ESR's support is only for a year though, it seems? It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to. A 2 year solution seems like a better, long term plan. In 2002-2009, having your web browser being a year out of date meant losing out on a lot of features and security fixes, but in the last 2 years innovations have really slowed down and I think 2 years support (as opposed to 1) would give institutions a lot more reason to stick to Firefox. Think of it - the many 4 year undergrad students (perhaps the less technically inclined student) would only have to experience one change in the web browser in their college career in school computer labs, etc. By changing this yearly, you're just adding another thing to the pile of the "annual make sure it all works together without crashing checklist".
I wasn't aware they still made them with less than 3 HDMI ports. What do people with more than one video game console do then? A quick look at newegg shows that only about 25% of available models (like you mentioned, probably the cheaper and higher sales volume models) have 2 or less HDMI ports. The vast majority of models do have 3+ HDMI ports. There may be a silver lining to this - people with low end models probably won't be interested in more than two devices attached to their TV. Alternately, people might be buying the low-end models for a bedroom or kitchen, while paying more for a proper "main" TV in the den/living room with 3+ HDMI inputs.
Well, if New Orleans and Dallas are any indication (both of their downtown centers are below the local water level), the seawall building business is going to heat up. If Galveston's proven anything, it's that a 17' seawall is extremely effective, and durable over the 100-year term.
I don't doubt there will continue to be some sort of dual-market for light users and heavy users, with light users getting the dongle, and heavy users paying extra for enhanced PVR box/service of some sort.
It would be interesting if the "enhanced PVR box" was simply a NAS with wifi that was paired with the MHL dongle. You can essentially do this already with the Apple TV and iTunes.
1. thumb drives are really cheap, you can fit a lot of PVR-quality video on 32, 64 or 128gb of memory 2. Most TVs have at least 3 HDMI ports, see also: Input button on remote 3. Why wouldn't CableCARDs come in smaller formats?
2015 is a long ways out yet, and miniaturization happens rapidly. Some TVs already have built-in CableCard ports anyways. MHL is the future though.
I think the PVR as a device is going to disappear entirely by 2015. If the "RokuStick" they're announcing (HDMI dongle for your TV) is any indication, especially at the sub-$100 launch price, there won't be any profit margin left in HDMI dongles in a few years. You will get a Netflix dongle free with your subscription, along with one for your Hulu Plus subscription; cable TV and satellite boxes will disappear completely and you'll get an HDMI dongle in a bubble pack mailer instead of a VCR-looking device.
Much like how calculators were $500 items that took up a permanent spot on your desk and are now given away as promotional items, HTPC/Media Centers are going the same way. I would be shocked if the next AppleTV is bigger than a book of matches.
Well there are two things I don't like about this, and one that I do:
1. If this is a non-critical part, why is it receiving stresses that is causing it to fail? 2. If there were oversights on non-critical parts, who's to say there weren't oversights on more important parts? These planes fly over huge tracts of empty ocean, it's not like they can just pull off to the side of the road and wait for AAA to tow them home
Good things:
1. Considering the absolute massive size of the airplane, number of parts (both moving and not), the number of assembly locations (+ final assembly) it's a goddamn miracle that they've only had two notable failures since the introduction
That said, the 747 has a really impressive track record and 40 years to work out any major failures. They seem relatively safe in my book. You'd have to drag me on to an A380 flight that travels over a body of water bigger than the English channel though. Call me in 10 years when they have 150+ in active service.
See, that's interesting, because the town my parents grew up in (Kerrville, Tx - pop 20,000 in a rural area) actually has at least two active theaters I can think of off the top of my head. One is the outdoor amphitheater (with lighting, curtain, etc) by the river with an attached indoor theater as well (http://www.hcaf.com), and on the other end of town they just built a very fancy, modern theater (http://caillouxtheater.com/)
You might look in to corporate sponsorship, Kerrville has leaned hard on the wealthy in their community to sponsor the arts. Your group might try getting in touch with their fund raising departments, or taking some city councilmembers out to lunch.
Teach them scripting, automation. Let them worry about full-fledged programs at a later point. My first foray in to programming was a bash script to sort all the files on my desktop in to folders to clean it up when I was 16 or so (also Visual Basic 6 had just been invented so my options were a lot more limited then, and the idea of free programming tutorials were laughable). Scripting is immediate and doesn't really require any intensive background to get it working.
Someone famously said that the distance between the platter and the read head is roughly equivilent to flying a 747 over Mt Everest with one inch to spare. It's not like joey and bubba can buy two pallets of platters, three pallets of drive cases, and a pallet of controller assemblies, a gallon of glue and assemble 20K drives in their garage over a weekend while burning through a pack of cigarettes. These aren't cuban sweat shop cigar factories, these devices are put together in enormous clean rooms with super tight tolerances.
The Jews that migrated to Palestine before world war two did so mostly legally.
Mostly legally, minus the whole "exceeding immigration quotas to the point that the british army had to turn away quite literally boatloads of immigrants at gunpoint from the dock:)
Besides, the post-balloon range is only ~50 miles. This isn't useful for deeply penetrating an opponent's airspace.
We lost our stealth-UAV 114 miles from the Iranian border. There's a lot of things within 150 miles of the border. Besides, launched from 55K feet, even with a crappy 12:1 glide ratio (a flying squirrel's is 2, modern sailplanes are 50+) you should have 150 miles of range (660k ft). Baghdad is 80 miles from the Iranian border, Tehran is 66 miles from the Caspian Sea. A balloon will travel 40-60mph once it gets above 100 feet or so.
Not to mention, you have an excellent view of the ground while you're gliding down, uninterrupted by the horizon.
With 15ft accuracy, you could land these things in the bushes of the garden or balcony of a head of state, who knows what conversations you can pick up from 100ft with modern technology.
Then CS and SE need national level organizations and professional licencing associations in every state like medical doctors, lawyers, architects and electrical engineers do. Because every time someone says "I'm a CS major" or "I'm a SE major" half the people (particularly the non-technical ones) mentally roll their eyes and think "computer programmer" or "web master".
Did you read a wikipedia article three months ago while half asleep, or is this some sort of elaborate troll? You're going to need to cite your theories. The Palestinians never migrated anywhere, they're the de-facto indiginous people of the region. If I said that the Aborigines migrated to Melbourne from Singapore after the British colonized Australia, my statement would be about as factual as yours. The Palestinians were part of the Ottoman empire and had inhabited the region for the last 1000+ years.
What on earth is this about "we'd rather not have [Israel] take over the middle east" -- the reason Israel is armed to the teeth is because the whole region rejects british imperialism and they would have pushed the jews back out long ago if they didn't have western backing (foreign aid + arms deals) to stay in the area. The jews were attacked as soon as they set foot in the region, this isn't a new thing, and they were aware they weren't wanted there. Go check out "The British Empire in Colour", there's some great original footage of jewish immigrants building forts on their newly settled land to protect themselves from the locals. It looks like something out of a British Colonists vs American Indians documentary. The Palestinians didn't want them there to begin with, and still don't want them there. The British were the ones with the bright idea to agree to displacing the locals and letting westerners colonize the area. Somehow the US got dragged in to it.
The more impressive trick is that it's way, way past it's total mission time, and was scheduled to come down around thanksgiving. It's now almost 2 months past it's original planned mission. And yeah, it did change it's orbit, back in May or so. Pretty much everyone wants to know what's going on in North Korea and Iran, and apparently you can photograph both from the orbit that Tiandong is in.
Everything they've been saying is that they have a right to defense (they do) and protect themselves. This is what India and Pakistan did, quietly, about 15 years ago. Now, they may have ulterior motives (they've stated before that they wouldn't mind turning Israel into a glass parking lot) but nuclear deterrence is something any nation* should strive for, and we're less than 20 years off from ICBMs being an off the shelf part/system that nearly every country will have. India and Pakistan have already demonstrated that the cat's out of the bag when it comes to nuclear proliferation. At this point we're only delaying the inevitable by 5-10 years, max.
As a US citizen you can still travel to Iran freely for business and tourism (for now). Technically they aren't an enemy (unless you buy the whole "Axis of Evil" rhetoric). The problem is that "we" don't want the Nuclear club getting any bigger, and when people say "would destabilize the region" they mean "Israel is likely to nuke Iran back to the stone age in a preemptive attack". This would cause several arab and muslim states to strongly consider nuking Israel, of note Iran and Pakistan. Syria doesn't have nukes but they wouldn't need a lot of convincing to start lobbing bombs across the border. It's a small region (think New Jersey) and they don't need to go very far.
If you look at the activity that's been going on lately, we sent an expensive spy drone over in to Iran, a missile research lab just outside of Tehran mysteriously exploded, and both the Chinese and the US both launched some high tech gadgetry in to space that orbits over Iran every few hours. Whatever they see down there must be pretty fucking juicy if we've talked the entire European continent to stop buying Iran's oil (1/5th of total current production) in the middle of a global recession.
So yeah, as always in this region there are a lot of things going on here -- Iran is a huge country (population 75 million, geographic size, wealth) with Nuclear ambitions, doesn't like Israel, and we don't want them getting the bomb. We are trying to protect Israel* via economic sanctions against Iran and stabilize the region, Iran is fighting for their ability to defend themselves and is holding the world's economy hostage.
*Why? This is the real question. Zionism sounds like a dirty word (it's not), but that's my guess
I think both locations experience -40 for long stretches of time (currently -14F at Amundsenâ"Scott station, South Pole... but it's the middle of summer there), and even though there's land under the airplane flying you to the station, I'm not sure that makes it easier to supply the station. In fact, it's cheaper to supply bases by boat (though the south pole station is inland by about 1300-2500miles, depending on who's counting). Internet access is going to be by Satellite/radio link as well, probably using whatever comm sattelite the south pole is (it's likely in a polar orbit). It's not like you can just subscribe to DSL or Cable internet in the Yukon:)
Generally, every major city ever built started off as a shantytown, which were progressively built, razed, and built again with better and better buildings over hundreds of years. This concept that the first buildings on a site must survive for 150+ years is a fairly recent one. Shanty towns don't cause poverty, they're what most people can realistically afford.
Our generation has half the buying power of our parents if you look at average pay vs cost of living from 30, 40 years ago. Average age of first home ownership, new car purchases are way up in the last 15 years. Also yes, California real estate prices are insane. Stay away from Texas please, we enjoy our $180,000, 2800 sq ft homes with a pool.
Most modern plays do suck(!). Straight guys don't like plays (I fall in to this category) but if you ask around you can find some good places that aren't too high brow.
There's a great place a couple of blocks from my house called "The Pocket Sandwich Theater" wedged in to the corner of a strip mall, they've been there for something like 30 years. Their specialty is to serve food before hand, and drinks during the intermissions. They only do sidesplittingly funny plays, and the audience is encouraged to throw popcorn at the actors (who sometimes will retaliate). It sort of boils down to scripted slapstick improv, or the sort of thing you might see in a high school theater class. The halloween production last year was some mix of Pirates and Vampires, and the christmas production was some sort of Zombie of Christmas Past deal. Keep in mind that Shakespeare wrote for the common man, there's quite a bit of slapstick humor going on in those too, it's not all boring and high brow (Les Miserables), or flamboyantly broadway-ish (Cats).
Watching trash live implies that you will do something other than watch prerecorded trash when you get home. Play cards, paint, play tennis, post on slashdot -- pretty much anything is preferable to passive entertainment like TV. How thick is the dust on your boxed copy of the boardgame Risk?:)
Until very recently (1980, perhaps?) people regularly only took out a 15 year mortgage on homes - you only bought what you could realistically afford. The concept of being in debt for a full third of your adult life (or more!) to pay off your home is a fairly recent phenomenon, and with 30 year mortgages, that number jumps to 50% in most cases. You're in even worse shape if you buy your home after you turn 20.
For most of humanity's existence, homes were built by the community using locally sourced materials, and no long term debt was accrued. I'm here in Texas, and I'm pretty confident that there are no gypsum mines (drywall) within a 50 mile radius of this house. If you visit impoverished areas of the world, people live in watertight houses, generally cinderblock, but they're built one room at a time, as finances permit the purchase of additional materials. In other areas, it may be an adobe hut, slowly expanded, and then finally surrounded by a mud wall forming a courtyard. Unfortunately due to building codes (among other things) this isn't permitted except in the most rural of areas (areas settled along the Texas-Mexico border by immigrants being one exception) of the United States.
The problem is that a house should only take a week or two to build at most, with additions coming later as the family expands, and instead people are mortgaging their entire lives to live in a building that might have been envied by the british aristocracy 200-300 years ago, and then continue to live in giant McMansions long after their family grows up and moves out. Unfortunately we came up with the idea that everyone needs to own and live in a giant generational-sized house, but only have 1.9 children instead of a house within their means.
So what you're saying is that the real reason my office building's super won't fix the wild swings from hot to cold throughout the day is that it actually improves productivity (not counting the time I spend complaining about the temperature)?
The problem though, is that while your revolution won't be televised, the general population may see other revolutions on TV (or hear of them through various means) and get the idea that they need one of their own (see also: arab spring). The better solution is to just minimize TV usage as much as possible to avoid them getting the idea in the first place. It's no coincidence that college students with lots of time on their hands to debate international politics end up at anti-war protests a lot more than busy parents with newborn children, even though the parents have a lot more at stake to protest.
People will passively absorb whatever's on TV, but a much smaller slice of the population is actually going to wade through the national section of a newspaper every day to figure out if they're getting screwed over by their own government.
Slashdot Mirror
ESR's support is only for a year though, it seems? It might take institutions 2-3 months to decide it's worth upgrading to. A 2 year solution seems like a better, long term plan. In 2002-2009, having your web browser being a year out of date meant losing out on a lot of features and security fixes, but in the last 2 years innovations have really slowed down and I think 2 years support (as opposed to 1) would give institutions a lot more reason to stick to Firefox. Think of it - the many 4 year undergrad students (perhaps the less technically inclined student) would only have to experience one change in the web browser in their college career in school computer labs, etc. By changing this yearly, you're just adding another thing to the pile of the "annual make sure it all works together without crashing checklist".
I wasn't aware they still made them with less than 3 HDMI ports. What do people with more than one video game console do then? A quick look at newegg shows that only about 25% of available models (like you mentioned, probably the cheaper and higher sales volume models) have 2 or less HDMI ports. The vast majority of models do have 3+ HDMI ports. There may be a silver lining to this - people with low end models probably won't be interested in more than two devices attached to their TV. Alternately, people might be buying the low-end models for a bedroom or kitchen, while paying more for a proper "main" TV in the den/living room with 3+ HDMI inputs.
Well, if New Orleans and Dallas are any indication (both of their downtown centers are below the local water level), the seawall building business is going to heat up. If Galveston's proven anything, it's that a 17' seawall is extremely effective, and durable over the 100-year term.
I don't doubt there will continue to be some sort of dual-market for light users and heavy users, with light users getting the dongle, and heavy users paying extra for enhanced PVR box/service of some sort.
It would be interesting if the "enhanced PVR box" was simply a NAS with wifi that was paired with the MHL dongle. You can essentially do this already with the Apple TV and iTunes.
People complaining that existing, outdated components are is too big to fit on the back of their TV, and not having enough HDMI ports, apparently.
1. thumb drives are really cheap, you can fit a lot of PVR-quality video on 32, 64 or 128gb of memory
2. Most TVs have at least 3 HDMI ports, see also: Input button on remote
3. Why wouldn't CableCARDs come in smaller formats?
2015 is a long ways out yet, and miniaturization happens rapidly. Some TVs already have built-in CableCard ports anyways. MHL is the future though.
I think the PVR as a device is going to disappear entirely by 2015. If the "RokuStick" they're announcing (HDMI dongle for your TV) is any indication, especially at the sub-$100 launch price, there won't be any profit margin left in HDMI dongles in a few years. You will get a Netflix dongle free with your subscription, along with one for your Hulu Plus subscription; cable TV and satellite boxes will disappear completely and you'll get an HDMI dongle in a bubble pack mailer instead of a VCR-looking device.
Much like how calculators were $500 items that took up a permanent spot on your desk and are now given away as promotional items, HTPC/Media Centers are going the same way. I would be shocked if the next AppleTV is bigger than a book of matches.
More info, or more importantly, a visual of exactly what an HDMI dongle may look like: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5305/roku-streaming-stick-brings-smarts-to-mhl-equipped-tvs
Well there are two things I don't like about this, and one that I do:
1. If this is a non-critical part, why is it receiving stresses that is causing it to fail?
2. If there were oversights on non-critical parts, who's to say there weren't oversights on more important parts? These planes fly over huge tracts of empty ocean, it's not like they can just pull off to the side of the road and wait for AAA to tow them home
Good things:
1. Considering the absolute massive size of the airplane, number of parts (both moving and not), the number of assembly locations (+ final assembly) it's a goddamn miracle that they've only had two notable failures since the introduction
That said, the 747 has a really impressive track record and 40 years to work out any major failures. They seem relatively safe in my book. You'd have to drag me on to an A380 flight that travels over a body of water bigger than the English channel though. Call me in 10 years when they have 150+ in active service.
See, that's interesting, because the town my parents grew up in (Kerrville, Tx - pop 20,000 in a rural area) actually has at least two active theaters I can think of off the top of my head. One is the outdoor amphitheater (with lighting, curtain, etc) by the river with an attached indoor theater as well (http://www.hcaf.com), and on the other end of town they just built a very fancy, modern theater (http://caillouxtheater.com/)
You might look in to corporate sponsorship, Kerrville has leaned hard on the wealthy in their community to sponsor the arts. Your group might try getting in touch with their fund raising departments, or taking some city councilmembers out to lunch.
Teach them scripting, automation. Let them worry about full-fledged programs at a later point. My first foray in to programming was a bash script to sort all the files on my desktop in to folders to clean it up when I was 16 or so (also Visual Basic 6 had just been invented so my options were a lot more limited then, and the idea of free programming tutorials were laughable). Scripting is immediate and doesn't really require any intensive background to get it working.
Someone famously said that the distance between the platter and the read head is roughly equivilent to flying a 747 over Mt Everest with one inch to spare. It's not like joey and bubba can buy two pallets of platters, three pallets of drive cases, and a pallet of controller assemblies, a gallon of glue and assemble 20K drives in their garage over a weekend while burning through a pack of cigarettes. These aren't cuban sweat shop cigar factories, these devices are put together in enormous clean rooms with super tight tolerances.
Mostly legally, minus the whole "exceeding immigration quotas to the point that the british army had to turn away quite literally boatloads of immigrants at gunpoint from the dock :)
We lost our stealth-UAV 114 miles from the Iranian border. There's a lot of things within 150 miles of the border. Besides, launched from 55K feet, even with a crappy 12:1 glide ratio (a flying squirrel's is 2, modern sailplanes are 50+) you should have 150 miles of range (660k ft). Baghdad is 80 miles from the Iranian border, Tehran is 66 miles from the Caspian Sea. A balloon will travel 40-60mph once it gets above 100 feet or so.
Not to mention, you have an excellent view of the ground while you're gliding down, uninterrupted by the horizon.
With 15ft accuracy, you could land these things in the bushes of the garden or balcony of a head of state, who knows what conversations you can pick up from 100ft with modern technology.
Then CS and SE need national level organizations and professional licencing associations in every state like medical doctors, lawyers, architects and electrical engineers do. Because every time someone says "I'm a CS major" or "I'm a SE major" half the people (particularly the non-technical ones) mentally roll their eyes and think "computer programmer" or "web master".
Did you read a wikipedia article three months ago while half asleep, or is this some sort of elaborate troll? You're going to need to cite your theories. The Palestinians never migrated anywhere, they're the de-facto indiginous people of the region. If I said that the Aborigines migrated to Melbourne from Singapore after the British colonized Australia, my statement would be about as factual as yours. The Palestinians were part of the Ottoman empire and had inhabited the region for the last 1000+ years.
What on earth is this about "we'd rather not have [Israel] take over the middle east" -- the reason Israel is armed to the teeth is because the whole region rejects british imperialism and they would have pushed the jews back out long ago if they didn't have western backing (foreign aid + arms deals) to stay in the area. The jews were attacked as soon as they set foot in the region, this isn't a new thing, and they were aware they weren't wanted there. Go check out "The British Empire in Colour", there's some great original footage of jewish immigrants building forts on their newly settled land to protect themselves from the locals. It looks like something out of a British Colonists vs American Indians documentary. The Palestinians didn't want them there to begin with, and still don't want them there. The British were the ones with the bright idea to agree to displacing the locals and letting westerners colonize the area. Somehow the US got dragged in to it.
The more impressive trick is that it's way, way past it's total mission time, and was scheduled to come down around thanksgiving. It's now almost 2 months past it's original planned mission. And yeah, it did change it's orbit, back in May or so. Pretty much everyone wants to know what's going on in North Korea and Iran, and apparently you can photograph both from the orbit that Tiandong is in.
More info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 skip down to the operational history part.
[[citation needed]]
Everything they've been saying is that they have a right to defense (they do) and protect themselves. This is what India and Pakistan did, quietly, about 15 years ago. Now, they may have ulterior motives (they've stated before that they wouldn't mind turning Israel into a glass parking lot) but nuclear deterrence is something any nation* should strive for, and we're less than 20 years off from ICBMs being an off the shelf part/system that nearly every country will have. India and Pakistan have already demonstrated that the cat's out of the bag when it comes to nuclear proliferation. At this point we're only delaying the inevitable by 5-10 years, max.
*Nations, not radicals
As a US citizen you can still travel to Iran freely for business and tourism (for now). Technically they aren't an enemy (unless you buy the whole "Axis of Evil" rhetoric). The problem is that "we" don't want the Nuclear club getting any bigger, and when people say "would destabilize the region" they mean "Israel is likely to nuke Iran back to the stone age in a preemptive attack". This would cause several arab and muslim states to strongly consider nuking Israel, of note Iran and Pakistan. Syria doesn't have nukes but they wouldn't need a lot of convincing to start lobbing bombs across the border. It's a small region (think New Jersey) and they don't need to go very far.
If you look at the activity that's been going on lately, we sent an expensive spy drone over in to Iran, a missile research lab just outside of Tehran mysteriously exploded, and both the Chinese and the US both launched some high tech gadgetry in to space that orbits over Iran every few hours. Whatever they see down there must be pretty fucking juicy if we've talked the entire European continent to stop buying Iran's oil (1/5th of total current production) in the middle of a global recession.
So yeah, as always in this region there are a lot of things going on here -- Iran is a huge country (population 75 million, geographic size, wealth) with Nuclear ambitions, doesn't like Israel, and we don't want them getting the bomb. We are trying to protect Israel* via economic sanctions against Iran and stabilize the region, Iran is fighting for their ability to defend themselves and is holding the world's economy hostage.
*Why? This is the real question. Zionism sounds like a dirty word (it's not), but that's my guess
I think both locations experience -40 for long stretches of time (currently -14F at Amundsenâ"Scott station, South Pole... but it's the middle of summer there), and even though there's land under the airplane flying you to the station, I'm not sure that makes it easier to supply the station. In fact, it's cheaper to supply bases by boat (though the south pole station is inland by about 1300-2500miles, depending on who's counting). Internet access is going to be by Satellite/radio link as well, probably using whatever comm sattelite the south pole is (it's likely in a polar orbit). It's not like you can just subscribe to DSL or Cable internet in the Yukon :)
Generally, every major city ever built started off as a shantytown, which were progressively built, razed, and built again with better and better buildings over hundreds of years. This concept that the first buildings on a site must survive for 150+ years is a fairly recent one. Shanty towns don't cause poverty, they're what most people can realistically afford.
Our generation has half the buying power of our parents if you look at average pay vs cost of living from 30, 40 years ago. Average age of first home ownership, new car purchases are way up in the last 15 years. Also yes, California real estate prices are insane. Stay away from Texas please, we enjoy our $180,000, 2800 sq ft homes with a pool.
Most modern plays do suck(!). Straight guys don't like plays (I fall in to this category) but if you ask around you can find some good places that aren't too high brow.
:)
There's a great place a couple of blocks from my house called "The Pocket Sandwich Theater" wedged in to the corner of a strip mall, they've been there for something like 30 years. Their specialty is to serve food before hand, and drinks during the intermissions. They only do sidesplittingly funny plays, and the audience is encouraged to throw popcorn at the actors (who sometimes will retaliate). It sort of boils down to scripted slapstick improv, or the sort of thing you might see in a high school theater class. The halloween production last year was some mix of Pirates and Vampires, and the christmas production was some sort of Zombie of Christmas Past deal. Keep in mind that Shakespeare wrote for the common man, there's quite a bit of slapstick humor going on in those too, it's not all boring and high brow (Les Miserables), or flamboyantly broadway-ish (Cats).
Watching trash live implies that you will do something other than watch prerecorded trash when you get home. Play cards, paint, play tennis, post on slashdot -- pretty much anything is preferable to passive entertainment like TV. How thick is the dust on your boxed copy of the boardgame Risk?
Until very recently (1980, perhaps?) people regularly only took out a 15 year mortgage on homes - you only bought what you could realistically afford. The concept of being in debt for a full third of your adult life (or more!) to pay off your home is a fairly recent phenomenon, and with 30 year mortgages, that number jumps to 50% in most cases. You're in even worse shape if you buy your home after you turn 20.
For most of humanity's existence, homes were built by the community using locally sourced materials, and no long term debt was accrued. I'm here in Texas, and I'm pretty confident that there are no gypsum mines (drywall) within a 50 mile radius of this house. If you visit impoverished areas of the world, people live in watertight houses, generally cinderblock, but they're built one room at a time, as finances permit the purchase of additional materials. In other areas, it may be an adobe hut, slowly expanded, and then finally surrounded by a mud wall forming a courtyard. Unfortunately due to building codes (among other things) this isn't permitted except in the most rural of areas (areas settled along the Texas-Mexico border by immigrants being one exception) of the United States.
The problem is that a house should only take a week or two to build at most, with additions coming later as the family expands, and instead people are mortgaging their entire lives to live in a building that might have been envied by the british aristocracy 200-300 years ago, and then continue to live in giant McMansions long after their family grows up and moves out. Unfortunately we came up with the idea that everyone needs to own and live in a giant generational-sized house, but only have 1.9 children instead of a house within their means.
So what you're saying is that the real reason my office building's super won't fix the wild swings from hot to cold throughout the day is that it actually improves productivity (not counting the time I spend complaining about the temperature)?
The problem though, is that while your revolution won't be televised, the general population may see other revolutions on TV (or hear of them through various means) and get the idea that they need one of their own (see also: arab spring). The better solution is to just minimize TV usage as much as possible to avoid them getting the idea in the first place. It's no coincidence that college students with lots of time on their hands to debate international politics end up at anti-war protests a lot more than busy parents with newborn children, even though the parents have a lot more at stake to protest.
People will passively absorb whatever's on TV, but a much smaller slice of the population is actually going to wade through the national section of a newspaper every day to figure out if they're getting screwed over by their own government.