In a lot of metro areas, city planners are working very hard to make bus lines suck as much as possible in order to make light rail appear much more attractive to the masses.
I frequently elect to drive rather than fly for the same reason, even from Minneapolis to Dallas. The cost savings of a cheap flight (and an extra vacation day or two from work) are completely wiped out by the cost of renting a car (or hiring cabs) in my destination city. Plus, when I drive, I can "travel heavy", bringing along plenty of luggage, a guitar, and my dog. Flying sucks. Riding a high speed rail to get around the country would be a similar hassle.
High-speed rail is a nice alternative to flying, especially in densely-populated nations like Japan, but America is so spread out, particularly in the West, that it's hard to imagine the infrastructure costs of laying all that rail being a viable alternative to just finding ways to make air travel cheaper and more convenient.
Yet a lot of the people cheering for all these rails are the same ones who scream bloody murder every time somebody wants to cut across the landscape with a 6" underground oil pipeline.
Yes, but hypothetically this could lead to a simple "eyeball morse code" which would someday allow instantaneous binary communication across light-years of distance. If you're a kooky Ray Kurtzweil fan, this is pretty huge.
Then again, if you're a kooky Ray Kurtzweil fan, you're probably not in the least bit surprised by this development, and wondering why it has taken so long.
Buck Henry adapted that book into a rather good TV movie, which I'm sure you can still find out there among the torrent si... *cough* *ahem*... used VHS shops.
The only weak point about it is when Harrison broadcasts an incredibly pedestrian saxophone solo as his demonstration of all the excellence that people are missing out on.
Instead of name-calling (regardless of how right you may be), it's more constructive to engage with these people reasonably.
Writing the guy hate mail may feel good, but appealing to his judgement would probably work a lot better.
His statement that anonymous Internet use that it "has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children" is essentially correct. However, it is also important for him to understand that his bill fails to make the Internet less anonymous, and would put a tremendous administrative burden on small businesses and private citizens.
Frankly, somebody should have already told him this by now. Understanding the nuts and bolts of new law is what congressional staffers are for.
Which leads me to suspect the motivations behind the bill. Who would gain from such a stupid law? Why the phone companies (both land and mobile), of course. The more barriers to entry they can establish for wi-fi hotspots, the more providers can control the data market. I suspect if we follow the money, it will turn out that they lobbied Sen. Cornyn pretty hard (and cherry-picked his office as one that would be sympathetic to their pitch.)
France has a "Ministry of Language", for crying out loud. I love their nuclear grid and their wine fields, but there is no problem in France too small for the government to poke its nose in it.
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law. You just pass laws that are impossible or unreasonable to follow and then when you want to come down on someone, you just hit them with a bunch of bullshit charges. So if federal law enforcement kicks down your door on some bogus child porn charge and doesn't find any child porn, they can save face, rather than just admit their mistake, by busting you on all the *other* stuff they found (your marijuana stash, your bootleg mp3's, and now the fact that you weren't keeping 2 years of archived data, and so on).
I really wish there were more people who get this. You don't need to be a conspiracy wonk to see how obvious it is that we are cultivating a legal framework which will eventually permit the state to lock up anybody they choose for almost any motivation.
Looking at the direction of state power we've been moving in over the last 20 years, I feel very comfortable calling myself a libertarian crackpot. Hooray for Reason Magazine, the Cato Institute, the ACLU, and pretty much all of the states in between the Mississippi River and the eastern border of California.
Everybody here should write to both of their Senators and their Representative (regardless) and simply provide a link to this/. thread to educate them on all the technical reasons why this bill is very ill-conceived.
In layman's terms most of the reasons boil down to:
1. The required equipment will cost private citizens and small businesses a prohibitive amount of money. Many homes will find themselves spending more on their log archive than they spent on their computers, and small Internet cafe businesses simply be forced to close.
2. It will require expertise which most people simply don't have, forcing everybody to hire IT professionals to manage their home networks. (Ask your congerssperson if they know how to set up such a log without enlisting the help of an expert. Then ask them how a working-class family could ever afford to hire such help simply to use the Internet on their home laptops.)
3. It will utterly fail to achieve the objective of preventing anonymous Internet use. HDCP logs only record MAC addresses, which can easily be forged and sometimes are not even unique.
This bill is about as useful and practical as asking people to keep a filing cabinet full of photographs of every shoe-footprint that ever shows up in their back garden. It richly deserves to be laughed off the floors of Congress, should it ever even get that far.
Kind of foolish of you to buy all those analog devices knowing since years ago that the digital switch-over was coming. If you didn't know this was coming, you didn't research all those purchases very well.
Unless, of course, you bought them knowing full well that you would only get use out of them for a limited time, and factored that into your purchase decision. You got out of them exactly what you were expecting.
Either way, nobody owes you a working shirtpocket TV or PC tuner card.
>>>People out in the sticks typically have either cable or satellite,
Nope. I looked up the Nielsen numbers today. 99% of the people living in the Metropolitian northeast are ready-to-go and won't notice the switchoff. Meanwhile people "living in the sticks" of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas are the least-prepared with 89%. Why? Because when you're living in No-Mans-Land Oklahoma you don't have city services like cable. You rely on your antenna. So repeating what I said before:
- House Republicans voted "no" and yet they represent rural residents (farmers) who are most likely to need a delay.
- House Democrats voted "yes delay the switch" and yet the Democrats largely represent people in the cities who are over 99% ready.
The way they voted is backwards from their constituents' actual needs.
Uh. Your data does not support your explanation. Nowhere does it indicate that the people in "No-Mans-Land" are the ones that are not ready. It could be the people in Oklahoma City.
Again, TV reception is TERRIBLE in most of rural America. Farmers/ranchers/miners either get cable/satelite, or they live with one or two mostly-snowy weak signals if they are too poor (and haven't arranged to steal the cable signal.
A drive through Minnesota's "Iron Range" towns is an impressive display of massive satellite dishes, every town has one for the local cable company's feed, plus the handful of well-off homes have their own.
The value of analog-only TV's went down when they made the decision five years ago. If you bought your TV after that, the decrease was already built into the price you paid.
If your TV is over five years old, you already got most of its functional life out of it anyway. Tubes start to go after about 10 years most of the time.
I'm wondering why so many commenters think it's so bad that the switch is delayed?
Let me count the ways.
1. Not having all broadcasters switch at once is going to be a confounding mess, even for those of us who have already switched. I'm currently using a big UHF-only antenna that I've been relying on for the last two years, because the current pre-switch digital signal is weak and UHF only. Post-switch, some broadcasters are moving their digital signal to VHF and all of them were going to be boosting the signal. Now, with the VHF band still tied up as some (but not all) migrate, there are likely to be days when NOBODY can tune in every channel with a single antenna/tuner combination. Yuck!
2. A good chunk of the freed-up bandwidth was meant to be used by emergency responders, who have made a significant investment in equipment which will now collect dust for six months.
3. A lot of businesses have started up with the plan of buying/leasing former analog VHF bandwidth. These companies now must sit on ice for six more months and pray that they don't go belly-up before they even get a chance to open.
4. Of the 5 percent that are not ready, most of them will still not "get ready" before June. Losing your TV signal for a little while is not the end of the world, and having their screens go to static is probably exactly what it takes to get them off the couch and waddling down to the store to pick up a cheap converter.
5. Local broadcasters are in a bind, because their business plans didn't call for six more months of sending two signals, but if they do take the option of switching on the 17th, they risk losing customers.
6. Current digital signals are so week, that outer-ring "exurbs" in most metro areas can't consistently tune them in. During the switch DTV signals are expected to become a lot more powerful, making the broadcasts much more widely available... but if everything is not switched at once it's going to mean that those communities will lose some of their analog signals before the digital signal is strong enough to reach them. They go dark because a handful of people were too lazy to take advantage of a converter coupon. It's idiotic.
- House Democrats voted "yes delay the switch" and yet the Democrats largely represent people in the cities. The city folk are 99.9% ready, since they have the convenience of cable wired into their homes and don't watch over-the-air tv.
- House Republicans voted "no" and yet they represent rural residents (farmers) who don't have cable, and are most likely to need a delay.
No, it's you that has it backwards. Strong over-the-air signals are really only available near urban centers. I live in the Midwest suburbs and have a roof antenna, as do most of the home-owners in my neighborhood. People out in the sticks typically have either cable or satellite, if they have TV at all.
"Sanford and Son" was a significant upgrade of "Steptoe and Son." Likewise, "All in the Family" was a brilliant transplant job. Both were distinctly American shows in spite of their BBC roots.
Oh, and the Drew Carey-run "Whose Line" was good, but then again the only real changes made were the host and the audience. Otherwise you could almost treat Season 1 of the US show as if it was Season 11 of the British one.
This is news that sci-fi fans needed, after losing Tennant as the Doctor and the changes in scripting at the top of Doctor Who, and the way that Battlestar Galactica and the StarGate series have collapsed upon themselves. Even if BSG was supposed to end in Season 5 from the start as per the director.
SG-1 and SGA were both killed without rhyme or reason, SGA was killed after promising that it was the successor to keep the StarGate universe alive after SG-1 fell.
SciFi is an evil channel, so hopefully they won't get their hands on red dwarf and try to milk it for value like they've done with other series that they killed.
BSG is still awesome. All the whiners about "All Along the Watchtower" seeming to shatter the forth wall can chill the hell out now. The last couple episodes explained why it made PERFECT sense that the cylons had a 1960's pop tune stuck in their heads.
While Tennant was a brilliant Doctor, the constant regenerations is part of the joy of the show for those of us who have loved it since we were kids. Also, the news that Peter Moffit is taking over as head writer has been greeted by most fans of the show with wild enthusiam. He penned some of the very best episodes of the new series (including "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" and "Blink.)
And then there's "Lost", which is already the second-best US Sci-Fi show ever made (after "Firefly")
So there's plenty of good sci-fi out there. Certainly much more than in my younger days, when there was nothing but "Buck Rogers" and the original run of Galactica.
That being the case, those of us who have already been watching in digital will need to go up on the roof and swap antennas again, bringing us back to the point that February is a lousy month to do that.
(Although I fully intend to brave the ice. The sooner they get this change-over done with, the better.)
For instance, you buy an older, used mac. It has an older version, say Tiger, of the operating system legally installed on it, but, you didn't get the OEM disks. Well, Apple no longer sells those disks....what do you do in case you need the CD's in case of failure and need to reinstall?
Ask other mac users. Go to any Mac User Group, school, or group of friends who use them, and odds are they will decide that simply GIVING you a perfectly legal copy of Tiger they have lying around is an attractive alternative to using it as a drink coaster or bicycle reflector.
Or go to lowendmac.com and take advantage of any of the MANY resources available to people using older macs.
Or go to the "Genius Bar" in any Apple Store and ask them. Depending how busy they are that day, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't just do the re-install for you, right there at the desk. Worst case, they'll help you find what you need, one way or another.
For instance, you buy an older, used mac. It has an older version, say Tiger, of the operating system legally installed on it, but, you didn't get the OEM disks. Well, Apple no longer sells those disks....what do you do in case you need the CD's in case of failure and need to reinstall?
Just go to any Mac User Group and ask around. Somebody will decide that just GIVING you their perfectly-legal copy of Tiger is an attractive alternative to using it as a drink coaster or bicycle reflector.
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In a lot of metro areas, city planners are working very hard to make bus lines suck as much as possible in order to make light rail appear much more attractive to the masses.
I frequently elect to drive rather than fly for the same reason, even from Minneapolis to Dallas. The cost savings of a cheap flight (and an extra vacation day or two from work) are completely wiped out by the cost of renting a car (or hiring cabs) in my destination city. Plus, when I drive, I can "travel heavy", bringing along plenty of luggage, a guitar, and my dog. Flying sucks. Riding a high speed rail to get around the country would be a similar hassle.
High-speed rail is a nice alternative to flying, especially in densely-populated nations like Japan, but America is so spread out, particularly in the West, that it's hard to imagine the infrastructure costs of laying all that rail being a viable alternative to just finding ways to make air travel cheaper and more convenient.
Yet a lot of the people cheering for all these rails are the same ones who scream bloody murder every time somebody wants to cut across the landscape with a 6" underground oil pipeline.
May I use the text of your points when writing to my congressional representatives?
Yes, but remove all the mistakes first, so you don't sound as scatter-brained as me.
Yes, but hypothetically this could lead to a simple "eyeball morse code" which would someday allow instantaneous binary communication across light-years of distance. If you're a kooky Ray Kurtzweil fan, this is pretty huge.
Then again, if you're a kooky Ray Kurtzweil fan, you're probably not in the least bit surprised by this development, and wondering why it has taken so long.
HDCP logs only record MAC addresses, which can easily be forged and sometimes are not even unique.
I didn't know it logged anything. I thought all it did was downgrade the quality of HD content when played on an unlicensed display.
I meant DHCP, obviously, but nevertheless...
Oh Snap, I've been told!
Buck Henry adapted that book into a rather good TV movie, which I'm sure you can still find out there among the torrent si... *cough* *ahem*... used VHS shops.
The only weak point about it is when Harrison broadcasts an incredibly pedestrian saxophone solo as his demonstration of all the excellence that people are missing out on.
Instead of name-calling (regardless of how right you may be), it's more constructive to engage with these people reasonably.
Writing the guy hate mail may feel good, but appealing to his judgement would probably work a lot better.
His statement that anonymous Internet use that it "has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children" is essentially correct. However, it is also important for him to understand that his bill fails to make the Internet less anonymous, and would put a tremendous administrative burden on small businesses and private citizens.
Frankly, somebody should have already told him this by now. Understanding the nuts and bolts of new law is what congressional staffers are for.
Which leads me to suspect the motivations behind the bill. Who would gain from such a stupid law? Why the phone companies (both land and mobile), of course. The more barriers to entry they can establish for wi-fi hotspots, the more providers can control the data market. I suspect if we follow the money, it will turn out that they lobbied Sen. Cornyn pretty hard (and cherry-picked his office as one that would be sympathetic to their pitch.)
Where's the party who doesn't want any of this shit and thinks the government has much, much more important stuff on its plate right now?
France?
Nope. Estonia.
France has a "Ministry of Language", for crying out loud. I love their nuclear grid and their wine fields, but there is no problem in France too small for the government to poke its nose in it.
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law. You just pass laws that are impossible or unreasonable to follow and then when you want to come down on someone, you just hit them with a bunch of bullshit charges. So if federal law enforcement kicks down your door on some bogus child porn charge and doesn't find any child porn, they can save face, rather than just admit their mistake, by busting you on all the *other* stuff they found (your marijuana stash, your bootleg mp3's, and now the fact that you weren't keeping 2 years of archived data, and so on).
I really wish there were more people who get this. You don't need to be a conspiracy wonk to see how obvious it is that we are cultivating a legal framework which will eventually permit the state to lock up anybody they choose for almost any motivation.
Looking at the direction of state power we've been moving in over the last 20 years, I feel very comfortable calling myself a libertarian crackpot. Hooray for Reason Magazine, the Cato Institute, the ACLU, and pretty much all of the states in between the Mississippi River and the eastern border of California.
Gyah... Always read the preview before clicking on "submit."
That first parenthetical remark should have read "(regardless of party)".
Everybody here should write to both of their Senators and their Representative (regardless) and simply provide a link to this /. thread to educate them on all the technical reasons why this bill is very ill-conceived.
In layman's terms most of the reasons boil down to:
1. The required equipment will cost private citizens and small businesses a prohibitive amount of money. Many homes will find themselves spending more on their log archive than they spent on their computers, and small Internet cafe businesses simply be forced to close.
2. It will require expertise which most people simply don't have, forcing everybody to hire IT professionals to manage their home networks. (Ask your congerssperson if they know how to set up such a log without enlisting the help of an expert. Then ask them how a working-class family could ever afford to hire such help simply to use the Internet on their home laptops.)
3. It will utterly fail to achieve the objective of preventing anonymous Internet use. HDCP logs only record MAC addresses, which can easily be forged and sometimes are not even unique.
This bill is about as useful and practical as asking people to keep a filing cabinet full of photographs of every shoe-footprint that ever shows up in their back garden. It richly deserves to be laughed off the floors of Congress, should it ever even get that far.
Kind of foolish of you to buy all those analog devices knowing since years ago that the digital switch-over was coming. If you didn't know this was coming, you didn't research all those purchases very well.
Unless, of course, you bought them knowing full well that you would only get use out of them for a limited time, and factored that into your purchase decision. You got out of them exactly what you were expecting.
Either way, nobody owes you a working shirtpocket TV or PC tuner card.
>>>People out in the sticks typically have either cable or satellite,
Nope. I looked up the Nielsen numbers today. 99% of the people living in the Metropolitian northeast are ready-to-go and won't notice the switchoff. Meanwhile people "living in the sticks" of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas are the least-prepared with 89%. Why? Because when you're living in No-Mans-Land Oklahoma you don't have city services like cable. You rely on your antenna. So repeating what I said before:
- House Republicans voted "no" and yet they represent rural residents (farmers) who are most likely to need a delay.
- House Democrats voted "yes delay the switch" and yet the Democrats largely represent people in the cities who are over 99% ready.
The way they voted is backwards from their constituents' actual needs.
Uh. Your data does not support your explanation. Nowhere does it indicate that the people in "No-Mans-Land" are the ones that are not ready. It could be the people in Oklahoma City.
Again, TV reception is TERRIBLE in most of rural America. Farmers/ranchers/miners either get cable/satelite, or they live with one or two mostly-snowy weak signals if they are too poor (and haven't arranged to steal the cable signal.
A drive through Minnesota's "Iron Range" towns is an impressive display of massive satellite dishes, every town has one for the local cable company's feed, plus the handful of well-off homes have their own.
The value of analog-only TV's went down when they made the decision five years ago. If you bought your TV after that, the decrease was already built into the price you paid.
If your TV is over five years old, you already got most of its functional life out of it anyway. Tubes start to go after about 10 years most of the time.
The fed has altered the deal. Pray they don't alter it further.
You win at the Internet.
I suppose, if you're confidently wrong, you're not confused.
Worked for Biden in the VP debate.
Only 5% of the nation is not ready according to Nielsen Ratings.
So 15 million people is no longer considered "a lot"? Wow.
So what would you call the 285 million people now having to put up with all of this crap because of them?
I'm wondering why so many commenters think it's so bad that the switch is delayed?
Let me count the ways.
1. Not having all broadcasters switch at once is going to be a confounding mess, even for those of us who have already switched. I'm currently using a big UHF-only antenna that I've been relying on for the last two years, because the current pre-switch digital signal is weak and UHF only. Post-switch, some broadcasters are moving their digital signal to VHF and all of them were going to be boosting the signal. Now, with the VHF band still tied up as some (but not all) migrate, there are likely to be days when NOBODY can tune in every channel with a single antenna/tuner combination. Yuck!
2. A good chunk of the freed-up bandwidth was meant to be used by emergency responders, who have made a significant investment in equipment which will now collect dust for six months.
3. A lot of businesses have started up with the plan of buying/leasing former analog VHF bandwidth. These companies now must sit on ice for six more months and pray that they don't go belly-up before they even get a chance to open.
4. Of the 5 percent that are not ready, most of them will still not "get ready" before June. Losing your TV signal for a little while is not the end of the world, and having their screens go to static is probably exactly what it takes to get them off the couch and waddling down to the store to pick up a cheap converter.
5. Local broadcasters are in a bind, because their business plans didn't call for six more months of sending two signals, but if they do take the option of switching on the 17th, they risk losing customers.
6. Current digital signals are so week, that outer-ring "exurbs" in most metro areas can't consistently tune them in. During the switch DTV signals are expected to become a lot more powerful, making the broadcasts much more widely available... but if everything is not switched at once it's going to mean that those communities will lose some of their analog signals before the digital signal is strong enough to reach them. They go dark because a handful of people were too lazy to take advantage of a converter coupon. It's idiotic.
Anything else you are wondering about?
This whole thing is bassbackwards:
- House Democrats voted "yes delay the switch" and yet the Democrats largely represent people in the cities. The city folk are 99.9% ready, since they have the convenience of cable wired into their homes and don't watch over-the-air tv.
- House Republicans voted "no" and yet they represent rural residents (farmers) who don't have cable, and are most likely to need a delay.
No, it's you that has it backwards. Strong over-the-air signals are really only available near urban centers. I live in the Midwest suburbs and have a roof antenna, as do most of the home-owners in my neighborhood. People out in the sticks typically have either cable or satellite, if they have TV at all.
"Sanford and Son" was a significant upgrade of "Steptoe and Son." Likewise, "All in the Family" was a brilliant transplant job. Both were distinctly American shows in spite of their BBC roots.
Oh, and the Drew Carey-run "Whose Line" was good, but then again the only real changes made were the host and the audience. Otherwise you could almost treat Season 1 of the US show as if it was Season 11 of the British one.
This is news that sci-fi fans needed, after losing Tennant as the Doctor and the changes in scripting at the top of Doctor Who, and the way that Battlestar Galactica and the StarGate series have collapsed upon themselves. Even if BSG was supposed to end in Season 5 from the start as per the director.
SG-1 and SGA were both killed without rhyme or reason, SGA was killed after promising that it was the successor to keep the StarGate universe alive after SG-1 fell.
SciFi is an evil channel, so hopefully they won't get their hands on red dwarf and try to milk it for value like they've done with other series that they killed.
BSG is still awesome. All the whiners about "All Along the Watchtower" seeming to shatter the forth wall can chill the hell out now. The last couple episodes explained why it made PERFECT sense that the cylons had a 1960's pop tune stuck in their heads.
While Tennant was a brilliant Doctor, the constant regenerations is part of the joy of the show for those of us who have loved it since we were kids. Also, the news that Peter Moffit is taking over as head writer has been greeted by most fans of the show with wild enthusiam. He penned some of the very best episodes of the new series (including "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" and "Blink.)
And then there's "Lost", which is already the second-best US Sci-Fi show ever made (after "Firefly")
So there's plenty of good sci-fi out there. Certainly much more than in my younger days, when there was nothing but "Buck Rogers" and the original run of Galactica.
He's still got a perfectly functional television. Nobody will be broadcasting to its tuner, but it works perfectly.
That being the case, those of us who have already been watching in digital will need to go up on the roof and swap antennas again, bringing us back to the point that February is a lousy month to do that.
(Although I fully intend to brave the ice. The sooner they get this change-over done with, the better.)
For instance, you buy an older, used mac. It has an older version, say Tiger, of the operating system legally installed on it, but, you didn't get the OEM disks. Well, Apple no longer sells those disks....what do you do in case you need the CD's in case of failure and need to reinstall?
Ask other mac users. Go to any Mac User Group, school, or group of friends who use them, and odds are they will decide that simply GIVING you a perfectly legal copy of Tiger they have lying around is an attractive alternative to using it as a drink coaster or bicycle reflector.
Or go to lowendmac.com and take advantage of any of the MANY resources available to people using older macs.
Or go to the "Genius Bar" in any Apple Store and ask them. Depending how busy they are that day, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't just do the re-install for you, right there at the desk. Worst case, they'll help you find what you need, one way or another.
For instance, you buy an older, used mac. It has an older version, say Tiger, of the operating system legally installed on it, but, you didn't get the OEM disks. Well, Apple no longer sells those disks....what do you do in case you need the CD's in case of failure and need to reinstall?
Just go to any Mac User Group and ask around. Somebody will decide that just GIVING you their perfectly-legal copy of Tiger is an attractive alternative to using it as a drink coaster or bicycle reflector.