all about huge footprint.

Because people use SMS to CHEAT. At least that's what my kids told me about their classmates and experiences. People will troll through their friends asking them via SMS what the answers are to the questions. These classmates are either in the same class or just finished the exam. Similarly, they are pumping this information towards people who are yet to take the class.

You are there to learn, not play social games. If I sit at my desk playing with FaceBook all day, should I be surprised if I get fired? Similarly if I am in a class and I am doing SMS all day, it is well withing the rights of the teacher to pull that phone out of service. Personally, I think the teacher is well within her rights to have the phone held until the end of the day or even require that the parents pick the phone up from the school rather than return it to the kids. You might complain that they need the phone to arrange for a ride -- Let them, but they should mention, "Oh by the way, you'll have to come in to the teachers office to pick up my phone because I wouldn't stop SMS during class"

In college you are paying for the class -- if you want to waste your money that's your choice. But in the public education system you are wasting my money and I don't want to pay day care for what will become a bunch of uneducated morons who's only asset is the ability to set world records on SMS speed.

You beat me to it!

I was thinking that if they just consolidated efforts into all this Office Management process it should be very reasonable to expect the new projects to exceed MS Exchange an instead of trying to catch up, start pulling ahead.

My work just upgraded their Office suite to the latest from Redmond. It is unbelievable how badly everything operates. It literally takes an hour what used to take a 10-20 minutes. Just love that superbar of theirs.

As is always the case with Microsoft, the new product is far from improved.

Considering that Mac is gaining shares and making money in the middle of the Financial Crisis one might ask what they can bring to the table that no one else in the world can provide?

Just to be very clear about my personal opinions: Microsoft makes a good mouse. Other than that they are pretty much the Evil Empire. I like Mac because it's almost Linux but does a better job on the notebook than Linux has (for me).

I think there is something to take from the Perl Best Practices when considering the viability of different languages. In this book they stress over and over the need to have maintainable code. Over the years I have had to go back and manage a large number of my applications and have found that the technical cost to any of these has more to do with the documentation and quality of the code above everything else. I have been (trying) to use Ruby and Javascript in addition to my long familiar Perl languages for some projects and have come to some conclusions based on these three.

Perl has a long history. Which translates to a lot of smart people using it and a fantastic amount of both well documented modules and well established modules that work well and readily. So there are four advantages here: documentation that is complete, documentation is accurate, modules are completely functional, testing/execution is easy.

Javascript is a bit of a fluster-cluck in comparison to this. Documentation is mixed. But there are a lot of really great quality modules with some really great sets of documentation out there. And some gross exeptions. But everyone has their black sheep. What javascript doesn't have is the ability to easy execute/test the code from a command line environment. It's got too much dependency on that ugly browser which can make execution and debugging rather difficult. IMHO javascript needs a rewrite to address it's shortcomings but it's still impressive in accomplishments.

Which turns my attention to Ruby. Lovely language, pretty, elegant, nice to work with. If you know what you are doing. There is effectively little to zero documentation on just about everything. Core modules, when you call up the 'ri' or 'rdoc' returns an emply documentation file. Nice job making it impossible to understand what's going on. There is peepcode, but with $9 a whack at documentation it's pretty easy for a project to get very expensive just trying to see what might be the best module. This is nice for one level of capitalism, but bad for the rest. Ruby has done an extremely bad job on documentation. Fortunately, they have done a very good job with test and execution so it's easier than javascript to work with in that regard. You just don't know what you are doing when you start.

If you don't believe me about Ruby try 'ri Rspec'. It returns an empty file letting you know there is nothing done to document the use of this module. I can find hundreds but this is just an example.

If Ruby was able to provide a level of documentation and functional modules that Perl can demonstrate there would not be much to slight Ruby for. This is a major barrier to adopting languages: documentation, testability, execution/debugging

This is a big cost savings and in northern regions typically come with a gas furnace backup for those really bad periods (sub zero?).

When I was replacing my 1950's furnace I looked into Ground sourced heat pumps and found that there used to be a very large incentive from the utility company to switch from electric to gas. But when the gas company purchased the electric company they dropped the incentive.

For my 1200 sq. ft. house it was a 100% increase in the installation costs ($20,000). This seems high overall, but I was gutting a 50 year old furnace and there was a lot of work to do. But the utility costs would have dropped from a $200/month high to a $30/month high. That implies 5.5 years to return the initial cost for Ground sourced heat. I was planning on moving about 2-3 years after installing the furnace and so decided it was not worth it. At this point I see no plans to move unless employment conditions require it. Ground Source would have been the better solution.

But so often it's just not worth the excess costs. A tax incentive would be great. It would especially help with electrical energy adoption since much of the load on gas would be mitigated

I disagree. You are looking at too small of a picture here. People who drive junkers do so for a reason. Either they can't afford it or don't want to afford a new vehicle. There is a good used car business simply because they don't purchase new cars and don't want the expense of payments.

What you are doing is trying to get people to invest in loans, now they have a financial burden making them less resilient to future financial shifts. You are also shifting their financial expenditures from somewhere to the Automotive industry. It's a transfer of money, not a creation of wealth.

If you really want to stimulate the economy then it benefit to refinance loans prior to default. I would love to refinance my car and house, but I can't afford the refinance charges. So now I have thousands locked up in payments on older goods that are unavailable for new purchases.

Interesting that the UK has this and US doesn't.

It's day one, so maybe there should be a little slack granted. But he needs to be careful. I think a LOT of people who did vote for Obama did so on the ideas he presented with a we'll see how he does. Otherwise the Republicans will lay waste to the Democrats in four years.

I would welcome a third party.

It doesn't matter where it goes. The point is it's not going into the pockets of an existing billion dollar industry. As a matter of survival, that industry will have no choice to to fight it every inch of the way. Since they have a lot of lobbyist embedded in Washington and you don't I would expect you to lose this argument on the hill in short order, regardless of being right or wrong.

In this case, the bridge was new.

In the case of writing FOSS, much of this would be replacing existing software rather than creating new software projects. That's the argument for saving money -- you have to remove the expense of the existing functional software.

Problem is, if you replace all the paid software with free software and you do a really good job of it, then all the software companies will fail in bulk and you will have a new problem to contend with.

Need to think this one through a little more. Wiping out Microsoft, Semantec, McAfee, Quicken, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, et al is not likely to improve the economy anytime soon.