Sure, it beats piracy (a little money and control over how long your content is on there) but if people were to cancel cable or watch Hulu on their Xboxes more, both cable/satellite providers and the content providers themselves would be unhappy.

I already watch Hulu on my xbox 360 and I don't have cable. I run MediaMall's Playon server in a Virtualbox Windows XP image on my Linux machine and it works fine. I can watch cbs.com, Netflix instant viewing content, Youtube videos and a lot of other content with this setup. Oh, and I also stream all my Mythtv recordings (ATSC local broadcast only) to the xbox via Fuppes. It's great. I've always had a deep hatred of cable companies, and it is really satisfying to cut them out and get all this content legally and essentially free (well, Playon is $39, but it is a one time fee). Goodbye to these customer unfriendly companies that are just middle men that add no value.

There are a lot of excuses as to why people download movies rather than renting them, but they're all pretty suspect.

How about this excuse: Just another way to stick it to the man.
To hell with these large media corporations, their DRM, their lobbying to buy my government, their longstanding battle against *my* fair use rights, and their generally customer unfriendly policies.

We gave them money because if AIG fails, two huge things go down with them.

Fine. A bailout makes sense to keep AIG from collapsing. But what the government should have done was just nationalize AIG 100% and fire their entire incompetent management team. You wouldn't see them trying to sue the government then, and there would be none of this over hyped outrage over executive bonuses either.

Why all the fear over nationalization? Mainstream media makes it sound like the USA would become the Soviet Union if it nationalized these 'too big to fail' institutions, and that is just B.S. Personally, I would prefer the state run institutions of socialism to the combination of large private corporations and the government (fascism).

The article is missing the best CPU value for the money, in my opinion. The AMD Kuma 7750 AM2+ processor. It's dual core, but at around $60 shipped (Newegg) nothing else touches it from a performance to dollar perspective. They should have included the 7750 in the comparison rather than the Athlon X2 6400+ (the 7750 is K10 architecture vs. K8 for the 6400+, has 2MB level 3 cache, is not discontinued, etc.)

Does anyone know if there are plans to offer the LGPL licensing option for PyQT Python bindings? Typically they have followed QT licensing, but I could see that it wouldn't necessarily be in their best interest to offer LGPL. Of course, if they don't someone could just fork it and put them out of business anyway...

Back in the mid 90's (1993, 1994) there was more to the Internet than just WWW/browser based html content. WAIS, Gopher, FTP clients were all tools you had to use back then.

I considered AMD graphics. Specifically integrated 2100 graphics on a AMD740G based motherboard. I thought it would be a good replacement for the Nvidia FX5200 AGP card I was using in my previous build. I soon found out that all available drivers in Kubuntu 8.10 suck for this chip. The binary drivers from AMD are probably the most full featured of the bunch, but tended to crash when playing HD video, etc. Needless to say, I bought a cheap fanless Nvidia 7200GS PCI-E card for the new MB, and it works flawlessly.

Not to be pedantic, but just to set the record straight Jesse Ventura was the governor of Minnesota, not Wisconsin.

Well, I don't know about Hulu, but the wikipedia article linked to in an earlier post indicates that Boxee is licensed under the GNU GPL. So if someone really wanted to, they could fork the project and add Hulu support back in. It would be a cat and mouse game at that point if Hulu wanted to try to break compatibility, but hey, that's pretty much how everything DRM related is in the OSS world anyway. Content providers are greedy and stupid.

Zombies... Must be in Austin, TX. http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/Road_signs_warn_of_zombies

Ubuntu has been sacrificing quality for an aggressive release schedule and new features with every release.

Well, I don't use Ubuntu proper (don't like Gnome), but this is certainly true of Kubuntu. It seems like it just keeps getting less and less polished with each release. I'm hoping they backport KDE4.2 to Interpid as soon as it's released. There are a lot of annoyances with KDE 4.1 in Interpid.

Why on Earth would you try to use the extremely narrow band used by our vision?

The only plausible reason I can think of is that it doesn't need to be licensed from the FCC. The US government has stolen it's citizens' rightful property and has sold off the more useful parts of the spectrum to the highest bidder. All they let the average guy used for unlicensed wifi and the like is the spectrum no one else wants, such as 2.4 Ghz. Not that using light would be much better.

I see your point, and I agree that KDE4 has been a big regression from the very stable, very usable KDE 3.5.x. I've never used Gnome, so switching to it would be a learning curve, so I've been trying to have patience with KDE4. I've tamed KDE 4.1 in Kubuntu 8.10 to the degree that it is reasonably usable (my wife still hates it compared to 3.5). Customizing Dolphin to have an "Up" button was a big help -- what were they thinking in leaving that out by default?? I still think KDE 3.5 was a hell of a lot more stable and usable. The KDE folks are promising big things for version 4.2, which is supposed to be the release for regular folks (I've read that 4.1 was targeted to "early adopters"). It should be released later this month.

find that KDE and QT apps are just ... slower than Gnome and GTK apps. Clicking on a menu shouldn't take 4 or 5 seconds to pop up. It should be pert-near instantaneous. Switching desktops should take milliseconds, not seconds, nor should it matter to which virtual desktop I'm switching.

What graphic card and driver are you using? I've read that KDE4 has issues with nvidia binary driver versions earlier than 177.80 due to bugs in the driver.
I've had problems with it using the amd fglrx driver with integrated graphics too (740G chipset, Radeon HD2100 integrated graphics).
When I bought a cheap nvidia 7200GS card and switched to using the current version of the nvidia binary driver available for Kubuntu 8.10 (177.82 I believe) performance improved markedly.

replace it with a citizen run mod point system.

I nominate...Slashdot!