Get me from London to Washington in 0.001 seconds or less alive and safe without the use of faster-than-light travel, time travel, wormholes, or similar devices.
Uhhh, if you get an unknown URL in your email, don't click on it. Some guys here asked me if I could code a web page to get someone named 'davidwr' from London to Washington in 0.001 seconds and I said I could do it, but he wouldn't be alive when he got there. They said that was ok, so...
No,I think the poster was making the point that TSA does not prevent airplanes from flying into buildings,
That's right, they don't. He was replying to a post that was talking about TSA preventing terrorists commandeering them and flying them into buildings, not the pilots, either deliberately or accidentally. This question was in the context of TSA succeeding in a task which TSA actually (pretends) to do, not one that it does not and cannot do.
In other words, like I already said, blaming TSA for failing to stop a private pilot from flying his private aircraft into a building is wrong because they do not have the responsibility to stop that, and do not claim they can prevent that.
By blaming them for this failure, you imply they DO have the responsibility for stopping it, or should have that job. You have enough stuff to blame them for without having to make stuff up, and they are pervasive enough without suggesting they control all airflight in the continental US.
Flawed because one person still managed to cause the better part of $40 million in damage and at least one death with an airplane,
Which was not the fault of TSA for failing to prevent, and is thus not reasonably part of any evaluation of their competence (or lack thereof). They also failed to stop the milk in my refridgerator from going sour and my cat from peeing on the carpet. Should we judge them on those failures, too? Answer yes to that and most people you want to convert to your opinion of the TSA will think you are a rabid nitwit and write you off as a loon. You'll preach to the choir, but the choir isn't enough to get the problem fixed.
I can't tell if you are advocating that TSA start screening private pilots in personal aircraft, or if you don't know that private pilots don't go through TSA checkpoints before going to their hangers.
I'm not even sure if you understand that TSA doesn't screen pilots of commercial aircraft for suicidal/homicidal intentions, only for fingernail clippers and bottled water.
In either case, blaming such an occurance on a TSA failure, when TSA wasn't involved, is a bit disengenuous. TSA couldn't have prevented this one, and they can't prevent any pilot from duplicating it. We've got too much disengenuity from TSA itself to need more from the justifiable critics.
And the fact that weather is setting records across the globe year after year right now, is not a concern because equipment used in 1936 had almost the same reading?
I think the fact that the previous record was set in 1936 pretty much disproves your "fact" that the weather is setting records "year after year". "Year after year" to most people means "every year or two", not "every 7 decades or so".
The restriction which Verizon agreed to was they would not limit or restrict " the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice". Clearly, retricting tethering is limiting the ability of their customers to use the applications of their choice.
Is it "restricting" your choice if they charge the same amount to tether using their phones or your own?
This same kind of language is in federal law regarding cable services and the use of CPE (customer provided equipment). Cable companies are not supposed to do things that limit the use of CPE without good cause. Who pays any attention to that?
Certainly not Comcast. When they forced everyone but basic cable subs to go digital, they broke the use of a lot of CPE. They COULD have left the digital signals for the Digital Basic service unscrambled and obeyed the spirit and letter of the law, but they chose not to. This isn't any premium service, it's the lowest tier of digital -- if you don't subscribe to digital they can trap your line to cut out all the digital service completely.
No, they said, you can't trap digital. Would you like to rent another DTA to connect to your VCR?
And now they are dropping all analog signals, which makes all analog CPE useless.
Obviously I don't fly around in private jets, but I'd think that they'd largely be flying IFR. A jet moves pretty fast, and I can't imagine they just go buzzing through airspace without any separation at 250kts (or higher), and they're going to burn a LOT of fuel if they stay below 18k feet.
The point is that it is legal and they can, if they want to remain out of the FAA flight databases.
They'd probably prefer to not be buzzing around in a pattern either when they land,
I'm not sure what you think this has to do with being VFR vs IFR. If you're at a tower-controlled airport (and enter the "system" when you call them to tell them you're inbound), you fly what they tell you. That can be a pattern, or more likely a straight-in if you're a jet. If you're at an uncontrolled airport, you fly what you can fly safely. That can be a straight-in. In fact, it is probably safer for a jet to fly a straight-in even with other traffic in the pattern, since they won't be trying to merge two different patterns on the turn to final. The jet and pattern traffic can adjust speeds so that the jet fits in between everything else.
That won't be a huge inconvenience or even unusual for most VFR only pattern users, since they've already got to deal with IFR traffic on approachs merging with them.
Sure, they can change their destination enroute, but that is a pain for everybody as well,
Not so much. Trying to fit into ORD or LAX on a pop-up might be hard, but diverting to most small or medium sized airports will be trivial. As for "coming along" a standard approach, if you're IFR you can be vectored onto almost any approach from any direction pretty easily. You don't need to fly every approach as a full approach as published. Most IFR traffic is vectored to final just because it is faster for the entire system to do that.
The FAA still has official knowledge of these planes and their destination.
The FAA not too long ago realized that they had a lot of bogus data for aircraft registrations. They have now started reregistering all civil aircraft in an attempt at cleaning up their database.
As for knowing the destinations? No, sorry. Anyone operating VFR under Part 91 (and probably other parts) doesn't need to file a flight plan listing a destination, so the FAA would have no idea where that plane is going. When departing a towered airport, you'll tell the controller which direction you are going so he can plan for routing of traffic in his airspace, but once you leave the airport traffic area you can turn any direction you want. In Class B or C airspace, you don't need to tell the controller your destination, just the route you want to fly to get out of that airspace. (You'd have to tell him your destination if it is in the controlled airspace.) If the controller asks and the destination is outside his control (and you're not getting an IFR clearance) you can tell him any destination you want -- you don't have to go there in reality.
Even with a flight plan on file (and an IFR clearance for IFR), all the pilot has to do is request a different destination while airborne (even as late as on final approach) and he's going somewhere else. Under a VFR flight plan, the pilot doesn't even have to ask, all he has to do is go there, making sure to either amend the plan or cancel it prior to his ETA. (On final at a tower-controlled airport, he'll have to tell the controller his direction of flight, but not destination.)
If they load up a small plane with explosives, how will keeping a destination private, except for the FAA, who is the one watching, help them?
The only reason the FAA would be watching a small aircraft is if they are in positive control airspace (Class A, B, or C, e.g., or Class D around a towered airport), or the small aircraft has asked for it (IFR flight plan or flight following.) You can easily approach many suitable targets without the FAA noticing.
Now, if you are headed towards a location with a TFR (temporary flight restriction), like around Air Force 1 or over large stadiums during sporting events, or headed towards prohibited airspace (over the White House, e.g.) the FAA will take notice and send your information to the Air Force who will come to visit you PDQ. They won' t know who you are, but they don't care who you are, just that you aren't supposed to be there.
No, E=IR says that voltage is equal to current times resistance.
But the voltage coming out of a transformer is static.
The voltage coming out of a transformer depends on the voltage going in. The voltage going in depends on the voltage present at the input to the system and the current being drawn through that system, using E=IR to calculate the voltage drop due to resistances of the feedlines.
Further, the voltage coming out of the transformer is subject to the same voltage drop due to resistance and current before it gets to the outlet, and then again in the power cord to the device you have plugged in. And we've not yet remembered that the transformer is a considerable amount of wire, so the voltage from a transformer will drop as you draw more current from it just do to internal resistance of the transformer itself. It has to. E=IR. If the internal resistance of a transformer is 1 ohm, then drawing just one ampere will cause a one volt drop in output.
The fact is that as you draw more current from the system, the voltage drop in the transmission line increases, which means the voltage at your device drops. Anyone who has seen the lights dim when the electric furnace or other high-current appliance turns on knows this. I have UPSs that routinely beep (signalling a low-volt input condition) every time the laser printer fuser powers up.
If there's an undervoltage at the end of a distribution line, that's what's called "line loss". Ohm's law is also not negotiable.
That's what I said, but you just spend an entire paragraph denying it. The voltage out of a transformer is not constant because the voltage in will change in response to the current being drawn from the system, and the currents in the transformer change the output as well.
That includes voltage drops in the output side of the transformer and the input. Too many people on a branch can cause the voltage to sag. Your neighbor drawing more current can cause your voltage to drop. Not will, but can. And that's all without the transformer blowing up. In fact, you will hit brownout long before your transformer blows up, since the line losses are a limit on the amount of power you can draw from the line to start with. As are the breakers in your breaker panel. As are the fuses in the distribution line.
You don't know much about electricity, do you? The voltage won't drop;
E=IR. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. Even for the small R of a power line.
It is not uncommon for the E of a household outlet to be low (100-110V) for a house on the end of a distribution line simply because of the drop in the distribution line.
Too noisy was not just a Boeing claim. Early flights were not required to decelerate below mach 1 before reaching land and they sent sonic booms up and down the coast.
Then they stopped doing that and they stopped being "too noisy". Calling them "too noisy" today is incorrect.
Eventually, every single Concorde route required subsonic descents and approaches for this very reason.
Uhhh, more like they required subsonic descents and approaches so they could be handled with normal traffic, and to obey federal law that has been around for a very long time. 250 knots below 10,000 feet, and 200 knots below 2500 AGL.
The only exemptions are "approval of the Administrator" (unlikely), and "minimum safe airspeed", which certainly isn't above mach 1 for the SST.
I will say this and only this: What you are describing is a significant part of the downward spiral of humanity.
I agree. The deliberate movement to leave people behind because of the assumption that anyone who doesn't understand specialized jargon is lazy or dumb is creating a sub-class of people who get to vote but don't get information they can use to make those votes intelligently.
There was a time when journalists challenged their readership because it was assumed the readership came to the journalist in search of knowledge.
That doesn't mean the journalist can ignore the audience to which he is writing and force them to learn a whole set of technical jargon if they want to know what he's saying. A good journalist has ALWAYS written so that his audience can understand him, simply because he is supposed to be a source of information. (Not "knowledge").
Over time it became apparent that you could sell more paper if you simplified the wording and phrasing, and made it more accessible to more people.
More information to more people is a good thing.
As I said before, when the focus becomes understanding the words and not the meaning, you accomplish nothing (except selling paper).
You don't need specialized jargon to impart the meaning; in fact, the use of jargon impedes the understanding of meaning. You've already demonstrated that more than once.
The mentality that people should not have to work to improve themselves is totally and utterly flawed.
There you go again wandering off topic. Nobody is talking about people improving themselves. When you want to learn a new subject, you need to learn new stuff. When you want to inform people of a current issue that requires information to make a good decision, you're not trying to "improve" people, your need is to impart information. Jargon gets in the way.
It isn't the journalist's job to turn every reader into a climate scientist when he writes about the latest IPCC report or some proposed legislation that deals with carbon penalties. It's his job to convey information in a way that is accessible to his readers.
I'm sure you'll enjoy your Twilight novels, your Oprah, and your Doritos.
Since you can't stop being an arrogant asshole long enough to hold an intelligent discussion, I'll let you go about your way spouting jargon to your Grannie or whatever.
So I'll take my novels wordy, my TV off, and my journals rich with jargon..
It is now clear what your problem is. You've confused the word "journalist" with the concept of technical journals. I've been pretty clear in saying that a journalist should write to the level of HIS AUDIENCE, which means a journalist who writes for JACM or Spectrum will write to a different level than one who writes for The Chicago Tribune. Please, continue to ignore that distinction and ramble on about Doritos, however. You've done so well, so far, doing that.
At your house, maybe. Just this morning I got the great viewing experience of NBC Sports channel carrying a soccer game from the Olympics, but I have no idea who was playing or what the scores were, because the score and team info were pushed off the top left of the screen into the protected area.
I mean, really, how long has HD been around?
At my house, about a year. When my old 30" CRT TV died, I had to buy a new one. Wonderful, I got a new 26" LCD in HD format. That was the largest LCD that would fit in the same space the CRT used to.
Now I get to see the cable channels letterboxing all their content on my LCD HD TV, so I get a picture that is about 1/3 the size of what I used to have.
But cool, I can get the cable channels that are HD (must carries) using the new QAM tuner in the TV. I'm not impressed by the images. And I get to watch my local PBS station taking an SD image and squeezing it so that when an HD user zooms the SD image back to HD, it looks right. Looks like crap on SD, but the HD users get normal pics. Just great.
I used to go to NAB when they were pushing "convergence" and the wonderful new world of HD, and even in the large display areas I didn't see any purpose for HD, other than selling everyone a new TV. YMMV.
Your grandparents (assuming you are an American and your family not recent immigrants) measured success as universal access to telephone service (and water, and electricity).
And more importantly, they measured it in being able to get something fixed when it was broken. Before the divestiture, when you had a phone problem you called the phone company to fix it. It was their wire, their phone, their long distance, their everything.
After the divestiture, you needed to know if your trouble was close (in your own equipment), local (between the demarc and the CO), or long distance, and who you called to fix it, if there was someone you could call, depended on where the problem was.
I still fondly remember trying to get a long distance access problem fixed and having Michigan Bell point the finger at AT&T and AT&T pointing right back at Mi Bell. In the meantime, I couldn't make long distance calls at all. "It just works" is a good status.
I still can't make long distance calls from my wireline at home. You see, I had selected a cheap LD service and they folded, which left me with none. In the good old days, the LD carrier didn't go bankrupt leaving you without service, the LD carrier was the phone company.
What does "common language" have to do with anything?
You said "plainspeak". That's the common language.
Your claim that jargon becomes common language is patently false, except for those things that enter the general population anyway. Computers are pretty common today, "hard disk" followed them into the public consumption. "Dyspnea" is doctor-speak, and unless you have it or are in the medical professions it is unlikely that jargon will have made it into "plainspeak". "T1", even though computers have become common, is still jargon that most people don't know, including, according to you, the people at PC Magazine.
You said the average person reads at the 7th grade level, let's talk to them as such.
No, I did not. I said that a journalist (the topic of this discussion) should write to the level of his audience, which for public consumption is 7th grade level. A TEACHER should elevate the grade levels; a journalist's job is to inform, not teach. There is a difference.
So you are a publisher! Explains your bent.
And what explains your insulting attitude? No, I'm not a publisher. I'm talking about JOURNALISTS, who WORK FOR A LIVING. If their articles aren't read then they aren't doing their job and they get fired. Why would any publisher pay a journalist who writes articles that the readers can't deal with? In fact, why would a publisher keep a journalist on staff that can't write an article that the publisher himself can understand? You expect a publisher to sit down with his paper every day and pull out a dictionary (which are notoriously bad for defining jargon) to look up all the 'hard words'? Right. The publisher is going to send the article back and say "our audience won't understand that, explain it better". Or he'll redline the paragraph and save the column inches.
I have indeed. You are a 7th grader.
And you are an insulting idiot. My "grade level" has nothing to do with this. I showed you the definition from a technical site for a piece of jargon that we were debating, and it clearly did not match your definition. That's where a common person is going to go when they want to see what you mean when you drop the term "T1" on them, and it doesn't say what you claim it means. YOU say that it it their responsibility to learn about the terms you use so they can understand what you write; it is clear that you are not using the terms the same way they are defined by others, and that makes pushing the onus for figuring it out back onto you.
Jargon belongs where people understand it already. Making your readers (as a journalist) work harder because you were too lazy to speak to them in a way they can understand means YOU are wrong, not them. They pay your salary to convey information. You failed. You're fired.
The jargon of today is - in theory - the plainspeak of tomorrow.
I know of no such theory that would make that claim. Doctors have had a jargon for as long as there have been doctors, and while SOME of their terms have made it into common language, most have not.
If readers (and listeners) take some time on the front end to learn the terms, they will have an easier time in the long run.
No, they won't. Just what terms do you think someone who is going to see is doctor is supposed to front load into his brain? Just which of the tens of thousands of medical terms will you need today? How about learning the jargon in today's newspaper? Got a clue, before you try reading the article, what's going to be there? Nope.
Jargon is used between people who know the terms. If you know one party doesn't know them, jargon is not appropriate. Especially for a journalist whose job is to explain things to normal people.
So let's all communicate like 7th graders, instead of educating people to the 12th grade.
I didn't say that and you know it. Let's communicate with our intended audiences so they understand what we are saying, not leave them stuck running for the dictionary because we're too erudite to actually communicate. When you say "I ordered a PRI T1 line to replace your SLIP over 56k modem, Gramma", you aren't educating her, you're leaving her behind deliberately.
The author's point, which is spot on, is that dumbing things down has created a general sentiment that jargon is hard.
Some of it is. Do you deny that? Some of it takes advanced education to understand, or depends on knowing so many other things that you aren't going to pick it up just because yuo saw the word on the front page. There's a reason why they don't cover calculus in fifth grade, or nuclear reactor engineering in ninth.
What is the purpose of a journalist writing an article in a newspaper about a technical subject? Is it to teach all the readers that subject, or teach them all the jargon? No. Of course not. It's to convey information. If your reader is a layman, use layman language. You'll save time and not drive your readers away. You're competing for his time, and you'll lose as soon as you lose him. Write an article that's too hard to understand because you're using jargon and the first reaction will be "turn the page", not "find a dictionary".
A T1 can be copper or optical,
You've just proven my point. "T1: A T1 line uses two wire pairs (one for transmit, one for receive) and time division multiplexing (TDM) to interleave 24 64-Kbps voice or data channels. The standard T1 frame is 193 bits long, which holds 24 8-bit voice samples and one synchronization bit with 8,000 frames transmitted per second. T1 is not restricted to digital voice or to 64 Kbps data streams. Channels may be combined and the total 1.544 Mbps capacity can be broken up as required." No mention of fiber. It's jargon. Your definition isn't the same as someone else's. You caused confusion instead of clearing it up. And people who don't deal with it on a regular basis aren't going to know what T1 is, so that point still stands. You say "meat vindaloo, please", to one of the Indian tech support high-schoolers, and you get dog instead of beef because "we" don't know that "meat" mean beef at all. Your problem, not mine.
If you don't understand what they're saying and can't be arsed to learn, just tell them "I'm too dumb or lazy too understand,
Problem is, they're telling you things that you need to make decisions about now, in many cases, not after you've gone home or to the library to look it all up.
As for being "lazy" or "dumb", you're just a flamebait spigot, aren't you?
I'd say that the "intelligent" fellow who uses jargon with someone who isn't expected to know it is the lazy one, since he's supposed to have a grasp of the concepts behind the jargon and can't be arsed to use simple words for his intended audience. If you know what pneumothorax is and cannot convert that to "air in the chest that is causing a collapse of your lung" then I doubt you have a full grasp of what it means in the first place.
He more or less says that some questions are too complicated to be explained in terms "that you're more familiar with".
If those things are too complicated to be explained in terms that the listener is familiar with, then the concept is probably not of any importance to the listener to start with. And if the listener isn't familiar with your terms, you're going to have to bring him up to speed before you can slap all the technical words on him anyway.
"Why do magnets work" doesn't need a full quantum mechanical lecture with Maxwell's equations and tensors and Feynman diagrams and chromodynamics tossed on for good measure to get the point across to a lay audience who might ask that question. Eleven dimensional string theory, hypothetical subatomic particles carrying the "field"? To one of his advanced physics classes, yes. To Joe Sixpack, no.
It's like a five year old asking "where do babies come from"? You don't go into genetics and meiosis and fallopian tubes and all the gory details to answer that question. You don't need to. Nor do you need to go into a full fluid dynamics/thermal transfer/equilibrium discussion to explain why CO2 keeps heat trapped.
I am totally behind this. The reason we have jargon and technical terms in the first place is specificity,
There are two reasons that jargon are used. First, by a person in the field to another person in the field to convey information based on a common understanding of the terms used. That's fine. That isn't what a journalist is trying to do, however.
The second reason to use jargon is to obfuscate the information or cause the recipient to lose interest. That, too, isn't what a journalist is supposed to do.
So, based on those two reasons, the answer is "NO", the journalist's job in conveying the information to his readers includes translating jargon. And if the journalist doesn't understand the jargon in the first place, he's going to have a hard time knowing which of the two reasons his source used the jargon is correct.
and failure to use these specially created words and phrases only causes confusion and false understandings.
Ever been to a doctor? Do you want him to tell you about your medical condition using jargon or clear language? How about the side effects of your prescription? Which is clearer? "This medication may cause dyspnea, anaphylaxis, or in rare cases pheochromocytoma. If you notice any of those, call an ambulance and come to the hospital immediately". Unless you are up on your medical jargon (most of us are not), you'll either be scared to death of any little event and calling 911 all the time, or not be aware that the "shortness of breath" or "itching" you are experiencing needs immediate attention. Much better to say "when you take this, you might have trouble breathing, suffer a severe alergic reaction, or in rare cases you might develop a tumor in your adrenal glands." Oh, ok. I know "trouble breathing". I know "allergic reaction". I don't know how I'd detect the last thing. Tell me more..."
Scientists typically have a hard time conveying information about what they do to the public, precisely because they become used to the jargon and don't realize that the average reading ability of their audience is 7th grade. The next time a scientists talks to you about "subaerial" events, ask him why he didn't just say "on the land". Yes, it's longer, but almost everyone understands "on the land" while not as many grasp "subaerial" (or the counterpart, subaqueous -- "underwater"). Or how about the ones who continually refer to "anthropogenic" when they could say "human-caused"?
We somehow managed to learn that meat could be chicken, beef, or pork,
"We" did? For many people "meat" means dog, cat, snake, horse, and a host of other things. It's what you deal with daily, so you know what you deal with daily.
How many people deal with dyspnea on a daily basis and have a reason to know about it, before the doctor who uses jargon uses it with you? Other than weather geeks who glue themselves to TWC, who knows "isobars"? Thermoclines? Isohaline contours? Common mode rejection?
how come we can't learn that T1 could be PRI, DIA, or dark?
"We" can, if we deal with it enough to need to know. Most of the public who reads the product of journalists don't study every field he covers so they can be conversant in the jargon. If you force people to look up the terms when they come across them, yes, you'll have "taught a man to fish" in a way, but more likely he'll say "fishing is too hard, I'm going to McDonald's. Call me when Big Brother is on."
By the way, your use of "dark" to refer to a T1 line is questionable. T1 is a copper pair which carries no light. "Dark" refers to fiber optic lines which do have a photonic signal when activated and are dark when disconnected. As in "dark fiber".
The station you hypothesize about isn't ad-free. They're probably showing more ads because infomercials bring in money while real programming costs them.
They aren't being paid to be on cable because they are covered under must carry. They can't be paid and be must-carry. Once they try to be paid for cable carriage, they lose must-carry and dissappear from the cable altogether.
They also don't have a national distribution cost that a large satellite network does. That's a pretty big expense, which they don't have to recoup from the cable company by charging for their signal.
So no, you missed the point. Satellite services (which is what we were talking about) "double dip" just like newspapers do. Nobody seems to mind that the papers do that. Why is satellite-fed network TV different?
People who sold satellite, the big ones, would say things like that because the feeds weren't scrambles, so you could get shows before commercials were inserted.
They were saying that about the pay channels like HBO because there are no ads (were, I don't know if you shouldn't count the ads for HBO programs) in the programming already.
Every advertising-supported satellite service came from the uplink with the ads already there. They had to. There was no easy or cheap way for the cable companies to break the programming up so they could insert ads themselves, they could only replace ads in the program stream with their own -- called "local avails".
Or, they would have been talking about the satellite-to-tape feeds that came out of network operations, but even those had holes where the local broadcast stations were expected to insert ads. You got to sit through a few minutes of black or "Insert Ad Here" instead of an ad, but big difference. The only feeds that weren't like that were sports feeds and you got to see the behind the scenes action where the ads were supposed to be put.
I'd like to know how we can put the nail in this utopian view of cable that it was created to provide ad-free content or that the cable fees the subscriber pay are supposed to replace the ad revenues for the program providers. That's so patently absurd that I cannot believe that anyone would say it. The local channels on cable always had ads because it was just broadcast TV on a wire, and the earliest satellite services were the SuperStations -- Ted Turner's WTBS in Atlanta being one. WGN another. WTBS carried every "local" ad for the Atlanta market, unless the cable company switched in a local, and it may have been the fact that all the Atlanta local ads were being seen in Padukah and Boise that pushed the local avail technology in the first place. You can STILL see Empire carpet ads on WGN because it is STILL a SuperStation. "1 8 hundred 5 8 8 2 3 hundred, empire"!
Since local TV is free, I figure 7 dollars is how much it actually costs to maintain the antenna, the cable, and associated equipment.
Ok, then you add a satellite-fed service and the maintenance and costs of the satellite dish and decoders etc. Greater than $7 now.
So HBO + Syfy + Food would be $10 + $2 + $2 plus the $7 hookup fee I discussed above. About $21 per month.....
Except all three channels will cost more because fewer people will be paying for them. Changing the economics of the system and expecting the prices to stay the same is a bit naive. Kind of like saying that the fixed plant cost must be $7 even when adding all kinds of other things to it. Or expecting the low-income pricing that is heavily subsidized by everyone else to stay the same when nobody is subsidizing it...
The cost for just HBO is about what I said. That's just for the HBO. I wasn't talking about any of the other costs that are covered by the service tier you are on.
and then finally I can pay $10 on top of that to get HBO.
So, like I said, the cost of HBO is $10, but the cost of the other equipment to get HBO is more. Someone who says they want "HBO and X and Y for $15/month" is ignoring those costs that you just went on about. $15 for HBO and two other channels? Ain't gonna happen.
All I want is to be able to subscribe to HBOGo for $10 per month without having to pay another $50 per month on top of that.
Wait a minute. You can't do that. You need the internet service and the cable/DSL modem and a computer and all the other things before you can get HBOGo, so you're going to pay the other $50 (if that's what that stuff costs you) too. Just like the guy who wants HBO plus 2 for $15... it really costs a lot more, and $15 isn't going to cover the fixed costs of the system, much less the programming he wants.
Yet, local independent channels exist and they manage OKish when they have to pay for the syndicated content on one side and pay for the transmitter on the other.
What does that have to do with being ad-free?
Expanding their broadcast area for free (by having cable carry them) should be a boon in itself without charging an 'access fee'.
Yep. Allows more ad revenue. That's the only money they get.
If the access expands enough, they can go on to save a ton of cash shutting the transmitter down and selling it off.
At that point they lose the must-carry protections and may have to pay the cable system to be carried. What they win by going non-broadcast they lose by having to pay to be seen at all. Not very good for a small station.
I'm still not sure how this all relates to the dual-sourced revenue system that people think shouldn't exist for cable but seem not to mind at all for print.
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Get me from London to Washington in 0.001 seconds or less alive and safe without the use of faster-than-light travel, time travel, wormholes, or similar devices.
Uhhh, if you get an unknown URL in your email, don't click on it. Some guys here asked me if I could code a web page to get someone named 'davidwr' from London to Washington in 0.001 seconds and I said I could do it, but he wouldn't be alive when he got there. They said that was ok, so ...
No,I think the poster was making the point that TSA does not prevent airplanes from flying into buildings,
That's right, they don't. He was replying to a post that was talking about TSA preventing terrorists commandeering them and flying them into buildings, not the pilots, either deliberately or accidentally. This question was in the context of TSA succeeding in a task which TSA actually (pretends) to do, not one that it does not and cannot do.
In other words, like I already said, blaming TSA for failing to stop a private pilot from flying his private aircraft into a building is wrong because they do not have the responsibility to stop that, and do not claim they can prevent that.
By blaming them for this failure, you imply they DO have the responsibility for stopping it, or should have that job. You have enough stuff to blame them for without having to make stuff up, and they are pervasive enough without suggesting they control all airflight in the continental US.
Flawed because one person still managed to cause the better part of $40 million in damage and at least one death with an airplane,
Which was not the fault of TSA for failing to prevent, and is thus not reasonably part of any evaluation of their competence (or lack thereof). They also failed to stop the milk in my refridgerator from going sour and my cat from peeing on the carpet. Should we judge them on those failures, too? Answer yes to that and most people you want to convert to your opinion of the TSA will think you are a rabid nitwit and write you off as a loon. You'll preach to the choir, but the choir isn't enough to get the problem fixed.
There was just one two years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_plane_crash
I can't tell if you are advocating that TSA start screening private pilots in personal aircraft, or if you don't know that private pilots don't go through TSA checkpoints before going to their hangers.
I'm not even sure if you understand that TSA doesn't screen pilots of commercial aircraft for suicidal/homicidal intentions, only for fingernail clippers and bottled water.
In either case, blaming such an occurance on a TSA failure, when TSA wasn't involved, is a bit disengenuous. TSA couldn't have prevented this one, and they can't prevent any pilot from duplicating it. We've got too much disengenuity from TSA itself to need more from the justifiable critics.
Or, "Hey Bubba, Watch This!"
Flying with someone in their small aircraft and they say "here, hold my beer while I show you this cool maneuver..."
And the fact that weather is setting records across the globe year after year right now, is not a concern because equipment used in 1936 had almost the same reading?
I think the fact that the previous record was set in 1936 pretty much disproves your "fact" that the weather is setting records "year after year". "Year after year" to most people means "every year or two", not "every 7 decades or so".
The restriction which Verizon agreed to was they would not limit or restrict " the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice". Clearly, retricting tethering is limiting the ability of their customers to use the applications of their choice.
Is it "restricting" your choice if they charge the same amount to tether using their phones or your own?
This same kind of language is in federal law regarding cable services and the use of CPE (customer provided equipment). Cable companies are not supposed to do things that limit the use of CPE without good cause. Who pays any attention to that?
Certainly not Comcast. When they forced everyone but basic cable subs to go digital, they broke the use of a lot of CPE. They COULD have left the digital signals for the Digital Basic service unscrambled and obeyed the spirit and letter of the law, but they chose not to. This isn't any premium service, it's the lowest tier of digital -- if you don't subscribe to digital they can trap your line to cut out all the digital service completely.
No, they said, you can't trap digital. Would you like to rent another DTA to connect to your VCR?
And now they are dropping all analog signals, which makes all analog CPE useless.
Obviously I don't fly around in private jets, but I'd think that they'd largely be flying IFR. A jet moves pretty fast, and I can't imagine they just go buzzing through airspace without any separation at 250kts (or higher), and they're going to burn a LOT of fuel if they stay below 18k feet.
The point is that it is legal and they can, if they want to remain out of the FAA flight databases.
They'd probably prefer to not be buzzing around in a pattern either when they land,
I'm not sure what you think this has to do with being VFR vs IFR. If you're at a tower-controlled airport (and enter the "system" when you call them to tell them you're inbound), you fly what they tell you. That can be a pattern, or more likely a straight-in if you're a jet. If you're at an uncontrolled airport, you fly what you can fly safely. That can be a straight-in. In fact, it is probably safer for a jet to fly a straight-in even with other traffic in the pattern, since they won't be trying to merge two different patterns on the turn to final. The jet and pattern traffic can adjust speeds so that the jet fits in between everything else.
That won't be a huge inconvenience or even unusual for most VFR only pattern users, since they've already got to deal with IFR traffic on approachs merging with them.
Sure, they can change their destination enroute, but that is a pain for everybody as well,
Not so much. Trying to fit into ORD or LAX on a pop-up might be hard, but diverting to most small or medium sized airports will be trivial. As for "coming along" a standard approach, if you're IFR you can be vectored onto almost any approach from any direction pretty easily. You don't need to fly every approach as a full approach as published. Most IFR traffic is vectored to final just because it is faster for the entire system to do that.
The FAA still has official knowledge of these planes and their destination.
The FAA not too long ago realized that they had a lot of bogus data for aircraft registrations. They have now started reregistering all civil aircraft in an attempt at cleaning up their database.
As for knowing the destinations? No, sorry. Anyone operating VFR under Part 91 (and probably other parts) doesn't need to file a flight plan listing a destination, so the FAA would have no idea where that plane is going. When departing a towered airport, you'll tell the controller which direction you are going so he can plan for routing of traffic in his airspace, but once you leave the airport traffic area you can turn any direction you want. In Class B or C airspace, you don't need to tell the controller your destination, just the route you want to fly to get out of that airspace. (You'd have to tell him your destination if it is in the controlled airspace.) If the controller asks and the destination is outside his control (and you're not getting an IFR clearance) you can tell him any destination you want -- you don't have to go there in reality.
Even with a flight plan on file (and an IFR clearance for IFR), all the pilot has to do is request a different destination while airborne (even as late as on final approach) and he's going somewhere else. Under a VFR flight plan, the pilot doesn't even have to ask, all he has to do is go there, making sure to either amend the plan or cancel it prior to his ETA. (On final at a tower-controlled airport, he'll have to tell the controller his direction of flight, but not destination.)
If they load up a small plane with explosives, how will keeping a destination private, except for the FAA, who is the one watching, help them?
The only reason the FAA would be watching a small aircraft is if they are in positive control airspace (Class A, B, or C, e.g., or Class D around a towered airport), or the small aircraft has asked for it (IFR flight plan or flight following.) You can easily approach many suitable targets without the FAA noticing.
Now, if you are headed towards a location with a TFR (temporary flight restriction), like around Air Force 1 or over large stadiums during sporting events, or headed towards prohibited airspace (over the White House, e.g.) the FAA will take notice and send your information to the Air Force who will come to visit you PDQ. They won' t know who you are, but they don't care who you are, just that you aren't supposed to be there.
Yes, wattage = amperage times voltage.
No, E=IR says that voltage is equal to current times resistance.
But the voltage coming out of a transformer is static.
The voltage coming out of a transformer depends on the voltage going in. The voltage going in depends on the voltage present at the input to the system and the current being drawn through that system, using E=IR to calculate the voltage drop due to resistances of the feedlines.
Further, the voltage coming out of the transformer is subject to the same voltage drop due to resistance and current before it gets to the outlet, and then again in the power cord to the device you have plugged in. And we've not yet remembered that the transformer is a considerable amount of wire, so the voltage from a transformer will drop as you draw more current from it just do to internal resistance of the transformer itself. It has to. E=IR. If the internal resistance of a transformer is 1 ohm, then drawing just one ampere will cause a one volt drop in output.
The fact is that as you draw more current from the system, the voltage drop in the transmission line increases, which means the voltage at your device drops. Anyone who has seen the lights dim when the electric furnace or other high-current appliance turns on knows this. I have UPSs that routinely beep (signalling a low-volt input condition) every time the laser printer fuser powers up.
If there's an undervoltage at the end of a distribution line, that's what's called "line loss". Ohm's law is also not negotiable.
That's what I said, but you just spend an entire paragraph denying it. The voltage out of a transformer is not constant because the voltage in will change in response to the current being drawn from the system, and the currents in the transformer change the output as well.
That includes voltage drops in the output side of the transformer and the input. Too many people on a branch can cause the voltage to sag. Your neighbor drawing more current can cause your voltage to drop. Not will, but can. And that's all without the transformer blowing up. In fact, you will hit brownout long before your transformer blows up, since the line losses are a limit on the amount of power you can draw from the line to start with. As are the breakers in your breaker panel. As are the fuses in the distribution line.
You don't know much about electricity, do you? The voltage won't drop;
E=IR. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. Even for the small R of a power line.
It is not uncommon for the E of a household outlet to be low (100-110V) for a house on the end of a distribution line simply because of the drop in the distribution line.
Too noisy was not just a Boeing claim. Early flights were not required to decelerate below mach 1 before reaching land and they sent sonic booms up and down the coast.
Then they stopped doing that and they stopped being "too noisy". Calling them "too noisy" today is incorrect.
Eventually, every single Concorde route required subsonic descents and approaches for this very reason.
Uhhh, more like they required subsonic descents and approaches so they could be handled with normal traffic, and to obey federal law that has been around for a very long time. 250 knots below 10,000 feet, and 200 knots below 2500 AGL.
The only exemptions are "approval of the Administrator" (unlikely), and "minimum safe airspeed", which certainly isn't above mach 1 for the SST.
I will say this and only this: What you are describing is a significant part of the downward spiral of humanity.
I agree. The deliberate movement to leave people behind because of the assumption that anyone who doesn't understand specialized jargon is lazy or dumb is creating a sub-class of people who get to vote but don't get information they can use to make those votes intelligently.
There was a time when journalists challenged their readership because it was assumed the readership came to the journalist in search of knowledge.
That doesn't mean the journalist can ignore the audience to which he is writing and force them to learn a whole set of technical jargon if they want to know what he's saying. A good journalist has ALWAYS written so that his audience can understand him, simply because he is supposed to be a source of information. (Not "knowledge").
Over time it became apparent that you could sell more paper if you simplified the wording and phrasing, and made it more accessible to more people.
More information to more people is a good thing.
As I said before, when the focus becomes understanding the words and not the meaning, you accomplish nothing (except selling paper).
You don't need specialized jargon to impart the meaning; in fact, the use of jargon impedes the understanding of meaning. You've already demonstrated that more than once.
The mentality that people should not have to work to improve themselves is totally and utterly flawed.
There you go again wandering off topic. Nobody is talking about people improving themselves. When you want to learn a new subject, you need to learn new stuff. When you want to inform people of a current issue that requires information to make a good decision, you're not trying to "improve" people, your need is to impart information. Jargon gets in the way.
It isn't the journalist's job to turn every reader into a climate scientist when he writes about the latest IPCC report or some proposed legislation that deals with carbon penalties. It's his job to convey information in a way that is accessible to his readers.
I'm sure you'll enjoy your Twilight novels, your Oprah, and your Doritos.
Since you can't stop being an arrogant asshole long enough to hold an intelligent discussion, I'll let you go about your way spouting jargon to your Grannie or whatever.
So I'll take my novels wordy, my TV off, and my journals rich with jargon ..
It is now clear what your problem is. You've confused the word "journalist" with the concept of technical journals. I've been pretty clear in saying that a journalist should write to the level of HIS AUDIENCE, which means a journalist who writes for JACM or Spectrum will write to a different level than one who writes for The Chicago Tribune. Please, continue to ignore that distinction and ramble on about Doritos, however. You've done so well, so far, doing that.
They could also just admit that TV = HD now,
At your house, maybe. Just this morning I got the great viewing experience of NBC Sports channel carrying a soccer game from the Olympics, but I have no idea who was playing or what the scores were, because the score and team info were pushed off the top left of the screen into the protected area.
I mean, really, how long has HD been around?
At my house, about a year. When my old 30" CRT TV died, I had to buy a new one. Wonderful, I got a new 26" LCD in HD format. That was the largest LCD that would fit in the same space the CRT used to.
Now I get to see the cable channels letterboxing all their content on my LCD HD TV, so I get a picture that is about 1/3 the size of what I used to have.
But cool, I can get the cable channels that are HD (must carries) using the new QAM tuner in the TV. I'm not impressed by the images. And I get to watch my local PBS station taking an SD image and squeezing it so that when an HD user zooms the SD image back to HD, it looks right. Looks like crap on SD, but the HD users get normal pics. Just great.
I used to go to NAB when they were pushing "convergence" and the wonderful new world of HD, and even in the large display areas I didn't see any purpose for HD, other than selling everyone a new TV. YMMV.
Your grandparents (assuming you are an American and your family not recent immigrants) measured success as universal access to telephone service (and water, and electricity).
And more importantly, they measured it in being able to get something fixed when it was broken. Before the divestiture, when you had a phone problem you called the phone company to fix it. It was their wire, their phone, their long distance, their everything.
After the divestiture, you needed to know if your trouble was close (in your own equipment), local (between the demarc and the CO), or long distance, and who you called to fix it, if there was someone you could call, depended on where the problem was.
I still fondly remember trying to get a long distance access problem fixed and having Michigan Bell point the finger at AT&T and AT&T pointing right back at Mi Bell. In the meantime, I couldn't make long distance calls at all. "It just works" is a good status.
I still can't make long distance calls from my wireline at home. You see, I had selected a cheap LD service and they folded, which left me with none. In the good old days, the LD carrier didn't go bankrupt leaving you without service, the LD carrier was the phone company.
As for being "lazy" or "dumb", you're just a flamebait spigot, aren't you?
Learn to fucking read, then get back to me on that.
I'll take that as a 'yes'.
What does "common language" have to do with anything?
You said "plainspeak". That's the common language.
Your claim that jargon becomes common language is patently false, except for those things that enter the general population anyway. Computers are pretty common today, "hard disk" followed them into the public consumption. "Dyspnea" is doctor-speak, and unless you have it or are in the medical professions it is unlikely that jargon will have made it into "plainspeak". "T1", even though computers have become common, is still jargon that most people don't know, including, according to you, the people at PC Magazine.
You said the average person reads at the 7th grade level, let's talk to them as such.
No, I did not. I said that a journalist (the topic of this discussion) should write to the level of his audience, which for public consumption is 7th grade level. A TEACHER should elevate the grade levels; a journalist's job is to inform, not teach. There is a difference.
So you are a publisher! Explains your bent.
And what explains your insulting attitude? No, I'm not a publisher. I'm talking about JOURNALISTS, who WORK FOR A LIVING. If their articles aren't read then they aren't doing their job and they get fired. Why would any publisher pay a journalist who writes articles that the readers can't deal with? In fact, why would a publisher keep a journalist on staff that can't write an article that the publisher himself can understand? You expect a publisher to sit down with his paper every day and pull out a dictionary (which are notoriously bad for defining jargon) to look up all the 'hard words'? Right. The publisher is going to send the article back and say "our audience won't understand that, explain it better". Or he'll redline the paragraph and save the column inches.
I have indeed. You are a 7th grader.
And you are an insulting idiot. My "grade level" has nothing to do with this. I showed you the definition from a technical site for a piece of jargon that we were debating, and it clearly did not match your definition. That's where a common person is going to go when they want to see what you mean when you drop the term "T1" on them, and it doesn't say what you claim it means. YOU say that it it their responsibility to learn about the terms you use so they can understand what you write; it is clear that you are not using the terms the same way they are defined by others, and that makes pushing the onus for figuring it out back onto you.
Jargon belongs where people understand it already. Making your readers (as a journalist) work harder because you were too lazy to speak to them in a way they can understand means YOU are wrong, not them. They pay your salary to convey information. You failed. You're fired.
The jargon of today is - in theory - the plainspeak of tomorrow.
I know of no such theory that would make that claim. Doctors have had a jargon for as long as there have been doctors, and while SOME of their terms have made it into common language, most have not.
If readers (and listeners) take some time on the front end to learn the terms, they will have an easier time in the long run.
No, they won't. Just what terms do you think someone who is going to see is doctor is supposed to front load into his brain? Just which of the tens of thousands of medical terms will you need today? How about learning the jargon in today's newspaper? Got a clue, before you try reading the article, what's going to be there? Nope.
Jargon is used between people who know the terms. If you know one party doesn't know them, jargon is not appropriate. Especially for a journalist whose job is to explain things to normal people.
So let's all communicate like 7th graders, instead of educating people to the 12th grade.
I didn't say that and you know it. Let's communicate with our intended audiences so they understand what we are saying, not leave them stuck running for the dictionary because we're too erudite to actually communicate. When you say "I ordered a PRI T1 line to replace your SLIP over 56k modem, Gramma", you aren't educating her, you're leaving her behind deliberately.
The author's point, which is spot on, is that dumbing things down has created a general sentiment that jargon is hard.
Some of it is. Do you deny that? Some of it takes advanced education to understand, or depends on knowing so many other things that you aren't going to pick it up just because yuo saw the word on the front page. There's a reason why they don't cover calculus in fifth grade, or nuclear reactor engineering in ninth.
What is the purpose of a journalist writing an article in a newspaper about a technical subject? Is it to teach all the readers that subject, or teach them all the jargon? No. Of course not. It's to convey information. If your reader is a layman, use layman language. You'll save time and not drive your readers away. You're competing for his time, and you'll lose as soon as you lose him. Write an article that's too hard to understand because you're using jargon and the first reaction will be "turn the page", not "find a dictionary".
A T1 can be copper or optical,
You've just proven my point. "T1: A T1 line uses two wire pairs (one for transmit, one for receive) and time division multiplexing (TDM) to interleave 24 64-Kbps voice or data channels. The standard T1 frame is 193 bits long, which holds 24 8-bit voice samples and one synchronization bit with 8,000 frames transmitted per second. T1 is not restricted to digital voice or to 64 Kbps data streams. Channels may be combined and the total 1.544 Mbps capacity can be broken up as required." No mention of fiber. It's jargon. Your definition isn't the same as someone else's. You caused confusion instead of clearing it up. And people who don't deal with it on a regular basis aren't going to know what T1 is, so that point still stands. You say "meat vindaloo, please", to one of the Indian tech support high-schoolers, and you get dog instead of beef because "we" don't know that "meat" mean beef at all. Your problem, not mine.
Yes, let's all use jargon when we don't need to.
If you don't understand what they're saying and can't be arsed to learn, just tell them "I'm too dumb or lazy too understand,
Problem is, they're telling you things that you need to make decisions about now, in many cases, not after you've gone home or to the library to look it all up.
As for being "lazy" or "dumb", you're just a flamebait spigot, aren't you?
I'd say that the "intelligent" fellow who uses jargon with someone who isn't expected to know it is the lazy one, since he's supposed to have a grasp of the concepts behind the jargon and can't be arsed to use simple words for his intended audience. If you know what pneumothorax is and cannot convert that to "air in the chest that is causing a collapse of your lung" then I doubt you have a full grasp of what it means in the first place.
He more or less says that some questions are too complicated to be explained in terms "that you're more familiar with".
If those things are too complicated to be explained in terms that the listener is familiar with, then the concept is probably not of any importance to the listener to start with. And if the listener isn't familiar with your terms, you're going to have to bring him up to speed before you can slap all the technical words on him anyway.
"Why do magnets work" doesn't need a full quantum mechanical lecture with Maxwell's equations and tensors and Feynman diagrams and chromodynamics tossed on for good measure to get the point across to a lay audience who might ask that question. Eleven dimensional string theory, hypothetical subatomic particles carrying the "field"? To one of his advanced physics classes, yes. To Joe Sixpack, no.
It's like a five year old asking "where do babies come from"? You don't go into genetics and meiosis and fallopian tubes and all the gory details to answer that question. You don't need to. Nor do you need to go into a full fluid dynamics/thermal transfer/equilibrium discussion to explain why CO2 keeps heat trapped.
I am totally behind this. The reason we have jargon and technical terms in the first place is specificity,
There are two reasons that jargon are used. First, by a person in the field to another person in the field to convey information based on a common understanding of the terms used. That's fine. That isn't what a journalist is trying to do, however.
The second reason to use jargon is to obfuscate the information or cause the recipient to lose interest. That, too, isn't what a journalist is supposed to do.
So, based on those two reasons, the answer is "NO", the journalist's job in conveying the information to his readers includes translating jargon. And if the journalist doesn't understand the jargon in the first place, he's going to have a hard time knowing which of the two reasons his source used the jargon is correct.
and failure to use these specially created words and phrases only causes confusion and false understandings.
Ever been to a doctor? Do you want him to tell you about your medical condition using jargon or clear language? How about the side effects of your prescription? Which is clearer? "This medication may cause dyspnea, anaphylaxis, or in rare cases pheochromocytoma. If you notice any of those, call an ambulance and come to the hospital immediately". Unless you are up on your medical jargon (most of us are not), you'll either be scared to death of any little event and calling 911 all the time, or not be aware that the "shortness of breath" or "itching" you are experiencing needs immediate attention. Much better to say "when you take this, you might have trouble breathing, suffer a severe alergic reaction, or in rare cases you might develop a tumor in your adrenal glands." Oh, ok. I know "trouble breathing". I know "allergic reaction". I don't know how I'd detect the last thing. Tell me more..."
Scientists typically have a hard time conveying information about what they do to the public, precisely because they become used to the jargon and don't realize that the average reading ability of their audience is 7th grade. The next time a scientists talks to you about "subaerial" events, ask him why he didn't just say "on the land". Yes, it's longer, but almost everyone understands "on the land" while not as many grasp "subaerial" (or the counterpart, subaqueous -- "underwater"). Or how about the ones who continually refer to "anthropogenic" when they could say "human-caused"?
We somehow managed to learn that meat could be chicken, beef, or pork,
"We" did? For many people "meat" means dog, cat, snake, horse, and a host of other things. It's what you deal with daily, so you know what you deal with daily.
How many people deal with dyspnea on a daily basis and have a reason to know about it, before the doctor who uses jargon uses it with you? Other than weather geeks who glue themselves to TWC, who knows "isobars"? Thermoclines? Isohaline contours? Common mode rejection?
how come we can't learn that T1 could be PRI, DIA, or dark?
"We" can, if we deal with it enough to need to know. Most of the public who reads the product of journalists don't study every field he covers so they can be conversant in the jargon. If you force people to look up the terms when they come across them, yes, you'll have "taught a man to fish" in a way, but more likely he'll say "fishing is too hard, I'm going to McDonald's. Call me when Big Brother is on."
By the way, your use of "dark" to refer to a T1 line is questionable. T1 is a copper pair which carries no light. "Dark" refers to fiber optic lines which do have a photonic signal when activated and are dark when disconnected. As in "dark fiber".
They aren't being paid to be on cable because they are covered under must carry. They can't be paid and be must-carry. Once they try to be paid for cable carriage, they lose must-carry and dissappear from the cable altogether.
They also don't have a national distribution cost that a large satellite network does. That's a pretty big expense, which they don't have to recoup from the cable company by charging for their signal.
So no, you missed the point. Satellite services (which is what we were talking about) "double dip" just like newspapers do. Nobody seems to mind that the papers do that. Why is satellite-fed network TV different?
People who sold satellite, the big ones, would say things like that because the feeds weren't scrambles, so you could get shows before commercials were inserted.
They were saying that about the pay channels like HBO because there are no ads (were, I don't know if you shouldn't count the ads for HBO programs) in the programming already.
Every advertising-supported satellite service came from the uplink with the ads already there. They had to. There was no easy or cheap way for the cable companies to break the programming up so they could insert ads themselves, they could only replace ads in the program stream with their own -- called "local avails".
Or, they would have been talking about the satellite-to-tape feeds that came out of network operations, but even those had holes where the local broadcast stations were expected to insert ads. You got to sit through a few minutes of black or "Insert Ad Here" instead of an ad, but big difference. The only feeds that weren't like that were sports feeds and you got to see the behind the scenes action where the ads were supposed to be put.
I'd like to know how we can put the nail in this utopian view of cable that it was created to provide ad-free content or that the cable fees the subscriber pay are supposed to replace the ad revenues for the program providers. That's so patently absurd that I cannot believe that anyone would say it. The local channels on cable always had ads because it was just broadcast TV on a wire, and the earliest satellite services were the SuperStations -- Ted Turner's WTBS in Atlanta being one. WGN another. WTBS carried every "local" ad for the Atlanta market, unless the cable company switched in a local, and it may have been the fact that all the Atlanta local ads were being seen in Padukah and Boise that pushed the local avail technology in the first place. You can STILL see Empire carpet ads on WGN because it is STILL a SuperStation. "1 8 hundred 5 8 8 2 3 hundred, empire"!
Since local TV is free, I figure 7 dollars is how much it actually costs to maintain the antenna, the cable, and associated equipment.
Ok, then you add a satellite-fed service and the maintenance and costs of the satellite dish and decoders etc. Greater than $7 now.
So HBO + Syfy + Food would be $10 + $2 + $2 plus the $7 hookup fee I discussed above. About $21 per month.....
Except all three channels will cost more because fewer people will be paying for them. Changing the economics of the system and expecting the prices to stay the same is a bit naive. Kind of like saying that the fixed plant cost must be $7 even when adding all kinds of other things to it. Or expecting the low-income pricing that is heavily subsidized by everyone else to stay the same when nobody is subsidizing it...
HBO costs a lot more than $10 per month.
The cost for just HBO is about what I said. That's just for the HBO. I wasn't talking about any of the other costs that are covered by the service tier you are on.
and then finally I can pay $10 on top of that to get HBO.
So, like I said, the cost of HBO is $10, but the cost of the other equipment to get HBO is more. Someone who says they want "HBO and X and Y for $15/month" is ignoring those costs that you just went on about. $15 for HBO and two other channels? Ain't gonna happen.
All I want is to be able to subscribe to HBOGo for $10 per month without having to pay another $50 per month on top of that.
Wait a minute. You can't do that. You need the internet service and the cable/DSL modem and a computer and all the other things before you can get HBOGo, so you're going to pay the other $50 (if that's what that stuff costs you) too. Just like the guy who wants HBO plus 2 for $15 ... it really costs a lot more, and $15 isn't going to cover the fixed costs of the system, much less the programming he wants.
Yet, local independent channels exist and they manage OKish when they have to pay for the syndicated content on one side and pay for the transmitter on the other.
What does that have to do with being ad-free?
Expanding their broadcast area for free (by having cable carry them) should be a boon in itself without charging an 'access fee'.
Yep. Allows more ad revenue. That's the only money they get.
If the access expands enough, they can go on to save a ton of cash shutting the transmitter down and selling it off.
At that point they lose the must-carry protections and may have to pay the cable system to be carried. What they win by going non-broadcast they lose by having to pay to be seen at all. Not very good for a small station.
I'm still not sure how this all relates to the dual-sourced revenue system that people think shouldn't exist for cable but seem not to mind at all for print.