The guys who run Hulu, on the other hand, are smart. You'll see why in a bit.

I don't even watch network TV, as it turns out. Nor cable. Canceled my DISH subscription a year ago. I get all of my content off of the intertubes. But regardless, let's start with American network television to spotlight some foolishness there. Let's begin with NBC.com.

For the purpose of discussion, let's suppose that you are a *huge* fan of NBC's 30 ROCK. I'm not, even though I think Tina Fey is really, really hot, but let's just pretend for a moment. Further, let's suppose that you missed last week's episode, so now you are pointing your Linux-powered Firefox browser at www.nbc.com to catch it. After a quick search and a couple of video advertisements you find the link to last week's episode.

You click it.

You get a pretty Flash animation of the NBC peacock, and a pop up window containing the following message:

Sorry but we do not support that browser, please use one of these
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Windows
Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 6
Firefox 3
Firefox 2
Chrome

Mac
Firefox 3
Firefox 2
Safari
Chrome
Camino

See what I'm getting at? What a stupid message! What a stupid policy to block Linux users! And how rude to not even tell us up front that we are being blocked! There are xx million Linux users in the United States. Nobody knows what xx is, but we're pretty sure that the number of Linux users in the US is in the tens of millions. If you believe the hit counters that some web sites use to collect stats on visitors, perhaps 5-7% of us who cruise the web are running some flavor of Linux. The population of the United States is approximately 350 million people. Five percent of 350 million is around 17.5 million.

This is an estimate, of course, but you get the idea. There are a significant number of us Linux users out there. And here we are being diss'ed by those idiots in the US television industry.

Ok, enough of that. I've wiped the little flecks of spittle off my lips. We can proceed, calmly.

Back to last week's episode of 30 ROCK. So what do we do? We go over to Hulu.com and watch it there. That's what we do. No muss, no fuss. And by so doing we cause NBC.com to lose advertisement revenue. We generate positive advertising cash flow for Hulu.com. The smart guys win, the idiots lose.

Works for me!

FWIW, not all American network TV companies have management and policies that are so thick-headed as those demonstrated by NBC.com. ABC provides an acceptable Linux viewing experience. Fox let me watch last week's episode of Bones (although the viewing experience was better on Hulu -- more Hulu bandwidth, perhaps). CBS has a nice library of videos that play fine with Linux: 48 Hours, 60 Minutes, CSI, and much more.

Come to think of it, it appears that it is mostly the TV execs over at NBC who are sporting the room-temperature IQs. Fortunately, observing practical applications of Darwin's theories can be quite rewarding. Let's all sit back and enjoy watching NBC go the way of the Dodo bird.