You're right about the advantages of 3G & WiMax however being limited to licenced spectrum means that only very large carriers can provide service and, here in the US at least, they just arn't interested in providing service anywhere but large metro areas. I know there is some unlicensed frequencies for WiMax but I havn't seen any sign of equipment for that and due to the frequencies used and power limits it doesn't look much better than WiFi. The nearest town to me has a population of around 50,000 and half the town still doesn't have DSL. The rest of the town does have cable access but it's over priced and the service is poor. On the other hand, every dsl modem sold/rented here for the last year or so has built in WiFi and you cannot drive 10 feet in town (in the half that has DSL anyway) without seeing/hearing from one or more of them. There are also a few Commercial WiFi providers but they are all small mom & pop outfits who are never going to be able to afford to go the licensed spectrum + proprietary hardware route.
BTW Are you sure about the ipv4/ipv6 issue? Afaik that is all handled by the OS and really shouldn't depend upon the underlying layers.
What is is the ACTUAL current and projected coverage area versus that of the GSM and 3G systems?
I see many APs daily but there isn't any sort of high speed cellular available for hundereds of miles. I already use other peoples APs and leave one of my APs open. Basically this is just a way for a large number of people to agree on some usage terms and for the less clued to participate safely by buying a pre-configured router.
I can get online from almost any restaurant or cafe in my neighborhood, which is about 90% of my usage.
Why limit yourself? sitting on the beach, at the pool or at your house is also nice..
Sure and around here wifi is far more likely to be available at those places than GSM or 3G.
Why worry about (and spend on) an missle defence system when adversaries are more likely to use the Federal Express package delivery system to send a bad-bomb?
Well this would have to be an either/or situation. Clearly nothing going 15000mph is going to be doing much zig-zagging. BTW are there really missles that go that fast while they are anywhere near (within 50000ft or so) of the ground?
I read your journal entry but I really don't think that actually solves anything. At the end of the day all it takes is for 1 copy of a work to "escape" onto the Internet in a non-DRMed format and the publisher might just as well not have bothered with DRM at all. Make no mistake, any DRM method that ends up being included on essentially all consumer electronic devices will be cracked and in the mean time low tech methods (grabbing audio from the amp inputs or outputs inside a stereo for example) will work fine. Sure most people won't go through the trouble but it only takes 1. About the only thing that you can be sure of is that it will increase the cost and complexity of both the equipment and media and waste at least some of the consumers time. Even if the cost is small on a per user basis it still adds up to a lot, maybe millions of dollars per year siphoned out of the economy for no long term gain.
All round this is a bad idea. Get the industry to agree on a standardized DRM (See JE at:http://ask.slashdot.org/~RingDev/journal/126947 )
I agree with your other points but I don't think any form of DRM is a solution. Every form of copy protection that I've ever run into has hurt legitimate customers at least a much as those attempting to break the law. In addition, it only takes one copy of a work to be cracked and that one copy can be turned into millions very rapidly. DRM is always going to be a money pit both in terms of direct spending by publishers and time/money spent by customers dealing with the inevitible flaws and compatability issues.
Second, the artists themselves will probably not like it, because it would change the economics for how they get paid. If Britney Spears has the #1 selling album, she's probably entitled to more money than your local indie band (though I'd argue which is actually worth more, ha). Is the industry going to have some sort of tracking in place to determine what is the most popular?
Well, they could still base the payments on CD sales and maybe other factors such as concert draw etc. Some people are still going to want the plastic discs plus whatever extras come along with those and if they are anything like me they are going to want mainly those from artists that they have heard and really like. If anything I think most artist would benefit from the greater exposure (though probably not the Britneys of the world). As for those who simply won't pay anything for their music, they are a lost cause anyway but their numbers might shrink a bit if the system in place were seen to be something close to fair and actually allowed them to legally get their music in whatever way they liked. Once you turn someone into a criminal or enemy you are a lot less likely to ever see another dime from them.
All that said, I think you are probably right that the record labels wouldn't actually go for it. Actually they might but only if they could set it up as some sort of a tax rather than a voluntary fee in exchange for a license.
My experrience has been somewhat different. I'm writing this now on my Zaurus./. renders perfectly as do the web mail and calendar features of phpgroupware. I don't think sites need to have special mobile versions, in fact the same pages that are difficult on my Z tend to be annoying on my desktop as well. As long as the design is clean and doesn't just assume you are viewing at some particular resolution it generally renders just fine.
it doesn't have to be open (which would be the only condensation issue). sealed metal would be ideal, for heat transmission.
Being open has nothing to do with condensation. Take a cold can of your favorite beverage out of the refridgerator and set it out on the counter for a bit and notice the moisture that forms on the outside of the can (unless you live someplace really dry).
None. Almost everything in a datacenter runs on DC power.
Sure it does, and I suppose all those plugs going into 120V AC outlets are just for show? Or are you suggesting he try to distribute DC directly to his various server components directly?
Yes, it would cost extra for a battery array, which is why I listed it seperately, but with it, you could replace more of your most expencive power with the cheapest, instead of replacing a smaller amount of power through out the day.
Forget the battery array, I want to know what kind of monster inverter you are going to need to run an entire data center full of equipment.
you don't want the tanks insulated! you want them to communicate heat/coldness with the atomosphere in the data center. no specialized equipment needed. the vats just slow the rate at which temperature rises/falls.
Yeah, a few hundred gallons of cold water in his data center sounds like a great idea. Not to mention the weight, space usage, condensation, and mold issues.
So they've patented "using one button to represent having pressed two or more buttons". Wouldn't the use of icons be prior art? How about the "Caps Lock" key?
Well hello, maybe you wouldn't get so many freaking applications if you didn't read them while loosly holding a stamp saying "granted".
Sounds a lot like a technological method of displaying the approval or disaproval of the patent office to certain text presented to it. In other words "prior art":)
One of the frustrating things about any discussion of ID is that there seem to be two completely seperate "theories" going under the same name. First there is the idea that some designer created everything and set up all the rules just so and simply let things run knowing full well everything that would follow including the fact that we would be having this conversation today. This one is completely and utterly outside of science since science assumes that the basic rules of the game are constant and doesn't deal with what "created the rules". The second involves an actual God of some sort that continuously fiddles with the rules. This is what you seem to be promoting but I'm not sure why you are calling it ID rather than creationism or religion since those seem to be more accurate terms for what you are calling ID. You obviously cannot falsify religion within science because science relies on the rules of the game staying constant and religion relies on the rules changing (or at least being suspended) whenever God feels like it. These are two completely seperate things and you cannot use one to prove or disprove the other.
On to your arguments:
In order for something to be falsifiable it must, at least in principle (even if not in practice with current tech), be testable. I fail to see how even in principle you could prove with science that the forces you mentioned MUST be the way they are. The best you could ever hope for would be to prove the opposite, that they could be some other way instead but doing so wouldn't falsify ID.
In your second argument one of your premises is "Calculations show, hoever, that random processes cannot proceed rapidly enough, given the number of baryons in the universe, to create the necessary information short of a huge number of lifetimes of the universe." I don't believe that it's possible for valid calculations to show any such thing. At best you might be able to show that it is unlikely but not impossible. In short you premise is assuming facts not in evidence.
Your third argument doesn't seem even logical to me. Certainly any being capable of creating life once could do it 30 times if he/she/it so desired.
Likewise your fourth argument isn't even an example of the falsifiability of intelligent design. If some creature not only designed the universe but also steps in and gives things a nudge when needed then NOTHING is falsifiable.
BTW while writing the above I looked up the word "argument" in Kdict to make sure I was spelling it correctly. The first entry that shows up includes the following example :
There is.. no more palpable and convincing argument of the existence of a Deity. --Ray.
Not only does the example seem surprisingly relivent to our discussion but the name "Ray" is my own. Maybe God IS just toying with us. Go figure:)
I know the US is 10x the size, but you also presumably have 10x the people counting. And in any case, for one event every 4 years it seems reasonable. Heck we do it every 1.5 years it seems:)
Based on the other posts by Canadians here I get the impression that we in the USA vote on a lot more stuff than you do. In any given election we arn't just voting on the President plus a few congress critters but also state reps, school board members, a judge or two, various poorly thought out initiatives etc. I'm not saying that manual vote counting isn't practical here but it does seem harder and more error prone.
And even if it was an OSS voting machine, the general public and in fact most people would get nothing from that, not having the first clue of what the code meant.
I don't think that's much of a problem. If the entire system (not just the code) is open to inspection you can bet that many interested parties would take advantage of the opportunity.
I know that was a joke but you might be on to something. Since Intel knows that these are going to be used with a single known OS they might have more confidence that they will never be triggered in real life or that a work around can be included with the OS. Remember that fixing bugs in silicon is expensive and in this case they simply may not have to fix them.
1. In the real world OSS HAS been catching on in business for many years. Like most things though it's been a gradual transition since people don't normally trash existing systems overnight unless the existing system is very broken. If some support company insists that in order to fix your DB server you will have to find another host for your file or dns server because combining them isn't supported then it's a lot faster to just put Linux on one of the old unused machines in the basement than to budget for a new machine + Windows and figure out the license implications. It might be just a temporary fix but once people see how well it works it doesn't take long to spread.
2. OSS adoption has largly been happening from the ground up by IT folks just trying to do their jobs effectively without having to fight for additional funding. It's no surprise that the survey takers and other PHBs are the last to know. We are finally hitting the critical mass required for survey takers and other non-IT folks to have heard of Linux and other OSS products. I was at the library the other day waiting for my wife to pick out some books and I picked up a copy of Popular Science (could have been Popular Mechanics). One of the articles was about some sort of beer keg fridge that ran Linux. The thing that struck me is that they mentioned Linux right in the first paragraph and didn't feel the need to say what Linux was. They just seemed to assume that the general population would know what Linux was. They couldn't have done that even a few years ago.
The problem is that unless they are really well resourced they won't be able to do everything the users need doing in the timescales that are necessary.
Well, it's pretty common to spend 5 minutes fixing the users reported problem and then the next hour or more fixing all the damage they did trying to fix it themselves.
But worse still, in your effort to protect the unsophisticated users from themselves, you inevitably hamstring the more sophisticated users.
I don't know if it works like this everywhere but often truly sophisticated users do tend to get some slack. The thing is the people who think they know what they are doing are the ones that cause 90% of the problems.
It's political BS that makes the situation difficult, not any technical difficulty.
Agreed, but until we at least get the political will to deal with the existing waste we should be cautious about creating more.
Swimming pool storage is just fine, it works, it's safe. The waste doesn't last for thousands of years, in 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from.
Somehow I don't find that reassuring considering the fact that yesterdays uranium mines tend to become tommorows Superfund sites. In any event, everything I've read suggests that high level waste from spent fuel rods needs to be contained for thousands of years, not hundereds. From the nrc.gov site:
Some of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have short half-lives (for example, iodine-131 has an 8-day half-life) and therefore their radioactivity decreases rapidly. However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
Even low level waste can be dangerous if it gets into the air or water. Are you really sure that none of those pools is ever going to leak or that the operators wouldn't cover it up if it did? It happens with all sorts of other toxic wastes and it's happened with uranium mines and processing facilities.
One other quote from the NRC re. wet storage:
Most pools were originally designed to store several years worth of spent fuel. Due to delays in developing disposal facilities for the spent fuel, licensees have redesigned and rebuilt equipment in the pools over the years to allow a greater number of spent fuel rods to be stored. However, this storage option is limited by the size of the spent fuel pool and the need to keep individual fuel rods from getting too close to other rods and initiating a criticality or nuclear reaction.
Well, to be honest, we should be using nuclear power anyway. It's very clean by relation to most currently available solutions.
It's certainly possible that nuclear power could be clean with adequate plans for reprocessing and disposal of waste but thats not the current situation. Currently nuclear is only "clean" in the sense that we've managed to sweep the problem under the rug by cramming tin sheds (er on-site temporary storage facilities) with far more waste than they were designed to handle for far longer than they were designed to handle it. Sooner or later we are going to have to not only handle the waste currently being produced but also 30+ years of waste sitting in temporary storage.
Unless you want to do something useful. Like watch more than OTA or non-digital programming. In which case you'll have to set up an IR blaster. That's going to quadruple the 1 hour estimate at least. Then if you want to add a second tuner which you also want to do something useful add another couple hours.
While the complexity can certainly grow if you want to do more complex things, it really isn't that bad as long as you stick to known supported hardware. I've been using Myth with DirecTV since some time in 2002. Even back then it didn't take long on Google to find a channel change script for my receiver, attach a serial cable and tell Myth to use it. Likewise getting a remote to work was easy, mostly because I spent $10 on ebay for a remote/receiver combo that was known to work with Lirc. If I'd insisted on making it work with one of my existing remotes it would have been worse. The only thing I spent too much time on was getting the TV-out function of my video card to produce a decent image and that had nothing to do with Myth. I'm not saying I'd want my mom to try to set it up but by/. standards it's not nearly as hard as you make it sound unless you make it hard by trying to use un-supported components. Once it's set up using Myth is dead easy, my wife took over ours years ago and she hates computers.
The true value of open source showed its self when I found a good deal on a hardware capture card that was supported by Linux but not Myth. I bought 2 and sent one to the author and he added support for it. I seriously doubt that any propriatary software vendor would have been so accommodating.
Actually Canada is a pretty good counter example. They have lots of empty space and yet their population is still very concentrated in/near major cities.
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You're right about the advantages of 3G & WiMax however being limited to licenced spectrum means that only very large carriers can provide service and, here in the US at least, they just arn't interested in providing service anywhere but large metro areas. I know there is some unlicensed frequencies for WiMax but I havn't seen any sign of equipment for that and due to the frequencies used and power limits it doesn't look much better than WiFi. The nearest town to me has a population of around 50,000 and half the town still doesn't have DSL. The rest of the town does have cable access but it's over priced and the service is poor. On the other hand, every dsl modem sold/rented here for the last year or so has built in WiFi and you cannot drive 10 feet in town (in the half that has DSL anyway) without seeing/hearing from one or more of them. There are also a few Commercial WiFi providers but they are all small mom & pop outfits who are never going to be able to afford to go the licensed spectrum + proprietary hardware route.
BTW Are you sure about the ipv4/ipv6 issue? Afaik that is all handled by the OS and really shouldn't depend upon the underlying layers.
I see many APs daily but there isn't any sort of high speed cellular available for hundereds of miles. I already use other peoples APs and leave one of my APs open. Basically this is just a way for a large number of people to agree on some usage terms and for the less clued to participate safely by buying a pre-configured router.
Why limit yourself? sitting on the beach, at the pool or at your house is also nice..
Sure and around here wifi is far more likely to be available at those places than GSM or 3G.
Why worry about (and spend on) an missle defence system when adversaries are more likely to use the Federal Express package delivery system to send a bad-bomb?
:)
You've obviously never dealt with FedEx
Well this would have to be an either/or situation. Clearly nothing going 15000mph is going to be doing much zig-zagging. BTW are there really missles that go that fast while they are anywhere near (within 50000ft or so) of the ground?
I read your journal entry but I really don't think that actually solves anything. At the end of the day all it takes is for 1 copy of a work to "escape" onto the Internet in a non-DRMed format and the publisher might just as well not have bothered with DRM at all. Make no mistake, any DRM method that ends up being included on essentially all consumer electronic devices will be cracked and in the mean time low tech methods (grabbing audio from the amp inputs or outputs inside a stereo for example) will work fine. Sure most people won't go through the trouble but it only takes 1. About the only thing that you can be sure of is that it will increase the cost and complexity of both the equipment and media and waste at least some of the consumers time. Even if the cost is small on a per user basis it still adds up to a lot, maybe millions of dollars per year siphoned out of the economy for no long term gain.
All round this is a bad idea. Get the industry to agree on a standardized DRM (See JE at:http://ask.slashdot.org/~RingDev/journal/126947 )
I agree with your other points but I don't think any form of DRM is a solution. Every form of copy protection that I've ever run into has hurt legitimate customers at least a much as those attempting to break the law. In addition, it only takes one copy of a work to be cracked and that one copy can be turned into millions very rapidly. DRM is always going to be a money pit both in terms of direct spending by publishers and time/money spent by customers dealing with the inevitible flaws and compatability issues.
Second, the artists themselves will probably not like it, because it would change the economics for how they get paid. If Britney Spears has the #1 selling album, she's probably entitled to more money than your local indie band (though I'd argue which is actually worth more, ha). Is the industry going to have some sort of tracking in place to determine what is the most popular?
Well, they could still base the payments on CD sales and maybe other factors such as concert draw etc. Some people are still going to want the plastic discs plus whatever extras come along with those and if they are anything like me they are going to want mainly those from artists that they have heard and really like. If anything I think most artist would benefit from the greater exposure (though probably not the Britneys of the world). As for those who simply won't pay anything for their music, they are a lost cause anyway but their numbers might shrink a bit if the system in place were seen to be something close to fair and actually allowed them to legally get their music in whatever way they liked. Once you turn someone into a criminal or enemy you are a lot less likely to ever see another dime from them.
All that said, I think you are probably right that the record labels wouldn't actually go for it. Actually they might but only if they could set it up as some sort of a tax rather than a voluntary fee in exchange for a license.
My experrience has been somewhat different. I'm writing this now on my Zaurus. /. renders perfectly as do the web mail and calendar features of phpgroupware. I don't think sites need to have special mobile versions, in fact the same pages that are difficult on my Z tend to be annoying on my desktop as well. As long as the design is clean and doesn't just assume you are viewing at some particular resolution it generally renders just fine.
it doesn't have to be open (which would be the only condensation issue). sealed metal would be ideal, for heat transmission.
Being open has nothing to do with condensation. Take a cold can of your favorite beverage out of the refridgerator and set it out on the counter for a bit and notice the moisture that forms on the outside of the can (unless you live someplace really dry).
None. Almost everything in a datacenter runs on DC power.
Sure it does, and I suppose all those plugs going into 120V AC outlets are just for show? Or are you suggesting he try to distribute DC directly to his various server components directly?
One of the easiest and most effective way to reduce your energy bills is to generate your own electricity from gas or fuel oil.
On what planet exactly? Come on mods this one is +1 Funny.
Yes, it would cost extra for a battery array, which is why I listed it seperately, but with it, you could replace more of your most expencive power with the cheapest, instead of replacing a smaller amount of power through out the day.
Forget the battery array, I want to know what kind of monster inverter you are going to need to run an entire data center full of equipment.
you don't want the tanks insulated! you want them to communicate heat/coldness with the atomosphere in the data center. no specialized equipment needed. the vats just slow the rate at which temperature rises/falls.
Yeah, a few hundred gallons of cold water in his data center sounds like a great idea. Not to mention the weight, space usage, condensation, and mold issues.
So they've patented "using one button to represent having pressed two or more buttons". Wouldn't the use of icons be prior art? How about the "Caps Lock" key?
Well hello, maybe you wouldn't get so many freaking applications if you didn't read them while loosly holding a stamp saying "granted".
:)
Sounds a lot like a technological method of displaying the approval or disaproval of the patent office to certain text presented to it. In other words "prior art"
On to your arguments:
In order for something to be falsifiable it must, at least in principle (even if not in practice with current tech), be testable. I fail to see how even in principle you could prove with science that the forces you mentioned MUST be the way they are. The best you could ever hope for would be to prove the opposite, that they could be some other way instead but doing so wouldn't falsify ID.
In your second argument one of your premises is "Calculations show, hoever, that random processes cannot proceed rapidly enough, given the number of baryons in the universe, to create the necessary information short of a huge number of lifetimes of the universe." I don't believe that it's possible for valid calculations to show any such thing. At best you might be able to show that it is unlikely but not impossible. In short you premise is assuming facts not in evidence.
Your third argument doesn't seem even logical to me. Certainly any being capable of creating life once could do it 30 times if he/she/it so desired.
Likewise your fourth argument isn't even an example of the falsifiability of intelligent design. If some creature not only designed the universe but also steps in and gives things a nudge when needed then NOTHING is falsifiable.
BTW while writing the above I looked up the word "argument" in Kdict to make sure I was spelling it correctly. The first entry that shows up includes the following example :
Not only does the example seem surprisingly relivent to our discussion but the name "Ray" is my own. Maybe God IS just toying with us. Go figure
I know the US is 10x the size, but you also presumably have 10x the people counting. And in any case, for one event every 4 years it seems reasonable. Heck we do it every 1.5 years it seems :)
Based on the other posts by Canadians here I get the impression that we in the USA vote on a lot more stuff than you do. In any given election we arn't just voting on the President plus a few congress critters but also state reps, school board members, a judge or two, various poorly thought out initiatives etc. I'm not saying that manual vote counting isn't practical here but it does seem harder and more error prone.
And even if it was an OSS voting machine, the general public and in fact most people would get nothing from that, not having the first clue of what the code meant.
I don't think that's much of a problem. If the entire system (not just the code) is open to inspection you can bet that many interested parties would take advantage of the opportunity.
I know that was a joke but you might be on to something. Since Intel knows that these are going to be used with a single known OS they might have more confidence that they will never be triggered in real life or that a work around can be included with the OS. Remember that fixing bugs in silicon is expensive and in this case they simply may not have to fix them.
Well, considering the fact that you also get a 3 year warranty with the retail boxes
That's not much of a risk since cpus pretty much never die from any cause that would be covered under warranty.
1. In the real world OSS HAS been catching on in business for many years. Like most things though it's been a gradual transition since people don't normally trash existing systems overnight unless the existing system is very broken. If some support company insists that in order to fix your DB server you will have to find another host for your file or dns server because combining them isn't supported then it's a lot faster to just put Linux on one of the old unused machines in the basement than to budget for a new machine + Windows and figure out the license implications. It might be just a temporary fix but once people see how well it works it doesn't take long to spread.
2. OSS adoption has largly been happening from the ground up by IT folks just trying to do their jobs effectively without having to fight for additional funding. It's no surprise that the survey takers and other PHBs are the last to know. We are finally hitting the critical mass required for survey takers and other non-IT folks to have heard of Linux and other OSS products. I was at the library the other day waiting for my wife to pick out some books and I picked up a copy of Popular Science (could have been Popular Mechanics). One of the articles was about some sort of beer keg fridge that ran Linux. The thing that struck me is that they mentioned Linux right in the first paragraph and didn't feel the need to say what Linux was. They just seemed to assume that the general population would know what Linux was. They couldn't have done that even a few years ago.
The problem is that unless they are really well resourced they won't be able to do everything the users need doing in the timescales that are necessary.
Well, it's pretty common to spend 5 minutes fixing the users reported problem and then the next hour or more fixing all the damage they did trying to fix it themselves.
But worse still, in your effort to protect the unsophisticated users from themselves, you inevitably hamstring the more sophisticated users.
I don't know if it works like this everywhere but often truly sophisticated users do tend to get some slack. The thing is the people who think they know what they are doing are the ones that cause 90% of the problems.
Agreed, but until we at least get the political will to deal with the existing waste we should be cautious about creating more.
Swimming pool storage is just fine, it works, it's safe. The waste doesn't last for thousands of years, in 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from.
Somehow I don't find that reassuring considering the fact that yesterdays uranium mines tend to become tommorows Superfund sites. In any event, everything I've read suggests that high level waste from spent fuel rods needs to be contained for thousands of years, not hundereds. From the nrc.gov site:
Even low level waste can be dangerous if it gets into the air or water. Are you really sure that none of those pools is ever going to leak or that the operators wouldn't cover it up if it did? It happens with all sorts of other toxic wastes and it's happened with uranium mines and processing facilities.
One other quote from the NRC re. wet storage:
Does that sound like a 500+ year solution to you?
Well, to be honest, we should be using nuclear power anyway. It's very clean by relation to most currently available solutions.
It's certainly possible that nuclear power could be clean with adequate plans for reprocessing and disposal of waste but thats not the current situation. Currently nuclear is only "clean" in the sense that we've managed to sweep the problem under the rug by cramming tin sheds (er on-site temporary storage facilities) with far more waste than they were designed to handle for far longer than they were designed to handle it. Sooner or later we are going to have to not only handle the waste currently being produced but also 30+ years of waste sitting in temporary storage.
Unless you want to do something useful. Like watch more than OTA or non-digital programming. In which case you'll have to set up an IR blaster. That's going to quadruple the 1 hour estimate at least. Then if you want to add a second tuner which you also want to do something useful add another couple hours.
/. standards it's not nearly as hard as you make it sound unless you make it hard by trying to use un-supported components. Once it's set up using Myth is dead easy, my wife took over ours years ago and she hates computers.
While the complexity can certainly grow if you want to do more complex things, it really isn't that bad as long as you stick to known supported hardware. I've been using Myth with DirecTV since some time in 2002. Even back then it didn't take long on Google to find a channel change script for my receiver, attach a serial cable and tell Myth to use it. Likewise getting a remote to work was easy, mostly because I spent $10 on ebay for a remote/receiver combo that was known to work with Lirc. If I'd insisted on making it work with one of my existing remotes it would have been worse. The only thing I spent too much time on was getting the TV-out function of my video card to produce a decent image and that had nothing to do with Myth. I'm not saying I'd want my mom to try to set it up but by
The true value of open source showed its self when I found a good deal on a hardware capture card that was supported by Linux but not Myth. I bought 2 and sent one to the author and he added support for it. I seriously doubt that any propriatary software vendor would have been so accommodating.
Actually Canada is a pretty good counter example. They have lots of empty space and yet their population is still very concentrated in/near major cities.