Sadly, this is next to useless because it doesn't cover any of the airports you are likely to be flying through. None of the major airline hub cities except Las Vegas and Miami are included on the list. Not DFW, not Atlanta, not Denver, not LAX, not Salt Lake City, not Cincinnati, not Chicago, not JFK.
Unless you're a complete fool, you probably have a pretty good idea how early to get to the airport to fly, and for most of us, that means printing your boarding pass from home before you leave, and arriving an hour before the plane leaves. That gives you thirty minutes through security, ten minutes in the airport, and then you're gone. There's very little time to use Wi-Fi, though I suppose if my plane were delayed out of San Jose due to maintenance problems, it might be marginally useful.
Similarly, when you get to your destination, Wi-Fi is the last thing you're thinking about. You're making a beeline for the luggage conveyor (if you checked any), then a beeline for the taxi stand or the pickup area or the car rental place. So although it's nice in theory that I could get free Wi-Fi when I get to Nashville, the fact of the matter is that I won't use it there, either, nor on my return trip.
The one part of your trip that you're not in control over---the one part of your trip where you actually spend a significant amount of time sitting in the airport twiddling your thumbs---is that three or four hour layover. Statistically speaking, this is almost always going to be in Dallas/Fort-Worth, Atlanta, Chicago, LAX, or Denver---maybe Las Vegas if you are flying from somewhere in the western U.S. to somewhere else in the western U.S., but even then, you're much more likely to go through LAX.
So it's a nice idea in principal, but in practice, you'd have a hard time picking worse airports in terms of improving things for U.S. passengers. The airports listed are almost never used for connections except maybe puddle jumper biplanes out to Lexington, KY or something. I mean, I guess they could have picked Jackson, TN (MKL), Milan's Linate Airport (LIN), and Air Europa (UX) or something, but....
Now for some perspective. There are estimated to be over 12 million MySQL installations worldwide. I can't find hard numbers on Sybase or Oracle, but assuming that Oracle and Sybase are about as popular as DB2, then the number of MySQL installations is nearly as many as all three of those vendors combined.
The EU's concerns can't be alleviated by forking. Only one company can own copyright on any given piece of code, which means:
Oracle could stop issuing commercial licenses for use of the client libraries, effectively preventing the use of MySQL with anything but open source software.
Oracle could probably sue the forks for patent infringement unless their license explicitly prevents it.
Oracle could stop distributing MySQL as open source, then make claims that parts of the code were added without its authorization and could create a really ugly copyright suit that could enjoin other projects from distributing forked versions of MySQL, creating chaos and confusion for years, much like the AT&T/USL v. BSDi suit did to BSD.
There are probably other things it could do as well. Those are just the first things that come to mind.
The reality is you spend all your time fiddling with it and cursing at it until your head is so bloody from banging it up against a brick wall that you give up and decide to give up TV altogether.
Close. The reality is that you spend so much time banging your head up against a brick wall that you just think you're watching TV.
Look at xscreensaver 10 years with 0 security holes, it allong with a host of other programs, show that you can make a system impenetrable!
That's a joke, right? An app that takes no input from anywhere (except trivial password input) has no security holes? Really? That's like a building with no windows and only one door just large enough for a cat being safe from burglars.:-)
And, of course, persecuting child-related sex offenders gets innocent people a lot more than it does hardcore crazies.
An interesting point. Statistically, in the U.S., for every 7 death row inmates who have been executed, one has been exonerated (usually due to improved DNA testing proving conclusively that somebody else did it). That's a staggering number. One might reasonably interpret this to mean that as many as one in eight people convicted is convicted falsely. Food for thought.
If you're going to get into framing, you should at least have the decency to frame the entire lot of those crooks, from the most right-wing Republican to the most leftist Democrat. Clean the House, then the Senate. Repeat every 12 years until term limits and limits on lobbying are enacted.
But there's not a glut of children who can't get adopted. There are many more people who want to adopt than there are children, and at least in the U.S., the rules on who can adopt keep getting tighter. There's a bureaucratic wall preventing adoptions from happening, not a lack of people willing to adopt. In fact, I've been told that a significant percentage of foster parents do so because it helps work around that bureaucracy.
Also, there's a substantial racial divide in adoption, with most people preferring to adopt someone of the same race and a significantly larger number of caucasian adoptive parents and a significantly larger number of non-caucasian (particularly Asian, IIRC) children waiting for adoption. Thus, reducing the number of kids doesn't really solve the problem. The places where people would be likely to take steps to have fewer kids are actually the places from which we need *more* kids to be put up for adoption (because they're already making extensive use of contraception), and the places where people are unlikely to take those steps are the places from which we need fewer kids put up for adoption.
No, quite a lot of stuff from China is not counterfeit. A lot of those products are manufactured by Chinese companies under their own names or under other made-up names, which by definition makes them not counterfeit because they aren't claiming to be something they're not. A lot of it is the result of manufacturing overruns, which while not authorized by the manufacturer and thus in a strict legal sense counterfeit, are in fact identical to the actual products, and thus not counterfeit by most sane definitions. And so on. Don't overgeneralize.
There are those who are opposed philosophically to contraception who won't use them or let their kids use them.
Rapists and child molesters aren't likely to use protection just to save their victims from harm, because if they cared about their victims, they wouldn't do those things in the first place.
It is unlikely that any long-term contraceptive could be given to anyone until well after puberty, as it is very unlikely that it is even possible to create such a contraceptive that wouldn't screw up reproductive development. Unless, of course, your goal is to sterilize the population, in which case you should just come right out and say it instead of hiding behind a harebrained scheme.
There's a huge shortage of children compared with the number of parents who want to adopt. Better contraception will make that problem worse.
We already have contraception that is safe, yet people don't bother to use that. If people can't be bothered to put on a condom, put in a diaphragm, take birth control pills, or have an IUD installed, they're not going to bother with the next scheme you come up with, either.
The lack of fear of pregnancy would lead to a significant increase in teenage sex, which would almost inevitably result in an increase in sexually transmitted disease among the population, which brings with it a whole host of serious health problems.
And in spite of its almost guaranteed failure to solve the problems that abortion attempts to solve, that solution also doesn't solve any of the other problems that an artificial womb could solve, all while blowing huge amounts of money on a project that is doomed to fail right from the start. Yeah, that's a better idea....
There's a difference between being pro-abortion rights and being pro-abortion. I support the right of assholes to have freedom of speech, even if it is hate speech against blacks, jews, or gays. That doesn't make me a KKK Nazi Republican.
This country is founded on the fundamental premise that we have freedom of religion, speech, etc., up to the point at which it directly harms others. The abortion debate is about the very complicated question of whether it harms another person or not. That's not an easy philosophical question to answer, and before anyone is qualified to answer that question, he or she must free himself or herself from the tendency to reply, "That's easy, my parents said..." or "That's easy, my preacher said..." or any other answer that comes easily. Such easy answers are almost always the wrong ones, as they are generally the end of thought on the subject rather than the beginning.
For example, the easy (but wrong) answers for how to fight abortion are: 1. sue to make it illegal, and 2. try to convince people not to have them. Suing, however, is unlikely to make any real progress. Convincing people not to have abortions is slightly better; it may save a few individual children while you are actively doing this work, but it is an extremely inefficient way to improve things because it requires eternal vigilance by a fairly large number of people to be effective to any significant degree.
By contrast, a much smarter answer is to contribute money to medical research to make it possible to sustain a fetus at progressively younger ages, eventually resulting in abortion being unnecessary, and eliminating any possible justification for abortion in the minds of even the staunchest abortion rights advocates. By answering in this way, your actions are the start of further thought and discussion instead of being dogmatic roadblocks to further thought. Further, instead of just reducing abortions, you're also doing something that helps humanity outside the context of abortion. Women who can't have kids could have kids, fetuses whose mothers die would not necessarily die, mothers who are diagnosed with cancer would no longer have to choose between chemotherapy and the lives of their children, women who are victims of rape or incest could give up their children for adoption and never have to endure childbirth for a child that was forced upon them, women who get pregnant when they are too young to safely bear a child would no longer be at serious risk, etc.
Think bigger. Don't think of abortion as a problem to be solved. Think of it as a bad solution to a wide range of problems that could be solved in other ways, then try to find other ways.
Nah, the Republicans fully support post-birth abortions, and in record numbers.
<sarcasm>There's nothing wrong with frying an innocent man, just as long as you don't kill an undifferentiated bundle of cells that might become a man. Taking the life of a fully-grown adult convicted of a serious crime is perfectly fine... even in states like Texas with a long history of false convictions, cases overturned *after* executions due to DNA evidence that the state deliberately barred that would have cleared the defendants, etc.</sarcasm>
Anyone who chooses a Republican who supports capital punishment over a Democrat merely because of the Democrat's support for abortion needs to seriously rethink his or her values.
I kind of wonder if there even ARE ten layers of management between "people who know what's going on" (I'm assuming you mean engineers and techs and not finance people) and COO.
That's called hyperbole. Look into it. That said, I can think of parts of companies I'm familiar with where there are at least 6 layers of management between the line level engineers and the top, and those aren't nearly as large as cable companies. I'm not saying the hierarchy needs to be shallower, though in most companies, you could lose one or two layers without any great loss. The point was that the management chains of companies whose CEOs or COOs think the customer is the enemy are almost always made up of butt kissers and back stabbers, so cleaning house and replacing the top few tiers of management is often very useful in improving the company, both in terms of its public image and in terms of how well it does business.
Also, "spend money on building out data infrastructure" is ludicrously general.
Okay, here's something more concrete if you'd like. Fiber everywhere. Coax is a maintenance nightmare. Between the corrosion, the reflection problems, etc., it can be an absolute bear, and the older the lines get, the worse the problems get. The longer you try to maintain legacy hardware like that, the more expensive it becomes to maintain. It quickly becomes more cost effective to just start over with better technology.
Here's something else. By using fiber, truck rolls go practically to zero. You can fully control who has access without bothering to unhook the lines. Good luck doing that with the unencrypted portion of coax signals.
Regarding the data portion of the infrastructure, well, that's the last mile of it. The rest of it is just leasing enough lines to handle the capacity. That said, I have some other ideas that can significantly reduce the number of those lines they have to lease....
But I like how you just predicted that every one of your ideas is a goldmine.
Let's just say it isn't without years of fairly accurately predicting what will work and what won't. I certainly can't say that all of my ideas are a guaranteed goldmine, but several of them are pretty much slam dunks, involving fairly minimal financial outlay and significant customer benefit. I also have some ideas for designing standards that would allow content providers to interact with P2P clients built into the CPEs to drastically reduce the average bandwidth overhead of digital delivery. By being a leader and pushing for such open standards in these areas, it will improve the customer experience and reduce bandwidth utilization dramatically, again, all without huge engineering effort (as in, the sort of thing I could build on my own in a couple of weeks).
I could go on with infrastructure ideas, but I'd probably bore you. I'm not going to talk about the more visible customer-facing ideas. They're too interesting, as they're the sort of thing I could do in a startup without the cable companies' help if I wanted to do so..
And of course MMS is even easier. It's just a glorified HTTPS request. The only difference is that it occurs in response to a WAP push (SMS). So once you get basic SMS and IP-based networking working, you get MMS support for free.
It's still just a couple hundred bytes. It wouldn't take a genius to encapsulate the exact same data (in both directions) into a UDP packet. All you have to know is an IPv6 (or non-routable IPv4) address of that particular wireless client (which you already have obtained for voice call handling anyway), and the device obviously has to have the IP number for the other end, but you already have an IP-based server for MMS that could handle ACKs and outbound messages on a separate port. It's probably less than ten lines of code on the client end and less than a hundred on the server end to do the encapsulation, and they should get almost all of the infrastructure they need for free as part of the voice infrastructure.
And of course MMS is even easier. It's just a glorified HTTPS request. The only difference is that it occurs in response to a WAP push (MMS). So once you get basic SMS and IP-based networking working, you get SMS support for free.
We need LTE to deliver VoIP to have what GSM provides, but without all the @#$& ELF or SLF radiation from the (@$#$(@( transmitter turning rapidly on and off making every audio device within 30 feet chatter just so it can check in with the tower.
Could well be. The closest I've ever come to Windows binary formats was doing a little bit of DOS assembly language programming in a class once. Even that, I did on a Mac in an emulator.:-)
The problem is that the execs don't get it. They're still providing the pipe, whether it is providing content from a network via a broadcast signal or via a more consumer-friendly data stream that you can pause, rewind, etc. The people who should be scared are the broadcast stations. Their days are numbered.
By contrast, the cable companies have no reason to be worried, and trying to take greater control of the content by creating their own "Cable Everywhere" content portals is the quickest way to burn through a wad of cash for a service that nobody cares about. There are many things they could do to provide value add and encourage subscriptions to premium services, VOD, etc., but trying to increase lock-in is not one of them.
Easier, even. With a multi-million-dollar company, it's small enough that if you screw up, you might bankrupt the company. That means that you have to be at least moderately familiar with what's going on in the company. With a multi-billion-dollar company, you have a dozen divisions that are each multi-million-dollar companies, each run by someone who has to think the same way.
Up a tier, however, the management of each division is left to the VP for the division. Half the time, the CEO doesn't even know what the company makes. It really doesn't matter at that level. They just have to know enough to understand what the VP means when they ask the VP why the division is losing money and when they expect to get back on track, or at least enough to know if they're getting a snow job from their underlings....
Tell you what, put me in charge of such a cable company at 10% of this clown's salary. I'll show you how it's done. The right fix for cable companies is to tear down about ten layers of management between the top brass and the people who know what's going on, spend money on building out data infrastructure further, and finding new services to offer that make your offerings more attractive. I have many ideas for new services that I'd roll out if I were running a cable company, any one of which would make a huge difference in users' lives and would significantly cut down on piracy by doing so. Of course, the notion of piracy when you have a cable signal coming in at a flat rate is absurd anyway, and always has been....
Slashdot Mirror
Now here's a funnier thought. Just two days after I posted that, a handful of Senators are proposing a Constitutional amendment to institute term limits . Coincidence?
Okay, which one of you smart alecks planted the kiddie porn on their machines? :-D
You must have misread what I said. The whole point of my post was that the layovers are almost always going to be in cities that this doesn't cover.
Sadly, this is next to useless because it doesn't cover any of the airports you are likely to be flying through. None of the major airline hub cities except Las Vegas and Miami are included on the list. Not DFW, not Atlanta, not Denver, not LAX, not Salt Lake City, not Cincinnati, not Chicago, not JFK.
Unless you're a complete fool, you probably have a pretty good idea how early to get to the airport to fly, and for most of us, that means printing your boarding pass from home before you leave, and arriving an hour before the plane leaves. That gives you thirty minutes through security, ten minutes in the airport, and then you're gone. There's very little time to use Wi-Fi, though I suppose if my plane were delayed out of San Jose due to maintenance problems, it might be marginally useful.
Similarly, when you get to your destination, Wi-Fi is the last thing you're thinking about. You're making a beeline for the luggage conveyor (if you checked any), then a beeline for the taxi stand or the pickup area or the car rental place. So although it's nice in theory that I could get free Wi-Fi when I get to Nashville, the fact of the matter is that I won't use it there, either, nor on my return trip.
The one part of your trip that you're not in control over---the one part of your trip where you actually spend a significant amount of time sitting in the airport twiddling your thumbs---is that three or four hour layover. Statistically speaking, this is almost always going to be in Dallas/Fort-Worth, Atlanta, Chicago, LAX, or Denver---maybe Las Vegas if you are flying from somewhere in the western U.S. to somewhere else in the western U.S., but even then, you're much more likely to go through LAX.
So it's a nice idea in principal, but in practice, you'd have a hard time picking worse airports in terms of improving things for U.S. passengers. The airports listed are almost never used for connections except maybe puddle jumper biplanes out to Lexington, KY or something. I mean, I guess they could have picked Jackson, TN (MKL), Milan's Linate Airport (LIN), and Air Europa (UX) or something, but....
Now for some perspective. There are estimated to be over 12 million MySQL installations worldwide. I can't find hard numbers on Sybase or Oracle, but assuming that Oracle and Sybase are about as popular as DB2, then the number of MySQL installations is nearly as many as all three of those vendors combined.
The EU's concerns can't be alleviated by forking. Only one company can own copyright on any given piece of code, which means:
There are probably other things it could do as well. Those are just the first things that come to mind.
And by asking for moderation, you pretty much guarantee no one will moderate your post. That's the 5th law of SlashReality.
Close. The reality is that you spend so much time banging your head up against a brick wall that you just think you're watching TV.
That's a joke, right? An app that takes no input from anywhere (except trivial password input) has no security holes? Really? That's like a building with no windows and only one door just large enough for a cat being safe from burglars. :-)
An interesting point. Statistically, in the U.S., for every 7 death row inmates who have been executed, one has been exonerated (usually due to improved DNA testing proving conclusively that somebody else did it). That's a staggering number. One might reasonably interpret this to mean that as many as one in eight people convicted is convicted falsely. Food for thought.
If you're going to get into framing, you should at least have the decency to frame the entire lot of those crooks, from the most right-wing Republican to the most leftist Democrat. Clean the House, then the Senate. Repeat every 12 years until term limits and limits on lobbying are enacted.
I'm assuming you meant to say "merely because of the Republican's support for capital punishment". No disagreement here.
But there's not a glut of children who can't get adopted. There are many more people who want to adopt than there are children, and at least in the U.S., the rules on who can adopt keep getting tighter. There's a bureaucratic wall preventing adoptions from happening, not a lack of people willing to adopt. In fact, I've been told that a significant percentage of foster parents do so because it helps work around that bureaucracy.
Also, there's a substantial racial divide in adoption, with most people preferring to adopt someone of the same race and a significantly larger number of caucasian adoptive parents and a significantly larger number of non-caucasian (particularly Asian, IIRC) children waiting for adoption. Thus, reducing the number of kids doesn't really solve the problem. The places where people would be likely to take steps to have fewer kids are actually the places from which we need *more* kids to be put up for adoption (because they're already making extensive use of contraception), and the places where people are unlikely to take those steps are the places from which we need fewer kids put up for adoption.
No, quite a lot of stuff from China is not counterfeit. A lot of those products are manufactured by Chinese companies under their own names or under other made-up names, which by definition makes them not counterfeit because they aren't claiming to be something they're not. A lot of it is the result of manufacturing overruns, which while not authorized by the manufacturer and thus in a strict legal sense counterfeit, are in fact identical to the actual products, and thus not counterfeit by most sane definitions. And so on. Don't overgeneralize.
That won't work for many reasons:
And in spite of its almost guaranteed failure to solve the problems that abortion attempts to solve, that solution also doesn't solve any of the other problems that an artificial womb could solve, all while blowing huge amounts of money on a project that is doomed to fail right from the start. Yeah, that's a better idea....
There's a difference between being pro-abortion rights and being pro-abortion. I support the right of assholes to have freedom of speech, even if it is hate speech against blacks, jews, or gays. That doesn't make me a KKK Nazi Republican.
This country is founded on the fundamental premise that we have freedom of religion, speech, etc., up to the point at which it directly harms others. The abortion debate is about the very complicated question of whether it harms another person or not. That's not an easy philosophical question to answer, and before anyone is qualified to answer that question, he or she must free himself or herself from the tendency to reply, "That's easy, my parents said..." or "That's easy, my preacher said..." or any other answer that comes easily. Such easy answers are almost always the wrong ones, as they are generally the end of thought on the subject rather than the beginning.
For example, the easy (but wrong) answers for how to fight abortion are: 1. sue to make it illegal, and 2. try to convince people not to have them. Suing, however, is unlikely to make any real progress. Convincing people not to have abortions is slightly better; it may save a few individual children while you are actively doing this work, but it is an extremely inefficient way to improve things because it requires eternal vigilance by a fairly large number of people to be effective to any significant degree.
By contrast, a much smarter answer is to contribute money to medical research to make it possible to sustain a fetus at progressively younger ages, eventually resulting in abortion being unnecessary, and eliminating any possible justification for abortion in the minds of even the staunchest abortion rights advocates. By answering in this way, your actions are the start of further thought and discussion instead of being dogmatic roadblocks to further thought. Further, instead of just reducing abortions, you're also doing something that helps humanity outside the context of abortion. Women who can't have kids could have kids, fetuses whose mothers die would not necessarily die, mothers who are diagnosed with cancer would no longer have to choose between chemotherapy and the lives of their children, women who are victims of rape or incest could give up their children for adoption and never have to endure childbirth for a child that was forced upon them, women who get pregnant when they are too young to safely bear a child would no longer be at serious risk, etc.
Think bigger. Don't think of abortion as a problem to be solved. Think of it as a bad solution to a wide range of problems that could be solved in other ways, then try to find other ways.
Nah, the Republicans fully support post-birth abortions, and in record numbers.
<sarcasm>There's nothing wrong with frying an innocent man, just as long as you don't kill an undifferentiated bundle of cells that might become a man. Taking the life of a fully-grown adult convicted of a serious crime is perfectly fine... even in states like Texas with a long history of false convictions, cases overturned *after* executions due to DNA evidence that the state deliberately barred that would have cleared the defendants, etc.</sarcasm>
Anyone who chooses a Republican who supports capital punishment over a Democrat merely because of the Democrat's support for abortion needs to seriously rethink his or her values.
Four out of five isn't bad, I suppose. *sigh*
Seriously? Where the heck do you live!?! I can only pick up maybe a dozen or so, and I'm in the freaking SF Bay Area!
Or are you counting subchannels?
That's called hyperbole. Look into it. That said, I can think of parts of companies I'm familiar with where there are at least 6 layers of management between the line level engineers and the top, and those aren't nearly as large as cable companies. I'm not saying the hierarchy needs to be shallower, though in most companies, you could lose one or two layers without any great loss. The point was that the management chains of companies whose CEOs or COOs think the customer is the enemy are almost always made up of butt kissers and back stabbers, so cleaning house and replacing the top few tiers of management is often very useful in improving the company, both in terms of its public image and in terms of how well it does business.
Okay, here's something more concrete if you'd like. Fiber everywhere. Coax is a maintenance nightmare. Between the corrosion, the reflection problems, etc., it can be an absolute bear, and the older the lines get, the worse the problems get. The longer you try to maintain legacy hardware like that, the more expensive it becomes to maintain. It quickly becomes more cost effective to just start over with better technology.
Here's something else. By using fiber, truck rolls go practically to zero. You can fully control who has access without bothering to unhook the lines. Good luck doing that with the unencrypted portion of coax signals.
Regarding the data portion of the infrastructure, well, that's the last mile of it. The rest of it is just leasing enough lines to handle the capacity. That said, I have some other ideas that can significantly reduce the number of those lines they have to lease....
Let's just say it isn't without years of fairly accurately predicting what will work and what won't. I certainly can't say that all of my ideas are a guaranteed goldmine, but several of them are pretty much slam dunks, involving fairly minimal financial outlay and significant customer benefit. I also have some ideas for designing standards that would allow content providers to interact with P2P clients built into the CPEs to drastically reduce the average bandwidth overhead of digital delivery. By being a leader and pushing for such open standards in these areas, it will improve the customer experience and reduce bandwidth utilization dramatically, again, all without huge engineering effort (as in, the sort of thing I could build on my own in a couple of weeks).
I could go on with infrastructure ideas, but I'd probably bore you. I'm not going to talk about the more visible customer-facing ideas. They're too interesting, as they're the sort of thing I could do in a startup without the cable companies' help if I wanted to do so..
Oops. Got those TLAs backwards. I meant to say:
And of course MMS is even easier. It's just a glorified HTTPS request. The only difference is that it occurs in response to a WAP push (SMS). So once you get basic SMS and IP-based networking working, you get MMS support for free.
It's still just a couple hundred bytes. It wouldn't take a genius to encapsulate the exact same data (in both directions) into a UDP packet. All you have to know is an IPv6 (or non-routable IPv4) address of that particular wireless client (which you already have obtained for voice call handling anyway), and the device obviously has to have the IP number for the other end, but you already have an IP-based server for MMS that could handle ACKs and outbound messages on a separate port. It's probably less than ten lines of code on the client end and less than a hundred on the server end to do the encapsulation, and they should get almost all of the infrastructure they need for free as part of the voice infrastructure.
And of course MMS is even easier. It's just a glorified HTTPS request. The only difference is that it occurs in response to a WAP push (MMS). So once you get basic SMS and IP-based networking working, you get SMS support for free.
We need LTE to deliver VoIP to have what GSM provides, but without all the @#$& ELF or SLF radiation from the (@$#$(@( transmitter turning rapidly on and off making every audio device within 30 feet chatter just so it can check in with the tower.
Could well be. The closest I've ever come to Windows binary formats was doing a little bit of DOS assembly language programming in a class once. Even that, I did on a Mac in an emulator. :-)
The problem is that the execs don't get it. They're still providing the pipe, whether it is providing content from a network via a broadcast signal or via a more consumer-friendly data stream that you can pause, rewind, etc. The people who should be scared are the broadcast stations. Their days are numbered.
By contrast, the cable companies have no reason to be worried, and trying to take greater control of the content by creating their own "Cable Everywhere" content portals is the quickest way to burn through a wad of cash for a service that nobody cares about. There are many things they could do to provide value add and encourage subscriptions to premium services, VOD, etc., but trying to increase lock-in is not one of them.
Easier, even. With a multi-million-dollar company, it's small enough that if you screw up, you might bankrupt the company. That means that you have to be at least moderately familiar with what's going on in the company. With a multi-billion-dollar company, you have a dozen divisions that are each multi-million-dollar companies, each run by someone who has to think the same way.
Up a tier, however, the management of each division is left to the VP for the division. Half the time, the CEO doesn't even know what the company makes. It really doesn't matter at that level. They just have to know enough to understand what the VP means when they ask the VP why the division is losing money and when they expect to get back on track, or at least enough to know if they're getting a snow job from their underlings....
Tell you what, put me in charge of such a cable company at 10% of this clown's salary. I'll show you how it's done. The right fix for cable companies is to tear down about ten layers of management between the top brass and the people who know what's going on, spend money on building out data infrastructure further, and finding new services to offer that make your offerings more attractive. I have many ideas for new services that I'd roll out if I were running a cable company, any one of which would make a huge difference in users' lives and would significantly cut down on piracy by doing so. Of course, the notion of piracy when you have a cable signal coming in at a flat rate is absurd anyway, and always has been....