Green Screen of Death

Our bedroom TiVo died this morning, aged 3+. More specifically, on rebooting from the frozen screen it came up with what I'll call the Green Screen of Death (inspired by Microsoft no doubt). You can hear the disk thrashing away, probably spewing little bits of magnetic plasma all over the place. We're debating now whether to rebuild it (we have the technology), turn it over to Tivo for "service", or let "frisket" dig a hole in the front yard and bury it.

Update @ 10:22 a.m.

The darn thing seems to have fixed itself, though we're taking this as a warning shot (it's been on continuously for 3+ years. Somehow I doubt it's as robust as a hardcore computer server). Must have fsck'd all the filesystems. (Um, no, that's not an obscenity, it's an ancient unix command, short for filesystem check, kind of like chkdsk but for a real operating system).

Pubscience shut down

PubScience was a US DoE sponsored site which offered free access to scientific and technical articles. Commercial publishers lobbied the Bush administration to shut it down and have succeeded according to this article at Federal Computer Week. This is "privatization" at work...basically, your tax dollars go to pay for the research, and then to find out about the results you get to pay a private firm for the privilege of access to formerly public information. I don't understand how the public is better off...