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If only it was more accessible. iTunes isn't really the "public" although it is a start. I personally like what they are doing across the (Ohio) river from me:

http://www.ket.org/collegecourses/

I've been following the "Western Tradition" with Eugen Weber for quite a while now and just wish there were more shows like this. It stopped being taped in 1989 and the entire Annenberg library seems to be a decade old.

I wish there were more tax breaks for professionals when it came to contributing to public television. With HDTV coming, soon public broadcasting will/has/can have more than just one or two stations (of three major cities that I pick up, all have at least three stations on ATSC, one with 5). Actors, professors, doctors, executives could all benefit in the pocket book by giving something back to the community.

Couple historical points for you though. Most roads did not "lead" to Rome anymore than most roads today lead to Washington DC. Most roads connected disparate parts of their empire with other disparate parts. The result being that many of these disparate parts became far less disparate.

As for why did they build the roads? It certainly wasn't to bring troops to Rome itself, in fact they were forbidden from crossing the Rubicon and coming to close to Rome (something Julius Ceaser famously defied). Roads were built to help them manage their far flung empire and keep their standing professional army busy during times of peace. The natural byproduct of the road system was the economic flourishment that the empire enjoyed.

Idle troops can be very dangerous, and building the roads served as much to keep their troops busy as they did for troop transport. Rome was pretty much alone in having professional troops intead of conscripts and understood the importance of a standing army. It was on of those minor details that led to both the size and longevity of their empire.

Here's what my local channel map looks like. 9.1 CBS HD
9.2 a doppler radar display (SD)

GOOD for them. Finally some one realizes what to do with this stuff rather than waste it on HD.

26.1 PBS Prime SD/ HD in evenings
26.2 PBS SD
26.3 PBS Kids SD (days only)
26.4 PBS Plus SD (days only)

Maybe you can get your local PBS to follow along with KET and send the EMWIN WX info in their stream too.

See KET: http://www.ket.org/dtv/datacasting.htm

Maybe if you knew what coal WAS, you might get some inkling of the "myth" behind coal and diamonds. Coal is naturally compressed carbon, usually from the decomposition of biomass. It can be up to 98% pure carbon and the impurities can be squeezed out or squeezed into the lattice as the molecules find tighter and tighter packing arrangements. Basically, carbon deposits could be coal or graphite, except for the fluke arrangement of higher environmental pressure and heat from volcanic activity. http://www.showcaves.com/english/explain/Mines/Dia mond.html http://www.ket.org/Trips/Coal/Glossary.html

The one caveat is that in Northern Areas it was discovered that asphalt roadways were not holding up as long as their concrete breathern. Many asphalt roads were having to be torn up and replaced every other year due to extensive freeze damage. Many cities went back to using concrete for their roads, until better techniques of preparing the roadbeds were discovered. Which were to compress and smooth the roadbed as much as possible, then lay a barrier layer of aggregate *gravel* on top of that to help with drainage and settling, then to finally slope the finished road from the middle to the edges for increased water run-off.

"Discovered". Feh. Until the cities were willing to cough up the money to prepare the roadbed correctly, a practice which had been in use two millennia earlier, but which fell out of use because of the lack of civic incentive to build and maintain good roads.

No, forum is singular, fora is plural. Both datum and forum are 2nd declension neuter in Latin, so -um is singular, and -a is plural.

Data is the singular. DATUM IS THE PLURAL

the sentence should read

"Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's datum are still housed in mainframe computers."

I have been correcting people over this for decades and still nobody corrects their usage

Well, there's bad news and good news for us folks who get public TV through KET (the Kentucky Network, the statewide PBS system here in Kentucky). I'll give the bad news first as it makes the good news sound better:

The Bad News:

1) Apparently KET does its own scheduling, so you can't find its schedule through PBS's pages; rather, try ket.org.

2) On the main KET network, apparently they aren't showing "Code Rush" at all. :( Damn those grandmas paying for "Mystery" (though I can't say much--a big part of it too, at least in Kentucky, is also people paying for KET to show Britcoms and the Red Green Show, so I guess all of us who like Red Dwarf and Keeping Up Appearances are just as much at fault...).

The Good News:

In those areas that get KET2 feeds (yes, Kentucky actually has two separate networks run by KET--the second one consisting of the non-KET PBS affiliates that got bought up en masse by KET a few years back), they're showing "Code Rush" on April 11. Check yer local listings and times, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah TV Scene blah blah Courier-Journal blah blah. :)

More Bad News (ok, I lied):

As far as I know, KET2 extends to Louisville and that's it (did I mention, offhand, that there was all of ONE non-KET-affiliate PBS station in Kentucky before KET bought them out?). If one hasn't got cable, Louisville is about the only place that one can see it (at least if you don't live in Covington--no idea what Ohio's public TV network has planned).

More Good News (at least according to KET's website):

If one does have cable, it looks as if darn near the entire Insight network in the Louisville-surrounding-area up to around Frankfort and Elizabethtown carries KET2. (No, I do not know what to tell you if you live in Lexington, except maybe you ought to move to Louisville seeing as Lexington seems to be populated mostly by snobs related to the horse-racing industry and nearly everyone I know who lives there loathes it. :) Those of you in the rest of the state might be able to get someone in a KET2-enabled area to videotape it for you, or you could probably buy it on cassette off KET's website come June or so.

M.o. dun said:

I'm not exactly sure what teletext is, but I do know that all (or almost all) TVs in the US have "CC" - closed caption. How's that different?

Well, if memory serves, teletext in Europe has a lot more services besides closed captioning--for example, complete program listings, newspaper/news reporting feeds, online shopping on some systems, etc. (Comparing closed captioning in the US to teletext services is a lot like comparing, say, computerised news services to a full-featured BBS system or multimedia-enabled web site. Europe uses it FAR more extensively than we do.)

This is not to say that teletext-type systems are COMPLETELY unknown in the US (I'll give an example of one in a bit), but part of it is that Europe has dedicated the bandwidth for it for some time. In the US, if memory serves, text services including closed captioning are carried on the 21st or 24th line of the 525-line NTSC signal, which is not a hell of a lot of room to stick stuff.

SOME teletext-type stuff besides closed captioning does exist in some areas, though. ABC stations carry program schedules sometimes on the text mode of a closed-caption signal (yes, with closed captioning there are two different modes and anywhere from two to four channels in each mode--regular closed caption mode and "text" mode which is essentially stripped-down teletext--yes, Slashdot readers (at least in the US) can test this on any TV made after 1993 or so with a 13" screen or larger--federal law mandates now that all TVs 13" screen or more have closed-captioning built in, and all of 'em have the text mode, even the cheap-arse models :). Some other stations will do this too, and on the other channels of text or regular CC mode may have captioning in other languages (I'd expect most stations in Miami to offer closed-captioning in Spanish too).

Possibly the neatest use I've seen for "text mode" in US-style closed captioning is how The Kentucky Network or KET, our statewide PBS network, does an agricultural teletext service called AGTEXT in cooperation with the University of Kentucky's agricultural school...basically has weather info, stockyards reports, agricultural hints, agricultural-related weather, etc. In the Louisville area it can be picked up on WKMJ-68 (KET 1; channel 13 on Louisville-area Insight Cable) on channel-1 text mode; I'm pretty darn sure the other KET affiliates statewide (with the exception of KET-2 (WKPC-15) in Louisville, which was formerly an independent PBS affiliate till they were bought out by KET--yes, we actually have TWO public broadcasting channels in Louisville, with different scheduling and double the Britcoms :) also carry the AGTEXT teletext feeds.

I'm not aware if anyone else is doing the AGTEXT thing or similar feeds like how is done in Kentucky, but it'd be very interesting to find out just what CAN be found on other channels/text mode across the US and Canada...maybe a list ought to be done. :)