For a majority of consumers, the difference between 1080i and 1080p will be even less noticable than the jump from 480i/p to 1080i.
Actually, it'll be damn-near nonexistant. Most 1080p HDTVs have a built-in 3:2 pulldown reversal filter, meaning they'll convert that 1080i picture back into fully progressive 24FPS (minus an occasional artifact)
Format Wars Don't Sell Players Agreed. This curse hit SACD and DVD-Audio as few years ago.
No. Wrong. SACD and DVD-Audio both ran into the upper-limits of what the human ear is capable of. Most people very literally can't hear the difference between 44.1KHz PCM (CDs) and something better/higher.
Format wars actually DO sell players... Competition is very healty. In this case, Toshiba seems to be forcing Sony to significantly lower their prices (and delay release until they could do that). Of course that has the effect of convincing Toshiba they need to lower their prices even further, and so on. The winner of the format war can be decided very quickly, by who is going to have the significantly cheaper discs/movies.
I'd say the competition makes it much, much more likely that one of them will eventually take over the market, since neither can be arrogant.
It's no understatement to say the general public is ignorant and moronic therefore creating a supply of higher resolution video where there is no demand garauntees failure.
Just because their priorities are not torwards pristine, photorealistic output, as you insist upon, doesn't mean they won't be impressed by highdef. Certainly, the desire of people wanting higher contrast and saturation may well be eliminated by higher definition video, which will be far sharper.
DVD production will be around for a long time because the discs are easy to stamp out and the market is saturated with players. [...] so as long as a cheaper alternative exists for the same title, people may choose to forego a slight imporvement of picture on their television for a nearly 50% cost savings. Plus, what person would honestly spend $30 to see most of the crap Hollywood releases these days?
You could have said the same things about VHS tapes when DVDs were first comming out, as well.
Joe Public may not see the difference on his budget HDTV set
Bullshit. The different in resolution is dramatic, and even the cheapest HD sets will show it. They wouldn't allow companies to call it an HDTV if it couldn't display an HD picture. In other words, if you aren't blind, you'll see the difference.
Actually, for all intents and purposes 720p looks better than craptacular 1080i
Generally not true. 720p looks better on 60fps high-motion material like live sports, and doesn't have the temporal/spacial aliasing of an interlaced format. However, for film, which is only 24FPS, no doubt the higher res of 1080 will be a dramatic improvement, while the interlacing will be a very minor drawback.
And, of course, if you have a 1080p set, 3:2 pulldown reversal and motion-adaptive deinterlacers can give you near-progressive video out of a 1080i video.
A regular DVD upconverted to 1080i or 720p on an HDTV looks really good to me,
-1 Banal.
Obviously DVDs look good... They don't look ANYWHERE near as good as highdef, but they look "good".
and it doesn't cost as much as you think since these special DVD players have come down in price.
They're still not cheap, and a $500 HDDVD player can do the job just fine.
Plus you get to keep your DVD collection.
As opposed to HD-DVD and Blu-ray, where purchasing either player will make your current DVD collection spontaneously explode.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray both have full backwards compatibility. You can keep your DVDs forever, and NEVER have to upgrade them, unless you're a video fanatic, and really WANT the highdef version.
So bank robbery is good for their security and should be encouraged?
This isn't the equivalent of bank robbery (nobody gets potentially harmed, and no real damage done). Rather, a far better example would be the instances of journalists repeatedly and successfully smuggling weapons through TSA security, onto commercial flights. Absolutely no real harm is done by it, and success leads to very important good things (increasing security where it is lacking).
The more they will find security holes, and make the system safer against the real threat, the truely malicious professionals. Of course, the analogy isn't perfect, but it's far closer than bank robbery and murder.
What is the special magic about technology that makes people give opposite answers to "Is X sensible?" and "Is X sensible using a computer?" for just about all values of X?
Probably because of people like you... People who can't relate the computer world to the proper real-world equivalents, and therefore have a really warped and twisted misunderstanding of the computer world.
I see no problem with him attempting to advance his society.
Obviously it's his money, and he can do with it whatever he pleases, but I can see a huge number of things "wrong" with "donating" it to organizations that not only don't need it, but are already quite wealthy. Would you see anything "wrong" if he donated the money to Microsoft? It's an order of magnitude different, but it's the same idea as donating money to almost any US companies.
but laser eye surgery absolutely improves the quality of life. What's wrong with that? And if we can create anything more efficiently, Tivos, automobiles, aircraft, refrigerators, etc, why would that be a bad thing?
That would be a very "bad thing" because the standard of living in the US is very high, and donations are not needed to advance the agenda of unnecessary consumerism.
The money is needed infinitely more in those nations with a very, very low standard of living. Those kinds of people who couldn't dream of affording our high-tech gadgets, surgery that improves eyesight, and unnecessary "quality of life" drugs.
ECS isn't exactly the best, but they also aren't the worst. What about companies like ASUS, or companies at the other side of the spectrum like PCCHIPS?
I hate multi-page articles as much as anybody, but damn. In the SECOND SENTENCE it says in no uncertain terms:
After merging with PC Chips, ECS has recently started pushing into the retail market;
I wonder if the DSL project can be forked to create a "Damn small server" project, so anyone can set it up on an old machine, enable some services, hide it in a corner, and use SSH/VNC to administer it.
Umm, that's pretty much what FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD are for. With a minimal install, all of them come in at less than 150MB, and that's with full-fledged versions of all the software, not minimally stripped versions.
Now, besides that, there have been innumerable projects to make Flash-based ultra-tiny distros out of those 3 as well. Projects like emBSD (which is about 4+ years out of date).
The only up-to-date OpenBSD minidistro I've been able to find is UnnamedBSD
I think the parent is wrong about this becomming a new military industrial complex, through. You can justify regularly wasting billions of dollars when it's for "defense", but you just simply can't when it's for... well... absolutely anything else. Particularly "exploration".
The People (tm) would vote for fuel subsidies and tax cuts. Just like they do every time they can.
Where and when has this happened? Every time "The People" vote directly around here, they approve of some new bond measure for new schools, expanding road networks, etc., etc. I don't see people strictly voting down bond measures, nor do I see any other form of "tax cuts" or "fuel subsidies" getting voted for.
In other words, don't confuse "politicians" with "The People".
What I mean is, the most highest purpose of a man's life is his family, to care for them and to protect them, with body and soul, and that also includes financial matters.
Handing your children so much money that they can live lavishly without ever having to do a day of work, is likely BAD for them.
It's one thing to give your children a decent ammount of money to help them, it's completely different to give them so much they never need to learn about responsibility, of any kind.
With that amount of money I think a LOT of groudbreaking research could take place in the medical fields, the tech sector, and even in the aerospace industry. Also reinvesting it in American business/education can give us a heads up over the up and coming Chinese.
Yes, all charity should go to the US... More free money for companies developing drugs for high-profit, upper-class disorders (viagra). More free money for further developing laser eye surgery. More free money torwards developing cheaper Tivos. Throwing more money at the US public school system.
Our military spending prevented 9/11 from happening.
Nice little straw man.
However, you may in fact, have been correct, if not for the fact that the military budget for US Air Defense was drastically cut after the fall of the USSR, and almost completely dismantled.
Just because it's not always spent in the best way possible, it doesn't even remotely follow that we shouldn't even try.
And boy, did we whip bin Laden's ass for even thinking about it!
The Taliban and Al Qaeda: yes. Bin Laden: not yet.
China could crash our economy into a zillion little shards.
Gee, at least you're not overstating things...
At worst, China could cause some painful inflation, that would hurt them far more than it would us.
Bush and Cheney have given them that power over us.
Complete straw man, again. The parent didn't say anything about Bush, let alone anything positive. It was a response to the question of drastically cutting the military budget down to a fraction of what it currently is (with nothing to back it up, I might add).
Even aside from their lackluster video quality inherent in high bandwidth MPEG2,
This is just patently untrue. VC-1 and H.264 don't magically add details you can't see in MPEG-2, or anything of the sort. MPEG-2 will look just as good as newer codecs, as long as you increase the bitrate to compensate. And with 25GB discs, you've got enough space for much-better-than-broadcast-HDTV MPEG-2 video.
If there's an issue, I suspect it's the audio codec. The Blu-ray case I saw advertised uncompressed multi-channel PCM audio, which would waste a great deal of space, for no advantage over losslessly compressed audio. Plus they're throwing in every other audio track they can find, high-bitrate DTS encoded, every foreign language track they have, in as many channels as possible, etc.
The rest of your complaints simply seem to be an issue of time. HD-DVD is further along than Blu-ray, and so is slightly ahead at introduction time (though Blu-ray has far more potential than HD-DVD).
The technology hardly worries me, though. They're both perfectly adequate for what they do, and fairly homogenous. The only question is: who's discs will be cheaper? Whoever gets down to $15 first may well take over, if the other format doesn't match their move immediately.
I was completely underwhelmed and didn't even realize I was watching an HD version of the film until the salesman told me.
If that's true (I don't believe it is) then you are quite simply blind... A problem the rest of the popluation doesn't have, so stop the anti-HD trolling already. And mods should stop giving these idiots points.
Take the gassed villages' word for it. Or take the UN inspectors' word for it, since they saw, and in some cases partly demolished enormous stockpiles. Or, you could consider the 500 sarin and mustard gas shells recently disclosed.
Nice straw man. You're only about 15 years off there. Chemical weapon don't have a long shelf-life, and it's been incontrovertably proven that Hussein didn't continue to produce it after the first Gulf War. All the stuff they've found has been far too old to be considered a weapon... You wouldn't want to eat it, but it's still less dangerous than, say, asbestos.
The evidence the Bush administration used to "prove" their case was being disproven at every corner, by simple fact-checking (aluminum centerfuges too small for nuclear development, claims being made by well-know liars, etc.). The UN inspectors allowed in shortly before the US invasion didn't find anything at all, even when following the administration's "intelligence" directions on where they should be. etc.
Even the administration has given up claiming Iraq had any WMDs, and stated so clearly. They would like, more than anyone, to find ANYTHING that they could point to for justification, or propose ANY hypothesis for why they couldn't find them. They don't do that, because they'd be torn to shreds. The evidence not only isn't there, but it overwhelmingly points to the opposite conclusion.
I don't get how the US seems to be the great liberator of WW2.
And I don't see why people who know next to nothing about history, are so very vocal about their ignorant views of it.
How is it that a country that only shows up in the last year get to take all the credit??
Besides the extensive ammount of ground American troops captured, there's the industrial angle. Supplies for Britan and Russia were largely comming from the US. That's primarily why Japan and Germany conspired to attack the US. The US immediately became a manufacturing giant that no other country could ever hope to match.
Britan, despite years of war, didn't have a single victory to speak of until the US joined, and started fighting along with them. Russia was being absolutely slaughtered. How could anyone believe this would just have magically turned around, if the US had not gotten involved?
And it definately wasn't anywhere near the "last year" of the war. Though, I suppose it could have been (with the opposite outcome), if not for the US.
That's because you're not considering the subject. TV standards can't be changed easily, which means TVs stay static for a very long time. NTSC TV hasn't changed in the past ~60 years.
Now, the technology driving them is transparently upgraded through the years, but that doesn't stop older TVs from working, and it doesn't change the standard.
In addition, HDTV has the same thing going for it that CDs do. HDTV's maximum resolution is so high, people won't hardly be able to notice any additional increase in resolution, unless it's on an extremely large screen (which most people don't buy for their homes).
So please, look at it from the other direction. Try and figure out any reason why the HDTV standard would be replaced or upgraded in the next 50 years.
You don't fail to see me (sic) point, you refuse to acknowledge it.
Wrong again.
I pointed out that LG isn't considered "crappy".
Completely irrelevant to the point at hand. I said "crappy" not to suggest LG is, just to make a point about a company's responsibility when chosing a supplier.
Seemingly by your reasoning that Apple is 100% responsible LG gets to go on their merry way and do as they see fit,
I NEVER said the supplier is not responsible. That's something you just pulled out of the air.
I'm dropping this conversation, as you're just turning into a completely nonsensical rant. Feel free to have the last word, if it makes you feel better.
The only thing we've really learned is that it's stupid to maintain your own personal video library,
Not at all. VHS tapes aren't compatible with DVD players, however, Blu-ray and HD-DVD players are fully compatible with the DVD collection you already own.
In addition, these high-def formats are fundamentally different:
They are being introduced at the very start of a new TV technology (unlike DVDs, which were released at the END of NTSC TVs).
They provide the full resolution these new TVs can display (unlike VHS)
It's perfectly reasonable to assume HDTV will be the standard for the next 50+ years. Only 3D TV could require something new, and that's nowhere near the horizon.
Now that our home media has switched to digital (computer) standards, it's perfectly reasonable to assume backwards compatibility for many, many generations of formats to come.
There's absolutely no reason to re-buy your DVD library, thanks to backwards compatibility.
These technologies are just being introduced. Maybe they won't catch-on for a few years.
You're acting like you have to throw away all your DVDs RIGHT NOW.
Dual layer DVD's have been out for a couple years now and the media/still/ costs about $2 a disc
Yes, but dual-layer DVDs have been the single exception, quite possibly because people haven't yet felt the desire to upgrade from their single-layer DVD burners.
CDs and single-layer DVDs have dropped through the floor very quickly, and I can't see any reason why single-layer Blu-ray discs won't do the same.
I fail to see your point. Whether "crappy" or not, by any arbitrary standards, Apple is still 100% responsible for picking them, for setting the standards, etc. and deserves whatever PR they get over being associated with them.
There's no way a cable company will want their DSTB population externally reachable. As such, the IP address shortage is a non-issue for them.
Nonsense. Any stateful firewall can prevent anyone from connecting to them, even though they have a public address.
That may, however, make it far more flexible in how Comcast can address the boxes. They can have an office anywhere in the world, which can have any IP address, and can still connect to the VPN and easily access anything they want. No need to try and make your 10.x.x.x network work with their 10.x.x.x network.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it'll be damn-near nonexistant. Most 1080p HDTVs have a built-in 3:2 pulldown reversal filter, meaning they'll convert that 1080i picture back into fully progressive 24FPS (minus an occasional artifact)
No. Wrong. SACD and DVD-Audio both ran into the upper-limits of what the human ear is capable of. Most people very literally can't hear the difference between 44.1KHz PCM (CDs) and something better/higher.
Format wars actually DO sell players... Competition is very healty. In this case, Toshiba seems to be forcing Sony to significantly lower their prices (and delay release until they could do that). Of course that has the effect of convincing Toshiba they need to lower their prices even further, and so on. The winner of the format war can be decided very quickly, by who is going to have the significantly cheaper discs/movies.
I'd say the competition makes it much, much more likely that one of them will eventually take over the market, since neither can be arrogant.
Just because their priorities are not torwards pristine, photorealistic output, as you insist upon, doesn't mean they won't be impressed by highdef. Certainly, the desire of people wanting higher contrast and saturation may well be eliminated by higher definition video, which will be far sharper.
You could have said the same things about VHS tapes when DVDs were first comming out, as well.
Bullshit. The different in resolution is dramatic, and even the cheapest HD sets will show it. They wouldn't allow companies to call it an HDTV if it couldn't display an HD picture. In other words, if you aren't blind, you'll see the difference.
Generally not true. 720p looks better on 60fps high-motion material like live sports, and doesn't have the temporal/spacial aliasing of an interlaced format. However, for film, which is only 24FPS, no doubt the higher res of 1080 will be a dramatic improvement, while the interlacing will be a very minor drawback.
And, of course, if you have a 1080p set, 3:2 pulldown reversal and motion-adaptive deinterlacers can give you near-progressive video out of a 1080i video.
-1 Banal.
Obviously DVDs look good... They don't look ANYWHERE near as good as highdef, but they look "good".
They're still not cheap, and a $500 HDDVD player can do the job just fine.
As opposed to HD-DVD and Blu-ray, where purchasing either player will make your current DVD collection spontaneously explode.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray both have full backwards compatibility. You can keep your DVDs forever, and NEVER have to upgrade them, unless you're a video fanatic, and really WANT the highdef version.
This isn't the equivalent of bank robbery (nobody gets potentially harmed, and no real damage done). Rather, a far better example would be the instances of journalists repeatedly and successfully smuggling weapons through TSA security, onto commercial flights. Absolutely no real harm is done by it, and success leads to very important good things (increasing security where it is lacking).
The more they will find security holes, and make the system safer against the real threat, the truely malicious professionals. Of course, the analogy isn't perfect, but it's far closer than bank robbery and murder.
Probably because of people like you... People who can't relate the computer world to the proper real-world equivalents, and therefore have a really warped and twisted misunderstanding of the computer world.
Obviously it's his money, and he can do with it whatever he pleases, but I can see a huge number of things "wrong" with "donating" it to organizations that not only don't need it, but are already quite wealthy. Would you see anything "wrong" if he donated the money to Microsoft? It's an order of magnitude different, but it's the same idea as donating money to almost any US companies.
That would be a very "bad thing" because the standard of living in the US is very high, and donations are not needed to advance the agenda of unnecessary consumerism.
The money is needed infinitely more in those nations with a very, very low standard of living. Those kinds of people who couldn't dream of affording our high-tech gadgets, surgery that improves eyesight, and unnecessary "quality of life" drugs.
There was only 1 nuke delivery system before the first ICBM and the ensuing space race, and that was the WWII B-29 bomber.
I hate multi-page articles as much as anybody, but damn. In the SECOND SENTENCE it says in no uncertain terms:
And for this, you got modded up. Wonderful.
Umm, that's pretty much what FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD are for. With a minimal install, all of them come in at less than 150MB, and that's with full-fledged versions of all the software, not minimally stripped versions.
Now, besides that, there have been innumerable projects to make Flash-based ultra-tiny distros out of those 3 as well. Projects like emBSD (which is about 4+ years out of date).
The only up-to-date OpenBSD minidistro I've been able to find is UnnamedBSD
Oh?
Radar? B-2 bombers? Jet fighters? High-altitude spy planes? Tanks? Aircraft carriers? Navy destroyers?
I think the parent is wrong about this becomming a new military industrial complex, through. You can justify regularly wasting billions of dollars when it's for "defense", but you just simply can't when it's for... well... absolutely anything else. Particularly "exploration".
Where and when has this happened? Every time "The People" vote directly around here, they approve of some new bond measure for new schools, expanding road networks, etc., etc. I don't see people strictly voting down bond measures, nor do I see any other form of "tax cuts" or "fuel subsidies" getting voted for.
In other words, don't confuse "politicians" with "The People".
Handing your children so much money that they can live lavishly without ever having to do a day of work, is likely BAD for them.
It's one thing to give your children a decent ammount of money to help them, it's completely different to give them so much they never need to learn about responsibility, of any kind.
As the saying goes: Money can't buy happiness.
Yes, all charity should go to the US... More free money for companies developing drugs for high-profit, upper-class disorders (viagra). More free money for further developing laser eye surgery. More free money torwards developing cheaper Tivos. Throwing more money at the US public school system.
It's the: "give a billionaire a fish" theory.
Nice little straw man.
However, you may in fact, have been correct, if not for the fact that the military budget for US Air Defense was drastically cut after the fall of the USSR, and almost completely dismantled.
Just because it's not always spent in the best way possible, it doesn't even remotely follow that we shouldn't even try.
The Taliban and Al Qaeda: yes. Bin Laden: not yet.
Gee, at least you're not overstating things...
At worst, China could cause some painful inflation, that would hurt them far more than it would us.
Complete straw man, again. The parent didn't say anything about Bush, let alone anything positive. It was a response to the question of drastically cutting the military budget down to a fraction of what it currently is (with nothing to back it up, I might add).
This is just patently untrue. VC-1 and H.264 don't magically add details you can't see in MPEG-2, or anything of the sort. MPEG-2 will look just as good as newer codecs, as long as you increase the bitrate to compensate. And with 25GB discs, you've got enough space for much-better-than-broadcast-HDTV MPEG-2 video.
If there's an issue, I suspect it's the audio codec. The Blu-ray case I saw advertised uncompressed multi-channel PCM audio, which would waste a great deal of space, for no advantage over losslessly compressed audio. Plus they're throwing in every other audio track they can find, high-bitrate DTS encoded, every foreign language track they have, in as many channels as possible, etc.
The rest of your complaints simply seem to be an issue of time. HD-DVD is further along than Blu-ray, and so is slightly ahead at introduction time (though Blu-ray has far more potential than HD-DVD).
The technology hardly worries me, though. They're both perfectly adequate for what they do, and fairly homogenous. The only question is: who's discs will be cheaper? Whoever gets down to $15 first may well take over, if the other format doesn't match their move immediately.
Brannigan was the most god awful, irritating and utterly unfunny part of Futurama.
If that's true (I don't believe it is) then you are quite simply blind... A problem the rest of the popluation doesn't have, so stop the anti-HD trolling already. And mods should stop giving these idiots points.
Gah! EVERY language has specific words or phrases that have become common across language barriers.
You mentioned French, so try:
à la carte
agent provocateur
attaché
carte blanche
cliché
décor
déjà vu
dossier
entrepreneur
faux
genre
laisser-faire
etc. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of
Nice straw man. You're only about 15 years off there. Chemical weapon don't have a long shelf-life, and it's been incontrovertably proven that Hussein didn't continue to produce it after the first Gulf War. All the stuff they've found has been far too old to be considered a weapon... You wouldn't want to eat it, but it's still less dangerous than, say, asbestos.
The evidence the Bush administration used to "prove" their case was being disproven at every corner, by simple fact-checking (aluminum centerfuges too small for nuclear development, claims being made by well-know liars, etc.). The UN inspectors allowed in shortly before the US invasion didn't find anything at all, even when following the administration's "intelligence" directions on where they should be. etc.
Even the administration has given up claiming Iraq had any WMDs, and stated so clearly. They would like, more than anyone, to find ANYTHING that they could point to for justification, or propose ANY hypothesis for why they couldn't find them. They don't do that, because they'd be torn to shreds. The evidence not only isn't there, but it overwhelmingly points to the opposite conclusion.
And I don't see why people who know next to nothing about history, are so very vocal about their ignorant views of it.
Besides the extensive ammount of ground American troops captured, there's the industrial angle. Supplies for Britan and Russia were largely comming from the US. That's primarily why Japan and Germany conspired to attack the US. The US immediately became a manufacturing giant that no other country could ever hope to match.
Britan, despite years of war, didn't have a single victory to speak of until the US joined, and started fighting along with them. Russia was being absolutely slaughtered. How could anyone believe this would just have magically turned around, if the US had not gotten involved?
And it definately wasn't anywhere near the "last year" of the war. Though, I suppose it could have been (with the opposite outcome), if not for the US.
That's because you're not considering the subject. TV standards can't be changed easily, which means TVs stay static for a very long time. NTSC TV hasn't changed in the past ~60 years.
Now, the technology driving them is transparently upgraded through the years, but that doesn't stop older TVs from working, and it doesn't change the standard.
In addition, HDTV has the same thing going for it that CDs do. HDTV's maximum resolution is so high, people won't hardly be able to notice any additional increase in resolution, unless it's on an extremely large screen (which most people don't buy for their homes).
So please, look at it from the other direction. Try and figure out any reason why the HDTV standard would be replaced or upgraded in the next 50 years.
Wrong again.
Completely irrelevant to the point at hand. I said "crappy" not to suggest LG is, just to make a point about a company's responsibility when chosing a supplier.
I NEVER said the supplier is not responsible. That's something you just pulled out of the air.
I'm dropping this conversation, as you're just turning into a completely nonsensical rant. Feel free to have the last word, if it makes you feel better.
Not at all. VHS tapes aren't compatible with DVD players, however, Blu-ray and HD-DVD players are fully compatible with the DVD collection you already own.
In addition, these high-def formats are fundamentally different:
They are being introduced at the very start of a new TV technology (unlike DVDs, which were released at the END of NTSC TVs).
They provide the full resolution these new TVs can display (unlike VHS)
It's perfectly reasonable to assume HDTV will be the standard for the next 50+ years. Only 3D TV could require something new, and that's nowhere near the horizon.
Now that our home media has switched to digital (computer) standards, it's perfectly reasonable to assume backwards compatibility for many, many generations of formats to come.
There's absolutely no reason to re-buy your DVD library, thanks to backwards compatibility.
These technologies are just being introduced. Maybe they won't catch-on for a few years.
You're acting like you have to throw away all your DVDs RIGHT NOW.
Yes, but dual-layer DVDs have been the single exception, quite possibly because people haven't yet felt the desire to upgrade from their single-layer DVD burners.
CDs and single-layer DVDs have dropped through the floor very quickly, and I can't see any reason why single-layer Blu-ray discs won't do the same.
I fail to see your point. Whether "crappy" or not, by any arbitrary standards, Apple is still 100% responsible for picking them, for setting the standards, etc. and deserves whatever PR they get over being associated with them.
Nonsense. Any stateful firewall can prevent anyone from connecting to them, even though they have a public address.
That may, however, make it far more flexible in how Comcast can address the boxes. They can have an office anywhere in the world, which can have any IP address, and can still connect to the VPN and easily access anything they want. No need to try and make your 10.x.x.x network work with their 10.x.x.x network.
Throw in a good-sized capacitor to smooth out the surges, and most drives should work fine, provided you don't have anything else on the same port.