If don't understand how an irriadiated food can bad, perhaps you should look a little more closely at what irriadiation does. Those high energy particles or waves cause ionization (it's called ionizing radiation for a good reason) and the formation of "free radicals" in the material being irradiated. A "free radical" is a fragment broken from a larger molecule. "Free radicals" are very reactive chemically, and will react with almost any other molecule they come near, to form new molecules. Many of these new molecules are suspect, at least, in terms of their safety in food. FYI, the energy of the applied radiation is what did the bond breaking necessary to create all those free radicals. That is why microwaving food to warm it up is not the same as hitting it with a thousand Rads of gamma from a Cobalt 60 source. Those gamma ray photons are far more energetic than the very long wave photons (by comparison) found inside a microwave oven.
But even that is not the whole story. Some molecules are more easily broken into fragments by ionizing radiation than other molecules because not all chemical bonds are equally strong. It turns out that some of the more fragile molecules happen to be the vitamins and other nutrients, so irradiating food actually does damage the nutritional quality of the food.
You could say that the same is true of cooking, and so it is, except that far fewer free radicals are created by cooking than are created by irradiation. However, cooking does destroy vitamins and other nutrients, too.
I would err on the safe side and at the very least LABEL THE FOOD so people know what they are getting. If a process such as irradiation is safe, and everyone understands that, then labeling food with an appropriate label should not cause anyone any problems. Milk is already labeled "Pasteurized" and "Homogenized" and few people or companies have much of a problem with that, because they know what they are getting. So WHY NOT apply the same labeling requirements to other processes done to food, such as genetic modification or irradiation?
FYI, the FCC has rearranged the television broadcast bands. The majority of the DTV channel allocations are inside a group of channels called "the core." The "core" channels are those that will still be in use for television broadcasting after the transition to DTV is complete. They are: 2-6 (low band VHF), 7-13 (high band VHF), and 20-51 (UHF). The article stated that the DTV station is on channel 20, so they appear to be where they are supposed to be.
So, if there is a solution to this problem, I would look to the "Land Mobile" world, where there never is enough spectrum, and where "creative" solutions to lack of spectrum space, such as using "vacant" TV channels come from.
However, I would not let Congress or the FCC off the hook. The primary motivation for this shifting around of TV channels is that Congress intends to auction off the so-called "700 MHz band" (consisting of UHF channels 52-69) to balance the Federal Budget.
RFI is no joke, especially when lives could be at stake. But this DTV station is doing exactly what Congress and the FCC ordered them to do, broadcast a digital TV signal on the channel assigned to them.
Every broadcast engineer I know (I am a television broadcast engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area) wants his or her station to be an asset to the community. RFI problems like this one do not make for good community relations, even when the "fault" for the problem lies elsewhere.
Re:Pirates of Silicon Valley?
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Linuxworld Fun
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I was at Linux World Tuesday afternoon, and witnessed a live interview on CNET radio, of a representative from Microsoft's booth. (The CNET radio host's name escapes me at the moment.) CNET may have an audio clip of it on their website (if they do such things) because when the interviewer asked the M$ representative about Steve Balmer's saying that Linux was like a Cancer, and went on to quote other M$ types also bashing Linux, the M$ guy sitting there said that if the same questions were asked today, he thought their (those high level Microsofties) answers would be much different.
Whether their M$ booth at Linux World and the words I heard during that CNET radio interview represent M$ "smelling the coffee" or if they are just another PR ploy, I do not know. What I did notice was that the M$ booth was small, pretty far off to one side of the hall, and that there was not much traffic going past their booth other than from folks like me, walking by and looking, just to see if the rumors were true.
The words I overheard from the M$ folks at the show were all about co-existence, but if what I read about M$ and their "Software Choice" initiative is true, than I saw an Oscar winning performance during that CNET radio interview.
I do not think M$ sold much of anything while I was there. My guess is that selling was not their purpose in attending the show. I think they wanted to see who else was there (both individual customers and exhibiting companies), and I think Microsoft wanted to mix with and listen to the folks staffing those other booths. There were several large booths from companies like HP, Sun, and IBM, and they all got a lot of traffic. The fact that I saw so many server racks, each 42 (or more) RU tall, filled with 1 RU servers, all running Linux/Apache, on display at the Linux World show has to say something to M$ about their future in the server arena. IIS has been cracked far too many times for many webmasters to trust IIS with anything important.
In addition, I was amazed to see just how many large companies were crowing about how well their Linux/Apache servers are running, and how much money they have been saving with that combination.
While I did see some desktop software (Gnome, Star Office 6.0, and Open Office), but I think the emphasis in this show was much more on servers and on network devices of various types, like Network Attached Storage and Storage Area Networks.
There is reason for the DTV mandate. It is called "The 700 Megahertz Band" and the Congress wants to auction it off ASAP!
FYI, broadcast television began as channels 1-13, in two chunks of spectrum, 48-88 MHz and 174-216 MHz. But, when the amateur radio community screamed "Foul" after losing their "5 Meter Band" they got what is now called the 6 meter band (50-54MHz) in exchange. So Television then became channels 2-13. Because TV tuners of the time could not deal with adjacent channels, and there weren't as many channels as there were people who wanted to broadcast on them, a third chunk of spectrum, 470-890 MHz was opened up. That was the UHF band, consisting of channels 14 to 83.
What's that? You don't recall watching any channel 83 television stations? Well..... that is a long story, but in brief, channels 70 to 83 were taken away, much to the chagrin of the people in many small rural comunities dependant on what were known as "Televison Translators" to bring them television. Lake Tahoe, for example, is not far from Sacramento, but unfortunately for the people living there, Sacramento's TV signals cannot make it through the mountain ridge line surrounding the lake. At one time, there were several translators up on that ridge line, re-broadcasting the Sacramento TV stations down into the Lake Tahoe basin, all using those those high UHF channel numbers.
So what became of those channels, you ask? Look no further than your old analog cell phone, because that is the spectrum where they operate, in what was used to be called the "translator band," channels 70 to 83.
Now we are looking at another spectrum grab. Broadcast television will soon become channels 2-13, and channels 20-51. Channels 52-69 are what is known as the "700 Megahertz Band" and they are scheduled to be auctioned off. But don't hold your breath for that to happen, because there are a lot of "wireless" companies that realized they paid FAR TOO MUCH for the spectrum they bought some time ago, and they are not about to bankrupt themselves this time around.
But even worse, the DTV mandate means that televsision broadcasters must play musical chairs (or channels) and that has resulted in huge expenses for most of them, with NO increase in revenue to pay for all that mandated digital transmission gear. WHY? Because the viewing audience is not watching DTV. That means the advertising world will not pay any more money for their ads to be broadcast, because with DTV, they are not reaching any more people.
I see two Boogy Bears here. The first is the Congress that had visions of BILLIONS and BILLIONS of Dollars just waiting to be made from those spectrum auctions, and second, the CableTV industry that right now delivers television signals to about 70% of the viewing audience nation wide. The CableTV folks are NOT REQUIRED TO CARRY ANY DTV SIGNALS. So, if you just bought a brand new Digital Television set (DTV tuner and all), don't bother trying to hook it up to your Cable. It will not work because the "Digital Cable" transmission standard they use is NOT the Broadcast transmission standard. The "Digital Cable" signal all the Cable folks think you should have is actually not even a good quality Standard Definition Signal -- and that is as it is seen through THEIR "Set Top Box." (FYI, they pack a standard def signal into 1 Megahertz of spectrum, by crushing the hell out of it. There are lots of MPEG artifacts visible in most "Digital Cable" signals, and they are all Standard Definition only.)
But even that is not all, the FCC decided that for the US population to receive DTV, we would all put up outdoor antennas 30 feet off the ground, with a mast mounted pre-amps and rotators. The FCC antenna is supposed to have at least 14 dB of gain and an 11 dB front-to-back ratio. But how many people can actually put up such an antenna on their condo, apartment roof, or even their individual house roof? Not very many. WHY? In the 60's and 70's, the Cable folks pursuaded many City Councils to rewrite their building codes, prohibiting all outdoor antennas. Those nice Cable folks may even have tucked an outdoor antenna prohibition into your deed, in the form of a "restrictive covenant." This was their not very subtle method of forcing people to pay for what they could otherwise receive free from antennas on their own roofs. It took a Federal exemption to such restrictive ordinances and covenants to allow people to buy and install those little 18 inch satellite dishes.
Right now I see several things holding back DTV. They are: 1) the CableTV companies that refuse to carry ANY broadcast DTV signals, 2) the content providers who are trying to make sure that you PAY, PAY, and PAY again for everything, including time shifting, and 3) the Congress who want to shove DTV down peoples throats, even though most people have not expressed any great interest in rushing out to purchase any $4,000 TV sets, just to "free up" the 700 Megahertz Band Congress wants so badly to auction off.
The problem is, you see, Congress has already spent the money they thought they would get from auctioning off the 700 Megahertz band, and their unbalanced books are now catching up all of us. This "Spectrum Auction" to balance their books idea actually began back in the early 90's when the only words the politicians knew were "Tax Cuts! Tax Cuts! Tax Cuts!"
I expect to see many of the smaller television stations, especially in regions of the country where the population density is low, to die from the expense of the DTV transition, because it is costing anywhere between $2 Million to $20 Million PER station, just to put a DTV signal into the air. And that DTV signal is probably only standard definition television. Now add the cost of the new HDTV studio equipment they will need to originate HDTV programming of their own, to be run in parallel with existing NTSC programming which canot be shut down yet, and you are looking at several more Millions of dollars. And all that is to be financed with no increased revenue to help pay the mortgage.
So what was that the Congress was saying a while back about "Unfunded Mandates?"
I am a broadcast engineer, and know a little about this general subject. There is a long history of corporations trying to control what the public can do with their products. The concept of preventing people from time shifting a television program and skipping the commercials in that program is one of many things that Big Hollywood does not like. They also don't like your getting up to go to the bathroom during one of those blocks of 6 or 7 ads they stack up and expect you to watch, starting about 1/2 way into a movie.
Be advised that there is more general issue at work here, and the industry term for it is "Rights Management." Another industry term is "Asset Management." The concept of "First Sale" that has applied to books and other print media for a very long time, causes the **AA to go cross-eyed.
Think about the "ebook reader," and what a few publishers and software companies tried to get away with. As I recall, they tried to link the "purchase" (read that as "Lease") of an electronic book title to the electronic serial number of the ebook reader, so you could not pass your electronic book file on to someone else the way you can with a real book. Nor could you save your downloaded ebook file to your own hard drive. Eventually you would you run out of memory in your ebook reader and then you would be forced to discard a copy of some title you "bought" in order to make room for another ebook title. Worse, as I also recall, if you should happen to lose your ebook reader, you will have lost all of the ebooks you ever "purchased" as well, because those purchases were recorded as belonging to your ebook serial number, not to you as a person. A replacement ebook would not have the same serial number as the one you lost, so your new ebook reader would look like exactly like one belonging to a new "customer," and you would be forced to pay full price - again - for the ebooks you "bought" once already.
I think the issue here is not really piracy, but rather the attempts of some very greedy corporations to make sure that everything you might want to do with their "product" will cost you money. Want to record the football game that will be broadcast on another network at the exact same time as the game you plan to watch in real time on Thanksgiving Day? Pay Up!! Want to time shift that daytime soap opera and watch it in the evening? Pay Up!! Don't have a valid credit card? Get Lost!!
But the one aspect of all of this that really gets to me is how "they" keep saying that their "Rights Management" technology is intended to make sure their "artists" are paid for their work. As I recall, in the recording industry those artists get only a small percentage (usually in single digits) of the purchase price of a recording. But worse yet is the fate of the actors (or their estates) you can see in all those "classic movies" that are being re-issued. They often receive nothing at all because they didn't have residuals for videtapes or DVDs written into their contracts of 50 years ago. For the corporations selling such "classics," the sales they make today produce some really big profits.
Recently I heard the concept described that says when we do not watch all the commercials, we are stealing from the artists, is disengenouous, because it turns out that the folks making all the noise about such stealing from the artists, are the very same folks that wrote those weasel worded contracts and made sure the "artists" got no money at all unless they happened to get very lucky and record an unstoppable smash hit. But artists with smash hits are very few compared to the many artists ripped off by weasel worded contracts. Too many good rock bands have learned this lesson the hard way. So have too many good book authors.
I think the problem boils down to this: we seem to have a bumper crop of corporations intent on creating and using technology to guarantee their own positive cash flow, regardless of the quality, or lack thereof, of the "product" they expect us to "buy."
So I say, "Let us have truly free enterprise and open markets! Allow artists to sell their art to us directly through the Internet, if they wish." And, "Let any genius who can figure out how to write the code to bit-bash the appropriate bits in a fast DSP chip in real time in that data stream called digital television do so." Make sure that she/he can legally make and sell such a product for us to put "in line" between the digital output of a digital television "tuner" or "set top box," and the digital input of a PVR (personal video disk recorder), so we can record what and when we want for our own personal use, regardless of the "Copyright" bits that may be present in the digital tlevision data stream.
Spare me! What exactly do you think the Five Supremes, the same folks who picked our President Select, would do with a challenge to the DMCA? What if they give it their blessing? What would we be able to do about the DMCA then?
I would rather not move the DMCA into the court system. I suggest we look for some other way to reverse it. One way I can think of for a large, but moneyless, group of people to overturn a law is to find some way to make that law unenforceable. Does anyone remember the 55 MPH National Speed Limit? I think that 55 MPH speed limit is an example of a law that went away largely because it became unenforceable. I know many places where so many people were breaking the 55 MPH speed limit that the police literally could do nothing. If the police actually wanted to give speeding tickets to everyone driving over the 55 limit, they would have been forced to completely baracade the roads and stop (and ticket) every driver there.
Maybe I have been watching a counterfeit version of PBS, but here in Silly-Con Valley we have our choice of 3 PBS stations. All 3 run several nationally distributed programs, and every one of those programs comes complete with several corporate "underwriting" announcements at both the beginning and the end of each program, and those anouncements look and sound a whole lot like commercials.
So what is this non-sense about PBS being unfair because it's gov'mint financed and does not have ads? Someoone should tell the folks who keep beating their "Pledge Now!" drums that they are well financed by their gov'mint. Or are the folks beating those "Pledge Now!" drums all lying to me about how much it costs them to acquire those ad-laden national programs?
IMHO, the real problem here is that this "friend" of ours apparently thinks our only reason for living is so we can watch ads for and to buy junk we don't really need. I hate to be the bearer of bad news for him, but there is more to life than watching ads and buying "stuff!"
I, for one, happen to enjoy walking on the ocean beach. (One place where I see or hear few ads of any sort.) Does this man actually believe that walking on a beach as I do should be a crime? Does he think I would be better off "enjoying" a nice collection of ads instead of watching a beautiful susnset out over the Pacific ocean?
I also live in "THE Valley" and I agree, we are presently being screwed. I have been looking around, and all I can say is that a lot of bandwidth will soon be available to and from SOMEONE. Have you noticed the road work down the middle of El Camino? If you will look carefully, you will see clusters of 4 manholes spaced about every 1000 feet as you go north from Santa Clara toward Mountain View on El Camino. There is a group of companies that were each going to dig up and repave the same streets so they could put in fibre ducts. It turns out that in many places, the same streets would have been dug up and repaved eight times. When these companies learned of each other's plans, they decided to work as a group so they would dig up the streets only once. This is a real Win-Win. First, they split the cost of the digging, etc. many ways, so each pays only a small fraction of the total project cost, and they disrupt traffic less as well. This reduced the hostility they received from the general public during commute times.
In my area, the same folks are now installing their fibre ducts (again in groups of 4 or more, with each duct color coded to identify whose it is) in residential areas. I expect we will soon see fibre cables being pulled into those ducts, and equipment installed in the vaults beneath the manholes.
This will provide a huge increase in the available bandwidth for a lot of people. We are talking fibre cables to within a few hundred feet of your home or business here. I expect this will provide speeds presently considered astronomical of 100 Megabits per second, or more. If the potential price/performance competition is real, I predict the speed "caps" we now see will soon be removed in both the DSL and CATV systems and their prices will have to drop drastically because there will be little reason to pay the kinds of prices we are now paying for DSL or CATV lines that will be very slow by comparison to these new fibre based systems. Watch for this in the coming months.
Beside these new systems, there already is a fibre to the curb system that was built and installed in San Jose, Santa Clara, and Campbell by Pac Bell BEFORE they were bought by Southwest Bell (SBC). This system was designed to turned on in phases. The first phase was a very good looking CATV system, but later on this same system was designed to deliver "Video Dial Tone" to every home with 6 Mhz bandwidth for each direction per "circuit." And that is just the video portion. The data channels Pac Bell planned were also symmetrical and very fast. This system uses pairs of 1/2 inch CATV cable (one for out-bound signals with the other for in-bound signals, each cable no longer than 1250 feet with a single 5 Mhz to 1 Ghz amplifier in each cable located at the 600 foot point.) These cables fanned out in up to 6 directions from each green box. The boxes are roughly the size of a large refrigerator/freezer on its side, and contains the termination hardware for all the fibres (there are several coming to each of these boxes), a set of large gell-cell batteries to provide 90 volts DC power down all of those CATV cables, a natural gas driven alternator, and a 240 volt AC to 90 volt DC converter. This box with its batteries and dual sources of utility power was designed to emulate a CO to your residential telephone, and will provide four hours of telephone service with NO outside power at all. However, if either natural gas or electricity is available, the "node" can run indefinitely.
There also was eventually going to be a small box on the side of your house to convert the cable signals (with the 90 volt DC power in them from the main cable running across the back of your yard) into a voice circuit for your telephone. But this box on the side of your house was also designed to provide you with much more, if you wanted it, because it had several available slots, with only one slot required for your Plain Old Telephone Service.
Look around. These are generally a large green box with an electric utility meter mounted on the side near the top and an air intake just below the meter. At the moment, this entire system is dormant because SBC pulled the plug on it right after they bought Pac Bell. But I just cannot believe such a system, with so much hardware already in place, will be dormant much longer. This system was designed to have a lot of potential and a lot of the hardware for it is already in place and tested. I think that if SBC cannot figure out what to do with it, someone else soon will.
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If don't understand how an irriadiated food can bad, perhaps you should look a little more closely at what irriadiation does. Those high energy particles or waves cause ionization (it's called ionizing radiation for a good reason) and the formation of "free radicals" in the material being irradiated. A "free radical" is a fragment broken from a larger molecule. "Free radicals" are very reactive chemically, and will react with almost any other molecule they come near, to form new molecules. Many of these new molecules are suspect, at least, in terms of their safety in food. FYI, the energy of the applied radiation is what did the bond breaking necessary to create all those free radicals. That is why microwaving food to warm it up is not the same as hitting it with a thousand Rads of gamma from a Cobalt 60 source. Those gamma ray photons are far more energetic than the very long wave photons (by comparison) found inside a microwave oven.
But even that is not the whole story. Some molecules are more easily broken into fragments by ionizing radiation than other molecules because not all chemical bonds are equally strong. It turns out that some of the more fragile molecules happen to be the vitamins and other nutrients, so irradiating food actually does damage the nutritional quality of the food.
You could say that the same is true of cooking, and so it is, except that far fewer free radicals are created by cooking than are created by irradiation. However, cooking does destroy vitamins and other nutrients, too.
I would err on the safe side and at the very least LABEL THE FOOD so people know what they are getting. If a process such as irradiation is safe, and everyone understands that, then labeling food with an appropriate label should not cause anyone any problems. Milk is already labeled "Pasteurized" and "Homogenized" and few people or companies have much of a problem with that, because they know what they are getting. So WHY NOT apply the same labeling requirements to other processes done to food, such as genetic modification or irradiation?
FYI, the FCC has rearranged the television broadcast bands. The majority of the DTV channel allocations are inside a group of channels called "the core." The "core" channels are those that will still be in use for television broadcasting after the transition to DTV is complete. They are: 2-6 (low band VHF), 7-13 (high band VHF), and 20-51 (UHF). The article stated that the DTV station is on channel 20, so they appear to be where they are supposed to be.
So, if there is a solution to this problem, I would look to the "Land Mobile" world, where there never is enough spectrum, and where "creative" solutions to lack of spectrum space, such as using "vacant" TV channels come from.
However, I would not let Congress or the FCC off the hook. The primary motivation for this shifting around of TV channels is that Congress intends to auction off the so-called "700 MHz band" (consisting of UHF channels 52-69) to balance the Federal Budget.
RFI is no joke, especially when lives could be at stake. But this DTV station is doing exactly what Congress and the FCC ordered them to do, broadcast a digital TV signal on the channel assigned to them.
Every broadcast engineer I know (I am a television broadcast engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area) wants his or her station to be an asset to the community. RFI problems like this one do not make for good community relations, even when the "fault" for the problem lies elsewhere.
I was at Linux World Tuesday afternoon, and witnessed a live interview on CNET radio, of a representative from Microsoft's booth. (The CNET radio host's name escapes me at the moment.) CNET may have an audio clip of it on their website (if they do such things) because when the interviewer asked the M$ representative about Steve Balmer's saying that Linux was like a Cancer, and went on to quote other M$ types also bashing Linux, the M$ guy sitting there said that if the same questions were asked today, he thought their (those high level Microsofties) answers would be much different.
Whether their M$ booth at Linux World and the words I heard during that CNET radio interview represent M$ "smelling the coffee" or if they are just another PR ploy, I do not know. What I did notice was that the M$ booth was small, pretty far off to one side of the hall, and that there was not much traffic going past their booth other than from folks like me, walking by and looking, just to see if the rumors were true.
The words I overheard from the M$ folks at the show were all about co-existence, but if what I read about M$ and their "Software Choice" initiative is true, than I saw an Oscar winning performance during that CNET radio interview.
I do not think M$ sold much of anything while I was there. My guess is that selling was not their purpose in attending the show. I think they wanted to see who else was there (both individual customers and exhibiting companies), and I think Microsoft wanted to mix with and listen to the folks staffing those other booths. There were several large booths from companies like HP, Sun, and IBM, and they all got a lot of traffic. The fact that I saw so many server racks, each 42 (or more) RU tall, filled with 1 RU servers, all running Linux/Apache, on display at the Linux World show has to say something to M$ about their future in the server arena. IIS has been cracked far too many times for many webmasters to trust IIS with anything important.
In addition, I was amazed to see just how many large companies were crowing about how well their Linux/Apache servers are running, and how much money they have been saving with that combination.
While I did see some desktop software (Gnome, Star Office 6.0, and Open Office), but I think the emphasis in this show was much more on servers and on network devices of various types, like Network Attached Storage and Storage Area Networks.
There is reason for the DTV mandate. It is called "The 700 Megahertz Band" and the Congress wants to auction it off ASAP!
..... that is a long story, but in brief, channels 70 to 83 were taken away, much to the chagrin of the people in many small rural comunities dependant on what were known as "Televison Translators" to bring them television. Lake Tahoe, for example, is not far from Sacramento, but unfortunately for the people living there, Sacramento's TV signals cannot make it through the mountain ridge line surrounding the lake. At one time, there were several translators up on that ridge line, re-broadcasting the Sacramento TV stations down into the Lake Tahoe basin, all using those those high UHF channel numbers.
FYI, broadcast television began as channels 1-13, in two chunks of spectrum, 48-88 MHz and 174-216 MHz. But, when the amateur radio community screamed "Foul" after losing their "5 Meter Band" they got what is now called the 6 meter band (50-54MHz) in exchange. So Television then became channels 2-13. Because TV tuners of the time could not deal with adjacent channels, and there weren't as many channels as there were people who wanted to broadcast on them, a third chunk of spectrum, 470-890 MHz was opened up. That was the UHF band, consisting of channels 14 to 83.
What's that? You don't recall watching any channel 83 television stations? Well
So what became of those channels, you ask? Look no further than your old analog cell phone, because that is the spectrum where they operate, in what was used to be called the "translator band," channels 70 to 83.
Now we are looking at another spectrum grab. Broadcast television will soon become channels 2-13, and channels 20-51. Channels 52-69 are what is known as the "700 Megahertz Band" and they are scheduled to be auctioned off. But don't hold your breath for that to happen, because there are a lot of "wireless" companies that realized they paid FAR TOO MUCH for the spectrum they bought some time ago, and they are not about to bankrupt themselves this time around.
But even worse, the DTV mandate means that televsision broadcasters must play musical chairs (or channels) and that has resulted in huge expenses for most of them, with NO increase in revenue to pay for all that mandated digital transmission gear. WHY? Because the viewing audience is not watching DTV. That means the advertising world will not pay any more money for their ads to be broadcast, because with DTV, they are not reaching any more people.
I see two Boogy Bears here. The first is the Congress that had visions of BILLIONS and BILLIONS of Dollars just waiting to be made from those spectrum auctions, and second, the CableTV industry that right now delivers television signals to about 70% of the viewing audience nation wide. The CableTV folks are NOT REQUIRED TO CARRY ANY DTV SIGNALS. So, if you just bought a brand new Digital Television set (DTV tuner and all), don't bother trying to hook it up to your Cable. It will not work because the "Digital Cable" transmission standard they use is NOT the Broadcast transmission standard. The "Digital Cable" signal all the Cable folks think you should have is actually not even a good quality Standard Definition Signal -- and that is as it is seen through THEIR "Set Top Box." (FYI, they pack a standard def signal into 1 Megahertz of spectrum, by crushing the hell out of it. There are lots of MPEG artifacts visible in most "Digital Cable" signals, and they are all Standard Definition only.)
But even that is not all, the FCC decided that for the US population to receive DTV, we would all put up outdoor antennas 30 feet off the ground, with a mast mounted pre-amps and rotators. The FCC antenna is supposed to have at least 14 dB of gain and an 11 dB front-to-back ratio. But how many people can actually put up such an antenna on their condo, apartment roof, or even their individual house roof? Not very many.
WHY? In the 60's and 70's, the Cable folks pursuaded many City Councils to rewrite their building codes, prohibiting all outdoor antennas. Those nice Cable folks may even have tucked an outdoor antenna prohibition into your deed, in the form of a "restrictive covenant." This was their not very subtle method of forcing people to pay for what they could otherwise receive free from antennas on their own roofs. It took a Federal exemption to such restrictive ordinances and covenants to allow people to buy and install those little 18 inch satellite dishes.
Right now I see several things holding back DTV. They are: 1) the CableTV companies that refuse to carry ANY broadcast DTV signals, 2) the content providers who are trying to make sure that you PAY, PAY, and PAY again for everything, including time shifting, and 3) the Congress who want to shove DTV down peoples throats, even though most people have not expressed any great interest in rushing out to purchase any $4,000 TV sets, just to "free up" the 700 Megahertz Band Congress wants so badly to auction off.
The problem is, you see, Congress has already spent the money they thought they would get from auctioning off the 700 Megahertz band, and their unbalanced books are now catching up all of us. This "Spectrum Auction" to balance their books idea actually began back in the early 90's when the only words the politicians knew were "Tax Cuts! Tax Cuts! Tax Cuts!"
I expect to see many of the smaller television stations, especially in regions of the country where the population density is low, to die from the expense of the DTV transition, because it is costing anywhere between $2 Million to $20 Million PER station, just to put a DTV signal into the air. And that DTV signal is probably only standard definition television. Now add the cost of the new HDTV studio equipment they will need to originate HDTV programming of their own, to be run in parallel with existing NTSC programming which canot be shut down yet, and you are looking at several more Millions of dollars. And all that is to be financed with no increased revenue to help pay the mortgage.
So what was that the Congress was saying a while back about "Unfunded Mandates?"
I am a broadcast engineer, and know a little about this general subject. There is a long history of corporations trying to control what the public can do with their products. The concept of preventing people from time shifting a television program and skipping the commercials in that program is one of many things that Big Hollywood does not like. They also don't like your getting up to go to the bathroom during one of those blocks of 6 or 7 ads they stack up and expect you to watch, starting about 1/2 way into a movie.
Be advised that there is more general issue at work here, and the industry term for it is "Rights Management." Another industry term is "Asset Management." The concept of "First Sale" that has applied to books and other print media for a very long time, causes the **AA to go cross-eyed.
Think about the "ebook reader," and what a few publishers and software companies tried to get away with. As I recall, they tried to link the "purchase" (read that as "Lease") of an electronic book title to the electronic serial number of the ebook reader, so you could not pass your electronic book file on to someone else the way you can with a real book. Nor could you save your downloaded ebook file to your own hard drive. Eventually you would you run out of memory in your ebook reader and then you would be forced to discard a copy of some title you "bought" in order to make room for another ebook title. Worse, as I also recall, if you should happen to lose your ebook reader, you will have lost all of the ebooks you ever "purchased" as well, because those purchases were recorded as belonging to your ebook serial number, not to you as a person. A replacement ebook would not have the same serial number as the one you lost, so your new ebook reader would look like exactly like one belonging to a new "customer," and you would be forced to pay full price - again - for the ebooks you "bought" once already.
I think the issue here is not really piracy, but rather the attempts of some very greedy corporations to make sure that everything you might want to do with their "product" will cost you money. Want to record the football game that will be broadcast on another network at the exact same time as the game you plan to watch in real time on Thanksgiving Day? Pay Up!! Want to time shift that daytime soap opera and watch it in the evening? Pay Up!! Don't have a valid credit card? Get Lost!!
But the one aspect of all of this that really gets to me is how "they" keep saying that their "Rights Management" technology is intended to make sure their "artists" are paid for their work. As I recall, in the recording industry those artists get only a small percentage (usually in single digits) of the purchase price of a recording. But worse yet is the fate of the actors (or their estates) you can see in all those "classic movies" that are being re-issued. They often receive nothing at all because they didn't have residuals for videtapes or DVDs written into their contracts of 50 years ago. For the corporations selling such "classics," the sales they make today produce some really big profits.
Recently I heard the concept described that says when we do not watch all the commercials, we are stealing from the artists, is disengenouous, because it turns out that the folks making all the noise about such stealing from the artists, are the very same folks that wrote those weasel worded contracts and made sure the "artists" got no money at all unless they happened to get very lucky and record an unstoppable smash hit. But artists with smash hits are very few compared to the many artists ripped off by weasel worded contracts. Too many good rock bands have learned this lesson the hard way. So have too many good book authors.
I think the problem boils down to this: we seem to have a bumper crop of corporations intent on creating and using technology to guarantee their own positive cash flow, regardless of the quality, or lack thereof, of the "product" they expect us to "buy."
So I say, "Let us have truly free enterprise and open markets! Allow artists to sell their art to us directly through the Internet, if they wish." And, "Let any genius who can figure out how to write the code to bit-bash the appropriate bits in a fast DSP chip in real time in that data stream called digital television do so." Make sure that she/he can legally make and sell such a product for us to put "in line" between the digital output of a digital television "tuner" or "set top box," and the digital input of a PVR (personal video disk recorder), so we can record what and when we want for our own personal use, regardless of the "Copyright" bits that may be present in the digital tlevision data stream.
Spare me! What exactly do you think the Five Supremes, the same folks who picked our President Select, would do with a challenge to the DMCA? What if they give it their blessing? What would we be able to do about the DMCA then?
I would rather not move the DMCA into the court system. I suggest we look for some other way to reverse it. One way I can think of for a large, but moneyless, group of people to overturn a law is to find some way to make that law unenforceable. Does anyone remember the 55 MPH National Speed Limit? I think that 55 MPH speed limit is an example of a law that went away largely because it became unenforceable. I know many places where so many people were breaking the 55 MPH speed limit that the police literally could do nothing. If the police actually wanted to give speeding tickets to everyone driving over the 55 limit, they would have been forced to completely baracade the roads and stop (and ticket) every driver there.
Maybe I have been watching a counterfeit version of PBS, but here in Silly-Con Valley we have our choice of 3 PBS stations. All 3 run several nationally distributed programs, and every one of those programs comes complete with several corporate "underwriting" announcements at both the beginning and the end of each program, and those anouncements look and sound a whole lot like commercials.
So what is this non-sense about PBS being unfair because it's gov'mint financed and does not have ads? Someoone should tell the folks who keep beating their "Pledge Now!" drums that they are well financed by their gov'mint. Or are the folks beating those "Pledge Now!" drums all lying to me about how much it costs them to acquire those ad-laden national programs?
IMHO, the real problem here is that this "friend" of ours apparently thinks our only reason for living is so we can watch ads for and to buy junk we don't really need. I hate to be the bearer of bad news for him, but there is more to life than watching ads and buying "stuff!"
I, for one, happen to enjoy walking on the ocean beach. (One place where I see or hear few ads of any sort.) Does this man actually believe that walking on a beach as I do should be a crime? Does he think I would be better off "enjoying" a nice collection of ads instead of watching a beautiful susnset out over the Pacific ocean?
Gimme a Break! This clown is certifiable!
David,
I also live in "THE Valley" and I agree, we are presently being screwed. I have been looking around, and all I can say is that a lot of bandwidth will soon be available to and from SOMEONE. Have you noticed the road work down the middle of El Camino? If you will look carefully, you will see clusters of 4 manholes spaced about every 1000 feet as you go north from Santa Clara toward Mountain View on El Camino. There is a group of companies that were each going to dig up and repave the same streets so they could put in fibre ducts. It turns out that in many places, the same streets would have been dug up and repaved eight times. When these companies learned of each other's plans, they decided to work as a group so they would dig up the streets only once. This is a real Win-Win. First, they split the cost of the digging, etc. many ways, so each pays only a small fraction of the total project cost, and they disrupt traffic less as well. This reduced the hostility they received from the general public during commute times.
In my area, the same folks are now installing their fibre ducts (again in groups of 4 or more, with each duct color coded to identify whose it is) in residential areas. I expect we will soon see fibre cables being pulled into those ducts, and equipment installed in the vaults beneath the manholes.
This will provide a huge increase in the available bandwidth for a lot of people. We are talking fibre cables to within a few hundred feet of your home or business here. I expect this will provide speeds presently considered astronomical of 100 Megabits per second, or more. If the potential price/performance competition is real, I predict the speed "caps" we now see will soon be removed in both the DSL and CATV systems and their prices will have to drop drastically because there will be little reason to pay the kinds of prices we are now paying for DSL or CATV lines that will be very slow by comparison to these new fibre based systems. Watch for this in the coming months.
Beside these new systems, there already is a fibre to the curb system that was built and installed in San Jose, Santa Clara, and Campbell by Pac Bell BEFORE they were bought by Southwest Bell (SBC). This system was designed to turned on in phases. The first phase was a very good looking CATV system, but later on this same system was designed to deliver "Video Dial Tone" to every home with 6 Mhz bandwidth for each direction per "circuit." And that is just the video portion. The data channels Pac Bell planned were also symmetrical and very fast. This system uses pairs of 1/2 inch CATV cable (one for out-bound signals with the other for in-bound signals, each cable no longer than 1250 feet with a single 5 Mhz to 1 Ghz amplifier in each cable located at the 600 foot point.) These cables fanned out in up to 6 directions from each green box. The boxes are roughly the size of a large refrigerator/freezer on its side, and contains the termination hardware for all the fibres (there are several coming to each of these boxes), a set of large gell-cell batteries to provide 90 volts DC power down all of those CATV cables, a natural gas driven alternator, and a 240 volt AC to 90 volt DC converter. This box with its batteries and dual sources of utility power was designed to emulate a CO to your residential telephone, and will provide four hours of telephone service with NO outside power at all. However, if either natural gas or electricity is available, the "node" can run indefinitely.
There also was eventually going to be a small box on the side of your house to convert the cable signals (with the 90 volt DC power in them from the main cable running across the back of your yard) into a voice circuit for your telephone. But this box on the side of your house was also designed to provide you with much more, if you wanted it, because it had several available slots, with only one slot required for your Plain Old Telephone Service.
Look around. These are generally a large green box with an electric utility meter mounted on the side near the top and an air intake just below the meter. At the moment, this entire system is dormant because SBC pulled the plug on it right after they bought Pac Bell. But I just cannot believe such a system, with so much hardware already in place, will be dormant much longer. This system was designed to have a lot of potential and a lot of the hardware for it is already in place and tested. I think that if SBC cannot figure out what to do with it, someone else soon will.