Comcast is a pro-big-government organization that receives lots of handouts from their friends in Congress and the local State Legislatures. You're not going to see any change in MSNBC's pro-big-government coverage. Corporations benefit from socialism
In many areas, including my own, Comcast holds the exclusive government-granted monopoly to supply cable television. In many areas they also hold a government-granted monopoly over internet, which means you might end-up like this guy (he lost his net for a year):
Never mind. I can't find the link. ----- But in brief, he was accused by Comcast in 2007 of "downloading too much data" and they turned-off his connection for a whole year. When he asked Comcast, "How much did I use?" they said they didn't know but he was in the top 10% of downloaders, therefore they have the right to turn off his connection without any warning. And no there's no appeals process.
You make the same mistake as those who equate Glenn Beck's or Sean Hannity's views with the views of Fox.
Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow are merely offering *their* opinions (leaning pro-big-government), not those of the network MSNBC. It says that in the credits if you ever bother to read them. Now if you had linked to this video instead, then you'd have a worthwhile point:
Nope. FCC rules require all local stations and "out of market but significantly-viewed" stations be provided free-of-charge in the basic cable package.
A year from now, maybe even sooner, you'll no longer be able to watch Comcast-NBC owned channels over the net.
Goodbye Bravo.com, USA.com, or Syfy.com episodes over the net. Goodbye MSNBC.com or CNBC.com streaming livefeeds. Or else if you can still stream, they'll lock it behind a subscriber wall: free for Comcast account holders and $2 per hour for the rest of us.
If ever a monopoly needed to be busted, Comcast is it. No more exclusive licenses to supply cable tv to neighborhoods. Let other competitors enter.
This is nothing new. I hear songs on the FM radio, and then I buy them on CD, and I'm amazed by how many extra details I hear on CD that didn't exist on the radio versions. I've noticed this particular phenomenon all the way back to 1990 when FM stations still played actual CDs. The source they used was good, but the frequency modulation stripped a lot of the quality.
Aside -
It's a shame AM Stereo never caught on. In its heyday, AM Stereo was as good as FM. Oh well.
>>>less dramatic than the uncompressed/lossy compression comparison.
Alright. Well let's say that a lossy compressed CD and DVD, with no loss in apparent quality, are 320 kbit/s and 5 Mbit/s respectively. And people are buying 128 kbit/s AAC files. The video equivalent would then be 2 Mbit/s, which people can stream in realtime over their internet connections.
I'm doing this now, where I watch streamed TV shows or movies rather than buy the disc. And I watch free cable television like FOX News or Discovery Channel rather than pay Comcast. What happened with music in the Dialup era (late-90s/early 2000s) is now reaching into the world of Hollywood too.
BTW the 250 gigabyte limit from Comcast is not about limited bandwidth. It's about stopping people like me from streaming free shows. They impose a limit to force me to "upgrade" to Pay TV.
>>>I wonder if this is the end of the golden age for Hollywood
More like the end of the silver age. The golden age ended circa 1950 when people could stay-at-home and watch entertainment on the TV, rather than drive to the theater. There was a lot of bankruptcy during this period, and even the mighty MGM succumbed. This was Hollywood's silver age.
And now people can watch entertainment on the net for virtually nothing, and whenever they feel like it. We are moving into Hollywood's bronze age where they will just barely hang-on, and become almost non-relevant. Kinda like Neaderthal during his last few years... out-competed by a newer, more flexible regime.
>>>(casette tapes overtook 8-tracks despite having arguably inferior sound)
(1) 8 tracks were still selling extremely well when the record companies *decided* having four formats (8track, record, cassette, and soon CD) was too many. So they simply stopped making the 8 tracks. It wasn't due to lack of interest.
(2) Cassettes are inferior to 8 tracks? Hardly. A chrome tape with Dolby B noise reduction, the standard used for commercial release, has a 20-20,000 hertz frequency response and 70 dB dynamic range. That's almost as good as CD, and no 8 track can touch it.
(3) I don't have the specs on 8 tracks but I know from personal experience that the playback speed changes depending on how "hard" you shove the cartridge into the player... that's really poor sound quality when your songs play at a variable rate.
When I saw The Lost World in 3D two years ago, it gave me a headache. The glasses distorted the image in an unpleasant, disorienting fashion. I decided I would never go see another 3D movie just because it was 3D.
Smart people only spend $20 on a game. So that's about $1-2 per hour of game. Very cheap.
BTW: I too like short games. Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube was criticized for "only" being ten hours, but I thought that was the perfect length for the dark story it told. If it had been longer I would have lost interest (as happened with Zelda Wind Waker), and labeled it "stretched" or "padded"
Gotta disagree. Songs have gone from 1400 kbit/s CD songs to 128 kbit/s AAC songs.
If movies underwent a similar downgrade in quality, instead of ~5 Mbit/s DVD movies you would have 0.45 Mbit/s streaming videos that people could watch in realtime on their computers, televisions, or iPods. We are now seeing that transition where people download their favorite shows or movies rather than drive to Walmart and buy the media.
It had nothing to do with Hollywood or Bluray, but because until recently people didn't have the minimu 0.5 Mbit/s connections. Now they do.
>>>And how well did that work for your last corrupted text file?
Extremely well. I read all 7 Harry Potter books using a corrupted OCR scan. From time to time the words might read "Harry Rotter pinted his wand at the eneny," but I still understood what it was supposed to be. My brain filtered-out the errors. That corrupted version is better than the computer saying, "I give up" and displaying nothing at all. .
>>>Say a random bit is missed and the whole file ends up shifted one to the left, how does the computer know that the combinations of pixel values it is displaying should start one bit out of sync so that the still existing data "looks" good? >>>
In the case of an image, it could shift the whole thing one bit to the left which results in a distorted but still-viewable photo. In the case of music, one missed bit won't even be noticed.
Another idea is to take a page from the analog world. When the analog television video became weak, rather than display nothing, the image would render in a reduced resolution (i.e. blurred). The same idea could be applied to digital television where a corrupted 1920x1080 image, if half the bits are missing, could be rendered at 960x540 instead. I've heard that European DTV has that capability built-in.
>>>- If the server is abroad, the Anti-Piracy comission will ask THE SPANISH ISPs to BLOCK ACCESS
And then the blocked websites will bring a lawsuit against Spain (Rapidshare v. Spain) in an EU court for violations of the Lisbon Treaty and Charter of Rights. The EU justices will rule against Spain's law and strike it down. At least that's how it would work here in the US
>>>The SGAE is nothing new, they're the usual corrupt mafia-like organization that you'd expect. They're just trying to screw over both consumers and artists as much as they can. They'd love to have it both ways (making downloads illegal and keeping the levies). >>>
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
The world would be a better place if the CEOs of SGAE, RIAA, MPAA, CRIA, and so on were executed by a mob of citizens. I guarantee you'd have a hard time finding a new CEO to replace the dead one. Scare the suits into submission.
>>>using nothing more than a POTS land line. No need for backbones nor ISP middlemen who could be coerced by law to implement all kinds of restrictive or surveillance measures.
Not quite true. Back in the BBS days my local telephone company (Bell; now Verizon) tried to charge me a "modem surcharge" or else have my phone disconnected. There has always been a middleman.
A lot of the world is also *against* you as I discovered after I walked in a Tea Party protest. I thought it was common sense - The current national debt is $120,000 per home, projected to be $200,000 by 2016, and yet the Congress is still spending money like mad. It needs to stop.
But no. Instead I was called an "astroturfer" which is wrong because I don't get paid. Then I was labeled a "racist" but that's also not true; and frankly insulting. Even if Hillary was president or McCain president, I'd still protest because I see us spending ourselves into a hole that we'll never escape. Common sense position? Apparently not; some Americans want the debt to climb to ~$200,000 per home.
"More of the world is with you than you think," is only half the story. A lot of the world is against you, and they want MORE government control, not less They want censorship. They want the Patriot Act. They want more spending.
Revoke the copy right. It isn't a right; it's a privilege which has been abused. Revoke that privilege.
Replace it with a *temporary* monopolistic *license* granted to the original author for 14 years. When that 14 years is up, the author will either have to get off his fat ass & write a new book/song/movie, or else get a job at Walmart like the rest of us normal citizens do.
For corporate "authors" this means they will no longer be able to sell $40 boxsets of old movies (example: Gone with the Wind) that were created by now-dead people. The corporations will have to innovate or die (as it should be).
>>>the majority of new internet technologies and sites are controlled by a smaller number of huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. What's your hompage right now, and how do you find your way to sites?
Slashdot Mirror
>>>the republicans..... turn MSNBC into FOX2
Comcast is a pro-big-government organization that receives lots of handouts from their friends in Congress and the local State Legislatures. You're not going to see any change in MSNBC's pro-big-government coverage. Corporations benefit from socialism
In many areas, including my own, Comcast holds the exclusive government-granted monopoly to supply cable television. In many areas they also hold a government-granted monopoly over internet, which means you might end-up like this guy (he lost his net for a year):
Never mind. I can't find the link. ----- But in brief, he was accused by Comcast in 2007 of "downloading too much data" and they turned-off his connection for a whole year. When he asked Comcast, "How much did I use?" they said they didn't know but he was in the top 10% of downloaders, therefore they have the right to turn off his connection without any warning. And no there's no appeals process.
Monopoly.
You make the same mistake as those who equate Glenn Beck's or Sean Hannity's views with the views of Fox.
Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow are merely offering *their* opinions (leaning pro-big-government), not those of the network MSNBC. It says that in the credits if you ever bother to read them. Now if you had linked to this video instead, then you'd have a worthwhile point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu6cHrU4L4E
Was that NBC, or just your local station demanding more money?
Also can't you get the station for free with an antenna?
Dear Comcast,
I'm moving to ABC.
signed,
Mr.Leno
I would have enjoyed that TV show a lot more if all the actors went topless
Nope. FCC rules require all local stations and "out of market but significantly-viewed" stations be provided free-of-charge in the basic cable package.
A year from now, maybe even sooner, you'll no longer be able to watch Comcast-NBC owned channels over the net.
Goodbye Bravo.com, USA.com, or Syfy.com episodes over the net. Goodbye MSNBC.com or CNBC.com streaming livefeeds. Or else if you can still stream, they'll lock it behind a subscriber wall: free for Comcast account holders and $2 per hour for the rest of us.
If ever a monopoly needed to be busted, Comcast is it. No more exclusive licenses to supply cable tv to neighborhoods. Let other competitors enter.
This is nothing new. I hear songs on the FM radio, and then I buy them on CD, and I'm amazed by how many extra details I hear on CD that didn't exist on the radio versions. I've noticed this particular phenomenon all the way back to 1990 when FM stations still played actual CDs. The source they used was good, but the frequency modulation stripped a lot of the quality.
Aside -
It's a shame AM Stereo never caught on. In its heyday, AM Stereo was as good as FM. Oh well.
>>>less dramatic than the uncompressed/lossy compression comparison.
Alright. Well let's say that a lossy compressed CD and DVD, with no loss in apparent quality, are 320 kbit/s and 5 Mbit/s respectively. And people are buying 128 kbit/s AAC files. The video equivalent would then be 2 Mbit/s, which people can stream in realtime over their internet connections.
I'm doing this now, where I watch streamed TV shows or movies rather than buy the disc. And I watch free cable television like FOX News or Discovery Channel rather than pay Comcast. What happened with music in the Dialup era (late-90s/early 2000s) is now reaching into the world of Hollywood too.
BTW the 250 gigabyte limit from Comcast is not about limited bandwidth.
It's about stopping people like me from streaming free shows.
They impose a limit to force me to "upgrade" to Pay TV.
>>>I wonder if this is the end of the golden age for Hollywood
More like the end of the silver age. The golden age ended circa 1950 when people could stay-at-home and watch entertainment on the TV, rather than drive to the theater. There was a lot of bankruptcy during this period, and even the mighty MGM succumbed. This was Hollywood's silver age.
And now people can watch entertainment on the net for virtually nothing, and whenever they feel like it. We are moving into Hollywood's bronze age where they will just barely hang-on, and become almost non-relevant. Kinda like Neaderthal during his last few years... out-competed by a newer, more flexible regime.
Move #7 to #3, otherwise theaters will go out of business. People will buy the cheap VCD, see the movie, and then not bother going to the theater.
>>>(casette tapes overtook 8-tracks despite having arguably inferior sound)
(1) 8 tracks were still selling extremely well when the record companies *decided* having four formats (8track, record, cassette, and soon CD) was too many. So they simply stopped making the 8 tracks. It wasn't due to lack of interest.
(2) Cassettes are inferior to 8 tracks? Hardly. A chrome tape with Dolby B noise reduction, the standard used for commercial release, has a 20-20,000 hertz frequency response and 70 dB dynamic range. That's almost as good as CD, and no 8 track can touch it.
(3) I don't have the specs on 8 tracks but I know from personal experience that the playback speed changes depending on how "hard" you shove the cartridge into the player... that's really poor sound quality when your songs play at a variable rate.
When I saw The Lost World in 3D two years ago, it gave me a headache. The glasses distorted the image in an unpleasant, disorienting fashion. I decided I would never go see another 3D movie just because it was 3D.
Smart people only spend $20 on a game. So that's about $1-2 per hour of game. Very cheap.
BTW: I too like short games. Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube was criticized for "only" being ten hours, but I thought that was the perfect length for the dark story it told. If it had been longer I would have lost interest (as happened with Zelda Wind Waker), and labeled it "stretched" or "padded"
>>>to hear Kevin Spacey say, "I killed him." under his breath
And I watch Kevin Spacey's other movie over-and-over just so I can see him disrobe the hot cheerleader. Ahhhhh 16-year-old perfection.
(mutters)
I'm going straight to hell
Gotta disagree. Songs have gone from 1400 kbit/s CD songs to 128 kbit/s AAC songs.
If movies underwent a similar downgrade in quality, instead of ~5 Mbit/s DVD movies you would have 0.45 Mbit/s streaming videos that people could watch in realtime on their computers, televisions, or iPods. We are now seeing that transition where people download their favorite shows or movies rather than drive to Walmart and buy the media.
It had nothing to do with Hollywood or Bluray, but because until recently people didn't have the minimu 0.5 Mbit/s connections. Now they do.
Hmmm. My DVD player just displays a blue screen when it encounters a corrupt MPEG-2 stream
>>>And how well did that work for your last corrupted text file?
Extremely well. I read all 7 Harry Potter books using a corrupted OCR scan. From time to time the words might read "Harry Rotter pinted his wand at the eneny," but I still understood what it was supposed to be. My brain filtered-out the errors. That corrupted version is better than the computer saying, "I give up" and displaying nothing at all.
.
>>>Say a random bit is missed and the whole file ends up shifted one to the left, how does the computer know that the combinations of pixel values it is displaying should start one bit out of sync so that the still existing data "looks" good?
>>>
In the case of an image, it could shift the whole thing one bit to the left which results in a distorted but still-viewable photo. In the case of music, one missed bit won't even be noticed.
Another idea is to take a page from the analog world. When the analog television video became weak, rather than display nothing, the image would render in a reduced resolution (i.e. blurred). The same idea could be applied to digital television where a corrupted 1920x1080 image, if half the bits are missing, could be rendered at 960x540 instead. I've heard that European DTV has that capability built-in.
>>>- If the server is abroad, the Anti-Piracy comission will ask THE SPANISH ISPs to BLOCK ACCESS
And then the blocked websites will bring a lawsuit against Spain (Rapidshare v. Spain) in an EU court for violations of the Lisbon Treaty and Charter of Rights. The EU justices will rule against Spain's law and strike it down. At least that's how it would work here in the US
>>>The SGAE is nothing new, they're the usual corrupt mafia-like organization that you'd expect. They're just trying to screw over both consumers and artists as much as they can. They'd love to have it both ways (making downloads illegal and keeping the levies).
>>>
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
The world would be a better place if the CEOs of SGAE, RIAA, MPAA, CRIA, and so on were executed by a mob of citizens. I guarantee you'd have a hard time finding a new CEO to replace the dead one. Scare the suits into submission.
>>>using nothing more than a POTS land line. No need for backbones nor ISP middlemen who could be coerced by law to implement all kinds of restrictive or surveillance measures.
Not quite true. Back in the BBS days my local telephone company (Bell; now Verizon) tried to charge me a "modem surcharge" or else have my phone disconnected. There has always been a middleman.
A lot of the world is also *against* you as I discovered after I walked in a Tea Party protest. I thought it was common sense - The current national debt is $120,000 per home, projected to be $200,000 by 2016, and yet the Congress is still spending money like mad. It needs to stop.
But no. Instead I was called an "astroturfer" which is wrong because I don't get paid. Then I was labeled a "racist" but that's also not true; and frankly insulting. Even if Hillary was president or McCain president, I'd still protest because I see us spending ourselves into a hole that we'll never escape. Common sense position? Apparently not; some Americans want the debt to climb to ~$200,000 per home.
"More of the world is with you than you think," is only half the story.
A lot of the world is against you, and they want MORE government control, not less
They want censorship. They want the Patriot Act. They want more spending.
Revoke the copy right. It isn't a right; it's a privilege which has been abused. Revoke that privilege.
Replace it with a *temporary* monopolistic *license* granted to the original author for 14 years. When that 14 years is up, the author will either have to get off his fat ass & write a new book/song/movie, or else get a job at Walmart like the rest of us normal citizens do.
For corporate "authors" this means they will no longer be able to sell $40 boxsets of old movies (example: Gone with the Wind) that were created by now-dead people. The corporations will have to innovate or die (as it should be).
>>>the majority of new internet technologies and sites are controlled by a smaller number of huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. What's your hompage right now, and how do you find your way to sites?
My home page is blank.