That still doesn't mean it equates 1:1 to *lost ticket sales*, especially as TBP and other mainstream *rrent sites are a global audience.

As someone who works in the content industries (I am a musician and 3D animator & VFX guy) I care less about the 'poor unwashed masses' consuming movies and music early in release schedule via *rrents for ticket sales reasons, and care more about people being able to experience creative works with some kind of quality control in place. Which imo is the same reason people care about cel phones going off in a theatre. As a content producer though cams and crappy mp3's are only going to worsen the experience regardless of how good or poor a script or composition may be. Quality control is paramount...

Thus it follows that MPAA is trying to insure that only HIGH QUALITY cams are created, none of that horribly low res head-shake-vomit-inducing cams for the proletariat thank you very much! (/sarcasm)

Maxtor had so many QA issues in their latter days that it contributed greatly towards the purchasing price that Seagate got when they bought them. Of course the CEO Bill Watkins promptly moved a huge bulk of the Seagate drive ops to the same plant (as a cost cutting measure it was presumed) that had issues for Maxtor and denied the 'bricking' issues that resulted for AS and ES series drives for at least 9 months... until the Seagate Board of Directors fired him and replaced him with the former CEO from 2004 (and subsequently addressed the firmware issues too.)

I flashed all 3 of my ES.2's to SN06 'just in case' while all of this was underway, and though it was denied that they had issues in my serial # range quite a few reports cropped up down the line of ES.2's outside the reported serial range having problems also so I'm happy I did, they still run fine in an array to this day.

My favorite quote from the article: “We continue to strengthen our cyber defenses, using the latest anti-virus software and other methods to protect Air Force resources and assure our ability to execute Air Force missions,” Cook said in a statement. “Continued education and training of all users will also help reduce the threat of malware to Department of Defense systems.” Why do I get the feeling that Norton/McAffee are offering their 'latest anti-virus software" to "strengthen our cyber defenses"...which will inevitably lead to a 2-4 year staged upgrade of all systems to bring them back up to their 'speeds' before they were "strengthened"..while software from ESET, VIPRE & AVAST are only found on the laptops of off duty personnel that have a clue. Given that DARPA sort of kickstarted this whole thing we're using these days you might think there'd be some military-grade software in use but I've yet to see any hint of that in any of the 'cybersecurity' discussions that find their way into our shared discussions on the 'tubes'.

Which would be why I said I'm not sure I can wait =]

On the flipside, TDP for SB-e isn't looking peachy for Intel either, so maybe I'll just reinvest in last gen hardware at the price drop when SB-e launches and tide things over until Ivy/22nm.

Well now I know for sure why SB-E (sandybridge-e) is not arriving until Q1 2012... Intel is just going to continue to milk SB parts for the time being. Sad because I really wanted to get an Ivy Xeon rig to replace my current dual proc mobo, but I'm not sure I can wait until 2013!

You're right the Hiibel case (moortak also identified it in a reply above) is the actual case that stands on the books but the Nevada Supreme court referenced a 1979 Texas case Brown v. Texas noting that the Supreme Court declined to address the issue of identification and decided that being asked to identify yourself didn't incriminate you if it wasn't specifically in reference to a crime. So I was perhaps overstating things a bit in my formerly caffeinated state, but the inaccuracy was misremembering the Nevada case stemmed from the Texas case and not the other way around. It's only been 7 years since I read the articles on that you'll have to forgive me =]

Well the supreme court decision that has directly led to "papers please" in the US took place in Texas, a man on his own property with his truck (NOT on public land or a public road) was asked for ID by a police officer and declined, was arrested and subsequently courts sided with 'the law' that you must provide identification at all times including on your own property....so yep Texas isn't exempt from police state status. Incidentally how are the speed traps in rural TX these days?

Woops meant to post that under my account, didn't realize this machine wasn't logged in...wish I knew how to delete a posting made accidentally under AC status. Any mods able to check ip/post time?

Not only that but it equates things like interfering with the Comcast+NBC merger to stopping someone sitting in their bedroom with the 'next big idea'. I'm not sure the author intended for that level of poetic irony...

I remember when most Comcast networks were ATTBI, and ATTBI decided 'not to renew' their @home contract, subsequently putting @home out of business. 3 months later AT&T was authorized to buy said network?? And kept most of the network @home built out (for the future) dark while letting people stay on the constricted backbone they erected for that 3 month duration for years in some areas? Ah yes good for the consumer & investor that was (of course Excite played a role there too...)

And when hulu was a relatively 'new' thing I remember how sluggish it sometimes was on comcast, even though a trace showed that there weren't an ungodly number of hops things would still get somehow 'congested' (not visible to a trace) and hulu would sit there rebuffering...and at the time I still paid for *all* of comcast's channels (including HD) and still preferred to sit online where I could choose what I wanted when I wanted without having to navigate a menu structure that was intentionally slowed down over the stock code to improve 'ad impressions' for their own services (which is what comcast has done with each UI i've seen...) Netflix had buffering issues as well, and with 6-7 machines here to test general connectivity there didn't seem to be *any* other issues. I sat there with their techs (and with some clearchannel techs in relation to an audio program I was having issues with that I subscribe to) and the routing itself seemed fine.

Then came the news about sandvine routers affecting p2p, but there was little talk about the issues with sustained streaming content (3-4 hour movies or continuous audio/video streams were often stalled just the same as p2p apps.) I have in fact upgraded my net to the top tiers available at every step of my comcast contract for the last decade, and while I can generally find ways to 'steer around' issues with open source & p2p software, fixing issues with endpoint services like netflix & premiereradio networks proved to be more difficult (because the lack of acknowledgement on the part of Comcast made it impossible for the responsible party to fix things!) Of course once the p2p throttling came out and comcast 'promised' to stop throttling those issues went away as well (curious that, though I still can't "prove" anything.)

I don't usually have issues with netflix now either (even though comcast is apparently doing 'network management' again), but Hulu--as my wife has observed a few times over the last few years without knowing 'why' she 'likes it now'--seems to work better than ever in terms of speed. Part of this of course is flash gaining video accelleration during the intervening time (so the UI feels 'better' to her and video can do HD with ease) but we don't get the rebuffering we used to either. So I explained to my wife the day Hulu was bought why we should still support netflix too, and I wondered what backdoor relation NBC & the other investors had with Comcast to magically get such good service (did they change to better edge hosting perhaps like netflix did with akamai back then or something simple on a technical level--a reasonable explanation?) Low & behold more time passes and now Comcast & NBC are merging...

Meanwhile my choices since 2002 have dwindled to Comcast & high speed or DSL with Qwest on an MSN backbone that still gives 768kbit as an entry level pricepoint, and 7MBit if I want to spend the same amount I'm spending for the 30mbit tier on comcast. In any case anecdotal evidence doesn't = data (oft repeated here) and I'm sure tl;dnr; in terms of a post length but I don't have high hopes for allowing companies to have 'managed services' and 'managed mergers' of monopolistic dimensions is going to benefit me much at all. I certainly fail to see how it's going to enable the next garage business to turn into a multimillion/billion dollar affair as the article seems to imply.

Every time I've seen the 'suits' attempt to create 'channels' in an attempt to market something on top of a layer of tech, the technology underneath it moves so quickly that any attempt at a static, controlled form of it winds up being obsolesced rather quickly. Remember having screensavers with feeds pre-rss as if we'd all been waiting for CNN to enter every idle second we had? And apps you could run at the top of your screen (which were early forms of spyware in some cases, logging basic user metrics before anyone care about such things.)

Actually my guess is that this is how they're going to finally 'open up' about the ACTA. They need justification to pollute the airwaves/media outlets with false claims that there is no hard data on 'how bad this problem is' since we can't yet track the statistics via beurocracy, so therefore we need mechanisms like 3-strikes so that we can begin to collect info on 'how bad things really are'.

Funny, I read the parent post as sarcasm.

This issue is related to automatic fan control not working due to improper registry keys, and so GPU's that run warm (9800 series for instance) can quickly overheat and potentially suffer damage. I'm having no issues with mine, but I set fan profiles manually as I'm using a machine that has a very hot MCH & fb-dimms (2008 Xeon) and don't want the gpu contributing more. However for anyone interested (and using a GT200 or at least G80/G92 on up) here's the fix: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161767

I do seem to recall that Quest kept falling under scrutiny during the years around this issue, though I would have to do some research to recall exactly what was at issue (soimething with their CEO or Board President?)