Not only that, but the sun is outputting rays in different wavelengths. You won't get a sunburn from office lamps, tanning beds are specifically designed to burn you.
The frequency emitted by LED is even more customizable, and narrow band.
I also think that the responsibility for the taser deaths should be, in some part, distributed to the engineers and doctors assigned with creating the device.
Oh, that's right. I think the actual distinction is that the Prius I have is a 2001, and the newer ones have the button. I don't think it's an international borders thing.
The built in control systems make the gas engine turn if you go faster than 15 mph. The PHEV kits that are more substantial, and actually have some benefit, are a couple thousand dollars. They have a larger battery, and the internal control system is rigged to go to ~35 mph before the gas engine turns on, and the gas engine charges the battery less often so you would be able to make it to work and back without using much, if any gasoline.
The state wants their tax money, but why should we give it to them? Please name me some "essential services" provided by the state that could not be provided in much better ways and possibly by much more qualified individuals.
Well, let's see. I want highways, and roads. That's pretty essential to me. If you are suggesting privatizing all that then I would challenge you to find evidence that the system would be better than it already is and more efficient (cost wise). The reason things are public is because these things should be owned by the people.
It's easy to say "why not use toll roads?" but an easier question to ask is "Why not just use what's already in place that works just fine?" I personally don't like toll roads because it's expensive. The only toll road I've used costs $1 or so for every couple of miles. The cost of gas where I live is $3.50. How much is the taxes half? so say it's 2.00 for 20 miles to make the math easy, it's still cheaper than the toll road. That's even rounding in the toll road's favor for all the uncertainty!
Yes, but is it not a tad bit ironic that the government and politicians are trying to push for cleaner vehicles and helping the environment, while at the same time enforcing tax laws that are restrictive on individuals and make it nearly impossible for them to achieve these goals. A) "The government" is not one person. Specifically, the politicians are mostly in the legislative branch, and fall on either side of the isle, and the executive branch enforces the laws.
B) Taxes tax good citizens and bad citizens. The government taxes activities it wants to encourage and discourage. If anything, this argument "if you had an electric vehicle you would not be paying gas taxes and might still be using highways and other roadways." shows that the tax law is working in both ways.
You are happy in the way things are and don't want anything to change. Maybe it isn't I who should take off the foil hat and move outside, but it is you who should plug in a lamp, blow out that candle, and look to see that the world has changed in the past 200 years and even in the past 100 years since the early days of the automobile.
If there really was some sort of injustice, which I don't believe there is, it would be so far on the bottom of my list of things to worry about. Don't you think there are better directions for politics to go then to amend this type of tax law across the whole country so that a very small minority doesn't get a tax break or gets taxed more? I think a few thousand dollars to one guy is not going to kill anyone. Meanwhile, I'll spend my time doing useful things, like replying to people with different opinions than me on the internet. Ok, so I can see the irony in that... For the record, my lamp already has a fluorescent bulb, and is currently in the off state, which is a sign of change based on the new problems facing me now.
My point is that most people use gasoline in their cars. Most cars use the roads to burn that gasoline. If you want a simple way to pay for roads, doesn't it make sense to tax gasoline? Seems like a good enough concept to get enough of the population to agree on it. This is a non issue. The usefulness of this article is to show people that bio-diesel is taxed just like gasoline.
Leading off with insults, always a winner. Sorry, I thought of it as leading off with a joke. I didn't think the foil hat thing would be offensive to you.
No, he was avoiding paying what is essentially a collective monopoly (after all there is an oil cartel).
Take off your aluminum foil hat, and go outside. There's really no one watching you from your neighbors bushes. The State wants their tax money. The laws may not be perfect, but they say that you need to pay money to the state to use fuel in your car.
Are fuel taxes perfect? no. They don't directly tax how much benefit you get from the roads. They also will tax you if you use the fuel in other things (although the couple of gallons of gas I use in my lawn mower every year is hardly worth mentioning). So what? What possible better solution could there be? Do you want to pay someone to read your odometer? Maybe put a tracking device in your car to see how far you go on state roads? Maybe driving habits, like frequent stops and accelerations have a lot to do with the wear and tear on the roads. Maybe you should be taxed more if you use the roads after the snow storm because your tax money goes to the snow plows to clear the path for you. Oh wait, I've got an even better idea! Why don't we just tax the gasoline so that it works out to be pretty fair 99% of the time! Excellent idea Jeff!
This article should be a warning to people to make sure they are within the tax laws when they use bio diesel. But of course, on slashdot, everyone wants to bring up their ideas to change the friggin world! Oh well, that's really why I read it anyways.
For a minute, I thought you were talking about BeyondTV/BeyondTV link... "- Do you have a Web interface for your schedule, program listings, videos, ecc..?" yes. "- Does it cut commercials?" yes "- Can it rip DVDs?" yes, but it costs extra, I just use nero "- Can it rip music CD?" hmmm no, but I only have the TV extension, not the full fledged media player. "- Can it play DivX?" yep and encode it too. "- Can it play HD Quicktime trailers?" yep. "- Can it use DVB-T, DVB-S, analog and cable at the same time?" dunno, prolly not, but I only have use for cable right now. "- Can you attach another frontend to it (one for your living room and one for your bed room)?" BeyondTV link is $30 per license. "- Can you transcode your recordings from MPEG2 to something else?" yes, quite effectively. "- Can you grab channel listings using xmltv?" not sure which interface it uses to get them, but it doesn't matter so long as they are there. "- Can you edit the videos using your remote?" no. "How much did you pay for it?" I got it free with a firefly remote, but the package normally costs less than $100.
"/me am happy to spend some more hours to set it up, but then have an open, extensible, hackable, complete product, and not a crippled software." I find a nice medium in the pay for something, get everything category. I used MCE for a year or so, got frustrated with something, and tried MythTV on several computers, but I could never get everything to work correctly, or even enough to get video on screen. I bought a firefly remote that came with BeyondTV and I am amazed. It takes me just as long to install XP/BeyondTV as it does MCE, and there is a lot more functionality, and it played the videos I already had recorded from MCE. My GF loves it too, like a lot.
Whatever you're using, if it doesn't have commercial skip, get something else. it's my favorite feature of beyondTV.
Don't you know that the price of a product has nothing to do with cost of production? It's based only on what people will pay, except for gasoline. People will pay anything for that, so the prices are based on the media hype surrounding the latest disaster to affect the prices.
The law might be to deter criminals from using another connection without being tracable. I'm talking sexual predators or something. I sure as hell wouldn't want the police knocking on my door accusing me of doing something I didn't do. On the other hand, it might be a good alibi for the media downloads...
Times are different now then they were in video vs. betamax. Look at the "format wars" between DVD+ and DVD- media. They both exist. And, so does DVD-RAM. People will eventually get players that can read both and just choose which media to watch based on the features and price. When they rent them or share them, it will be based on the format available. At any rate, I think High Definition video formats are still way out of the range of the 90% of the customers who will ultimately decide which format will be more profitable for the manufacturers. I'm not going to get a player/recorder until I can get everything together for a reasonable price. I have to upgrade my TV before I even care.
Who exactly is "the police and prosecutor"? Is this the same entity that arrested you?
The one example you backed up, for one specific case, actually disagrees with your statement that "the police" aren't required to obey the law. He was charged with manslaughter. Hooray, the system works!
I might agree with what you say, I might not. The point is, there needs to be evidence that supports your general conclusions. To support these general conclusions, evidence does not include examples of single events that support it. Supporting a claim that police in general don't have hard enough punishment might include a study concluding that police convicted in crimes while on the job are given 50% less jail time than others convicted of similar crimes (not actually true, I just made that up).
A little Circuit City history for you.
Before they took away commission (In Jan 2003, I think), some people were making a lot of money at circuit city. They changed the rules. Anyone making more than $40,000/year, based on their average comm./hour, was either given a manager position or shown the door, with a severance package based on the years they served.
Anyone who was on commission and made less that 40K (~$16/hour) would get their average hourly rate to keep working. As long as they kept up enough not to get fired, they would keep their rate. I worked on commission there for three years (I was 16-19 yrs old) and I worked a lot harder than peers that were making hourly wages. If you've never worked on commission, you should realize that it takes a lot of energy to me happy every day at work. After they had an hourly wage, they didn't have to work as hard, but got paid the same. Sounds like a cushy deal to me.
Any new hires had a cap on their hourly wage (something like $9.75/hour). I imagine that was competitive to the Best Buy wages at the time, but I don't know that personally. So there was a large gap of people who were working for $10-$16 per hour and doing the same job as the new people no matter who was smarter or harder working or more honest.
My guess is that Circuit City just fired all the people who were making more than their current hourly wage cap. Seems to make sense to me. If the workers are actually worth that much, then they will find another job that pays well. If not, then they were getting paid too much. Pretty simple. I don't see this as any different then when they were working for commission. People that made the money, got paid the money. Simple concept.
1) I wonder what effect that will have long term on the components. Specifically, will it reduce the oxidation on the metallic parts? Hmmm...
2) What about having to wait twenty minutes or something to get the oxygen levels high enough for the techs to fix a major crash. I guess the idea might be that the computers take care of their own major disasters.
Why not go back to the original Mario Bros? Or Donkey Kong? It's all the same characters right?
Probably because Super Mario Bros took a big leap forward from the first two. And I think the list creators would suggest that there is a bigger, more important leap to Super Mario Bros 3. I may not agree, but that's at least up to qualitative evidence.
If you look at all the posts in this thread you will notice a lot more than ten games that people will swear need to go on the list. That should proove that there are a whole lot of influential games. Sitting in my chair, I say the soccer thing is a little weird, but I don't have the scope of an average person. I have the scope of a technical engineer with a wealthy North American video gaming experience. I'm guessing some other demographic really thought that game was important.
"Remember the HD Mfrs are not stupid about caching or Flash limits, so this is stuff that people a lot smarter than the average SlashDot reader has already considered and worked around."
That's right! I challenge anyone to find something as cheap, and small with as much technology as a modern hard drive. There is a lot more that goes into one of those than storage, to read off of a disk that's spinning at 10,000rpm and a reading arm that's hovering mere molecules above the surface of the disk, you need to have incredibly intelligent algorithms to compensate for errors in the reading arms position, as well as dealing with the disk movement such as the taco effect. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the flash drive doesn't only improve the speed of the data, but will greatly reduce the failure rate of hard disks.
For research to be valid, the assumptions need to be founded in truth. I'm not sure all these are.
My biggest problem is assuming everyone submitting code with an @ibm.com email address is being paid for their development. Looked at a different perspective from the author:
if there are 2,000 people contributing patches in the last year, where do you think people with the kind of experience and capabilities to patch the kernel will work? 7-eleven?
There is one conclusion you can take, a portion smaller than 35% of the patches come from people who are unemployed. And that's only if the author's other assumptions are correct.
Granted the broadcomm stuff, RedHat, these are probably M-F folks, but not necessarily, I think that's a jump that costs these results.
It also tells me about the parental controls every time I connect to the internet, for updates, for the web, for the shop, for everything.
When I was a kid (sooo long ago, I'm 23) I would set things up myself to avoid parental controls. But with this thing displaying about parental controls all the time, I would find it hard for a responsible parent to not see the message within a month or two.
I also don't think there's anything wrong with parental controlling the internet browser to completely shut it off. You aren't really sensoring them, because they have the normal PC with internet anyway (who would have high speed internet just for their wii?)
I'm surprised I haven't seen more lude jokes about one handed controlling, the vibration built into the controller, playing with your wiiwii, nothing?
"My forays into hobby robotics tells me that this isn't as easy as it first appears it might be."
Thank you. I program autonomous vehicles, and people sort of stare at me blankly when I tell them I've spent the last few months of my life trying to detect the color of a traffic light. People often take for granted their ability to sense the world around them. I can assure you, robots do not take that for granted...
maybe this is too specific, but I can't keep files on servers that aren't owned by my company. I am doing gov't contract work, and my company is required by law to be responsible for the security. Google apps would be great, but only if there were a box we could own that we could keep in a locked room and be responsible for it.
1) The American gov't isn't about making things better for the majority. That's not Capitalism. That's not in the constitution. If it were, minorities (not just typical minorities like race) could be treated unfairly to benefit society as a whole. Even if the majority of people vote for a referendum, if it conflicts with the constitution, then it won't get used.
2) The gov't has the ideal of not interfering with business if it can avoid it. But, because the FCC already interferes with controlling the broadcast frequencies, it may arguable that the FCC is actually ALREADY bias towards large companies that can afford to buy the very expensive wireless space. It could be argued that a more free market would be obtained if this were to pass, therefore the FCC would be interfering less than they are currently. My guess is this won't work, but maybe it will convince them to consider this type of policy for the huge amount of bandwidth they will be distributing from the shutdown of analog TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but the sun is outputting rays in different wavelengths. You won't get a sunburn from office lamps, tanning beds are specifically designed to burn you. The frequency emitted by LED is even more customizable, and narrow band. I also think that the responsibility for the taser deaths should be, in some part, distributed to the engineers and doctors assigned with creating the device.
Oh, I know.... I barely have time to reply, I'm so busy at work right now.
Oh, that's right. I think the actual distinction is that the Prius I have is a 2001, and the newer ones have the button. I don't think it's an international borders thing.
The built in control systems make the gas engine turn if you go faster than 15 mph. The PHEV kits that are more substantial, and actually have some benefit, are a couple thousand dollars. They have a larger battery, and the internal control system is rigged to go to ~35 mph before the gas engine turns on, and the gas engine charges the battery less often so you would be able to make it to work and back without using much, if any gasoline.
Well, let's see. I want highways, and roads. That's pretty essential to me. If you are suggesting privatizing all that then I would challenge you to find evidence that the system would be better than it already is and more efficient (cost wise). The reason things are public is because these things should be owned by the people.
It's easy to say "why not use toll roads?" but an easier question to ask is "Why not just use what's already in place that works just fine?" I personally don't like toll roads because it's expensive. The only toll road I've used costs $1 or so for every couple of miles. The cost of gas where I live is $3.50. How much is the taxes half? so say it's 2.00 for 20 miles to make the math easy, it's still cheaper than the toll road. That's even rounding in the toll road's favor for all the uncertainty!
Yes, but is it not a tad bit ironic that the government and politicians are trying to push for cleaner vehicles and helping the environment, while at the same time enforcing tax laws that are restrictive on individuals and make it nearly impossible for them to achieve these goals. A) "The government" is not one person. Specifically, the politicians are mostly in the legislative branch, and fall on either side of the isle, and the executive branch enforces the laws.B) Taxes tax good citizens and bad citizens. The government taxes activities it wants to encourage and discourage. If anything, this argument "if you had an electric vehicle you would not be paying gas taxes and might still be using highways and other roadways." shows that the tax law is working in both ways.
You are happy in the way things are and don't want anything to change. Maybe it isn't I who should take off the foil hat and move outside, but it is you who should plug in a lamp, blow out that candle, and look to see that the world has changed in the past 200 years and even in the past 100 years since the early days of the automobile.If there really was some sort of injustice, which I don't believe there is, it would be so far on the bottom of my list of things to worry about. Don't you think there are better directions for politics to go then to amend this type of tax law across the whole country so that a very small minority doesn't get a tax break or gets taxed more? I think a few thousand dollars to one guy is not going to kill anyone. Meanwhile, I'll spend my time doing useful things, like replying to people with different opinions than me on the internet. Ok, so I can see the irony in that... For the record, my lamp already has a fluorescent bulb, and is currently in the off state, which is a sign of change based on the new problems facing me now.
My point is that most people use gasoline in their cars. Most cars use the roads to burn that gasoline. If you want a simple way to pay for roads, doesn't it make sense to tax gasoline? Seems like a good enough concept to get enough of the population to agree on it. This is a non issue. The usefulness of this article is to show people that bio-diesel is taxed just like gasoline.
Leading off with insults, always a winner. Sorry, I thought of it as leading off with a joke. I didn't think the foil hat thing would be offensive to you.Take off your aluminum foil hat, and go outside. There's really no one watching you from your neighbors bushes. The State wants their tax money. The laws may not be perfect, but they say that you need to pay money to the state to use fuel in your car.
Are fuel taxes perfect? no. They don't directly tax how much benefit you get from the roads. They also will tax you if you use the fuel in other things (although the couple of gallons of gas I use in my lawn mower every year is hardly worth mentioning). So what? What possible better solution could there be? Do you want to pay someone to read your odometer? Maybe put a tracking device in your car to see how far you go on state roads? Maybe driving habits, like frequent stops and accelerations have a lot to do with the wear and tear on the roads. Maybe you should be taxed more if you use the roads after the snow storm because your tax money goes to the snow plows to clear the path for you. Oh wait, I've got an even better idea! Why don't we just tax the gasoline so that it works out to be pretty fair 99% of the time! Excellent idea Jeff!
This article should be a warning to people to make sure they are within the tax laws when they use bio diesel. But of course, on slashdot, everyone wants to bring up their ideas to change the friggin world! Oh well, that's really why I read it anyways.
For a minute, I thought you were talking about BeyondTV/BeyondTV link...
/me am happy to spend some more hours to set it up, but then have an open, extensible, hackable, complete product, and not a crippled software."
"- Do you have a Web interface for your schedule, program listings, videos, ecc..?" yes.
"- Does it cut commercials?" yes
"- Can it rip DVDs?" yes, but it costs extra, I just use nero
"- Can it rip music CD?" hmmm no, but I only have the TV extension, not the full fledged media player.
"- Can it play DivX?" yep and encode it too.
"- Can it play HD Quicktime trailers?" yep.
"- Can it use DVB-T, DVB-S, analog and cable at the same time?" dunno, prolly not, but I only have use for cable right now.
"- Can you attach another frontend to it (one for your living room and one for your bed room)?" BeyondTV link is $30 per license.
"- Can you transcode your recordings from MPEG2 to something else?" yes, quite effectively.
"- Can you grab channel listings using xmltv?" not sure which interface it uses to get them, but it doesn't matter so long as they are there.
"- Can you edit the videos using your remote?" no.
"How much did you pay for it?" I got it free with a firefly remote, but the package normally costs less than $100.
"
I find a nice medium in the pay for something, get everything category. I used MCE for a year or so, got frustrated with something, and tried MythTV on several computers, but I could never get everything to work correctly, or even enough to get video on screen. I bought a firefly remote that came with BeyondTV and I am amazed. It takes me just as long to install XP/BeyondTV as it does MCE, and there is a lot more functionality, and it played the videos I already had recorded from MCE. My GF loves it too, like a lot.
Whatever you're using, if it doesn't have commercial skip, get something else. it's my favorite feature of beyondTV.
Don't you know that the price of a product has nothing to do with cost of production? It's based only on what people will pay, except for gasoline. People will pay anything for that, so the prices are based on the media hype surrounding the latest disaster to affect the prices.
The law might be to deter criminals from using another connection without being tracable. I'm talking sexual predators or something. I sure as hell wouldn't want the police knocking on my door accusing me of doing something I didn't do. On the other hand, it might be a good alibi for the media downloads...
Times are different now then they were in video vs. betamax. Look at the "format wars" between DVD+ and DVD- media. They both exist. And, so does DVD-RAM. People will eventually get players that can read both and just choose which media to watch based on the features and price. When they rent them or share them, it will be based on the format available. At any rate, I think High Definition video formats are still way out of the range of the 90% of the customers who will ultimately decide which format will be more profitable for the manufacturers. I'm not going to get a player/recorder until I can get everything together for a reasonable price. I have to upgrade my TV before I even care.
don't break your ban, download it, and sent trent the $0.25.
(Score 1: unjustified blanket statements)
Who exactly is "the police and prosecutor"? Is this the same entity that arrested you?
The one example you backed up, for one specific case, actually disagrees with your statement that "the police" aren't required to obey the law. He was charged with manslaughter. Hooray, the system works!
I might agree with what you say, I might not. The point is, there needs to be evidence that supports your general conclusions. To support these general conclusions, evidence does not include examples of single events that support it. Supporting a claim that police in general don't have hard enough punishment might include a study concluding that police convicted in crimes while on the job are given 50% less jail time than others convicted of similar crimes (not actually true, I just made that up).
A little Circuit City history for you. Before they took away commission (In Jan 2003, I think), some people were making a lot of money at circuit city. They changed the rules. Anyone making more than $40,000/year, based on their average comm./hour, was either given a manager position or shown the door, with a severance package based on the years they served. Anyone who was on commission and made less that 40K (~$16/hour) would get their average hourly rate to keep working. As long as they kept up enough not to get fired, they would keep their rate. I worked on commission there for three years (I was 16-19 yrs old) and I worked a lot harder than peers that were making hourly wages. If you've never worked on commission, you should realize that it takes a lot of energy to me happy every day at work. After they had an hourly wage, they didn't have to work as hard, but got paid the same. Sounds like a cushy deal to me. Any new hires had a cap on their hourly wage (something like $9.75/hour). I imagine that was competitive to the Best Buy wages at the time, but I don't know that personally. So there was a large gap of people who were working for $10-$16 per hour and doing the same job as the new people no matter who was smarter or harder working or more honest. My guess is that Circuit City just fired all the people who were making more than their current hourly wage cap. Seems to make sense to me. If the workers are actually worth that much, then they will find another job that pays well. If not, then they were getting paid too much. Pretty simple. I don't see this as any different then when they were working for commission. People that made the money, got paid the money. Simple concept.
I don't think you are a typical /.er. Most of us find a way to make it to McDonalds.
Thanks for the history lesson, Gramps.
Seriously though, it was interesting to investigate why this was marked funny. Very clever and obscure. Nice!
FTA: "Whether or not the AMDs or Intels of the world will buy in remains to be seen, but the potential is undeniable."
They aren't the only folks who use heat sinks. Come on, use your head!
1) I wonder what effect that will have long term on the components. Specifically, will it reduce the oxidation on the metallic parts? Hmmm...
2) What about having to wait twenty minutes or something to get the oxygen levels high enough for the techs to fix a major crash. I guess the idea might be that the computers take care of their own major disasters.
Why not go back to the original Mario Bros? Or Donkey Kong? It's all the same characters right?
Probably because Super Mario Bros took a big leap forward from the first two. And I think the list creators would suggest that there is a bigger, more important leap to Super Mario Bros 3. I may not agree, but that's at least up to qualitative evidence.
If you look at all the posts in this thread you will notice a lot more than ten games that people will swear need to go on the list. That should proove that there are a whole lot of influential games. Sitting in my chair, I say the soccer thing is a little weird, but I don't have the scope of an average person. I have the scope of a technical engineer with a wealthy North American video gaming experience. I'm guessing some other demographic really thought that game was important.
How do the locals power their new cell phones exactly?
"Remember the HD Mfrs are not stupid about caching or Flash limits, so this is stuff that people a lot smarter than the average SlashDot reader has already considered and worked around."
That's right! I challenge anyone to find something as cheap, and small with as much technology as a modern hard drive. There is a lot more that goes into one of those than storage, to read off of a disk that's spinning at 10,000rpm and a reading arm that's hovering mere molecules above the surface of the disk, you need to have incredibly intelligent algorithms to compensate for errors in the reading arms position, as well as dealing with the disk movement such as the taco effect. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the flash drive doesn't only improve the speed of the data, but will greatly reduce the failure rate of hard disks.
For research to be valid, the assumptions need to be founded in truth. I'm not sure all these are.
My biggest problem is assuming everyone submitting code with an @ibm.com email address is being paid for their development. Looked at a different perspective from the author:
if there are 2,000 people contributing patches in the last year, where do you think people with the kind of experience and capabilities to patch the kernel will work? 7-eleven?
There is one conclusion you can take, a portion smaller than 35% of the patches come from people who are unemployed. And that's only if the author's other assumptions are correct.
Granted the broadcomm stuff, RedHat, these are probably M-F folks, but not necessarily, I think that's a jump that costs these results.
It also tells me about the parental controls every time I connect to the internet, for updates, for the web, for the shop, for everything.
When I was a kid (sooo long ago, I'm 23) I would set things up myself to avoid parental controls. But with this thing displaying about parental controls all the time, I would find it hard for a responsible parent to not see the message within a month or two.
I also don't think there's anything wrong with parental controlling the internet browser to completely shut it off. You aren't really sensoring them, because they have the normal PC with internet anyway (who would have high speed internet just for their wii?)
I'm surprised I haven't seen more lude jokes about one handed controlling, the vibration built into the controller, playing with your wiiwii, nothing?
"My forays into hobby robotics tells me that this isn't as easy as it first appears it might be."
Thank you. I program autonomous vehicles, and people sort of stare at me blankly when I tell them I've spent the last few months of my life trying to detect the color of a traffic light. People often take for granted their ability to sense the world around them. I can assure you, robots do not take that for granted...
maybe this is too specific, but I can't keep files on servers that aren't owned by my company. I am doing gov't contract work, and my company is required by law to be responsible for the security. Google apps would be great, but only if there were a box we could own that we could keep in a locked room and be responsible for it.
I would make two arguments on this topic:
1) The American gov't isn't about making things better for the majority. That's not Capitalism. That's not in the constitution. If it were, minorities (not just typical minorities like race) could be treated unfairly to benefit society as a whole. Even if the majority of people vote for a referendum, if it conflicts with the constitution, then it won't get used.
2) The gov't has the ideal of not interfering with business if it can avoid it. But, because the FCC already interferes with controlling the broadcast frequencies, it may arguable that the FCC is actually ALREADY bias towards large companies that can afford to buy the very expensive wireless space. It could be argued that a more free market would be obtained if this were to pass, therefore the FCC would be interfering less than they are currently. My guess is this won't work, but maybe it will convince them to consider this type of policy for the huge amount of bandwidth they will be distributing from the shutdown of analog TV.