Well, at 50:1 H.264 would give 204Mbps, so Gb-e could pump that over a wire. But where's a wireless protocol for 204Mbps? Maybe 802.11g over multiple simul channels...
HDMI bandwidth is 10.2Gbps synchronous (ie. not packet switched). 10Gbps (theoretical max) wired ethernet therefore won't even do it, not with a single cable. Is there any wireless protocol that could deliver HDMI data without loss, even using multiple channels (if properly supported)?
"It's a heat engine," Stechel said. "But instead of doing mechanical work, it does chemical work."
If it's really a heat engine, then it might be powered better by something other than sunlight. Sunlight does offer an average (across night/season/weather/latitude) of about 400W:m^2 in North America, but this machine will consume quite a lot of energy to produce and maintain, while consuming area that could deliver more energy in direct power from the sunlight than what it stores in "reformed CO2". Which either way means displacing petrofuel with sunlight, but likely more petrofuel is replaced net with direct solar power (or even biomass, the most scalable solar power).
However, much of the inefficiency of solar power generation is lost as heat. If this system could capture more of that wasted heat as power, then it could sit under the direct solar generators, improving their efficiency. Since direct solar power now operates at up to 45% efficiency (concentrated by cheap reflectors), capturing even half of the wasted heat could represent a huge boost to the solar process.
Again, the power investment in the heat engine must be considered against the net energy budget. But maybe it performs even better on chemical reactions that aren't CO2 -> CO -> fuel. Even just cracking the CO2 down to carbon solids and O2 could be a more efficient net result. Or some totally different chemical process currently powered by petrofuels which can be made much more efficient by capturing some waste heat (of which industry produces quite a great amount as other hard-to-manage pollution).
But then, there's another application for heat engines that's probably even better than any of those. Perhaps geothermal power can be more efficiently tapped with better heat engines than the traditional. Geothermal sources typically don't need high efficiency, because they're such large amounts of original power ("the interior heat of the Earth"). But there are places with meager geothermal recoverability that might be feasible if there were more efficient transduction tech.
No matter what, research into converting heat into more usable power sources is extremely worthwhile. This is exactly the kind of basic research for which I'm glad to pay taxes that support Sandia and other National Labs like it.
Well, I don't think the reporting (even here on Slashdot) is out of proportion to the seriousness of the RIAA lawyer's repeated lying to the jury about the legality of personal copies (which is an important protected right the RIAA hates). But the reporting does omit that fundamental fact of our adversarial legal system: the complaining lawyer can't just lie to make a jury think the defendant is guilty without getting a challenge that damages the complaining case.
What we see here is how Americans routinely get screwed by bad lawyers (on both sides) who face no repercussions, but get paid a lot to jointly miscarry justice, and by the media, which crystallizes the results by teaching Americans that they can get treated that way legitimately by the courts. The lawyers "misspeak" and "mistakenly stay silent", and the media "misreports".
But at least American media is evolving some adversarial media. Like this thread, where we can point out what's wrong with the lawyers, and the reporting. At least we're finding a way past letting the corporate media monopolies (with their corporate consensus and uniformity) act as lawyers, judge and jury when presenting these cases to the public. Maybe once we're good at that, we'll find a way to open the justice system more, so "many eyeballs" can improve the legal products before they're irrevocably committed.
If Thomas' lawyer didn't pick up that lie by Sony's lawyer to convince the jury that Sony would lie about consumer rights and RIAA rights, then Thomas' lawyer should be fired.
Thomas should get a new trial, with a new lawyer, and the two old lawyers should pay for screwing up the entire trial.
While Sears is spying on you, it's also exposing your purchase records to anyone with your contact info. What penalty will Sears pay for violating its own privacy policy? Will it be on lay-away?
No, the government has to be reformed in this process, or government failures will keep patents mainly a battleground, an impediment to progress. And if there's no fine to compensate the government for its work processing everything (including the legal process), then the system will continue to operate as a subsidy to businesses (and guarantors of profits to patent insurance corps, or alternately drive them into nonexistence).
The lawyers' and insurance corps' feeding frenzy keeps the patent game largely the province of big corporations which aren't nearly as efficient at innovating as are small inventors.
Why shouldn't patent trolls challenge every patent? If they lose, they should pay all costs. The system already offers them an incentive to hassle without legit basis: extort an out of court settlement to drop the suit.
The USPTO grants the patents, but there can be other agencies involved in a bad process, like if some other Executive Branch office installed someone it didn't test for qualifications.
In the event that a patent app is incomprehensible to a college engineering (or other relevant discipline) grad, it shouldn't be granted. The purpose of the patent is for the public to read it to know what not to duplicate, and what is available for license, as well as general education of how things work (without allowing copying a temporarily protected invention). Incomprehensible patents make matters worse.
From whom, themselves? This is starting to sound like a perpetual motion patent.
Except that exposing government incompetence is worth a reward. If the government failed when granting a bogus patent to a patent troll, then the troll is doing the system a favor by showing it's broken, like anyone else.
When a bogus patent is demonstrated to have been filed and defended by an owner who knew it was bogus, the party demonstrating so should be able to claim a reward. Such bogus patents do a lot of damage, from obstructing "progress in science and the useful arts", to clogging up the patent system and the courts. Probably the bogus owner should pay a fine to the government, and the party proving it bogus should get a percentage. If it was granted by incompetence by a government agent, that agency should pay. When the owner exploited an incompetent government agent, they both should pay.
That system would encourage people to expose bogus patents. It would deter bogus filings and incompetent grantings. And it would siphon lawyers away from filing bogus patents into exposing them.
Every Windows version has included this feature. The "Frustration Detected" value is set to "ON" on the installer by default. There's no known way to turn it off, so it's 100% accurate.
My idea is actually just a request for the "thin clients" that big industry players tried to introduce almost a decade ago. The reason to have these things process just the GUI, not the app, is that then they can be small, light, cheap, and longlasting on a charge. The use scenario is to offer GUIs to LANs, so WiFi is already "ubiquitous" enough (if you set one up). 802.11e WMM is QoS with latency low enough for VoIP and video, so it's probably also just fine for the kinds of apps I'm talking about.
The price of "PCs" isn't plummeting fast enough, or we'd already have this class of devices as a version of the PC. If the device were not actually a PC, not a general purpose processor, but rather based on mainly GPU and a minimal CPU (or even an ASIC) for connecting the GPU to the WiFi, then it could be light and cheap. But most importantly it could last a long time, like a week, on a charge, especially if its display is just SVGA or UGA, not a real desktop.
What has actually changed is that there is now a scale economy for these small displays and GPUs, and enough content in enough homes (and offices) now that "LAN remotes" are something lots of people can see a use for. So they're cheaper to make, and have a bigger market. Sounds like a worthwhile product to make.
Instead, they're turning out endless parades of slightly different notebook models. Seems like a waste of time, and a missed opportunity.
Tell me how selling hundreds of millions of cheap webpads as "remote controls" for smart/multimedia homes has no profit in it. Or show me where they keep that bin, so I can rummage through it for more "uncommercial" ideas.
Why would the connection be under 5Mbps? A home WLAN should be something closer to 100Mbps. And I don't think we're talking about playing Quake, or watching movies, just exposing control GUIs to manage multimedia (including email, calendar, phone GUIs, etc). Not replacing a desktop, but offering a GUI peripheral to control a network of content and apps.
FWIW, Windows 2000 server would probably need something like gigabit networking to get even close to 100Mbps to a device like this over VNC.
The Palm Pilot in fact revolutionized the PC business, and fueled the smartphone revolution, by doing exactly what I described, but without networking (especially not wireless) - just a decade ago.
I'm not talking about a standalone device. Not one that would primarily network farther than somewhere in the same building. I'm talking about dinky little interactive displays that are network peripherals for a W/LAN. I agree that symbolic graphics transmission (X, display postscript) would be better, but bitmaps can accommodate video. With 100Mbps WiFi, that's no problem, so the onboard processing (for power/weight) is better dedicated to solely GUI. Plus the inherent tiered architecture would be a lot easier for regular people to understand.
I think this is the niche that is actually waiting to happen the way the tablet makers tried to say theirs was 5-7 years ago. But much bigger, especially now that there's so many LANs deployed now.
We don't need all these dinkier notebooks or "tablet PCs". Because they're expensive and suck a lot of power (therefore are heavy and don't last long between charges). These portable PCs are too big, and mobile phones are too small.
What we need are lightweight little touchtablets running VNC. That weigh a handful of ounce, unfold from 8" to 17", last a week on a charge, and cost under $100. All they have to do is display a remote tappable desktop, with mutable little speakers, maybe bluetooth headphones/keyboards for occasional use. Live on WiFi.
There's a thousand models of the "mobile desktop relacement". What we need is little devices that are just little controllers for all the media and info consumption we do when we're away from workstations, and want to do more than talk or look up some factoid on a phone. If they were cheap enough, people would buy a bunch to leave all over the place where we might just pick them up.
I'd like the URLs in my GUIs to be displayed in their frame with an icon indicating their character set, and colored if in a character set different from my GUI default. If I had that, I'd like to see "native" glyphs without fear that they're decoys. Even though such a system would no longer force most content publishers to deliver content in my own privileged native character set.
I think Google's grand design is to take time to cultivate its various functions independently, united solely by the simple search function (and all functions delivering ads, in/directly). Over time, as their individual product brands dominate, Google's API will capture a large enough developer base to compete with Microsoft on that primary essential asset: developer mindshare. Once Google has the advantage (or at least reliable momentum towards it), Google can itself unify some of these products, which will then finally become actual targets with which Microsoft can more conventionally compete - materializing only once ready to compete.
The flagship will probably be a social network descended from Orkut, which will let people compose media/app suites with more or less interactive content (dependent on who's composing it), derived from the entire Internet's content, but within the Google platform. The social network will be the way consumers filter results guided by lexical searches, "related" by their associates' editorial decisions.
If this sounds a lot like the 1996 Web in essence, but just with a lot more elaborate linking and media types, that's because it is. Google is booming precisely because it's as close to the unsupervised Internet, but with a single corporate entry point, as possible. Which means a return to "homepages" of actual people, linked to what they idiosyncratically like, is a recipe for success.
I'd like to see some version of these electromagnetic "shape memory" materials in a cheap transparent form that can coat touchscreens. If they could be switched from smooth to a raised bump quickly, with very little power, and at high rez (about the size of a display pixel), they'd make for great feedback devices for "GUIs". Raised edges of GUI widgets, even vibrating areas indicating active buttons and their state. That would compensate quite a lot for how our fingers obscure the GUIs while we're operating them. And maybe even eliminate most of the need to actually even look at the GUI for most familiar interfaces.
If this MRMF stuff can work in a thin enough coating, maybe it could be transparent. Or just some other transparent stuff that isn't as fancy, but just jumps on command without blocking the light.
Microwaving, drilling, freezing, hammering and hatpinning seem likely to get you sent to Guantanamo the next time you try to show it to an Immigration official.
BTW, "Liberalism: Finding the gray area in a coin flip. Ethics Shmethics." in your.sig is pretty hypocritical considering the advice you just gave. Unless you're calling yourself "liberal". But you're probably "really libertarian".
The total evening network news audience now stands at around 26 million, down about a million from the year before. It has now dropped by about 1 million a year for the last 25 years.
Ratings, which count the number of television sets in the U.S. tuned to a given program, declined almost 4% between November 2005 and November 2006, falling to 18.2, down from 18.9 in November 2005, according to data from Nielsen Media Research.1 That is about the same pace as in recent years.2
Meanwhile, share -- the percentage of just those sets in use at a given time that are tuned to a program -- declined more, 8%, to 34 in November 2006, from 37 the same time in 2005. Now, only about a third of the TV sets in use at the dinner hour are tuned to the network news.
Those stats are from 2006. After another year, that probably means there's only 25M or fewer viewers. Half the number from 1982. But the rates are much faster than they inummerately describe (they watcht too much TV to be good at math). 1M of 25M is a 4% drop in 2006; the 1M drop in 1983 was a 2% drop. And since the US population was about 230M in 1982, but 300M now, we're talking about a drop from about 22% to about 8% of the population tuning in. Which is a drop to almost one third, in case you're wondering.
That one third still watching TV is probably mostly the same people as a quarter century ago, now glued to sets in their nursing homes, unable to change the channel. And the stats don't even address the number of people who now don't just mainline the nightly news as the gospel truth, but also cross-reference with the Internet, including actually discussing the news on blogs.
The news has never been a good business for the broadcasters. It was just jammed into their commercial offerings to justify their use of the public airwaves and all kinds of other subsidies they get, and to make the rest of the "messages" (advertisements and the propaganda disguised as "news") more respectable. The rest of their programming makes more money in the ads that's their only real product. So they'll be glad to call it quits once no one is interested in holding them to any kind of "public service" any more.
As soon as about an hour or so of actual news is clickable YouTube on my bigscreen TV that my friends have all recommended, I'll be happy to let them get away with finally just canceling their shabby efforts.
I thought the new US passports issued since sometime in the middle of last year already embed readable electronics, whether RFID or some other kind of chip.
Or is the State Department so screwed up that it doesn't even know it's already released them into the wild, where the bad guys are already raping and pillaging them?
Isn't there some way to fry these RFID documents without rendering them useless to optical or human readers of their visible surfaces?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at 50:1 H.264 would give 204Mbps, so Gb-e could pump that over a wire. But where's a wireless protocol for 204Mbps? Maybe 802.11g over multiple simul channels...
HDMI bandwidth is 10.2Gbps synchronous (ie. not packet switched). 10Gbps (theoretical max) wired ethernet therefore won't even do it, not with a single cable. Is there any wireless protocol that could deliver HDMI data without loss, even using multiple channels (if properly supported)?
If it's really a heat engine, then it might be powered better by something other than sunlight. Sunlight does offer an average (across night/season/weather/latitude) of about 400W:m^2 in North America, but this machine will consume quite a lot of energy to produce and maintain, while consuming area that could deliver more energy in direct power from the sunlight than what it stores in "reformed CO2". Which either way means displacing petrofuel with sunlight, but likely more petrofuel is replaced net with direct solar power (or even biomass, the most scalable solar power).
However, much of the inefficiency of solar power generation is lost as heat. If this system could capture more of that wasted heat as power, then it could sit under the direct solar generators, improving their efficiency. Since direct solar power now operates at up to 45% efficiency (concentrated by cheap reflectors), capturing even half of the wasted heat could represent a huge boost to the solar process.
Again, the power investment in the heat engine must be considered against the net energy budget. But maybe it performs even better on chemical reactions that aren't CO2 -> CO -> fuel. Even just cracking the CO2 down to carbon solids and O2 could be a more efficient net result. Or some totally different chemical process currently powered by petrofuels which can be made much more efficient by capturing some waste heat (of which industry produces quite a great amount as other hard-to-manage pollution).
But then, there's another application for heat engines that's probably even better than any of those. Perhaps geothermal power can be more efficiently tapped with better heat engines than the traditional. Geothermal sources typically don't need high efficiency, because they're such large amounts of original power ("the interior heat of the Earth"). But there are places with meager geothermal recoverability that might be feasible if there were more efficient transduction tech.
No matter what, research into converting heat into more usable power sources is extremely worthwhile. This is exactly the kind of basic research for which I'm glad to pay taxes that support Sandia and other National Labs like it.
Well, I don't think the reporting (even here on Slashdot) is out of proportion to the seriousness of the RIAA lawyer's repeated lying to the jury about the legality of personal copies (which is an important protected right the RIAA hates). But the reporting does omit that fundamental fact of our adversarial legal system: the complaining lawyer can't just lie to make a jury think the defendant is guilty without getting a challenge that damages the complaining case.
What we see here is how Americans routinely get screwed by bad lawyers (on both sides) who face no repercussions, but get paid a lot to jointly miscarry justice, and by the media, which crystallizes the results by teaching Americans that they can get treated that way legitimately by the courts. The lawyers "misspeak" and "mistakenly stay silent", and the media "misreports".
But at least American media is evolving some adversarial media. Like this thread, where we can point out what's wrong with the lawyers, and the reporting. At least we're finding a way past letting the corporate media monopolies (with their corporate consensus and uniformity) act as lawyers, judge and jury when presenting these cases to the public. Maybe once we're good at that, we'll find a way to open the justice system more, so "many eyeballs" can improve the legal products before they're irrevocably committed.
If Thomas' lawyer didn't pick up that lie by Sony's lawyer to convince the jury that Sony would lie about consumer rights and RIAA rights, then Thomas' lawyer should be fired.
Thomas should get a new trial, with a new lawyer, and the two old lawyers should pay for screwing up the entire trial.
While Sears is spying on you, it's also exposing your purchase records to anyone with your contact info. What penalty will Sears pay for violating its own privacy policy? Will it be on lay-away?
So irrational numbers like pi are proof that we're imaginary?
No, the government has to be reformed in this process, or government failures will keep patents mainly a battleground, an impediment to progress. And if there's no fine to compensate the government for its work processing everything (including the legal process), then the system will continue to operate as a subsidy to businesses (and guarantors of profits to patent insurance corps, or alternately drive them into nonexistence).
The lawyers' and insurance corps' feeding frenzy keeps the patent game largely the province of big corporations which aren't nearly as efficient at innovating as are small inventors.
Why shouldn't patent trolls challenge every patent? If they lose, they should pay all costs. The system already offers them an incentive to hassle without legit basis: extort an out of court settlement to drop the suit.
The USPTO grants the patents, but there can be other agencies involved in a bad process, like if some other Executive Branch office installed someone it didn't test for qualifications.
In the event that a patent app is incomprehensible to a college engineering (or other relevant discipline) grad, it shouldn't be granted. The purpose of the patent is for the public to read it to know what not to duplicate, and what is available for license, as well as general education of how things work (without allowing copying a temporarily protected invention). Incomprehensible patents make matters worse.
From whom, themselves? This is starting to sound like a perpetual motion patent.
Except that exposing government incompetence is worth a reward. If the government failed when granting a bogus patent to a patent troll, then the troll is doing the system a favor by showing it's broken, like anyone else.
When a bogus patent is demonstrated to have been filed and defended by an owner who knew it was bogus, the party demonstrating so should be able to claim a reward. Such bogus patents do a lot of damage, from obstructing "progress in science and the useful arts", to clogging up the patent system and the courts. Probably the bogus owner should pay a fine to the government, and the party proving it bogus should get a percentage. If it was granted by incompetence by a government agent, that agency should pay. When the owner exploited an incompetent government agent, they both should pay.
That system would encourage people to expose bogus patents. It would deter bogus filings and incompetent grantings. And it would siphon lawyers away from filing bogus patents into exposing them.
Every Windows version has included this feature. The "Frustration Detected" value is set to "ON" on the installer by default. There's no known way to turn it off, so it's 100% accurate.
My idea is actually just a request for the "thin clients" that big industry players tried to introduce almost a decade ago. The reason to have these things process just the GUI, not the app, is that then they can be small, light, cheap, and longlasting on a charge. The use scenario is to offer GUIs to LANs, so WiFi is already "ubiquitous" enough (if you set one up). 802.11e WMM is QoS with latency low enough for VoIP and video, so it's probably also just fine for the kinds of apps I'm talking about.
The price of "PCs" isn't plummeting fast enough, or we'd already have this class of devices as a version of the PC. If the device were not actually a PC, not a general purpose processor, but rather based on mainly GPU and a minimal CPU (or even an ASIC) for connecting the GPU to the WiFi, then it could be light and cheap. But most importantly it could last a long time, like a week, on a charge, especially if its display is just SVGA or UGA, not a real desktop.
What has actually changed is that there is now a scale economy for these small displays and GPUs, and enough content in enough homes (and offices) now that "LAN remotes" are something lots of people can see a use for. So they're cheaper to make, and have a bigger market. Sounds like a worthwhile product to make.
Instead, they're turning out endless parades of slightly different notebook models. Seems like a waste of time, and a missed opportunity.
Tell me how selling hundreds of millions of cheap webpads as "remote controls" for smart/multimedia homes has no profit in it. Or show me where they keep that bin, so I can rummage through it for more "uncommercial" ideas.
Why would the connection be under 5Mbps? A home WLAN should be something closer to 100Mbps. And I don't think we're talking about playing Quake, or watching movies, just exposing control GUIs to manage multimedia (including email, calendar, phone GUIs, etc). Not replacing a desktop, but offering a GUI peripheral to control a network of content and apps.
FWIW, Windows 2000 server would probably need something like gigabit networking to get even close to 100Mbps to a device like this over VNC.
How lucky for you that after so many years of people saying they want a pony, and what it should be like, that ponies are now widely available.
It weighs 1.5Kg, has about 1h battery life, and its website dates from 2002 - so I doubt it's available at any price.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about.
The Palm Pilot in fact revolutionized the PC business, and fueled the smartphone revolution, by doing exactly what I described, but without networking (especially not wireless) - just a decade ago.
I'm not talking about a standalone device. Not one that would primarily network farther than somewhere in the same building. I'm talking about dinky little interactive displays that are network peripherals for a W/LAN. I agree that symbolic graphics transmission (X, display postscript) would be better, but bitmaps can accommodate video. With 100Mbps WiFi, that's no problem, so the onboard processing (for power/weight) is better dedicated to solely GUI. Plus the inherent tiered architecture would be a lot easier for regular people to understand.
I think this is the niche that is actually waiting to happen the way the tablet makers tried to say theirs was 5-7 years ago. But much bigger, especially now that there's so many LANs deployed now.
We don't need all these dinkier notebooks or "tablet PCs". Because they're expensive and suck a lot of power (therefore are heavy and don't last long between charges). These portable PCs are too big, and mobile phones are too small.
What we need are lightweight little touchtablets running VNC. That weigh a handful of ounce, unfold from 8" to 17", last a week on a charge, and cost under $100. All they have to do is display a remote tappable desktop, with mutable little speakers, maybe bluetooth headphones/keyboards for occasional use. Live on WiFi.
There's a thousand models of the "mobile desktop relacement". What we need is little devices that are just little controllers for all the media and info consumption we do when we're away from workstations, and want to do more than talk or look up some factoid on a phone. If they were cheap enough, people would buy a bunch to leave all over the place where we might just pick them up.
I'd like the URLs in my GUIs to be displayed in their frame with an icon indicating their character set, and colored if in a character set different from my GUI default. If I had that, I'd like to see "native" glyphs without fear that they're decoys. Even though such a system would no longer force most content publishers to deliver content in my own privileged native character set.
I think Google's grand design is to take time to cultivate its various functions independently, united solely by the simple search function (and all functions delivering ads, in/directly). Over time, as their individual product brands dominate, Google's API will capture a large enough developer base to compete with Microsoft on that primary essential asset: developer mindshare. Once Google has the advantage (or at least reliable momentum towards it), Google can itself unify some of these products, which will then finally become actual targets with which Microsoft can more conventionally compete - materializing only once ready to compete.
The flagship will probably be a social network descended from Orkut, which will let people compose media/app suites with more or less interactive content (dependent on who's composing it), derived from the entire Internet's content, but within the Google platform. The social network will be the way consumers filter results guided by lexical searches, "related" by their associates' editorial decisions.
If this sounds a lot like the 1996 Web in essence, but just with a lot more elaborate linking and media types, that's because it is. Google is booming precisely because it's as close to the unsupervised Internet, but with a single corporate entry point, as possible. Which means a return to "homepages" of actual people, linked to what they idiosyncratically like, is a recipe for success.
I'd like to see some version of these electromagnetic "shape memory" materials in a cheap transparent form that can coat touchscreens. If they could be switched from smooth to a raised bump quickly, with very little power, and at high rez (about the size of a display pixel), they'd make for great feedback devices for "GUIs". Raised edges of GUI widgets, even vibrating areas indicating active buttons and their state. That would compensate quite a lot for how our fingers obscure the GUIs while we're operating them. And maybe even eliminate most of the need to actually even look at the GUI for most familiar interfaces.
If this MRMF stuff can work in a thin enough coating, maybe it could be transparent. Or just some other transparent stuff that isn't as fancy, but just jumps on command without blocking the light.
Microwaving, drilling, freezing, hammering and hatpinning seem likely to get you sent to Guantanamo the next time you try to show it to an Immigration official.
.sig is pretty hypocritical considering the advice you just gave. Unless you're calling yourself "liberal". But you're probably "really libertarian".
BTW, "Liberalism: Finding the gray area in a coin flip. Ethics Shmethics." in your
Those stats are from 2006. After another year, that probably means there's only 25M or fewer viewers. Half the number from 1982. But the rates are much faster than they inummerately describe (they watcht too much TV to be good at math). 1M of 25M is a 4% drop in 2006; the 1M drop in 1983 was a 2% drop. And since the US population was about 230M in 1982, but 300M now, we're talking about a drop from about 22% to about 8% of the population tuning in. Which is a drop to almost one third, in case you're wondering.
That one third still watching TV is probably mostly the same people as a quarter century ago, now glued to sets in their nursing homes, unable to change the channel. And the stats don't even address the number of people who now don't just mainline the nightly news as the gospel truth, but also cross-reference with the Internet, including actually discussing the news on blogs.
The news has never been a good business for the broadcasters. It was just jammed into their commercial offerings to justify their use of the public airwaves and all kinds of other subsidies they get, and to make the rest of the "messages" (advertisements and the propaganda disguised as "news") more respectable. The rest of their programming makes more money in the ads that's their only real product. So they'll be glad to call it quits once no one is interested in holding them to any kind of "public service" any more.
As soon as about an hour or so of actual news is clickable YouTube on my bigscreen TV that my friends have all recommended, I'll be happy to let them get away with finally just canceling their shabby efforts.
I thought the new US passports issued since sometime in the middle of last year already embed readable electronics, whether RFID or some other kind of chip.
Or is the State Department so screwed up that it doesn't even know it's already released them into the wild, where the bad guys are already raping and pillaging them?
Isn't there some way to fry these RFID documents without rendering them useless to optical or human readers of their visible surfaces?