It did. All scores are now zero. ;)

it's not the player, I had Netflix until they started charging - it wasn't worth it. Hulu still has issues, but had better quality and that had not dropped. It still, at high use times, has additional artifacts not visible during low use times. I'm on fiber - I don't think it's the ISP, unless it's the peering issue.

You can record whatever happens in the public domain. Making that available to the public at large is a different issue. The government keeping that data is illegal.

I have 18 Mbps down with low-latency, I used to have Netflix - the content stream in general was terrible, as far as quality of the picture went. Many compression artifacts, some streaming packet drops leading to hiccups in the picture, etc. If your TV is bigger than 40", then Netflix quality is abysmal, the bigger it is the more obvious all the problems. Sound comes through usually fine. I also have Hulu Plus currently, I'll be giving it another try soon.

The biggest piece of humor here is that I have absolutely 0 issues capturing any video stream, no matter the DRM, even off a tablet. Neither does anyone else. If you can accept the terrible quality of streaming video, then a camcorder version wouldn't upset you at all either. This is why BD sales are increasing, but not stellar. As bigger TVs become standard, the picture quality becomes far more important. And having ripped BDs on your media server is the only way to enjoy them, even for a single viewing - skip all the commercial intro nonsense. Just the movie please.

Because it's one thing to have an identification item on your car, it's another to track where you are when and store that data. It's no different than the NSA keeping tabs of everyone you know and when you talked to them. If that's not clear, please prep yourself for an anal implant that will collect all data on your person at all times, for the public record.

Personally, I think anyone who thinks what the parent thinks is stupid. An old computer that works can still be used as a basic tool. We still have an old 386 that takes inventory for a lab. Why update it? It's not on a network...no malware concern...no software updates necessary. Should we go blow a few hundred bucks on a new PC that will require additional hundreds in IT support? I don't think so.

I personally own some old working TI calculators (see http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/texas_instruments_2500.html). They work, should I throw them away?

I read your link - I don't know why you're surprised. The article itself states 500K years as the oldest known successful extraction and reading of DNA.

Furthermore, all the assumptions and theories are based on the analysis of 3000-8000 year old bird bones. The most significant factors in DNA degradation are stated to be exposure to water, followed by oxygen and micro-organism activity. Enzymes will only take you so far, and are listed as the starting point. I'd say that this particular theory will undergo quite a bit scrutiny in the coming years, and will at best be a rule of thumb since there are far more variables to account for than they have so far.

Agree with parent. Airplane is a must see movie. But as was pointed out, many of the jokes are likely to go unnoticed, or not understood by those who didn't live in or study the era.

Funny, my granite is eleven years old, stain free, and never once resealed. Where do you dig up this kind of bullshit?

Not until it shows potential to damage the amp....

give it a year and it will be.

Centralized means centralized control. It's hard to charge fees, disable access, or censor data on a decentralized data store. And I'm not sure what problem they're trying to solve that whois addresses. I've had 0 issues finding out who owns what, although I might have to dig a little occasionally. And that's fine. They are free to query them all too.

Check out the Orion program, from the 50s

and yet the only way I'd touch anything that even hinted of COBOL is to migrate it to any modern language. Even Perl is more maintainable than the general COBOL program. (OK, maybe not, but at least it'd be more concise)

That was interesting enough to look up - some brief skimming reveals that the saying appears to be of recent British origin, although they were in China, and probably mistranslated something. Learn something new and interesting everyday. It still sounds good though I'll now have to refer to it as a British curse instead. :)