I would feel pretty good about this if it were being proposed as some sort of standard, but from the blurb, it looks like a single-vendor lock-in situation. You will need an Nvidia graphics card to make it work, but your monitor will also need an Nvidia circuit board to regulate the framerate. The only value of this kind of variable framerate technology is for gaming. This means that the needed circuitry will appear only in monitors that are meant specifically for gamers. This means that they will be segmented off from the larger LCD market, and probably priced for "the gamer who has everything". But then again, this kind of gamer can just buy some fancy 60Hz monitors and a graphics card that doesn't tear frames because it has enough power. The latter course is probably cheaper. I know that lots of PC gamers now use big LCD televisions as their desktop monitors, or multi-monitor setups. Somehow I don't see these people upgrading their monitors so that they can look decent even at lower framerates. They would just buy the sort of graphics card that doesn't give them lower framerates.
I understand the value of doing experiments, and I understand the value of replicating experiments. But this doesn't sound like either. It just seems like something that you install on a roach and watch it go. What is to be learned from going through the motions? That it works? We already know that. Are the students practicing some valuable skill when they clip the antennae and attach the backpack? If so, then doing this might have some value. But if this is being done "just because" then yeah, they probably shouldn't be doing it.
So far the comments are advising that you replace your router with another stand-alone router that car run open firmware, and I agree. But the calculation is different if you want to run an always-available hard disk on your network. You see, consumer routers sometimes have a USB port, but the bandwidth of the USB connection is so atrocious that it's almost unusable. You'd be lucky if you had access to 1/10 of the theoretical USB2 bandwidth. This is where homebrew routers excel. Any normal-ish motherboard - even for Atom - has a proper USB2 and SATA interface, which will actually work close to its rated speed. You could probably even hardhack the SATA on your netbook to connect to a full-sized drive. If you screen is off, I don't think that your power usage will be much higher than a router's. Mine uses about 8W, pretty much 24/7. Most likely, it broadcasts a stronger signal that what your netbook can do, but remember that you can buy a USB2 network adapter if you need to improve the connection strength.
Yeah, this applies to any innovation:
"We've invented something amazing and revolutionary!"
"But not everyone in the world can have it right away, so the people without it will be an underclass! Stop inventing wonderful, revolutionary things! Don't you see they destroy the world?"
I wonder who will be the first to buy ads on the live terrorism channel. In the 80's, a friend of mine wrote a short story about a future in which anyone could have their own television channel, with real-time viewer tracking. Money would pour in real time into their bank accounts in proportion to how many viewers their channel had. Then somebody had the idea to do a live murder spree and police chase on their channel, which made them very rich, very quickly. So, yeah, we're getting close.
Sounds like a group that doesn't really need to hold out a tin cup when they want to get a project funded. If they really want this game, they could probably find enough money to continue under their couch cushions. To me it sounds more like they got bored when they realized that this would be hard, and moved on to some other fantasy/project. That's their right. I've also abandoned my share of half-finished projects, for similar reasons. The thing is, they shouldn't have taken kickstarter money if they knew they were like this.
So what's a human supposed to do on Europa? Operate a hammer and icepick? That doesn't sound very productive. That 45-second figure on Mars sounds hyperbolic, since on good days, the rovers can actually go pretty far and take lots of pictures.
But here's what I don't get about people who make comments like yours: Instead of looking at current missions and wishing that humans were there to do it better, why not instead ask what humans would do in space, and wish for (and design) machines that could do it as well. I mean, be concrete. For all the mission specific objectives (beyond: what happens to a person there?) that manned missions have - whether it's reconnaissance, construction, experimentation, etc. - I am pretty sure that it would be less expensive and less risky to make robots that could preform them equally well, less expensively and more safely. I think that's been the case since basically the Apollo era, when human lives were cheap and autonomous systems were miserable. That's the good reason why the Apollo era ended in 1972. The NASA home run of the 70's was the Voyager program. Then we pissed away the 80's shuttling people to LEO for no very good reason.
And if you compare the primitive rovers of today to manned missions, keep in mind also that the latter would be several orders of magnitude more expensive, and what amazing advances we could make if those budgets were going to robotics and autonomous systems. Maybe those robots really could do in 45 seconds what yesterday's rovers take a day to do. I mean, for fuck's sake. We have cars that can drive better than my mom.
Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.
Well, there was a time when they were good at it, like when they branched out from being a DOS vendor to selling a GUI to go on top, to adding a WYSIWYG word processor, then spreadsheet, then slide presenter, web browser, and all kinds of other things that implanted them into the heart of consumer computing. We tend to remember the later, unsuccessful attempts, but it's because of the earlier, successful attempts at branching out that we're even talking about Microsoft.
Apple has thus far also branched out rather successfully, but it's possible that further branching attempts will fail miserably. Maybe Apple have gotten complex enough that anything new they try will be a "meh"-inducing pile of compromises. After all, that's what happened to Microsoft, and the pattern might describe the natural life cycle of a major tech company.
In most contexts this is too true, and quite sad. However, if you aren't allowed to tell a story "according to quantum mechanics", you have no chance of explaining the functioning of the ordinary objects all around us, like lasers, LEDs, microwave ovens, fucking magnets, superconductors, sunshine, and many others. The real problem is that "according to quantum mechanics" has been so abused that people reflexively glaze over when they hear it. That abuse has made the world stupider and sadder, and undoing the damage is a valuable endeavor.
I think that the equation whiners here overestimate the clarity gained when text does include actual equations. I hate to remind you that probably millions of people have stared at the equation with the deltas and the h-bar, and still managed to completely fail to understand quantum uncertainty. In fact, it's a popular view these days that Heisenberg himself did not understand just what his uncertainty results said about the underlying world. And it's not for a lack of seeing the equation. He derived the damned thing.
I also don't think that the author is getting enough credit for just how good a job he did in vividly yet accurately describing what was up with the uncertainty principle. A part of his point is that you don't automatically know what's going on in quantum mechanics when you can solve all the problems on your QM exam and get an A in the course. Even (maybe especially) physicists tell themselves sloppy stories when they think about conjugate properties - I won't say "observables", though that's what we called them in my QM courses. Then when the physicists try to dumb down their already sloppy interpretations for a lay audience, you're on the high road to atrocities like "What the Bleep".
Well of course this and all other empires will fall. It's basically the second law of thermodynamics applied to societies. The more relevant question is whether the empire which replaces it will also have panopticon spying on its citizens. And my confidence in answering 'yes' is at least 99%. Spying is the future.
I'm not saying I like it, but I think we must focus on the next question, the question of what the state may do with the information they gather. Will we criminalize certain thoughts, opinions and "traitorous" ideologies? Doing so may be hard to resist now it's very easy to identify the people who have them. I think that de-facto outlawing thought-crimes is the real step over the cliff - not the spying itself. We should focus our political energies on making sure that step is never taken, and insofar as it has been taken already, walking it back.
One problem with cheap and homebrew CNC machines is that the cutting head loses track of its own position. The feedback from CNC machines comes to the computer from sensors on the position screws of the various axes. These can lose their calibration. I keep thinking that with this kind of technology, a computer can "visually" determine the precise position of the cutting head and also of the material being cut. It can update the computer constantly on the exact shape of the remaining material, and then compare it to the design and calculate what else needs to be cut away. Basically, all of the feedback can potentially be just optical, but of course, the computer can "eyeball it" much more accurately than a person. Because good cameras are cheap and CPU cycles are cheap, I think this could be the basis of a very flexible and affordable CNC machine. I suppose it would be important to have a good sawdust removal system, because that could potentially obscure the view - although I guess the cutting head itself could be used to sweep it away.
I don't see why you have to be a dick to cops. Why wouldn't you just talk to them like a polite person? They don't have an easy job, and when people think of them the way rebelling teenagers think of their parents, it only makes their job harder to do well. It also increases the chances of them making horrible mistakes. I think we all have a stake in cops having accurate information when they're investigating crimes.
The Japanese have solved air hockey. Now I'm waiting for Koreans to create the perfect AI computer to play Starcraft 2. (And I'm not talking about this guy.) The AI that comes with the game is inexcusably pathetic.
Maybe it's cheaper to sample a lot, rather than to sample less and extrapolate accelerations. They probably get away with a simpler prediction algorithm when their data points are so dense. Or maybe, the way the puck moves in air hockey is more sensitive to initial (impact) conditions than you realize. I'm guessing that in the 50th of a second before you hit the puck, you can do a lot of things to significantly affect its trajectory. Anyway, maybe that's what they discovered as they built this system - something about the game itself.
I wish somebody would stop and ask the following question: What is the ethical way to treat massive numbers of abandoned and unadoptable pets, if you don't have an endless farm somewhere upstate with endless food and veterinary care? I don't love PETA (for reasons unrelated to this) but I'm pretty sure that if they had alternatives beside euthanasia, they would use them. It's sad, but let's not be children about it. The alternative for those animals is a fate much worse than a humane death at the hands of PETA. I only wish that instead of sending the animals for incineration, they would donate them to local Chinese restaurants, to spare the lives of other animals that would not need to die to be on a menu.
Oh, I would be so happy if the internet killed car dealerships! Yes, there are some industries hurt by the internet age that I mourn, like local book stores. But if car dealerships just die, I won't miss them at all. I won't miss their loud, stupid advertisements on TV, but I especially won't miss the ugly way in which they use valuable real estate in populated areas. American cities would work so much better if they used space more wisely and became generally denser. Car dealerships are one of the most important plagues that is keeping that from happening. Fuck them and their useless sprawling parking lots. There is nothing socially redeeming about them at all. I hope that car companies in the future make a move like Apple, and have something like a Mazda store in the local mall. It would basically be a showroom in which the cars are presented like jewels, with salespeople and mechanic "geniuses" that could chat up customers, as well as curious mallgoers who got hypnotized by the shiny things. They could have a back exit to a portion of the mall's underground parking lot where they have a few more cars that can go out for a test drive. Their maintenance and repair could be done by an authorized mechanic shop with a contract. That needs some land, but much less than a dealership. Really, there is no reason for traditional parking lot car dealers to live, and many great reasons for them to die.
It's not just that. Talking about how everything good at Apple came from the brilliant mind of a now-dead guy actually is a dig at (present-day) Apple. It serves to undermine confidence in Apple's prospects, and feeds the meme of Apple's inevitable post-Jobs decline, without explicitly stating that.
Farmed carnivorous fish right now get fed bycatch, a slurry of little fish of no commercial value that fishermen pull out of the sea. There are many problems with this, one of them being the mercury that concentrates in the farmed fish and eventually humans. I wonder if they would be able to feed on farmed insects, which could be obtained in a much more responsible way, and clean of poisonous metals.
Would they add some sort of hard-coded serial number chip that phones home whenever the device is online? I strongly doubt that such a feature would remain uncracked for very long. At best, it might be something that an observant Craigslist buyer could use to distinguish a hacked device from an unhacked one. I think that's the first realistic goal to aim at. I was close to buying an iPod Touch on Craigslist, but backed out because the situation seemed shady, and I didn't know how to verify whether the device was stolen. I know it's tempting to hope that we can use the phone itself to catch thieves and prevent unauthorized transfers, but I don't think we should ever expect to succeed. Every decent phone thief can just power down a phone right after stealing it, and disable the security in a makeshift Faraday cage workshop. All this will do is to provide a perfect spy tool on legitimate phone owners.
The real fight is going to be about net neutrality. My cable company happens to own my internet pipe, and they're certainly not requiring me to buy their cable tv service. (I wouldn't consider it!) The streaming and VOD channels are already out there, and there will be many more. As long as the ISP doesn't block the packets from reaching me, there isn't much they can do to stop this. That's why I mentioned net neutrality.
I have a feeling this will all be moot soon. Youtube are about to unveil subscription channels, and we already have Hulu, Netflix, etc. All we need is an idiot-proof box for the living room so that grandma can surf all these channels with her "clicker" and we'll forget there ever was such a thing as cable tv.
I think that Google first proved that they are capable of delivering pretty 1080p video without stuttering, while leaving you the option for 720p if your internet or playback device can't handle 1080p. We'll see what content they will be offering, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: People are comfortable with Youtube as a video delivery system. You can bet that there will be living room devices that will seamlessly treat your subscribed Youtube channels as regular TV channels. Hopefully, future Youtube Android apps will allow you to pre-buffer the premium content so that you can watch it even when you don't have a good connection, for example, on a bus. If some of their subscriptions were things like Discovery Channel, ESPN and Comedy Central, how many people would drop their cable TV altogether? If these channels were on premium Youtube, the living room experience of watching them would be undiminished compared to cable TV, and all kinds of new options for VOD and watching on portable devices would open up. If Google does this right, the only people that will continue subscribing to cable TV will be luddites who can't be bothered to make Youtube work in their living room.
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I would feel pretty good about this if it were being proposed as some sort of standard, but from the blurb, it looks like a single-vendor lock-in situation. You will need an Nvidia graphics card to make it work, but your monitor will also need an Nvidia circuit board to regulate the framerate. The only value of this kind of variable framerate technology is for gaming. This means that the needed circuitry will appear only in monitors that are meant specifically for gamers. This means that they will be segmented off from the larger LCD market, and probably priced for "the gamer who has everything". But then again, this kind of gamer can just buy some fancy 60Hz monitors and a graphics card that doesn't tear frames because it has enough power. The latter course is probably cheaper. I know that lots of PC gamers now use big LCD televisions as their desktop monitors, or multi-monitor setups. Somehow I don't see these people upgrading their monitors so that they can look decent even at lower framerates. They would just buy the sort of graphics card that doesn't give them lower framerates.
I understand the value of doing experiments, and I understand the value of replicating experiments. But this doesn't sound like either. It just seems like something that you install on a roach and watch it go. What is to be learned from going through the motions? That it works? We already know that. Are the students practicing some valuable skill when they clip the antennae and attach the backpack? If so, then doing this might have some value. But if this is being done "just because" then yeah, they probably shouldn't be doing it.
So far the comments are advising that you replace your router with another stand-alone router that car run open firmware, and I agree. But the calculation is different if you want to run an always-available hard disk on your network. You see, consumer routers sometimes have a USB port, but the bandwidth of the USB connection is so atrocious that it's almost unusable. You'd be lucky if you had access to 1/10 of the theoretical USB2 bandwidth. This is where homebrew routers excel. Any normal-ish motherboard - even for Atom - has a proper USB2 and SATA interface, which will actually work close to its rated speed. You could probably even hardhack the SATA on your netbook to connect to a full-sized drive. If you screen is off, I don't think that your power usage will be much higher than a router's. Mine uses about 8W, pretty much 24/7. Most likely, it broadcasts a stronger signal that what your netbook can do, but remember that you can buy a USB2 network adapter if you need to improve the connection strength.
Yeah, this applies to any innovation: "We've invented something amazing and revolutionary!" "But not everyone in the world can have it right away, so the people without it will be an underclass! Stop inventing wonderful, revolutionary things! Don't you see they destroy the world?"
I wonder who will be the first to buy ads on the live terrorism channel. In the 80's, a friend of mine wrote a short story about a future in which anyone could have their own television channel, with real-time viewer tracking. Money would pour in real time into their bank accounts in proportion to how many viewers their channel had. Then somebody had the idea to do a live murder spree and police chase on their channel, which made them very rich, very quickly. So, yeah, we're getting close.
Sounds like a group that doesn't really need to hold out a tin cup when they want to get a project funded. If they really want this game, they could probably find enough money to continue under their couch cushions. To me it sounds more like they got bored when they realized that this would be hard, and moved on to some other fantasy/project. That's their right. I've also abandoned my share of half-finished projects, for similar reasons. The thing is, they shouldn't have taken kickstarter money if they knew they were like this.
So what's a human supposed to do on Europa? Operate a hammer and icepick? That doesn't sound very productive. That 45-second figure on Mars sounds hyperbolic, since on good days, the rovers can actually go pretty far and take lots of pictures.
But here's what I don't get about people who make comments like yours: Instead of looking at current missions and wishing that humans were there to do it better, why not instead ask what humans would do in space, and wish for (and design) machines that could do it as well. I mean, be concrete. For all the mission specific objectives (beyond: what happens to a person there?) that manned missions have - whether it's reconnaissance, construction, experimentation, etc. - I am pretty sure that it would be less expensive and less risky to make robots that could preform them equally well, less expensively and more safely. I think that's been the case since basically the Apollo era, when human lives were cheap and autonomous systems were miserable. That's the good reason why the Apollo era ended in 1972. The NASA home run of the 70's was the Voyager program. Then we pissed away the 80's shuttling people to LEO for no very good reason.
And if you compare the primitive rovers of today to manned missions, keep in mind also that the latter would be several orders of magnitude more expensive, and what amazing advances we could make if those budgets were going to robotics and autonomous systems. Maybe those robots really could do in 45 seconds what yesterday's rovers take a day to do. I mean, for fuck's sake. We have cars that can drive better than my mom.
Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.
Well, there was a time when they were good at it, like when they branched out from being a DOS vendor to selling a GUI to go on top, to adding a WYSIWYG word processor, then spreadsheet, then slide presenter, web browser, and all kinds of other things that implanted them into the heart of consumer computing. We tend to remember the later, unsuccessful attempts, but it's because of the earlier, successful attempts at branching out that we're even talking about Microsoft.
Apple has thus far also branched out rather successfully, but it's possible that further branching attempts will fail miserably. Maybe Apple have gotten complex enough that anything new they try will be a "meh"-inducing pile of compromises. After all, that's what happened to Microsoft, and the pattern might describe the natural life cycle of a major tech company.
In most contexts this is too true, and quite sad. However, if you aren't allowed to tell a story "according to quantum mechanics", you have no chance of explaining the functioning of the ordinary objects all around us, like lasers, LEDs, microwave ovens, fucking magnets, superconductors, sunshine, and many others. The real problem is that "according to quantum mechanics" has been so abused that people reflexively glaze over when they hear it. That abuse has made the world stupider and sadder, and undoing the damage is a valuable endeavor.
I think that the equation whiners here overestimate the clarity gained when text does include actual equations. I hate to remind you that probably millions of people have stared at the equation with the deltas and the h-bar, and still managed to completely fail to understand quantum uncertainty. In fact, it's a popular view these days that Heisenberg himself did not understand just what his uncertainty results said about the underlying world. And it's not for a lack of seeing the equation. He derived the damned thing.
I also don't think that the author is getting enough credit for just how good a job he did in vividly yet accurately describing what was up with the uncertainty principle. A part of his point is that you don't automatically know what's going on in quantum mechanics when you can solve all the problems on your QM exam and get an A in the course. Even (maybe especially) physicists tell themselves sloppy stories when they think about conjugate properties - I won't say "observables", though that's what we called them in my QM courses. Then when the physicists try to dumb down their already sloppy interpretations for a lay audience, you're on the high road to atrocities like "What the Bleep".
Well of course this and all other empires will fall. It's basically the second law of thermodynamics applied to societies. The more relevant question is whether the empire which replaces it will also have panopticon spying on its citizens. And my confidence in answering 'yes' is at least 99%. Spying is the future.
I'm not saying I like it, but I think we must focus on the next question, the question of what the state may do with the information they gather. Will we criminalize certain thoughts, opinions and "traitorous" ideologies? Doing so may be hard to resist now it's very easy to identify the people who have them. I think that de-facto outlawing thought-crimes is the real step over the cliff - not the spying itself. We should focus our political energies on making sure that step is never taken, and insofar as it has been taken already, walking it back.
Am I missing something? Rockets went into space in the 40's?
One problem with cheap and homebrew CNC machines is that the cutting head loses track of its own position. The feedback from CNC machines comes to the computer from sensors on the position screws of the various axes. These can lose their calibration. I keep thinking that with this kind of technology, a computer can "visually" determine the precise position of the cutting head and also of the material being cut. It can update the computer constantly on the exact shape of the remaining material, and then compare it to the design and calculate what else needs to be cut away. Basically, all of the feedback can potentially be just optical, but of course, the computer can "eyeball it" much more accurately than a person. Because good cameras are cheap and CPU cycles are cheap, I think this could be the basis of a very flexible and affordable CNC machine. I suppose it would be important to have a good sawdust removal system, because that could potentially obscure the view - although I guess the cutting head itself could be used to sweep it away.
I don't see why you have to be a dick to cops. Why wouldn't you just talk to them like a polite person? They don't have an easy job, and when people think of them the way rebelling teenagers think of their parents, it only makes their job harder to do well. It also increases the chances of them making horrible mistakes. I think we all have a stake in cops having accurate information when they're investigating crimes.
The Japanese have solved air hockey. Now I'm waiting for Koreans to create the perfect AI computer to play Starcraft 2. (And I'm not talking about this guy.) The AI that comes with the game is inexcusably pathetic.
Maybe it's cheaper to sample a lot, rather than to sample less and extrapolate accelerations. They probably get away with a simpler prediction algorithm when their data points are so dense. Or maybe, the way the puck moves in air hockey is more sensitive to initial (impact) conditions than you realize. I'm guessing that in the 50th of a second before you hit the puck, you can do a lot of things to significantly affect its trajectory. Anyway, maybe that's what they discovered as they built this system - something about the game itself.
I wish somebody would stop and ask the following question: What is the ethical way to treat massive numbers of abandoned and unadoptable pets, if you don't have an endless farm somewhere upstate with endless food and veterinary care? I don't love PETA (for reasons unrelated to this) but I'm pretty sure that if they had alternatives beside euthanasia, they would use them. It's sad, but let's not be children about it. The alternative for those animals is a fate much worse than a humane death at the hands of PETA. I only wish that instead of sending the animals for incineration, they would donate them to local Chinese restaurants, to spare the lives of other animals that would not need to die to be on a menu.
Oh, I would be so happy if the internet killed car dealerships! Yes, there are some industries hurt by the internet age that I mourn, like local book stores. But if car dealerships just die, I won't miss them at all. I won't miss their loud, stupid advertisements on TV, but I especially won't miss the ugly way in which they use valuable real estate in populated areas. American cities would work so much better if they used space more wisely and became generally denser. Car dealerships are one of the most important plagues that is keeping that from happening. Fuck them and their useless sprawling parking lots. There is nothing socially redeeming about them at all. I hope that car companies in the future make a move like Apple, and have something like a Mazda store in the local mall. It would basically be a showroom in which the cars are presented like jewels, with salespeople and mechanic "geniuses" that could chat up customers, as well as curious mallgoers who got hypnotized by the shiny things. They could have a back exit to a portion of the mall's underground parking lot where they have a few more cars that can go out for a test drive. Their maintenance and repair could be done by an authorized mechanic shop with a contract. That needs some land, but much less than a dealership. Really, there is no reason for traditional parking lot car dealers to live, and many great reasons for them to die.
It's not just that. Talking about how everything good at Apple came from the brilliant mind of a now-dead guy actually is a dig at (present-day) Apple. It serves to undermine confidence in Apple's prospects, and feeds the meme of Apple's inevitable post-Jobs decline, without explicitly stating that.
Farmed carnivorous fish right now get fed bycatch, a slurry of little fish of no commercial value that fishermen pull out of the sea. There are many problems with this, one of them being the mercury that concentrates in the farmed fish and eventually humans. I wonder if they would be able to feed on farmed insects, which could be obtained in a much more responsible way, and clean of poisonous metals.
Would they add some sort of hard-coded serial number chip that phones home whenever the device is online? I strongly doubt that such a feature would remain uncracked for very long. At best, it might be something that an observant Craigslist buyer could use to distinguish a hacked device from an unhacked one. I think that's the first realistic goal to aim at. I was close to buying an iPod Touch on Craigslist, but backed out because the situation seemed shady, and I didn't know how to verify whether the device was stolen. I know it's tempting to hope that we can use the phone itself to catch thieves and prevent unauthorized transfers, but I don't think we should ever expect to succeed. Every decent phone thief can just power down a phone right after stealing it, and disable the security in a makeshift Faraday cage workshop. All this will do is to provide a perfect spy tool on legitimate phone owners.
The real fight is going to be about net neutrality. My cable company happens to own my internet pipe, and they're certainly not requiring me to buy their cable tv service. (I wouldn't consider it!) The streaming and VOD channels are already out there, and there will be many more. As long as the ISP doesn't block the packets from reaching me, there isn't much they can do to stop this. That's why I mentioned net neutrality.
I have a feeling this will all be moot soon. Youtube are about to unveil subscription channels, and we already have Hulu, Netflix, etc. All we need is an idiot-proof box for the living room so that grandma can surf all these channels with her "clicker" and we'll forget there ever was such a thing as cable tv.
I think that Google first proved that they are capable of delivering pretty 1080p video without stuttering, while leaving you the option for 720p if your internet or playback device can't handle 1080p. We'll see what content they will be offering, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: People are comfortable with Youtube as a video delivery system. You can bet that there will be living room devices that will seamlessly treat your subscribed Youtube channels as regular TV channels. Hopefully, future Youtube Android apps will allow you to pre-buffer the premium content so that you can watch it even when you don't have a good connection, for example, on a bus. If some of their subscriptions were things like Discovery Channel, ESPN and Comedy Central, how many people would drop their cable TV altogether? If these channels were on premium Youtube, the living room experience of watching them would be undiminished compared to cable TV, and all kinds of new options for VOD and watching on portable devices would open up. If Google does this right, the only people that will continue subscribing to cable TV will be luddites who can't be bothered to make Youtube work in their living room.