Agreed, but the "old" Netflix, flush with VC dollars & a growing stock price, would've said "we can build ad-tech from scratch better than anyone else."

BTW, the Microsoft ad-tech is likely Xandr, which most recently was owned by AT&T: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.ads.microsoft.co...

Any engineers feel a little sad about this? The company that had so much influence on "cloud native" now has to depend on Microsoft for their technology?

How about Birdi, which has quite a few more features than Nest Protect:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/birdi

They were on stage with AT&T last week, and AT&T has a big investment in home automation (Digital Life).

It's a lot of reading, but the EMP commission report seems to be the most thorough review of the possible impacts of EMP.

I read "One Second After" which paints the end-of-the-world scenario that the OP posits, and then I read the EMP Commission report. My impression was that the actual impact would be awful, but not as bad as the book proposes. The premise of "One Second After" is that almost everything is totally destroyed... all electronics, power, telecommunications, and modern transportation. In reality, only a subset would be affected. For example, from the EMP Commission report:

an EMP attack would disrupt or damage a functionally significant fraction of the electronic
circuits in the Nation’s civilian telecommunications systems in the geographic region exposed to EMP.

Note that it didn't say *all* telecommunications would be damaged. In fact, it later says that there will still be enough surviving infrastructure to overload the circuits from people making calls. Even just a few operational phone lines would go a long way to facilitating emergency response across communities.

However, the report rightly notes that all our infrastructure is interrelated and damage in one infrastructure area can impact others. Notably:

The Commission has concluded that the electrical system within the NERC region so disrupted
will collapse with near certainty. [...] This loss is very large geographically and restoration is very likely to be beyond short-term emergency
backup generators and batteries.

Which means even the parts of the telecommunications infrastructure that survive would be without power to keep it going.

EMP may not send us back to the dark ages, but it is a very serious threat. Also keep in mind that the report was written in 2008, and our dependence on electronics has only increased since then.

You can sort through the 100's of responses and attempt to summarize, or you can just buy this e-book from GigaOm. I'm not affiliated with the author, but I do like GigaOm, and their Cord Cutter series has been really good

Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable
Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable (link with referral code if so inclined)

To answer the question, the best way to watch TV is AT&T's U-Verse: nice responsive UI, good channel selection, whole home DVR. But if you want the best bang for the buck, here's what I did:

- Roku with Netflix. Added Amazon for one-off purchases. Also have a Hulu Plus subscription, but haven't found it useful yet.
- Antenna for over the air -- better HD than cable and quite a few channels. Surprisingly, this little antennae worked really well for me:

Paper Thin Leaf Indoor HDTV Antenna
Paper Thin Leaf Indoor HDTV Antenna (link with referral code if so inclined)

Those comments were frightening... particularly the one from CarHauler...

This may seem funny, but there is more truth to this than you think... just not the way you expect:

1) There was an actual company that wanted to charge gamers for special network routes that would get you lower ping times. You know what happened to them? No one wanted the product and they shut down. The free market at work.

2) A very similar scenario to what you describe can happen if net neutrality is taken to the extreme... without the ability to tamp down some of the most extreme consumers of bandwidth, you will likely see bandwidth caps and tiering come into play. Sure, it won't be site-specific, but I hope you like paying by the bit.

Bill Snyder writes a long post, with meticulous footnotes, criticizing certain AT&T ads, but not once does he link to the actual AT&T ads! Where are the ads so we can judge for ourselves?

Hmmm... commenter doesn't RTFA and makes judgment based on previous bias, and gets moderated +5 Insightful? Wow.

I read the article and was amazed at the great use of technology, that we could beam video and aircraft commands across the world to do surveillance and attacks. But then I saw a special on PBS last night where our ground troops can't even talk with the Afghans. The interpreter didn't speak good english, and his face was blurred out -- no doubt due to fear for his life and his family's safety. So, I wondered, why can't we use the same UAV technology to facilitate better translation?

Simply, give ground troops a video camera, mic, and speaker. Video and audio would be relayed to a translator sitting anywhere in the world. The translator could translate from Afghan to english, speaking into the troops' earpiece. English to Afghan would be broadcast over the speaker the troop carries. It's not nearly as personal, but I'd bet we'd get better and more translators. They can work anywhere and don't have to fear being shot or their family being threatened.

I don't know if you were being sarcastic, but it actually is pretty special that these drug companies had the profit motivation to develop a drug like this. You have to ask yourself if these drugs would've been developed under a socialized drug development system. Would government researchers have been funded to develop these drugs? I can imagine that politicians would have found "better" things to spend taxpayer money on than the "remote" chance of a pandemic flu.

"Interesting" is the right moderation here... As in "Interesting that someone would be so close-minded as to require prospective employees to be on a social networking site." I realize this is Slashdot, but if you'd step away from your computer for a little bit, you'd realize there are plenty of ways to socialize without being on a social network. Such as, I dunno, hanging out with your friends, belonging to your local church, volunteering with civic organizations, participating in a local sports league, etc. In fact those in-person activities are a better indication of someone's ability to get along with co-workers than being on Facebook.