It's for the children. Reducing volume on commercials stops corporations from brain-washing our children into buying sexist Barbie dolls and fake cigarettes!
"Well golly. I hadn't thought of that. You got my vote! You really care for the people. And my kids." - Joe or Jill High School Graduate
>>>the #STRING will still find some way to fuck it up.
where #STRING alternates between "Democrats" and "Republicans". Stop wasting your vote on the same D or R screwage. Vote third party. Even if you lose you can brag, "Well I didn't vote for either asshole. Can't blame me."
Please tell your colleagues that the best music uses all or most of a CD's 80 dB volume range, not just the top 5 dB (i.e. avoids volume compression). If your bosses are wondering why CD sales are dropping, it's because there's little point buying a CD that sounds like it was mastered from a 128k MP3 file. Make the CD sound better than an MP3, and we'll buy it. IMHO. A Fan.
>>>different volumes could be selected for different situations.
Well since nobody's invented what I will call "consumer-variable sound adjustment", I devised a different solution: I just mute everything (except scifi which has cool AFX) and read the subtitles to follow the dialogue, while listening to the commercial-free radio in the background.
>>>the same spot could play louder during Footday Night Monball than during CSI,
(1) So what?
(2) I think you might have that backwards. The music in CSI and other dramas is often louder than the sports games. Sure when a crowd cheers football gets loud, but the overall average volume is quieter. (IMHO) .
>>>What will the Senate do next, vote to reduce gravity, so overweight people can get around more easily?
I thought they were planning to outlaw any car older than 2005, in order to stimulate the purchase of new cars - a kind of Cash for Clunkers Megadrive. Or maybe that was the plan to smash windows to provide job for glaziers? I don't know. I get easily distra..... oooo beach volleyball in TV! So bouncy. And fit.:-D
>>>2 stations 50 miles apart will NOT be given the same channel.
Even 2 stations 100 miles apart will not be given the same channel. And that's the problem here in the Midatlantic and Northeast. Because all the cities are so close together, every channel from 2 through 51 is occupied by a station with no room for new TV programs, or TV Band/whitespace Devices. (See my list of call latters below.)
Oh it's also worth noting that this area is labeled the "Canadian border zone" by the FCC. That shorthand means the stations must cooperate with Canada, otherwise their stations could interfere with our stations, and vice-versa.
In my experience the only hotels that give away "free" anything, also cost over $50 a night so they aren't really providing free service - it's included in the high rate.
I typically stay at the budget hotels that are $30 or less, and they charge for the extras like internet or long distance calls or laundry. Example: Last Motel 6 I stayed wanted to charge $3/day or $90/month. Now there was one place I stayed that gave me free Cable internet ($10 extra per week), but then the manager got fired for doing that. The new manager tried to charge me retroactively but I got angry so he let me continue on the freebie plan.
In any case free internet is not usual. They provide a free hookup for 56k (the phone line) and that's it.
>>>>>I'm one of those AOL subscribers >> >>This explains... so much.
HAHA. Funny.;-) But seriously: When I'm on business travel and stuck in hotels, I don't have access to my home's hghspeed internet. So instead I use my laptop to connect to AOL's Netscape Dialup. It works well and only costs $7/month. Plus it includes test/html/image compression so a webpage loads just as fast as 500k DSL (about 10 seconds).
Good grief. What a pain in the ass. Fine! Here's a quick list that I will type off in a hurry, and if I make any typos, too bad. OH AND WHY is it that you keep posting as anonymous coward instead of using your actual user ID? Protecting your karma I suppose.
37 - reserved to radioastronomy 19/20 - reserved to police/emergency radio 2-13 - unusable by TV Band/whitespace devices but the stations currently occupying this band include: wzpa, wiav, wpvi, wjla, wwjt, wgal, wbph, whtm, wbal/wbre (overlapping stations), whyy, wyou, wjz
14-51 (notice there are no open channels for using TVBDs) wtsd/ wfdc/ wmjf/ wphl/ w18bc/ whp/ wboc/ wnjs/ wlyh/ w24cs/ wpsj/ wtve/ wgtw/ kyw/ wfpa/ wuvp/ wmpb/ wgcb/ wppx/ wpsg/ wzpa/ wcau/ wpxw/ wybe/ wttg/ wdca/ witf/ wmar/ wpha/ wlvt/ wnuv/ w40az/ wutb/ wnai/ wvia/ wtxf/ wpmt/ wmcn/ wolf/ well/ wbff/ wfmz/ wpmt/ wgal/ wnep/ wdcw/ wgal(repeater)
>>>They seem to think they can reallocate spectrum today
They're wrong. As the press release says, "Make available 500 MHz of Federal and commercial spectrum over the next 10 years to foster investment". i.e. Not immediately. In order to sell off "unused digital TV spectrum", they FIRST have to remove the TV stations from channels 26-51 and reassign them someplace else. That process will take about ten years +/- a year or two.
Remember it took 12 years to move from analog to digital. These transitions don't happen overnight. Neither will this "squeezing" of TV from 50 downto 25 channels.
>>>Based on the DMA listings, there are no markets with 48 broadcasters.
Well except for the market where I live - DC, Baltimore, York, and Philadelphia which were divided into 4 pieces by Nielsen, but are really the same place (I can see all four).
9 isn't open - that was a typo. But even if it was open, TV band/whitespace devices can't use the VHF Band. Channel 1 was assigned to police radio in the 1940s. Channel 52 and up were sold off in 2008 to ATT, Verizon, and others for cellphones.
>>>I recently flew from California to the midwest and drove back. The flight took 6 hours, including a layover in Minneapolis. I drove back - that took 3 days, driving 14 hours/day.
And what did I say in my original post? "The car is faster unless the trip is extremely long (requiring more than 1 day's drive)."
Another anecdote: When I was living in Frederick Virginia and commuting to southern DC, a lot of my coworkers used the train. I then asked my boss how long his trip was, an he admitted he left his home at 6:00am, walked to the metro, and did not arrive at work until 7:30. In contrast I left at 6am and arrived at 6:45. AGAIN the car trip was faster.
Only in close states like Pennsylvania or Ohio will voting third party affect an election.
In states like Maryland that turns-out ~70% democrat in every president election, there's no way a Libertarian or Green could affect the outcome. Of course in that case there's no point voting Republican either. Might as well cast your vote for the third party.
>>>Somehow we need to put a stop to this practice of appointing "Czars". Anyone who can't pass muster with the Senate shouldn't be calling shots in the Executive Branch. >>>
Remember when I said Executive Orders should be unconstitutional? That includes executive orders from czars. It is Congresses' job to make laws, not the executive branch (which merely executes laws). Furthermore the whole of the US government, which includes all three branches, is forbidden from exercising powers never granted to it per the 10th Amendment. That is not just an optional piece of wording - it's the Law - ruling above even the president.
You want to put a stop to "czars"? Make the 10th Amendment supreme. Make "the appointing of czars" a reserved power of the States, never granted to the US. While Congress was given the power to regulate products on the internet (interstate commerce), nobody in the executive branch ever was.
>>>I voted for Obama based on my belief that he would make better decisions than McCain. We tend to forget that the election was not a yea or nay vote for Obama. It was a contest between two contenders. >>>
No it wasn't. There were MANY choices among the Democrats and Republicans during the primaries. For example you (the american people) could have picked Hillary instead. Or Ron Paul (best choice for president then and now). Or Rudy Giuliani or the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (who I think was better than McCain).
Or maybe vote Libertarian. Even if you you think that's a throw-away vote you could at least say, like me, "I haven't voted for Gore or Bush or Kerry or McCain or Obama. Don't blame me."
>>>Under President Bush, assassinations by Hellfire missile in crowded city streets was standard practice.
How on earth is this modded +1 insightful? I don't recall Bush sending any Hellfires down the streets of Baltimore or Richmond..... or ordering the assassination of US citizens abroad. I'm aware of ONE case where he held a US citizen without trial at Gitmo, but the american was let go. He was not assassinated.
>>>Chinese online stores that sell counterfeit Viagra are not part of the solution.
But what if the online store is run by a licensed doctor, is located in California, and the Viagra he's selling real? Why should the US Government cut me off from this source of cheap pills? Why squash the freedom of choice consumers enjoy in an Open source market?
>>>"White House's IP Czar...start voluntarily blocking access to sites"
You see what happens when you don't pay attention? I spend the summer playing videogames and watching movies, and while I'm distracted President George Duh Bush comes back to office. Jeez. I thought we go rid of that joker and his-anti free speech ways.
Anonymous Coward said: Why not just link to the 45 other places you've posted the list?..... You know what? I hope they do take away your fucking TV. I hope you turn it on one day, and nothing is there. I hope you sit there and stare at a blank screen (not even snow to look at - they took that from you too already, didn't they?). I smile as I think of your simple whimpering as you paw in futility at the TV. Your only friend...gone...gone... Gone.
Ignoring the little teeny-bopper temper tantrum, and going back to the first question:
Why? Is slashdot experiencing a shortage of bits, such that I can't *retype from scratch* the same list that I posted two weeks ago? NO. There are probably a lot of people who never saw the original list, so I posted it for THEIR benefit, not yours.
>>>No you should tether your phone to your laptop and get 700k+ service that way.
Cellphone I assume? Well it's because my cellphone costs me $0.00 plus whatever calls I make (almost none). The cheapest dataplan I've ever seen costs about $500/year. Why on earth would I want to increase my bill by that much? Nah. I'll stick with the $7 dialup, which I don't use that much anyway (just hotels).
Besides dialup is kinda fun. Whenever I hear that doo-dee-doo-dah followed by the "skreee" it reminds me of my youth, and early experiments with Ataris and Commodores online. --- Okay I'm just joking.;-)
Wow. An Anonymous Coward actually said something insightful. BTW V.92 is the same as the old V.90 56k standard most of us used in the late 90s, but it added some new features. Like increased speed. 56/48k instead of the old 56/33k.
Uuuugh. The ignorance, it burns.
Much of the issue with slow page loading on modems comes latency, and the problem that causes with the 100s of TCP connections and sometimes dozens of DNS lookups required to fully pull down a page.. It's a lot of setup and teardown and a lot of overhead. If you're able to do all that on the server side with nice fat pipe and then pack it in to a nice optimized compressed stream (while piling on some extra lossy compression for images too), then yes web page viewing on a modem is perfectly bearable.
Like V.92, you don't hear about it much because it didn't become available until the broadband revolution really took off
>>>Hmmm! is the image compression programmable? I'm thinking in terms of 0.1% of the original size.
That would be cool. And yes it is programmable, but the only "allowed" settings in AOL/netscape's software are 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50%. Oh and 100% (i.e. no image compression). At 10% most images are already shrunk to 1K, so you wouldn't gain much additional benefit anyway. What you probably need is something like Opera Browser which only loads images if you click on them.
It's always interesting visiting a porn site with the image compression turned on. It make the girls look like "paint by number" drawings instead of photographs.
>>>the FCC recommended holding a kind of auction to sell off unused digital TV spectrum
Already done as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The FCC sold off (actually rented) unused channels (52 through 69) for a couple million dollars to ATT, Verizon, and other major megacorps. They took possession of the space on June 13 2009. The FCC also reserved some of the space for Police/Fire/Emergency radio.
The National Broadband Plan discusses removing channels 25 and up, but that won't happen until after we have *another* transition from MPEG2 to MPEG4 converter boxes. i.e. Circa 2020.
There's always some kind of transition going on. - Like when Macs moved from 68000 series to PowerPC. - Or when IBM PCs moved from 16 to 32 bit. - Or when AM Radio moved to AM Stereo (and now: AM HD). - And from Year 99 dates to Year 2000 dates.
The changeover can be complicated but it usually works out okay. I bet IPv4 to IPv6 will barely be noticed by the average user.
Slashdot Mirror
It's for the children. Reducing volume on commercials stops corporations from brain-washing our children into buying sexist Barbie dolls and fake cigarettes!
"Well golly. I hadn't thought of that. You got my vote! You really care for the people. And my kids." - Joe or Jill High School Graduate
>>>the #STRING will still find some way to fuck it up.
where #STRING alternates between "Democrats" and "Republicans". Stop wasting your vote on the same D or R screwage. Vote third party. Even if you lose you can brag, "Well I didn't vote for either asshole. Can't blame me."
>>>I have to master audio
Please tell your colleagues that the best music uses all or most of a CD's 80 dB volume range, not just the top 5 dB (i.e. avoids volume compression). If your bosses are wondering why CD sales are dropping, it's because there's little point buying a CD that sounds like it was mastered from a 128k MP3 file. Make the CD sound better than an MP3, and we'll buy it. IMHO. A Fan.
>>>different volumes could be selected for different situations.
Well since nobody's invented what I will call "consumer-variable sound adjustment", I devised a different solution: I just mute everything (except scifi which has cool AFX) and read the subtitles to follow the dialogue, while listening to the commercial-free radio in the background.
>>>the same spot could play louder during Footday Night Monball than during CSI,
(1) So what?
(2) I think you might have that backwards. The music in CSI and other dramas is often louder than the sports games. Sure when a crowd cheers football gets loud, but the overall average volume is quieter. (IMHO)
.
>>>What will the Senate do next, vote to reduce gravity, so overweight people can get around more easily?
I thought they were planning to outlaw any car older than 2005, in order to stimulate the purchase of new cars - a kind of Cash for Clunkers Megadrive. Or maybe that was the plan to smash windows to provide job for glaziers? I don't know. I get easily distra..... oooo beach volleyball in TV! So bouncy. And fit. :-D
>>>2 stations 50 miles apart will NOT be given the same channel.
Even 2 stations 100 miles apart will not be given the same channel. And that's the problem here in the Midatlantic and Northeast. Because all the cities are so close together, every channel from 2 through 51 is occupied by a station with no room for new TV programs, or TV Band/whitespace Devices. (See my list of call latters below.)
Oh it's also worth noting that this area is labeled the "Canadian border zone" by the FCC. That shorthand means the stations must cooperate with Canada, otherwise their stations could interfere with our stations, and vice-versa.
In my experience the only hotels that give away "free" anything, also cost over $50 a night so they aren't really providing free service - it's included in the high rate.
I typically stay at the budget hotels that are $30 or less, and they charge for the extras like internet or long distance calls or laundry. Example: Last Motel 6 I stayed wanted to charge $3/day or $90/month. Now there was one place I stayed that gave me free Cable internet ($10 extra per week), but then the manager got fired for doing that. The new manager tried to charge me retroactively but I got angry so he let me continue on the freebie plan.
In any case free internet is not usual. They provide a free hookup for 56k (the phone line) and that's it.
>>>>>I'm one of those AOL subscribers
>>
>>This explains... so much.
HAHA. Funny. ;-) But seriously: When I'm on business travel and stuck in hotels, I don't have access to my home's hghspeed internet. So instead I use my laptop to connect to AOL's Netscape Dialup. It works well and only costs $7/month. Plus it includes test/html/image compression so a webpage loads just as fast as 500k DSL (about 10 seconds).
L8r
>>>include the call signs of those 48 stations.
Good grief. What a pain in the ass. Fine! Here's a quick list that I will type off in a hurry, and if I make any typos, too bad. OH AND WHY is it that you keep posting as anonymous coward instead of using your actual user ID? Protecting your karma I suppose.
37 - reserved to radioastronomy
19/20 - reserved to police/emergency radio
2-13 - unusable by TV Band/whitespace devices but the stations currently occupying this band include: wzpa, wiav, wpvi, wjla, wwjt, wgal, wbph, whtm, wbal/wbre (overlapping stations), whyy, wyou, wjz
14-51 (notice there are no open channels for using TVBDs)
wtsd/
wfdc/
wmjf/
wphl/
w18bc/
whp/
wboc/
wnjs/
wlyh/
w24cs/
wpsj/
wtve/
wgtw/
kyw/
wfpa/
wuvp/
wmpb/
wgcb/
wppx/
wpsg/
wzpa/
wcau/
wpxw/
wybe/
wttg/
wdca/
witf/
wmar/
wpha/
wlvt/
wnuv/
w40az/
wutb/
wnai/
wvia/
wtxf/
wpmt/
wmcn/
wolf/
well/
wbff/
wfmz/
wpmt/
wgal/
wnep/
wdcw/
wgal(repeater)
>>>They seem to think they can reallocate spectrum today
They're wrong. As the press release says, "Make available 500 MHz of Federal and commercial spectrum over the next 10 years to foster investment". i.e. Not immediately. In order to sell off "unused digital TV spectrum", they FIRST have to remove the TV stations from channels 26-51 and reassign them someplace else. That process will take about ten years +/- a year or two.
Remember it took 12 years to move from analog to digital. These transitions don't happen overnight. Neither will this "squeezing" of TV from 50 downto 25 channels.
>>>Based on the DMA listings, there are no markets with 48 broadcasters.
Well except for the market where I live - DC, Baltimore, York, and Philadelphia which were divided into 4 pieces by Nielsen, but are really the same place (I can see all four).
9 isn't open - that was a typo. But even if it was open, TV band/whitespace devices can't use the VHF Band. Channel 1 was assigned to police radio in the 1940s. Channel 52 and up were sold off in 2008 to ATT, Verizon, and others for cellphones.
>>>I recently flew from California to the midwest and drove back. The flight took 6 hours, including a layover in Minneapolis. I drove back - that took 3 days, driving 14 hours/day.
And what did I say in my original post?
"The car is faster unless the trip is extremely long (requiring more than 1 day's drive)."
Another anecdote: When I was living in Frederick Virginia and commuting to southern DC, a lot of my coworkers used the train. I then asked my boss how long his trip was, an he admitted he left his home at 6:00am, walked to the metro, and did not arrive at work until 7:30. In contrast I left at 6am and arrived at 6:45. AGAIN the car trip was faster.
Only in close states like Pennsylvania or Ohio will voting third party affect an election.
In states like Maryland that turns-out ~70% democrat in every president election, there's no way a Libertarian or Green could affect the outcome. Of course in that case there's no point voting Republican either. Might as well cast your vote for the third party.
>>>Somehow we need to put a stop to this practice of appointing "Czars". Anyone who can't pass muster with the Senate shouldn't be calling shots in the Executive Branch.
>>>
Remember when I said Executive Orders should be unconstitutional? That includes executive orders from czars. It is Congresses' job to make laws, not the executive branch (which merely executes laws). Furthermore the whole of the US government, which includes all three branches, is forbidden from exercising powers never granted to it per the 10th Amendment. That is not just an optional piece of wording - it's the Law - ruling above even the president.
You want to put a stop to "czars"? Make the 10th Amendment supreme. Make "the appointing of czars" a reserved power of the States, never granted to the US. While Congress was given the power to regulate products on the internet (interstate commerce), nobody in the executive branch ever was.
>>>I voted for Obama based on my belief that he would make better decisions than McCain. We tend to forget that the election was not a yea or nay vote for Obama. It was a contest between two contenders.
>>>
No it wasn't. There were MANY choices among the Democrats and Republicans during the primaries. For example you (the american people) could have picked Hillary instead. Or Ron Paul (best choice for president then and now). Or Rudy Giuliani or the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (who I think was better than McCain).
Or maybe vote Libertarian. Even if you you think that's a throw-away vote you could at least say, like me, "I haven't voted for Gore or Bush or Kerry or McCain or Obama. Don't blame me."
>>>Under President Bush, assassinations by Hellfire missile in crowded city streets was standard practice.
How on earth is this modded +1 insightful? I don't recall Bush sending any Hellfires down the streets of Baltimore or Richmond..... or ordering the assassination of US citizens abroad. I'm aware of ONE case where he held a US citizen without trial at Gitmo, but the american was let go. He was not assassinated.
>>>Chinese online stores that sell counterfeit Viagra are not part of the solution.
But what if the online store is run by a licensed doctor, is located in California, and the Viagra he's selling real? Why should the US Government cut me off from this source of cheap pills? Why squash the freedom of choice consumers enjoy in an Open source market?
>>>"White House's IP Czar...start voluntarily blocking access to sites"
You see what happens when you don't pay attention? I spend the summer playing videogames and watching movies, and while I'm distracted President George Duh Bush comes back to office. Jeez. I thought we go rid of that joker and his-anti free speech ways.
Anonymous Coward said: ..... You know what? I hope they do take away your fucking TV. I hope you turn it on one day, and nothing is there. I hope you sit there and stare at a blank screen (not even snow to look at - they took that from you too already, didn't they?). I smile as I think of your simple whimpering as you paw in futility at the TV. Your only friend...gone...gone... Gone.
Why not just link to the 45 other places you've posted the list?
Ignoring the little teeny-bopper temper tantrum, and going back to the first question:
Why? Is slashdot experiencing a shortage of bits, such that I can't *retype from scratch* the same list that I posted two weeks ago? NO. There are probably a lot of people who never saw the original list, so I posted it for THEIR benefit, not yours.
>>>No you should tether your phone to your laptop and get 700k+ service that way.
Cellphone I assume? Well it's because my cellphone costs me $0.00 plus whatever calls I make (almost none). The cheapest dataplan I've ever seen costs about $500/year. Why on earth would I want to increase my bill by that much? Nah. I'll stick with the $7 dialup, which I don't use that much anyway (just hotels).
Besides dialup is kinda fun. Whenever I hear that doo-dee-doo-dah followed by the "skreee" it reminds me of my youth, and early experiments with Ataris and Commodores online. --- Okay I'm just joking. ;-)
Wow. An Anonymous Coward actually said something insightful. BTW V.92 is the same as the old V.90 56k standard most of us used in the late 90s, but it added some new features. Like increased speed. 56/48k instead of the old 56/33k.
Uuuugh. The ignorance, it burns.
Much of the issue with slow page loading on modems comes latency, and the problem that causes with the 100s of TCP connections and sometimes dozens of DNS lookups required to fully pull down a page.. It's a lot of setup and teardown and a lot of overhead. If you're able to do all that on the server side with nice fat pipe and then pack it in to a nice optimized compressed stream (while piling on some extra lossy compression for images too), then yes web page viewing on a modem is perfectly bearable.
Like V.92, you don't hear about it much because it didn't become available until the broadband revolution really took off
>>>Hmmm! is the image compression programmable? I'm thinking in terms of 0.1% of the original size.
That would be cool. And yes it is programmable, but the only "allowed" settings in AOL/netscape's software are 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50%. Oh and 100% (i.e. no image compression). At 10% most images are already shrunk to 1K, so you wouldn't gain much additional benefit anyway. What you probably need is something like Opera Browser which only loads images if you click on them.
It's always interesting visiting a porn site with the image compression turned on.
It make the girls look like "paint by number" drawings instead of photographs.
>>>the FCC recommended holding a kind of auction to sell off unused digital TV spectrum
Already done as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The FCC sold off (actually rented) unused channels (52 through 69) for a couple million dollars to ATT, Verizon, and other major megacorps. They took possession of the space on June 13 2009. The FCC also reserved some of the space for Police/Fire/Emergency radio.
The National Broadband Plan discusses removing channels 25 and up, but that won't happen until after we have *another* transition from MPEG2 to MPEG4 converter boxes. i.e. Circa 2020.
There's always some kind of transition going on.
- Like when Macs moved from 68000 series to PowerPC.
- Or when IBM PCs moved from 16 to 32 bit.
- Or when AM Radio moved to AM Stereo (and now: AM HD).
- And from Year 99 dates to Year 2000 dates.
The changeover can be complicated but it usually works out okay. I bet IPv4 to IPv6 will barely be noticed by the average user.
>>>Woah, I wish they could get the wonders of compression to work with DSL and cable, too.
Try Opera Turbo
Same thing.
Although they only compress images to 50% original size (instead of 10%), so the speed increase won't be as dramatic.