Pick any of the online printers for a cheap price (snapfish, shutterfly, etc.), they are all about the same and will print with a quality photo processing machine on quality photo paper. Don't try to print any pictures you want to last at home. By the time you put enough money into it, you could have bought 5 copies of each of your other photos from a pro.
All that said, I would recommend only printing what you really want now (for frames, photo books, to put on the fridge, etc). Don't print them "to have a copy in 20 years". I do agree having a photo sharing site as the sole copy is a bad idea, but keeping them digital isn't.
I have all of our kid's photos on a computer at home (RAID 1 setup, but that may be too much for some to deal with), a second copy on a usb hard drive at home (for local backup), a third copy on a server I have in collocation (a similar solution would be mozy, carbonite, backblaze, etc.), and then the majority uploaded to Google Picasa for friends and family to view and order prints.
Sure, JPEG (what 99% of my photos are in) may not be around forever, but odds are, it isn't going to disappear overnight and I would much rather, in 10-20 year or whatever when JPEG goes away run some converting program overnight than deal with storing a bunch of shoeboxes of old photos.
Just keep your photos digital and put them on as many hard drives and in as many places as you can.
It takes longer for most older people to find jobs. It has nothing to do with being a programmer or not.
Exactly. I have often seen it quoted that for every 10K extra in salary you would expect to make, you should add an extra month to your job search/time without work in case of a layoff. Generally, a 35 year old expects to make more than a 25 year old. It stands to reason that it would take a little longer to find a job.
Instagram isn't a good data point. The instagram purchase was done pretty much by Mark Zuckerberg alone, and then told to the Facebook board (not proposed).
Pretty much it was a rich kid saying, "oh yeah twitter, 1 Billion dollars, how do you like that?!?"
I don't think this bubble is the same. Recent IPOs (Groupon, Zynga, etc) have pretty much calmed down (although they may still be somewhat too high, it isn't as crazy as the last time). Google just make 2.9 Billion, so their valuation is pretty reasonable. Facebook, according to SEC filings is cash positive, so it isn't unreasonable to place at least some value on them as well.
If the temps are in "operating ranges" which run higher than you might think (check with the hard drive manufacturer for specs), temperature doesn't correlate to drive failure:
Hard Disk Sentinel: http://www.hdsentinel.com/ is a great tool They even have a free Linux client. What it does over SMART is that it takes the SMART data and weights them according to indications of failure, then gives you a score of 0-100 (100 being great, 0 being dead) as to how healthy the drive is. We use this extensively and have created NAGIOS scripts that monitor the output. Generally, if a drive has a score of 65 or higher, I will generally continue using it (pretty much all my setups are RAID 10 or RAID 6). If the score starts dropping rapidly (a few points every day, even if it started high) or gets below 65 or so, I go ahead and replace it. It has helped out a bunch.
Even with that, using the SMART data, in a SMART way, still only predicts about 30% of failures. The other 70% will come out of no where. That is why it is best to assume all drives will die at anytime and are suspect and never allow a single drive to be the sole copy of anything.
So someone with a clear head please explain, is this just bullshit whining of people who don't understand that there is no _speed_ component in the phrase "unlimited data" and it's perfectly legitimate to throttle at some point as long as it's disclosed, or is it truly AT&T advertising unlimited data at guaranteed 3g or 4g speeds?
The problem is that, at the time these "unlimited data" plans were sold and the contracts were signed, there were no constraints (i.e. throttling). iPhones started killing AT&Ts network, so they stopped selling "unlimited data" plans and started only selling only plans with a specified amount of data and prearranged overage charges (2 GB, 5 GB, etc.)
The people with existing "unlimited data" contracts were grandfathered in and for a time, nothing changed. Recently they have started throttling the grandfathered "unlimited data" customers, something that was never part of the original agreement. That is what everyone is so upset about.
If you are right that MS products in general are harder to maintain, then guess what THAT IS THE BUSINESS TO BE IN.
Amen. I own a small consulting company. We pretty much only do Linux servers where at all possible. We do support and generally recommend Windows desktops. Close to 90% of my revenue comes from Windows support. The Linux servers, you set them up, collect your fee, and don't look at them for a year. I often have a challenge to justify upgrades/patches because the server just works so well.
Windows desktops though, break all the time. They get viruses, Outlook pst files get corrupted, and it just craps out in general. This is where I make my money.
As long as you can clarify that stuff is not your fault, but rather something that just happens (I wouldn't advise a long Microsoft rant though, people will just think you are making excuses), then there is tons to be made in Microsoft support.
I have people say all the time "I bet you get tired of computers breaking". I always respond, "No, if computers stopped breaking, I would have to find another job."
I don't equate it to stupidity. It's not that people don't understand the implications of this. It's made fairly clear.. âoeevery site you visit will be known to usâ. It comes down to having different priorities.
The Slashdot crowd is privacy sensitive. It's important to us. The fact that it's not important to others is something we have to learn to accept. We canâ(TM)t always write it off as âoewell, they are just stupid.. if only we could explain it to them in the right way..â because they have a valid opinion. They've chosen to live a certain way, and privacy is not a priority to them.
I agree that it is just a matter of opinion. Honestly, if it is completely open and upfront like this, I really have no issue with it. I am actually considering trying to sign up for this, and I have a BS in Computer Science, work in IT, and visit Slashdot daily. I honestly don't really see what all the concern is about.
It wouldn't be very hard to get most details of my life from just a little browsing habits, and really, I can't think of anything I would care about other people knowing. If anyone asked me straight up, I would probably tell them. I am completely fine with people that want to keep there privacy and don't even see it as "they have something to hide", but I honestly don't care. I generally assume that anything other than thoughts that are only in my head are known to others and my thoughts can probably often be inferred. Maybe I am just too simple minded though.
If I have a choice to keep things private if needed (maybe I need to overthrow a king or something), then I am cool with companies "invading" my privacy. There just needs to be an opt-out, even if that opt-out is "don't use the service (read Facebook)".
Yep, even with SDCards, I don't think there are phones out there that can compete with some MP3 players in terms of storage.
That's why I use Subsonic. With it and my android phone, I have as much storage as I can fit into a server using SATA drives (currently in mine, 2 TB). I never have to worry if I loaded the song/album I wanted to play, if it isn't already on my phone, I just pick it and subsonic streams it. It caches locally a fixed amount that you can set, so you still have music to play if you are out of a coverage area. I fought for a while to keep getting more and more storage on a Rockboxed mp3 player, but eventually just gave up once I found Subsonic.
But how much sense does it make in dollars per month to carry a smartphone vs. a dumbphone and a Galaxy Player or Archos 43, when smartphone service is still about five times the price of the cheapest dumbphone plan?
I have a Sansa e280 with Rockbox on it. I once used it for all my music, but now I just use it for audiobooks. All my music is now through my phone.
Here is my setup: I have a Motorola Triumph on Virgin Mobile, my costs were $129 for the phone (I got it on Black Friday, they are around $220 on Amazon, or you can get the Optimus V for about $100 which also is a nice phone). My monthly plan costs $25 a month (this plan is $35 now, I'm grandfathered in). That's it. I get unlimited data (rate limited after 2.5 GB, but then still fast enough for music streaming). So, overall, my phone costs aren't much more than a "dumbphone" plan. At least for my needs.
For music, on my phone I have Pandora, Slacker, and, the coolest of all Subsonic. Subsonic is a music streaming service that I run on my home Linux server that gives me full access to my entire music collection, wherever I am. So instead of trying to fit everything on one MicroSD card, I just leave it on my RAID 10 array at home and stream it from there. Subsonic also caches however much I want on my phone locally, so if I don't have wifi or 3g coverage, I still have around 2 GB (my current setting, you can go higher) of music on my phone to play. With cynogenmod and DSP, the music sounds great to me in my car or though headphones, although I will be the first to admit that I don't have the most "sensitive" ears.
Umm.. The meddled with the distro to turn it into a tablet type OS. The main thing everyone complains about on the desktop, Unity, would actually be pretty nice on a tablet.
Umm, they did exactly that. Check out the last four pages of the article. Basically, T-Mobile is really good if you live in the middle of no where (until AT&T buys them that is).
I was more or less in the same boat. Here is what I did:
No home phone (why do you really need that anymore anyway, I guess that could very for some).
Cell Phones, Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V. It is a great android phone and my monthly service is $25 for unlimited texting, unlimited data, and 300 minutes. They have higher minute plans if needed, but going over minutes isn't very expensive and you can restart a plan early. My wife and I were on a family plan with AT&T, but two VM plans is cheaper. After the initial cost of the phones, we are coming out way ahead and get a lot more.
TV: We were spending about $100 per month with Dish. Bought a Roku box for living room, put the Wii in the bedroom and got a $9 Netflix streaming plan. Got a $3 a month (averaged out) pandora paid subscription for music. Put a $45 antenna in the attic. I now get better quality HD locals than with Dish (I also have a computer setup to record if desired, but that admittedly does add extra expense) and we watch everything on Netflix or Hulu. Sure, we don't get to watch everything we did, but there is plenty for us to watch (including our daughter) and we shouldn't be watching so much TV anyway. Plus, the way I put it to my wife was "Is $1000 a year worth it to watch House Hunters on HGTV"? I think when you put it in terms like that and realize that if you give up a few shows to save a lot of money, it is an easy decision. Also, I tend to find that for most people that have "can't miss shows" after a few weeks of not seeing them, they don't really care about that show anymore. All they really want is a few hours of mindless TV entertainment and the exact show doesn't always matter.
Now, if the Tab had come $100 cheaper and offered me something MORE than what the iPad2 does, I would be all over it. But for the same price it's just not worth it to lose the ease of use, interoperability, and application support.
Exactly. It's not enough to match the ipad, it has to be CHEAPER than the ipad to be worthwhile for normal people.
Not meant as flamebait, but I believe Android would never have gotten as popular as now if the iphone hadn't been limited to one carrier and priced higher than the android phones in the USA.
What about the Asus Transformer? It is $400 (equivalent iPad 2 is $500) has the internal memory, a dual core tegra chip, same gorilla glass ips screen, etc. It also has Flash, you don't have to use iTunes, and there are a lot more apps/options in general than iOS. I have one and love it.
leaking dangerous amounts of radiation into the environment
The problem with that is that there are not dangerous amount of radiation leaking into the environment. For a good, more informed, less bias summary, read here:
No one has died from radiation poising, and as of now, it doesn't look like anyone will. The major concern right now is a financial one, not an environmental or safety one. If they wanted, they could let the "cores melt down" and nothing really bad would happen. The cores would be contained in the designed containment chambers. The only downside is that you loose a lot of really expensive uranium and can't really put a new plant right there anymore.
Also, take this into account, Chernobyl, which by all accounts was worse than Japan's situation could turn out to be killed between 28 and 700,000 people (depends on who you ask, but lets go with the "long term effects, people who got cancer in their 70s that maybe wouldn't have and use the 700,000). Each year in China alone, 700,000 die from air pollution related causes, mostly from coal power plants:
In addition, on average 30+ workers die in China's coal mines each year. 28 workers total died in the Chernobyl meltdown.
Coal kills way more people than nuclear energy has. It is kind of like terrorism in America. Everyone is going through crazy steps like the TSA to prevent another terrorist attack, even though your are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist (in the USA).
Is nuclear 100% safe, no it isn't. Neither is walking down the street or drinking water. The fact is we need energy for the world, to provide heating and cooling, to help produce food, and to help our economies grow. With the technologies out there right now, nuclear is, in my opinion, by far the best option. It is cleaner and safer than coal and is about the same cost per kwh. Hydroelectric would be better, but it is limited as to where you can put it. Solar and wind are great future technologies, but until efficiency is greatly improved and/or better storage techniques are developed, they can't supply the power requirements we have right now, much less in the future.
This isn't exactly true. For reference, I am in Texas. The cheapest landline I can get is about $20 a month. The cheapest dial-up I know of, is about $8 a month, so $28 per month total.
For an initial investment of $150 (I know, that is kind of a lot, but it might could be saved for), I can get an LG Optimus from Virgin Mobile. I can then pay $25 per month and get 300 minutes of calling, unlimited texting, and turn my phone into a wifi hotspot with unlimited data with about 700 kbps - 1.1 Mbps download speeds (aka much better than dialup).
So I would be paying about the same (or maybe less) than a phone line and dial up, and getting much better service. The only hangup would be the initial $150 for the phone, and I could see how that could be the deal breaker for some. On the other hand, if you managed to buy a say $300 computer to need Internet access, you should be able to find a way to buy a $150 phone. That said, it could even reduce the barrier of entry to things like email since you could just start with the phone and have reasonable email usage without a computer.
Checkout Virgin Mobile. If you have good Sprint coverage in your area, it is great. You can get an LG Optimus V, with Android 2.2 for $150, and then get monthly service with unlimited data and texting for $25 a month, no contract.
Really though, there are alternatives out there. Like I posted above, I just got a LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile for $150 with no contract. It runs Android 2.2 and is really nice. My monthly service is $25 and I get unlimited data and texting. I am also not locked into any contract. I can use my phone as a wifi hotspot to get Internet access from just about anywhere on my laptop.
I thought this as well, for a long time, until about two weeks ago. That was when Virgin Mobile came out with the LG Optimus V (I swear this isn't an ad, I just love this phone). The phone itself cost $150, no contract. My monthly service costs $25 a month and I get unlimited data and texting. I can now listen to Pandora in my car, get my email quickly and easily wherever I go, monitor my Nagios installation constantly, and it even turns into a WiFi hotspot at the push of a button if I need to use my laptop for some "real work". I agree the $500 iphones with $100+ monthly contracts for 2 years are crazy, but for $150 upfront and then $25 a month that I can quit anytime I want (plus I need a cell phone anyway), it is hard to pass up.
You just need a better credit card. There are tons of cards out there, with no annual fee, that let you create virtual account numbers with set dollar and time limits. For example, I have the Citi Forward Visa that has no annual fee, pretty good rewards, and free, unlimited virtual account numbers.
Anytime I need to pay for something on a site I am not that sure about (sometimes due to shadyness, sometimes due to hard to get out of auto-renewal), I create a virtual account number online, set a limit at or maybe $5 over what I need to pay them (in case tax works out differently or something) and set a time limit of a month. Then I give them a one time use number and limit my liability to just the amount I want to pay them, for the shortest time possible.
A la carte, pay per show per season, instant movie rental...
These are all available. Buy a Roku Box for $60 and you have all the things you mentioned between Netflix and Amazon VOD. With Netflix, you have a $9 a month subscription fee with "instant movie rental" of whatever you want.
With Amazon VOD you have a la carte (just get one episode of a TV show, one movie, etc), pay per show per season (most TV shows are between $1 USD - $3 USD per episode, or you can get a discount for buying the whole season), and instant movie rental (pick your movie, pay a reduced fee, "rent" it for 24-48 hours, depending on the movie). Most things come in SD and HD with no commercials.
I more or less have this same setup. I have a small AMD Athlon X2 machine/case with large/quiet fans that I built that runs ubuntu, but basically just boots into freevo. I have my video files directory nfs mounted at boot up and freevo just sees them as if they were on the local machine. I have another old laptop in the bedroom that is under my dresser that does the same thing. I bought two USB remotes from dealextreme.com for like $9 each and hooked them up. I had to create custom modmaps for a few buttons, but other than that it just worked. The setup was a little bit of a pain, but now that it is done, my wife (non-tech) uses it with no problems. The other plus is that since it uses VLC, Xine, and/or Mplayer to play the videos (you can configure it based on file extension), it can play pretty much anything without having to worry about going from one thing to another.
Get a Sansa Clip+. They are about the same size as a Shuffle, play just about any format of music file, have great battery life, a lot bigger internal memory for the price, plus a microSD slot to expand their capacity. The battery life is great. There is a small glowing screen, but it dims/turns off after about 10 seconds without a button press.
I honestly don't understand why people by Apple music players (ipod, shuffle, etc.). I'm not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't get it. The Clip+ doesn't even look ugly. What could the Shuffle do that it doesn't, except maybe have perfect integration with iTunes, which is a horribly bloated program anyway (and which will sync to a Clip+ as well).
Slashdot Mirror
Pick any of the online printers for a cheap price (snapfish, shutterfly, etc.), they are all about the same and will print with a quality photo processing machine on quality photo paper. Don't try to print any pictures you want to last at home. By the time you put enough money into it, you could have bought 5 copies of each of your other photos from a pro.
All that said, I would recommend only printing what you really want now (for frames, photo books, to put on the fridge, etc). Don't print them "to have a copy in 20 years". I do agree having a photo sharing site as the sole copy is a bad idea, but keeping them digital isn't.
I have all of our kid's photos on a computer at home (RAID 1 setup, but that may be too much for some to deal with), a second copy on a usb hard drive at home (for local backup), a third copy on a server I have in collocation (a similar solution would be mozy, carbonite, backblaze, etc.), and then the majority uploaded to Google Picasa for friends and family to view and order prints.
Sure, JPEG (what 99% of my photos are in) may not be around forever, but odds are, it isn't going to disappear overnight and I would much rather, in 10-20 year or whatever when JPEG goes away run some converting program overnight than deal with storing a bunch of shoeboxes of old photos.
Just keep your photos digital and put them on as many hard drives and in as many places as you can.
If you don't like the TSA, you can travel a different way
Sure, as long as you also don't want to travel by car or train or subways or ferries
I guess that still leaves by foot (as long as you don't go in a subway tunnel) and maybe horse. I guess we really shouldn't complain.
It takes longer for most older people to find jobs. It has nothing to do with being a programmer or not.
Exactly. I have often seen it quoted that for every 10K extra in salary you would expect to make, you should add an extra month to your job search/time without work in case of a layoff. Generally, a 35 year old expects to make more than a 25 year old. It stands to reason that it would take a little longer to find a job.
Instagram isn't a good data point. The instagram purchase was done pretty much by Mark Zuckerberg alone, and then told to the Facebook board (not proposed).
Pretty much it was a rich kid saying, "oh yeah twitter, 1 Billion dollars, how do you like that?!?"
I don't think this bubble is the same. Recent IPOs (Groupon, Zynga, etc) have pretty much calmed down (although they may still be somewhat too high, it isn't as crazy as the last time). Google just make 2.9 Billion, so their valuation is pretty reasonable. Facebook, according to SEC filings is cash positive, so it isn't unreasonable to place at least some value on them as well.
If the temps are in "operating ranges" which run higher than you might think (check with the hard drive manufacturer for specs), temperature doesn't correlate to drive failure:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/#more-337
Look for the "lessons learned" section in that link.
Hard Disk Sentinel: http://www.hdsentinel.com/ is a great tool They even have a free Linux client. What it does over SMART is that it takes the SMART data and weights them according to indications of failure, then gives you a score of 0-100 (100 being great, 0 being dead) as to how healthy the drive is. We use this extensively and have created NAGIOS scripts that monitor the output. Generally, if a drive has a score of 65 or higher, I will generally continue using it (pretty much all my setups are RAID 10 or RAID 6). If the score starts dropping rapidly (a few points every day, even if it started high) or gets below 65 or so, I go ahead and replace it. It has helped out a bunch.
Even with that, using the SMART data, in a SMART way, still only predicts about 30% of failures. The other 70% will come out of no where. That is why it is best to assume all drives will die at anytime and are suspect and never allow a single drive to be the sole copy of anything.
So someone with a clear head please explain, is this just bullshit whining of people who don't understand that there is no _speed_ component in the phrase "unlimited data" and it's perfectly legitimate to throttle at some point as long as it's disclosed, or is it truly AT&T advertising unlimited data at guaranteed 3g or 4g speeds?
The problem is that, at the time these "unlimited data" plans were sold and the contracts were signed, there were no constraints (i.e. throttling). iPhones started killing AT&Ts network, so they stopped selling "unlimited data" plans and started only selling only plans with a specified amount of data and prearranged overage charges (2 GB, 5 GB, etc.)
The people with existing "unlimited data" contracts were grandfathered in and for a time, nothing changed. Recently they have started throttling the grandfathered "unlimited data" customers, something that was never part of the original agreement. That is what everyone is so upset about.
If you are right that MS products in general are harder to maintain, then guess what THAT IS THE BUSINESS TO BE IN.
Amen. I own a small consulting company. We pretty much only do Linux servers where at all possible. We do support and generally recommend Windows desktops. Close to 90% of my revenue comes from Windows support. The Linux servers, you set them up, collect your fee, and don't look at them for a year. I often have a challenge to justify upgrades/patches because the server just works so well.
Windows desktops though, break all the time. They get viruses, Outlook pst files get corrupted, and it just craps out in general. This is where I make my money.
As long as you can clarify that stuff is not your fault, but rather something that just happens (I wouldn't advise a long Microsoft rant though, people will just think you are making excuses), then there is tons to be made in Microsoft support.
I have people say all the time "I bet you get tired of computers breaking". I always respond, "No, if computers stopped breaking, I would have to find another job."
I don't equate it to stupidity. It's not that people don't understand the implications of this. It's made fairly clear.. âoeevery site you visit will be known to usâ. It comes down to having different priorities.
The Slashdot crowd is privacy sensitive. It's important to us. The fact that it's not important to others is something we have to learn to accept. We canâ(TM)t always write it off as âoewell, they are just stupid.. if only we could explain it to them in the right way..â because they have a valid opinion. They've chosen to live a certain way, and privacy is not a priority to them.
I agree that it is just a matter of opinion. Honestly, if it is completely open and upfront like this, I really have no issue with it. I am actually considering trying to sign up for this, and I have a BS in Computer Science, work in IT, and visit Slashdot daily. I honestly don't really see what all the concern is about.
It wouldn't be very hard to get most details of my life from just a little browsing habits, and really, I can't think of anything I would care about other people knowing. If anyone asked me straight up, I would probably tell them. I am completely fine with people that want to keep there privacy and don't even see it as "they have something to hide", but I honestly don't care. I generally assume that anything other than thoughts that are only in my head are known to others and my thoughts can probably often be inferred. Maybe I am just too simple minded though.
If I have a choice to keep things private if needed (maybe I need to overthrow a king or something), then I am cool with companies "invading" my privacy. There just needs to be an opt-out, even if that opt-out is "don't use the service (read Facebook)".
Yep, even with SDCards, I don't think there are phones out there that can compete with some MP3 players in terms of storage.
That's why I use Subsonic. With it and my android phone, I have as much storage as I can fit into a server using SATA drives (currently in mine, 2 TB). I never have to worry if I loaded the song/album I wanted to play, if it isn't already on my phone, I just pick it and subsonic streams it. It caches locally a fixed amount that you can set, so you still have music to play if you are out of a coverage area. I fought for a while to keep getting more and more storage on a Rockboxed mp3 player, but eventually just gave up once I found Subsonic.
But how much sense does it make in dollars per month to carry a smartphone vs. a dumbphone and a Galaxy Player or Archos 43, when smartphone service is still about five times the price of the cheapest dumbphone plan?
I have a Sansa e280 with Rockbox on it. I once used it for all my music, but now I just use it for audiobooks. All my music is now through my phone.
Here is my setup: I have a Motorola Triumph on Virgin Mobile, my costs were $129 for the phone (I got it on Black Friday, they are around $220 on Amazon, or you can get the Optimus V for about $100 which also is a nice phone). My monthly plan costs $25 a month (this plan is $35 now, I'm grandfathered in). That's it. I get unlimited data (rate limited after 2.5 GB, but then still fast enough for music streaming). So, overall, my phone costs aren't much more than a "dumbphone" plan. At least for my needs.
For music, on my phone I have Pandora, Slacker, and, the coolest of all Subsonic. Subsonic is a music streaming service that I run on my home Linux server that gives me full access to my entire music collection, wherever I am. So instead of trying to fit everything on one MicroSD card, I just leave it on my RAID 10 array at home and stream it from there. Subsonic also caches however much I want on my phone locally, so if I don't have wifi or 3g coverage, I still have around 2 GB (my current setting, you can go higher) of music on my phone to play. With cynogenmod and DSP, the music sounds great to me in my car or though headphones, although I will be the first to admit that I don't have the most "sensitive" ears.
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
Umm.. The meddled with the distro to turn it into a tablet type OS. The main thing everyone complains about on the desktop, Unity, would actually be pretty nice on a tablet.
This has been their intention all along.
Umm, they did exactly that. Check out the last four pages of the article. Basically, T-Mobile is really good if you live in the middle of no where (until AT&T buys them that is).
I was more or less in the same boat. Here is what I did:
No home phone (why do you really need that anymore anyway, I guess that could very for some).
Cell Phones, Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V. It is a great android phone and my monthly service is $25 for unlimited texting, unlimited data, and 300 minutes. They have higher minute plans if needed, but going over minutes isn't very expensive and you can restart a plan early. My wife and I were on a family plan with AT&T, but two VM plans is cheaper. After the initial cost of the phones, we are coming out way ahead and get a lot more.
TV: We were spending about $100 per month with Dish. Bought a Roku box for living room, put the Wii in the bedroom and got a $9 Netflix streaming plan. Got a $3 a month (averaged out) pandora paid subscription for music. Put a $45 antenna in the attic. I now get better quality HD locals than with Dish (I also have a computer setup to record if desired, but that admittedly does add extra expense) and we watch everything on Netflix or Hulu. Sure, we don't get to watch everything we did, but there is plenty for us to watch (including our daughter) and we shouldn't be watching so much TV anyway. Plus, the way I put it to my wife was "Is $1000 a year worth it to watch House Hunters on HGTV"? I think when you put it in terms like that and realize that if you give up a few shows to save a lot of money, it is an easy decision. Also, I tend to find that for most people that have "can't miss shows" after a few weeks of not seeing them, they don't really care about that show anymore. All they really want is a few hours of mindless TV entertainment and the exact show doesn't always matter.
Now, if the Tab had come $100 cheaper and offered me something MORE than what the iPad2 does, I would be all over it. But for the same price it's just not worth it to lose the ease of use, interoperability, and application support. Exactly. It's not enough to match the ipad, it has to be CHEAPER than the ipad to be worthwhile for normal people. Not meant as flamebait, but I believe Android would never have gotten as popular as now if the iphone hadn't been limited to one carrier and priced higher than the android phones in the USA.
What about the Asus Transformer? It is $400 (equivalent iPad 2 is $500) has the internal memory, a dual core tegra chip, same gorilla glass ips screen, etc. It also has Flash, you don't have to use iTunes, and there are a lot more apps/options in general than iOS. I have one and love it.
leaking dangerous amounts of radiation into the environment
The problem with that is that there are not dangerous amount of radiation leaking into the environment. For a good, more informed, less bias summary, read here:
http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/53461/fukushima-nuclear-accident-simple-and-accurate-explanation
No one has died from radiation poising, and as of now, it doesn't look like anyone will. The major concern right now is a financial one, not an environmental or safety one. If they wanted, they could let the "cores melt down" and nothing really bad would happen. The cores would be contained in the designed containment chambers. The only downside is that you loose a lot of really expensive uranium and can't really put a new plant right there anymore.
Also, take this into account, Chernobyl, which by all accounts was worse than Japan's situation could turn out to be killed between 28 and 700,000 people (depends on who you ask, but lets go with the "long term effects, people who got cancer in their 70s that maybe wouldn't have and use the 700,000). Each year in China alone, 700,000 die from air pollution related causes, mostly from coal power plants:
http://www.pri.org/business/global-development/thousands-of-deaths-because-of-china-s-coal-energy2500.html
In addition, on average 30+ workers die in China's coal mines each year. 28 workers total died in the Chernobyl meltdown.
Coal kills way more people than nuclear energy has. It is kind of like terrorism in America. Everyone is going through crazy steps like the TSA to prevent another terrorist attack, even though your are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist (in the USA).
Is nuclear 100% safe, no it isn't. Neither is walking down the street or drinking water. The fact is we need energy for the world, to provide heating and cooling, to help produce food, and to help our economies grow. With the technologies out there right now, nuclear is, in my opinion, by far the best option. It is cleaner and safer than coal and is about the same cost per kwh. Hydroelectric would be better, but it is limited as to where you can put it. Solar and wind are great future technologies, but until efficiency is greatly improved and/or better storage techniques are developed, they can't supply the power requirements we have right now, much less in the future.
This isn't exactly true. For reference, I am in Texas. The cheapest landline I can get is about $20 a month. The cheapest dial-up I know of, is about $8 a month, so $28 per month total.
For an initial investment of $150 (I know, that is kind of a lot, but it might could be saved for), I can get an LG Optimus from Virgin Mobile. I can then pay $25 per month and get 300 minutes of calling, unlimited texting, and turn my phone into a wifi hotspot with unlimited data with about 700 kbps - 1.1 Mbps download speeds (aka much better than dialup).
So I would be paying about the same (or maybe less) than a phone line and dial up, and getting much better service. The only hangup would be the initial $150 for the phone, and I could see how that could be the deal breaker for some. On the other hand, if you managed to buy a say $300 computer to need Internet access, you should be able to find a way to buy a $150 phone. That said, it could even reduce the barrier of entry to things like email since you could just start with the phone and have reasonable email usage without a computer.
Checkout Virgin Mobile. If you have good Sprint coverage in your area, it is great. You can get an LG Optimus V, with Android 2.2 for $150, and then get monthly service with unlimited data and texting for $25 a month, no contract.
Really though, there are alternatives out there. Like I posted above, I just got a LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile for $150 with no contract. It runs Android 2.2 and is really nice. My monthly service is $25 and I get unlimited data and texting. I am also not locked into any contract. I can use my phone as a wifi hotspot to get Internet access from just about anywhere on my laptop.
I thought this as well, for a long time, until about two weeks ago. That was when Virgin Mobile came out with the LG Optimus V (I swear this isn't an ad, I just love this phone). The phone itself cost $150, no contract. My monthly service costs $25 a month and I get unlimited data and texting. I can now listen to Pandora in my car, get my email quickly and easily wherever I go, monitor my Nagios installation constantly, and it even turns into a WiFi hotspot at the push of a button if I need to use my laptop for some "real work". I agree the $500 iphones with $100+ monthly contracts for 2 years are crazy, but for $150 upfront and then $25 a month that I can quit anytime I want (plus I need a cell phone anyway), it is hard to pass up.
You just need a better credit card. There are tons of cards out there, with no annual fee, that let you create virtual account numbers with set dollar and time limits. For example, I have the Citi Forward Visa that has no annual fee, pretty good rewards, and free, unlimited virtual account numbers.
Anytime I need to pay for something on a site I am not that sure about (sometimes due to shadyness, sometimes due to hard to get out of auto-renewal), I create a virtual account number online, set a limit at or maybe $5 over what I need to pay them (in case tax works out differently or something) and set a time limit of a month. Then I give them a one time use number and limit my liability to just the amount I want to pay them, for the shortest time possible.
Thanks for the blog post, random guy.
A la carte, pay per show per season, instant movie rental...
These are all available. Buy a Roku Box for $60 and you have all the things you mentioned between Netflix and Amazon VOD. With Netflix, you have a $9 a month subscription fee with "instant movie rental" of whatever you want.
With Amazon VOD you have a la carte (just get one episode of a TV show, one movie, etc), pay per show per season (most TV shows are between $1 USD - $3 USD per episode, or you can get a discount for buying the whole season), and instant movie rental (pick your movie, pay a reduced fee, "rent" it for 24-48 hours, depending on the movie). Most things come in SD and HD with no commercials.
Its out there.
I more or less have this same setup. I have a small AMD Athlon X2 machine/case with large/quiet fans that I built that runs ubuntu, but basically just boots into freevo. I have my video files directory nfs mounted at boot up and freevo just sees them as if they were on the local machine. I have another old laptop in the bedroom that is under my dresser that does the same thing. I bought two USB remotes from dealextreme.com for like $9 each and hooked them up. I had to create custom modmaps for a few buttons, but other than that it just worked. The setup was a little bit of a pain, but now that it is done, my wife (non-tech) uses it with no problems. The other plus is that since it uses VLC, Xine, and/or Mplayer to play the videos (you can configure it based on file extension), it can play pretty much anything without having to worry about going from one thing to another.
Get a Sansa Clip+. They are about the same size as a Shuffle, play just about any format of music file, have great battery life, a lot bigger internal memory for the price, plus a microSD slot to expand their capacity. The battery life is great. There is a small glowing screen, but it dims/turns off after about 10 seconds without a button press. I honestly don't understand why people by Apple music players (ipod, shuffle, etc.). I'm not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't get it. The Clip+ doesn't even look ugly. What could the Shuffle do that it doesn't, except maybe have perfect integration with iTunes, which is a horribly bloated program anyway (and which will sync to a Clip+ as well).