It really is that cheap. $4.95/mo for the package + $0.43 in franchise fees = $5.38/mo. It nets you seven channels, contrasted to the nine I get with my OTA rig. It's missing three of the subchannels I get with OTA and includes QVC (thanks for that Time Warner). I believe people with QAM tuners get a few extra channels, which aren't encrypted, but it's been awhile since I've had cable so I'd have to confirm that.
Good cyber people won't put up with the insane government clearance bullshit.
There's plenty of Government agencies that need talented IT people (*cough* HHS *cough*) where you don't need to deal with 'insane government clearance bullshit'.
You're tacitly equating the organization that gave us Reading Rainbow, The News Hour, and Nova with the organization that gave us Xenu? Seriously?
Incidentally, there is a difference between PBS and its member stations, whom receive most of the benefit from the pledge drives. I can't speak to the financial situation of PBS, but I do have friends on the board of our local PBS station, and they've never been flush with cash.
Re:They where acting like the cable co / CATV
on
Bye Bye Aereo, For Now
·
· Score: 3, Informative
the day of putting rabbit ears on the TV are largely over
Those days never existed except for those lucky enough to live within a few miles of the transmitters. These people can still use rabbit ears and pull in quality signals. A friend of mine uses the non-amplified version of this, aimed at an inside wall of his house in the direction of the transmitters, and he pulls in the same channels I do. I'm 15 miles out, with a row of trees in the way, so I had to go to one of these, mounted on my back porch, which fortuitously happens to face the transmitters. Growing up I lived about 70 miles out, as the crow flies, and we had to use something like this, on a mast, with in-line amplifiers, and an antenna rotor.
Regarding 8VSB, current receivers can handle multi-path just fine. You're also overlooking the fact that multi-path was an issue with NTSC as well, leading to ghost images. Digital either works or it doesn't, invest in a quality receiver and proper antenna design (rabbit ears don't count) and you're very likely to end up in the "works" category.
Exactly wrong. 'Must carry' means CATV providers pay nothing for the content. This is at the option of the broadcaster.
Yes, and the broadcaster isn't very apt to agree to that if the CATV provider is marking up the channel, are they? Local broadcast channels are supposed to be made available at or very close to cost, because we decided as a matter of public policy that we wished to keep them in business for all the benefits (real and imagined) provided by them.
In any case, Aereo was trying to profit off the work of others, without offering them any sort of consideration in return. Why don't you try putting up an antenna and reselling the signal to your neighbors for profit. Do you think such behavior would be regarded as legal or acceptable?
Re:They where acting like the cable co / CATV
on
Bye Bye Aereo, For Now
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Aereo was a leech. They were trying to take OTA signals, for free, and retransmit them for profit. There's no "must carry" analogy here, "must carry" implies that the channels are made available for cost (where I live the CATV provider offers local broadcast channels for next to nothing, $4.95/mo last time I checked), not that the CATV provider is marking them up for profit.
The supposedly conservative judges modified an existing law.
The three dissents came from the conservative side of the court: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Maybe next time you should read the ruling (or even the Wikipedia summary) before you open your mouth? Of course, that wouldn't have meshed with your talking points, so why bother to learn the facts when you can take a cheap shot?
Re:They where acting like the cable co / CATV
on
Bye Bye Aereo, For Now
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Why should anyone pay a fee to re-transmit free-to-air TV signals? I understand that cable channels rely on subscription fees to stay in business, but we're talking about the major networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and PBS - that are broadcast across 94% of the United States at no charge.
Take PBS out of the equation, because they don't get retransmission fees. They're carried under the must-carry doctrine, meaning the cable company has to carry the local PBS station, but in exchange the station doesn't get any direct financial consideration.
Regarding the other networks, Congress gave broadcasters two choices: must-carry or retransmission consent. Most broadcasters have opted for retransmission consent, because they see it as a source of revenue that offsets their declining advertising dollars. The economics of the broadcast business have changed and it's debatable that it could survive without this source of revenue. Actually it's debatable that it will survive at all in the long term, in its current form, even with retransmission revenue. Broadcasters will continue to be squeezed financially, retransmission fees won't plug the gap indefinitely, and their ultimate future is probably one of even more reality TV crap (it's cheap to produce) and re-runs. Quality original content will be pay-to-play, with the exception of PBS, which will probably manage to survive on the goodwill of its benefactors (here's hoping), though even that isn't a guaranteed thing.
As far as why Congress set up this ecosystem, you'd have to ask them. They were trying to fix a lot of problems in the marketplace, MSOs were refusing to carry local channels or re-selling them for profit, which was a problem. As is usually the case, Congress managed to create more problems than they solved, and the legislation was actually passed over GHWB's veto.
Re: They where acting like the cable co / CATV
on
Bye Bye Aereo, For Now
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The charges that OTA channels get to charge cable companies a purely a protection racket. THAT is what should have been made illegal, not Aereo!
Take it up with Congress. It's not the job of the Supreme Court to nullify lousy laws unless they fail to pass Constitutional Muster. The Cable Act is Congress exercising its power to regulate interstate commerce, so what exactly do you wish the nine to do about it?
Their argument holds zero water with me. We haven't specifically studied the effect of Ambien on driving, but common sense says it's an extremely foolish idea to consume a depressant prior to operating heavy machinery. THC doesn't neatly fall into the depressant category, but it does have well known depressant effects, and it's beyond absurd to condone driving under the influence.
They have to pretend it's harmless, the same way the most rabid elements of the pro-choice crowd have to tell themselves "It's just a lump of cells."
Very few people are capable of simply leaving the argument at "It's your body, you're responsible for the choices you make." They have to go further and pretend that lighting a plant on fire and inhaling the smoke into your lungs is somehow good for you. As though walking around stoned all the time is somehow a benefit to yourself and society.
The best explanation I ever heard of pot came from a South Park episode: "Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but, well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored, and it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything."
You don't OD on it in the classical sense that it kills you. You can OD on it to the point that you suffer very negative effects, particularly if you eat it. For a novice user the effects would be very overwhelming. Hell, even for a regular user the effects wouldn't be pleasant. Maureen Dowd wrote about this recently.
Consuming too much of any substance sucks. I only have first hand experience with THC, alcohol, and caffeine. Of the three I've found the caffeine overdose to be the worst experience, defining overdose here as "consuming more than I should", not "consuming so much my health is in danger".
which is completely irrelevant because there is no evidence whatsoever either that marijuana impairs driving ability
Selected effects from Erowid (hardly a pro-prohibition source) which impact one's ability to operate machinery:
* slowness (slow driving, talking)
* interruption of linear memory; difficulty following a train of thought
* time sense altered (for example, cars seem like they are moving too fast); time dilation and compression are common at higher doses
* dizziness, confusion
* clumsiness, loss of coordination at high doses
One would think that we could agree that people should have full control of their faculties when operating heavy machinery. Personally, I wasted three years of my life smoking weed, I know first hand what the effects are, and I don't care to share the roadways with a bunch of stoned drivers. If you need THC so badly you can't stay sober while operating your automobile you've got a problem and need to seek help.
As an aside, I really hate people who have to argue in favor of marijuana by dismissing the known negative effects. You can't just say "Let people be responsible for their own choices", you have to dismiss the negative effects of recreational drug use. Perhaps that's a logical reaction to 75 years of lying from the other side, but it still seems intentionally dishonest to me.
Murder is a legal definition. Killings committed pursuit to the laws of war are not murder. As far as your apparent negative attitude towards the military, I'll leave you with an Orwell quote: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
Tilt at this particular windmill until the cows come home if it makes you happy. You've lost the battle of public opinion, as well as the legal one, and whether you like it or not racial quotas are soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
If you live in MA you can't (legally) own a firearm without first obtaining permission from the Commonwealth, permission that can be denied for almost any reason by your local Police Chief. Ditto for trying to carry said firearm in public. Both of these are actions that are allowed by default in the vast majority (approx 40) of the United States. MA is so hostile to the notion of self-defense that it's technically illegal to carry pepper spray there without a license. I'm hard pressed to think of a State that's worse with regards to the 2nd Amendment. New Jersey perhaps, though it's a toss up.
Pretty ironic seeing as how the American Revolution got going in MA over an attempt to disarm the population.
That's an incredibly stupid idea. You might as well make the password a six digit numeric, because that's about how long it will take a computer to go through every.dll on a standard Windows installation looking to see if one is the keyfile.
That's because the Asian-American experience doesn't speak in favor of the sort of social engineering desired by the types that favor affirmative action and other sorts of reverse discrimination. They're literally at a loss to explain why the Asian-American community isn't mired in poverty in spite of the best efforts of the evil white man to keep them down. They also ignore the experiences of the multitude of different white peoples (Italians, Irish, Poles, etc.) that faced discrimination and somehow managed to build productive lives for themselves and their progeny.
The only answer they have is to take from the successful and give to the unsuccessful, which brings to mind the quote about teaching a man to fish....
I've done week long water fasts without hallucinations. The scientific literature is filled with examples of people surviving 30+ day long hunger strikes with nothing more than water. I'd concur that it's far from optimal, but securing a source of food is the last item on the survival checklist for a reason. Shelter and water are far more important. Next in line is fire. I'd really like to know where you can get lost in CONUS (particularly east of the Mississippi) where starvation is going to become a factor before you are rescued or can find civilization.
So your solution to a handful of people being assholes is to disadvantage everyone of European and Asian descent, even though the vast majority of the disadvantaged are not assholes? My family came here in the 1930s, from Germany, and settled in the Northeast. We had nothing to do with Jim Crow or slavery. Not that it should matter, even if my ancestors had been guilty as sin it shouldn't carry down to me, unless you wish to bring back corruption of blood.
Affirmative action on the basis of race will be dead within a generation.
There's plenty of industries in the United States that would jive with your sense of business ethics. There's no reason to try and shove a square peg into a round hole when there's plenty of square holes looking for pegs.
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It really is that cheap. $4.95/mo for the package + $0.43 in franchise fees = $5.38/mo. It nets you seven channels, contrasted to the nine I get with my OTA rig. It's missing three of the subchannels I get with OTA and includes QVC (thanks for that Time Warner). I believe people with QAM tuners get a few extra channels, which aren't encrypted, but it's been awhile since I've had cable so I'd have to confirm that.
Good cyber people won't put up with the insane government clearance bullshit.
There's plenty of Government agencies that need talented IT people (*cough* HHS *cough*) where you don't need to deal with 'insane government clearance bullshit'.
You're tacitly equating the organization that gave us Reading Rainbow, The News Hour, and Nova with the organization that gave us Xenu? Seriously?
Incidentally, there is a difference between PBS and its member stations, whom receive most of the benefit from the pledge drives. I can't speak to the financial situation of PBS, but I do have friends on the board of our local PBS station, and they've never been flush with cash.
the day of putting rabbit ears on the TV are largely over
Those days never existed except for those lucky enough to live within a few miles of the transmitters. These people can still use rabbit ears and pull in quality signals. A friend of mine uses the non-amplified version of this, aimed at an inside wall of his house in the direction of the transmitters, and he pulls in the same channels I do. I'm 15 miles out, with a row of trees in the way, so I had to go to one of these, mounted on my back porch, which fortuitously happens to face the transmitters. Growing up I lived about 70 miles out, as the crow flies, and we had to use something like this, on a mast, with in-line amplifiers, and an antenna rotor.
Regarding 8VSB, current receivers can handle multi-path just fine. You're also overlooking the fact that multi-path was an issue with NTSC as well, leading to ghost images. Digital either works or it doesn't, invest in a quality receiver and proper antenna design (rabbit ears don't count) and you're very likely to end up in the "works" category.
Exactly wrong. 'Must carry' means CATV providers pay nothing for the content. This is at the option of the broadcaster.
Yes, and the broadcaster isn't very apt to agree to that if the CATV provider is marking up the channel, are they? Local broadcast channels are supposed to be made available at or very close to cost, because we decided as a matter of public policy that we wished to keep them in business for all the benefits (real and imagined) provided by them.
In any case, Aereo was trying to profit off the work of others, without offering them any sort of consideration in return. Why don't you try putting up an antenna and reselling the signal to your neighbors for profit. Do you think such behavior would be regarded as legal or acceptable?
Aereo was a leech. They were trying to take OTA signals, for free, and retransmit them for profit. There's no "must carry" analogy here, "must carry" implies that the channels are made available for cost (where I live the CATV provider offers local broadcast channels for next to nothing, $4.95/mo last time I checked), not that the CATV provider is marking them up for profit.
Here's an interesting history of the relevant legislation if you're curious.
The supposedly conservative judges modified an existing law.
The three dissents came from the conservative side of the court: Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Maybe next time you should read the ruling (or even the Wikipedia summary) before you open your mouth? Of course, that wouldn't have meshed with your talking points, so why bother to learn the facts when you can take a cheap shot?
Why should anyone pay a fee to re-transmit free-to-air TV signals? I understand that cable channels rely on subscription fees to stay in business, but we're talking about the major networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and PBS - that are broadcast across 94% of the United States at no charge.
Take PBS out of the equation, because they don't get retransmission fees. They're carried under the must-carry doctrine, meaning the cable company has to carry the local PBS station, but in exchange the station doesn't get any direct financial consideration.
Regarding the other networks, Congress gave broadcasters two choices: must-carry or retransmission consent. Most broadcasters have opted for retransmission consent, because they see it as a source of revenue that offsets their declining advertising dollars. The economics of the broadcast business have changed and it's debatable that it could survive without this source of revenue. Actually it's debatable that it will survive at all in the long term, in its current form, even with retransmission revenue. Broadcasters will continue to be squeezed financially, retransmission fees won't plug the gap indefinitely, and their ultimate future is probably one of even more reality TV crap (it's cheap to produce) and re-runs. Quality original content will be pay-to-play, with the exception of PBS, which will probably manage to survive on the goodwill of its benefactors (here's hoping), though even that isn't a guaranteed thing.
As far as why Congress set up this ecosystem, you'd have to ask them. They were trying to fix a lot of problems in the marketplace, MSOs were refusing to carry local channels or re-selling them for profit, which was a problem. As is usually the case, Congress managed to create more problems than they solved, and the legislation was actually passed over GHWB's veto.
The charges that OTA channels get to charge cable companies a purely a protection racket. THAT is what should have been made illegal, not Aereo!
Take it up with Congress. It's not the job of the Supreme Court to nullify lousy laws unless they fail to pass Constitutional Muster. The Cable Act is Congress exercising its power to regulate interstate commerce, so what exactly do you wish the nine to do about it?
Their argument holds zero water with me. We haven't specifically studied the effect of Ambien on driving, but common sense says it's an extremely foolish idea to consume a depressant prior to operating heavy machinery. THC doesn't neatly fall into the depressant category, but it does have well known depressant effects, and it's beyond absurd to condone driving under the influence.
But don't pretend that ANY drug is harmless.
They have to pretend it's harmless, the same way the most rabid elements of the pro-choice crowd have to tell themselves "It's just a lump of cells."
Very few people are capable of simply leaving the argument at "It's your body, you're responsible for the choices you make." They have to go further and pretend that lighting a plant on fire and inhaling the smoke into your lungs is somehow good for you. As though walking around stoned all the time is somehow a benefit to yourself and society.
The best explanation I ever heard of pot came from a South Park episode: "Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but, well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored, and it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything."
You don't OD on it in the classical sense that it kills you. You can OD on it to the point that you suffer very negative effects, particularly if you eat it. For a novice user the effects would be very overwhelming. Hell, even for a regular user the effects wouldn't be pleasant. Maureen Dowd wrote about this recently.
Consuming too much of any substance sucks. I only have first hand experience with THC, alcohol, and caffeine. Of the three I've found the caffeine overdose to be the worst experience, defining overdose here as "consuming more than I should", not "consuming so much my health is in danger".
which is completely irrelevant because there is no evidence whatsoever either that marijuana impairs driving ability
Selected effects from Erowid (hardly a pro-prohibition source) which impact one's ability to operate machinery:
* slowness (slow driving, talking)
* interruption of linear memory; difficulty following a train of thought
* time sense altered (for example, cars seem like they are moving too fast); time dilation and compression are common at higher doses
* dizziness, confusion
* clumsiness, loss of coordination at high doses
One would think that we could agree that people should have full control of their faculties when operating heavy machinery. Personally, I wasted three years of my life smoking weed, I know first hand what the effects are, and I don't care to share the roadways with a bunch of stoned drivers. If you need THC so badly you can't stay sober while operating your automobile you've got a problem and need to seek help.
As an aside, I really hate people who have to argue in favor of marijuana by dismissing the known negative effects. You can't just say "Let people be responsible for their own choices", you have to dismiss the negative effects of recreational drug use. Perhaps that's a logical reaction to 75 years of lying from the other side, but it still seems intentionally dishonest to me.
Murder is a legal definition. Killings committed pursuit to the laws of war are not murder. As far as your apparent negative attitude towards the military, I'll leave you with an Orwell quote: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
His next trick will be to call you a racist.
The entire fucking anti-affirmative action movement is basically white guys upset
Damn white guys.
I make $32,000/yr and live in a one bedroom apartment. Sorry if the power and privilege has gone to my head.
Tilt at this particular windmill until the cows come home if it makes you happy. You've lost the battle of public opinion, as well as the legal one, and whether you like it or not racial quotas are soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
If you live in MA you can't (legally) own a firearm without first obtaining permission from the Commonwealth, permission that can be denied for almost any reason by your local Police Chief. Ditto for trying to carry said firearm in public. Both of these are actions that are allowed by default in the vast majority (approx 40) of the United States. MA is so hostile to the notion of self-defense that it's technically illegal to carry pepper spray there without a license. I'm hard pressed to think of a State that's worse with regards to the 2nd Amendment. New Jersey perhaps, though it's a toss up.
Pretty ironic seeing as how the American Revolution got going in MA over an attempt to disarm the population.
That's an incredibly stupid idea. You might as well make the password a six digit numeric, because that's about how long it will take a computer to go through every .dll on a standard Windows installation looking to see if one is the keyfile.
That's because the Asian-American experience doesn't speak in favor of the sort of social engineering desired by the types that favor affirmative action and other sorts of reverse discrimination. They're literally at a loss to explain why the Asian-American community isn't mired in poverty in spite of the best efforts of the evil white man to keep them down. They also ignore the experiences of the multitude of different white peoples (Italians, Irish, Poles, etc.) that faced discrimination and somehow managed to build productive lives for themselves and their progeny.
The only answer they have is to take from the successful and give to the unsuccessful, which brings to mind the quote about teaching a man to fish....
I've done week long water fasts without hallucinations. The scientific literature is filled with examples of people surviving 30+ day long hunger strikes with nothing more than water. I'd concur that it's far from optimal, but securing a source of food is the last item on the survival checklist for a reason. Shelter and water are far more important. Next in line is fire. I'd really like to know where you can get lost in CONUS (particularly east of the Mississippi) where starvation is going to become a factor before you are rescued or can find civilization.
So your solution to a handful of people being assholes is to disadvantage everyone of European and Asian descent, even though the vast majority of the disadvantaged are not assholes? My family came here in the 1930s, from Germany, and settled in the Northeast. We had nothing to do with Jim Crow or slavery. Not that it should matter, even if my ancestors had been guilty as sin it shouldn't carry down to me, unless you wish to bring back corruption of blood.
Affirmative action on the basis of race will be dead within a generation.
There's plenty of industries in the United States that would jive with your sense of business ethics. There's no reason to try and shove a square peg into a round hole when there's plenty of square holes looking for pegs.