Plugging in might not be the advantage everyone thinks. How much electricity does it take to charge the car? Are electricity rates cheap enough so that it makes more sense to plug in the car, versus just fill up?
So if it costs $20 worth of electricity to get all that extra 'mileage per gallon', but only $15 worth of gasoline to get the extra distance, wouldn't it make more sense just to fuel?
The point of a hybrid is simply to get more out of the energy we put in. The problem isn't combustion engines; its that the engines are notoriously inefficient as far as how much useable energy you get. The regenerative braking and electric motor from the alternator are ways to capture unused energy from the combustion. Then we up the efficiency.
The eventual goal, regardless of the source of the energy, is to put to use a greater percentage of the energy. So if we use a gallon of gas or a gallon of hydrogen, we want to get as much of the potential energy that exists in the materials as possible. That's what hybrids do. Adding two different fuel sources and just filling them seperately doesn't bring us any closer to that goal.
I don't think that the voting is really an issue... after all, there are other taxes levied by the state on citizens of other states, such as a state sales tax. Many taxes are levied selectively, such as property tax, and taxes on certain goods, excise tax on vehicles (for which you've already paid a sales tax). Voting has nothing to do with it. The state can pose a tax on any sort of economic transaction, such as a sale of a good / service / bond, etc. That includes paying someone a salary, unfourtunately. It can also levy taxes on property already owned, like houses, cars, whatever.
To answer your second question, I can give you an experienced answer. I used to work for a firm where we had two canadian telecommuters. They were paid as contractors and it was their own responsibility to handle taxes. This is the preferred way. International taxes are defined by the citizenship of the person, usually.
Believe it or not, you pay income tax as long as you are a US citizen, regardless of where you earned the money. My Roommate worked in Japan for 3 years. She had to pay Japanese income tax. She also had to pay a US Federal Income Tax, but any income under $80,000 is usually not taxed.
There was an instance a while back, but I can't remember, of a famous rich american renouncing his/her citizenship so he/she didn't have to pay taxes. And even that doesn't work, because congress passed a law that requires you to pay taxes even if you renounce your citizenship for 10 years after renunciation.
FYI, all the complexities above are why companies like PriceWaterhouseCoopers are in business
Welcome to my world, but on a tiny scale for you. I'm a conservative and almost every cool geeky work, whether it be music, movies, art, or anything else, is of the opposite beliefs as mine. Its hard to reconcile.
For instance, every band I go to see usually gives some sort of political speech and I have to wait through it before I hear the music. A lot of movie stars that I enjoy seeing hate my beliefs too. As a matter of fact, its almost always more likely the opposite.
So quit whining, one good sci-fi writer doesn't agree with you in the ballot box. So freakin' what? does that make his art any less good?
I actually think this is a dumb statement by Yahoo, and I use firefox daily.
Yahoo should not pledge firefox support, it should pledge STANDARDS support. If all their pages validate, and contain the proper doctypes, then Yahoo becomes stardards supporting, and all good browsers that obey standards will render them correctly. They'll also gracefully degrade per platform/browser.
Say what you want, I've been getting job offers and phonecalls from recruiters looking for contractors to do LAMP projects, specifically in PHP. Most people are attracted to the virtually ZERO cost and crapload of free tools.
For instance, I was actually asked to do an application for a client where scripting language and platform hadn't been decided. the mini-app had to generate images on the fly, include a search-engine style capability, etc. In ASP-land, I'd have to use an external DLL for the images and buy a searching script. In PHP-land, I used the built-in graphics library and phpdig. Although I think ASP.NET has its own built in graphics libraries, its simply much much harder to find free code for it. I know that might be an anathema to some, but why re-write barcode generating scripts or search functionality when a good alternative has already been written?
Panasonic is an awesome display. I have one of the first consumer models ( TH-42PW5 ) and its a great picture. The only thing lacking is a good software interface on the TV. They're also upgradable ( my TV has composite / VGA / component only, but can be upgraded to DVI with an expansion card). It's also built like a tank.
I think you could have a million whistleblowers blowing a million whistles, but that wouldnt' solve the problem.
The reason that this, and some (not all) government projects are often overrun and mismanaged, is because they are simply not held to the same market forces as REAL companies. There's a reason that you, and I, and most slashdotters don't buy a ferrari, even if we could get financing for it. We know it would bankrupt us right quick. Yet governments are charged with a task, but governments can't go bankrupt.
In any business, if you were responsible for securing software, but you didn't draft a contract that would allow you to own the software in this situation, you'd be fired. Or your company would go belly-up for the $10 million delay. Either way, you wouldn't have a job. The system would weed out bad employees and bad businesses. However, there is no such failsafe for the gov't.
Also, governments have projects, but managements of the projects are also most likely hamstrung by politics. A group of elected people whose agendas are more important than the financial success of the project are the ones in charge. At any company, CEOs are usually not elected and usually their own success is directly linked to the project/companys success.
Dude, you might want to put semicolons at the end of your lines of code. Perhaps because it doesn't compile, yields a parse error, that your change was ignored?
Even more strange, is that if P2P sites really don't want people trading pirated content, why don't they monitor their networks? Or, even have some sort of 'feedback' mechanism, where users of the app could flag content as 'copyright infringing', which would send an MD5 hash and link to a file to a moderator for review? I think if P2P networks actively policed/enforced a no-pirated-works policy, then MGM and others might be less inclined to try and destroy them.
The truth is that we are far less concerned about violating copyrights than we are about other forms of loss to people or companies. In civil court, if you have a piece of property and someone injures themselves on it, even if they are trespassing, often you will be found liable. The virtual property of P2P networks have some innate responsibility to ensure that their property isn't being used to break the law.
I see a lot of IE versus Firefox comments, so I'll just get it out of the way now.
Firefox renders CSS more consistently than IE. Developers like that.
Firefox uses about 2 mb less than IE while running in windows XP viewing the same slashdot thread.
Firefox allows window tabbing.
things not affected: Popup blocking, since SP2 does it. Plugins, since activeX is dead anyways.
Basically, if IE 7 uses tabs, has a smaller/leaner memory footprint, and renders CSS like a good webbrowser SHOULD, then firefox loses some of it edge.
Seriously, why doesn't TiVo license its cool interface and technology into the existing cable boxes? I would love it if my Comcast box had TiVo software on it, because TiVo knows how to write good software. Who cares what hardware it runs on?
Also, I think TiVo should get into writing PVR software for PCs for hackers. Although, hackers hardly pay for anything, so maybe that's not such a good idea.
This is the founding priciple of the US: to give the state as little power as possible.
if this were the case, the most strict adherence to the principle would be to disband the army, police, tax collectors, and social programs. That would divest the government of all its power and be most closely related to your 'principle'.
The founding principle of the United States is the respect of an individual's life, liberty, and pusuit of happiness. The conflict here is not liberty, because no one is free to violate the rights of others. The people of the US have a right to live in a safe, sane world. Those who have committed a crime (ie violated a restraining order) have abdicated their rights.
to keep individuals from harming each other, we trust a third party, the government, to form an objective body of legislation and enforcement.
disadvantages of OSS development include absence of complete documentation or technical support.
I don't think this is true. OSS, by its definition, does not preclude lack of docs or tech support. There are lots of projects and commercial or public ventures in OSS that provide great documentation and technical support.
Individual developers or efforts spawn these things. Maybe the OSS community should set limited expectations in these fields and have a standards set. IE to be part of a certified OSS project (in whatever certification one would like to invent for this), a project must provide documentation for developers and users that covers X number of things. Same for tech support, require that levels of support be available and published, and turnaround times be expected, etc.
I think that things like docs and tech support and others are , in the non-OSS world, enforced by competition. (IE, Everyone's doing it, we must do it to be competitive). Maybe the competition paradigm will be replaced by a standards / certification paradigm in the OSS world. (IE, everyone's required to do this to get on sourceforge or something)
Well, now we know why communist states are totalitarian. Because you just stated that food, shelter, and physical health are more important than the rights of man. I don't care if you could feed the starving babies of the world by enslaving men, (and time has proven that you can't,) it still is not right to do so.
Even if I were to think of non-failed institutions, could I not build hypotheticals? Does Kerala have a declaration of rights of its citizens? Can citizens own property and the results of their labor? Full tummies and proper healthcare do not make a man free. If this were the case our prisons are guarunteed freedom.
When a flood strikes Kerala, does the government have the right to confiscate the crops of the farmers? Does the government allow open criticism of the policies of the government?
The ten amendments of the United States constitution reflect a desire of a fledging nation which asked simply that the right to live one's life, as he or she sees fit, (regardless of his or her 'community'), be codified. That a man's freedom is his right by birth, and his survival his own responsibility. If a man's survival is the responsibility of others, he has de facto enslaved them by his existence. Either a man is free and his life is his own responsibility, or everyone's life is everyone else's responsibility, and no one is free.
Maybe you don't see freedom as a necessary component of the life of a man. Which is fine, you are 'free' to believe that or anything else. I'm also glad I am free to ignore you, and you cannot impose your will upon me via the use of force.
If they do release it in 2005, they have less than 10 months to come up with a Halo-calibre killer app, or they're going to be laughed out of the industry.
There are rumors that the unsatisfying and incomplete feel to Halo 2 was that the real game, the one we were expecting from the demo we saw at the E3 conference, is coming out on the next-gen this year. I guess the idea is that they port the code to run on Xbox2, using enhanced HD-resolutions and such, and finish the cliff-hanger ending.
I take it you've not read anything about communism
That's the idea. Everyone falls in love with communism when they read Marx. Everyone loves to TALK about communism. They write papers, they prostelyze about its virtues, and how wonderful it could be.
But how is it, something so good on paper could always seem to be implemented wrong. Must be the wrong leaders, they say. 'My gang would implement communism better', they write.
Maybe communism on PAPER leaves something out, that communism in PRACTICE always requires. Communism requires totalitarian rule in order to affix prices, force labor, and keep the popular will in check. Western pseudo-capitalist/democratic republics often don't need such rule, since participation in everything but rule of law is optional. In communism, those who choose not to work the assigned work defeat the larger economic machinery, which is highly directed. In the pseudo-capitalist/dr's, those who choose not to work only hurt themselves, they are not assigned any specific task and own the product of their labor.
The disenfranchising factor among communist philosophy is that one cannot be free, in the traditional sense (libre), if one does not own the product of his labor outright, to sell, barter or save. The freedom of speech evaporates if one cannot save pennies to buy a soapbox to stand on. One cannot be free to live where he or she pleases.
I guess a good encapsulation would be, can we expect the bill of rights to make any sense if Americans could not own the product of their labors?
the firewire / controller related info exists mostly at avsforum.com
Specifically, Motorola makes a cable box used pretty widely, its the DCT 6200. Comcast and Shaw use it. Also, some other boxes like samsung and Directv have firewire out.
Basically, with my comcast 6200, you can hook a six pin to six pin into your x86 pc or Mac, and with the right drivers, view the view stream as a 'Transport Stream'. All analog and digital video appears minus certain HD channels which are 'blocked'. Basically, all analog channels are available because the analog stream is converted into MPEG-2 by the cable box. The digital channels require no conversion, but when passed to the firewire, are blocked by some flag in the transport stream.
I think the.17 release probably has this integrated, AKA you don't need the drivers since the code talks to the device directly.
Its actually really hard to implement in windows since talking to devices requires a lot of overhead, you need a specific device driver first. In linux, i'm pretty sure you can just open a raw firewire AV/C handle and write data to the device. I've been trying to re-work some of mythTV's code in windows, with little success.
If you have the right cable box, you can record on OSX. You can schedule recording using iCal, too. I know its not exactly MythTV based, but its still cool as hell.
http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C
As an unrelated aside, MythTV hackers/ contributors have been making strides, writing code to assist in changing channels and complelely controlling/s treaming from cablebox firewire things. Which is cool; one cable for audio, video and administration makes PVR'ing supereasy.
Slashdot Mirror
Plugging in might not be the advantage everyone thinks. How much electricity does it take to charge the car? Are electricity rates cheap enough so that it makes more sense to plug in the car, versus just fill up?
So if it costs $20 worth of electricity to get all that extra 'mileage per gallon', but only $15 worth of gasoline to get the extra distance, wouldn't it make more sense just to fuel?
The point of a hybrid is simply to get more out of the energy we put in. The problem isn't combustion engines; its that the engines are notoriously inefficient as far as how much useable energy you get. The regenerative braking and electric motor from the alternator are ways to capture unused energy from the combustion. Then we up the efficiency.
The eventual goal, regardless of the source of the energy, is to put to use a greater percentage of the energy. So if we use a gallon of gas or a gallon of hydrogen, we want to get as much of the potential energy that exists in the materials as possible. That's what hybrids do. Adding two different fuel sources and just filling them seperately doesn't bring us any closer to that goal.
I don't think that the voting is really an issue... after all, there are other taxes levied by the state on citizens of other states, such as a state sales tax. Many taxes are levied selectively, such as property tax, and taxes on certain goods, excise tax on vehicles (for which you've already paid a sales tax). Voting has nothing to do with it. The state can pose a tax on any sort of economic transaction, such as a sale of a good / service / bond, etc. That includes paying someone a salary, unfourtunately. It can also levy taxes on property already owned, like houses, cars, whatever.
To answer your second question, I can give you an experienced answer. I used to work for a firm where we had two canadian telecommuters. They were paid as contractors and it was their own responsibility to handle taxes. This is the preferred way. International taxes are defined by the citizenship of the person, usually.
Believe it or not, you pay income tax as long as you are a US citizen, regardless of where you earned the money. My Roommate worked in Japan for 3 years. She had to pay Japanese income tax. She also had to pay a US Federal Income Tax, but any income under $80,000 is usually not taxed.
There was an instance a while back, but I can't remember, of a famous rich american renouncing his/her citizenship so he/she didn't have to pay taxes. And even that doesn't work, because congress passed a law that requires you to pay taxes even if you renounce your citizenship for 10 years after renunciation.
FYI, all the complexities above are why companies like PriceWaterhouseCoopers are in business
Welcome to my world, but on a tiny scale for you. I'm a conservative and almost every cool geeky work, whether it be music, movies, art, or anything else, is of the opposite beliefs as mine. Its hard to reconcile.
For instance, every band I go to see usually gives some sort of political speech and I have to wait through it before I hear the music. A lot of movie stars that I enjoy seeing hate my beliefs too. As a matter of fact, its almost always more likely the opposite.
So quit whining, one good sci-fi writer doesn't agree with you in the ballot box. So freakin' what? does that make his art any less good?
So what you're saying is, open source should steal from closed source, instead of selling its software on its own merits?
It would be a big boost to me If i were able to funnell the fortune of, say , Lenardo Dicaprio, into my own bank account.
I actually think this is a dumb statement by Yahoo, and I use firefox daily.
Yahoo should not pledge firefox support, it should pledge STANDARDS support. If all their pages validate, and contain the proper doctypes, then Yahoo becomes stardards supporting, and all good browsers that obey standards will render them correctly. They'll also gracefully degrade per platform/browser.
Say what you want, I've been getting job offers and phonecalls from recruiters looking for contractors to do LAMP projects, specifically in PHP. Most people are attracted to the virtually ZERO cost and crapload of free tools.
For instance, I was actually asked to do an application for a client where scripting language and platform hadn't been decided. the mini-app had to generate images on the fly, include a search-engine style capability, etc. In ASP-land, I'd have to use an external DLL for the images and buy a searching script. In PHP-land, I used the built-in graphics library and phpdig. Although I think ASP.NET has its own built in graphics libraries, its simply much much harder to find free code for it. I know that might be an anathema to some, but why re-write barcode generating scripts or search functionality when a good alternative has already been written?
Panasonic is an awesome display. I have one of the first consumer models ( TH-42PW5 ) and its a great picture. The only thing lacking is a good software interface on the TV. They're also upgradable ( my TV has composite / VGA / component only, but can be upgraded to DVI with an expansion card). It's also built like a tank.
I think you could have a million whistleblowers blowing a million whistles, but that wouldnt' solve the problem.
The reason that this, and some (not all) government projects are often overrun and mismanaged, is because they are simply not held to the same market forces as REAL companies. There's a reason that you, and I, and most slashdotters don't buy a ferrari, even if we could get financing for it. We know it would bankrupt us right quick. Yet governments are charged with a task, but governments can't go bankrupt.
In any business, if you were responsible for securing software, but you didn't draft a contract that would allow you to own the software in this situation, you'd be fired. Or your company would go belly-up for the $10 million delay. Either way, you wouldn't have a job. The system would weed out bad employees and bad businesses. However, there is no such failsafe for the gov't.
Also, governments have projects, but managements of the projects are also most likely hamstrung by politics. A group of elected people whose agendas are more important than the financial success of the project are the ones in charge. At any company, CEOs are usually not elected and usually their own success is directly linked to the project/companys success.
Short half-life of plasma screens is a myth. They last about 15 years before becoming half as bright as they were originally.
I bet the LCD screen's backlight would give out well before 15 years.
Dude, you might want to put semicolons at the end of your lines of code. Perhaps because it doesn't compile, yields a parse error, that your change was ignored?
Hold on, let me channel a liberal.
Iran? They are a country of morally virtuous individuals. Their intertwining of religion and government is their culture, and we must respect culture!
Its okay there, because they're different.
I agree with your sentiments.
Even more strange, is that if P2P sites really don't want people trading pirated content, why don't they monitor their networks? Or, even have some sort of 'feedback' mechanism, where users of the app could flag content as 'copyright infringing', which would send an MD5 hash and link to a file to a moderator for review? I think if P2P networks actively policed/enforced a no-pirated-works policy, then MGM and others might be less inclined to try and destroy them.
The truth is that we are far less concerned about violating copyrights than we are about other forms of loss to people or companies. In civil court, if you have a piece of property and someone injures themselves on it, even if they are trespassing, often you will be found liable. The virtual property of P2P networks have some innate responsibility to ensure that their property isn't being used to break the law.
Who believes for one second that this technology is actually 100% secure?
The people at Visa.
Did you ever fill your belly after a hard's days work of coding with hopes and dreams?
Some people want to create good things, and trade them, instead of giving them away.
I see a lot of IE versus Firefox comments, so I'll just get it out of the way now.
/leaner memory footprint, and renders CSS like a good webbrowser SHOULD, then firefox loses some of it edge.
Firefox renders CSS more consistently than IE. Developers like that.
Firefox uses about 2 mb less than IE while running in windows XP viewing the same slashdot thread.
Firefox allows window tabbing.
things not affected: Popup blocking, since SP2 does it. Plugins, since activeX is dead anyways.
Basically, if IE 7 uses tabs, has a smaller
Why doesn't TiVo become a software company?
Seriously, why doesn't TiVo license its cool interface and technology into the existing cable boxes? I would love it if my Comcast box had TiVo software on it, because TiVo knows how to write good software. Who cares what hardware it runs on?
Also, I think TiVo should get into writing PVR software for PCs for hackers. Although, hackers hardly pay for anything, so maybe that's not such a good idea.
hey, where are the list of linux programs that stop working after an upgrade?
oh, that's right. no one writes software for linux.
PS when Mac upgraded to OSX, and pretty much destroyed backwards compatibility of its programs, no one whined here.
This is the founding priciple of the US: to give the state as little power as possible.
if this were the case, the most strict adherence to the principle would be to disband the army, police, tax collectors, and social programs. That would divest the government of all its power and be most closely related to your 'principle'.
The founding principle of the United States is the respect of an individual's life, liberty, and pusuit of happiness. The conflict here is not liberty, because no one is free to violate the rights of others. The people of the US have a right to live in a safe, sane world. Those who have committed a crime (ie violated a restraining order) have abdicated their rights.
to keep individuals from harming each other, we trust a third party, the government, to form an objective body of legislation and enforcement.
disadvantages of OSS development include absence of complete documentation or technical support.
I don't think this is true. OSS, by its definition, does not preclude lack of docs or tech support. There are lots of projects and commercial or public ventures in OSS that provide great documentation and technical support.
Individual developers or efforts spawn these things. Maybe the OSS community should set limited expectations in these fields and have a standards set. IE to be part of a certified OSS project (in whatever certification one would like to invent for this), a project must provide documentation for developers and users that covers X number of things. Same for tech support, require that levels of support be available and published, and turnaround times be expected, etc.
I think that things like docs and tech support and others are , in the non-OSS world, enforced by competition. (IE, Everyone's doing it, we must do it to be competitive). Maybe the competition paradigm will be replaced by a standards / certification paradigm in the OSS world. (IE, everyone's required to do this to get on sourceforge or something)
the ability of modern society to manage long term projects end-to-end is *dismal*.
That's why Boston, fifteen years later, is still buried in the Big Dig.
Free speech is itself useless in reality
Well, now we know why communist states are totalitarian. Because you just stated that food, shelter, and physical health are more important than the rights of man. I don't care if you could feed the starving babies of the world by enslaving men, (and time has proven that you can't,) it still is not right to do so.
Even if I were to think of non-failed institutions, could I not build hypotheticals? Does Kerala have a declaration of rights of its citizens? Can citizens own property and the results of their labor? Full tummies and proper healthcare do not make a man free. If this were the case our prisons are guarunteed freedom.
When a flood strikes Kerala, does the government have the right to confiscate the crops of the farmers? Does the government allow open criticism of the policies of the government?
The ten amendments of the United States constitution reflect a desire of a fledging nation which asked simply that the right to live one's life, as he or she sees fit, (regardless of his or her 'community'), be codified. That a man's freedom is his right by birth, and his survival his own responsibility. If a man's survival is the responsibility of others, he has de facto enslaved them by his existence. Either a man is free and his life is his own responsibility, or everyone's life is everyone else's responsibility, and no one is free.
Maybe you don't see freedom as a necessary component of the life of a man. Which is fine, you are 'free' to believe that or anything else. I'm also glad I am free to ignore you, and you cannot impose your will upon me via the use of force.
If they do release it in 2005, they have less than 10 months to come up with a Halo-calibre killer app, or they're going to be laughed out of the industry.
There are rumors that the unsatisfying and incomplete feel to Halo 2 was that the real game, the one we were expecting from the demo we saw at the E3 conference, is coming out on the next-gen this year. I guess the idea is that they port the code to run on Xbox2, using enhanced HD-resolutions and such, and finish the cliff-hanger ending.
I take it you've not read anything about communism
That's the idea. Everyone falls in love with communism when they read Marx. Everyone loves to TALK about communism. They write papers, they prostelyze about its virtues, and how wonderful it could be.
But how is it, something so good on paper could always seem to be implemented wrong. Must be the wrong leaders, they say. 'My gang would implement communism better', they write.
Maybe communism on PAPER leaves something out, that communism in PRACTICE always requires. Communism requires totalitarian rule in order to affix prices, force labor, and keep the popular will in check. Western pseudo-capitalist/democratic republics often don't need such rule, since participation in everything but rule of law is optional. In communism, those who choose not to work the assigned work defeat the larger economic machinery, which is highly directed. In the pseudo-capitalist/dr's, those who choose not to work only hurt themselves, they are not assigned any specific task and own the product of their labor.
The disenfranchising factor among communist philosophy is that one cannot be free, in the traditional sense (libre), if one does not own the product of his labor outright, to sell, barter or save. The freedom of speech evaporates if one cannot save pennies to buy a soapbox to stand on. One cannot be free to live where he or she pleases.
I guess a good encapsulation would be, can we expect the bill of rights to make any sense if Americans could not own the product of their labors?
the firewire / controller related info exists mostly at avsforum.com
.17 release probably has this integrated, AKA you don't need the drivers since the code talks to the device directly.
t hreadid=403695p ?id=410_0_1_0_C
Specifically, Motorola makes a cable box used pretty widely, its the DCT 6200. Comcast and Shaw use it. Also, some other boxes like samsung and Directv have firewire out.
Basically, with my comcast 6200, you can hook a six pin to six pin into your x86 pc or Mac, and with the right drivers, view the view stream as a 'Transport Stream'. All analog and digital video appears minus certain HD channels which are 'blocked'. Basically, all analog channels are available because the analog stream is converted into MPEG-2 by the cable box. The digital channels require no conversion, but when passed to the firewire, are blocked by some flag in the transport stream.
I think the
Its actually really hard to implement in windows since talking to devices requires a lot of overhead, you need a specific device driver first. In linux, i'm pretty sure you can just open a raw firewire AV/C handle and write data to the device. I've been trying to re-work some of mythTV's code in windows, with little success.
appropriate links:
PC: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&
MAC:
http://macteens.com/more.ph
email me if you have any questions or pop on over to the AVS forums
If you have the right cable box, you can record on OSX. You can schedule recording using iCal, too. I know its not exactly MythTV based, but its still cool as hell.
/s treaming from cablebox firewire things. Which is cool; one cable for audio, video and administration makes PVR'ing supereasy.
http://macteens.com/more.php?id=410_0_1_0_C
As an unrelated aside, MythTV hackers/ contributors have been making strides, writing code to assist in changing channels and complelely controlling