Speed increases in processors have nothing to do with Moore's Law, which predicts the doubling of the NUMBER of transistors in integrated circuits every two years.
Is it an interesting technology that we'll benefit from? Sure. But the mention of Moore's Law on this topic is just plain careless.
Things like this give HD-DVD an even bigger advantage. What's the initial advantage? Naming.
Consumers absolutely know what a DVD is. They understand what HD is (although some may not be aware that the DVD format isn't already HD). Thus, it's a simple leap to comprehend HD-DVD - it's a DVD that shows prettier pictures. Consumers have no clue what a BluRay is, though marketing dollars will try to change that.
...until they can figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside. No word on whether SBC is having similar problems with their fiber roll-out.
Probably not - most of Florida is barely above sea level, so there's just not as much room to bury things that you don't also want below the water table. It's no surprise they're accidentally chewing up other utilities.
Combine that with the fact that much of Florida is seated on limestone, which is easily eaten away resulting in sinkholes, and I think this is probably a fairly localized problem, and has next to nothing to do with FTTP.
Okay, let's start with the premise that they are doing what most DSL providers are doing, reselling BellSouth DSL. It's worth noting that apparently many companies such as Earthlink and SpeedFactory find this, by itself, to be a profitable business. Earthlink is able to offer this service for $40/month, and they make money.
Now, you have AOL, offering the same service, but tacking on $15 more a month, and they can't find a way to make this a worthwhile component of their business?!? They have a $15 buffer over what competitors can make profitable, AND presumably lower churn since AOL customers seem less educated about their options and thus less likely to switch. They're bleeding dial-up customers like crazy, and now are shuttering the one fragment of their business that had a prayer of attracting customers looking to leave dial-up. They'd make better business decisions flipping coins.
The simple solution is software RAID, and possibly scheduled backups. Maybe not for consumers yet, but certainly for the technically inclined. A 200 GB hard drive can be had for $80. An average 3 MP photo is ~500kb, so such a drive could hold 400,000 digital photos. Mirror this data onto another drive, perhaps back it up occasionally, and you have a fairly foolproof way to keep the data indefinitely.
Inexpensive storage media has been outpacing the size of the media files for a while now. Digital video will be a bump in the road, but that will even out as well. Unarchived data is a recipe for disaster, but archiving has become quite easy and practical using commodity hardware.
Why does widespread use of nuclear power require federalization? If it's economically viable, power companies will build them (securing the facilities would need to be regulated). If not, let's look at other solutions. It's ignorant to think that power companies will just sit on their hands and consume all fossil fuels without preparing an alternative source of power generation.
Yes. But too many people would rather fear-monger the ills of nuclear power than join a rational discussion of how it can be widely implemented in a safe, clean, and effective manner.
Their value-proposition is weak and slipping, yet they won't do a thing about it. It seems that their current business model is pretty much to hope that not too many customers leave, and just stay put paying $25 a month due to inertia. The AOL-TW merger ranks among the all-time dumbest moves in corporate merger history. They had this grand vision of combining a huge ISP with a content company, so that people would flock to AOL for all of the exclusive Time-Warner content they were offering. I guess nobody noticed that audio and video content such as TW has is prohibitively painful to download over dialup!
AOL arrogantly ignored broadband for years. I don't know if they thought it was going away, or that it would never see enough market penetration to affect their business, but this was a fatal misstep. At the time broadband was taking off, most of the baby Bells would have sold their souls to co-brand their DSL service with AOL, but I'm guessing AOL thought they could keep it to themselves and make more money. Now, even more arrogantly, they seem to believe that once someone HAS broadband, they'll pay full AOL prices just to access AOL content over their broadband connection. They're getting pinched on both sides - cheap dialup providers like NetZero and peoplePC are killing them on price, and DSL and cable kill them on performance. And they're too ignorant to realize that very little of their content can't be had in more variety, cheaper, on the internet at large than in their happy little walled garden.
How so many people make so much money to make such stupid decisions is beyond me.
It's not very hard, get 1 DVI cable, connect from the Box to the TV. The cable will tell the TV what mode to go into, the TV switches automatically as the source changes. I really don't see the problem.
The consumer doesn't *have* to know what 480i/p, 720p or 1080i are, the TV does.
Ideally, you'd be correct, but practically, the manufacturers are still getting a handle on this stuff. I have a Philips 60" HD-capable (no tuner) projection TV. It has 2 inputs that appear to be HD capable, both have component inputs, one also supports DVI.
The component-only input only actually supports 480i, with the component cables simply giving you a cleaner video input. Feed it 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and all you'll see is garbage. The other input supports 1080i and 480p, but not 480i and 720p. When I first received my HD Dish Network receiver, it was defaulted to 720p, which once again caused my TV to display garbage. I had to set up a temporary composite video feed to my TV so I could dig through the menus and tell the receiver to output 1080i instead.
As a technophile, this wasn't a huge problem. But to the average consumer, this would be out and out maddening. And just try to explain to them why the TV won't let them properly connect their HDTV receiver and their progressive scan DVD player at the same time. All of this rubbish is temporary - the manufacturers will eventually work it out. But for now, consumers *do* need at least an understanding of the different resolution options, and possibly some outside help to get their HD rig running.
Makes sense.
on
The Long Tail
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Look at the television market. You went from 3 major networks (Fox) to 4 major networks and several minor networks (UPN, WB, PAX) on broadcast, and shows like The Simpsons, Married With Children, 7th Heaven, and Buffy found a place because there wasn't as much pressure to be the huge hit that's needed to maintain ratings at a blockbuster network.
Cable comes along and adds a few more channels, at a lower distribution cost. Some local unaffiliated stations become "superstations" (TBS, USA I think, WGN), and a few niche players develop (most notably MTV, VH1, CMT, and eventually TLC, Discovery, etc). But remember the old cable boxes? They had a cap of about 36 channels, so there was no room for diversification, only replacement of one interest with another.
Cable began to broaden as TV sets came cable-ready, adding broader interests again, but the floodgates have really opened with the advent of digital cable and satellite. Now, the incremental distribution cost of a channel is marginal. Channels number in the hundreds, and more unusual interests can now be explored - think Discovery Health, VH1 Classic, TechTV, Game Show Network, etc. The distributers are still limited, but those limitations continue to fall as cable providers find ways to squeeze more bandwidth out of their lines and satellite adds capacity in the sky through new satellites and better (or just more) compression. The new limits are becoming simply the ability of the channel to remain profitable, and provide their channel at a price the dish and cable services find profitable as well. Content is getting cheaper as media has become near omnipresent. We have channels on local Atlanta cable - Falconsvision and Comcast Sports South. Both capitalize almost entirely on previously recorded and produced content, repackaged. By aggregating existing content, they're able to provide something that distinguishes them from the satellite providers, and is easily a profitable endeavor.
I see this trend stalling for a while as increased capacity is used for distribution of the same content in higher resolution (HD). This pause may be quite drawn out, depending on when the consumer decides that the image is "good enough". (There is little demand, for example, for higher resolution digital audio. I don't think 1080i is the end of the upgrade cycle for video.) Alternately, a new distribution channel (easy to use internet-based channel surfing) may accelerate this growth, but this seems unlikely for quite some time - with ~15 Megabit/s plus bandwidth requirements for compressed HDTV, it will be a while before the average home is able to receive content at a resolution that can compare to current TV technology. More hindering is the lack of a broadcast mechanism for the internet (one source, unlimited listeners within a certain range). A PC with gigabit ethernet would only allow 66 HD concurrent viewers, provided the hardware could keep up. This tech needs to cheaply scale to hundreds of thousands to become practical.
Party list is quite unappealing. The prominence of parties and partisan voting blocks is one of the major flaws in American government. Party list only serves to make the party of greater importance. Parties should be deemphasized, individual candidates should gain prominence. Party list further muddies the waters by further suppressing the abilities of independents to succeed, and by placing access to the ballot in the hands of the parties. If there are no primaries and the party list is selected by committee, it gets even worse.
If you take a look at the democracies of Europe however, people are far more engaged in politics and the turnouts during elections are on average far higher than the US or UK. That's because their voice can be heard, every vote counts...
All three of the proposed methodologies are either overly party-centric or complex.
In both Party List and Mixed Member, the party controls access, at least in part, to the ballot. Many of the more interesting and effective politicians are NOT the candidates that would be sanctioned by the party, and that is often precisely why they appealed to the people. If you want even more boring, partisan, homogeneous politics, I guess these are good ideas.
Both party list approaches fail to address the issue of lesser-evil voting, and perhaps exaggerate it. If there are 21 candidates on an open party list ballot, and I get only one vote, there's a solid chance I will have voted for NONE of my 10 representatives. Worse, suppose a moderate and an extremist are both running on one party's ticket, and I favor the moderate and vote for them. If more people vote for the extremist, my vote would help ensure that the party gets the seat, but the balance of votes for that party makes the extreme candidate get elected. I have no way to indicate that I'd really prefer a moderate from another party over the extremist.
Closed Party List and mixed member both give full control of at least part of slate of candidates to the party, and it may be that the candidate many people would prefer is so far down the party's priority list that they can only be elected if the party sweeps the district.
Choice voting is a reasonable idea, but with an electorate that can't understand how to properly punch holes in a piece of paper, and claims to be initimidated by voting on a computer, how practical is a ballot like the one shown?
We've seen first hand in Georgia the impact of multi-member district races. The result is campaigns and representation that is spread too thin. How do 10 people all effectively represent and discuss matters with a constituency of 300,000 people as a state representative? How much MORE important is money as a factor compared to community involvement and personal contact in a district so large - money is the only way to reach such a large district, and money is part of the problem, not the solution.
Why are these systems so party-centric? It seems to me that in American politics, parties and their battles are part of the problem rather than the answer. Representation should be elected on the merits, proposals and record of an individual, not based on how much favor an individual has curried with their party's state headquarters. Increasing ballot access for independent candidates, encouraging voting systems that allow voters to support these candidates without aiding the candidate the like the least, and finding ways to downplay the need for large sums of money in elections are more certain ways to better elections and representation.
How many times are they going to repackage the same thing and hope that enterprises start begging to throw money at it this time?
Heard the hype once when it was SOAP. Heard the hype again when it was Web Services. Hearing it again as SOA. It's still the same thing - exposing parts of your business using XML over HTTP. Some will say SOA is about a philosophy, about loose coupling. What nitwits were writing tightly coupled web services? The problem there ISN'T the technology, it's the development philosophy, and products don't fix bad design.
People who do whatever you do for a living suck! How's that for a witty, well-informed rejoinder.
Well, if you explained why... They said that lawyers sucked, and named reasons why. Granted it was a blanket statement for all lawyers rather than simply "Copyright/Trademark lawyers suck". I write software for a living. I wouldn't be offended that much if someone said "software developers suck - my operating system is always crashing when I'm doing something productive". Sure they were mad at software developers, but the specifics don't match my area of expertise - a glancing blow at best. Similarly, I doubt many district attorneys were offended by their comment about lawyers.
But what neo-conservatives seem to conveniently forget is that the tax rate isn't a flat percentage. With capital gains tax breaks, estate tax roll backs, offshore investment breaks, etc., a rich person with a good accountant will pay significantly less by percentage than a middle-class person who takes the standard deductions.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not saying I'm a neo-con. If anything, I tend toward libertarian conservatism or traditional conservatism. According to this quiz, I'm a liberal.
How can your assertion regarding tax distribution possibly be true in light of reports such as this? The top 10% of earners earn 40.1% of the money, but pay 66.4% of the income taxes. While the rates aren't in lock-step with the marginal tax rates, they certainly aren't paying "significantly less by percentage".
So before you go throwing labels about (which you accused me of doing with class warfare, although we both know that upper-class and middle-class are non-partisan terms widely used to describe income levels in very general terms)
My issue wasn't with you using these terms, it was with how you used them. You said that "upper class people" received hundreds of times more money back from the Bush tax cuts than "middle class and below". In my given example, this is not true even 100-fold unless you stretch "upper class" to mean the top 1% and "middle class" to be only people at or below that $300 threshhold. You suggest that this comparison is wrong because the wealthy already pay lower taxes through clever accounting, which is true enough, but in these cases, the tax cuts help them even less, since they would have to be paying federal income tax in the first place in order to benefit from a tax cut. You can trot out the sunset of the estate tax, but it's pretty clear that money's already been taxed at least once if not more through the years it was accumulated.
Don't put words in my mouth - I never said that. I am a strong believer in capitalism and a free market economy. However, I'm also a strong believer in a flat tax with no loopholes - which is not where our current system lies.
Your statement implied the tax cuts unfairly benefitted the upper class, and you used raw dollar amounts rather than percentages as your example. If this tax cut was unfair, there's only a few options as to what you believe IS a fair tax cut.
I'm in agreement with you that much of our tax policy is so messy because of the loopholes, favoritism, and demagoguery that surround it. My personal preference is the Fair Tax, since it simplifies the system dramatically and eliminates exceptions. Further, it removes the tax burden from the poor while still providing incentive to save, invest, and otherwise improve your financial situation. It also eliminates the offshore loopholes you describe, since it is not based on accountant-manipulated reported income, but on actual purchases that are much harder to manipulate.
Woodruff had the largest rooms, I believe. Then they built ULC - friggin apartments for mostly the athletes, complete with stoves, fridges, et al. Don't know what happened after the olympics, though I think all of those dorms went to Georgia State/RANT
Wrong. ULC was the first set of apartment style dorms built on campus, and they remain on west campus and still belong to GT. While athletes tended to choose ULC, it was far from "mostly" for them. Some apartment style dorms were built on North Ave for Georgia State. Rumor has it they've realized how dumb it was to build the dorms so far from the GSU campus, and that GT will be buying them (not a good idea if the hearsay about build quality is true).
Two problems here - one is the assumption that wealth is a zero sum game, if only during a drought (recession). An enterprising citizen can start a business and find himself wealthy even during times such as the past few years, though perhaps not as easily.
The second, and more noteworthy problem is the idea that the money held by the wealthy stops flowing. In truth, the only way the wealthy keep money out of the economy is if they bury it in their backyard or hoard it under a pillow. Otherwise, where is that money? It's in a bank account, where the bank can lend that money to other citizens. It's invested in businesses which can create jobs and grow to build the economy. It's used to purchase goods and services, which pays other citizens. It's used to build buildings, which require both labor and supplies.
In short, it's almost impossible for the wealthy to keep their "water" to themselves.
Kerry wasn't willing to support the effort in Iraq unless he could increase taxes in the process. Isn't that lovely?
So, wanting to be able to pay for something is a flaw? The only thing worse than tax and spend is spend and spend.
No, the flaw is only being willing to fund something if you can slay someone else's sacred cow that you dislike in the process. Bush wouldn't approve the legislation not because it attempted to both allocate funds and name the source of those funds. He refused it because it was a blatant attempt to get him to trade one policy initiative for another. A great deal of time and debate went into instituting the tax cuts. To reflexively repeal them as the first source of funding the war and without much discussion is a disservice to the original debate.
He also supports not running up trillion dollar deficits while keeping a tax cut that gives middle-class and below families less than $300 each, while upper-class people get hundreds of times that.
Wow... you don't even disguise the class warfare, do you? "middle-class" vs. "upper-class"
Liberals seem to enjoy putting taxes in absolute dollar terms rather than in... wait for it... CONTEXT. If I pay $30k a year in taxes, and someone else pays $2k a year in taxes, I can give each person a 10% tax cut - and that might sound fair. I can even give them a 20% tax cut, and me a 10% tax cut, and it sounds like I'm doing them a favor. But in your terms... "Oh my GOSH! You gave yourself $3,000 but only gave them $200 or $400!" It doesn't make sense to give every person a tax cut that's equal in raw dollars when the tax rate is a percentage.
Furthermore, let's examine your example, "hundreds of times that". Even 100 times $300 = $30k you are suggesting that ONE individual or family is receiving as a result of the Bush tax cuts (which cut 5% at the top marginal rate). To receive a $30k cut, that would mean they would still need to be paying $210k in taxes annually, which corresponds to an annual income of AT LEAST $650k.
So your example applies to roughly the top 1%. That's far from just "upper-class", that's a tiny cross-section of our country. If you had your way, every tax increase would put a higher percent increase on "the rich" and every tax cut would give a bigger (or equal) raw dollar amount to the "less fortunate". Of course taken to the limit, this leads to $0 tax or even cash back for the lower class, shifting the full tax burden onto the upper class, but I'm not surprised that income redistribution is the goal of the American left.
Now, let's put that quote back in context... Originally, a bill was proposed seeking $87 billion in funding to support the war in Iraq, to be paid for by repealing the Bush tax cut. Kerry voted for it. Bush refused to sign that bill, and instead had a Republican senator propose an identical $87 billion dollar bill for funding to be paid for by increasing the deficit. John Kerry, among others, believe that you don't just run up your credit cards willy-nilly without figuring some way to pay them, and voted against that bill.
Spin, spin, spin. Your filling in the context on the vote is interesting, and I hadn't heard it before. Counterspin - John Kerry wasn't willing to support the effort in Iraq unless he could increase taxes in the process. Isn't that lovely?
The problem is that whoever introduced the first bill that Kerry voted for decided to advance an agenda (rollback of the Bush tax cuts) while addressing a need (funding the war effort in Iraq). Ideally, on average, the U.S. would balance its budget, with minor variations in each direction. This goal, however doesn't mean that each policy initiative should be directly tied to its source of funding, unless there is a direct relationship (such as increasing Medicare taxes to cover higher Medicare premiums). Iraq and tax cuts are not directly related, and the first bill was an obvious swipe to wipe out one Bush policy initiative to fund another.
At this stage, we were committed to the war, and needed to fund it - I don't think many lawmakers disagreed on that. After the $87 billion passed, lawmakers should have then started a separate discussion on how to even out the budget - whether through cutting other budgets, increasing income, etc. If increasing taxes is a good solution to this problem, it should be passed SEPARATELY.
The exact quote was an unfortunate gaffe, but there is still room for criticism even taken in context.
Give me a break. Any excuse of this technology being used to identify terrorists as they enter is moron bait. How much time did terrorists spend casing airport security before they even thought about executing the 9/11 attack? How much time was put into the research they recently uncovered into the structure of those financial centers?
Do they REALLY think that it won't take terrorists more than about an hour to figure out that if they don't want to be identified, then they won't try and get a locker? Further, even if they took a fingerprint of every single visitor to the statute, do they really think the terrorists can't find some young zealot who isn't in the terrorist database to do their dirty work?
Much like airport security, this is an example of the innocent masses giving up their rights for a false sense of security. Anyone with dastardly intentions could evade these measures after 30 minutes of observation.
Without the privacy issues, it isn't such a bad idea.
So the NFL's only voiced concern is about blacked-out games being shuttled around the country? Boo hoo. I love the NFL - of the major US professional sports, I think they do the best job of marketing their product and projecting a positive image. Baseball has marginalized itself with nasty, public labor disputes and a season that makes it impossible to care about individual games (each game is 0.6% of the season), as well as an irrational attachment to "history", common-sense be damned. The NBA has had minor labor disputes, but mostly I think the increasingly urban image of the league makes it hard for much of the US to relate to it. Hockey has always been 4th place, and the impending ugly labor dispute is certain to crush any gains they had made.
That being said, there are MANY bigger fish for the NFL to fry, many of which would short-circuit this problem.
1) Sell secondary TV rights. There are how many hundred random channels on extended cable/satellite now? Allow those channels to bid on secondary and even tertiary rights to show games. This would take some money off the top of the broadcast contracts, but it would almost certainly be at worst break-even on a cash basis, AND improve interest in the league.
2) End local blackout rules. Most people simply won't be motivated to buy a ticket to a game because it's not on TV. They're either going, or they're not. Period. Furthermore, if let people build interest in your team by watching them on TV, they might WANT to buy a ticket later in the season. The fact that I can walk into a dozen sports bars within a 5 mile radius and watch the blacked out game further renders this policy ridiculous.
3) End NFL Sunday Ticket exclusivity. I can't understand in the slightest how limiting the audience for an easily replicated product to 12% of the cable/TV market is at all intelligent. Once again, while DirecTV may pay a premium for the exclusivity, it seems evident that the contracts with EchoStar and all of the cable operators would more than make up for this, not to mention that the lower costs would lead to competitive, lower rates and thus increased subscriptions ($250 is prohibitive for many, but $100 isn't).
4) End all other stupid TV restrictions. Although it seems about impossible to find the full terms of their restrictions, I know this - in any given week, only one network may show a double-header. The other network can only show one game, no matter how interesting the matchup might be. This is just senseless. Further, there seem to be other restrictions about not showing other games at the same time as a local team, and not showing a game before or after a local home game. These Byzantine restrictions hurt the sport, and I find it doubtful that there's any significant, demonstrable financial windfall that results.
Why companies cling tirelessly to old, closed methods of doing business is beyond me. They're sitting there trying to legislate away the symptoms instead of looking at the source. The "problem" is that people WANT to watch their product! Sports are naturally a rare sort of television - the perceived value of seeing it as it happens tends to override the desire so skip commericals or watch it for free later.
People want to watch the games they want, preferably live. Give them this, and the TiVo/sharing concern becomes a non-issue.
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...that their bid to get exclusive with the NBA failed. At least there's a shred of sanity left in the sports industry, and still hope for a few companies other than EA to survive.
Also, for comparison, Vonage Canada is offering 500 minutes to North America for $19.99 and $34.99 unlimited in-province plus 500 long distance minutes. For $5 more, I think a lot of people will be claiming the extra 440 minutes of long distance. Oh, and at $45, Vonage CA is FULL unlimited, not capped at 100 minutes long distance.
Is it an interesting technology that we'll benefit from? Sure. But the mention of Moore's Law on this topic is just plain careless.
Things like this give HD-DVD an even bigger advantage. What's the initial advantage? Naming.
Consumers absolutely know what a DVD is. They understand what HD is (although some may not be aware that the DVD format isn't already HD). Thus, it's a simple leap to comprehend HD-DVD - it's a DVD that shows prettier pictures. Consumers have no clue what a BluRay is, though marketing dollars will try to change that.
Probably not - most of Florida is barely above sea level, so there's just not as much room to bury things that you don't also want below the water table. It's no surprise they're accidentally chewing up other utilities.
Combine that with the fact that much of Florida is seated on limestone, which is easily eaten away resulting in sinkholes, and I think this is probably a fairly localized problem, and has next to nothing to do with FTTP.
Now, you have AOL, offering the same service, but tacking on $15 more a month, and they can't find a way to make this a worthwhile component of their business?!? They have a $15 buffer over what competitors can make profitable, AND presumably lower churn since AOL customers seem less educated about their options and thus less likely to switch. They're bleeding dial-up customers like crazy, and now are shuttering the one fragment of their business that had a prayer of attracting customers looking to leave dial-up. They'd make better business decisions flipping coins.
Wait, so this article about WiMax, *microwave* frequency transmission, was written by John *Cook*. You can't make this stuff up, folks.
The simple solution is software RAID, and possibly scheduled backups. Maybe not for consumers yet, but certainly for the technically inclined. A 200 GB hard drive can be had for $80. An average 3 MP photo is ~500kb, so such a drive could hold 400,000 digital photos. Mirror this data onto another drive, perhaps back it up occasionally, and you have a fairly foolproof way to keep the data indefinitely.
Inexpensive storage media has been outpacing the size of the media files for a while now. Digital video will be a bump in the road, but that will even out as well. Unarchived data is a recipe for disaster, but archiving has become quite easy and practical using commodity hardware.
Why does widespread use of nuclear power require federalization? If it's economically viable, power companies will build them (securing the facilities would need to be regulated). If not, let's look at other solutions. It's ignorant to think that power companies will just sit on their hands and consume all fossil fuels without preparing an alternative source of power generation.
Yes. But too many people would rather fear-monger the ills of nuclear power than join a rational discussion of how it can be widely implemented in a safe, clean, and effective manner.
AOL arrogantly ignored broadband for years. I don't know if they thought it was going away, or that it would never see enough market penetration to affect their business, but this was a fatal misstep. At the time broadband was taking off, most of the baby Bells would have sold their souls to co-brand their DSL service with AOL, but I'm guessing AOL thought they could keep it to themselves and make more money. Now, even more arrogantly, they seem to believe that once someone HAS broadband, they'll pay full AOL prices just to access AOL content over their broadband connection. They're getting pinched on both sides - cheap dialup providers like NetZero and peoplePC are killing them on price, and DSL and cable kill them on performance. And they're too ignorant to realize that very little of their content can't be had in more variety, cheaper, on the internet at large than in their happy little walled garden.
How so many people make so much money to make such stupid decisions is beyond me.
Ideally, you'd be correct, but practically, the manufacturers are still getting a handle on this stuff. I have a Philips 60" HD-capable (no tuner) projection TV. It has 2 inputs that appear to be HD capable, both have component inputs, one also supports DVI.
The component-only input only actually supports 480i, with the component cables simply giving you a cleaner video input. Feed it 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and all you'll see is garbage. The other input supports 1080i and 480p, but not 480i and 720p. When I first received my HD Dish Network receiver, it was defaulted to 720p, which once again caused my TV to display garbage. I had to set up a temporary composite video feed to my TV so I could dig through the menus and tell the receiver to output 1080i instead.
As a technophile, this wasn't a huge problem. But to the average consumer, this would be out and out maddening. And just try to explain to them why the TV won't let them properly connect their HDTV receiver and their progressive scan DVD player at the same time. All of this rubbish is temporary - the manufacturers will eventually work it out. But for now, consumers *do* need at least an understanding of the different resolution options, and possibly some outside help to get their HD rig running.
Cable comes along and adds a few more channels, at a lower distribution cost. Some local unaffiliated stations become "superstations" (TBS, USA I think, WGN), and a few niche players develop (most notably MTV, VH1, CMT, and eventually TLC, Discovery, etc). But remember the old cable boxes? They had a cap of about 36 channels, so there was no room for diversification, only replacement of one interest with another.
Cable began to broaden as TV sets came cable-ready, adding broader interests again, but the floodgates have really opened with the advent of digital cable and satellite. Now, the incremental distribution cost of a channel is marginal. Channels number in the hundreds, and more unusual interests can now be explored - think Discovery Health, VH1 Classic, TechTV, Game Show Network, etc. The distributers are still limited, but those limitations continue to fall as cable providers find ways to squeeze more bandwidth out of their lines and satellite adds capacity in the sky through new satellites and better (or just more) compression. The new limits are becoming simply the ability of the channel to remain profitable, and provide their channel at a price the dish and cable services find profitable as well. Content is getting cheaper as media has become near omnipresent. We have channels on local Atlanta cable - Falconsvision and Comcast Sports South. Both capitalize almost entirely on previously recorded and produced content, repackaged. By aggregating existing content, they're able to provide something that distinguishes them from the satellite providers, and is easily a profitable endeavor.
I see this trend stalling for a while as increased capacity is used for distribution of the same content in higher resolution (HD). This pause may be quite drawn out, depending on when the consumer decides that the image is "good enough". (There is little demand, for example, for higher resolution digital audio. I don't think 1080i is the end of the upgrade cycle for video.) Alternately, a new distribution channel (easy to use internet-based channel surfing) may accelerate this growth, but this seems unlikely for quite some time - with ~15 Megabit/s plus bandwidth requirements for compressed HDTV, it will be a while before the average home is able to receive content at a resolution that can compare to current TV technology. More hindering is the lack of a broadcast mechanism for the internet (one source, unlimited listeners within a certain range). A PC with gigabit ethernet would only allow 66 HD concurrent viewers, provided the hardware could keep up. This tech needs to cheaply scale to hundreds of thousands to become practical.
Party list is quite unappealing. The prominence of parties and partisan voting blocks is one of the major flaws in American government. Party list only serves to make the party of greater importance. Parties should be deemphasized, individual candidates should gain prominence. Party list further muddies the waters by further suppressing the abilities of independents to succeed, and by placing access to the ballot in the hands of the parties. If there are no primaries and the party list is selected by committee, it gets even worse.
All three of the proposed methodologies are either overly party-centric or complex.
In both Party List and Mixed Member, the party controls access, at least in part, to the ballot. Many of the more interesting and effective politicians are NOT the candidates that would be sanctioned by the party, and that is often precisely why they appealed to the people. If you want even more boring, partisan, homogeneous politics, I guess these are good ideas.
Both party list approaches fail to address the issue of lesser-evil voting, and perhaps exaggerate it. If there are 21 candidates on an open party list ballot, and I get only one vote, there's a solid chance I will have voted for NONE of my 10 representatives. Worse, suppose a moderate and an extremist are both running on one party's ticket, and I favor the moderate and vote for them. If more people vote for the extremist, my vote would help ensure that the party gets the seat, but the balance of votes for that party makes the extreme candidate get elected. I have no way to indicate that I'd really prefer a moderate from another party over the extremist.
Closed Party List and mixed member both give full control of at least part of slate of candidates to the party, and it may be that the candidate many people would prefer is so far down the party's priority list that they can only be elected if the party sweeps the district.
Choice voting is a reasonable idea, but with an electorate that can't understand how to properly punch holes in a piece of paper, and claims to be initimidated by voting on a computer, how practical is a ballot like the one shown?
We've seen first hand in Georgia the impact of multi-member district races. The result is campaigns and representation that is spread too thin. How do 10 people all effectively represent and discuss matters with a constituency of 300,000 people as a state representative? How much MORE important is money as a factor compared to community involvement and personal contact in a district so large - money is the only way to reach such a large district, and money is part of the problem, not the solution.
Why are these systems so party-centric? It seems to me that in American politics, parties and their battles are part of the problem rather than the answer. Representation should be elected on the merits, proposals and record of an individual, not based on how much favor an individual has curried with their party's state headquarters. Increasing ballot access for independent candidates, encouraging voting systems that allow voters to support these candidates without aiding the candidate the like the least, and finding ways to downplay the need for large sums of money in elections are more certain ways to better elections and representation.
Heard the hype once when it was SOAP. Heard the hype again when it was Web Services. Hearing it again as SOA. It's still the same thing - exposing parts of your business using XML over HTTP. Some will say SOA is about a philosophy, about loose coupling. What nitwits were writing tightly coupled web services? The problem there ISN'T the technology, it's the development philosophy, and products don't fix bad design.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not saying I'm a neo-con. If anything, I tend toward libertarian conservatism or traditional conservatism. According to this quiz, I'm a liberal.
How can your assertion regarding tax distribution possibly be true in light of reports such as this? The top 10% of earners earn 40.1% of the money, but pay 66.4% of the income taxes. While the rates aren't in lock-step with the marginal tax rates, they certainly aren't paying "significantly less by percentage".
My issue wasn't with you using these terms, it was with how you used them. You said that "upper class people" received hundreds of times more money back from the Bush tax cuts than "middle class and below". In my given example, this is not true even 100-fold unless you stretch "upper class" to mean the top 1% and "middle class" to be only people at or below that $300 threshhold. You suggest that this comparison is wrong because the wealthy already pay lower taxes through clever accounting, which is true enough, but in these cases, the tax cuts help them even less, since they would have to be paying federal income tax in the first place in order to benefit from a tax cut. You can trot out the sunset of the estate tax, but it's pretty clear that money's already been taxed at least once if not more through the years it was accumulated.Your statement implied the tax cuts unfairly benefitted the upper class, and you used raw dollar amounts rather than percentages as your example. If this tax cut was unfair, there's only a few options as to what you believe IS a fair tax cut.
I'm in agreement with you that much of our tax policy is so messy because of the loopholes, favoritism, and demagoguery that surround it. My personal preference is the Fair Tax, since it simplifies the system dramatically and eliminates exceptions. Further, it removes the tax burden from the poor while still providing incentive to save, invest, and otherwise improve your financial situation. It also eliminates the offshore loopholes you describe, since it is not based on accountant-manipulated reported income, but on actual purchases that are much harder to manipulate.
Wrong. ULC was the first set of apartment style dorms built on campus, and they remain on west campus and still belong to GT. While athletes tended to choose ULC, it was far from "mostly" for them. Some apartment style dorms were built on North Ave for Georgia State. Rumor has it they've realized how dumb it was to build the dorms so far from the GSU campus, and that GT will be buying them (not a good idea if the hearsay about build quality is true).
In addition to ULC, Tech built several additional apartment-style dorms in preparation for the Olympics - 6th St, 8th St, Hemphill, and Center Street dorms - some of which have multiple buildings. While not everyone can get a slot in these dorms, it's far from a privilege for the athletes or elite. A recent AJC article mentioned that these dorms at GT have set a new standard, that other schools visit Tech to see how it's done.
The second, and more noteworthy problem is the idea that the money held by the wealthy stops flowing. In truth, the only way the wealthy keep money out of the economy is if they bury it in their backyard or hoard it under a pillow. Otherwise, where is that money? It's in a bank account, where the bank can lend that money to other citizens. It's invested in businesses which can create jobs and grow to build the economy. It's used to purchase goods and services, which pays other citizens. It's used to build buildings, which require both labor and supplies.
In short, it's almost impossible for the wealthy to keep their "water" to themselves.
No, the flaw is only being willing to fund something if you can slay someone else's sacred cow that you dislike in the process. Bush wouldn't approve the legislation not because it attempted to both allocate funds and name the source of those funds. He refused it because it was a blatant attempt to get him to trade one policy initiative for another. A great deal of time and debate went into instituting the tax cuts. To reflexively repeal them as the first source of funding the war and without much discussion is a disservice to the original debate.
Cut and spend is a viable option as well.
Wow... you don't even disguise the class warfare, do you? "middle-class" vs. "upper-class"
Liberals seem to enjoy putting taxes in absolute dollar terms rather than in... wait for it... CONTEXT. If I pay $30k a year in taxes, and someone else pays $2k a year in taxes, I can give each person a 10% tax cut - and that might sound fair. I can even give them a 20% tax cut, and me a 10% tax cut, and it sounds like I'm doing them a favor. But in your terms... "Oh my GOSH! You gave yourself $3,000 but only gave them $200 or $400!" It doesn't make sense to give every person a tax cut that's equal in raw dollars when the tax rate is a percentage.
Furthermore, let's examine your example, "hundreds of times that". Even 100 times $300 = $30k you are suggesting that ONE individual or family is receiving as a result of the Bush tax cuts (which cut 5% at the top marginal rate). To receive a $30k cut, that would mean they would still need to be paying $210k in taxes annually, which corresponds to an annual income of AT LEAST $650k.
So your example applies to roughly the top 1%. That's far from just "upper-class", that's a tiny cross-section of our country. If you had your way, every tax increase would put a higher percent increase on "the rich" and every tax cut would give a bigger (or equal) raw dollar amount to the "less fortunate". Of course taken to the limit, this leads to $0 tax or even cash back for the lower class, shifting the full tax burden onto the upper class, but I'm not surprised that income redistribution is the goal of the American left.
The problem is that whoever introduced the first bill that Kerry voted for decided to advance an agenda (rollback of the Bush tax cuts) while addressing a need (funding the war effort in Iraq). Ideally, on average, the U.S. would balance its budget, with minor variations in each direction. This goal, however doesn't mean that each policy initiative should be directly tied to its source of funding, unless there is a direct relationship (such as increasing Medicare taxes to cover higher Medicare premiums). Iraq and tax cuts are not directly related, and the first bill was an obvious swipe to wipe out one Bush policy initiative to fund another.
At this stage, we were committed to the war, and needed to fund it - I don't think many lawmakers disagreed on that. After the $87 billion passed, lawmakers should have then started a separate discussion on how to even out the budget - whether through cutting other budgets, increasing income, etc. If increasing taxes is a good solution to this problem, it should be passed SEPARATELY.
The exact quote was an unfortunate gaffe, but there is still room for criticism even taken in context.
Do they REALLY think that it won't take terrorists more than about an hour to figure out that if they don't want to be identified, then they won't try and get a locker? Further, even if they took a fingerprint of every single visitor to the statute, do they really think the terrorists can't find some young zealot who isn't in the terrorist database to do their dirty work?
Much like airport security, this is an example of the innocent masses giving up their rights for a false sense of security. Anyone with dastardly intentions could evade these measures after 30 minutes of observation.
Without the privacy issues, it isn't such a bad idea.
That being said, there are MANY bigger fish for the NFL to fry, many of which would short-circuit this problem.
1) Sell secondary TV rights. There are how many hundred random channels on extended cable/satellite now? Allow those channels to bid on secondary and even tertiary rights to show games. This would take some money off the top of the broadcast contracts, but it would almost certainly be at worst break-even on a cash basis, AND improve interest in the league.
2) End local blackout rules. Most people simply won't be motivated to buy a ticket to a game because it's not on TV. They're either going, or they're not. Period. Furthermore, if let people build interest in your team by watching them on TV, they might WANT to buy a ticket later in the season. The fact that I can walk into a dozen sports bars within a 5 mile radius and watch the blacked out game further renders this policy ridiculous.
3) End NFL Sunday Ticket exclusivity. I can't understand in the slightest how limiting the audience for an easily replicated product to 12% of the cable/TV market is at all intelligent. Once again, while DirecTV may pay a premium for the exclusivity, it seems evident that the contracts with EchoStar and all of the cable operators would more than make up for this, not to mention that the lower costs would lead to competitive, lower rates and thus increased subscriptions ($250 is prohibitive for many, but $100 isn't).
4) End all other stupid TV restrictions. Although it seems about impossible to find the full terms of their restrictions, I know this - in any given week, only one network may show a double-header. The other network can only show one game, no matter how interesting the matchup might be. This is just senseless. Further, there seem to be other restrictions about not showing other games at the same time as a local team, and not showing a game before or after a local home game. These Byzantine restrictions hurt the sport, and I find it doubtful that there's any significant, demonstrable financial windfall that results.
Why companies cling tirelessly to old, closed methods of doing business is beyond me. They're sitting there trying to legislate away the symptoms instead of looking at the source. The "problem" is that people WANT to watch their product! Sports are naturally a rare sort of television - the perceived value of seeing it as it happens tends to override the desire so skip commericals or watch it for free later.
People want to watch the games they want, preferably live. Give them this, and the TiVo/sharing concern becomes a non-issue.