Slashdot Mirror
DTV Coupon Program Out of Money
Thelasko writes "It appears that the US Government's digital converter box program is running out of money. If you sign up after the program runs out of money, you will receive your voucher if the program receives more funding. Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."
This summer, Congress will conduct hearings on the massive waste and fraud in the program surrounding scores of bogus vendors each selling tens of thousands of fictitious boxes, all with "valid" coupons.
Ibid.
Don't forget the approx 20,000,000,000 commercials.
Not like it matters. The program will get whatever extra money it needs. No way will the feds deprive Joe Bob of his basic right to free programming. Panem et circenses for the 21st century.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The converter boxes aren't that expensive, about as much as a new game, sure it sucks to be forced to buy new equipment but there are other things one can do besides watch TV if they are so unwilling to suffer the cost of the boxes.
This is true, my grandmother bought one for $30. Not too expensive. However, when I came home for Christmas, she asked me to hook the box up. She needed the TV to record soap operas on her VCR while she was at work. That is all she used it for (we're talking technologically inept middle of nowhere country folk here). Ok, so I run the coaxial cable into the back of the converter, then put the RCA cables into the input on the back of the VCR (which then turned into a coaxial cable to the back of her TV as her TV is 20 years old and that's all it has). Everything is working fine but as a side result, she can't program different channels because the converter box determines the channels. Ok, not a big deal to her.
... I tried a few other VCRs at my parent's house and they all seem to do it.
But then we record something and I notice a very peculiar thing with the color. I seem to recall that if you had put a DVD signal through a VCR, the color would modulate so that people couldn't dupe videos (or maybe there is a technical restriction). Anyway, she said she would put up with it but after watching 10 minutes of TV I wanted to throw the damned thing through the window.
So tell me, how do you record on these things to a VCR with no color modulation
My work here is dung.
New TVs are not that expensive.
New TVs are expensive. If you're living on less than $800 a month, that $100+ is going to be felt. Trust me. This is obvious to anyone who hasn't had money supplied to them by their parents for their entire lives...
Is someone living on $500 a month "entitled" to watch television for free? If so, why?
Because of this silly notion that "the people" own the airwaves...
Not really a surprise. Voting against TV would be, politically, about as sensible as voting for the "Islamopedophile encouragement and anti-jesus act of 2009".
New TVs are not that expensive
WTF are you talking about? I paid a thousand dollars for mine! And not only that, throwing away a perfectly good TV is immorally wasteful, even if it's only a nineteen incher you paid a hundred bucks for.
The government is paying to fix a problem that THEY caused. You and your wife's $60k incomes togather may make a thousand bucks "chicken feed" but my forty grand and no wife can't afford to replace an otherwise perfectly good television.
Ask Gumby whose employer is being subsidized by the government by its giving Gumby a LINK card (making it possible to pay Gumby less; food stamps are a handout to the poor's employers) if he can easily afford that forty dollar converter box.
Its amazing how ignorant the upper middle class can be.
Free Martian Whores!
New TVs are not that expensive. Even pensioners could buy a new one. I don't think the government should be paying for any of this.
It's very simple. Go back to the reasons for the "digital only" conversion. First, strike out the myth that it's to give HD. Digital HD. Second, remember that the market was not demanding digital TV.
So what's left? Two things. First, the government wanted to sell off the bandwidth that normal TV uses. Second, the *AA lobbies loved the idea of digital because they could put their "broadcast flag" in it and implement DRM.
Neither of these two reasons are in the public interest, and again, the market did not demand the conversion to digital TV. The Bush admin controlled FCC knew that they would have a lot of pissed off people if they forced people to buy new TV's so they came up with this converter box to pay for their hidden agendas.
No it won't. Because of something the government did.
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted?
(Look! A car analogy that works!!)
This is the entertainment equivalent of that. Everybody's old TVs that work fine are being obsoleted, not by the market, but by the government saying, essentially, "Your old TV is now illegal."
Certain things you can get away with doing that, if it doesn't affect a majority of people. You can restrict handgun calibers to 0.30 and lower, and most people will say "Well, what do those gun freaks need all those .38 and .44 guns for, anyway?" and the government gets away with it.
Try to do it with TV or cars, and the 90+ percent of the population that's affected will be rather annoyed, to say the least.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I'd love to compare the current U.S. to the faltering Roman empire but there's a football game on. Has anyone seen my welfare check?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
It probably has something to do with the massive amount of lead and various other environmentally hazardous material found in televisions: the gov't doesn't want it all in landfills. Especially, for that matter, right away: when TVs all stop working at once, everyone is going to dispose of their old ones immediately (not leave them laying around). Such a thing could overwhelm sanitation services (due to the weight of the things) temporarily.
Also, there are a LOT of people out there who don't like throwing things out. So there are still quite a few 30+ year old TVs out there with the analog 19 channel dials.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
or people will start to read books.
If the converter box coupons help keep perfectly good CRT TVs out of the wastestream it sounds like money well spent.
(Relevent report on that from 60 Minutes)
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The bad part about digital TV is the method of transmission they used is inferior in some ways to analog TV. It requires a very strong signal to get any video at all, and it's very suspectible to multipath interference. Analog TV would degrade gracefully, so that if you didn't get a strong signal you could at least hear it, and see black and white video. Digital TV is all-or-none. Also, portable TV antennas no longer work (at least, not while you're moving), so you can't stick one in your car or your Sony Watchman. Digital broadcast TV is a pain at this point...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Collect some cans along the road and turn them in to buy your converter.
I'd rather collect some TVs along the road and turn them into a sculpture of a triceratops.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I wonder if this has anything to do with it?
Scammers Exploit DTV Coupon Program
So, paying for another mode of reception doesn't insulate you from the DTV switch.
Besides, it's too late to be having this argument. When they reclaimed the spectrum, part of the deal was that people would still be able to watch broadcast TV without laying out for a new TV or bearing the full cost of a converter box. That was the deal. You can't just tell people something to get their consent to make changes, and then not follow through on your end of the bargain.
You forgot one important justification for the DTV changeover: ending a massively wasteful use of spectrum.
A single analog TV channel uses a 6 Mhz of spectrum. And most channels sit vacant to avoid interference. Just four channels--24hz--is enough bandwidth to run a full-fledged mobile 3G network. You tell me what's a smarter way to use that chunk of spectrum.
Besides, relatively few people even get television from an antenna anymore. Technological advances have always caused some to lag behind--why should TV be any different? I don't get why people just assume that it's in the public's interest for broadcasters to control massive quantities of spectrum when pretty much every engineer and economist has demonstrated that broadcasting analog television signals is a complete waste of spectrum.
I see why you might think that market didn't "demand" a conversion to digital broadcasting, that's only because the people who benefited from the analog era had no incentive to move on.
Command-and-control spectrum allocation is on the way out. Letting politically powerful lobbies like the National Association of Broadcasters dictate how the public airwaves are used is unacceptable. We need to figure out a way to use spectrum intelligently, and the DTV conversion is a good step in that direction.