Fine, fine... Not relevant. My mistake. However, everything else I said stands.
A very large number of relatively rich people in CA does drive up the median.
Averaging prices across large areas that include both both very big cities with expensive housing and less dense, less expensive areas does drive up the median.
Lot size (within reason) is not a strong factor in determining a home's price.
Back in the day we wouldn't get 5 years in prison for writing software to workaround intentional bugs added by the vendor to prop up their outdated and failing business model.
Reverse engineering and working around such methods is explicitly allowed by the DMCA under the interoperability clause.
There's no way they can make a case that you're doing it to circumvent their copyright restrictions.
Who didn't see this coming? Anyone trying to encode 640x480 h.264 videos for playback on the iPod/AppleTV certainly did, as they've left the format completely undocumented, require a stupid arbitrary UUID atom to be there or iTunes won't copy it to the player, and perhaps even worse, iTunes imposes other restrictions on the encoding options that hobble the quality, yet such files play fine on the iPod hardware, you are just forced to use a 3rd party app to copy such files over. http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2006-September/015930.html
IMHO, everyone should load up the RockBox firmware on their iPods, and tell Apple to screw themselves and their proprietary lockout nonsense, before they try to stop people from upgrading their firmware, too. As an added bonus, you are then able to use higher quality and open/patent-free audio formats (Ogg Vorbis/MPC Musepack).
Commercial companies do that all the time, which is FINE - that is the idea of BSD-style licenses, that anyone can take it and make changes without ever contributing anything back.
No on both counts.
First, companies DON'T do that all the time. Most find some way to contribute back, either some changes/fixes, other code, or donations.
Second, it is legal, but it isn't "fine." And I don't know of any company at all that has taken so much BSD code, and contributed nothing back, on anything close to the scale of eg. the Linux kernel, or a great many other Linux/GNU/GPL projects. Sun, Apple, etc. are heavy users of BSD code, but they have contributed code back, open sourced plenty of their own useful code, etc.
If they want people to contribute changes back, why didn't they put their code under the GPL instead of the BSD license in the first place?
BSDers want to give you the flexibility to use it however you want, or however you need to. The GPL obviously doesn't. They don't expect you to contribute all your changes back, but it's sort of on the honor system that if you can, you contribute SOMETHING back.
Saying "screw them, they should have chosen a different license" is legal, of course, but decidedly antisocial. I'd liken it to abusing the "Take-a-penny, Leave-a-penny" systems found at convenience stores... Always taking pennies that are there, even though you don't need them, and never putting any back...
Furthermore, when I was growing up, we lived in a medium sized $40,000 house on half an acre... Which just happened to be directly across the street (overlooking the tennis court) from Roy Rogers'/Dale Evan's multi-million dollar home. The ridiculously rich with extravagant homes may push the average price up, but that doesn't change the facts that low priced homes are out there. In fact it's pretty patently ridiculous to claim housing prices in CA are all hundreds of thousands of dollars, where there is such an unimaginably huge section of completely and totally land all across it. High prices demand scarcity, and there is sure no lack of land in CA... just in SF/LA.
But they make up a large fraction of the population, and a large fraction of the total dwellings.
Yes, well if you ONLY want to talk about SF/LA, then say so. Don't say "California" to refer to just those two areas, and more than that, definitely don't IGNORE the fact that I specifically excluded those areas, to talk about property values in the rest of the state.
So, you can commute to/from downtown LA during rush hour in less than 60 minutes, and you live on one acre, and it's only worth $150k?
Downtown L.A., during rush hour, in 60 minutes... No. But I would make it very easily under your "2 hour" mark.
And it doesn't sound like you've been to L.A. The "outskirts" of L.A. happen to include huge cities like San Bernardino and Riverside.
Guess what happens to your pee when you are dehydrated? It's get much more concentrated.
It's not just if you're dehydrated. The longer you hold your pee in, more concentrated, and the lower the water level. When low on water, I strongly recommend refraining from urinating as long as you reasonably can so that your body has the chance to extract as much usable water from as it can before exiting your body.
how much heat could you give off without allowing any of that water to evaporate?
Obviously none. However, I don't recall the "still suit" being able to supply you with water indefinitely, so perhaps it only allows a small amount of water to escape.
Pooling the sweat, allowing convection to concentrate the heat, then releasing a small amount of the hottest water, you could remove much more heat per volume of water than normal sweating would. I'm not about to do the math to figure out how much water is needed for every calorie of cooling, but it's probably still a lot. Perhaps coupling this with a very efficient heat exchanger (powered by your movement) could make this actually practical, at least in theory.
You could have some sort of switchable (on/of) insulation to allow the water exchange heat with the cool air at night, and insulate again when the temperature rises, to preserve that thermal mass.
You could have a refillable pocket with chemicals that have an exothermic reaction, and can keep you relatively cool for eg. a month before needing to be replaced....or perhaps they have extremely powerful, yet small and lightweight batteries to power a heat-pump cooling system.
You're absolutely correct, but I think there's also one thing you've missed.
With proprietary software, the companies making money with the code (or not) usually feel compelled to contribute SOMETHING back upstream, one way or another. Either patches to the code they're using, or perhaps releasing some other useful code under a BSD or other similar license.
With GPLers, there is a disconnect. It seems they believe that the GPL is "open enough" and very often make no effort to relicense or offer their code/patches for inclusion upstream. I guess they don't see any advantage to the BSD license, and think everyone should just switch to the GPL, then they can use the code, and everyone will be happy... A bit of evangelizing I suppose.
So, GPLers are taking huge amounts of BSD code, locking it up under an incompatible license, and all too often contributing nothing back. If a commercial company did this, BSDers would get at least a little bit upset. It's strictly allowed by the license, but definitely antisocial behavior. But in fact, the vast majority of companies find something to contribute back (code or money) while it seems GPLers very rarely do.
The GPL also has another unfortunate effect... It divides open source developers into separate groups, which can no longer collaborate. Proprietary code doesn't divert open source developers from working the original project. More restrictive open source license, however, do, and the popularity of Linux and the like means many may first hear about the GPLd derivative code, and not even know there is a BSD licensed version also.
So these issues have led to a lot of ill will between BSDers and GPLers, and there have been at least a few BSDers who specifically use the BSDv1 license, or add other clauses in their (otherwise) BSD license to make it GPL incompatible. Of course, that's far from an ideal solution, as the code can't be used in GPL software at all.
No they haven't AFAIK. They released the driver under the GPL, but didn't provide documentation otherwise, which is REALLY what people want. Open sourcing the code is much, much better than binary-only drivers, but still makes it pretty difficult to figure out how the hardware actually works.
[...] leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content.
Umm, what?
Unless I'm mistaken, NBC is that TV channel which broadcasts its megawatt TV signal through my head 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just about everywhere across the entire country.
You know something...? It's perfectly legal to capture a signal being broadcast to you, and do just about anything with it.
So, for the price of a simple $30 TV capture card, an hour plugging it in, and installing the software, you too can record any of NBC's shows, in a format that can be played by Quicktime on most any Mac, or fed to iTunes and converted for use on your iPod. And it's FREEEE!
Have you ever actually looked at housing prices anywhere in California?
I've bought and sold two homes within the past 2 years. You, however, seem to know nothing of housing prices, outside of LA/SF.
if you can find any house for less than $200k you're lucky,
That's complete nonsense. Median price means very little. You can have half the houses selling for $50,000, and the other half selling for $500,000, and the median price will be apparently high, but the $50,000 homes still exist. With a large number of relatively rich people in California, that's very much the case.
And even more, the median housing prices are being averaged out over such huge counties, with both smaller and very large cities included, heavily biases the numbers towards the large cities with high prices. eg. See San Bernardino county, with ridiculously high housing prices in Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Ontario, etc. and an extremely large number of people and homes in that area, despite homes in most the rest of the county being extremely inexpensive.
and if you want land with that it is going to be considerably more
That's also nonsense. This isn't LA/SF. Once you get outside the biggest cities, you practically can't buy a house without 1/4 acre or so, and most have significantly more. Maybe right on Main St. houses won't have much land, but everywhere else, it's very cheap.
You need to actually go look at housing prices before making idiotic assertions. It's clear you've lived in SF/LA your entire life (or perhaps don't live in the state at all).
If you are within two hours of either of those places, get prepared to pay a lot more than that for "a big house and an acre or perhaps two".
First of all, the point was that those places make up a tiny fraction of California, and most places, even large cities, aren't remotely as bad (nor within 2 hours drive).
However, I am well within a 1 hour drive of much of Los Angeles, and just recently sold my previous house on a 1 acre lot for $150,000, just before the housing bubble burst. It's very, very easy to find homes in the area for much less.
I'd like to see how people that pay tax as if their property was worth $200K would like to live in a place in California that _actually_ is worth $200K. See how much they would object to some rich dudes parking a plane somewhere if that also meant that finally electricity would come to town.
That's an unbelievably ridiculous generalization. Anywhere outside of the few largest cities (eg. the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco area), and 200K will easily buy you a big house and an acre or perhaps two. This isn't in the middle of nowhere (with no electricity), this is most every city in the state of California with the noted exceptions.
Any scheme where you can go bankrupt isn't really earning your money, so much as it is gambling. Of course that does have the potential to make you very wealthy, very quickly, but that isn't the standard model of working your way to the top.
Discovery Channel turned to crap many years ago. It had spectacular content, all the time, 10 years ago. From then until now, it's been a steep fall.
The same happened to TLC. It wasn't nearly as good as Discovery, but had plenty of good content. It turned into the "Trading Spaces" channel, some kind of Discovery network answer to Lifetime/Oxygen, practically over-night.
National Geographic is there, right now... Over the past year, it has transitioned from a great channel, to non-stop animal training and mindless documentaries about bridge building. Their attempt to relegate their previous audience to a single "Sci/Tech" night per week seemed incredibly short-sighted and condescending, and in fact appears to have been short-lived, as the "Sci/Tech" content has quickly become crap of the highest order, with hour after hour of nothing but floating through the galaxy, and mind-numbing narration of elementary-school level facts and figures about it. It's so very sad, NatlGeo was just starting to turn from a good into a really great channel before hour after hour of the dog trainer signaled the beginning of the end.
I can't find any redeeming qualities in any of the shows CBS/Fox/ABC has regularly, and extremely little on NBC.
PBS is vast majority of what I watch. A sad statement about the quality of current programming, as The Discovery Channel was once far, far better than PBS, and PBS really hasn't improved much if at all.
In fact I entirely despise PBS' most of PBS' schedule, and the mentality behind it. They have a terrible tenancy of constant British programming, as if there's something superior to random shows/movies if the actors happen to have English accents. Hell, how about some Australian/Canadian/Irish shows and films for a change? And kids shows are desirable, certainly, but literally 11+ hours a day dedicated entirely to preschoolers seems quite excessive, and also leaves out a huge age range. "Classic Arts" seems a waste of time that they air only to increase the percentage of non-commercial programming to claim that (despite their non-stop pledge drives) they have more content per hour than commercial channels (negligibly close, really), and really just prevents them from going off the air entirely.
MTV hasn't shown a music video (or anything that actually even remotely classifies as "music", for that matter) since the early 1990s;
I've had cable since before then. I do not recall quality ever significantly improving (or degrading for that matter) over that time-frame. So I fail to see where your theory of quality being "inversely proportional to the quality of the actual signal" comes from. I also don't see how it relates to any of the channels you've mentioned, since none of those content changes seems to coincide with a change in resolution or other video quality improvements.
Yours just seems to be a rant that TV networks you used-to like have changed for the worse, and you refuse to watch other ones that you just might like.
A complete switch to digital will likely cause the TV stations to permanently lose a lot of viewers.
Quite the opposite. Higher quality TV is likely to entice much higher viewership than seen currently.
Quality matters. That's the reason there are many millions of people paying just to receive their local channels via cable or satellite. People who didn't want to pay for cable, and had poor signal quality, will now find OTA not only watchable, but better than anything they've seen before. It also means more content, as sub-channels are used instead of dedicating the full bandwidth to a single HD stream.
It'll also mean a lot more channels on cable, perhaps being able to surpass satellite in available content, with better quality, OnDemand, and without the limitations.
The problem isn't the switch to digital. The problem is the technophobes and curmudgeons crying, yelling and screaming that they aren't willing to try anything else, and resist change at every turn.
Even a singleeconomy ticket on a transatlantic flight uses about a ton of CO2, which is far far more than you should be using all year for all your needs.
Right... People shouldn't be allowed to travel. No.
Your alternative option is what? Row a canoe across? If not for airplanes, expect people to travel on big, heavy, inefficient cruise ships that are sure to pollute even more.
Once the effects of high altitute emmission of the CO2 is taken into effect, the airline industry contributes 13% of our emmissions here in the U.K.
And how much of that is greenhouse effect is canceled out by the cooling effect of contrails?
Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple.
That's bull. Sea levels have risen before, and significant numbers of people didn't die from it. There's no reason to believe slightly faster rise will be any different.
Nobody works their way to becoming multi-billionaires... There's absolutely nothing one man could do that could possibly be worth that kind of compensation.
They, like many others, hit the stock-market lottery. There's enough stupid people that will buy stocks for millions of times what they're actually worth, that early buyers can become billionaires just because they happen to be there.
No amount of (legal) work can guarantee you that level of riches. You can only hope to be in the right place, at the right time. You'd do just as well to buy a $1 "Power-Ball" lottery ticket as to invest many thousands of dollars (of cash, or your time/service) in some start-up, hopping it'll be the next ridiculously overhyped and unbelievably overpriced stock-market darling.
it's not like the American dream is dead, it's the American dreamer that's dead.
That's crap. There are more American entrepreneurs making themselves rich right now than there ever have been before. Few or none are naive enough to believe they can work enough to make themselves billionaires on merit.
We don't? It was grown for something like 150 years in the US, and is still grown widely outside this country. How could there possibly be anything we don't know about hemp already?
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Fine, fine... Not relevant. My mistake. However, everything else I said stands.
A very large number of relatively rich people in CA does drive up the median.
Averaging prices across large areas that include both both very big cities with expensive housing and less dense, less expensive areas does drive up the median.
Lot size (within reason) is not a strong factor in determining a home's price.
etc. etc.
Reverse engineering and working around such methods is explicitly allowed by the DMCA under the interoperability clause.
There's no way they can make a case that you're doing it to circumvent their copyright restrictions.
Who didn't see this coming? Anyone trying to encode 640x480 h.264 videos for playback on the iPod/AppleTV certainly did, as they've left the format completely undocumented, require a stupid arbitrary UUID atom to be there or iTunes won't copy it to the player, and perhaps even worse, iTunes imposes other restrictions on the encoding options that hobble the quality, yet such files play fine on the iPod hardware, you are just forced to use a 3rd party app to copy such files over.
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2006-September/015930.html
IMHO, everyone should load up the RockBox firmware on their iPods, and tell Apple to screw themselves and their proprietary lockout nonsense, before they try to stop people from upgrading their firmware, too. As an added bonus, you are then able to use higher quality and open/patent-free audio formats (Ogg Vorbis/MPC Musepack).
No on both counts.
First, companies DON'T do that all the time. Most find some way to contribute back, either some changes/fixes, other code, or donations.
Second, it is legal, but it isn't "fine." And I don't know of any company at all that has taken so much BSD code, and contributed nothing back, on anything close to the scale of eg. the Linux kernel, or a great many other Linux/GNU/GPL projects. Sun, Apple, etc. are heavy users of BSD code, but they have contributed code back, open sourced plenty of their own useful code, etc.
BSDers want to give you the flexibility to use it however you want, or however you need to. The GPL obviously doesn't. They don't expect you to contribute all your changes back, but it's sort of on the honor system that if you can, you contribute SOMETHING back.
Saying "screw them, they should have chosen a different license" is legal, of course, but decidedly antisocial. I'd liken it to abusing the "Take-a-penny, Leave-a-penny" systems found at convenience stores... Always taking pennies that are there, even though you don't need them, and never putting any back...
Oops:
totally EMPTY land all across it.
Already explained this point in detail:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=296423&cid=20597657
Furthermore, when I was growing up, we lived in a medium sized $40,000 house on half an acre... Which just happened to be directly across the street (overlooking the tennis court) from Roy Rogers'/Dale Evan's multi-million dollar home. The ridiculously rich with extravagant homes may push the average price up, but that doesn't change the facts that low priced homes are out there. In fact it's pretty patently ridiculous to claim housing prices in CA are all hundreds of thousands of dollars, where there is such an unimaginably huge section of completely and totally land all across it. High prices demand scarcity, and there is sure no lack of land in CA... just in SF/LA.
Yes, well if you ONLY want to talk about SF/LA, then say so. Don't say "California" to refer to just those two areas, and more than that, definitely don't IGNORE the fact that I specifically excluded those areas, to talk about property values in the rest of the state.
Downtown L.A., during rush hour, in 60 minutes... No. But I would make it very easily under your "2 hour" mark.
And it doesn't sound like you've been to L.A. The "outskirts" of L.A. happen to include huge cities like San Bernardino and Riverside.
It's not just if you're dehydrated. The longer you hold your pee in, more concentrated, and the lower the water level. When low on water, I strongly recommend refraining from urinating as long as you reasonably can so that your body has the chance to extract as much usable water from as it can before exiting your body.
Obviously none. However, I don't recall the "still suit" being able to supply you with water indefinitely, so perhaps it only allows a small amount of water to escape.
Pooling the sweat, allowing convection to concentrate the heat, then releasing a small amount of the hottest water, you could remove much more heat per volume of water than normal sweating would. I'm not about to do the math to figure out how much water is needed for every calorie of cooling, but it's probably still a lot. Perhaps coupling this with a very efficient heat exchanger (powered by your movement) could make this actually practical, at least in theory.
You could have some sort of switchable (on/of) insulation to allow the water exchange heat with the cool air at night, and insulate again when the temperature rises, to preserve that thermal mass.
You could have a refillable pocket with chemicals that have an exothermic reaction, and can keep you relatively cool for eg. a month before needing to be replaced.
You're absolutely correct, but I think there's also one thing you've missed.
With proprietary software, the companies making money with the code (or not) usually feel compelled to contribute SOMETHING back upstream, one way or another. Either patches to the code they're using, or perhaps releasing some other useful code under a BSD or other similar license.
With GPLers, there is a disconnect. It seems they believe that the GPL is "open enough" and very often make no effort to relicense or offer their code/patches for inclusion upstream. I guess they don't see any advantage to the BSD license, and think everyone should just switch to the GPL, then they can use the code, and everyone will be happy... A bit of evangelizing I suppose.
So, GPLers are taking huge amounts of BSD code, locking it up under an incompatible license, and all too often contributing nothing back. If a commercial company did this, BSDers would get at least a little bit upset. It's strictly allowed by the license, but definitely antisocial behavior. But in fact, the vast majority of companies find something to contribute back (code or money) while it seems GPLers very rarely do.
The GPL also has another unfortunate effect... It divides open source developers into separate groups, which can no longer collaborate. Proprietary code doesn't divert open source developers from working the original project. More restrictive open source license, however, do, and the popularity of Linux and the like means many may first hear about the GPLd derivative code, and not even know there is a BSD licensed version also.
So these issues have led to a lot of ill will between BSDers and GPLers, and there have been at least a few BSDers who specifically use the BSDv1 license, or add other clauses in their (otherwise) BSD license to make it GPL incompatible. Of course, that's far from an ideal solution, as the code can't be used in GPL software at all.
No they haven't AFAIK. They released the driver under the GPL, but didn't provide documentation otherwise, which is REALLY what people want. Open sourcing the code is much, much better than binary-only drivers, but still makes it pretty difficult to figure out how the hardware actually works.
Umm, what?
Unless I'm mistaken, NBC is that TV channel which broadcasts its megawatt TV signal through my head 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just about everywhere across the entire country.
You know something...? It's perfectly legal to capture a signal being broadcast to you, and do just about anything with it.
So, for the price of a simple $30 TV capture card, an hour plugging it in, and installing the software, you too can record any of NBC's shows, in a format that can be played by Quicktime on most any Mac, or fed to iTunes and converted for use on your iPod. And it's FREEEE!
I've bought and sold two homes within the past 2 years. You, however, seem to know nothing of housing prices, outside of LA/SF.
That's complete nonsense. Median price means very little. You can have half the houses selling for $50,000, and the other half selling for $500,000, and the median price will be apparently high, but the $50,000 homes still exist. With a large number of relatively rich people in California, that's very much the case.
And even more, the median housing prices are being averaged out over such huge counties, with both smaller and very large cities included, heavily biases the numbers towards the large cities with high prices. eg. See San Bernardino county, with ridiculously high housing prices in Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Ontario, etc. and an extremely large number of people and homes in that area, despite homes in most the rest of the county being extremely inexpensive.
That's also nonsense. This isn't LA/SF. Once you get outside the biggest cities, you practically can't buy a house without 1/4 acre or so, and most have significantly more. Maybe right on Main St. houses won't have much land, but everywhere else, it's very cheap.
You need to actually go look at housing prices before making idiotic assertions. It's clear you've lived in SF/LA your entire life (or perhaps don't live in the state at all).
First of all, the point was that those places make up a tiny fraction of California, and most places, even large cities, aren't remotely as bad (nor within 2 hours drive).
However, I am well within a 1 hour drive of much of Los Angeles, and just recently sold my previous house on a 1 acre lot for $150,000, just before the housing bubble burst. It's very, very easy to find homes in the area for much less.
That's an unbelievably ridiculous generalization. Anywhere outside of the few largest cities (eg. the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco area), and 200K will easily buy you a big house and an acre or perhaps two. This isn't in the middle of nowhere (with no electricity), this is most every city in the state of California with the noted exceptions.
Any scheme where you can go bankrupt isn't really earning your money, so much as it is gambling. Of course that does have the potential to make you very wealthy, very quickly, but that isn't the standard model of working your way to the top.
No they won't. With few exceptions, they will move, to higher ground.
People that haven't been living behind a levy, certainly won't want to see one going up in front of them, destroying their view, and the beach.
Discovery Channel turned to crap many years ago. It had spectacular content, all the time, 10 years ago. From then until now, it's been a steep fall.
The same happened to TLC. It wasn't nearly as good as Discovery, but had plenty of good content. It turned into the "Trading Spaces" channel, some kind of Discovery network answer to Lifetime/Oxygen, practically over-night.
National Geographic is there, right now... Over the past year, it has transitioned from a great channel, to non-stop animal training and mindless documentaries about bridge building. Their attempt to relegate their previous audience to a single "Sci/Tech" night per week seemed incredibly short-sighted and condescending, and in fact appears to have been short-lived, as the "Sci/Tech" content has quickly become crap of the highest order, with hour after hour of nothing but floating through the galaxy, and mind-numbing narration of elementary-school level facts and figures about it. It's so very sad, NatlGeo was just starting to turn from a good into a really great channel before hour after hour of the dog trainer signaled the beginning of the end.
I can't find any redeeming qualities in any of the shows CBS/Fox/ABC has regularly, and extremely little on NBC.
PBS is vast majority of what I watch. A sad statement about the quality of current programming, as The Discovery Channel was once far, far better than PBS, and PBS really hasn't improved much if at all.
In fact I entirely despise PBS' most of PBS' schedule, and the mentality behind it. They have a terrible tenancy of constant British programming, as if there's something superior to random shows/movies if the actors happen to have English accents. Hell, how about some Australian/Canadian/Irish shows and films for a change? And kids shows are desirable, certainly, but literally 11+ hours a day dedicated entirely to preschoolers seems quite excessive, and also leaves out a huge age range. "Classic Arts" seems a waste of time that they air only to increase the percentage of non-commercial programming to claim that (despite their non-stop pledge drives) they have more content per hour than commercial channels (negligibly close, really), and really just prevents them from going off the air entirely.
Congratulations on reading my rant this far...
I've had cable since before then. I do not recall quality ever significantly improving (or degrading for that matter) over that time-frame. So I fail to see where your theory of quality being "inversely proportional to the quality of the actual signal" comes from. I also don't see how it relates to any of the channels you've mentioned, since none of those content changes seems to coincide with a change in resolution or other video quality improvements.
Yours just seems to be a rant that TV networks you used-to like have changed for the worse, and you refuse to watch other ones that you just might like.
Quite the opposite. Higher quality TV is likely to entice much higher viewership than seen currently.
Quality matters. That's the reason there are many millions of people paying just to receive their local channels via cable or satellite. People who didn't want to pay for cable, and had poor signal quality, will now find OTA not only watchable, but better than anything they've seen before. It also means more content, as sub-channels are used instead of dedicating the full bandwidth to a single HD stream.
It'll also mean a lot more channels on cable, perhaps being able to surpass satellite in available content, with better quality, OnDemand, and without the limitations.
The problem isn't the switch to digital. The problem is the technophobes and curmudgeons crying, yelling and screaming that they aren't willing to try anything else, and resist change at every turn.
Right... People shouldn't be allowed to travel. No.
Your alternative option is what? Row a canoe across? If not for airplanes, expect people to travel on big, heavy, inefficient cruise ships that are sure to pollute even more.
And how much of that is greenhouse effect is canceled out by the cooling effect of contrails?
That's bull. Sea levels have risen before, and significant numbers of people didn't die from it. There's no reason to believe slightly faster rise will be any different.
Nobody works their way to becoming multi-billionaires... There's absolutely nothing one man could do that could possibly be worth that kind of compensation.
They, like many others, hit the stock-market lottery. There's enough stupid people that will buy stocks for millions of times what they're actually worth, that early buyers can become billionaires just because they happen to be there.
No amount of (legal) work can guarantee you that level of riches. You can only hope to be in the right place, at the right time. You'd do just as well to buy a $1 "Power-Ball" lottery ticket as to invest many thousands of dollars (of cash, or your time/service) in some start-up, hopping it'll be the next ridiculously overhyped and unbelievably overpriced stock-market darling.
That's crap. There are more American entrepreneurs making themselves rich right now than there ever have been before. Few or none are naive enough to believe they can work enough to make themselves billionaires on merit.
Yes I can. A simple $20 experiment will do it. The difference is HUGE.
You apparently don't know what a loss leader is.
Google search is very directly ad supported. How do you propose to do that with downloaded (offline) XML TV listing and apps that use it, like MythTV?
I'll ignore the rest of your off-topic rant.
We don't? It was grown for something like 150 years in the US, and is still grown widely outside this country. How could there possibly be anything we don't know about hemp already?