I still have one too, through a place called American Wireless.
Up in far Northern Cali, cell service is terrible, especially in the hilly regions. We don't have cell service in our house, which is in the middle of a subdivision in a medium-sized city.
However, the pager works every time, no fail. I don't know if it is still true, but they used to be satellite-based which would explain why it even works when I'm in the driving through the middle of a mountain range.
No, that is not it either. Init spawns svscan, which monitors the service. If svscan dies, it's respawned by init. If init dies, you have other problems. It's really not as convoluted as you're making it sound.
Sun Microsystems--a company of some really smart engineers--literally duplicated this system almost exactly in Solaris 10. The command to manage it is literally one character off (svc vs. svcs). It's a good idea (tm).
I must be just too busy to be that picky about it. For instance, pretend you're a one-man shop with four dozen servers a datacenter couple thousand miles away. Those little things (in particular your SSHD example) can be the difference between making money and spending money. In fact, without some level of automation like that I'd be willing to boast it's nearly impossible.
My repetitive mantra in this series of threads is "notify and restart". That way you can look into it when you can, and not have to. As I mentioned elsewhere as well, the "just died" scenario admittedly doesn't happen very often, but what does is accidentally doing something like that. SSHD again, would be a prime example.
It happens. Just like car accidents and lotteries. But, for some reason, these conversations always focus on the process "just dying", which admittedly isn't often. What often happens more is when someone accidentally kills a really important daemon, like SSHD, and your server is 3000 miles away. That's the idea.
That's because you're an admin.
The better alternative is to notify of the failure and get it restarted immediately so the service can continue to be used by it's consumers?
Yup, we do. Not much patching either--since most of the tricky stuff is done via vpopmail.
We did replace qmail-smtpd with a drop in from LinuxMagic for the valid user checking piece.
We (I mean our company) use a drop-in replacement for qmail-smtpd called magic-smtpd. It lets you do exactly what you're looking to do. We also wrote some custom scripts against vpopmail to drop smtp sessions for invalid addresses during the conversation.
Let me know if you're interested in it.
While I agree with the first four points, I have to disagree on the last. While the possibility his daemon might die is a valid one, having a wrapping process to watch it and restart it is just good admin practice. Sun obviously thought it was a good idea, since they've incorporated something almost identical in Solaris 10.
Very true. Most of the issues with the car were due to the unskilled labor force assembling the vehicles, though. Not necessarily because of poor design (remember Lotus had a hand in designing them). By the time the linen workers got the knack of it, DMC was out of business.
That being said, you can still order brand-new parts rescued the original factory inventory. Right down the composite frame.
Being someone that drives a collector DMC-12 a few times a month, I have to pipe in and state that it actually doesn't handle quite as bad as most people are led to believe. It's nothing stellar, but for 1981 it's not half bad. Better than average, actually.
The engine is underpowered for the car, but it is a nice driver.
Remember that the car started out lower and meaner--with better handling. Last minute changes due to federal crash regulations at the time changed the ride height and thus the handling characteristics.
Why can't "good" and "making money" be in the same sentence? Just because a company makes money, doesn't make them evil. It makes them evil when they do bad things to make money.
Don't bring logic into this conversation!! What are you thinking?!?! Everybody knows companies exist to only serve the needs of their customers, not make money or help their employees and thier families prosper.
While I don't necessarily disagree with any of your points, I do think you misinterpret Steve Jobs' view of Apple's role in the computer industry.
Along with your Steve Jobs profile, you paint a picture of an elitist, which is presicely where I believe he wants Apple Computer at. I think he perceives an Apple Computer to be an experience worthy of the cost, any cost; better than anything else by leaps and bounds, and worth the time and effort to make it so. He wants an Apple computer to equate to a Bentley automobile or some other ultra-luxurious item.
What you didn't hit upon is that there actually are people in the market that will pay (up the nose) for so-called "ultra-luxury" items. The same folks that pay $10,000 for a platinum-plated bathroom sink may just very well see Apple computers as that type item for their computing need--if only by appearance and price alone. While I have in no way gone out to actually see if higher income brackets prefer Apple computers to others, I do know off-the-cuff that an awful lot of famous people tend to have them (Actors, Musicians, etc)--and probably for the status/fashion appeal as well as the functionality.
Whether that approach it is right or wrong for the Apple Computer, Inc. and its stock holders is up for grabs, but the "image" he has built for his company has no doubt been reinforced by his self-promotion and mangement style. And I think that 5% market is exactly what he intended.
But the money they are borrowing is a debt on *your* head. You hate for them to balance the budget because it might come with a tough decision, but borrowing money on your behalf is just fine? You really have bought into the live-beyond-your-means consumerism. They are spending so much of your money that they are borrowing more in your name to cover what they've already spent, and they are too irresponsible to only spend what they earn.
Personally, I'd like to see them pay off the debt, even if it means that a hard choice or two will have to be made now. If the debt was gone, then my taxes would be about 25% less. I want the tax break. Give me back the money that the Bushs and Reagan stole from my pocket in increased taxes to cover their interest payments.
Well, I touched on this in our other thread, but I absolutely do not believe in the live-beyond-your-means consumerism. That's precisely what our government does, and look how well it's treated them.
The tough decision to be made isn't milking more money out of people with higher taxes, but which programs and policies to nix. There's way more money to be made up there than eeking a few thousand more dollars out of each tax payer.
It's too late. Reagan and the Bushs sabotaged the budget. It's saddled with huge intrest payments. Taxes need to go up to pay off the debt in some reasonable time. A person can pay off a house in 30 years, but our national debt has increased so much that everyone in the country would need to pay more than $2000 per year more just to pay it off in 30 years. And you claim that we shouldn't worry about it. When is it too much? At some point, a Republican will finally notice that 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or whatever of our income going to nothing other than interest on loans is too high. Where will that be? If it were paid off now, I'd be paying more than $2000 less per year in taxes to get what we have. The Republicans are taking away $2000 per year from me to pay for interest on their poor fiscal policy. How can you be outraged when some Democrat pays $2,000,000 on some health clinic, when the Republicans are responsible for paying over $300,000,000,000 per year in vaporous interest payments, increasingly to foreign banks (2 million is just 1/150000 of the debt payment).
I am concerned about it. But as a righty libertarian, I look not to the government to solve the problem, but to us. The government caused the problem to begin with for pete's sake! I believe we are approaching common ground, but our solutions differ.
The reason we have such insanely high debt is because of big government. The Republicans have spent more, but it's been--in general--on the right things. A strong military, for example. I'm no Republican, but I think they "get" where the money needs to go for the most part.
Your view is that we need to increase taxes to reduce the debt. That won't happen. That extra "surplus" lying around won't go to paying off loans. Deep down you know that, because it's the government!!! Between the Republicans spending it, and the Democrats adding more and more bleeding-heart social programs, it's all for naught. That is where we are today, and what we have now will not work for tomorrow. Agreed.
The problem needs to be attacked head on, instead of treating the symptoms (a big budget) with more tax money. Instead of focusing on the debt, we need to take some responsibilty ourselves by not relying on the government to bail us out whenever we have a problem. We need WAY less government programs. WAY less. I'm talking like no Social Security, No Medicare, blow it out of the water... privatize the entire thing put it out of the federal government's hands, and back into ours. At a minimum, into the State's (it is the State's role, after all) I'm not against regulated industries in some cases--I believe it's needed to ensure quality of service in some cases--but the more money in the private sector benefits us all.
Knocking out gigantic money pits like those and keeping taxes as they are, and possibly even reducing taxes at the same time (therefore beefing up the economy, and in turn generating yet more taxes) will eliminate the debt even quicker than trying to squeeze more pennies out of us.
You have to keep in mind the Federal Government's role, as architected, was to protect the soverignty of the collective union from internal or external threats. Not to bail out social ills citizens in those states. That is why I have such a big problem with the Federal Government, Democrats, in particular; because they are the furthest piece of the government away from your locality, and they're bailing folks out with social programs?
Cut the programs, the debt will take care of itself. I think we both agree on that.
Clinton shut down the federal government on more than one occassion because the Republican congress wouldn't give him a balanced budget to sign. He is the only president I remember doing that. They waited until the last possible moment, and gave it to him so he'd have no choice. He called their bluff, they came back with something he would sign. He worked hard to keep spending down. He worked hard to prevent the tax cuts for the rich that Bush pushed through and was more than happy to sign.
I know I'm jumping in another thread, but I can't resist when it comes to this stuff... especially when I see a liberal pattern:)
Out of the liberal presidents I've been alive for, I have to admit that I hated Clinton the least. I do think that the stuff with Monica was way overblown, and I do think he did a decent job on some things, and I think Republicans were WAY out of line bringing personal crap into his political career. But, most of that is because he wasn't a blue-butted lib, he was more left of center....
Here is a counter-weight to most of your arguments. Granted, that's a Republican site, but between the two the facts do spill out. A lot of Bush 2's spending was to replace a lot of things that Clinton got rid of. You know, like a military, that we could use to prevent religious fanatics from blowing up our stuff.
Again, I'm not sure why you keep taking the obtuse view on tax cuts, but the proper way to get things in order is to cut programs, not increase taxes. Increasing taxes only allows the government do less with more, rather than becoming more efficient, smaller, and streamlined. History proves this as well, and not just in the USA.
Tax cuts on the rich are not bad things. Rich people buy expensive stuff, which injects more money into our free economy, which helps out everyone in the end. Rich people use that money to start businesses to make more money, in that wake give people more jobs, and chances to succeed themselves.
I see where you're trying to go with your argument, but the destination just isn't there. This country works because we--you and I both work, spend, and build families in the American system. Free market, and Free choice. The Government is outside that system, not the center of it. Its sole purpose is to enable you and I to do those things with as little intervention from itself as possible, not become the barrier by introducing policies and taxes. WE are the center of the "System". It is not.
If you "get" that the way I do...i.e. that you are the person in charge, not the Feds... you're well on your way to becoming a recovering liberal, like myself. Come on in, the water is quite clear.:)
1. The people you mention above will be pissed off and still buy their TV's even without the vouchers. They sure as hell won't waste their money on news or educational channels though.
2. The real poor (those that are really trying to rise above their circumstances) will just do without.
and what will that cause?
disinformation and unrest among those if the information "dark"
and what will that cause?
I dont know, but it scares the hell out of me.
I do like your approach, and I think you're right. Most "free" services of media transport will probably disappear in the coming years.
BUT, I would like to propose a different outlook than 'disinformation and unrest'...
I would propose that the reason most of the "free" media services are failing are because they are based in outright left spin and disinformation themselves... then folks like me are completely willing and compelled to "pay" for services that actually offer less spin (right or left for that matter) and more fact. For example, there's a reason I won't watch local news channels any more... I'll gladly pay for Fox News Channel--the least evil of all of them--on cable than free television's newscasts.
All in all, though... I think there'd be less disinformation among those in the "dark". Instead of Matt Lauer and Katie Couric telling the "poor" what they should know, they might actually have to figure it out for themselves. Free thinking is generally a good thing.
So, the only president in recent history that got a surplus, a liberal, is whining and making sloppy decisions, while Bushs increase the debt and the deficit at a huge rate?
What the heck are you talking about??? You seem to think that between raising taxes and cutting programs--having a surplus in the federal government's pocket is a good thing? That's good decision making? Go ahead and give your hard-earned money away dude... so the government can buy people TV sets (it's in the budget, it's okay). WOW. I just don't get it, but that's another topic altogether.
Common man, you can't be that narrowsighted. The current Bush inherited a bad economy (tech burst), which he has single-handedly turned around. The proof is in the numbers and joblesness stats since the burst. Look 'em up on the.gov sites. Immediately Bush takes office, terrorists attack our country and we retaliate--which is I'm guessing you are basing your claims of "spend, spend, spending"--of which Clinton did absolutely NOTHING of worth about (with his SURPLUS, no less) when all the warning signs were flashing in the 90's.
Bottom line: Cutting taxes, reducing programs, and putting money back into people's pockets is the ONLY way to push this country ahead. Balancing the "budget" means nothing when it is buffetted with more of our money. I'll decide how to spend my dollars, thanks
And you think it reasonable to demand of a single individual that they, in detail, solve something that a government with trillions spent on that or related programs, is unable to solve?
Absolutely. Me, I'm a righty libertarian. I believe less is more when it comes to government. Period.
Big Government-More Taxes-Whining libs complaining about huge government making huge sloppy decisions is a wonderful example of the hypocrisy of libs to me. You in essence, answered your own question. NO, big government with huge programs and trillions of dollars won't sove a thing.
I'm a free person, business owner, and citizen in the United States. I fully 100% without-a-doubt believe that this country allows anyone with drive and ambition acheive anything, anything, anything one could ever imagine. I know this because I've seen it happen. I believe it can happen. I believe in my country, not my government. That means I take responsibility for coming up with ideas instead of deferring it off. THAT is the difference.
"I don't have the time" or "I can't do it" or "I don't want to" is simply not in my vocabulary.
So yes, come up with a solution. Mine? Maybe dropping analog TV would give people the drive to actually save money so they can afford digital ones. There's three freaking years to do it. No government tax money needed for that. Wait, this is liberal America, we can't ask people to take responsiblity for their actions. Sorry about that, I forgot.
LOL, I read the actual statistic somewhere regarding exactly what you stated. Out of the populous considered below the poverty line, something like 30 or 40% had big screen tv's in thier homes. A higher percentage of that had more than one TV.
But, don't let the right wing spinsters fool you... these people are SUFFERING! Worse than anyone else in the entire world! Give me a f'n break already. Libs can't face the fact that bad news sells, and since the mainstream press is the primary source of their "facts", it must be true (to quote my lib brother "It has to be true if it's in a movie, right?").
Ironically, the media companies spreading the left's message are doing it for precisely what libs have such a problem of: Profit! Hypocrites.
I'm really impressed that the appeal to Sept. 11th came in on the FIRST article. Slashdot should be proud to have the right wing spin machine view it with the importance that it receives.
Forget college, forget healthcare, we need radio bandwidth and tax cuts for the richest to help fight the terrorists.
Not knowing your exact polictial stance, I'll ask what I usually ask my left-leaning friends when I hear stuff like this:
Complaining aside, in detail, how would you solve the problem?
Generally what I get back is more complaining, or some generalized theoretical spiel that has no consideration of reality. Please try to avoid that.
Slashdot Mirror
I still have one too, through a place called American Wireless. Up in far Northern Cali, cell service is terrible, especially in the hilly regions. We don't have cell service in our house, which is in the middle of a subdivision in a medium-sized city. However, the pager works every time, no fail. I don't know if it is still true, but they used to be satellite-based which would explain why it even works when I'm in the driving through the middle of a mountain range.
No, that is not it either. Init spawns svscan, which monitors the service. If svscan dies, it's respawned by init. If init dies, you have other problems. It's really not as convoluted as you're making it sound. Sun Microsystems--a company of some really smart engineers--literally duplicated this system almost exactly in Solaris 10. The command to manage it is literally one character off (svc vs. svcs). It's a good idea (tm).
I must be just too busy to be that picky about it. For instance, pretend you're a one-man shop with four dozen servers a datacenter couple thousand miles away. Those little things (in particular your SSHD example) can be the difference between making money and spending money. In fact, without some level of automation like that I'd be willing to boast it's nearly impossible.
My repetitive mantra in this series of threads is "notify and restart". That way you can look into it when you can, and not have to. As I mentioned elsewhere as well, the "just died" scenario admittedly doesn't happen very often, but what does is accidentally doing something like that. SSHD again, would be a prime example.
It happens. Just like car accidents and lotteries. But, for some reason, these conversations always focus on the process "just dying", which admittedly isn't often. What often happens more is when someone accidentally kills a really important daemon, like SSHD, and your server is 3000 miles away. That's the idea.
Notify and restart.
Slide 10: http://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.11.02/slides.pdf 2007.11: $500 ! $1000; qmail placed into public domain.
It's not the same; you're not familiar with how daemontools (or Sun's version) works. What happens if inetd dies?
That's because you're an admin. The better alternative is to notify of the failure and get it restarted immediately so the service can continue to be used by it's consumers?
Yup, we do. Not much patching either--since most of the tricky stuff is done via vpopmail. We did replace qmail-smtpd with a drop in from LinuxMagic for the valid user checking piece.
Yes it does.
We (I mean our company) use a drop-in replacement for qmail-smtpd called magic-smtpd. It lets you do exactly what you're looking to do. We also wrote some custom scripts against vpopmail to drop smtp sessions for invalid addresses during the conversation. Let me know if you're interested in it.
While I agree with the first four points, I have to disagree on the last. While the possibility his daemon might die is a valid one, having a wrapping process to watch it and restart it is just good admin practice. Sun obviously thought it was a good idea, since they've incorporated something almost identical in Solaris 10.
Very true. Most of the issues with the car were due to the unskilled labor force assembling the vehicles, though. Not necessarily because of poor design (remember Lotus had a hand in designing them). By the time the linen workers got the knack of it, DMC was out of business. That being said, you can still order brand-new parts rescued the original factory inventory. Right down the composite frame.
Being someone that drives a collector DMC-12 a few times a month, I have to pipe in and state that it actually doesn't handle quite as bad as most people are led to believe. It's nothing stellar, but for 1981 it's not half bad. Better than average, actually.
The engine is underpowered for the car, but it is a nice driver.
Remember that the car started out lower and meaner--with better handling. Last minute changes due to federal crash regulations at the time changed the ride height and thus the handling characteristics.
Why can't "good" and "making money" be in the same sentence? Just because a company makes money, doesn't make them evil. It makes them evil when they do bad things to make money.
Don't bring logic into this conversation!! What are you thinking?!?! Everybody knows companies exist to only serve the needs of their customers, not make money or help their employees and thier families prosper.
Along with your Steve Jobs profile, you paint a picture of an elitist, which is presicely where I believe he wants Apple Computer at. I think he perceives an Apple Computer to be an experience worthy of the cost, any cost; better than anything else by leaps and bounds, and worth the time and effort to make it so. He wants an Apple computer to equate to a Bentley automobile or some other ultra-luxurious item.
What you didn't hit upon is that there actually are people in the market that will pay (up the nose) for so-called "ultra-luxury" items. The same folks that pay $10,000 for a platinum-plated bathroom sink may just very well see Apple computers as that type item for their computing need--if only by appearance and price alone. While I have in no way gone out to actually see if higher income brackets prefer Apple computers to others, I do know off-the-cuff that an awful lot of famous people tend to have them (Actors, Musicians, etc)--and probably for the status/fashion appeal as well as the functionality.
Whether that approach it is right or wrong for the Apple Computer, Inc. and its stock holders is up for grabs, but the "image" he has built for his company has no doubt been reinforced by his self-promotion and mangement style. And I think that 5% market is exactly what he intended.
Well, I touched on this in our other thread, but I absolutely do not believe in the live-beyond-your-means consumerism. That's precisely what our government does, and look how well it's treated them.
The tough decision to be made isn't milking more money out of people with higher taxes, but which programs and policies to nix. There's way more money to be made up there than eeking a few thousand more dollars out of each tax payer.
I am concerned about it. But as a righty libertarian, I look not to the government to solve the problem, but to us. The government caused the problem to begin with for pete's sake! I believe we are approaching common ground, but our solutions differ.
The reason we have such insanely high debt is because of big government. The Republicans have spent more, but it's been--in general--on the right things. A strong military, for example. I'm no Republican, but I think they "get" where the money needs to go for the most part.
Your view is that we need to increase taxes to reduce the debt. That won't happen. That extra "surplus" lying around won't go to paying off loans. Deep down you know that, because it's the government!!! Between the Republicans spending it, and the Democrats adding more and more bleeding-heart social programs, it's all for naught. That is where we are today, and what we have now will not work for tomorrow. Agreed.
The problem needs to be attacked head on, instead of treating the symptoms (a big budget) with more tax money. Instead of focusing on the debt, we need to take some responsibilty ourselves by not relying on the government to bail us out whenever we have a problem. We need WAY less government programs. WAY less. I'm talking like no Social Security, No Medicare, blow it out of the water... privatize the entire thing put it out of the federal government's hands, and back into ours. At a minimum, into the State's (it is the State's role, after all) I'm not against regulated industries in some cases--I believe it's needed to ensure quality of service in some cases--but the more money in the private sector benefits us all.
Knocking out gigantic money pits like those and keeping taxes as they are, and possibly even reducing taxes at the same time (therefore beefing up the economy, and in turn generating yet more taxes) will eliminate the debt even quicker than trying to squeeze more pennies out of us.
You have to keep in mind the Federal Government's role, as architected, was to protect the soverignty of the collective union from internal or external threats. Not to bail out social ills citizens in those states. That is why I have such a big problem with the Federal Government, Democrats, in particular; because they are the furthest piece of the government away from your locality, and they're bailing folks out with social programs?
Cut the programs, the debt will take care of itself. I think we both agree on that.
I know I'm jumping in another thread, but I can't resist when it comes to this stuff... especially when I see a liberal pattern :)
Out of the liberal presidents I've been alive for, I have to admit that I hated Clinton the least. I do think that the stuff with Monica was way overblown, and I do think he did a decent job on some things, and I think Republicans were WAY out of line bringing personal crap into his political career. But, most of that is because he wasn't a blue-butted lib, he was more left of center....
Here is a counter-weight to most of your arguments. Granted, that's a Republican site, but between the two the facts do spill out. A lot of Bush 2's spending was to replace a lot of things that Clinton got rid of. You know, like a military, that we could use to prevent religious fanatics from blowing up our stuff.
Again, I'm not sure why you keep taking the obtuse view on tax cuts, but the proper way to get things in order is to cut programs, not increase taxes. Increasing taxes only allows the government do less with more, rather than becoming more efficient, smaller, and streamlined. History proves this as well, and not just in the USA.
Tax cuts on the rich are not bad things. Rich people buy expensive stuff, which injects more money into our free economy, which helps out everyone in the end. Rich people use that money to start businesses to make more money, in that wake give people more jobs, and chances to succeed themselves.
I see where you're trying to go with your argument, but the destination just isn't there. This country works because we--you and I both work, spend, and build families in the American system. Free market, and Free choice. The Government is outside that system, not the center of it. Its sole purpose is to enable you and I to do those things with as little intervention from itself as possible, not become the barrier by introducing policies and taxes. WE are the center of the "System". It is not.
If you "get" that the way I do...i.e. that you are the person in charge, not the Feds... you're well on your way to becoming a recovering liberal, like myself. Come on in, the water is quite clear. :)
I do like your approach, and I think you're right. Most "free" services of media transport will probably disappear in the coming years.
BUT, I would like to propose a different outlook than 'disinformation and unrest'...
I would propose that the reason most of the "free" media services are failing are because they are based in outright left spin and disinformation themselves... then folks like me are completely willing and compelled to "pay" for services that actually offer less spin (right or left for that matter) and more fact. For example, there's a reason I won't watch local news channels any more... I'll gladly pay for Fox News Channel--the least evil of all of them--on cable than free television's newscasts.
All in all, though... I think there'd be less disinformation among those in the "dark". Instead of Matt Lauer and Katie Couric telling the "poor" what they should know, they might actually have to figure it out for themselves. Free thinking is generally a good thing.
What the heck are you talking about??? You seem to think that between raising taxes and cutting programs--having a surplus in the federal government's pocket is a good thing? That's good decision making? Go ahead and give your hard-earned money away dude... so the government can buy people TV sets (it's in the budget, it's okay). WOW. I just don't get it, but that's another topic altogether.
Common man, you can't be that narrowsighted. The current Bush inherited a bad economy (tech burst), which he has single-handedly turned around. The proof is in the numbers and joblesness stats since the burst. Look 'em up on the .gov sites. Immediately Bush takes office, terrorists attack our country and we retaliate--which is I'm guessing you are basing your claims of "spend, spend, spending"--of which Clinton did absolutely NOTHING of worth about (with his SURPLUS, no less) when all the warning signs were flashing in the 90's.
Bottom line: Cutting taxes, reducing programs, and putting money back into people's pockets is the ONLY way to push this country ahead. Balancing the "budget" means nothing when it is buffetted with more of our money. I'll decide how to spend my dollars, thanks
As my new proverb states: Both sex AND sensationalist news sell!
Big Government-More Taxes-Whining libs complaining about huge government making huge sloppy decisions is a wonderful example of the hypocrisy of libs to me. You in essence, answered your own question. NO, big government with huge programs and trillions of dollars won't sove a thing. I'm a free person, business owner, and citizen in the United States. I fully 100% without-a-doubt believe that this country allows anyone with drive and ambition acheive anything, anything, anything one could ever imagine. I know this because I've seen it happen. I believe it can happen. I believe in my country, not my government. That means I take responsibility for coming up with ideas instead of deferring it off. THAT is the difference. "I don't have the time" or "I can't do it" or "I don't want to" is simply not in my vocabulary. So yes, come up with a solution. Mine? Maybe dropping analog TV would give people the drive to actually save money so they can afford digital ones. There's three freaking years to do it. No government tax money needed for that. Wait, this is liberal America, we can't ask people to take responsiblity for their actions. Sorry about that, I forgot.
But, don't let the right wing spinsters fool you... these people are SUFFERING! Worse than anyone else in the entire world! Give me a f'n break already. Libs can't face the fact that bad news sells, and since the mainstream press is the primary source of their "facts", it must be true (to quote my lib brother "It has to be true if it's in a movie, right?").
Ironically, the media companies spreading the left's message are doing it for precisely what libs have such a problem of: Profit! Hypocrites.
Not knowing your exact polictial stance, I'll ask what I usually ask my left-leaning friends when I hear stuff like this:
Complaining aside, in detail, how would you solve the problem?
Generally what I get back is more complaining, or some generalized theoretical spiel that has no consideration of reality. Please try to avoid that.