Completely agree. As soon as I heard the news, I knew that people would immediately start complaining, even though this is a great deal. For 30 cents a day, you can stream on-demand from a (presumably) huge library of shows to any of your devices. The ads are around 5-10% of your total viewing time, as opposed to somewhere around 25% for a typical TV broadcast. This is NOT some conspiracy to ripoff customers - honestly I'll be surprised they can even make much of a profit from this.

Has anyone online ever done any of the following?
-paid for cable TV: $40/month, with ~25% commercial time
-gone to the movies: $5/hour, with ~20 minutes of commercials at the beginning
-rented a movie (brick&mortar): $5/movie
These are all orders of magnitude more expensive and inconvenient than what Hulu is proposing. (This also highlights how great a deal the current free Hulu service is.)

My only caveat to this is the "presumably" above - if the catalog being offered for $10/month is only marginally larger than the free catalog, then it might not be worth it. Still, to dismiss this as a money grab seems unbelievably narrowminded. This is exactly how I want the future of media to be: low cost, large number of choices, control over when I watch, minimal advertising, access from all my devices, etc.

I think Livescribe's model is much better than IOGear's for taking notes - you don't have to deal with moving the receiver around during class, just turn the pen on to get started (takes ~4 seconds to boot up) and then forget about it. The audio recording is also much more helpful than I expected, especially since you can archive your notebooks for posterity. Last week I wanted to review something I learned last year, so I just typed in the search and got to hear a five-minute lecture about it :)

If you're just interested in organization and searching, I'd highly recommend the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen - all the smarts are in the pen, which isn't too expensive compared to a tablet, and you can buy the compatible notebooks cheaply. All your notes get backed up to your computer when you dock your pen, it does a great job searching for a specific piece of text. My handwriting is a disaster, and I have never seen a search fail so far - I believe that it actually uses the sequence of pen motions (not just OCR on the final result) and it can tolerate some of the letters being unreadable. It has other features as well, such as recording audio (the mic has a decent gain) and syncing it with your notes. They also have an SDK and are launching an app store, so in the future you should be able to make good use of the ARM processor in the pen.

I was thinking the same thing - could they really have been serious about the 10-day DRM? It wasn't as if people's reactions were unpredictable, so I find it hard to believe that they honestly thought people wouldn't complain. As you pointed out, this seems more like a conscious "Door-in-the-face" technique than a legitimate retraction.