What I don't like is the fact that space is becoming increasingly privatised.
Well, why shouldn't it be? Most endeavors in the US are handled privately.
Well, because the market mechanism doesn't work as well as the public mechanism here - if the US were only able to shed its market fundamentalism and understand that some tasks are optimal for one sector, some for the other. Space exploration is the archetypal community effort - it benefits all of mankind and almost all financial benefits to the country are almost entirely external (research and development yielding advances in manufacturing, engineering, etcetera)
Of course, you might get results because all the people who actually want to get space stuff done will gravitate towards the suboptimal solution, but the optimal solution would just be to lobby for a change in priorities of your national government. For the price of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars you could do the Apollo project between 10 and 40 times over, depending on which estimate you trust, never mind the human cost.
First of all, "Becoming epidemic" is perfectly cromulent since epidemic is both an adjective and a noun.
Second of all, it is probably the more descriptive word. "Widespread" do not convey the notion of something which is catching on, in this case due to social pressures - which "epidemic" does.
The problem with Mitt is that it wasn't clear that it was a joke.
There are two problems, one minor, one severe, which caused this:
One, he's not the funniest man in the world. That's fine. People are voting for a politican, and a great sense of humour and delivery - although useful, is not a prerequisite.
The second problem is the real one: He has said - and is running on a platform of! - so many so profoundly stupid things that it was in no way clear that he didn't sincerely mean this to be true.
If they had been able to scan the originals, that might yield a quality improvement - but there are so many things I'd love to try out with the raw materials.
I would be very interested in seeing what digital image processing might be possible to use - if one could mangle the three temporally separate frames into a luminance signal and a chrominance signal which interpolates using motion-compensation derived from luminance, that might temper the rainbow effect somewhat - and triple the temporal resolution!
The person is operating a business - admittedly, on non-standard terms - but she is running a business. That does include a requirement to understand and comply with the basic laws of the land. And she has done it in a way which runs afoul of some laws that are there for good reasons but which are not impossible to get around.
It's bureaucracy doing exactly what it is supposed to do: Ensuring a functional market by regulating it competently.
The Genesis account clearly says that the 24-hour day was not in existence until the 4th creative day, thus the creative "days" could not have been literal Earth days. Technically, the last two could have been, but they weren't because 1) the same word for "day" is used for all six, and 2) science (duh).
Personally, I am a creationist (couldn't you guess?), but I actually know what the Bible says.
That's an odd claim. I looked up the Young Literal Translation:
4 And God seeth the light that [it is] good, and God separateth between the light and the darkness, 5 and God calleth to the light `Day,' and to the darkness He hath called `Night;' and there is an evening, and there is a morning -- day one. (...) 13 and there is an evening, and there is a morning -- day third. 14 And God saith, `Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens, to make a separation between the day and the night, then they have been for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and they have been for luminaries in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth:' and it is so. 16 And God maketh the two great luminaries, the great luminary for the rule of the day, and the small luminary -- and the stars -- for the rule of the night; 17 and God giveth them in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth,
Which suggests a few things: Firstly that the separation God made between night and day occured on the first day, not the fourth (but some more stuff happens on the third). Since you trumpet your superior knowledge of the Bible, I think you really ought to at least have memory of the first page of the book. Secondly, he makes the statement right at the top. Thirdly, that the presence of these lights in the sky was the definition of the time of day. Fourthly, that he means "day" and "night" to be something which is only indicated by the presence of the luminaries, and not something which is actually defined inherently by their relative position.
Interestingly, the literal translation also does seem to indicate quite strongly that the Moon gives off light - which, together with the implied geocentricity, I would consider a claim difficult to reconcile with your argument that the Bible is not inconsistent with scientific findings.
Wait, what? I don't see how that makes sense in the context you used "them" in the above text...
The Second Amendment is an excellent example of an idea which has no real relevance for the purpose intended in the old days, which should really not be a part of the US Constitution.
I think we need more protection against collective punishment-like restrictions ("Some people abuse guns; ban them for everyone."). Again, I don't think the current amendments go far enough in this regard. I believe it needs to be made explicitly clear.
That's a weird way to state the problem. It's not a collective punishment - it's a risk/benefit assessment. The fact that I'm not allowed to carry out biological experiments on contagious diseases or store high explosives in my downtown apartment is good because I don't see any reason anyone would do that. That's not a "punishment". The thought that my neighbor does not have those rights is a relief. And it does prevent random accidents. The point is: Why would you need a semi-automatic weapon for personal use? Is regulating their ownership really "punishment", or is that really just a disingenuous turn of phrase?
The primary reason why it is possible to ensure that the gun control is so incredibly lax in the US, is by harping on the ramifications of the Second Amendment and the idea that it provides some kind of hypothetical balance of power against the US Government. Sure. Try forming a militia, go somewhere and rebel - see how that works out for your group and the crater that would surround it.
But that argument, so incredibly separated from reality, is the primary argument against gun control - and that is possible because the Constitution is turning into something people are supposed to have faith in, in the religious sense, rather than a document that should appeal to rationality.
Ironically, the idea that the Constitution is immutable really does remove freedom of self-determination from the people - subverting the intent of the document.
Personally, I don't get this idea of turning the Constitution into a dogmatic, religious text. To me, the idea that the document is to be revered for the position it has rather than its content, lessens its value by implying it will not stand its content being tested. My reverence is reserved for liberal values, and not the text itself. Especially when it is generally ignored anyway when it's considered convenient by the executive branch.
Don't get me wrong - as a historical document it is one of the most important documents in human history, but laws appropriate for ensuring a free society in 1776 may well not be appropriate for 2012, hard as that may seem to understand. The Second Amendment is an excellent example of an idea which has no real relevance for the purpose intended in the old days, which should really not be a part of the US Constitution.
At home in Norway, we change our constitution from time to time. It's much closer to being just another law, than it is to being a sacrament. I like it that way.
As an extra data point: in Norway, we have the concept of protected speech, which refers to types of expressions which are covered by the Norwegian constitutional provisions for free speech. Advertisement, for instance, is not considered protected speech - which is why it's possible to ban false advertisement.
x86 is not a monoculture. That is an absurd claim.
All problems with the x86 instruction set have lay in its implementation, which differs wildly from processor set to processor set. The implementations of the ISA may have security issues, but there is no inherent insecurity in the x86 instruction set.
Actually, that's more or less something of a myth. If you look at the delay taken after a failed manned mission, for instance, the Soviets would take significantly longer time to look over their mistakes than the US would.
There were certainly quiet failures, but those have come out into the open by now. After the fall of the iron curtain and the declassification of Soviet space information, there was no discovery of any body of fatal accidents so massive that they indicate that the Soviet Union took, as you put it "losses in stride" to any greater extent than the United States did.
What was "fun" was some of the later OS installs that came on floppies. Anybody remember how many floppies Win95 took? And it never failed that one of the floppies, usually one of those needed at the very end, wouldn't work.
That's nothing. The Norwegian company that delivered the computing hardware and software for the F16 flight simulator, Norsk Data, was actually required by the US Air Force to deliver their software as punched cards for quite a few years after punch cards had really gone out of fashion.
Every software patch was the same - requiring staff to manually collate the source code punched cards - basically, manually merging patches.
Actually IIRC the DEC Rainbow just didn't have formatting capacity on its floppy controller. There is software to get PCs to format RX50 diskettes, and there is a single DEC with an RX50 that can be triggered to format RX50 floppies. Part of me wants to say that it was the Rainbow - that or the Pro 380...
You're describing "sticky shed syndrome", or hydrolysis of the polyurethane binding layer between the oxide and the base. Some tape brands are more susceptible to it than others. Storage conditions are another significant determinant.
Basically, humidity reacts with the glue that keeps the rust sticking to the plastic. If there was archival data of such significance, the tapes should have been "baked" - that is, slowly heated to a precise temperature which would re-dry the glue. After that, the tapes would probably mount fine.
If you had conferred with some people like the Computer History Museum (just down the block from the Googleplex), they would have helped you out.
Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision. Plus, they used big and slow bombers, which made it possible to intercept them. Thus, they employed a lesson from Ken Thompson in the future: "When in doubt, use brute force".:)
The design was not scaled down as such - it was a 100MT bomb; they simply substituted lead for U-238 in the tamper.
> But what if experiments were to conclusively prove that all aspects of personality can be explained by neurological processes? Then, consciousness would be tied to an observable, physical mechanism
You fallacy is assuming brain = mind.
How on earth can you say my fallacy is that assumption when you're replying to a sentence which explicitly supposes it as a hypothetical?
> There are no experiments you can perform to confirm or invalidate the existence of God.
Actually there is. Unfortunately it requires death as that results of that experience and the aftermath will provide all the proofs and more then one person could ever dream that indeed your consciousness simply changes state after death, and that there is a super-consciousness to the sub-consciousness of everyone. *Unfortunately* getting the results of said experiment back to the living is the catch.
But what if experiments were to conclusively prove that all aspects of personality can be explained by neurological processes? Then, consciousness would be tied to an observable, physical mechanism and then you would need to render the idea of a mirroring consciousness existing outside the observed - which is kind of a stretch, but those are not exactly news to theology.
The basic point that should be made is that just because something cannot be disproven does not mean that it is more likely than any other arbitrary and absurd claim. The reason the belief in a deity is taken seriously is because it is more widely held than the belief that we all stem from an invisible Coca-Cola dispenser inside the core of the Moon; the two claims have the same amount of intellectual merit.
Science is not a zero-sum game. Scientific discoveries enrich everybody, regardless of which country they're made in.
Yep, but scientific advances in a country act as an indicator of the technological and scientific standing of the nation at large (which more often than not are are advanced by the investments in those scientific advancements).
Think of the Apollo Space Program. Sure, it embiggened mankind, but the materials and computer competence required to build those rockets stayed in the US, and was just another government-funded cornerstone of the tech that made the US dominate the world economy to an extent that it's still coasting on the successes of yesteryear.
"I don't know if I'd say NOTHING. It's pretty fucking hot outside."
Where you live, maybe. We've just gone through one of the coldest Springs on record. The other was last year.
Arguing that climate science is wrong because of weather is like arguing that the theory of gravity is wrong because your helium balloon goes up. Stupid.
But that's beside the point. Gore sure as hell didn't show us any CAUSE. What he showed us were graphs without scales or indexes, or numbers of any kind... rhetoric, but not evidence.
Yes, and Nelson Mandela should never have gotten the Peace Prize either. I mean, his work against Apartheid was sorely lacking in citations and his party program wasn't even accepted by any major peer-reviewed journal!
We knew it was getting hotter, even without AGW. So "it's hot outside" isn't an argument in Gore's favor. If AGW ever does turn out to be true, he stands to make a freaking fortune with the cap-and-trade businesses he set up. And if that's not conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
The whole POINT of the Nobel Peace Prize is to help a good thing become a bigger thing. Both by granting it visibility on the global stage and a little bit of dough, it's supposed to help it out. Gore does not operate a "cap and trade" business; that's government policy, not a business model. He does oversee some green investment funds, though.
Which kind of makes sense if you seem to be one of few people with deep pockets who realize what impact this will have on the profitability of different things.
Taking off my trainee broadcast engineer hat now, and making this argument only as an individual here: Don't forget that much like a free press benefits a society whether or not you read the papers, the value delivered to society by media independent of commercial interests goes far beyond whether or not you actually watch it yourself.
The nature of publically licensed media is diametrically opposed to the nature of advertisement-funded ones. With ad-funded TV, the viewer is not the customer, but the product. The repercussions this fact has in every aspect of content productions are difficult to overstate.
Since the commercial pressure is alleviated, the networks also tend to be more informative and less tabloid. Which in turn means that voters are better informed about which representatives serve their interests - which means that everyone is more likely to get a fair shake in life.
The proportion of the cost to television networks of distribution versus production has been steadily declining ever since television began. Largely the cost now lies in content production. But I certainly agree: The definition of what constitutes a television will become irrelevant in a surprisingly short amount of time, so it's also a significant political challenge.
Putting on my Labour Youth member hat now to view this from a political angle: NRK needs to be completely independent from short-term political fluctuations, and must never be afraid to challenge the powers that be. The license has proven to be an excellent way of doing this, and folding it into the state budget has not. The solution is not obvious, but we need one. I've wondered that perhaps a constitutional amendment might be a good way to go about this. A free press bound to its stock holders' interests is not free. The country needs a press outlet which isn't so obsessed about ratings that they're afraid to discuss boring but important news.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't like is the fact that space is becoming increasingly privatised.
Well, why shouldn't it be? Most endeavors in the US are handled privately.
Well, because the market mechanism doesn't work as well as the public mechanism here - if the US were only able to shed its market fundamentalism and understand that some tasks are optimal for one sector, some for the other. Space exploration is the archetypal community effort - it benefits all of mankind and almost all financial benefits to the country are almost entirely external (research and development yielding advances in manufacturing, engineering, etcetera)
Of course, you might get results because all the people who actually want to get space stuff done will gravitate towards the suboptimal solution, but the optimal solution would just be to lobby for a change in priorities of your national government. For the price of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars you could do the Apollo project between 10 and 40 times over, depending on which estimate you trust, never mind the human cost.
First of all, "Becoming epidemic" is perfectly cromulent since epidemic is both an adjective and a noun.
Second of all, it is probably the more descriptive word. "Widespread" do not convey the notion of something which is catching on, in this case due to social pressures - which "epidemic" does.
The problem with Mitt is that it wasn't clear that it was a joke.
There are two problems, one minor, one severe, which caused this:
One, he's not the funniest man in the world. That's fine. People are voting for a politican, and a great sense of humour and delivery - although useful, is not a prerequisite.
The second problem is the real one: He has said - and is running on a platform of! - so many so profoundly stupid things that it was in no way clear that he didn't sincerely mean this to be true.
They did: They picked the metric system, which they have been using since 1990 and exclusively since 2007.
The submitter is the one who used the deprecated regional standard.
If they had been able to scan the originals, that might yield a quality improvement - but there are so many things I'd love to try out with the raw materials.
I would be very interested in seeing what digital image processing might be possible to use - if one could mangle the three temporally separate frames into a luminance signal and a chrominance signal which interpolates using motion-compensation derived from luminance, that might temper the rainbow effect somewhat - and triple the temporal resolution!
The person is operating a business - admittedly, on non-standard terms - but she is running a business. That does include a requirement to understand and comply with the basic laws of the land. And she has done it in a way which runs afoul of some laws that are there for good reasons but which are not impossible to get around.
It's bureaucracy doing exactly what it is supposed to do: Ensuring a functional market by regulating it competently.
The Genesis account clearly says that the 24-hour day was not in existence until the 4th creative day, thus the creative "days" could not have been literal Earth days. Technically, the last two could have been, but they weren't because 1) the same word for "day" is used for all six, and 2) science (duh).
Personally, I am a creationist (couldn't you guess?), but I actually know what the Bible says.
That's an odd claim. I looked up the Young Literal Translation:
4 And God seeth the light that [it is] good, and God separateth between the light and the darkness,
5 and God calleth to the light `Day,' and to the darkness He hath called `Night;' and there is an evening, and there is a morning -- day one.
(...)
13 and there is an evening, and there is a morning -- day third.
14 And God saith, `Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens, to make a separation between the day and the night, then they have been for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years,
15 and they have been for luminaries in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth:' and it is so.
16 And God maketh the two great luminaries, the great luminary for the rule of the day, and the small luminary -- and the stars -- for the rule of the night;
17 and God giveth them in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth,
Which suggests a few things: Firstly that the separation God made between night and day occured on the first day, not the fourth (but some more stuff happens on the third). Since you trumpet your superior knowledge of the Bible, I think you really ought to at least have memory of the first page of the book. Secondly, he makes the statement right at the top. Thirdly, that the presence of these lights in the sky was the definition of the time of day. Fourthly, that he means "day" and "night" to be something which is only indicated by the presence of the luminaries, and not something which is actually defined inherently by their relative position.
Interestingly, the literal translation also does seem to indicate quite strongly that the Moon gives off light - which, together with the implied geocentricity, I would consider a claim difficult to reconcile with your argument that the Bible is not inconsistent with scientific findings.
Who is them?
The exceptions.
Wait, what? I don't see how that makes sense in the context you used "them" in the above text...
The Second Amendment is an excellent example of an idea which has no real relevance for the purpose intended in the old days, which should really not be a part of the US Constitution.
I think we need more protection against collective punishment-like restrictions ("Some people abuse guns; ban them for everyone."). Again, I don't think the current amendments go far enough in this regard. I believe it needs to be made explicitly clear.
That's a weird way to state the problem. It's not a collective punishment - it's a risk/benefit assessment. The fact that I'm not allowed to carry out biological experiments on contagious diseases or store high explosives in my downtown apartment is good because I don't see any reason anyone would do that. That's not a "punishment". The thought that my neighbor does not have those rights is a relief. And it does prevent random accidents. The point is: Why would you need a semi-automatic weapon for personal use? Is regulating their ownership really "punishment", or is that really just a disingenuous turn of phrase?
The primary reason why it is possible to ensure that the gun control is so incredibly lax in the US, is by harping on the ramifications of the Second Amendment and the idea that it provides some kind of hypothetical balance of power against the US Government. Sure. Try forming a militia, go somewhere and rebel - see how that works out for your group and the crater that would surround it.
But that argument, so incredibly separated from reality, is the primary argument against gun control - and that is possible because the Constitution is turning into something people are supposed to have faith in, in the religious sense, rather than a document that should appeal to rationality.
Ironically, the idea that the Constitution is immutable really does remove freedom of self-determination from the people - subverting the intent of the document.
Who is them?
Personally, I don't get this idea of turning the Constitution into a dogmatic, religious text. To me, the idea that the document is to be revered for the position it has rather than its content, lessens its value by implying it will not stand its content being tested. My reverence is reserved for liberal values, and not the text itself. Especially when it is generally ignored anyway when it's considered convenient by the executive branch.
Don't get me wrong - as a historical document it is one of the most important documents in human history, but laws appropriate for ensuring a free society in 1776 may well not be appropriate for 2012, hard as that may seem to understand. The Second Amendment is an excellent example of an idea which has no real relevance for the purpose intended in the old days, which should really not be a part of the US Constitution.
At home in Norway, we change our constitution from time to time. It's much closer to being just another law, than it is to being a sacrament. I like it that way.
The Constitution is implemented as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court.
There are a multitude of limits to freedom of speech, as there must be. Wikipedia has a good list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions
As an extra data point: in Norway, we have the concept of protected speech, which refers to types of expressions which are covered by the Norwegian constitutional provisions for free speech. Advertisement, for instance, is not considered protected speech - which is why it's possible to ban false advertisement.
x86 is not a monoculture. That is an absurd claim.
All problems with the x86 instruction set have lay in its implementation, which differs wildly from processor set to processor set. The implementations of the ISA may have security issues, but there is no inherent insecurity in the x86 instruction set.
Actually, that's more or less something of a myth. If you look at the delay taken after a failed manned mission, for instance, the Soviets would take significantly longer time to look over their mistakes than the US would.
There were certainly quiet failures, but those have come out into the open by now. After the fall of the iron curtain and the declassification of Soviet space information, there was no discovery of any body of fatal accidents so massive that they indicate that the Soviet Union took, as you put it "losses in stride" to any greater extent than the United States did.
What was "fun" was some of the later OS installs that came on floppies. Anybody remember how many floppies Win95 took? And it never failed that one of the floppies, usually one of those needed at the very end, wouldn't work.
That's nothing. The Norwegian company that delivered the computing hardware and software for the F16 flight simulator, Norsk Data, was actually required by the US Air Force to deliver their software as punched cards for quite a few years after punch cards had really gone out of fashion.
Every software patch was the same - requiring staff to manually collate the source code punched cards - basically, manually merging patches.
Actually IIRC the DEC Rainbow just didn't have formatting capacity on its floppy controller. There is software to get PCs to format RX50 diskettes, and there is a single DEC with an RX50 that can be triggered to format RX50 floppies. Part of me wants to say that it was the Rainbow - that or the Pro 380...
You're describing "sticky shed syndrome", or hydrolysis of the polyurethane binding layer between the oxide and the base. Some tape brands are more susceptible to it than others. Storage conditions are another significant determinant.
Basically, humidity reacts with the glue that keeps the rust sticking to the plastic. If there was archival data of such significance, the tapes should have been "baked" - that is, slowly heated to a precise temperature which would re-dry the glue. After that, the tapes would probably mount fine.
If you had conferred with some people like the Computer History Museum (just down the block from the Googleplex), they would have helped you out.
Yeah, but that kind of defeats the point of Facebook's extremely powerful photo sharing systems, though.
Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision. Plus, they used big and slow bombers, which made it possible to intercept them. Thus, they employed a lesson from Ken Thompson in the future: "When in doubt, use brute force". :)
The design was not scaled down as such - it was a 100MT bomb; they simply substituted lead for U-238 in the tamper.
> But what if experiments were to conclusively prove that all aspects of personality can be explained by neurological processes? Then, consciousness would be tied to an observable, physical mechanism
You fallacy is assuming brain = mind.
How on earth can you say my fallacy is that assumption when you're replying to a sentence which explicitly supposes it as a hypothetical?
If the next step in discovering what makes the world around us tick involves a slightly larger tunnel, I'm all for it.
> There are no experiments you can perform to confirm or invalidate the existence of God.
Actually there is. Unfortunately it requires death as that results of that experience and the aftermath will provide all the proofs and more then one person could ever dream that indeed your consciousness simply changes state after death, and that there is a super-consciousness to the sub-consciousness of everyone. *Unfortunately* getting the results of said experiment back to the living is the catch.
But what if experiments were to conclusively prove that all aspects of personality can be explained by neurological processes? Then, consciousness would be tied to an observable, physical mechanism and then you would need to render the idea of a mirroring consciousness existing outside the observed - which is kind of a stretch, but those are not exactly news to theology.
The basic point that should be made is that just because something cannot be disproven does not mean that it is more likely than any other arbitrary and absurd claim. The reason the belief in a deity is taken seriously is because it is more widely held than the belief that we all stem from an invisible Coca-Cola dispenser inside the core of the Moon; the two claims have the same amount of intellectual merit.
I did not use "Stupid" as a noun to address you, I used the word as an adjective to describe the line of reasoning. Clearly.
"That's beside the point" means "it is not relevant to the argument I'm making", which is not the same as "That is irrelevant to global warming".
Oh, god, this is stupid.
Science is not a zero-sum game. Scientific discoveries enrich everybody, regardless of which country they're made in.
Yep, but scientific advances in a country act as an indicator of the technological and scientific standing of the nation at large (which more often than not are are advanced by the investments in those scientific advancements).
Think of the Apollo Space Program. Sure, it embiggened mankind, but the materials and computer competence required to build those rockets stayed in the US, and was just another government-funded cornerstone of the tech that made the US dominate the world economy to an extent that it's still coasting on the successes of yesteryear.
"I don't know if I'd say NOTHING. It's pretty fucking hot outside."
Where you live, maybe. We've just gone through one of the coldest Springs on record. The other was last year.
Arguing that climate science is wrong because of weather is like arguing that the theory of gravity is wrong because your helium balloon goes up. Stupid.
But that's beside the point. Gore sure as hell didn't show us any CAUSE. What he showed us were graphs without scales or indexes, or numbers of any kind... rhetoric, but not evidence.
Yes, and Nelson Mandela should never have gotten the Peace Prize either. I mean, his work against Apartheid was sorely lacking in citations and his party program wasn't even accepted by any major peer-reviewed journal!
We knew it was getting hotter, even without AGW. So "it's hot outside" isn't an argument in Gore's favor. If AGW ever does turn out to be true, he stands to make a freaking fortune with the cap-and-trade businesses he set up. And if that's not conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
The whole POINT of the Nobel Peace Prize is to help a good thing become a bigger thing. Both by granting it visibility on the global stage and a little bit of dough, it's supposed to help it out. Gore does not operate a "cap and trade" business; that's government policy, not a business model. He does oversee some green investment funds, though.
Which kind of makes sense if you seem to be one of few people with deep pockets who realize what impact this will have on the profitability of different things.
Or my favorite:
EINE - EINE Is Not EMACS
ZWEI - ZWEI Was Eine Initially
Taking off my trainee broadcast engineer hat now, and making this argument only as an individual here: Don't forget that much like a free press benefits a society whether or not you read the papers, the value delivered to society by media independent of commercial interests goes far beyond whether or not you actually watch it yourself.
The nature of publically licensed media is diametrically opposed to the nature of advertisement-funded ones. With ad-funded TV, the viewer is not the customer, but the product. The repercussions this fact has in every aspect of content productions are difficult to overstate.
Since the commercial pressure is alleviated, the networks also tend to be more informative and less tabloid. Which in turn means that voters are better informed about which representatives serve their interests - which means that everyone is more likely to get a fair shake in life.
The proportion of the cost to television networks of distribution versus production has been steadily declining ever since television began. Largely the cost now lies in content production. But I certainly agree: The definition of what constitutes a television will become irrelevant in a surprisingly short amount of time, so it's also a significant political challenge.
Putting on my Labour Youth member hat now to view this from a political angle: NRK needs to be completely independent from short-term political fluctuations, and must never be afraid to challenge the powers that be. The license has proven to be an excellent way of doing this, and folding it into the state budget has not. The solution is not obvious, but we need one. I've wondered that perhaps a constitutional amendment might be a good way to go about this. A free press bound to its stock holders' interests is not free. The country needs a press outlet which isn't so obsessed about ratings that they're afraid to discuss boring but important news.