There's no reason they couldn't offer a la carte analog service.
Here is one, how do they filter the analog channels you don't subscribe to at each home? The analog package "basic cable" tends to be all or nothing for a reason. When you get into digital channels they _can_ do a la carte (HBO, Showtime, playboy etc.) but they chose to offer non-premium digital channels in packages. They bundle digital channels in packages mostly for marketing and billing reasons, once the analog channels go away they may offer an all-out a la carte system but until then the cons outweigh the pro's.
The DBS carriers could probably do la cart as well, but also choose not to. If they ever did offer it, it would probably be by request-only, where they mail you a card with boxes to check off. Billing for the service would also be confusing because the per channel cost would probably be cheaper for 100 channels than it would be for 4 because they couldn't realistically make money charging you $2.50/month, combined with the fact that licensing fees are more expensive for certain channels than others. Would they start with a base price of like $20/mo? Do they waive it if you have more than a certain amount of channels selected? Figuring out the pricing structure would be outside the skill level of most consumers, and impractical to go over on the phone with a sales or billing agent. One thing to consider as well is that the channels you are least interested in tend to cost less, so not much money is saved by you getting rid of them.
PSS. Also, by getting rid of the home shopping network and charging people more money the cable companies would make the same amount, but the consumer would spend more. Once the technology is there the option may eventually be available, though.
I made another post here that may clear up the answer to that. The short answer is that if they stopped broadcasting all analog channels today they would brick millions of TV's in the short term and not many people would be happy about it.
(ps. this is because many people pipe the cable directly to a TV with an analog only tuner rather than first going through a set top box, TV's supporting cable card would also work, but few people currently have them)
but it'd probably be quite expensive for them, at least initially.
The cable companies are already simulcasting several channels as both analog and digital to support "legacy" users who are using no set top box (ie, the analog tuner in your TV). The cable companies could drop these analog channels in many systems pretty much over night, but it would force all the users to either get a set top box for every TV, or go buy new TV's with digital tuners and cable card support. So the cost to this decision would go to the user, rather than the cable company.
I believe the plan is to make everything available in digital and gradually phase out the analog broadcasts to free up the spectrum. The last deadline I heard for analog consumer TV's I heard was 2008, but it either has been or will likely be extended.
Cable Card is the technology that will allow it all to happen, you will be able to bring along your own consumer set top or tuner and just plug in a unique card that will allow you to decode the channels you pay for. Even MS has a Cable Card license so even Media Center will be able to pull down all the channels you subscribe through the tuner rather than just analog channels before.
There have been some conflicting studies on this (search: cable la carte), but the cable companies say the end result is that it would end up costing you more money to select only the things you want. For example, cable companies get paid to carry the home shopping channel and if you drop it you will end up paying more for the other chans. Part of the problem also spawns from the fact that many channels are still analog and it would be pretty much impossible to exclude or include just some of the analog channels.
The cable companies _could_ make everything digital only over night but they risk bricking millions of TV's that have just analog tuners and no cable card support. I suspect that once analog channels go the way of the Dodo bird, a la cart programming will be a possibility, but at that point the broadcast flag could also become possible.
"Maybe the 13th amendment was passed because allowing people to enter into unrestricted labor contracts had been tried before, and it didn't work."
But of course, an exception is granted to the United States military. I was with the National Guard and a few years back we had a stateside security mission. I spend 13 months working my ass off for 80 hours a week as a salaried employee. As a civilian in the US I have no problem working a 70 or 75 hour work week because at least as a civilian I get paid for my time.
Maybe conditions in China leave something to be desired, but there is nothing wrong with a 60+ hour work week as long as anything over 40 is overtime.
Really, and just how would you know? I hear people call lots of things difficult but after doing it myself I usually decide they were exaggerating. One thing people don't understand about prisoners is that just holding a job or being self supported was too difficult for many of them. Many of them are too weak to stop being substance dependant. Some of the people I know who have been in and out of jail are some of the same losers I used to beat up in high school.
I keep hearing how difficult jail/prison is but the people saying it keep going back.
A guy I knew in PA was pulled over for speeding. The police officer saw the tape recorder on his dash board and he was charged and convicted for recording the traffic stop with it. When the cop informed him he was going to arrest him for the recorder he sped off with the cop hanging on to the door trying to get him out of the car. The police officer was not hurt badly but the guy was sentenced to several years in jail for a handful of violations (the most severe of which were committed after he was stopped).
I had an incident in high school once where another student took a tape recorder to school to try to get my friends and I for harassment. He was able to bring the recorder to school and follow us around legally because the school (like Wal-Mart) is a public place and the laws permit recording without need to notify the parties being recorded.
It is also legal to have video surveillance in your home so long as no image is being recorded. Recording on private property can only take place if prior consent of the involved parties is granted, even if the other party is the police.
Where it gets interesting though is if you are stopped in a traffic stop, if you record the police from _your_ car you are a felon.
Why must it be so black and white? The ESRB makes judgement calls every day as they decide ratings for games. If the content is provided with the game, it is rated for it. If the content is 100% mod, it is not the fault of the game maker. In cases in between, it is up to the ESRB to make a judgement call.
The problem with saying anything goes so long as modification is required to unlock it, is that there is not a rule that says how difficult the mod must be. To me opening game.ini and changing "adult content=0" to "adult content=1" could be considered a mod. Such a policy could open the door to blatant abuse of the rating system.
That is sort of like calling in a bomb threat somewhere and later defending yourself by saying "all the words I used are out there already, I only arranged them differently".
I think deciding if the content is there in the game and the mod unlocked it, or if the content was provided by the mod seems to be the most reasonable place to draw the line. Not surprisingly, few people on Slashdot seem to agree.
Unless you live under a rock you should know that Windows server sales are higher volume than Linux servers (source). Since many of the Windows servers are used internally one could say IIS has been traditionally under-represented in the Netcraft survey.
Now they win over a domain parking service and everyone want to say the statistics are unfairly in their favor? What about all the years those statistics worked against them, I didn't see you complaining then.
I like to work with Apache, but 2k3 server is a large improvement from MS. If MS finally getting their act together on the server front means they win back some of the "Netcraft share" than great.
Did I read that right or does MS really have a $6.2bn anual R&D budget? For that kind of money they could provide all the software I use with Windows for free.
I clicked through the first few pages to check it out and opted out after I read the details. Since we decided not to commit to the contract after reading it rather than going through with it and reneging on the purchase later I believe we are both in the clear.
Before you call him a Racist nazzi, you may want to know Amil Imani, author of what is probably the most brutal of the above mentioned articles is also Iranian born.
Journalists tend to travel more than your average joe, so their primary systems tend to be ultra mobile laptops and their opinions often seem to be focused around that.
They prefer something they can use on an airplane but I tend to prefer huge ~40lb gaming systems that would need it's own ticket to get on the plane. Even with laptops all I do is lug it from one docking station to the next.
Not everyone does most of their work from an airplane.
It isn't just about charity. They plan for the laptops to cost $100 each over time, but I am sure they will be muce more expensive to manufacture at first. They are only selling them for $300 if they get 100,000 other people to do it as well. I assume that unless that many people sign up the cost of selling them will be too high even at $300 each. I think they are using this to get the project off the ground.
"and windows XP/ie 6 useragents are VERY common among users of other systems"
I have seen this arguement hundreds of times and I swear to god that EVERY TIME someone makes it someone else corrects them and points out they are still mostly always still identifyable. Not to mention that masking as IE is not a default setting. Here are some examples:
IE on Windows user-agant:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;.NET CLR 1.1.4322;.NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Opera pretending to be IE
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.23 [es-ES]
Firefox pretending to be IE:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9
As you can see in each example although they are masked to look like IE, they are still identified. Your idea that all the statistics and estimates are wrong is rather weak.
I just don't see the verging-on-100% people tout of happy windows and ie users - in fact, most of the time when I come into contact with a john q public who's regularly using IE to browse the internet, they will specifically be wondering how they can exit whatever computing hell they're in - be it frequent reinstallations, spyware, constant lockups and so on.
Well I won't argue with that, in the case of Firefox many have already made the switch, but this is not so much the case with Linux. The problem is that the people I know able enough to admin their own Linux systems are capable enough to know their way around Windows well enough to avoid most of the hazards. The strength of Linux is where Joe User has someone to admin Linux for him, but on the desktop the user is typically the admin so cases like this tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
... or maybe it's just inertia... or that people just don't know.
People don't know, I am SURE that is it. Maybe you would have gotten away with this excuse back in 1998, but even sites as pro-Linux as Slashdot boast readerbases of Windows users in the 85-90%+ range.
I only know one person whose default browser is still IE.
Considering FF is still under 15% market share, I am going to go out on a limb and say you probably don't get out much.
Why are all the responses on Slashdot so predictable? Sometimes I wonder if the people on Slashdot are real, or if they have figured out a away to automate Slashcode to mine IRC channels and formulate opinions based on it?
it would be cheaper to take that 1/3 and buy a lower-spec white box and throw linux or bsd on it
It is a free market man, if this was cheaper and better then I guess everyone will do that instead and we don't need to be having this conversation, right?
Maybe the fact that Windows costs more than many of these people make in a month and they _still_ won't install free copies of Linux should be some kind of indication that mayby Linux is not the all singing, all dancing, solution to everything the people on Slashdot seem to think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is one, how do they filter the analog channels you don't subscribe to at each home? The analog package "basic cable" tends to be all or nothing for a reason. When you get into digital channels they _can_ do a la carte (HBO, Showtime, playboy etc.) but they chose to offer non-premium digital channels in packages. They bundle digital channels in packages mostly for marketing and billing reasons, once the analog channels go away they may offer an all-out a la carte system but until then the cons outweigh the pro's.
The DBS carriers could probably do la cart as well, but also choose not to. If they ever did offer it, it would probably be by request-only, where they mail you a card with boxes to check off. Billing for the service would also be confusing because the per channel cost would probably be cheaper for 100 channels than it would be for 4 because they couldn't realistically make money charging you $2.50/month, combined with the fact that licensing fees are more expensive for certain channels than others. Would they start with a base price of like $20/mo? Do they waive it if you have more than a certain amount of channels selected? Figuring out the pricing structure would be outside the skill level of most consumers, and impractical to go over on the phone with a sales or billing agent. One thing to consider as well is that the channels you are least interested in tend to cost less, so not much money is saved by you getting rid of them.
PSS. Also, by getting rid of the home shopping network and charging people more money the cable companies would make the same amount, but the consumer would spend more. Once the technology is there the option may eventually be available, though.
(ps. this is because many people pipe the cable directly to a TV with an analog only tuner rather than first going through a set top box, TV's supporting cable card would also work, but few people currently have them)
The cable companies are already simulcasting several channels as both analog and digital to support "legacy" users who are using no set top box (ie, the analog tuner in your TV). The cable companies could drop these analog channels in many systems pretty much over night, but it would force all the users to either get a set top box for every TV, or go buy new TV's with digital tuners and cable card support. So the cost to this decision would go to the user, rather than the cable company.
I believe the plan is to make everything available in digital and gradually phase out the analog broadcasts to free up the spectrum. The last deadline I heard for analog consumer TV's I heard was 2008, but it either has been or will likely be extended.
Cable Card is the technology that will allow it all to happen, you will be able to bring along your own consumer set top or tuner and just plug in a unique card that will allow you to decode the channels you pay for. Even MS has a Cable Card license so even Media Center will be able to pull down all the channels you subscribe through the tuner rather than just analog channels before.
The cable companies _could_ make everything digital only over night but they risk bricking millions of TV's that have just analog tuners and no cable card support. I suspect that once analog channels go the way of the Dodo bird, a la cart programming will be a possibility, but at that point the broadcast flag could also become possible.
But of course, an exception is granted to the United States military. I was with the National Guard and a few years back we had a stateside security mission. I spend 13 months working my ass off for 80 hours a week as a salaried employee. As a civilian in the US I have no problem working a 70 or 75 hour work week because at least as a civilian I get paid for my time.
Maybe conditions in China leave something to be desired, but there is nothing wrong with a 60+ hour work week as long as anything over 40 is overtime.
Really, and just how would you know? I hear people call lots of things difficult but after doing it myself I usually decide they were exaggerating. One thing people don't understand about prisoners is that just holding a job or being self supported was too difficult for many of them. Many of them are too weak to stop being substance dependant. Some of the people I know who have been in and out of jail are some of the same losers I used to beat up in high school.
I keep hearing how difficult jail/prison is but the people saying it keep going back.
For 3 million I would spend a year in prison.
A guy I knew in PA was pulled over for speeding. The police officer saw the tape recorder on his dash board and he was charged and convicted for recording the traffic stop with it. When the cop informed him he was going to arrest him for the recorder he sped off with the cop hanging on to the door trying to get him out of the car. The police officer was not hurt badly but the guy was sentenced to several years in jail for a handful of violations (the most severe of which were committed after he was stopped).
It is also legal to have video surveillance in your home so long as no image is being recorded. Recording on private property can only take place if prior consent of the involved parties is granted, even if the other party is the police.
Where it gets interesting though is if you are stopped in a traffic stop, if you record the police from _your_ car you are a felon.
The problem with saying anything goes so long as modification is required to unlock it, is that there is not a rule that says how difficult the mod must be. To me opening game.ini and changing "adult content=0" to "adult content=1" could be considered a mod. Such a policy could open the door to blatant abuse of the rating system.
How can you have an article like this and not link Google Fight with iPod vs Beer? iPod wins 431,000,000 to 153,000,000!
That is sort of like calling in a bomb threat somewhere and later defending yourself by saying "all the words I used are out there already, I only arranged them differently".
I think deciding if the content is there in the game and the mod unlocked it, or if the content was provided by the mod seems to be the most reasonable place to draw the line.
Not surprisingly, few people on Slashdot seem to agree.
Everybody cared when they were all on Linux, now that some of them are on ISS we have decided to stop caring?
Now they win over a domain parking service and everyone want to say the statistics are unfairly in their favor? What about all the years those statistics worked against them, I didn't see you complaining then.
I like to work with Apache, but 2k3 server is a large improvement from MS. If MS finally getting their act together on the server front means they win back some of the "Netcraft share" than great.
Did I read that right or does MS really have a $6.2bn anual R&D budget? For that kind of money they could provide all the software I use with Windows for free.
I clicked through the first few pages to check it out and opted out after I read the details. Since we decided not to commit to the contract after reading it rather than going through with it and reneging on the purchase later I believe we are both in the clear.
BSD - Geek Different
Before you call him a Racist nazzi, you may want to know Amil Imani, author of what is probably the most brutal of the above mentioned articles is also Iranian born.
They prefer something they can use on an airplane but I tend to prefer huge ~40lb gaming systems that would need it's own ticket to get on the plane. Even with laptops all I do is lug it from one docking station to the next.
Not everyone does most of their work from an airplane.
It isn't just about charity. They plan for the laptops to cost $100 each over time, but I am sure they will be muce more expensive to manufacture at first. They are only selling them for $300 if they get 100,000 other people to do it as well. I assume that unless that many people sign up the cost of selling them will be too high even at $300 each. I think they are using this to get the project off the ground.
IE on Windows user-agant: .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
Opera pretending to be IE
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.23 [es-ES]
Firefox pretending to be IE:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9
As you can see in each example although they are masked to look like IE, they are still identified. Your idea that all the statistics and estimates are wrong is rather weak.
I just don't see the verging-on-100% people tout of happy windows and ie users - in fact, most of the time when I come into contact with a john q public who's regularly using IE to browse the internet, they will specifically be wondering how they can exit whatever computing hell they're in - be it frequent reinstallations, spyware, constant lockups and so on.
Well I won't argue with that, in the case of Firefox many have already made the switch, but this is not so much the case with Linux. The problem is that the people I know able enough to admin their own Linux systems are capable enough to know their way around Windows well enough to avoid most of the hazards. The strength of Linux is where Joe User has someone to admin Linux for him, but on the desktop the user is typically the admin so cases like this tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
People don't know, I am SURE that is it. Maybe you would have gotten away with this excuse back in 1998, but even sites as pro-Linux as Slashdot boast readerbases of Windows users in the 85-90%+ range.
I only know one person whose default browser is still IE.
Considering FF is still under 15% market share, I am going to go out on a limb and say you probably don't get out much.
Why are all the responses on Slashdot so predictable? Sometimes I wonder if the people on Slashdot are real, or if they have figured out a away to automate Slashcode to mine IRC channels and formulate opinions based on it?
It is a free market man, if this was cheaper and better then I guess everyone will do that instead and we don't need to be having this conversation, right?
Maybe the fact that Windows costs more than many of these people make in a month and they _still_ won't install free copies of Linux should be some kind of indication that mayby Linux is not the all singing, all dancing, solution to everything the people on Slashdot seem to think it is.