> If this was an instance of the violation of the law of thermodynamics, it wouldn't > have been introduced to the world as a new car. It would have been heralded as the > wondrous piece of science it would have been. It would turn science on its ear and > literally change everything we think we know. You'll forgive my incredible scepticism > when someone comes around with a scheme to break that law in the form of a gadget > they are trying to hawk.
Mod this man up. If I was a Japanese guy who discovered some "free-energy-from-water" process, I wouldn't be using it to merely power a car. Japan doesn't have any native oil production at all. Hint, they started the Asian portion of World War II because the USA embargoed oil exports to Japan due to atrocities like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre "The Rape of Nanking". Due to the embargo, Japan was looking at totally running out of oil by the end of 1942. Civilians would starve, as would the occupation army in China, and their vaunted military machine would grind to a halt and collapse. Japan had a choice between pulling out of China and grovelling before the USA, or else militarily capture oil-producing territories. Guess which they chose?
Japan would dearly love to have "free-energy-from-water". Due to their annual oil bills, they would greatly benefit from something like this device. But rather than merely putting it in cars, they'd scale them up into large electrical powerplants that would run their cities. The Japanese desparation accounts for the fact that Japan is the last country where serious research into cold fusion is going on http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm. Cold fusion, BTW, is the only conceivable form of free-energy-from-water that doesn't break the known laws of physics, but implementation is the problem. The fact that the company is hawking a consumer product to the man on the street, rather than a big power plant to government, is what pegs my bogo-meter.
> "A new survey shows that data retention laws indeed do influence the > behavior of citizens (at least in Germany). 11% had already abstained from > using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions and 52% > would not > use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.
> Prosecutors reportedly have a series of e-mails and wiretapped phone conversations of Spitzer.
> In a interview two years ago, Spitzer, then-attorney general, told ABC News > he had some advice for people who break the law. "Never talk when you can > nod, and never nod when you can wink, and never write an e-mail because it's > death. You're giving prosecutors all the evidence we need," he said.
What he did miss was not to shuffle money around in a manner that raises the suspicion of the authorities. It was his financial maneuvering to get money to the prostitute that was his downfall.
> The thing though with Red Hat (and Fedora) are losing distro > marketshare to Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros.
Redhat doesn't need "distro marketshare". They need *PAYING CUSTOMERS*. I've been using linux since early 2000. I started off with a remaindered copy of Redhat linux 5 point something that came on 2 CDs in a manual at a bookstore. Redhat 7.3 was *THE BEST* end-user distro of its time. But Redhat didn't get too much money off of it. They dumped end-user distro in favour of Fedora, which is a testbed for their enterprise product. Redhat makes its profits off of RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux). And they're doing quite well, I might add.
As someone who got started in linux on Redhat's distro, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for them. Yes, they may have moved on to "big business", but... - they did a helluva lot for linux in the early years - they didn't destroy their legacy. No SCOX imitation.
> The worst thing that could happen from this is that your download area > gets littered with superfluous files and you can fix that in seconds!
Howsabout a malicious website drops ***ONE*** malicious executable on your desktop? Let's say the malicious executable has a faked-up IE7 icon. Next Monday, the user starts up Windows, wants to browse "teh Interweb", clicks on the familiar IE7 icon on the desktop, and... oops. A well-coded malicious executable could even spawn the real IE7, to try to cover its tracks.
Windows has different security conventions than OSX. Apple needs to hire real Windows developers, rather than merely re-compiling Safari to a different target OS.
I live in Canada, where Bell throttles their retail customers, and their resellers' customers, you insensitive clod. I don't do P2P. Besides I can *LITERALLY* download faster over dialup at 45 to 50 kbits, than over throttled P2P (30 kbits).
As a Gentoo user, I don't have to deal with "major releases". I installed Gentoo on my current machine 2 years ago. With Gentoo's slow, rolling upgrade, my operating system is identical to that of somebody who did a new install yesterday. The biggest updates for me are GNOME and KDE and gcc and Xorg. While I use Blackbox WM, there are quite a few apps that use the base libs of GNOME and KDE.
Many universities and other publically-spirited sites mirror several distros. Different release cycles spread out the load on these servers. Having multiple distros being updated at once will result in more people updating at the same time. The result would be servers sitting almost idle for periods of time, with short periods of "server not available".
This is not a joke. I remember, years ago, when Redhat was *THE* major end-user distro. When a new version came out, regular users would have to wait a week or so before they could download it.
> Our numbers say different, and that's the only number that matters to us.
> According to our stats, 94.1% of our users are on broadband. The > average for sites that use omniture for site tracking is 91.1%
You've got cause+effect ass-backwards. Design a website that is painful to use on dialup, and pretty soon you've got nothing but broadband users. Much like those idiots that make IE-specific webpages, and deliberately block everything else, and then claim that all their users run IE.
When the UHF TV band was first assigned in the late 1940's, it had 70 channels from channel 14 (470..476 mhz) through channel 83 (884..890 mhz). The original Hoverman desing worked OK for channels 14..54, but gain fell off sharply above channel 54, and it was useless for the top of the UHF band.
In the late 1980's channels 70..83 (806..890 mhz) were removed from UHF allocation, and auctioned off as "the 800 mhz band" to cellphone providers, etc. The Hoverman's problems were somewhat less severe after that.
As of the North American NTSC TV shutdown (2009/02/17 in USA and 2011/08/31 in Canada), the UHF band will lose channels 52..69 (698..806 mhz). This is where the bandwidth for the current "700 mhz band auction" will come from. The Hoverman can easily deal with a reduced UHF band encompassing channels 14..51. The tweaked "Gray-Hoverman" antenna also benefits from the use of modelling software that simply did not exist in 1959 when the first Hoverman patent was granted.
> Or to show you how foreign countries don't use the same nomenclature, there's the > National Democratic Party of Germany which is "viewed by its opponents and the > mainstream media as a de facto neo-Nazi organization".
Then there was the National Socialist German Workers Party. No xenophobes, they even accepted a former Austrian corporal as their leader. And the rest was history.
> To an extent I agree with you that had the US joined sooner, the war may have ended > sooner, yet I doubt that the US would have had the same national will without Pearl > Harbor to devote so much of the economy to fighting the war.
Fortunately for the free world, the stupid Austrian Corporal chose to declare war on the USA right after Pearl Harbor. If Hitler hadn't done that, I doubt the USA would've declared war on him. Instead, they would've concentrated on Japan
- the USA wouldn't have supplied a large chunk of logistics for the Russians (trucks and spare parts, etc). Russia would've suffered a lot more, and the Wermacht a lot less.
- the UK would've been knocked out of the war effort. An invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion) would still be suicidal. But merely getting the British to stop pounding the shit out of German factories would've been very helpful for the Nazi war effort.
- the USA doesn't split its effort between Europe and Asia. Instead, they throw their entire effort at Japan. Net result, they take Japan in late 1944 or ealy 1945 "the hard way", because the Manhattan project isn't quite ready. We're talking *MAJOR* US casualties, and even worse for Japanese civilians, fighting to the bitter end. Atrocities on both sides.
- by mid-1945, fighting is deadlocked in central Russia with huge casualties on both sides. With Hitler in control of Roumanian and middle east oilfields, his Messerschmitt ME 262 fleet would be starting to make itself felt in Russia. They would make mincemeat out of Russian piston-engined fighter aircraft, but military casualties would be hurting Germany by now. I could see an uneasy peace being made with a rump-Russia that has Novosibirsk at its western boundary.
- given the absolute ugliness of the conventional land war in Japan, the US public would revolt if the US tried to intervene in Europe.
- by January 1946...
- the USA controls what's left of Japan
- Hitler controls mainland Europe, and the oil-rich middle east
- rump-Russia controls Novosibirsk and eastward
Russia and Germany would have sustained huge casualties. The US would've lost less, but the public revulsion would still be there. The British Empire would lose all of African colonies and the middle east. Meanwhile, I could see an arms race with jet planes, and possibly atomic bombs.
1) MS salesguy... duhhh, nice company youse got here Mr. CEO, wit all dem computers running XP. Youse wouldn't want something terrible to happen, like the BSA discovers that they're all running Vista and sues the daylights outta youse. For only a million dollars in protection... oops...errr... I mean Vista site licence, we can see to it that nothing terrible happens to your company.
2) CEO... Get the F*** out of here. I'm *NEVER* switching from XP to Vista.
3) MS "upgrade worm" comes along and "upgrades" systems from XP to Vista
4) Federal marshalls raid the company after an anonymous tip
5) Every PC at the company is found to be running Vista
From some IPV6 tutorials, I understand that the RIR is identified in the header. Does this mean that a simple iptables rule could allow me to block all of AFRINIC or LACNIC or APNIC? If so, bring it on.
> Given a standard end-user allocation of a/64 network, you will have 1.8*10^19 > addresses to play with. It is unlikely that you would need to fake more with NAT.
That is really F***ing stupid...
- back in the old days, nobody imagined how much demand there would be, so they handed out Class A (16 million addresses) at a time. Then they discovered that addresses weren't really infinite, so they ended up having to invent CIDR and NAT to conserve addresses.
- mark my words; down the road, thanks to these idiotic IPV6 allocations, there will have to be a CIDR-like hack for IPV6 to reclaim some of the throwaway bits. WTF do individual users need *THAT* much space? A/104 would give every user the equivalant of a current Class A to play with. Heck, a/120 allows for 256 machines at my residence. I don't have that many electrical plugs, and the electrical bills would bankrupt me.
>> Nor does the rest of the Internet need to know about IBM's internal network topology.
> I'm really not sure I see the correlation, there. What, exactly, does IBM need to hide?
Please tell me you're not in the network security field. The less information the bad guys have about your internal network, the better. I.e. it's kinda hard to scan your system for vulnerable software/OS when the attackers only see one generic address that doesn't respond to external connections, other than port-forwarded connections that the company wants to respond to.
WTF is it with you NAT-zis anyways? If NAT creates problems for me, I'll get rid of it at home. Till then, I'll keep it cause it's useful. I happen to have a 2nd PC that I keep as a "hot backup". Every couple of weeks I turn it on, and update it (Gentoo linux). Damned if I'm going to pay extra for a 2nd IP address for that machine.
It does help to keep the bad guys guessing about your layout. Do you have 1 desktop, or a 100 servers? With NAT, they don't know. Makes a difference when deciding where to attack.
Speaking of cellphones, any blackout lasting at least 3 to 6 hours will take cell off the air. Not to mention that when a blackout hits, everybody downtown will whip out their cellphones, and *TRY* to call someone, effectively gridlocking cellphones. Cell sucks when it comes to reliability.
Running fibre in a subdivision where you have a house every 100 or 200 feet is one thing. Subsidizing fibre to every farmhouse, log cabin, and cottage would bankrupt the USA or Canada. Please don't compare the wide open spaces of North America with densely populated cites, or the even more densely populated cities of Europe and Asia.
Broadcasters are avoiding channels 2 through 6 when given a choice which channels to select after the digital switchover. There will be almost no TV stations in that band in the USA after Feb 17, 2009 (and in Canada after Aug 31, 2011). That's 30 mhz of usuable frequency space (not counting the 4-mhz gap between channels 4 and 5).
While these frequencies may not be so great for a 6mhz wide TV channel, they're perfectly usable for digital internet. And you're guaranteed no interference with TV, because there won't be any TV stations in that spectrum.
You asked your grandparents why there isn't a channel 1... your grandchildren will be asking you why there aren't any channels 1-through-6.
I'm 56, and I average under 5 gigabytes a month on my ADSL account. I subscribe to a legal internet radio service, which compensates artists, and actually plays real music. I do not buy or listen to, let alone download/upload the latest potty-mouthed rapper or Britney-clone-bimbo recorded with today's dynamically-over-compressed crapppy studio effects. Unauthorized downloading of today's crap is a crime against musical taste, and should be outlawed for that reason alone.
Secondly, this sets a very ugly precedent, if allowed to pass. Musical rights are like construction unions, there's a gazillion of them. The Songwriters and Recording artists are only two of them. There are also performance rights and reproduction rights and who knows what else. By the time they all get their pound of flesh, my $29.95 ADSL account will have a $15/month tax on it.
But wait, it gets better, or should I say, worse. I'm sure the movie industry will want its $15/month, as will the TV industry. and e-book publishers, and software publishers. So now we're looking at a $75/month tax on my $29.95/month ADSL account.
Regardless of whether it's malice, or incompetence, or ignorance, it has the exact same effect on other customers of the same ISP. Quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, etc.
> about 10 digital channels can be carried in one 6 mhz analog channel path
No bleeping way, unless most of them are shopping channels showing slideshows of static images of products for sale.
> about 5 hd channels per 6 mhz spread
I call bullshit. Even Direct-TV with their "HD Lite" can't get that much compression.
5 SDTV channels can be accomadated in 6 mhz. Beyond that, they start losing picture quality, and customers complain. High-Def TV (ATSC) already uses compression to fit into 6 mhz TV channels. You might get away with cutting the high-def channel down to about 4.5 mhz, but that's pushing it. Any more lossy, and you get HD Lite, and class-action lawsuits.
There are some optimizations possible. The cable company can push all the channels out via fibre to a box in each neighbourhood. The "last mile" from the neighbourhood box to your TV set will only carry the one digital (and/or high-def) channel that you're watching, plus all the analogs. The set-top-box in your living room requests the appropriate digital channel.
1) ISPs implement surcharges for high-gigabyte-downloading customers 2) 5% of customers leave 3) Net traffic usage goes down 50%, while revenue only decreases 5% 4) Increased profit!!!
Slashdot Mirror
> If this was an instance of the violation of the law of thermodynamics, it wouldn't
> have been introduced to the world as a new car. It would have been heralded as the
> wondrous piece of science it would have been. It would turn science on its ear and
> literally change everything we think we know. You'll forgive my incredible scepticism
> when someone comes around with a scheme to break that law in the form of a gadget
> they are trying to hawk.
Mod this man up. If I was a Japanese guy who discovered some "free-energy-from-water" process, I wouldn't be using it to merely power a car. Japan doesn't have any native oil production at all. Hint, they started the Asian portion of World War II because the USA embargoed oil exports to Japan due to atrocities like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre "The Rape of Nanking". Due to the embargo, Japan was looking at totally running out of oil by the end of 1942. Civilians would starve, as would the occupation army in China, and their vaunted military machine would grind to a halt and collapse. Japan had a choice between pulling out of China and grovelling before the USA, or else militarily capture oil-producing territories. Guess which they chose?
Japan would dearly love to have "free-energy-from-water". Due to their annual oil bills, they would greatly benefit from something like this device. But rather than merely putting it in cars, they'd scale them up into large electrical powerplants that would run their cities. The Japanese desparation accounts for the fact that Japan is the last country where serious research into cold fusion is going on http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm. Cold fusion, BTW, is the only conceivable form of free-energy-from-water that doesn't break the known laws of physics, but implementation is the problem. The fact that the company is hawking a consumer product to the man on the street, rather than a big power plant to government, is what pegs my bogo-meter.
According to the Slashdot story...
> "A new survey shows that data retention laws indeed do influence the
> behavior of citizens (at least in Germany). 11% had already abstained from
> using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions and 52% > would not
> use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.
According to ABC News Go.com story about the downfall of Elliot Spitzer
at http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4424507&page=1
> Prosecutors reportedly have a series of e-mails and wiretapped phone conversations of Spitzer.
> In a interview two years ago, Spitzer, then-attorney general, told ABC News
> he had some advice for people who break the law. "Never talk when you can
> nod, and never nod when you can wink, and never write an e-mail because it's
> death. You're giving prosecutors all the evidence we need," he said.
What he did miss was not to shuffle money around in a manner that raises the
suspicion of the authorities. It was his financial maneuvering to get money to
the prostitute that was his downfall.
> The thing though with Red Hat (and Fedora) are losing distro
> marketshare to Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros.
Redhat doesn't need "distro marketshare". They need *PAYING CUSTOMERS*. I've been using linux since early 2000. I started off with a remaindered copy of Redhat linux 5 point something that came on 2 CDs in a manual at a bookstore. Redhat 7.3 was *THE BEST* end-user distro of its time. But Redhat didn't get too much money off of it. They dumped end-user distro in favour of Fedora, which is a testbed for their enterprise product. Redhat makes its profits off of RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux). And they're doing quite well, I might add.
As someone who got started in linux on Redhat's distro, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for them. Yes, they may have moved on to "big business", but...
- they did a helluva lot for linux in the early years
- they didn't destroy their legacy. No SCOX imitation.
> The worst thing that could happen from this is that your download area
> gets littered with superfluous files and you can fix that in seconds!
Howsabout a malicious website drops ***ONE*** malicious executable on your desktop? Let's say the malicious executable has a faked-up IE7 icon. Next Monday, the user starts up Windows, wants to browse "teh Interweb", clicks on the familiar IE7 icon on the desktop, and... oops. A well-coded malicious executable could even spawn the real IE7, to try to cover its tracks.
Windows has different security conventions than OSX. Apple needs to hire real Windows developers, rather than merely re-compiling Safari to a different target OS.
I live in Canada, where Bell throttles their retail customers, and their resellers' customers, you insensitive clod. I don't do P2P. Besides I can *LITERALLY* download faster over dialup at 45 to 50 kbits, than over throttled P2P (30 kbits).
As a Gentoo user, I don't have to deal with "major releases". I installed Gentoo on my current machine 2 years ago. With Gentoo's slow, rolling upgrade, my operating system is identical to that of somebody who did a new install yesterday. The biggest updates for me are GNOME and KDE and gcc and Xorg. While I use Blackbox WM, there are quite a few apps that use the base libs of GNOME and KDE.
Many universities and other publically-spirited sites mirror several distros. Different release cycles spread out the load on these servers. Having multiple distros being updated at once will result in more people updating at the same time. The result would be servers sitting almost idle for periods of time, with short periods of "server not available".
This is not a joke. I remember, years ago, when Redhat was *THE* major end-user distro. When a new version came out, regular users would have to wait a week or so before they could download it.
>> And here I thought somebody was suing over Dots Per Inch.
> Better to write that as "dots/in.", anyway. ^_-
In Slashdot ???
> Our numbers say different, and that's the only number that matters to us.
> According to our stats, 94.1% of our users are on broadband. The
> average for sites that use omniture for site tracking is 91.1%
You've got cause+effect ass-backwards. Design a website that is painful to use on dialup, and pretty soon you've got nothing but broadband users. Much like those idiots that make IE-specific webpages, and deliberately block everything else, and then claim that all their users run IE.
When the UHF TV band was first assigned in the late 1940's, it had 70 channels from channel 14 (470..476 mhz) through channel 83 (884..890 mhz). The original Hoverman desing worked OK for channels 14..54, but gain fell off sharply above channel 54, and it was useless for the top of the UHF band.
In the late 1980's channels 70..83 (806..890 mhz) were removed from UHF allocation, and auctioned off as "the 800 mhz band" to cellphone providers, etc. The Hoverman's problems were somewhat less severe after that.
As of the North American NTSC TV shutdown (2009/02/17 in USA and 2011/08/31 in Canada), the UHF band will lose channels 52..69 (698..806 mhz). This is where the bandwidth for the current "700 mhz band auction" will come from. The Hoverman can easily deal with a reduced UHF band encompassing channels 14..51. The tweaked "Gray-Hoverman" antenna also benefits from the use of modelling software that simply did not exist in 1959 when the first Hoverman patent was granted.
> Or to show you how foreign countries don't use the same nomenclature, there's the
> National Democratic Party of Germany which is "viewed by its opponents and the
> mainstream media as a de facto neo-Nazi organization".
Then there was the National Socialist German Workers Party. No xenophobes, they even accepted a former Austrian corporal as their leader. And the rest was history.
> To an extent I agree with you that had the US joined sooner, the war may have ended
> sooner, yet I doubt that the US would have had the same national will without Pearl
> Harbor to devote so much of the economy to fighting the war.
Fortunately for the free world, the stupid Austrian Corporal chose to declare war on the USA right after Pearl Harbor. If Hitler hadn't done that, I doubt the USA would've declared war on him. Instead, they would've concentrated on Japan
- the USA wouldn't have supplied a large chunk of logistics for the Russians (trucks and spare parts, etc). Russia would've suffered a lot more, and the Wermacht a lot less.
- the UK would've been knocked out of the war effort. An invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion) would still be suicidal. But merely getting the British to stop pounding the shit out of German factories would've been very helpful for the Nazi war effort.
- the USA doesn't split its effort between Europe and Asia. Instead, they throw their entire effort at Japan. Net result, they take Japan in late 1944 or ealy 1945 "the hard way", because the Manhattan project isn't quite ready. We're talking *MAJOR* US casualties, and even worse for Japanese civilians, fighting to the bitter end. Atrocities on both sides.
- by mid-1945, fighting is deadlocked in central Russia with huge casualties on both sides. With Hitler in control of Roumanian and middle east oilfields, his Messerschmitt ME 262 fleet would be starting to make itself felt in Russia. They would make mincemeat out of Russian piston-engined fighter aircraft, but military casualties would be hurting Germany by now. I could see an uneasy peace being made with a rump-Russia that has Novosibirsk at its western boundary.
- given the absolute ugliness of the conventional land war in Japan, the US public would revolt if the US tried to intervene in Europe.
- by January 1946...
- the USA controls what's left of Japan
- Hitler controls mainland Europe, and the oil-rich middle east
- rump-Russia controls Novosibirsk and eastward
Russia and Germany would have sustained huge casualties. The US would've lost less, but the public revulsion would still be there. The British Empire would lose all of African colonies and the middle east. Meanwhile, I could see an arms race with jet planes, and possibly atomic bombs.
This picture is safe for work. You just have to have a dirty mind to appreciate it.
1) MS salesguy... duhhh, nice company youse got here Mr. CEO, wit all dem computers running XP. Youse wouldn't want something terrible to happen, like the BSA discovers that they're all running Vista and sues the daylights outta youse. For only a million dollars in protection... oops...errr... I mean Vista site licence, we can see to it that nothing terrible happens to your company.
2) CEO... Get the F*** out of here. I'm *NEVER* switching from XP to Vista.
3) MS "upgrade worm" comes along and "upgrades" systems from XP to Vista
4) Federal marshalls raid the company after an anonymous tip
5) Every PC at the company is found to be running Vista
6) Big lawsuit by BSA
7) Profit
From some IPV6 tutorials, I understand that the RIR is identified in the header. Does this mean that a simple iptables rule could allow me to block all of AFRINIC or LACNIC or APNIC? If so, bring it on.
> Given a standard end-user allocation of a /64 network, you will have 1.8*10^19
/104 would give every user the equivalant of a current Class A to play with. Heck, a /120 allows for 256 machines at my residence. I don't have that many electrical plugs, and the electrical bills would bankrupt me.
> addresses to play with. It is unlikely that you would need to fake more with NAT.
That is really F***ing stupid...
- back in the old days, nobody imagined how much demand there would be, so they handed out Class A (16 million addresses) at a time. Then they discovered that addresses weren't really infinite, so they ended up having to invent CIDR and NAT to conserve addresses.
- mark my words; down the road, thanks to these idiotic IPV6 allocations, there will have to be a CIDR-like hack for IPV6 to reclaim some of the throwaway bits. WTF do individual users need *THAT* much space? A
>> Nor does the rest of the Internet need to know about IBM's internal network topology.
> I'm really not sure I see the correlation, there. What, exactly, does IBM need to hide?
Please tell me you're not in the network security field. The less information the bad guys have about your internal network, the better. I.e. it's kinda hard to scan your system for vulnerable software/OS when the attackers only see one generic address that doesn't respond to external connections, other than port-forwarded connections that the company wants to respond to.
WTF is it with you NAT-zis anyways? If NAT creates problems for me, I'll get rid of it at home. Till then, I'll keep it cause it's useful. I happen to have a 2nd PC that I keep as a "hot backup". Every couple of weeks I turn it on, and update it (Gentoo linux). Damned if I'm going to pay extra for a 2nd IP address for that machine.
It does help to keep the bad guys guessing about your layout. Do you have 1 desktop, or a 100 servers? With NAT, they don't know. Makes a difference when deciding where to attack.
Speaking of cellphones, any blackout lasting at least 3 to 6 hours will take cell off the air. Not to mention that when a blackout hits, everybody downtown will whip out their cellphones, and *TRY* to call someone, effectively gridlocking cellphones. Cell sucks when it comes to reliability.
Running fibre in a subdivision where you have a house every 100 or 200 feet is one thing. Subsidizing fibre to every farmhouse, log cabin, and cottage would bankrupt the USA or Canada. Please don't compare the wide open spaces of North America with densely populated cites, or the even more densely populated cities of Europe and Asia.
Broadcasters are avoiding channels 2 through 6 when given a choice which channels to select after the digital switchover. There will be almost no TV stations in that band in the USA after Feb 17, 2009 (and in Canada after Aug 31, 2011). That's 30 mhz of usuable frequency space (not counting the 4-mhz gap between channels 4 and 5).
While these frequencies may not be so great for a 6mhz wide TV channel, they're perfectly usable for digital internet. And you're guaranteed no interference with TV, because there won't be any TV stations in that spectrum.
You asked your grandparents why there isn't a channel 1... your grandchildren will be asking you why there aren't any channels 1-through-6.
I'm 56, and I average under 5 gigabytes a month on my ADSL account. I subscribe to a legal internet radio service, which compensates artists, and actually plays real music. I do not buy or listen to, let alone download/upload the latest potty-mouthed rapper or Britney-clone-bimbo recorded with today's dynamically-over-compressed crapppy studio effects. Unauthorized downloading of today's crap is a crime against musical taste, and should be outlawed for that reason alone.
Secondly, this sets a very ugly precedent, if allowed to pass. Musical rights are like construction unions, there's a gazillion of them. The Songwriters and Recording artists are only two of them. There are also performance rights and reproduction rights and who knows what else. By the time they all get their pound of flesh, my $29.95 ADSL account will have a $15/month tax on it.
But wait, it gets better, or should I say, worse. I'm sure the movie industry will want its $15/month, as will the TV industry. and e-book publishers, and software publishers. So now we're looking at a $75/month tax on my $29.95/month ADSL account.
This money-grab must be stopped now.
> If TFA is accurate then TW's tiers are a pathetic joke. 40GB as the highest
> one? In a 30 day month that works out to 1.33GB a day or 123.45Kbit/s.
Aside from P2P, how many *TYPICAL HOME USER* apps can you think of that eat bandwidth bandwidth 24x7?
Regardless of whether it's malice, or incompetence, or ignorance, it has the exact same effect on other customers of the same ISP. Quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, etc.
> about 10 digital channels can be carried in one 6 mhz analog channel path
No bleeping way, unless most of them are shopping channels showing slideshows of static images of products for sale.
> about 5 hd channels per 6 mhz spread
I call bullshit. Even Direct-TV with their "HD Lite" can't get that much compression.
5 SDTV channels can be accomadated in 6 mhz. Beyond that, they start losing picture quality, and customers complain. High-Def TV (ATSC) already uses compression to fit into 6 mhz TV channels. You might get away with cutting the high-def channel down to about 4.5 mhz, but that's pushing it. Any more lossy, and you get HD Lite, and class-action lawsuits.
There are some optimizations possible. The cable company can push all the channels out via fibre to a box in each neighbourhood. The "last mile" from the neighbourhood box to your TV set will only carry the one digital (and/or high-def) channel that you're watching, plus all the analogs. The set-top-box in your living room requests the appropriate digital channel.
1) ISPs implement surcharges for high-gigabyte-downloading customers
2) 5% of customers leave
3) Net traffic usage goes down 50%, while revenue only decreases 5%
4) Increased profit!!!