I was under the impression that the reason they could make it free was that they were generating power on site with solar panels.

That being said, it doesn't scale well to popularity of the stations.

As a physician I'm quite interested in the subject. :-) Things have been bad in the past, but is getting better on all fronts. Let's take your issues one at a time:

There's a cap placed on residency hours per week and hours in a row, now. Yes, it's sometimes broken, but it's a lot better than 20 years ago. And, no, it's not routine practice to fake your timesheets. Or at least where I trained ~15 years ago, and not in the training program I assist overseeing. That being said, in some subspecialty fellowships I wouldn't doubt that it's more common to do this -- But they do this to gain more experience as you may only get a once in a decade experience if you stay on call and extra 2 hours. Who would deprive themselves that?

Penmanship is not taught in medical school. But electronic perscriptions are becoming more commonplace in the last few years (both on the outpatient and inpatient sides). And the last couple decades have brought on more responsibility of the patient to know what they are taking. The outpatient medication errors are the combined fault of the physician, the pharmacist, and the patient.

I wouldn't say that anyone routinely operates on the wrong body part. But mistakes do happen. It's now standard of care to do a "time out" with the patient, nurse, and physician all in the operating room to agree on the patient's name, date of birth, and procedure to be performed before any sedation is administered or incisions are performed. But I once had a patient respond to a different name who expected to have the same procedure performed. Fortunately he was tripped up by the date of birth.

As for washing hands, that's a culture change. My hospital has random people anonymously assigned to watch people enter and leave patient rooms to make sure we always wash in and out. (The people are people that work on the floors anyway.) A couple verbal warnings and suddenly everyone's compliant. No need for technology.

And the younger generation of physicians are more humble. But that's also because they tread medicine as more of a job and less of a calling. I guess you can't get everything. :-(

A decade (or more) ago I set my dad up with a .yahoo.com email address and made his home page yahoo.com.

Now he has shared that email address with so many business contacts that he's locked in for life.

I'm the same way with my gmail address. I'm essentially locked in as well. They can offer me 5 ways to get my email out (and I do back up my email about once a year) but it doesn't matter if hundreds of contacts have that address.

How about filing a DMCA claim against their movies?

I use the Free Cable plugin almost every night. Maybe you have to make sure yours is being updated?

I don't know about the Hulu plugin. Haven't used that in a couple months.

And that's what the tax code is supposed to settle.

In a capitalistic society there is a need for some individuals to have excess capitol/money to invest in new ideas/companies. Gates just seems to be the richest.

And you know what? It has to be someone. Why not him. At least he seems to make an effort to give away some of the money towards his charity.

Do I like what he did with the Microsoft OS monopoly? Of course not. But what he's done with the money isn't as disgusting as just putting it into big oil or buying his own island or something like that.

Agree. The postal service is a steal at it's price, and has an exceedingly high rate of success in properly delivering mail.

My parents live in one of the boroughs of New York City. They moved a few miles. Their mail got forwarded for the requisite 6 months and they changed all the addresses as good folks do.

Forward 20 years. They go away on a trip and decide to stop their mail when they are gone. When they go to the postal office to pick up their mail, the lady at the desk asks them to wait for the local supervisor. The supervisor asks them if they previously lived at [their previous address]. Apparently a foreign bank had been sending out a bank statement once a year to my dad and he forgot about it with the move. The post office was required to send it back, but the supervisor connected the dots and told my dad that the return address was a foreign bank.

It actually is simple. All you need to do is destroy the planet. And I don't mean just kill all life on the planet. I mean make it so that the planet Earth no longer exists. (see here: http://qntm.org/destroy )

Admittedly she must have been a reasonable actress if people were quoting her and thinking that they were quoting Palin.

Screw all that. Do what I did:

1. Download XBMC and install it on your desktop computer. Play around with the plugins and add the repository for the repository installer plugin.

2. Download via XBMC the plugins for Free Cable, Hulu, You Tube, and whatever other video plugins look good. From the previous step you shouldn't have to add any repositories on via their websites, you can do it via the repository installer plugin.

3. Once you get things working fine on the previous step, get a nettop PC to put by your TV and use a remote control to control (this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0041ULKW2/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 is great as it comes with a remote and built in IR receiver and can turn itself on via the remote as well.)

4. Cut out the Video part of your cable bill and just get a reasonable download speed on your internet (the cheapest level is probably enough).

Hopefully at this point you'll be able to control XBMC via the remote control and never have to touch the nettop computer again.

They're hand made. You should expect some varience.

Sort of like how when you buy a wooden table they have a clause that there are natural knots in the wood that may effect the grain of the table.

In the same way, these missiles are obviously made of wood.

Just checked out the website.

The articles are quite similar to the ones here, but minimal discussion on articles from days ago.

Also I'm personally not a fan of the advertise placement on that site (which is also the reason I don't read techdirt much).

Scale. Catalog businesses never had 1% the volume of current online cross-state businesses.

Plus, purchasing via catalog didn't make you exempt from paying taxes. It just put the onus on the individual to calculate and collect taxes, rather than the business. This law just puts the onus back on the business.

I like the $1 million dollar floor, if it's on online gross. It allows small mom-and-pop businesses to have an online presence, and when they grow a bit they'll have to use tax software to help them out. $1 million gross seems like a reasonable number to me. You start collecting more than that you should be able to pay for some infrastructure to collect taxes. We increase that too much and big companies will be incentivized to break up their businesses to smaller units to slip under the radar.

While I applaud anything this complex being made open source, I'm wondering it it's a few years too late.

We are on the cusp of an era of high pixel density ("retina") displays. Will we still need to worry about more complex rendering of fonts (ie: hints for small sizes), or just render at whatever point size to screen and be happy that the resolution is high enough to make whatever we display readable?

You don't need three friends.

You just need three Facebook Friends.