Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix

Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is great.

I felt the same. It had the surface qualities of a series about nerdy/geeky computers in the 80s. But missed the essence. I identify much more with Mike Judge's work in Office Space & his Silicon Valley tv series.

A soap opera with a technical facade.

Well, it's a good drama which happens to have a technological background. And it so happens, too, that this technological background is realistic, precise, and even historically accurate.

It's a good advance to make tech dramas approachable to the general public. If the series, as a work of art, is bad, in the end very few people will watch it regardless of its technological accuracy.

That being said, my inner geek agrees with you: too much drama. But again, maybe I'm not exactly the target audience.

I also found it relatively shallow, but I mostly enjoyed watching it because it introduced the whole 80's computer revolution story to my wife, who had previously ignored the subject. She seemed to get along fine with the characters without getting too geeked out by the technology, so I imagine that there is a balancing act going on with the AMC writers behind the show.

That said, we're both looking forward to the next season .. for me, mostly because I love the soundtrack and have a secret crush on Cameron .. for my wife, I guess for the same reasons. ;)

Though it's my understanding that they could have just booted into DOS and performed list on the BIOS? (To get the compiled binary)

During the reverse engineering scene I would assume that they are reading the BIOS which would have been stored in ROM (Read Only Memory). The ROM chip would have the same address and read control lines like any standard memory chip which could be read by setting the Address lines, the Memory Read, any additional/ancillary signaling and then reading the data lines.

Once you had all the bytes read, you could in principle run this through a Disassembler to get the actual Assembly language instructions (minus any original comments). You would have to figure out the boundaries of code, data etc.

I would assume in those early days, they wouldn't expect the run of the mill hackers to be able to disassemble the stored data in ROM.

I assume it steals every piece of data it can but this chrome extension works for US Netflix

http://hola.org/

Apparently Netflix is cracking down on users circumventing the geolocks on content -- but if you want to try, remember that ssh does socks5 (including DNS) proxying. Spin up a VPS at eg Digital Ocean or some other provider that has US presence, and simply:

    ssh -D 8080 yourvps.example.com #or use putty on windoze

You might want to install FoxyProxy for Firefox -- otherwise just point your browser to localhost:8080 as a socks5 server. Apparently Chrome does some funky bits with DNS over socks5 -- but as far as I can figure out the new default in Firefox is sane (DNS over socks if a socks5 proxy is defined).

Not that you'll probably have to have "a US" Netflix account, unless they just use location data for determining what shows you're "entitled" to.

Same works for Amazon Prime, to eg. watch the free pilot of "Man in the High Castle": http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-High-Castle/dp/B00RSI5EHQ

Same deal -- you'll probably need to sign-out/register a "new" Amazon.com account. FYI.

I just tried to change the URL but the 'edit' feature is only allowing me to edit the Title and not the URL. Does anyone know how I can edit the URL also?

"Sorry, Netflix hasn't come to this part of the world yet" on a blank page.

Kind of annoying, not even letting the possible future customers do some harmless window shopping.

Ok, url changed from http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70302182.