Hard? Google for "iraq civilian deaths". http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
They're reporting 17884 civilians. So that's around 20,000 if you count coalition military as well. The only number missing then is the number of insurgents that have been killed. It's also worth noting that most of those 17884 were killed by suicide bombers (see the database on the site - 7350 were from the coalition force).
Now for a comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of _prisoners_in _Iraq_under_Saddam_Hussein
Looks like Saddam killed at least 250,000 people just in 1988 and after the first Gulf war. Are you going to say that the allies were wrong in going after Hitler too?
They're definitely not in conflict... you're just trying to spin it that way. I'll make it simple for you to understand:
People will not die if the Hubble Space Telescope is abandonded. People WILL die if we leave Iraq immediately.
That's why complaining about the money going into Iraq doesn't do any good. We simply CAN'T leave. The Hubble is completely different. We CAN abandon it without any major negative effects other than delaying our deep space observations (remember.. the stars will be there in 10 years if we can afford a replacement for Hubble then, at a cheaper cost if the shuttles are replaced).
1. $1-2 billion might not be a good investment for the Hubble. If that money is applied to the design of a replacement satellite, or possibly a replacement for the shuttles, then we might gain even more by NOT spending on the Hubble. It's a cost tradeoff issue, and is hardly a simple decision to make. It's a decision that can only be made when looking at the entire NASA budget (which Slashdot posts never do).
I'd personally like to see $1-2 billion go towards a replacement for the shuttles, since that would greatly reduce the maintenance costs for satellites down the line.
2. The anti-Bush rhetoric is getting old. There's many reason we should or shouldn't be in Iraq, but the fact remains that we ARE in Iraq. We should not leave anytime soon (most reasonable people can agree with that), since the entire thing would have been in vain. So, we're stuck with paying the $80 billion per year for the next few years.
At this point it does no good to complain about the extra money required for Iraq, since it's going there no matter what. It's far more important to determine how agencies will make better use of their reduced funding... like deciding if the Hubble should be repaired or if the money should be spent on something else.
It's not the school environment it's the teaching staff!
That's such BS. At my high school there were a large majority of students that just didn't care about learning. They didn't want to be there, but since they had to be they decided to spend that time socializing and screwing around. If I don't remember how to factor a polynomial properly, is it my teacher's fault? It could be, but it's far more likely that I wasn't paying attention during that part of class, or that I just forgot about it since then.
Here in Wisconsin, a government class is required at the high school level. They cover a range of topics, and the declaration of independance, constitution, and bill of rights are each covered in-depth. I'm sure I could do very well on that survey, but I guarantee that most of my classmates would fail just as poorly as the ones in the Knight Foundation study.
4. Companies that may or may not have received venture capital, but didn't spend wastefully.
There are quite a few small companies that started during the late 90's that sold a large majority of their products from their website. I worked at such a company, and it's still in business now. The key is that there wasn't a lot of wasteful spending, and it was based on a solid business model. It didn't have a big storefront in case the web sales failed, but it also didn't buy a lot of things it didn't really need, or hire people not required to just get by.
I'm probably far less paranoid than most of the Slashdot crowd. Anything that contains sensitive information (read: finances) gets stored on a CD in my fire safe. Everything past that is a simple attempt to prevent having to restore files or rebuild my system. I have a hardware firewall, but mostly just avoid doing stuff online that could be risky. I make online purchases, but use an actual credit card with a low limit. That's it.
I really don't think Big Brother is watching me (I'm not that interesting), but if they are, I don't really care. They'd find out what they want to know no matter how hard I try locking my stuff down.
If you don't use the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox, and if you use an IE theme, the only way most users know it's different is the way Bookmarks are handled. I got my grandma up and running with Firefox in 5 minutes, and she didn't need any training to switch from IE (except showing her which icon accesses the Internet now). This is a lady that took an hour to show how to compose and send an email.
The reason Firefox is gaining popularity is because it fits a niche in the market that needed to be filled: an fast, clean alternative to IE. K-Meleon doesn't seem to fill any other niche, which means it would be a direct competitor with Firefox.
I'm sorry, but that's a battle it's probably going to lose. As for taking market share from IE, I don't see it being anything significant. Any IE users that switch are likely to change to Firefox, since there's so many existing users and comes across as a commercial product (read: clean website, clean interface, etc). Any IE users that were unlikely to switch to Firefox are unlikely to switch to K-Meleon. The only people I see using this are the Slashdot crowd.
I personally won't switch because Firefox has been stable enough for me, and waiting 2 seconds for it to load isn't too painful. K-Meleon can probably load it in what, 1.5 seconds? Yay.
The entire Xeelee Sequence of books are excellent. Ring is a good start, but Vacuum Diagrams is by far the best. It's also the heaviest content of theoretical physics and mathematics that I've seen in a sci-fi book before.
Additionally, Social Security is something like a Ponzi scheme, and as such, if you stop paying into it now, then those who have already paid into it won't be able to get back what they put into it. So, it's either tough luck for the under-[insert age here] crowd in the future, or it's tough luck for the baby boomers now. Guess who will win that one?
The difference is, it's a one-time tough luck for the baby boomers. If it's not fixed, then the situation will continue to get worse until someone decides to make the tough decision to change it. In other words, if we don't say tough luck to the baby boomers, we'll be having this same conversation in 20 years, but it will be a lot worse.
What most people don't understand is that baby boomers and people already on social security will not lose their benefits. That's what the $2 trillion cost is about. I say go ahead and switch the system now before it costs us $5 trillion to fix it 10 years from now.
If you set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around Mars, you wouldn't need line of sight to get the data from a rover back to Earth. You could do this with just a repeater, though.
It gets interesting as we spread out more and more. You can set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around each planet, and data has a much more likely chance of getting back to Earth. You can relay pictures of the stars from Mars to Earth when it's on the other side of the sun.
You can also send satellites out past Pluto, and if you have a router in orbit around Pluto, there's a good chance for it to relay the signal back to Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus. Then those can relay it back closer and so on. It's much better than the laser aligned communications we use now, where the satellite needs a direct line back to Earth.
Good point. I'd argue that it comes down to the fact that Hollywood writers don't have the scientific knowledge necessary to write good sci-fi scripts, which is why we're seeing a lot of books made into film (War of the Worlds, LoTR, HGTTG, Clark's Rama series).
It makes sense... take a book with an established fanbase that's exciting and well thought out, and make it into a movie. That way the studio doesn't have to worry about the story being plausible, since the original author did that. They just need to worry about a good book to script conversion and take it from there.
I actually don't mind one bit. It's fun seeing books I love become movies, even if they're changed slightly. It's fun, and it brings these great stories to more people.:)
I look at this a little differently than most of the posters so far. This could be absolutely terrible, which is a definite possibility given that Disney is doing it (without Pixar, for that matter:).
However, if it does end up being good and have a halfway decent story, it will bring a story that many of us have enjoyed for a long time to a new generation of fans. How many kids out there do you know of that have watched Tron? What about Cloak and Dagger? D.A.R.Y.L? These are classic movies that most people won't see unless they're redone and released again in theaters.
I'm looking forward to taking my niece to the movie, and having another 'geek' movie to watch with my wife (she LOVES LoTR). It's going to be tough to make it as good as the original, but I think that's fine as long as it's not completely awful.
Until Apple and the linux community start providing inexpensive computers that are easy to use to these markets, there's an actual NEED for Microsoft to do so. I agree that MS is doing this in order to lock people into Windows, but it's pointless to complain about when they're filling a demand that nobody else is.
I think the hardware issue is a big part of locking down some of the features (the resolution limitation is the first that stands out), but I'd bet that the rest is meant to reduce the learning curve. I know a lot of elderly people that refuse to work on a computer because they get overwhelmed with options. Contrary to what much of the linux community believes, some people PREFER fewer options. The trick is to make each option stable and useful, which is what MS hasn't nailed yet.
If you read the article, you'd see they're targetting 3rd world countries. Many of these people have never used a computer before. So, it's not an issue of them being smart enough to run more than 3 applications, it's them being able to run more than 3 and understand what's happening when the system slows down or crashes.
Why not reduce the learning curve instead of overwhelming them with options and possible issues?
People who have never touched a computer before don't know WHAT they want. They don't understand the concept of a single resolution vs multiple resolutions... my grandmother uses a computer and doesn't understand either.
I think it's better to only allow 3 applications than to allow unlimited applications and have the system slow to the point it's unusable (read the article.. these are 200-300mhz systems with minimal ram). It would make more sense to someone not knowing anything about computers that they can only have 3 programs open at a time (and get a message saying so) than to have the system freeze up or crash due to them opening 40 instances of Paint (and getting no error message).
Keep in mind the target market here. Your complaints would be accurate if this were being sold to people in the US who are just looking for a cheap alternative to XP Pro/Home, but that's not the case.
I have mod points, but I don't want to waste them since I think many Slashdotters would agree with you. So I'll respond to your post as politely as possible instead. I'm no MS fanboy, but I do tend to have a more balanced view since I use both linux and Windows regularily.
You obviously didn't read the article, or didn't understand what MS is going for with this product. They're not giving "us this crap" as you state, they're releasing it ONLY to target markets that the product is specifically designed for. Also, the hardware that this will run on isn't MS-only, and the owners of said hardware can choose to install Linux at any point if they desire to do so. MS could EASILY release systems that would lock in to only run XP Starter Edition, which they'd have the right to do considering they're helping design them, but instead they're allowing people to choose in order to see how XP Starter fares against any competition.
But that's the thing... there is not competition. There is no stable Linux installation that does what XP Starter is trying to do: target people who have no computer experience whatsoever. In fact, there's few Linux flavors that target people with just basic computer skills either.
Linux development teams could learn something from MS in how they researched the niche market and found out exactly what was needed. They locked down many of the features in the OS to make it less breakable and more stable for slow hardware (limiting the # of programs running and limiting to a single resolution).
I work at a company that helps inner city teens get the skills they need to get decent jobs. They LOVE being able to sit down at an old recycled computer and look around online, or type papers for school. We've done research that shows that many of our participants will write papers for school if they're able to type them on a computer instead of writing them by hand, since it's a novelty and the end result looks much nicer. Anything that helps these kids get the skills they need to graduate and get a better job is a good thing, and it's my belief that the same holds true for people in foreign countries that have never had the benefit of working on a computer.
Perhaps instead of jumping on MS's case for doing something worthwhile (granted, they're still trying to increase their market share and profits), you could put that energy into working on a linux build that does similar. Or you could work with computer manufacturers and donors to try getting inexpensive systems built for inner-city families. It'd do much more good than your little rant.
Go to avsforums.com and check out the HTPC section. I built my movie server for right around $400, excluding storage space. Then it's an additional $5/movie using 250GB drives in external USB enclosures. Backup? If a drive goes bad, it would result in my having to DVD-Shrink around 45 movies, which would take me about a week (start 1 before work, 1 before bed, 1 before dinner, etc..). So, for a 2.5TB server (500 movies), it'll cost me a tad under $3000.
I also use Meedio (meedio.com) so I can access weather, music, RSS feeds, email on my TV. Zoomplayer with fddshow allows me to upconvert DVD's to 1080i HD. Finally, I also have game emulators installed, so I can play any NES, SNES, Genesis, or Atari game ever created.
Most of all, though, I consider it a hobby since it's a nice challenge for my brain. Keeps me busy .
I agree with your entire post, but feel the need to point out that it'd be far easier just adding this stuff to some exterior paint and slapping it on your entire house. Won't cover the roof, but you could always paint the boards before putting down shingles, or even line your attic with aluminum foil.
Like you said, though... far easier to install some cat5.
Someone else fixed your problem with #3, but I'll address that anyway:
1. They might be able to increase the rate, but I can choose to end the contract at any time. My cable company doesn't require me to sign up for a certain period of time, and even prorates fees for partial months. So, if they raise their fees and I can find a better deal, I'll go elsewhere.
2. Until this happens, getting the PVR through the cable company is still the cheapest route. So, I'll get mine through them until they end their service, at which point the cost of buying my own will have dropped considerably.
3. $192. That's around the cost of a cheap PVR or PVR card, but by renting from the cable company I get free upgrades and repairs. My HD decoder that I rent from Time Warner went bad the other day... started overheating and wouldn't change channels. I just took it to a service center and got a newly released model. No costs incurred.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard? Google for "iraq civilian deaths".
f _prisoners_in _Iraq_under_Saddam_Hussein
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
They're reporting 17884 civilians. So that's around 20,000 if you count coalition military as well. The only number missing then is the number of insurgents that have been killed. It's also worth noting that most of those 17884 were killed by suicide bombers (see the database on the site - 7350 were from the coalition force).
Now for a comparison:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_o
Looks like Saddam killed at least 250,000 people just in 1988 and after the first Gulf war. Are you going to say that the allies were wrong in going after Hitler too?
They're definitely not in conflict... you're just trying to spin it that way. I'll make it simple for you to understand:
People will not die if the Hubble Space Telescope is abandonded. People WILL die if we leave Iraq immediately.
That's why complaining about the money going into Iraq doesn't do any good. We simply CAN'T leave. The Hubble is completely different. We CAN abandon it without any major negative effects other than delaying our deep space observations (remember.. the stars will be there in 10 years if we can afford a replacement for Hubble then, at a cheaper cost if the shuttles are replaced).
There's two things to respond to in your post:
1. $1-2 billion might not be a good investment for the Hubble. If that money is applied to the design of a replacement satellite, or possibly a replacement for the shuttles, then we might gain even more by NOT spending on the Hubble. It's a cost tradeoff issue, and is hardly a simple decision to make. It's a decision that can only be made when looking at the entire NASA budget (which Slashdot posts never do).
I'd personally like to see $1-2 billion go towards a replacement for the shuttles, since that would greatly reduce the maintenance costs for satellites down the line.
2. The anti-Bush rhetoric is getting old. There's many reason we should or shouldn't be in Iraq, but the fact remains that we ARE in Iraq. We should not leave anytime soon (most reasonable people can agree with that), since the entire thing would have been in vain. So, we're stuck with paying the $80 billion per year for the next few years.
At this point it does no good to complain about the extra money required for Iraq, since it's going there no matter what. It's far more important to determine how agencies will make better use of their reduced funding... like deciding if the Hubble should be repaired or if the money should be spent on something else.
It's not the school environment it's the teaching staff!
That's such BS. At my high school there were a large majority of students that just didn't care about learning. They didn't want to be there, but since they had to be they decided to spend that time socializing and screwing around. If I don't remember how to factor a polynomial properly, is it my teacher's fault? It could be, but it's far more likely that I wasn't paying attention during that part of class, or that I just forgot about it since then.
Here in Wisconsin, a government class is required at the high school level. They cover a range of topics, and the declaration of independance, constitution, and bill of rights are each covered in-depth. I'm sure I could do very well on that survey, but I guarantee that most of my classmates would fail just as poorly as the ones in the Knight Foundation study.
4. Companies that may or may not have received venture capital, but didn't spend wastefully.
There are quite a few small companies that started during the late 90's that sold a large majority of their products from their website. I worked at such a company, and it's still in business now. The key is that there wasn't a lot of wasteful spending, and it was based on a solid business model. It didn't have a big storefront in case the web sales failed, but it also didn't buy a lot of things it didn't really need, or hire people not required to just get by.
I'm probably far less paranoid than most of the Slashdot crowd. Anything that contains sensitive information (read: finances) gets stored on a CD in my fire safe. Everything past that is a simple attempt to prevent having to restore files or rebuild my system. I have a hardware firewall, but mostly just avoid doing stuff online that could be risky. I make online purchases, but use an actual credit card with a low limit. That's it.
I really don't think Big Brother is watching me (I'm not that interesting), but if they are, I don't really care. They'd find out what they want to know no matter how hard I try locking my stuff down.
Can't seem to find it now, either. I was using it for version 0.5 or 0.6, so perhaps it didn't get modified to work for 1.0.
If you don't use the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox, and if you use an IE theme, the only way most users know it's different is the way Bookmarks are handled. I got my grandma up and running with Firefox in 5 minutes, and she didn't need any training to switch from IE (except showing her which icon accesses the Internet now). This is a lady that took an hour to show how to compose and send an email.
The reason Firefox is gaining popularity is because it fits a niche in the market that needed to be filled: an fast, clean alternative to IE. K-Meleon doesn't seem to fill any other niche, which means it would be a direct competitor with Firefox.
I'm sorry, but that's a battle it's probably going to lose. As for taking market share from IE, I don't see it being anything significant. Any IE users that switch are likely to change to Firefox, since there's so many existing users and comes across as a commercial product (read: clean website, clean interface, etc). Any IE users that were unlikely to switch to Firefox are unlikely to switch to K-Meleon. The only people I see using this are the Slashdot crowd.
I personally won't switch because Firefox has been stable enough for me, and waiting 2 seconds for it to load isn't too painful. K-Meleon can probably load it in what, 1.5 seconds? Yay.
The entire Xeelee Sequence of books are excellent. Ring is a good start, but Vacuum Diagrams is by far the best. It's also the heaviest content of theoretical physics and mathematics that I've seen in a sci-fi book before.
Additionally, Social Security is something like a Ponzi scheme, and as such, if you stop paying into it now, then those who have already paid into it won't be able to get back what they put into it. So, it's either tough luck for the under-[insert age here] crowd in the future, or it's tough luck for the baby boomers now. Guess who will win that one?
The difference is, it's a one-time tough luck for the baby boomers. If it's not fixed, then the situation will continue to get worse until someone decides to make the tough decision to change it. In other words, if we don't say tough luck to the baby boomers, we'll be having this same conversation in 20 years, but it will be a lot worse.
What most people don't understand is that baby boomers and people already on social security will not lose their benefits. That's what the $2 trillion cost is about. I say go ahead and switch the system now before it costs us $5 trillion to fix it 10 years from now.
If you set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around Mars, you wouldn't need line of sight to get the data from a rover back to Earth. You could do this with just a repeater, though.
It gets interesting as we spread out more and more. You can set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around each planet, and data has a much more likely chance of getting back to Earth. You can relay pictures of the stars from Mars to Earth when it's on the other side of the sun.
You can also send satellites out past Pluto, and if you have a router in orbit around Pluto, there's a good chance for it to relay the signal back to Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus. Then those can relay it back closer and so on. It's much better than the laser aligned communications we use now, where the satellite needs a direct line back to Earth.
It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)
Found by searching Slashdot for "paint".
2 12 8253&tid=193&tid=172&tid=218
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/29/
Good point. I'd argue that it comes down to the fact that Hollywood writers don't have the scientific knowledge necessary to write good sci-fi scripts, which is why we're seeing a lot of books made into film (War of the Worlds, LoTR, HGTTG, Clark's Rama series).
:)
It makes sense... take a book with an established fanbase that's exciting and well thought out, and make it into a movie. That way the studio doesn't have to worry about the story being plausible, since the original author did that. They just need to worry about a good book to script conversion and take it from there.
I actually don't mind one bit. It's fun seeing books I love become movies, even if they're changed slightly. It's fun, and it brings these great stories to more people.
I look at this a little differently than most of the posters so far. This could be absolutely terrible, which is a definite possibility given that Disney is doing it (without Pixar, for that matter :).
However, if it does end up being good and have a halfway decent story, it will bring a story that many of us have enjoyed for a long time to a new generation of fans. How many kids out there do you know of that have watched Tron? What about Cloak and Dagger? D.A.R.Y.L? These are classic movies that most people won't see unless they're redone and released again in theaters.
I'm looking forward to taking my niece to the movie, and having another 'geek' movie to watch with my wife (she LOVES LoTR). It's going to be tough to make it as good as the original, but I think that's fine as long as it's not completely awful.
Like...
this?
or this?
possibly even this?
And those are just the good movies. But you're right.. generalizations are fun.
Until Apple and the linux community start providing inexpensive computers that are easy to use to these markets, there's an actual NEED for Microsoft to do so. I agree that MS is doing this in order to lock people into Windows, but it's pointless to complain about when they're filling a demand that nobody else is.
I think the hardware issue is a big part of locking down some of the features (the resolution limitation is the first that stands out), but I'd bet that the rest is meant to reduce the learning curve. I know a lot of elderly people that refuse to work on a computer because they get overwhelmed with options. Contrary to what much of the linux community believes, some people PREFER fewer options. The trick is to make each option stable and useful, which is what MS hasn't nailed yet.
If you read the article, you'd see they're targetting 3rd world countries. Many of these people have never used a computer before. So, it's not an issue of them being smart enough to run more than 3 applications, it's them being able to run more than 3 and understand what's happening when the system slows down or crashes.
Why not reduce the learning curve instead of overwhelming them with options and possible issues?
People who have never touched a computer before don't know WHAT they want. They don't understand the concept of a single resolution vs multiple resolutions... my grandmother uses a computer and doesn't understand either.
I think it's better to only allow 3 applications than to allow unlimited applications and have the system slow to the point it's unusable (read the article.. these are 200-300mhz systems with minimal ram). It would make more sense to someone not knowing anything about computers that they can only have 3 programs open at a time (and get a message saying so) than to have the system freeze up or crash due to them opening 40 instances of Paint (and getting no error message).
Keep in mind the target market here. Your complaints would be accurate if this were being sold to people in the US who are just looking for a cheap alternative to XP Pro/Home, but that's not the case.
I have mod points, but I don't want to waste them since I think many Slashdotters would agree with you. So I'll respond to your post as politely as possible instead. I'm no MS fanboy, but I do tend to have a more balanced view since I use both linux and Windows regularily.
You obviously didn't read the article, or didn't understand what MS is going for with this product. They're not giving "us this crap" as you state, they're releasing it ONLY to target markets that the product is specifically designed for. Also, the hardware that this will run on isn't MS-only, and the owners of said hardware can choose to install Linux at any point if they desire to do so. MS could EASILY release systems that would lock in to only run XP Starter Edition, which they'd have the right to do considering they're helping design them, but instead they're allowing people to choose in order to see how XP Starter fares against any competition.
But that's the thing... there is not competition. There is no stable Linux installation that does what XP Starter is trying to do: target people who have no computer experience whatsoever. In fact, there's few Linux flavors that target people with just basic computer skills either.
Linux development teams could learn something from MS in how they researched the niche market and found out exactly what was needed. They locked down many of the features in the OS to make it less breakable and more stable for slow hardware (limiting the # of programs running and limiting to a single resolution).
I work at a company that helps inner city teens get the skills they need to get decent jobs. They LOVE being able to sit down at an old recycled computer and look around online, or type papers for school. We've done research that shows that many of our participants will write papers for school if they're able to type them on a computer instead of writing them by hand, since it's a novelty and the end result looks much nicer. Anything that helps these kids get the skills they need to graduate and get a better job is a good thing, and it's my belief that the same holds true for people in foreign countries that have never had the benefit of working on a computer.
Perhaps instead of jumping on MS's case for doing something worthwhile (granted, they're still trying to increase their market share and profits), you could put that energy into working on a linux build that does similar. Or you could work with computer manufacturers and donors to try getting inexpensive systems built for inner-city families. It'd do much more good than your little rant.
Go to avsforums.com and check out the HTPC section. I built my movie server for right around $400, excluding storage space. Then it's an additional $5/movie using 250GB drives in external USB enclosures. Backup? If a drive goes bad, it would result in my having to DVD-Shrink around 45 movies, which would take me about a week (start 1 before work, 1 before bed, 1 before dinner, etc..). So, for a 2.5TB server (500 movies), it'll cost me a tad under $3000.
I also use Meedio (meedio.com) so I can access weather, music, RSS feeds, email on my TV. Zoomplayer with fddshow allows me to upconvert DVD's to 1080i HD. Finally, I also have game emulators installed, so I can play any NES, SNES, Genesis, or Atari game ever created.
Most of all, though, I consider it a hobby since it's a nice challenge for my brain. Keeps me busy .
I agree with your entire post, but feel the need to point out that it'd be far easier just adding this stuff to some exterior paint and slapping it on your entire house. Won't cover the roof, but you could always paint the boards before putting down shingles, or even line your attic with aluminum foil.
Like you said, though... far easier to install some cat5.
So we need an extra leap second every 913 years, unless the year is divisible by 3652 (to account for the .25).
Someone else fixed your problem with #3, but I'll address that anyway:
1. They might be able to increase the rate, but I can choose to end the contract at any time. My cable company doesn't require me to sign up for a certain period of time, and even prorates fees for partial months. So, if they raise their fees and I can find a better deal, I'll go elsewhere.
2. Until this happens, getting the PVR through the cable company is still the cheapest route. So, I'll get mine through them until they end their service, at which point the cost of buying my own will have dropped considerably.
3. $192. That's around the cost of a cheap PVR or PVR card, but by renting from the cable company I get free upgrades and repairs. My HD decoder that I rent from Time Warner went bad the other day... started overheating and wouldn't change channels. I just took it to a service center and got a newly released model. No costs incurred.