I'm glad you asked that question. Thank you. My friends: Let's assume that an Ipod or Ipod-like device gains the ability to broadcast wireless internet over the television bands. There are a number of things that could go wrong (from worst to best case):
- Person hacks their Ipod to use any damn channel they please, thereby blocking my local weather/news channel WGAL8 because they are broadcasting directly overtop of it.
- Person uses Ipod normally, but Ipod database does not list nearby cities stations like WBAL11 (Baltimore) or WPHL17 (Philadelphia). As a result of this oversight I lose channels 2,3,6,10,11,12,13,17,29,35,57,65 because the Ipod is broadcasting directly overtop of them.
- Person uses Ipod normally, and Ipod decides to broadcast on channel 7, directly adjacent to WGAL8. The "spillover" from channel 7 confuses my television receiver and I can't tune-in my local weather/news. I see a picture, but it's just unwatchable garbage.
- Person uses Ipod normally, but the cable connector hanging out of the wall picks-up the Ipod's broadcast, and several channels became "staticy" or "pixelated" as a result of the interference on the line.
"Time's up!" - Tom Brokaw "But I'm not finished..." "Oh yes you are. These are the rules you agreed to." "Drat."
Well I can understand some people's viewpoints. My 75-year-old mom often complains "there's nothing decent on television anymore; too many bedroom scenes". She wants it to be sanitized to her tastes, otherwise she has nothing to watch.
It can be especially difficult if you have kids watching.
For a less technological approach, I simply BUY whatever CD or DVD I want to keep. Storebought CDs/DVDs have the advantage of using actual pits, rather than dye, so they will never stop working unless they are physically damaged. My oldest CD is 20 years and still plays flawlessly. I fully expect that my CDs and DVDs will still be playing even after I'm wormfood.
For stuff that's not worth buying but I still want to keep (say, Sexy Vixens 5), I just keep a backup on both my C: and an external USB: drive. The odds of both drives failing simultaneously are low. And even if they did fail, I wouldn't cry about it.
Wait a minute. Microsoft said they were entirely rebuilding Windows 7 from the ground-up, trying to get the kernal to run more-efficiently. That doesn't sound like mere window-dressing (like M.e. was merely Win98.2). That sounds like a complete overhaul.
>>>So long as you use a program that can resume downloads if the connection fails your set.
Yep. About two years ago I was stuck in a hotel for two months, and with nothing but a 24k connection (lots of noise). I was still able to download whole seasons of Doctor Who, SG1, and Battlestar Galactica over that line. Bittorent would just slowly but steadily download piece-by-piece.
All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them.
I had no idea we had working cloaks! Cool. Having an invisibility cloak would make raiding the Sorority Girls' dorm so much easier for the Engineering house. Where can I get one?:-)
Here's another Jefferson quote that I like, mainly because he must have been peering into a crystal ball, because he so accurately predicted the future:
"This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But the Supreme Court has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114
Examples:
- the SCOTUS decision to censor television. - the SCOTUS decision to allow Congress to ban the growing of wheat or corn by private citizens (unless they first ask Congress' permission). - the SCOTUS decision to allow random car stops & checks by Homeland Security or Immigration Cops. - the SCOTUS decision to allow searches of home without a search warrant. - and on and on.
"the Supreme Court's leading conservatives made clear they would like to uphold an official crackdown on the use of expletives during daytime and early evening hours."
Reading this brought to mine Thomas Jefferson's warning:
"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.
"The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves."
Clearly the conservatives on the court are NOT acting as judges interpreting law, but as private citizens trying to push their own agenda, and using their power to superimpose their religious views onto all 300,000,000 residents ("They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps"). This is just wrong.
Personally, I would like to know why any word is considered vulgar.
Well, I hate to bring this up because the French get blamed too much in my opinion, but the reality is: It's the fault of the french. When the Northern French invaded Britannia and took-over, the Old English spoken by the common man became a vulgar "uneducated" language, and French was preferred. Over time the two languages merged into Middle English, but the damage had already been done. That's why some things are acceptable, and some things not.
- "We're eating cow" or "We're eating deer" or "We're eating pig" is not acceptable. - "It's vulgar and uncivilized" claimed the new Northern French rulers. Instead you substitute the French words: beef, venison, pork.
- You don't fuck. You use the french word Intercourse. - You don't shit. You use the french word Poo. - And so on.
Imprecise focus inside the eye is caused by an elongation of the eye's sphere. This is just a natural process of growing, and is no different than the elongation of other body parts. Eyeball shapes are as variable as that other famous sphere men admire so much (the female breast). Just as breasts have many shapes, so too do eyeballs, and it has NOTHING to do with how close you sit to a CRT.
I lost my perfect vision in third grade. It had nothing to do with computers or television watching (I had neither). It was just the result of a growth spurt. Nothing more. In recent years my vision has actually improved, as another growth spurt made my eyes have grown closer to a perfect sphere shape.
First off, the Constitution was written in the 1780s. The Tenth Amendment was not added until the 1790s. They didn't happen concurrently, nor were they written by the same group of men, as you falsely imply.
Second:
You setup a strawman argument. That's something else "anyone with a semester of law school" would avoid. Strict constructionists recognize that "speech" also includes written speech (diaries) or visual speech (films). They interpret the Supreme Law narrowly, but not anally. They are not convenient strawmen for you to setup and beat down. They are more intelligent than a strawman.
As for contradiction between Amendment 10 and Art. I sec. 9, there is none. Amendment 10 reinforces how the Constitution is supposed to be read, as an exhaustive list of powers, and that any powers not enumerated can not be exercised by the central government. This was part of the compromise that allowed the Bill of Rights to be approved, else we'd probably have no Bill of Rights (which would be a tragedy).
Although many of the Founders argued there's no need for a Bill of Rights, after all the Congress can not exercise powers not granted to it, the State Legislatures never-the-less thought it was important to list certain guaranteed liberties, because they knew that governments tend to grab for power.
History has shown their fear was correct. How else do you explain the government regulating how much wheat I can grow in my own backyard for my own family's consumption? Under current law a farmer such as myself is banned from doing so unless I first ask Congress' permission. ----- I cannot lay my hand upon any part of the Constitution that grants Congress that authority, and yet they subsumed that authority anyway. Thank the 1790s generation for the first amendment, else they'd probably ban me from writing blogs too (because it impacts interstate commerce, or some such nonsense).
"classical liberal" has been redefined as "conservative" since the 1930s. The political philosophy means embracing the ideals of small government that Jefferson's Democrat Party was founded upon (like not supporting a Central Bank), but those ideals were later abandoned by that party in favor of socialism (FDR's New Deal).
So the Republicans took-up the cause. They are "liberal" in the classic sense of the 1700s, but "conservative" using modern American terminology. That's where Ron Paul lies, and who often quotes Jefferson in his speeches.
One is a 24/7 news network with a stated goal of pushing the conservative agenda.
Citation please. I don't think FOX News has ever stated that as their mission. (On the contrary, I think FNN is the only non liberal-slanted news on the dial.) I don't think you'll find any interview where FNN's CEO stated he's pushing conservatism.
Also:
I don't think there's anything wrong with media bias. I can lay my hand on the constitution where it's guaranteed the right to a free press, but I can not lay my hand on any part that guarantees the press will be non-biased. If a CNN host wants to wear a "vote Obama" pin, that's fine with me. At least they're being upfront and honest about their bias.
I prefer honest bias rather than fake pretense of non-bias.
And Millenium. Basically the whole Friday night block during the 1990s and 2000s was a killing zone. The only show that survived FOX's Friday Night Wrath was the X-Files, which itself was almost canceled during seasons one and two. It only survived because of us loyal college students watching the show, just prior to going-out binge drinking.;-)
>>>Try watching YouTube or downloading the latest cracked WaReZ game with a modem.
I've done both, since I travel and there's often nothing but a phoneline provided by the hotel. So I plugin my laptop and dialup at 50kbit/s. You can watch youtube.com by pressing "pause" and waiting for the buffer to fill, and then pressing play when it's about half full.
You can download games or movies via bittorrent. I download three or four episodes of Stargate during the day when I'm at work, or at night when sleeping. And the porn images, although slow, are not that bad. My Netscape ISP compresses images on the fly, so it can shrink them to half normal size w/ no noticeable loss, or 5% normal size if you're in a hurry.;-)
There's always using dial-up to connect to another country. Slow...
>>>What is with all these Slashdot users who "lost the driver disc"?
Good question. I keep all my CDs/DVDs inside those CaseLogic notebooks. That way I always know where they are located (on the bookshelf), and can always find them when needed. There's still the possibility I might lose the entire notebook, but that seems unlikely since it never leaves my room.
Whatever. I'd rather use an OS that is supported by >90% of the people, than some other OS. I've already been down the road of non-standard computers (Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Macintosh Quadra) and while I loved all those machines, I did not love seeing my IBM PC friends running programs that I could not run. (The "Mac version coming soon" problem.) I like being able to run virtually any program I feel like running.
>>>...public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009
Good. Maybe I can buy Window NT 7 and skip over Vista (NT6) completely. Vista's a worthless piece of trash. My brother has a computer with roughly the same specs as mine, but his Vista machine runs like it's an old, mindnumbingly slow 200 megahertz computer, compared to the rapid-fire pace of my XP setup.
Of course NT 7 might be trash too... hopefully not. Hopefully Microsoft has learned from its errors.
Kevin Martin is a Bush-appointed political hack. I thought that Slashdot leaned decidedly against corrupt government acts like this.
Yeah it's a bit odd, but not too surprising. Most people support large government acts if they can personally gain from the act.
In this case, most slashdotters don't care about wireless television; only wireless internet. If the government decides to effectively-end wireless television to make room for wireless internet-capable Ipods, then so be it. The slashdotters will happily fall into line with the Bush administration's heavy-handed government, because even though other people are getting screwed, the slashdotters are gaining.
I disagree. If monopolies actually could "undercut" other businesses, we'd all still be listing to Sony/Philips Comcast Discs or Compact Cassettes, not downloadable songs.
As for American history, a lot of companies were *falsely* declared monopolies (by power-hungry politicians) when in fact there was plenty of competition, and no monopoly existed.
At least with a private monopoly, you have the choice to "opt out". Comcast has a monopoly in my area, but its rates are outrageously high, so I simply decided to opt-out of giving them my money. I'd like to see you try to do the same with a Government Monopoly (for example: Medicare).
A government monopoly is even worse than a private monopoly. I'd rather have the later, than the former, especially since the latter has the possibility of new companies being born to break-up the monopoly. (Like Dish or Directv satellite. Or Verizon FiOS.)
Yes, but there's no reason why you can't have multiple Cable TV or Internet providers. Wires don't take-up much space, so it should be a simple task to run multiple companies through the same underground pipe:
- Comcast - Cox - Time-Warner - Verizon
Every home should be wired to multiple providers, so that the consumer has multiple choices.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on. It's a kiddy movie, but it's still very entertaining. (And Hermione's grown into quite a beautiful young woman.)
What on earth could be wrong with it anyway?
I'm glad you asked that question. Thank you. My friends: Let's assume that an Ipod or Ipod-like device gains the ability to broadcast wireless internet over the television bands. There are a number of things that could go wrong (from worst to best case):
- Person hacks their Ipod to use any damn channel they please, thereby blocking my local weather/news channel WGAL8 because they are broadcasting directly overtop of it.
- Person uses Ipod normally, but Ipod database does not list nearby cities stations like WBAL11 (Baltimore) or WPHL17 (Philadelphia). As a result of this oversight I lose channels 2,3,6,10,11,12,13,17,29,35,57,65 because the Ipod is broadcasting directly overtop of them.
- Person uses Ipod normally, and Ipod decides to broadcast on channel 7, directly adjacent to WGAL8. The "spillover" from channel 7 confuses my television receiver and I can't tune-in my local weather/news. I see a picture, but it's just unwatchable garbage.
- Person uses Ipod normally, but the cable connector hanging out of the wall picks-up the Ipod's broadcast, and several channels became "staticy" or "pixelated" as a result of the interference on the line.
"Time's up!" - Tom Brokaw
"But I'm not finished..."
"Oh yes you are. These are the rules you agreed to."
"Drat."
Second best thing ever. Right after the Sybian. Now I don't have to kill myself trying to keep my woman happy. ;-)
Well I can understand some people's viewpoints. My 75-year-old mom often complains "there's nothing decent on television anymore; too many bedroom scenes". She wants it to be sanitized to her tastes, otherwise she has nothing to watch.
It can be especially difficult if you have kids watching.
Yes like Harry Potter's cloak. He can see through the cloth, but no one can see him.
Great idea!
For a less technological approach, I simply BUY whatever CD or DVD I want to keep. Storebought CDs/DVDs have the advantage of using actual pits, rather than dye, so they will never stop working unless they are physically damaged. My oldest CD is 20 years and still plays flawlessly. I fully expect that my CDs and DVDs will still be playing even after I'm wormfood.
For stuff that's not worth buying but I still want to keep (say, Sexy Vixens 5), I just keep a backup on both my C: and an external USB: drive. The odds of both drives failing simultaneously are low. And even if they did fail, I wouldn't cry about it.
Windows 7 is just Vista in sheeps clothing...
Wait a minute. Microsoft said they were entirely rebuilding Windows 7 from the ground-up, trying to get the kernal to run more-efficiently. That doesn't sound like mere window-dressing (like M.e. was merely Win98.2). That sounds like a complete overhaul.
You just don't get it, do you?
No I didn't know that. So I have to wait for Windows NT 8 for a working OS? (Same way I skipped-over M.e.)
>>>So long as you use a program that can resume downloads if the connection fails your set.
Yep. About two years ago I was stuck in a hotel for two months, and with nothing but a 24k connection (lots of noise). I was still able to download whole seasons of Doctor Who, SG1, and Battlestar Galactica over that line. Bittorent would just slowly but steadily download piece-by-piece.
All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them.
I had no idea we had working cloaks! Cool. Having an invisibility cloak would make raiding the Sorority Girls' dorm so much easier for the Engineering house. Where can I get one? :-)
Here's another Jefferson quote that I like, mainly because he must have been peering into a crystal ball, because he so accurately predicted the future:
"This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But the Supreme Court has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114
Examples:
- the SCOTUS decision to censor television.
- the SCOTUS decision to allow Congress to ban the growing of wheat or corn by private citizens (unless they first ask Congress' permission).
- the SCOTUS decision to allow random car stops & checks by Homeland Security or Immigration Cops.
- the SCOTUS decision to allow searches of home without a search warrant.
- and on and on.
"the Supreme Court's leading conservatives made clear they would like to uphold an official crackdown on the use of expletives during daytime and early evening hours."
Reading this brought to mine Thomas Jefferson's warning:
"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.
"The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves."
Clearly the conservatives on the court are NOT acting as judges interpreting law, but as private citizens trying to push their own agenda, and using their power to superimpose their religious views onto all 300,000,000 residents ("They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps"). This is just wrong.
Personally, I would like to know why any word is considered vulgar.
Well, I hate to bring this up because the French get blamed too much in my opinion, but the reality is: It's the fault of the french. When the Northern French invaded Britannia and took-over, the Old English spoken by the common man became a vulgar "uneducated" language, and French was preferred. Over time the two languages merged into Middle English, but the damage had already been done. That's why some things are acceptable, and some things not.
- "We're eating cow" or "We're eating deer" or "We're eating pig" is not acceptable.
- "It's vulgar and uncivilized" claimed the new Northern French rulers. Instead you substitute the French words: beef, venison, pork.
- You don't fuck. You use the french word Intercourse.
- You don't shit. You use the french word Poo.
- And so on.
Nonsense.
Imprecise focus inside the eye is caused by an elongation of the eye's sphere. This is just a natural process of growing, and is no different than the elongation of other body parts. Eyeball shapes are as variable as that other famous sphere men admire so much (the female breast). Just as breasts have many shapes, so too do eyeballs, and it has NOTHING to do with how close you sit to a CRT.
I lost my perfect vision in third grade. It had nothing to do with computers or television watching (I had neither). It was just the result of a growth spurt. Nothing more. In recent years my vision has actually improved, as another growth spurt made my eyes have grown closer to a perfect sphere shape.
First off, the Constitution was written in the 1780s. The Tenth Amendment was not added until the 1790s. They didn't happen concurrently, nor were they written by the same group of men, as you falsely imply.
Second:
You setup a strawman argument. That's something else "anyone with a semester of law school" would avoid. Strict constructionists recognize that "speech" also includes written speech (diaries) or visual speech (films). They interpret the Supreme Law narrowly, but not anally. They are not convenient strawmen for you to setup and beat down. They are more intelligent than a strawman.
As for contradiction between Amendment 10 and Art. I sec. 9, there is none. Amendment 10 reinforces how the Constitution is supposed to be read, as an exhaustive list of powers, and that any powers not enumerated can not be exercised by the central government. This was part of the compromise that allowed the Bill of Rights to be approved, else we'd probably have no Bill of Rights (which would be a tragedy).
Although many of the Founders argued there's no need for a Bill of Rights, after all the Congress can not exercise powers not granted to it, the State Legislatures never-the-less thought it was important to list certain guaranteed liberties, because they knew that governments tend to grab for power.
History has shown their fear was correct. How else do you explain the government regulating how much wheat I can grow in my own backyard for my own family's consumption? Under current law a farmer such as myself is banned from doing so unless I first ask Congress' permission. ----- I cannot lay my hand upon any part of the Constitution that grants Congress that authority, and yet they subsumed that authority anyway. Thank the 1790s generation for the first amendment, else they'd probably ban me from writing blogs too (because it impacts interstate commerce, or some such nonsense).
"classical liberal" has been redefined as "conservative" since the 1930s. The political philosophy means embracing the ideals of small government that Jefferson's Democrat Party was founded upon (like not supporting a Central Bank), but those ideals were later abandoned by that party in favor of socialism (FDR's New Deal).
So the Republicans took-up the cause. They are "liberal" in the classic sense of the 1700s, but "conservative" using modern American terminology. That's where Ron Paul lies, and who often quotes Jefferson in his speeches.
One is a 24/7 news network with a stated goal of pushing the conservative agenda.
Citation please. I don't think FOX News has ever stated that as their mission. (On the contrary, I think FNN is the only non liberal-slanted news on the dial.) I don't think you'll find any interview where FNN's CEO stated he's pushing conservatism.
Also:
I don't think there's anything wrong with media bias. I can lay my hand on the constitution where it's guaranteed the right to a free press, but I can not lay my hand on any part that guarantees the press will be non-biased. If a CNN host wants to wear a "vote Obama" pin, that's fine with me. At least they're being upfront and honest about their bias.
I prefer honest bias rather than fake pretense of non-bias.
And Sliders.
And Brisco County Junior.
And Space: Above and Beyond.
And Millenium. Basically the whole Friday night block during the 1990s and 2000s was a killing zone. The only show that survived FOX's Friday Night Wrath was the X-Files, which itself was almost canceled during seasons one and two. It only survived because of us loyal college students watching the show, just prior to going-out binge drinking. ;-)
>>>Try watching YouTube or downloading the latest cracked WaReZ game with a modem.
I've done both, since I travel and there's often nothing but a phoneline provided by the hotel. So I plugin my laptop and dialup at 50kbit/s. You can watch youtube.com by pressing "pause" and waiting for the buffer to fill, and then pressing play when it's about half full.
You can download games or movies via bittorrent. I download three or four episodes of Stargate during the day when I'm at work, or at night when sleeping. And the porn images, although slow, are not that bad. My Netscape ISP compresses images on the fly, so it can shrink them to half normal size w/ no noticeable loss, or 5% normal size if you're in a hurry. ;-)
There's always using dial-up to connect to another country. Slow...
...but very workable.
>>>What is with all these Slashdot users who "lost the driver disc"?
Good question. I keep all my CDs/DVDs inside those CaseLogic notebooks. That way I always know where they are located (on the bookshelf), and can always find them when needed. There's still the possibility I might lose the entire notebook, but that seems unlikely since it never leaves my room.
Whatever. I'd rather use an OS that is supported by >90% of the people, than some other OS. I've already been down the road of non-standard computers (Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Macintosh Quadra) and while I loved all those machines, I did not love seeing my IBM PC friends running programs that I could not run. (The "Mac version coming soon" problem.) I like being able to run virtually any program I feel like running.
>>>...public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009
Good. Maybe I can buy Window NT 7 and skip over Vista (NT6) completely. Vista's a worthless piece of trash. My brother has a computer with roughly the same specs as mine, but his Vista machine runs like it's an old, mindnumbingly slow 200 megahertz computer, compared to the rapid-fire pace of my XP setup.
Of course NT 7 might be trash too... hopefully not. Hopefully Microsoft has learned from its errors.
Kevin Martin is a Bush-appointed political hack. I thought that Slashdot leaned decidedly against corrupt government acts like this.
Yeah it's a bit odd, but not too surprising. Most people support large government acts if they can personally gain from the act.
In this case, most slashdotters don't care about wireless television; only wireless internet. If the government decides to effectively-end wireless television to make room for wireless internet-capable Ipods, then so be it. The slashdotters will happily fall into line with the Bush administration's heavy-handed government, because even though other people are getting screwed, the slashdotters are gaining.
I disagree. If monopolies actually could "undercut" other businesses, we'd all still be listing to Sony/Philips Comcast Discs or Compact Cassettes, not downloadable songs.
As for American history, a lot of companies were *falsely* declared monopolies (by power-hungry politicians) when in fact there was plenty of competition, and no monopoly existed.
At least with a private monopoly, you have the choice to "opt out". Comcast has a monopoly in my area, but its rates are outrageously high, so I simply decided to opt-out of giving them my money. I'd like to see you try to do the same with a Government Monopoly (for example: Medicare).
A government monopoly is even worse than a private monopoly. I'd rather have the later, than the former, especially since the latter has the possibility of new companies being born to break-up the monopoly. (Like Dish or Directv satellite. Or Verizon FiOS.)
Yes, but there's no reason why you can't have multiple Cable TV or Internet providers. Wires don't take-up much space, so it should be a simple task to run multiple companies through the same underground pipe:
- Comcast
- Cox
- Time-Warner
- Verizon
Every home should be wired to multiple providers, so that the consumer has multiple choices.