Because there's limited OTA bandwidth, and allowing everybody to transmit willy nilly is a good way to get NO functionality out of it.
Thus the FCC, to regulate the bandwidth. Over time, more uses for wireless have come up, and they decided that if they can make TV broadcasting more efficient, they'd be able to serve the same number or more channels to customers while freeing up bandwidth for other uses/services that require their own bandwidth to function properly.
Thus digital television. They made it force of law because otherwise nobody would switch, and are funding the coupon program out of the proceeds of the spectrum auction.
Safe modern power generation is difficult in seismically active areas.
So? Some of the nuclear reactors are very close to fault lines already, and have thus far weathered all earthquakes without serious damage. Besides, it's not like you can't transmit the electricity elsewhere - even over hundreds, thousands of miles. While our superconducting lines still have to be cooled, that can be done with liquid nitrogen which is easy enough to make, and economical when you get enough wattage/amperage transiting the lines.
Nuclear plants are designed to take earthquakes as a matter of course. I figure that between the various methods of generating non-fossil fuel power and various transmission systems, we can provide reasonable cost power to pretty much anywhere there's civilization.
Whereas I'm all for nuclear, it is not a one-size-fits-all fix.
Never said it was. I'm sure there's a few exemptions out there, but in general anywhere you can slap down a coal plant you can also slap down a nuclear plant.
Salt storage isn't something that scales down well; it's used by solar thermal plants, not solar voltiac cells. You wouldn't be placing this every mile, you'd be keeping it at the solar plant.
In my combined vision for the future I figure a couple things:
1. Plug in Hybrids/EVs will have a far greater role. 2. Due to expense/savings, many/most home charging stations will have load leveling capabilities. 3. Putting a PHEV/EV in a garage will swamp all but the most extreme energy saving measures otherwise taken. The tesla roadster has a 53kwh battery, and uses 28 kwh per 100 miles. 3.57 miles/kwh. Figure an annual average driving distance of 15000 miles, that's 4.2K kwh/year, 350 kwh/month. About 50% of the average annual usage of households in the USA(8,900 kwh/year. Keep in mind that the Tesla is light and efficient compared to most EVs due to it's sports car heritage and LiIon batteries. Oh, and that most families at this point have 2 or more vehicles.
A - Given 1&3, More generating capacity will be needed, not less, even if our population remains stable. B - Given A&2, the difference between peak and baseload should shrink. C - Despite 3, energy saving and leveling measures should be taken where practical. D - Despite what realtors tell us, homes DON'T always increase in value. It's mostly the land the house sits on. At some point it's worth it to tear the sucker down and build a *GOOD* house on the plot. Good today = energy efficient. All sorts of tricks are possible with a new house that aren't possible or practical with an old one. But I'd put a dryer(30A@220V) or even stove(50A) plug into the garage. E - Save the oil/NG for building materials and long range high speed travel.
Get people off of direct electric heat and towards geothermal heat pumps. Interesting tidbit - did you know that heat pump water heaters are produced? They'll cool and dehumidify the air around the hot water tank while heating the water. Cost is around a third that of direct electric. They've also developed heat pump dryers - they need a line to a drain like the washer, but use substantially less electricity and dry clothes faster with less heat. If I was running a laundrymat in a trustworthy area, I'd seriously consider them - not only would it reduce my expenses with the dryers, it'd also reduce the amount of AC needed.
I figure lots of solar in areas where peak demand tends to coincide with peak sun, wind in the appropriate areas, all backed up by a ton of nuclear capacity - and nuclear CAN load level; they're generally run at max capacity because they're the cheapest source of demand electricty going. Spreading solar out is pretty much required; in my area putting a wind turbine up next to/in a lot of the small towns would reduce the amount of electricity lost on wires.
The flip side of your statistic is that it only took one nuclear accident to kill the same number of people as all the coal power plants in the world kill in a year.
Have to correct your statement a bit. By some counts, you'd have to have 25 Chernobyl level disasters a YEAR to equal the toll of coal. Clearly, statistics don't support anywhere near that level of incidents. For one thing, the containment structures all operating reactors have(that Chernobyl lacked) would tend to stop leaks. Chernobyl killed somewhere between 50 and 70 people directly. 4k is a 'worst case' scientific estimate. There are some theoretical higher numbers, but they depend upon disputed science(linear harm theory), as evidence shows that lower exposures to radiation don't cause expected extra cases of cancer. Outside of Chernobyl - there's something like a half dozen casualties; most caused by steam explosions. Steam explosions aren't unique to nuclear power either.
China's coal mining has averaged 5k-7k deaths a year, for decades. Meanwhile, we've had 1 Chernobyl over the course of 50 years. Pollution wise, there are estimates that it kills over a 100k, some even say a quarter million, a year.
We build 3X more plants than we have now and we'd be able to turn off the coal plants. Probably less even, as modern genIII plants tend to have more capacity than genII plants while being considerably safer. Using modern design techniques, they really simplified the plants. Fewer pipes, valves, switches, etc... Fewer things to break.
Anyways, like I said, if I had my way I'd be replacing all the coal plants with nuclear not because nuclear is 100% safe - but because it's substantially safer and less polluting than coal plants. In the USA, approximately 200 people are killed mining and transporting coal to the power plants.
I wonder how those numbers will scale up if a country like China replaced all it's coal with nuclear.
56-70 confirmed for Chernobyl*. Considering the 50 year history of nuclear power, we average less than 2 deaths a year, even including it. Any arguments about cancer deaths also has to deal with the cancer deaths from coal plant pollution. The only power death's I'm aware of since Chernobyl was a couple of Japanese workers who violated about a phone book's of regulations, didn't use the proper equipment and safety measures; preferring to mix the stuff in a stainless steel bucket in quantities far exceeding what they were supposed to.
In 2001, we produced ~ 2.5k TWh of electricity from nuclear sources; 16% of the world's electricity. Coal is 40%.
Build up to 4X as many nuke plants as we currently have and we'd be able to shut off all the coal plants.
Going by our average of 2 nuclear power deaths a year, that'd increase to 8 a year. Big whoopty do. Well, except for the unlucky 8 - but I'd rather sacrifice 8 than 100,000.
*Sorry, but I tend to discount greenpeace's numbers as an outlier. I've seen no evidence that they considered chemical pollution(the USSR wasn't very clean), tobacco use, heck the very contamination from dirty coal plants.
Don't you think that if we'd been using nuclear power as long as we've been using coal, we'd far more nuclear power-related deaths and incidents than we do now?
Don't have the study handy, but Nuclear not only has a far lower death toll than Coal in total, it also has a far lower death toll per kwh produced. For example, China, any given year, has more coal miners die in accidents than Chernobyl killed, even if you take upper end statistics. Even the 57 or so immediately attributable deaths from Chernobyl are exceeded by coal mining deaths in the USA in a couple years. If you want to add in statistical radiation deaths, we need to also add in the deaths from pollution from coal plants, and again, we end up with that a Chernobyl a year would kill fewer people than coal.
First, I'll point out that I believe that nuclear weapons aren't in the same category as nuclear power; that'd be like adding deaths from tank weapons into automotive deaths.
Still, I think it's an interesting topic. Hiroshima: 140k Nagasaki: 80k Chernobyl: 57 direct deaths, 4k 'additional cancer cases', estimated, not all of which would be fatal. Other: Various accidents; under a hundred. Less than 1% of the above, easily within the margin of error of the nuclear weapons usage.
224k total, of which 1.8% can be attributed, partially, to nuclear power(Chernobyl was also a weapons material plant, which affected it's design).
If you believe this article, 24k lives are 'shortened' by coal power, cause 2.8k cases of lung cancer a year, 4k deaths from asthma, heart attacks, etc... At 4k, we're killing a Chernobyl's worth of citizens each and every year. In the 63 years since the nuclear attacks in 1945, that would be 252,000 people.
On to China - They've made it a 'goal' to reduce their annual coal mining deaths to a 'mere' 5k in 2007 over the 7k of 2003. In 1988 - "chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was 26% of all causes of death. If even a fraction of a percent of those deaths are from the pollution from coal power, 26k a year isn't outrageous from a country of over a billion.
Basically; I figure coal power kills more people every year than Chernobyl accident did period, and it bypasses our nuclear bombings in less than five years.
And people wonder why I'd shut down all the coal plants if I could...
Second, even if your workload consists of apps that are purely single threaded, you still benefit from two cores by letting your workload run on one core, and everything else on the second.
The single biggest thing I noticed when I built my first dual core computer over my older single core one. Didn't even notice the graphics improvement that much.
As a result, I'm unlikely to ever go back to single core. I figure quad core will be my next upgrade; but I bought a dual for the time because metrics had dual > quad > single for the price of the CPU for users of mostly single threaded applications, even many multi-threaded ones. The simple reason was that, for the price, quads took a good hit on clock speed.
I'd argue that they aren't lying, unless they don't watch OTA broadcasts. My grandfather has dish, but still watches local channels. The form asks whether you have those services - but doesn't discriminate you if you answer yes.
Who would want to be the president who 2 weeks after being in office takes television away from 20% of the country.
Would it really be 20%? 14.3 million is the Nielsen estimate that rely on OTA TV. Per the census in 2000, we have 105M households.
That means only 13% of households depend on OTA. Per NTIA - on Dec 17, 2008 11M out of that 14.3M had requested coupons. Overall, 22M households had requested 41M coupons, and 17M redeemed. That means 77% of that 13% has had the opportunity to get a converter box or two.
By my calc, the number of households that would lose the ability to receive OTA broadcasts would be well under 3% at this point. At least some households wouldn't be requesting coupons/buying converter boxes due to purchasing of TVs with digital tuners.
Hmm... Have you checked the power they're transmitting at? I've read that many of the stations are transmitting at lower power until they shut off the analog stations.
Other solutions, if possible(you might be in an apartment), might be to put an antenna on the roof or in the attic. Even with a longer cable run, a larger antenna will beat rabbit ears all to heck. The extra height doesn't hurt either.
Then again, I download fairly frequently as well - I get 5 stations, including the religious channel on my ignore list and PBS.
In other words, the savings in gigawatts is coming at the price of cutting off service to outlying areas.
I'm one of those 'outlying areas', I pick up DTV just fine. Though I have to wonder at the presumed power savings; most stations I know of that are transmitting in both are going to turn off their analog transmitters and switch the digital transmitter to their originally assigned channel/frequency, and broadcast at full power. Just digitally, which allows something like 3 video streams per channel.
Considering the gross or so we still have in a storage room and that we actually DON'T want them to do much besides provide a desktop, I don't think we're going to be replacing them anytime soon.
The things will probably still be around next decade if they have the failure rates you'd expect from such basic pieces of equipment.
I'm a small cog in a very big machine; I don't have much power over purchasing.
I haven't had any issues; and I'm more than 50 miles from the transmitters. Not much in the way of multipath where I am, but signal strength is a definite issue; The digital channels are universally better thus far than the analogs(that have some snow).
They could delay it for 10 more years and there'd still be people out there that have no clue until the TV stops working and a big graphic comes on that explains why it stopped working.
Or at least until their TV stops working and they haul themselves to the store to buy a new one(they'd be unlikely to understand a converter box if they're that dumb).
Hmmm... Seems like a bad strategy to me. You might be able to sell some right now while no more coupons are being issued; but as long as the coupons are available I'd be hesitant to try to sell them on Ebay.
I'd put them up on switching day, if not a bit later. After the coupon program has expired.
One of my stations switched recently anyways; other than telling my TV to check for a digital station on that channel, no issues. Picture improved, though it's pretty obvious that they're merely feeding it an analog signal through a converter for now.
While I'd push more funding in for the coupons; I have the feeling that many/most on that list don't actually need a box. Talking with various people, there's a lot getting them 'just in case' even though they get cable/dish. For that matter, I bought one for my CRT TV about a month before a great deal had me buying a new LCD TV.
The final point I'd have is that, at this point, delaying the switch won't get you that many more digital capable homes - many are procrastinating, and will continue to do so until they can't get broadcast TV.
Meanwhile I'd like to see those applications for the freed up bandwidth to actually happen. Of course, I saw on conspiracy theory that those wanting a delay have or are looking to bring out competing products.
My response to that is that 3rd graders don't need computers. Technically speaking, not even high school studends NEED computers, but it can be helpful.
Depending on the course of instruction, some computers alongside the wall would work. I'd go with group activities with them.
Did you know teachers can't even have paper on the wall within 2 feet of a door or window? Schools have extremely strict codes for these things. I'm not saying you couldn't find a way, but it would be totally disruptive and/or rigid for any classroom.
They must have locked things down a bit more since I was in school then. Besides, as long as you use cords rated for that duty you'd be fine. I wasn't talking about some extension cord you pick up at walmart, more the wide flat ones (like 3" wide) that you can get from the office supply stores; properly installed they aren't considered tripping hazards.
Or, like xaxa said, you simply make the desks unmovable; it's not like most of my classes moved the desks much anyways.
The power outlets are a great idea, except that no schools are outfitted for such a thing thus driving costs of implementing it through the roof, and it would make it impossible to re-arrange any desks making the system extremely inflexible and without the support of any sane teachers.
Compared to most remodeling jobs the cost would be quite reasonable as long as you're not hiring chicago contractors.
Often schools have raised ceilings just like many businesses - giving them plenty of room to run more wiring. Realistically, five 20A circuits would give plenty of classroom for primary education class sizes. Fewer, if you're going to pay attention about using lower power devices.
Put them along the walls, then use flat extension cords. There, you have your arrangeable rooms. Or even use ceiling drops. Plenty of options.
As for the costs... No. That was the cost for getting one more computer put in the classroom with an agreement to swap out bad hardware, nothing else.
Ouch, in that case. Was it at least a completely outfitted computer?
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Because there's limited OTA bandwidth, and allowing everybody to transmit willy nilly is a good way to get NO functionality out of it.
Thus the FCC, to regulate the bandwidth. Over time, more uses for wireless have come up, and they decided that if they can make TV broadcasting more efficient, they'd be able to serve the same number or more channels to customers while freeing up bandwidth for other uses/services that require their own bandwidth to function properly.
Thus digital television. They made it force of law because otherwise nobody would switch, and are funding the coupon program out of the proceeds of the spectrum auction.
Safe modern power generation is difficult in seismically active areas.
So? Some of the nuclear reactors are very close to fault lines already, and have thus far weathered all earthquakes without serious damage. Besides, it's not like you can't transmit the electricity elsewhere - even over hundreds, thousands of miles. While our superconducting lines still have to be cooled, that can be done with liquid nitrogen which is easy enough to make, and economical when you get enough wattage/amperage transiting the lines.
Nuclear plants are designed to take earthquakes as a matter of course. I figure that between the various methods of generating non-fossil fuel power and various transmission systems, we can provide reasonable cost power to pretty much anywhere there's civilization.
Whereas I'm all for nuclear, it is not a one-size-fits-all fix.
Never said it was. I'm sure there's a few exemptions out there, but in general anywhere you can slap down a coal plant you can also slap down a nuclear plant.
That would be using an old GenII design; the newer GenIII designs, in order to increase safety and reduce building/maintenance costs are far simpler.
Estimates put them at $1-2 per watt of capacity, putting a 1.6GW plant like Calvert at 3.2B to build on the top end.
But yeah, nuclear power, despite the huge build costs are still cheaper than the alternatives.
Salt storage isn't something that scales down well; it's used by solar thermal plants, not solar voltiac cells. You wouldn't be placing this every mile, you'd be keeping it at the solar plant.
In my combined vision for the future I figure a couple things:
1. Plug in Hybrids/EVs will have a far greater role.
2. Due to expense/savings, many/most home charging stations will have load leveling capabilities.
3. Putting a PHEV/EV in a garage will swamp all but the most extreme energy saving measures otherwise taken. The tesla roadster has a 53kwh battery, and uses 28 kwh per 100 miles. 3.57 miles/kwh. Figure an annual average driving distance of 15000 miles, that's 4.2K kwh/year, 350 kwh/month. About 50% of the average annual usage of households in the USA(8,900 kwh/year. Keep in mind that the Tesla is light and efficient compared to most EVs due to it's sports car heritage and LiIon batteries. Oh, and that most families at this point have 2 or more vehicles.
A - Given 1&3, More generating capacity will be needed, not less, even if our population remains stable.
B - Given A&2, the difference between peak and baseload should shrink.
C - Despite 3, energy saving and leveling measures should be taken where practical.
D - Despite what realtors tell us, homes DON'T always increase in value. It's mostly the land the house sits on. At some point it's worth it to tear the sucker down and build a *GOOD* house on the plot. Good today = energy efficient. All sorts of tricks are possible with a new house that aren't possible or practical with an old one. But I'd put a dryer(30A@220V) or even stove(50A) plug into the garage.
E - Save the oil/NG for building materials and long range high speed travel.
Get people off of direct electric heat and towards geothermal heat pumps. Interesting tidbit - did you know that heat pump water heaters are produced? They'll cool and dehumidify the air around the hot water tank while heating the water. Cost is around a third that of direct electric. They've also developed heat pump dryers - they need a line to a drain like the washer, but use substantially less electricity and dry clothes faster with less heat. If I was running a laundrymat in a trustworthy area, I'd seriously consider them - not only would it reduce my expenses with the dryers, it'd also reduce the amount of AC needed.
I figure lots of solar in areas where peak demand tends to coincide with peak sun, wind in the appropriate areas, all backed up by a ton of nuclear capacity - and nuclear CAN load level; they're generally run at max capacity because they're the cheapest source of demand electricty going. Spreading solar out is pretty much required; in my area putting a wind turbine up next to/in a lot of the small towns would reduce the amount of electricity lost on wires.
The flip side of your statistic is that it only took one nuclear accident to kill the same number of people as all the coal power plants in the world kill in a year.
Have to correct your statement a bit. By some counts, you'd have to have 25 Chernobyl level disasters a YEAR to equal the toll of coal. Clearly, statistics don't support anywhere near that level of incidents. For one thing, the containment structures all operating reactors have(that Chernobyl lacked) would tend to stop leaks. Chernobyl killed somewhere between 50 and 70 people directly. 4k is a 'worst case' scientific estimate. There are some theoretical higher numbers, but they depend upon disputed science(linear harm theory), as evidence shows that lower exposures to radiation don't cause expected extra cases of cancer. Outside of Chernobyl - there's something like a half dozen casualties; most caused by steam explosions. Steam explosions aren't unique to nuclear power either.
China's coal mining has averaged 5k-7k deaths a year, for decades. Meanwhile, we've had 1 Chernobyl over the course of 50 years. Pollution wise, there are estimates that it kills over a 100k, some even say a quarter million, a year.
We build 3X more plants than we have now and we'd be able to turn off the coal plants. Probably less even, as modern genIII plants tend to have more capacity than genII plants while being considerably safer. Using modern design techniques, they really simplified the plants. Fewer pipes, valves, switches, etc... Fewer things to break.
Anyways, like I said, if I had my way I'd be replacing all the coal plants with nuclear not because nuclear is 100% safe - but because it's substantially safer and less polluting than coal plants. In the USA, approximately 200 people are killed mining and transporting coal to the power plants.
Please name the ones that couldn't be replaced by nuclear power, or other alternative sources of electricity.
If the alternative was coal or no medical devices, no heat, no computers, no electricity, then yes, coal has saved far more lives.
But we can do cleaner today.
I wonder how those numbers will scale up if a country like China replaced all it's coal with nuclear.
56-70 confirmed for Chernobyl*. Considering the 50 year history of nuclear power, we average less than 2 deaths a year, even including it. Any arguments about cancer deaths also has to deal with the cancer deaths from coal plant pollution. The only power death's I'm aware of since Chernobyl was a couple of Japanese workers who violated about a phone book's of regulations, didn't use the proper equipment and safety measures; preferring to mix the stuff in a stainless steel bucket in quantities far exceeding what they were supposed to.
In 2001, we produced ~ 2.5k TWh of electricity from nuclear sources; 16% of the world's electricity. Coal is 40%.
Build up to 4X as many nuke plants as we currently have and we'd be able to shut off all the coal plants.
Going by our average of 2 nuclear power deaths a year, that'd increase to 8 a year. Big whoopty do. Well, except for the unlucky 8 - but I'd rather sacrifice 8 than 100,000.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
*Sorry, but I tend to discount greenpeace's numbers as an outlier. I've seen no evidence that they considered chemical pollution(the USSR wasn't very clean), tobacco use, heck the very contamination from dirty coal plants.
Don't you think that if we'd been using nuclear power as long as we've been using coal, we'd far more nuclear power-related deaths and incidents than we do now?
Don't have the study handy, but Nuclear not only has a far lower death toll than Coal in total, it also has a far lower death toll per kwh produced. For example, China, any given year, has more coal miners die in accidents than Chernobyl killed, even if you take upper end statistics. Even the 57 or so immediately attributable deaths from Chernobyl are exceeded by coal mining deaths in the USA in a couple years. If you want to add in statistical radiation deaths, we need to also add in the deaths from pollution from coal plants, and again, we end up with that a Chernobyl a year would kill fewer people than coal.
First, I'll point out that I believe that nuclear weapons aren't in the same category as nuclear power; that'd be like adding deaths from tank weapons into automotive deaths.
Still, I think it's an interesting topic.
Hiroshima: 140k
Nagasaki: 80k
Chernobyl: 57 direct deaths, 4k 'additional cancer cases', estimated, not all of which would be fatal.
Other: Various accidents; under a hundred. Less than 1% of the above, easily within the margin of error of the nuclear weapons usage.
224k total, of which 1.8% can be attributed, partially, to nuclear power(Chernobyl was also a weapons material plant, which affected it's design).
If you believe this article, 24k lives are 'shortened' by coal power, cause 2.8k cases of lung cancer a year, 4k deaths from asthma, heart attacks, etc... At 4k, we're killing a Chernobyl's worth of citizens each and every year. In the 63 years since the nuclear attacks in 1945, that would be 252,000 people.
On to China - They've made it a 'goal' to reduce their annual coal mining deaths to a 'mere' 5k in 2007 over the 7k of 2003. In 1988 - "chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was 26% of all causes of death. If even a fraction of a percent of those deaths are from the pollution from coal power, 26k a year isn't outrageous from a country of over a billion.
Basically; I figure coal power kills more people every year than Chernobyl accident did period, and it bypasses our nuclear bombings in less than five years.
And people wonder why I'd shut down all the coal plants if I could...
Second, even if your workload consists of apps that are purely single threaded, you still benefit from two cores by letting your workload run on one core, and everything else on the second.
The single biggest thing I noticed when I built my first dual core computer over my older single core one. Didn't even notice the graphics improvement that much.
As a result, I'm unlikely to ever go back to single core. I figure quad core will be my next upgrade; but I bought a dual for the time because metrics had dual > quad > single for the price of the CPU for users of mostly single threaded applications, even many multi-threaded ones. The simple reason was that, for the price, quads took a good hit on clock speed.
I'd argue that they aren't lying, unless they don't watch OTA broadcasts. My grandfather has dish, but still watches local channels. The form asks whether you have those services - but doesn't discriminate you if you answer yes.
Who would want to be the president who 2 weeks after being in office takes television away from 20% of the country.
Would it really be 20%? 14.3 million is the Nielsen estimate that rely on OTA TV. Per the census in 2000, we have 105M households.
That means only 13% of households depend on OTA. Per NTIA - on Dec 17, 2008 11M out of that 14.3M had requested coupons. Overall, 22M households had requested 41M coupons, and 17M redeemed. That means 77% of that 13% has had the opportunity to get a converter box or two.
By my calc, the number of households that would lose the ability to receive OTA broadcasts would be well under 3% at this point. At least some households wouldn't be requesting coupons/buying converter boxes due to purchasing of TVs with digital tuners.
Hmm... Have you checked the power they're transmitting at? I've read that many of the stations are transmitting at lower power until they shut off the analog stations.
Other solutions, if possible(you might be in an apartment), might be to put an antenna on the roof or in the attic. Even with a longer cable run, a larger antenna will beat rabbit ears all to heck. The extra height doesn't hurt either.
Then again, I download fairly frequently as well - I get 5 stations, including the religious channel on my ignore list and PBS.
In other words, the savings in gigawatts is coming at the price of cutting off service to outlying areas.
I'm one of those 'outlying areas', I pick up DTV just fine. Though I have to wonder at the presumed power savings; most stations I know of that are transmitting in both are going to turn off their analog transmitters and switch the digital transmitter to their originally assigned channel/frequency, and broadcast at full power. Just digitally, which allows something like 3 video streams per channel.
Considering the gross or so we still have in a storage room and that we actually DON'T want them to do much besides provide a desktop, I don't think we're going to be replacing them anytime soon.
The things will probably still be around next decade if they have the failure rates you'd expect from such basic pieces of equipment.
I'm a small cog in a very big machine; I don't have much power over purchasing.
Well, one four month delay today, a multiple year one before that, another after the four months are done...
They might be hoping to get significant market share in the next few months. Reach some sort of tipping point ala game systems.
I wouldn't count on it though; that's why I called it a conspiracy theory.
I haven't had any issues; and I'm more than 50 miles from the transmitters. Not much in the way of multipath where I am, but signal strength is a definite issue; The digital channels are universally better thus far than the analogs(that have some snow).
They could delay it for 10 more years and there'd still be people out there that have no clue until the TV stops working and a big graphic comes on that explains why it stopped working.
Or at least until their TV stops working and they haul themselves to the store to buy a new one(they'd be unlikely to understand a converter box if they're that dumb).
Or you watch TV so rarely it'll be at least 3 months before you notice the conversion...
Hmmm... Seems like a bad strategy to me. You might be able to sell some right now while no more coupons are being issued; but as long as the coupons are available I'd be hesitant to try to sell them on Ebay.
I'd put them up on switching day, if not a bit later. After the coupon program has expired.
One of my stations switched recently anyways; other than telling my TV to check for a digital station on that channel, no issues. Picture improved, though it's pretty obvious that they're merely feeding it an analog signal through a converter for now.
While I'd push more funding in for the coupons; I have the feeling that many/most on that list don't actually need a box. Talking with various people, there's a lot getting them 'just in case' even though they get cable/dish. For that matter, I bought one for my CRT TV about a month before a great deal had me buying a new LCD TV.
The final point I'd have is that, at this point, delaying the switch won't get you that many more digital capable homes - many are procrastinating, and will continue to do so until they can't get broadcast TV.
Meanwhile I'd like to see those applications for the freed up bandwidth to actually happen. Of course, I saw on conspiracy theory that those wanting a delay have or are looking to bring out competing products.
What do you guys use instead of C7s then?
WYSE models, though it looks like they've done a redesign since we got ours.
This one looks closer to what we have, but our's don't have linux on them.
Requires making sure all the PC's are either configured identically, or you install your apps to the network or Citrix. :-/
Which is why I start thinking heavily on going with thinnets - just leave everything to the big powerful servers in a back room somewhere.
My response to that is that 3rd graders don't need computers. Technically speaking, not even high school studends NEED computers, but it can be helpful.
Depending on the course of instruction, some computers alongside the wall would work. I'd go with group activities with them.
Did you know teachers can't even have paper on the wall within 2 feet of a door or window? Schools have extremely strict codes for these things. I'm not saying you couldn't find a way, but it would be totally disruptive and/or rigid for any classroom.
They must have locked things down a bit more since I was in school then. Besides, as long as you use cords rated for that duty you'd be fine. I wasn't talking about some extension cord you pick up at walmart, more the wide flat ones (like 3" wide) that you can get from the office supply stores; properly installed they aren't considered tripping hazards.
Or, like xaxa said, you simply make the desks unmovable; it's not like most of my classes moved the desks much anyways.
*head explodes again*
Aren't heads expensive?
The power outlets are a great idea, except that no schools are outfitted for such a thing thus driving costs of implementing it through the roof, and it would make it impossible to re-arrange any desks making the system extremely inflexible and without the support of any sane teachers.
Compared to most remodeling jobs the cost would be quite reasonable as long as you're not hiring chicago contractors.
Often schools have raised ceilings just like many businesses - giving them plenty of room to run more wiring. Realistically, five 20A circuits would give plenty of classroom for primary education class sizes. Fewer, if you're going to pay attention about using lower power devices.
Put them along the walls, then use flat extension cords. There, you have your arrangeable rooms. Or even use ceiling drops. Plenty of options.
As for the costs... No. That was the cost for getting one more computer put in the classroom with an agreement to swap out bad hardware, nothing else.
Ouch, in that case. Was it at least a completely outfitted computer?