DVD's and CD's supposedly should last for 20-100 years depending on whose marketing bullshit you are reading, but in practice up to 15 years is the maximum before the thing starts degrading.
I presume you're talking about off-the-shelf CD-Rs, which certainly wouldn't be used here. Gold CDs are well worth the investment if you're planning long-term storage of data, and are certain to last at least reasonably near a century. Make a copy every ~50 years, and you have some extra insurance. Use some extra discs to store parity information (ala par2) and you have even more insurance against either a couple entire discs going bad, or several individual CDs being usable, but having a number of unreadable sectors.
Tape suffers, albeit less, from the same ailment hard disks suffer from, even the current batch of LTO-3 and 4 WORM media.
Indeed. It suffers from several other issues as well. Degradation of the tape, wear and tear from reading the tape, any electromagnetic field (eg. static) etc.
The current generation of MO or UDO drives however use a laser to heat up particular clusters of particles after which it uses a magnet to create the 1 respectively the 0.
The "current generation"? Are you suggesting there were previous generations of magneto-optical drives, that DIDN'T use OPTICS and MAGNETICS to store data?
This means that they are (nigh) impervious to magnetism or heat as long as those two are not combined. MO/UDO is therefore the only medium that will survive for long times on a shelf.
These two sentences are bullshit from beginning to end. Sound like you've got lots of stock in Sony, or some other major MO company. Or at least you've bought-in to their bullshit press releases.
If you heat a MO disc up to it's "Currie Point/Temperature" the magnetic orientation (all stored data) will be erased. No magnetism is needed. In fact it is inherently true for any material that uses magnetism to store data. That is how MO discs are erased so they can be rewritten.
Optical discs are no more susceptible to heat than MO discs are, and aren't at all susceptible to magnetism (or more accurately, the potential for decay of a less robust magnetic layer). And it's not as if either is highly susceptible to heat, either... Unless you plan on keeping your discs in an oven, or have someone intentionally put the discs in a drive and trying to overwrite them, neither should degrade due to heat, within a century's time.
Finally, you neglect to mention that it's much more difficult to read MO discs than purely optical formats (CDs/DVDs/etc.). The equipment must be much more accurate to follow the tracks on the MO discs. Unlike purely optical discs, MO is highly sensitive to alignment issues. As such, the difficulties in recovering data from an aging or damaged MO drive are about the same experienced when recovering data from HDD platters (ie. alignment issues), as well as tapes, as you've mentioned. After a few decades, I'd be much more worried about being able to read ANYTHING from a MO disc, than I would a CD/DVD...
For rewritable media, MO is probably the most reliable format currently available. It supports around 1 million erase/rewrite cycles, compared to the ~100 with CD-RW. But it doesn't compare nearly as favorably to write-once optical media.
It may be trivial to copy a few terabytes around between ONLINE ARRAYS. When the drives are all off-line, and physically need to be found, connected, thrown out, and their replacements installed in their absence, the difficulties add up fast.
The problem isn't necessarily the medium of storage itself, its the whole of how the information is encoded. After awhile, the machinery and knowledge of the format will be lost.
How long has it been since the basic knowledge needed to read a mainstream storage format has been forgotten? Give me a set of punch cards for the ENIAC and I'll come up with a reader for them in a couple days. Digital is digital.
And CDs/DVDs are even simpler. If you have a laser that can read the bits on the disc, it takes a tiny bit of detective work to figure it out. Even if you don't know about error correction codes, just arbitrarily specify increasing byte sizes until you get something that appears sane.
Pretty quickly, you'll get an uncompressed video stream. It might have a lot of random digital noise, and completely wrong colors, but will clearly be comprehensible video. From that point, it will take a trivial amount of effort to figure out what (ECC) bits to drop, and what color-space conversion to use.
People have no perspective. It's ridiculous to assume people, 100 years from now won't know EVERYTHING there is to know about CDs. Magnetic formats are difficult to handle, only because random variations in the field makes it look random, until you figure out the exact scan type, orientation, speed, etc. Binary optical discs, OTOH, may be the simplest format ever invented. Magnetic tapes have the additional drawback of commonly being proprietary, where CDs and DVDs are open standards, so millions of people around the world know exactly how to read them, and many hard copies of the full specs exist.
It's only when you start talking about complicated compression, or file formats that there is even the possibility of losing the knowledge. With proprietary software, it can happen in a very, very short time. With open standards, it's difficult to say just how long the knowledge will remain, but you can be sure it's going to take well over a century before that knowledge is even hard to come by.
And with uncompressed formats, I'd put the range at several centuries. Not only does everyone have to switch off of binary computers, but they also have to entirely FORGET that in ancient history, that short and fat race of people, known to string long thin pieces of metal on wooden poles, were using base-2 math to represent all their data.
With normal film, hold it up to a light, the image is there. Suppose that in 200 years someone wants to play back the film - even if such a machine did not exist, it would be easy to construct.
That's right, any idiot can play back film. Of course, they'll get no SOUND out of it, because that's encoded along the edges. And for the past couple decades, it has been stored in a digital format, no less.
Why work is taxed at a higher rate than investments, I'll never understand.
Where do you think the money to invest in dividends comes from? Tax it again...
If you want, you could also increase the taxes applicable on liquidating or trading stocks to compensate instead.
Who are these poor people you know that make money on anything other than their labor?
Look at the statistics. The majority of dividends currently go to retirees, not multi-millionaire. The tax code of 2003 was changed specifically so that the poor get a lower tax rate on their dividends, and it's not as if they passed the law for the nonexistent.
In the sum total of my life, I think I've made about $5 in interest income and about $20 on a savings bond; the rest was via elbow grease.
The fact that you don't know how to save money doesn't mean that nobody else does. When I got out of college, I had already earned several hundred dollars in interest from my savings account, based on the money I earned (and saved) both during my last year of high school, and throughout college.
but I don't think too many people in downtown Cleveland are clamoring for reduced taxes on their non-existent stock dividends.
Did you even read the rest of my post? I'm not insisting that everyone should have dividends. I want dividends to come back (whether for the rich or the poor) because of the drastic changes it will affect for corporate policy. The higher taxes have nearly killed off dividends, and caused the mess we're in.
The 50 million Americas who rely on analog OTA as a primary or backup medium are, over the next 13 months, expected to not just buy more equipment, but also to become RF experts and perform non-trivial antenna installations in order to continue watching the free television.
If you have a non-crappy signal strength with your current setup, you will merely need the (free) converter box.
The vast majority of people will find they get a far, far better picture. There are innumerable testaments to this fact that are easily found.
I can't even guess as to what your problem may be, that's why I recommend finding an expert. Your problem may simply be that HDTV channels are currently (during this transition period) broadcast on temporary towers, at as fraction as much power as the analog stations (to avoid conflicts in a temporarily very crowded band) and sometimes from entirely different locations.
Whatever the case, your results are provably atypical, and your rants about the horrors of DTV are nonsense.
Before you try to educate me, I suggest you check my journal entry on HDTV.
From what I've read, the only solution is to erect an antenna taller than the nearby trees -- and that's still no guarantee.
Well that explains it... You're confusing very different issues.
Trees are a problem for UHF signals. End of story. Digital or analog, if your antenna has to aim through a tree towards the UHF broadcasting tower, it is going to be a nightmare.
No doubt your analog TV stations are all nothing but VHF stations, so it's just dumb luck that you are experiencing this UHF problem for the first time with a digital receiver.
When the switchover finally happens in 2009, you can expect many of the digital broadcasts to switch over to VHF channels, and see the same robustness with those stations as you do with analog VHF.
And weather has nothing to do with it. Clouds and rain should be almost completely transparent to the frequencies used by OTA TV, even at the top of the VHF spectrum. Now, wind might make the branches and leaves of your obstructing trees move around, but that's just another symptom.
I've tried powered, directional antennas and mapped out the best orientation for each signal. I've tried outside antennas in different places. Nothing has helped.
I suggest you find someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the subject than you do. Selecting and positioning a high gain UHF antenna is anything but trivial.
he obviously resists getting the boot. Assuming you don't have anything strong enough to outright fire the CEO, how much money can he make your company lose between now and you actually getting him sacked?
That presumes a 100% guarantee he'll be fired. If the board votes, and comes up one short, he can either start running the company into the ground, and guarantee he'll be fired when they vote again. Or he can do something to improve his performance, to make it less likely he'll be fired at all.
What's more, CEOs don't work at one company for their entire lives. He's going to be looking for another company to pay him the big bucks, and that's less likely to happen if he is fired instead of resigning, and sure as hell isn't going to happen if he runs his company into the ground for a month, THEN gets fired...
"Golden Parachutes" wouldn't be quite so bad if they were at least based entirely on something like current stock prices to determine the amount... Then taking huge risks with a company doesn't seem like such a good idea, as he bears as much risk as anyone else.
IMHO sales people make no difference whatsoever in traditional big box stores.
I'm forced to agree with you, but ONLY because the current crop of sales people are so incompetent that they are a hindrance rather than a help.
Innumerable times I've had questions about a product... Think: battery life of a portable CD player, number and types of connections available, etc. Over and over, I've found staff are useless. Most simply say they don't know at every question, yet always insist on continuing to orbit me, and keep asking if I have any other questions. The kind of psychopathic tendencies such behavior must require absolutely boggles the mind. I've had a couple instances where a sales person proceeded to read everything on the box of the product, then finally inform me that it doesn't say... immensely helpful of course, as I can't read it myself. I'm not sure if they assumed I was blind, or just terribly lazy.
Yes, sales people would be immensely valuable if they knew a damn thing about the products they sell. Since they never do, it is money completely wasted.
It's obvious to me that the corporate system rewards short-sighted execs. What can be done to fix this systemic problem?
Change the tax code to eliminate the double taxation on dividends. I recall numerous people, much smarter than I, confidently announcing that the decline of dividends (due to the increase in taxation many years ago) would have a terribly destabilizing effect on the stock market. In hindsight, it's amazing just how understated their doom and gloom predictions seem to have been.
I believe you will see a strong correlation between the sudden steep decline of dividends, and the start of the stock market insanity we see in-force today. Because of the decline of dividends, perpetual increases in stock price are the only thing that matters to investors. Also, because of the large number of amateurs, and simplistic advice by professionals, it seems such simple metrics like quickly increasing stock prices, P/E ratios, etc., have gained mythic proportions... So much so that stocks crash on a small drop in profits, and skyrocket to hundreds of times the value of a company (not to mention more than some entire nations) when there is a small increase in profits.
This has caused much of the stock market to become nothing but a massive pyramid scheme. Unfortunately, those who are the most idiotic, and bought into the scheme at the highest and most recent price, are now the ones who get to vote on what the company does, and of course they vote for more mergers, more insanity, and more short-term profits, and will pay executives ANYTHING to just keep sustaining the pyramid for a little while longer, until they can cash out and go destroy some other company that's still in the earlier stages of the pyramid. But unlike a standard pyramid scheme, the entire world is being affected by it, even if they didn't opt in.
Note: I'm not a Republican, CATO, or Heritage Institute shill. By all means, increase income taxes (on the higher tax brackets) to make up the difference. But unlike something like the estate tax, singling out dividends for extra taxation doesn't make much sense, as the rich and the poor both are subjected, and has had the unintended side effect of largely ending the practice of dividends, and (IMHO) more than any other factor, caused the change of the stock market into a much more unstable and irrational entity.
The digital signals may be far less tolerant of interference, especially with all that encryption.
All evidence points to the opposite. Lots of people in areas that got nothing on analog are getting perfect signals as soon as they switch to a digital receiver.
There are sure to be exceptions, especially where multipath interference is terribly heavy and you don't want to buy a new (better/directional) antenna, but the vast majority of people will get a perfect picture almost all the time, and very few drop-outs.
Since DTV uses less radio spectrum than analog, we can have the same number of channels taking up less space,
Digital COULD use less radio spectrum, but instead, they've given it just as much so it can broadcast a high definition stream.
which allows for the big 700 MHz spectrum auction that we've been hearing about
The FCC could have dropped the 700MHz spectrum at any time (do you know of ANY markets where there are more than 50 OTA broadcast TV channels?). They just decided it would be easiest to do it now, since channel assignments are getting completely shuffled around anyhow.
The strict cut-off of out-of-band signal allowing adjacent channels with no chance of interference helps a little, as does the switch from "translators" to "boosters" but neither is really significantly relevant to the 700MHz auction.
Wonderful, as I watch a lot of PBS and cannot receive their channel 3 digital signal, even with a roof antenna pointed directly at it.
You're probably using an old omnidirectional VHF antenna, while, particularly for digital broadcasts, you need a newer directional VHF antenna with the elements arranged in a series of V shapes.
It sucks to have to buy a new antenna for a single station, I know, but maybe it'll improve your reception with other VHF (VHF-high) digital TV stations as well.
The type of person that can spend $500 on a television set and doesn't have cable/satellite is probably not a big TV watcher.
I can spend $500 on a TV, am a big TV watcher. I must admit I pay for TV service, but I don't WANT TO. The analog signals in the area are just so weak as to make OTA TV currently unwatchable. The switchover to digital should change this, and I'll happily get rid of my largely wasted subscription.
Tell me, what do YOU watch on cable/satellite? I bet 90%+ of it is just syndicated content that was originally available OTA. Get a DVR and you won't need the endless reruns.
What do I watch on cable anymore? All the great channels went low budget and turned to crap. Discovery, TLC, National Geographic, SciFi... I watch none of them anymore. In fact, other than Daily Show/Colbert, and some History Channel shows, I watch nothing that isn't already available OTA.
TV is the major issue with American obesity, particularly in children.
Bullshit. Eating too many calories is almost the sole cause of obesity.
Unless you are choosing to watch TV instead of running a marathon, climb a mountain, etc., the calorie expenditure for normal activity makes a nominal difference to your weight.
That's just it. I haven't heard a single word about this any place other than online.
I've seen the "2009 analog switchover" commercial on TV a couple dozen times already, and we're more than a year away, and the voucher program isn't even starting it's earliest stages for a couple more months.
The national government will be taking tax dollars from people, taking an administrative cut, then turning around and giving it back to pay exclusively for converter boxes.
Not true in the slightest.
The money will be coming from the 700MHz spectrum auction, and the profits will VASTLY exceed the cost of buying everyone a digital to analog converter box.
Not only does it not come out of people's taxes, but the extra "found money" will make it possible to LOWER people's taxes next year, or at least not require a tax increase for a couple more years.
I wish we'd done away with interlacing when the HD standards were being written.
I do, too. However, the truth is, interlacing is the only way to get full resolution on slow motion (1080p30), while getting smooth motion during fast scenes (540p60). With the same bandwidth, perhaps they could have made 1080p48 happen instead, but no displays at the time could really keep up.
There's a much more straight forward issue that bothers me about HDTV... Dolby bribing MIT to advise against including MP2 audio, even though it is quite competitive and patent-free, so every broadcaster is forced to license Dolby Digital/AC3/A52.
Now we're having digital TV rammed down our throats. This time with the help of the government. TV and electronic shops are jumping for joy, and of course the cable companies are rubbing their hands in glee.
As are the emergency services, who will now have access to some of that spectrum that is no longer needed for communications.
The poor consumer is having to buy lots of new equipment
Yes, the poor consumer has to pay 2-3 hours' salary for a converter box to get a perfect signal instead of the staticy mess of analog and interference, and additional channels. Shucks.
While I'm not asking for a backwards compatibility, I would appreciate it if a similarly long switch over period would be given.
Backwards compatibility was the only reason a decade-plus switchover period was POSSIBLE. Analog TV broadcasts take 6MHz of spectrum EACH. It's utterly unreasonable to expect the government to keep hundreds of MHz of spectrum allocated for analog broadcasts, while at the same time, using a significant fraction of that range for digital broadcasts as well. It's an absurd notion.
All these years I've been fed propaganda telling me that over the air HDTV would require fancy antennas, but it turns out to be a BIG LIE.
It's not propaganda at all. You just happen to be in an area where the signal is strong enough, terrain does not include hills or lots of high rise buildings, and have a newer receiver which has been significantly improved over the initial offerings.
At least with an analog tv if you have a crappy antenna you get some snow or other interference and the program is still watchable. With Digital TV you get big pixel blocks and sound cut-out that makes the program completely unbearable to watch.
If you get a good enough signal that the analog version is even WATCHABLE without the picture being entirely static, you'll get a PERFECT PICTURE with DTV. It's only on the fringes, 40+ miles away that digital drop-outs will be a problem if you have a crappy antenna. I happen to know just how horrendous analog TV is in fringe signal areas, and I anxiously await the switchover.
I can completely imagine that running an engine at its peak efficiency for electricity generation, then using the electricity to power an electric motor (which can have 80% to 90% efficiency) would be more efficient than using the engine to drive the wheels directly.
Imagine all you want, but running an ICE in it's ideal power band can't possibly give you the 20%+ higher efficiency needed to overcome the electrical conversion losses, especially since current hybrids already keep it in a very small range near the power band the vast majority of the time.
my hybrid uses about 4 to 5 liters of gasoline per 100 km, whereas other gasoline cars in the same class use about twice as much. I like to think that this is at least partially due to the combustion engine being used to generate electricity
Nope. Your car sips fuel because it is very lightweight, has a far more efficient gas engine, and is able to collect and use otherwise wasted energy from braking. Hybrids rarely generate electricity directly from running the engine, because it's simply a waste. Though, due to their designs, can occasionally become necessary.
Numerous (far older) conventional vehicles have rivaled the fuel efficiency ratings of current hybrids, and with much more primitive materials, engine designs, and poor aerodynamics. I'd very much like to see the engine and frames of current hybrids spun off into conventional cars, without the added dead-weight and expense of the electrical system. Had this conversion before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=-1&mode=nested&commentsort=1&op=Change&sid=234837&cid=19145087&pid=19145087
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I presume you're talking about off-the-shelf CD-Rs, which certainly wouldn't be used here. Gold CDs are well worth the investment if you're planning long-term storage of data, and are certain to last at least reasonably near a century. Make a copy every ~50 years, and you have some extra insurance. Use some extra discs to store parity information (ala par2) and you have even more insurance against either a couple entire discs going bad, or several individual CDs being usable, but having a number of unreadable sectors.
Indeed. It suffers from several other issues as well. Degradation of the tape, wear and tear from reading the tape, any electromagnetic field (eg. static) etc.
The "current generation"? Are you suggesting there were previous generations of magneto-optical drives, that DIDN'T use OPTICS and MAGNETICS to store data?
These two sentences are bullshit from beginning to end. Sound like you've got lots of stock in Sony, or some other major MO company. Or at least you've bought-in to their bullshit press releases.
If you heat a MO disc up to it's "Currie Point/Temperature" the magnetic orientation (all stored data) will be erased. No magnetism is needed. In fact it is inherently true for any material that uses magnetism to store data. That is how MO discs are erased so they can be rewritten.
Optical discs are no more susceptible to heat than MO discs are, and aren't at all susceptible to magnetism (or more accurately, the potential for decay of a less robust magnetic layer). And it's not as if either is highly susceptible to heat, either... Unless you plan on keeping your discs in an oven, or have someone intentionally put the discs in a drive and trying to overwrite them, neither should degrade due to heat, within a century's time.
Finally, you neglect to mention that it's much more difficult to read MO discs than purely optical formats (CDs/DVDs/etc.). The equipment must be much more accurate to follow the tracks on the MO discs. Unlike purely optical discs, MO is highly sensitive to alignment issues. As such, the difficulties in recovering data from an aging or damaged MO drive are about the same experienced when recovering data from HDD platters (ie. alignment issues), as well as tapes, as you've mentioned. After a few decades, I'd be much more worried about being able to read ANYTHING from a MO disc, than I would a CD/DVD...
For rewritable media, MO is probably the most reliable format currently available. It supports around 1 million erase/rewrite cycles, compared to the ~100 with CD-RW. But it doesn't compare nearly as favorably to write-once optical media.
It may be trivial to copy a few terabytes around between ONLINE ARRAYS. When the drives are all off-line, and physically need to be found, connected, thrown out, and their replacements installed in their absence, the difficulties add up fast.
How would you know? You didn't even read it.
No, "they" aren't going to invest any money in the project.
I call karma whore.
You can, but it won't help. Your hard drive will seize up, salt mine or no. Your CDs will oxidize, your tapes will begin to flake, etc.
How long has it been since the basic knowledge needed to read a mainstream storage format has been forgotten? Give me a set of punch cards for the ENIAC and I'll come up with a reader for them in a couple days. Digital is digital.
And CDs/DVDs are even simpler. If you have a laser that can read the bits on the disc, it takes a tiny bit of detective work to figure it out. Even if you don't know about error correction codes, just arbitrarily specify increasing byte sizes until you get something that appears sane.
Pretty quickly, you'll get an uncompressed video stream. It might have a lot of random digital noise, and completely wrong colors, but will clearly be comprehensible video. From that point, it will take a trivial amount of effort to figure out what (ECC) bits to drop, and what color-space conversion to use.
People have no perspective. It's ridiculous to assume people, 100 years from now won't know EVERYTHING there is to know about CDs. Magnetic formats are difficult to handle, only because random variations in the field makes it look random, until you figure out the exact scan type, orientation, speed, etc. Binary optical discs, OTOH, may be the simplest format ever invented. Magnetic tapes have the additional drawback of commonly being proprietary, where CDs and DVDs are open standards, so millions of people around the world know exactly how to read them, and many hard copies of the full specs exist.
It's only when you start talking about complicated compression, or file formats that there is even the possibility of losing the knowledge. With proprietary software, it can happen in a very, very short time. With open standards, it's difficult to say just how long the knowledge will remain, but you can be sure it's going to take well over a century before that knowledge is even hard to come by.
And with uncompressed formats, I'd put the range at several centuries. Not only does everyone have to switch off of binary computers, but they also have to entirely FORGET that in ancient history, that short and fat race of people, known to string long thin pieces of metal on wooden poles, were using base-2 math to represent all their data.
That's right, any idiot can play back film. Of course, they'll get no SOUND out of it, because that's encoded along the edges. And for the past couple decades, it has been stored in a digital format, no less.
The guy who has to keep buying new storage media... He cares. He cares a lot.
Copying millions of 1MB pictures is trivial. Copying thousands and thousands of multi-terabyte movies is not.
Where do you think the money to invest in dividends comes from? Tax it again...
If you want, you could also increase the taxes applicable on liquidating or trading stocks to compensate instead.
Look at the statistics. The majority of dividends currently go to retirees, not multi-millionaire. The tax code of 2003 was changed specifically so that the poor get a lower tax rate on their dividends, and it's not as if they passed the law for the nonexistent.
The fact that you don't know how to save money doesn't mean that nobody else does. When I got out of college, I had already earned several hundred dollars in interest from my savings account, based on the money I earned (and saved) both during my last year of high school, and throughout college.
Did you even read the rest of my post? I'm not insisting that everyone should have dividends. I want dividends to come back (whether for the rich or the poor) because of the drastic changes it will affect for corporate policy. The higher taxes have nearly killed off dividends, and caused the mess we're in.
If you have a non-crappy signal strength with your current setup, you will merely need the (free) converter box.
The vast majority of people will find they get a far, far better picture. There are innumerable testaments to this fact that are easily found.
I can't even guess as to what your problem may be, that's why I recommend finding an expert. Your problem may simply be that HDTV channels are currently (during this transition period) broadcast on temporary towers, at as fraction as much power as the analog stations (to avoid conflicts in a temporarily very crowded band) and sometimes from entirely different locations.
Whatever the case, your results are provably atypical, and your rants about the horrors of DTV are nonsense.
Before you try to educate me, I suggest you check my journal entry on HDTV.
Well that explains it... You're confusing very different issues.
Trees are a problem for UHF signals. End of story. Digital or analog, if your antenna has to aim through a tree towards the UHF broadcasting tower, it is going to be a nightmare.
No doubt your analog TV stations are all nothing but VHF stations, so it's just dumb luck that you are experiencing this UHF problem for the first time with a digital receiver.
When the switchover finally happens in 2009, you can expect many of the digital broadcasts to switch over to VHF channels, and see the same robustness with those stations as you do with analog VHF.
And weather has nothing to do with it. Clouds and rain should be almost completely transparent to the frequencies used by OTA TV, even at the top of the VHF spectrum. Now, wind might make the branches and leaves of your obstructing trees move around, but that's just another symptom.
I suggest you find someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the subject than you do. Selecting and positioning a high gain UHF antenna is anything but trivial.
If you insist on doing it yourself, you're going to need to understand a lot about signal prorogation. A good start would be reading through this site: http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ISSUES/erecting_antenna.html
That presumes a 100% guarantee he'll be fired. If the board votes, and comes up one short, he can either start running the company into the ground, and guarantee he'll be fired when they vote again. Or he can do something to improve his performance, to make it less likely he'll be fired at all.
What's more, CEOs don't work at one company for their entire lives. He's going to be looking for another company to pay him the big bucks, and that's less likely to happen if he is fired instead of resigning, and sure as hell isn't going to happen if he runs his company into the ground for a month, THEN gets fired...
"Golden Parachutes" wouldn't be quite so bad if they were at least based entirely on something like current stock prices to determine the amount... Then taking huge risks with a company doesn't seem like such a good idea, as he bears as much risk as anyone else.
I'm forced to agree with you, but ONLY because the current crop of sales people are so incompetent that they are a hindrance rather than a help.
Innumerable times I've had questions about a product... Think: battery life of a portable CD player, number and types of connections available, etc. Over and over, I've found staff are useless. Most simply say they don't know at every question, yet always insist on continuing to orbit me, and keep asking if I have any other questions. The kind of psychopathic tendencies such behavior must require absolutely boggles the mind. I've had a couple instances where a sales person proceeded to read everything on the box of the product, then finally inform me that it doesn't say... immensely helpful of course, as I can't read it myself. I'm not sure if they assumed I was blind, or just terribly lazy.
Yes, sales people would be immensely valuable if they knew a damn thing about the products they sell. Since they never do, it is money completely wasted.
Change the tax code to eliminate the double taxation on dividends. I recall numerous people, much smarter than I, confidently announcing that the decline of dividends (due to the increase in taxation many years ago) would have a terribly destabilizing effect on the stock market. In hindsight, it's amazing just how understated their doom and gloom predictions seem to have been.
I believe you will see a strong correlation between the sudden steep decline of dividends, and the start of the stock market insanity we see in-force today. Because of the decline of dividends, perpetual increases in stock price are the only thing that matters to investors. Also, because of the large number of amateurs, and simplistic advice by professionals, it seems such simple metrics like quickly increasing stock prices, P/E ratios, etc., have gained mythic proportions... So much so that stocks crash on a small drop in profits, and skyrocket to hundreds of times the value of a company (not to mention more than some entire nations) when there is a small increase in profits.
This has caused much of the stock market to become nothing but a massive pyramid scheme. Unfortunately, those who are the most idiotic, and bought into the scheme at the highest and most recent price, are now the ones who get to vote on what the company does, and of course they vote for more mergers, more insanity, and more short-term profits, and will pay executives ANYTHING to just keep sustaining the pyramid for a little while longer, until they can cash out and go destroy some other company that's still in the earlier stages of the pyramid. But unlike a standard pyramid scheme, the entire world is being affected by it, even if they didn't opt in.
Note: I'm not a Republican, CATO, or Heritage Institute shill. By all means, increase income taxes (on the higher tax brackets) to make up the difference. But unlike something like the estate tax, singling out dividends for extra taxation doesn't make much sense, as the rich and the poor both are subjected, and has had the unintended side effect of largely ending the practice of dividends, and (IMHO) more than any other factor, caused the change of the stock market into a much more unstable and irrational entity.
All evidence points to the opposite. Lots of people in areas that got nothing on analog are getting perfect signals as soon as they switch to a digital receiver.
There are sure to be exceptions, especially where multipath interference is terribly heavy and you don't want to buy a new (better/directional) antenna, but the vast majority of people will get a perfect picture almost all the time, and very few drop-outs.
Digital COULD use less radio spectrum, but instead, they've given it just as much so it can broadcast a high definition stream.
The FCC could have dropped the 700MHz spectrum at any time (do you know of ANY markets where there are more than 50 OTA broadcast TV channels?). They just decided it would be easiest to do it now, since channel assignments are getting completely shuffled around anyhow.
The strict cut-off of out-of-band signal allowing adjacent channels with no chance of interference helps a little, as does the switch from "translators" to "boosters" but neither is really significantly relevant to the 700MHz auction.
You're probably using an old omnidirectional VHF antenna, while, particularly for digital broadcasts, you need a newer directional VHF antenna with the elements arranged in a series of V shapes.
It sucks to have to buy a new antenna for a single station, I know, but maybe it'll improve your reception with other VHF (VHF-high) digital TV stations as well.
I can spend $500 on a TV, am a big TV watcher. I must admit I pay for TV service, but I don't WANT TO. The analog signals in the area are just so weak as to make OTA TV currently unwatchable. The switchover to digital should change this, and I'll happily get rid of my largely wasted subscription.
Tell me, what do YOU watch on cable/satellite? I bet 90%+ of it is just syndicated content that was originally available OTA. Get a DVR and you won't need the endless reruns.
What do I watch on cable anymore? All the great channels went low budget and turned to crap. Discovery, TLC, National Geographic, SciFi... I watch none of them anymore. In fact, other than Daily Show/Colbert, and some History Channel shows, I watch nothing that isn't already available OTA.
Bullshit. Eating too many calories is almost the sole cause of obesity.
Unless you are choosing to watch TV instead of running a marathon, climb a mountain, etc., the calorie expenditure for normal activity makes a nominal difference to your weight.
I've seen the "2009 analog switchover" commercial on TV a couple dozen times already, and we're more than a year away, and the voucher program isn't even starting it's earliest stages for a couple more months.
Not true in the slightest.
The money will be coming from the 700MHz spectrum auction, and the profits will VASTLY exceed the cost of buying everyone a digital to analog converter box.
Not only does it not come out of people's taxes, but the extra "found money" will make it possible to LOWER people's taxes next year, or at least not require a tax increase for a couple more years.
I do, too. However, the truth is, interlacing is the only way to get full resolution on slow motion (1080p30), while getting smooth motion during fast scenes (540p60). With the same bandwidth, perhaps they could have made 1080p48 happen instead, but no displays at the time could really keep up.
There's a much more straight forward issue that bothers me about HDTV... Dolby bribing MIT to advise against including MP2 audio, even though it is quite competitive and patent-free, so every broadcaster is forced to license Dolby Digital/AC3/A52.
As are the emergency services, who will now have access to some of that spectrum that is no longer needed for communications.
Yes, the poor consumer has to pay 2-3 hours' salary for a converter box to get a perfect signal instead of the staticy mess of analog and interference, and additional channels. Shucks.
Backwards compatibility was the only reason a decade-plus switchover period was POSSIBLE. Analog TV broadcasts take 6MHz of spectrum EACH. It's utterly unreasonable to expect the government to keep hundreds of MHz of spectrum allocated for analog broadcasts, while at the same time, using a significant fraction of that range for digital broadcasts as well. It's an absurd notion.
It's not propaganda at all. You just happen to be in an area where the signal is strong enough, terrain does not include hills or lots of high rise buildings, and have a newer receiver which has been significantly improved over the initial offerings.
If you get a good enough signal that the analog version is even WATCHABLE without the picture being entirely static, you'll get a PERFECT PICTURE with DTV. It's only on the fringes, 40+ miles away that digital drop-outs will be a problem if you have a crappy antenna. I happen to know just how horrendous analog TV is in fringe signal areas, and I anxiously await the switchover.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atkinson_cycle&oldid=174159571#Vehicles_using_Atkinson-cycle_engines
http://www.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/biodiesel_from_algae.pdf
Imagine all you want, but running an ICE in it's ideal power band can't possibly give you the 20%+ higher efficiency needed to overcome the electrical conversion losses, especially since current hybrids already keep it in a very small range near the power band the vast majority of the time.
Nope. Your car sips fuel because it is very lightweight, has a far more efficient gas engine, and is able to collect and use otherwise wasted energy from braking. Hybrids rarely generate electricity directly from running the engine, because it's simply a waste. Though, due to their designs, can occasionally become necessary.
Numerous (far older) conventional vehicles have rivaled the fuel efficiency ratings of current hybrids, and with much more primitive materials, engine designs, and poor aerodynamics. I'd very much like to see the engine and frames of current hybrids spun off into conventional cars, without the added dead-weight and expense of the electrical system. Had this conversion before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=-1&mode=nested&commentsort=1&op=Change&sid=234837&cid=19145087&pid=19145087
My compliments on your superb aim.
I couldn't hit the side of a barn, let alone the side of a crater, millions of miles away.