passive cooled refrigerators do exist. see here for some prototipes, but I remember I read they were easer to find in northern europe.

I strongly advice everyone using mythtv to move to vdr instead. I did a year ago, after 3 years of mythtv, it's another league as far as usability. It you need al the non-tv addons you're better off with xbmc+vdr. do yourself a favour and drop mythtv now.

in europe, thanks to publishing lobbies the companies gets paid to compensate allegedly lost sales.
in italy at least this is paid directly by the government, so that end users haven't noticed, still I think it's a shame that libraries, which for thousands of years have been the place that could freely spread culture are now considered 'lost sales'

it's directive 92/100 from 1992 (in several languages).

here is an explanation.

press release from 2002 that says that many countries have not adopted the directive yet (italy did in 1996).

wikipedia says this amount is in reality not very high, however the principle itself is chilling.

after 3-4 years of mythtv I found VDR, and it's everything myth is supposed to be.
if you're using dvb-s/t/c it's perfect, notice that it springs from the linuxtv project itself. it's also super fast, channel switching is faster than my set-top box.
and if you need grey-area tools to use your legit subscription services there are plenty of tools available, and most of all you can talk about it freely in the forums, as opposed to the mythtv mailing lists.
for the media player part, I use xbmc

if the heating bill is the problem, why not centralize it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

I live in a 200k people town in italy.
we have a power plant close to the town center.
we have built pipes under most of the central part of town
hot water coming out of the plant as a byproduct get
piped to the individual homes and is used for heating during the winter.
the bill for the people is cheaper and it seem to work quite well.

the only problem is what gets burned in the plant, but that is a typical italian political problem that would probably not exist in other parts of the world

after four years of mythtv a few months ago I upgraded to VDR (http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Main_Page)

I always avoided it since I wanted the 'noisy backend in basement' and 'silent frontend in living room' separation, and I thought it was exclusive to mythtv. In reality, vdr handles it much better and on lower hardware specs.

and for all of the non-tv features, xbmc takes care of them very nicely.

In Italy copyright is death+70 years, so this rule (performance+50/70) will actually shorten the copyright in most cases.

all it takes to make everybody happy is require video uploaders who use copyrighted music to clearly state the song they are using, so that youtube can automagically link the video to a 'buy this song now' place

it's so obvious that I think that the only reason this has not been implemented yet (and the real reason for artists' rants) it's that they have not agreed yet on which webstore should sell the music.

mp3-crossing!
fill them up and then leave them on some bench at a park!

not even the pope, who has expressed several times his support to darwin's work!

i think it was Robin Williams who said 'americans: so puritan even the english kicked them out'

thank god (notice the pun) it seems to apply to a small, although noisy, minority of americans

I once had a user that had a strange (to her) dialog box.
She could take a screenshot of the box only (alt+print screen, so not that clueless after all), print it, and faxed it to me with a handwritten note asking 'what should I do?'.
I should add that the dialog box only had a 'OK' button, and that was the only option...