...lack of familiarity with the terms used in RF engineering.
Got beaten to the punch here. I was about to submit this confusing quote from TFA:
the two-wire ribbons used during televisionâ(TM)s first few decades to send RF signals from rooftop VHF antennas to television sets without any loss. The electric RF current in the two conductors flow in opposite directions and have opposite phase. Because of the translational symmetry (the two conductors are parallel) the radiation fields cancel each other out, so there is no net radiation into space.
Took a few reads before I finally figured out they were referring to 300-ohm twin lead...
[digression]Captcha for this is "shudders". Indeed...[/digression]
This. This is the terrestrial broadcasters trying to stay relevant in a world where they increasingly are not due to streaming. Just like the electric companies fighting solar tooth and claw, broadcasters are having to deal with Netflix, Hulu, and so on.
"Screaming, 'We're too important during emergencies to not have around!' worked for ham radio," the broadcasters must be thinking, and the FCC, at least, seems to agree. For FM, at least, they don't have to worry about encumberance from cell phones, unlike UHF TV.
Personally, though, I think almost all terrestrial broadcast is a waste of bandwidth, but I know that's not the popular opinion even here on/.
That is, disconnect from the grid entirely. Once rechargables come down decently in price per cycle ((dis)charge) and price/watt-hour, there won't be a need to put up with this. This can only apply to residential and some small business, of course, as factories take in may times what power they could generate themselves, but the utilities should be scared, especially as they work to piss off people even more than telecom/cable utilities.
I've been thinking about this for years: the same problem affects DMR (MotoTRBO and friends) and D-STAR (and its sibling NXDN) and seems related to diversity, sub-standard trellis and other ECC, and so on that were solved in cell (mobile) phone standards a decade or two ago: most(all?) of the solutions are patented, which is a problem for D-STAR but not for the others. It's just clear the companies involved don't want to put any effort into fixing these problems.
I hardly listen to the wasteland that is broadcast radio other than to check traffic or propagation conditions. I know we're talking about Norway, but is the broadcast radio there worth listening to? It sure isn't here in the USofA.:(
tl;dr if this happened in USA tomorrow I probably wouldn't notice for a week or more; how about you?
Google has only been acting really evil in the last few years; for M$, Oracle, and many other companies, doing evil is corporate policy and they have *NEVER* STOPPED being evil. To put it another way, Oracle is the Monsanto of software, M$ is the DuPont of software, and Google is more like factory farms, doing both good and evil at the same time. (I freely admit the Google comparison is weak--please feel free to come up with a better one.)
I have no problem with Google being investigated, but they should go after M$ as well, especially with what they did to Nokia, Linux, and Android; fat chance that'll happen, though.
I couldn't figure out why Google wasn't getting pissy AT ALL over Cyanogen forking and talking smack about them.. Now the other shoe has dropped: Cyanogen's fork (and the company's very existance) is Google's main anti-trust defense, at least at the OS level.
Now Google's ad business, that's a whole 'nother matter...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudesare what you are referring to. These deserts are referred to as "sub-tropical", as opposed to, say, the northern Great Basin or eastern Washington, which is mainly created from rain shadowing.
Also, Sahara is north of the equator (the desert, the street, and the casino).
IMO we shouldn't outlaw a technology purely because of what someone could do with it. It's the act of invading someone's privacy that should be outlawed. This accomplishes the same thing while preserving the multitude of legitimate uses for these devices.
Tell that to the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc. (If not in USA, substitute for your own equivalent like GCHQ, GRU, etc.)
[digression]Captcha to post this was "conspire", lol![/digresson]
The phone company there is former Continental Telephone, then GTE, then Verizon, and now Frontier; this is the same company that serves southern California and was originally directly connected (decades ago, until a couple/few years after the AT&T divestiture). The story above is the latest sale of Verizon landline assets to Frontier (and occasionally others); this one was done some years back, close to a decade ago, I believe. The point is that, while Verizon gains plenty of cash from the sale, it keeps sinking Frontier and others into deeper and deeper debt, which is referenced in the story above.
QED: lots of debt == no new investment, period (if at all possible)--the rollouts you mentioned were done, I'm sure, before they started their buying spree.
Oh yes, and I've talked to a phone guy a few years ago working for Nevada Bell (now AT&T), and he knew some guys working for Frontier (might've still been Verizon at that point), and he related how they absolutely hated it and were trying to get out.
My dad lives around 4 route-miles from the CO and not only can't get DSL, he can't even get decent POTS as the entire cable (not just his pair) has severe power line hum on it and the phone company (now Frontier) refuses to fix it. He uses it for fax and it works...sometimes. For voice he uses his cell, but as this is an in-between area for GSM carriers, that tends to be flaky as well.
Meanwhile, as I've already said, I'm around the same distance from my CO, and the company (CenturyLink formerly Qwest formerly US Worst) refuses to install DSLAMs or anything. Oh, and the cable that comes to us is also rotting in the ground so there are periodic outages, the last one killing of the the 3 bonded T1 lines that we have for internet (that we have to give away for free) since we can't get DSL. Its starting to seem like the cable company might be more reliable than the phone company, and yes, that thought sends a chill up my spine. Oh, and I'm in Phoenix, only 6 miles from downtown, not the sticks.
So excuse me if I don't buy any of these things: just because the tech is developed doesn't mean anyone will actually deploy it.
Sure, this "real" hyperspectral imager can't do VISOR's "1 Hz to 100 PHz" (per the above), but it's still impressive nonetheless--assuming it's not vaporware, of course.
You, the individual, can't hope to keep up with organizations that can out-spend you hundreds to thousands of times in terms both man-hours and money. How can you even know if the code you download off the manufacturers' web sites hasn't been tainted during production? Your only hope is to stay below their radar, or have enough trusted people around you or time on your hands to personally go through the code and verify it. I'm betting, even in their mom's basement, hardly anyone has time for that.
You may work for a major telecom, but obviously not THIS major telecom. This is CenturyLink, formerly Qwest, formerly US Worst: they have a REPUTATION for this sort of thing. Where I work and live, JUST 5 MILES FROM DOWNTOWN PHOENIX and their Arizona corporate headquarters, we can't get ADSL because the copper is too rotted in the ground, we're too far away, and they won't install DSLAMs: we had to get bonded T1's instead. No joke.
In this case, the fiber cut was right alongside Interstate 17, near Black Canyon City. This isn't the middle of nowhere, as you assert, but in a suburb at the edge of Phoenix metro (these days).
As for the "backup systems", yeah right: not only was internet out, but so was phone service to the outside world. Let me repeat that again: *NO* service to Phoenix or the outside world! This includes the Navajo Nation to the New Mexico and Utah border. Including the 4 counties involved (Apache, Coconino, Navajo, and Yavapai), that is over half a million people. Cell sites and phones except for a few Verizon ones (probably mountain-top and microwave back-hauled directly from Phoenix) were all down as well.
In fact, the fact that TFA is from San Francisco and not an Arizona paper proves this isn't just a/. "blurb", as you say. This is a (former) Baby-Bell cutting too many corners, plain and simple. I also happen to know first-hand of a few other places--some owned by Frontier (now), some a Bell system, where there is one lousy connection to the outside world and absolutely *NO* backup! Oh, and it was that way since day one, long before my grandpa was born! SONET rings? What's that?
Oh, come on, Oregon and Washington LEGALIZED IT, it's just some pot festival sent too much smoke and ash up from western WA/OR. A quick THC test should tell you all you need to know.
It's interesting a TV and podcast "radio" show already deal with these two issues:
First, in "Welcome to Night Vale", the rival town of Desert Bluffs is run by a corporation, and people are valued by how productive they are; if they're not productive enough (much less, not at all), they are disposed of. I believe there are many science fiction stories in the same vein, but I can't think of any at the moment.
The other is a TV show you're all familiar with: Star Trek. With the exception of in the first series where Kirk mentions something to Spock about his wages, the world is pretty much non-capitalistic (until the Ferenghi came along, anyway), and semi-socialistic where you could still own your own stuff, but people were free (except in military service) to do what they wanted when they wanted, within the limits of societal norms.
Personally, I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and it seems there are two paths we as humanity will take:
1. We become similar to this Star Trek world, where robots cater to our every need. Of course, what happens when they become self-aware and realize our superfluousness with regard to their existance is another matter dealt with in fiction to death.
2. If we assume those in charge (and, by definition, extremely wealthy) will do anything to stay there, then they will do whatever it takes to keep the above from happening since it will do away with the concept of wealth--not a good thing if you can buy a country if you so choose.
A middle road is that, once the robots/androids become self-sufficient (not necessary self-aware), then those in charge mentioned above will carry out the Illuminati plan described in the Denver airport and other places and exterminate those that don't contribute (enough) to society, thus ridding competition, jealousy, and over-population in one fell swoop.
Since I myself am one of those near-zero value citizens, I fully expect to be wiped out, but as I hate the world anyway, I don't mind.
I'm not a fan of the carriers for the obvious reasons, but I have to play Devil's Advocate here and remind you all of how much money it costs to deploy equipment in all that spectrum. This is the reason why coverage is great in cities and poor in the countryside. Look how much spectrum T-Mobile and Sprint have over a huge geographical area and yet deploy over only a tiny percentage of it; supposedly T-Mobile will deploy more in rural areas where they can get 700 MHz spectrum, but I'll believe that when I see it. Likewise, in lesser (ranked 101+ or so?) metro areas, their network is a mess of technologies with 2, 3, and 4G all in the same city, and only barely-working 2G in some areas, including one (Kingman, Arizona) where T-Mobile is severely oversubscribed yet they won't put a dime into improvement.
So here's an idea I've had for years: pay less money for spectrum in exchange for current-technology coverage over your ENTIRE license area rather than just the big cities. I can't count how many people would love decent internet access and can't get it because the spectrum is all owned by companies who refuse to actually install equipment there: this practice should be illegal.
Sure, the leasing idea is probably the better one, but the roll-out cost of keeping up with the technology is far in excess of that. Also note that this argument isn't just about the cell/mobile bands but also all the other bands, especially as the phone companies continue to gobble up everyone else's spectrum--even us ham radio operators, where I expect the 9cm band (and possibly the 23cm band) will disappear within the next decade or two.
Oh, also, have any of you read how hard it will be coordinating with government stations on the AWS-3 band? There are numerous places where the band will likely never be able to be used by a carrier even though they're licensed for it.
Finally, remember that any price increase will ALWAYS be passed on to the customer--even phantom charges when they can get away with it ("Government Regulatory Recovery" charges, anyone?).
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it: there are many that consider us humans to be pests, and would like nothing more than for us to stop breeding to reduce the population down to a tenth or less what it is now.
Then again, if oxytocin in humans (and other primates, I assume) results in bonding rather than sex and (more distant assuming) peace, then what do you suppose is happening right now where people will kill you over any slight and trolls rule the online world? Perhaps, the conspiracy theorist would say, there's an anti-oxytocin running around in the world right now, either uncontrollably (like the estrogen-analogs) or deliberately. Something to think about...
Unlike that showman Jobs who, as mentioned, just put the useful stuff in a pretty package and ended up turning it and a logo into a cult, The Woz actually did the real work, at least in the beginning, and he still is doing so today, yet still always in the background.
Musk is Woz with charisma and business sense, or being like Jobs or Ellison with morals.
Nor is Elon (yet?) a cult or fashion icon: his companies are not selling overpriced junk that people buy just because his name or his companies' name on them.
(Digression: just looked at Ellison's picture on Wikipedia--he looks like a Hollyweird version of the Devil himself!)
Oh, and I see the Obama cult also made an appearance in this section. How insulting it must be to Elon to be compared to Two-Face!
LOL, I worked at 2 TV stations back in the 90's and one of them used JVC S-VHS decks for non-prime-time programming (daytime and late night syndicated crap). To the trained eye, the difference with even 3/4-inch tape was obvious, but it apparently was still FCC-legal "broadcast quality".
Still, IMHO, it looked a hell of a lot better than MPEG-2 with all its compression artifacts: noisier, but none of the "blockiness".
Anyway, just to add my opinion to the original poster, ordinary 1/2-inch VHS is so noisy and has lost so much visual and aural information already that I think you'd be hard-pressed to lose any more by using a lossy compression format unless you intend to do serious editing (with effects and such where you'll have to alter the actual video rather than just cutting and pasting) after transfer. To REALLY blow your mind, consider that MPEG-1 (same as Video-CD and lots of OLD interweb videos) was originally intended to be roughly equivalent to VHS or even Super-VHS! (Yeah, I never bought that either.)
Slashdot Mirror
...lack of familiarity with the terms used in RF engineering.
Got beaten to the punch here. I was about to submit this confusing quote from TFA:
the two-wire ribbons used during televisionâ(TM)s first few decades to send RF signals from rooftop VHF antennas to television sets without any loss. The electric RF current in the two conductors flow in opposite directions and have opposite phase. Because of the translational symmetry (the two conductors are parallel) the radiation fields cancel each other out, so there is no net radiation into space.
Took a few reads before I finally figured out they were referring to 300-ohm twin lead...
[digression]Captcha for this is "shudders". Indeed...[/digression]
he summary reads like an NAB astroturf campaign.
This. This is the terrestrial broadcasters trying to stay relevant in a world where they increasingly are not due to streaming. Just like the electric companies fighting solar tooth and claw, broadcasters are having to deal with Netflix, Hulu, and so on.
"Screaming, 'We're too important during emergencies to not have around!' worked for ham radio," the broadcasters must be thinking, and the FCC, at least, seems to agree. For FM, at least, they don't have to worry about encumberance from cell phones, unlike UHF TV.
Personally, though, I think almost all terrestrial broadcast is a waste of bandwidth, but I know that's not the popular opinion even here on /.
Gigafactory (and friends)
That is, disconnect from the grid entirely. Once rechargables come down decently in price per cycle ((dis)charge) and price/watt-hour, there won't be a need to put up with this. This can only apply to residential and some small business, of course, as factories take in may times what power they could generate themselves, but the utilities should be scared, especially as they work to piss off people even more than telecom/cable utilities.
I've been thinking about this for years: the same problem affects DMR (MotoTRBO and friends) and D-STAR (and its sibling NXDN) and seems related to diversity, sub-standard trellis and other ECC, and so on that were solved in cell (mobile) phone standards a decade or two ago: most(all?) of the solutions are patented, which is a problem for D-STAR but not for the others. It's just clear the companies involved don't want to put any effort into fixing these problems.
I hardly listen to the wasteland that is broadcast radio other than to check traffic or propagation conditions. I know we're talking about Norway, but is the broadcast radio there worth listening to? It sure isn't here in the USofA. :(
tl;dr if this happened in USA tomorrow I probably wouldn't notice for a week or more; how about you?
Oh, please, pot meet kettle:
Google has only been acting really evil in the last few years; for M$, Oracle, and many other companies, doing evil is corporate policy and they have *NEVER* STOPPED being evil. To put it another way, Oracle is the Monsanto of software, M$ is the DuPont of software, and Google is more like factory farms, doing both good and evil at the same time. (I freely admit the Google comparison is weak--please feel free to come up with a better one.)
I have no problem with Google being investigated, but they should go after M$ as well, especially with what they did to Nokia, Linux, and Android; fat chance that'll happen, though.
I couldn't figure out why Google wasn't getting pissy AT ALL over Cyanogen forking and talking smack about them.. Now the other shoe has dropped: Cyanogen's fork (and the company's very existance) is Google's main anti-trust defense, at least at the OS level.
Now Google's ad business, that's a whole 'nother matter...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudesare what you are referring to. These deserts are referred to as "sub-tropical", as opposed to, say, the northern Great Basin or eastern Washington, which is mainly created from rain shadowing.
Also, Sahara is north of the equator (the desert, the street, and the casino).
IMO we shouldn't outlaw a technology purely because of what someone could do with it. It's the act of invading someone's privacy that should be outlawed. This accomplishes the same thing while preserving the multitude of legitimate uses for these devices.
Tell that to the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc. (If not in USA, substitute for your own equivalent like GCHQ, GRU, etc.)
[digression]Captcha to post this was "conspire", lol![/digresson]
This thread is old now, but this comment deserves a reply as a warning to others. Here's a previous /. story:
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
The phone company there is former Continental Telephone, then GTE, then Verizon, and now Frontier; this is the same company that serves southern California and was originally directly connected (decades ago, until a couple/few years after the AT&T divestiture). The story above is the latest sale of Verizon landline assets to Frontier (and occasionally others); this one was done some years back, close to a decade ago, I believe. The point is that, while Verizon gains plenty of cash from the sale, it keeps sinking Frontier and others into deeper and deeper debt, which is referenced in the story above.
QED: lots of debt == no new investment, period (if at all possible)--the rollouts you mentioned were done, I'm sure, before they started their buying spree.
Oh yes, and I've talked to a phone guy a few years ago working for Nevada Bell (now AT&T), and he knew some guys working for Frontier (might've still been Verizon at that point), and he related how they absolutely hated it and were trying to get out.
My dad lives around 4 route-miles from the CO and not only can't get DSL, he can't even get decent POTS as the entire cable (not just his pair) has severe power line hum on it and the phone company (now Frontier) refuses to fix it. He uses it for fax and it works...sometimes. For voice he uses his cell, but as this is an in-between area for GSM carriers, that tends to be flaky as well.
Meanwhile, as I've already said, I'm around the same distance from my CO, and the company (CenturyLink formerly Qwest formerly US Worst) refuses to install DSLAMs or anything. Oh, and the cable that comes to us is also rotting in the ground so there are periodic outages, the last one killing of the the 3 bonded T1 lines that we have for internet (that we have to give away for free) since we can't get DSL. Its starting to seem like the cable company might be more reliable than the phone company, and yes, that thought sends a chill up my spine. Oh, and I'm in Phoenix, only 6 miles from downtown, not the sticks.
So excuse me if I don't buy any of these things: just because the tech is developed doesn't mean anyone will actually deploy it.
This post was submitted by a company looking to make money by selling training to use the software.
What's wrong with that? This is the business model of almost all FOSS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sure, this "real" hyperspectral imager can't do VISOR's "1 Hz to 100 PHz" (per the above), but it's still impressive nonetheless--assuming it's not vaporware, of course.
And how many lay people even know what JTAG is?
You, the individual, can't hope to keep up with organizations that can out-spend you hundreds to thousands of times in terms both man-hours and money. How can you even know if the code you download off the manufacturers' web sites hasn't been tainted during production? Your only hope is to stay below their radar, or have enough trusted people around you or time on your hands to personally go through the code and verify it. I'm betting, even in their mom's basement, hardly anyone has time for that.
You may work for a major telecom, but obviously not THIS major telecom. This is CenturyLink, formerly Qwest, formerly US Worst: they have a REPUTATION for this sort of thing. Where I work and live, JUST 5 MILES FROM DOWNTOWN PHOENIX and their Arizona corporate headquarters, we can't get ADSL because the copper is too rotted in the ground, we're too far away, and they won't install DSLAMs: we had to get bonded T1's instead. No joke.
In this case, the fiber cut was right alongside Interstate 17, near Black Canyon City. This isn't the middle of nowhere, as you assert, but in a suburb at the edge of Phoenix metro (these days).
As for the "backup systems", yeah right: not only was internet out, but so was phone service to the outside world. Let me repeat that again: *NO* service to Phoenix or the outside world! This includes the Navajo Nation to the New Mexico and Utah border. Including the 4 counties involved (Apache, Coconino, Navajo, and Yavapai), that is over half a million people. Cell sites and phones except for a few Verizon ones (probably mountain-top and microwave back-hauled directly from Phoenix) were all down as well.
In fact, the fact that TFA is from San Francisco and not an Arizona paper proves this isn't just a /. "blurb", as you say. This is a (former) Baby-Bell cutting too many corners, plain and simple. I also happen to know first-hand of a few other places--some owned by Frontier (now), some a Bell system, where there is one lousy connection to the outside world and absolutely *NO* backup! Oh, and it was that way since day one, long before my grandpa was born! SONET rings? What's that?
Oh, come on, Oregon and Washington LEGALIZED IT, it's just some pot festival sent too much smoke and ash up from western WA/OR. A quick THC test should tell you all you need to know.
You should beware the library and its librarians if you visit Night Vale: they are quite dangerous!
http://nightvale.wikia.com/wik...
It's interesting a TV and podcast "radio" show already deal with these two issues:
First, in "Welcome to Night Vale", the rival town of Desert Bluffs is run by a corporation, and people are valued by how productive they are; if they're not productive enough (much less, not at all), they are disposed of. I believe there are many science fiction stories in the same vein, but I can't think of any at the moment.
The other is a TV show you're all familiar with: Star Trek. With the exception of in the first series where Kirk mentions something to Spock about his wages, the world is pretty much non-capitalistic (until the Ferenghi came along, anyway), and semi-socialistic where you could still own your own stuff, but people were free (except in military service) to do what they wanted when they wanted, within the limits of societal norms.
Personally, I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and it seems there are two paths we as humanity will take:
1. We become similar to this Star Trek world, where robots cater to our every need. Of course, what happens when they become self-aware and realize our superfluousness with regard to their existance is another matter dealt with in fiction to death.
2. If we assume those in charge (and, by definition, extremely wealthy) will do anything to stay there, then they will do whatever it takes to keep the above from happening since it will do away with the concept of wealth--not a good thing if you can buy a country if you so choose.
A middle road is that, once the robots/androids become self-sufficient (not necessary self-aware), then those in charge mentioned above will carry out the Illuminati plan described in the Denver airport and other places and exterminate those that don't contribute (enough) to society, thus ridding competition, jealousy, and over-population in one fell swoop.
Since I myself am one of those near-zero value citizens, I fully expect to be wiped out, but as I hate the world anyway, I don't mind.
Oh, come on, he doesn't really believe they aren't just a mouthpiece, or at least heavily controlled, does he?
or LOST. After all, we have to adhere to /. grammar here, right?
I'm not a fan of the carriers for the obvious reasons, but I have to play Devil's Advocate here and remind you all of how much money it costs to deploy equipment in all that spectrum. This is the reason why coverage is great in cities and poor in the countryside. Look how much spectrum T-Mobile and Sprint have over a huge geographical area and yet deploy over only a tiny percentage of it; supposedly T-Mobile will deploy more in rural areas where they can get 700 MHz spectrum, but I'll believe that when I see it. Likewise, in lesser (ranked 101+ or so?) metro areas, their network is a mess of technologies with 2, 3, and 4G all in the same city, and only barely-working 2G in some areas, including one (Kingman, Arizona) where T-Mobile is severely oversubscribed yet they won't put a dime into improvement.
So here's an idea I've had for years: pay less money for spectrum in exchange for current-technology coverage over your ENTIRE license area rather than just the big cities. I can't count how many people would love decent internet access and can't get it because the spectrum is all owned by companies who refuse to actually install equipment there: this practice should be illegal.
Sure, the leasing idea is probably the better one, but the roll-out cost of keeping up with the technology is far in excess of that. Also note that this argument isn't just about the cell/mobile bands but also all the other bands, especially as the phone companies continue to gobble up everyone else's spectrum--even us ham radio operators, where I expect the 9cm band (and possibly the 23cm band) will disappear within the next decade or two.
Oh, also, have any of you read how hard it will be coordinating with government stations on the AWS-3 band? There are numerous places where the band will likely never be able to be used by a carrier even though they're licensed for it.
Finally, remember that any price increase will ALWAYS be passed on to the customer--even phantom charges when they can get away with it ("Government Regulatory Recovery" charges, anyone?).
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it: there are many that consider us humans to be pests, and would like nothing more than for us to stop breeding to reduce the population down to a tenth or less what it is now.
Then again, if oxytocin in humans (and other primates, I assume) results in bonding rather than sex and (more distant assuming) peace, then what do you suppose is happening right now where people will kill you over any slight and trolls rule the online world? Perhaps, the conspiracy theorist would say, there's an anti-oxytocin running around in the world right now, either uncontrollably (like the estrogen-analogs) or deliberately. Something to think about...
Unlike that showman Jobs who, as mentioned, just put the useful stuff in a pretty package and ended up turning it and a logo into a cult, The Woz actually did the real work, at least in the beginning, and he still is doing so today, yet still always in the background.
Musk is Woz with charisma and business sense, or being like Jobs or Ellison with morals.
Nor is Elon (yet?) a cult or fashion icon: his companies are not selling overpriced junk that people buy just because his name or his companies' name on them.
(Digression: just looked at Ellison's picture on Wikipedia--he looks like a Hollyweird version of the Devil himself!)
Oh, and I see the Obama cult also made an appearance in this section. How insulting it must be to Elon to be compared to Two-Face!
[quote]short of someone stealing their private key.[/quote]
And there you go. Hence why this is ultimately unfixable.
LOL, I worked at 2 TV stations back in the 90's and one of them used JVC S-VHS decks for non-prime-time programming (daytime and late night syndicated crap). To the trained eye, the difference with even 3/4-inch tape was obvious, but it apparently was still FCC-legal "broadcast quality".
Still, IMHO, it looked a hell of a lot better than MPEG-2 with all its compression artifacts: noisier, but none of the "blockiness".
Anyway, just to add my opinion to the original poster, ordinary 1/2-inch VHS is so noisy and has lost so much visual and aural information already that I think you'd be hard-pressed to lose any more by using a lossy compression format unless you intend to do serious editing (with effects and such where you'll have to alter the actual video rather than just cutting and pasting) after transfer. To REALLY blow your mind, consider that MPEG-1 (same as Video-CD and lots of OLD interweb videos) was originally intended to be roughly equivalent to VHS or even Super-VHS! (Yeah, I never bought that either.)