If it was on PBS, I'd be worried that it would be biased.....

I give up even trying to watch charlie rose on pbs these days....... whenever reporters are brought in to discuss current events, there are always 2 from the editorial wing of the new york times, and 3 from other left leaning news outlets and the conversation always goes around to complaining about tea partiers.

I used to watch frontline, newshour, and other shows on pbs and the BBC....haven't been able to for the last 10 years, especially as even the science shows are no longer willing to consider all sides of an argument, and the bias is as much in what issues are covered as in the content and who they consult as experts. Pretty much ever since gore lost the election, and the AP decided that that fair fact based reporting wasn't informing voters properly, the closest I've found to fair reporting is the wall street journal (assuming you skip the editorial pages) and focus just on the news.

Fox also isn't that bad in the sense that they actually are open about their biases.....CNN/etc not so much.

The black line has been nothing but problematic for me(2TB, SATA 3Gbps).

Purchased 2 of them, both failed, RMA on the first has been working reliably, had to RMA the 2nd 3 times and it kept failing...no point in RMA'ing any further. Yes, I switched cables, power, and controllers to ensure it was the drives fault. From what I've read, western digital is doing only a minimal job on repairing RMA'd drives and then just sending them back out as re-certified and truncating warranties on rma'd drives down from the 5yr original guarantee to just 90 days.

Strangely enough, not a single problem with the either the seagate enterprise constellation drives (2TB) or the western digital RE4 enterprise drives (also 2TB). Dozens of these in production, some for a year now, and smartmon shows no issues except that while the western digital firmware is not 100% compatible w/ some controllers, seagate is compatible but trades that off for slightly less performance.

Unfortunately, amazon caved into the demands of the large publishers and is now allowing publishers to set prices. Naturally, the publishers have started to test having ebook prices of popular new releases actually be $1-2 higher than the equivalent hardcover and after the release has been out awhile reduce the ebook price to be just the same as paperback. So, in effect we move from the situation a year ago where kindle readers were receiving a discount on books and publishers could complain that the future of publishing was in peril - we now have a situation where kindle readers are being pushed as an extra money maker - kindle readers are paying a premium for fast access to books above and beyond the cost of the kindle itself. Somewhat of an interesting situation where if a kindle owner has an amazon prime account, he is actually paying amazon extra not to kill a tree and burn additional energy to send him the physical copy.

Why does anyone care how much taxes companies pay? if a company is rich so what? The money is worthless until it is returned to the investors or employees, and then it is very highly taxed. Short of controlling the flow of money across national borders, I can't see why anyone should be looking at how much taxes the companies pay rather than how much taxes the individual investors and employees pay.

As another kindle user, yes, ebooks tend to be cheaper and it certainly saves $$ never to be paying full hardback pricing ever again. Honestly, I've stopped buying any physical books at all. Everything goes to Kindle, and unless I really want a particular book, I never pay more than $15 for one (non-technical books) and most of the time pricing is in the $6.99 - $9.99 range.

Honestly, the biggest problem I've had is that while most of the books that I want are available in kindle edition, not all are. Also, I've had some issues finding certain o'reilly titles in kindle version. I'm guessing they took awhile to ramp up kindle support, prefering readers to use safari.com or buy online from oreilly.com. Neither is really an option for me. I want the ability for Amazon to manage my library and to download/redownload my books to whatever kindle I am using (I also hate the idea of paying safari to rent access to books)...I can take small kindle to gym and read while on treadmill, and then use larger kindle at work for the same book (and I dont have to find where I left off, amazon syncs that for me along with any notes/bookmarks/etc). However, this only works if book was purchased from amazon.

I'm honestly fine with all the DRM/etc limitations of Kindle. I'll trade off any functionality loss for the lower purchase price. And, rather than having to search several bookcases at home for book I want later on, I can quickly search my kindle library for whatever I need.

* If you move your infrastructure in with them and later lose confidence in their abilities for whatever reason, how quickly and easily can you terminate and move out w/o all the hassle of pre-paying to end of term? This should be your biggest requirement. No matter how much do diligence you do on technical matters prior to moving in, things change...the datacenter provider could have financial problems, sudden facility problems, lose key critical staff, etc. Your contract needs to allow you the option to terminate when you reasonably lose confidence in their abilities w/o a billion hoops or outlandish costs.

* Power pricing and limitations on how much they are allowed to pass on additional costs from utilities during term of contract.

OK, Let's say you were running ZDnet when the decision came on whether to pursue this deal.

Option 1:
Say no because morally you don't feel right about supporting censorship. Bzzzz, you are now being personally sued for not looking after the best interests of your shareholders (which by law, is limited to financial concerns). You will also likely get fired and replaced by a CEO who will do the deal and thank his lucky stars that he got the opportunity to be promoted because his prior boss had a conscience. So, you lose your job and deal gets done anyway. Great work.

Option 2:
Do the deal. Unless you can phrase your objections to the deal in financial terms, you really don't have any other option. Really.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that:
a) companies themselves are neither bad nor good and it makes zero sense to demonize any of them for pursuing shareholder interests
b) the ceo's of these companies shouldn't be blamed for the choices either (if they should be blamed for anything, it is for accepting a job in the first place after being informed by their lawyer about the legal requirements for pursuing shareholder interests.)

If we want to stop these type of things from happening, than what we really need to be doing is finding a way to help, not hurt, executives of these companies. Change laws so it is harder to sue them for considering anything other than financial aspects in decisions. Of course, the problem is that it is very hard to determine how to do this right. If you give the CEO's too much leeway, the impact could be equally severe -- companies that deliver horrible financial performance year after year, which means all the families that invested end up with sharply reduced retirement savings because they lost a few critical percent of growth to their savings for every year for an extended period.

Only on slashdot are there any easy answers.

You apparently missed the the announcement from Cisco that they've released their own virtual switch with enterprise features to replace the limited capabilities in VMware's. And, yes, vmware will fully support it and it will be plug and play compatible. Furthermore, on a cluster of ESX hosts, you can have multiple Cisco supervisor appliances running for HA/management, while a Cisco switch configuration/etc is shared across all nodes and ports being logically linked to each vm, regardless of where vm is located and even during vmotion.

Cisco details at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html