No. Analog television has a SOFT floor, where the difference between watchable and unwatchable varies from person-to-person. The floor is movable.
>>>"They're actually receiving far more watchable digital signals than they would have done with analog, but it doesn't feel like that because they had a greater selection of signals with analog that "showed up" on the TV." >>>
Real-world example:
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via analog - it's black-n-white but I can follow the action
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via digital - due to the 50 mile distance, the tuner just displays a blank screen
Remind me again: How is a "digital blank screen" better than my watchable analog image?!?!? Grrrr. Hulk mad. Hulk smash. Hulk want Ravens.;-)
>>>They're actually receiving far more watchable digital signals than they would have done with analog, but it doesn't feel like that because they had a greater selection of signals with analog that "showed up" on the TV. >>>
Real-world example:
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via analog - it's fuzzy but I can follow the action
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via digital - due to the 50 mile distance, the tuner just displays a blank screen
Remind me again: How is a "digital blank screen" better than my watchable analog image?!?!? Grrrr. Hulk mad. Hulk smash. Hulk want Ravens.;-)
>>>The threshold level of data loss that overwhelms the error correction is MUCH lower than that to make an analog signal effectively unwatchable.
Gotta disagree. If we're comparing watchable versus unwatchable, I think analog wins. With a rooftop antenna in southeast Pennsylvania I get around 25 watchable analog stations. With my CM7000 DTV tuner box, that drops to just 13. (The remaining 12 stations are just blank screens.) Clearly the analog has a lower threshold before it becomes unwatchable, and the digital has a higher threshold at which point it displays nothing.
>>>The digital TV uses less, and in a different band.
False, false, false. Why do people keep repeating these lies?!?!? (Normally I'd say mistakes or false facts, but it's been repeated so many times, it's now become a lie.) U.S.-DTV uses the same 6 megahertz per channel bandwidth as analog. DTV uses the same VHF and UHF bands as analog.
>>>these are raw HD signals, not pre-compressed to fit into a cable channel or satellite broadcast.
False.
Raw HD would require ~1000 megabit/second whereas ATSC-TV is only 19 megabit/s wide. Therefore the HD has to be compressed prior to transmission. ALSO: If your station has multiple channels, that makes the HD even more compressed.... perhaps only 8 megabit/s. (For comparison, HD-Bluray is 50 megabit/s.) So yes over-the-air HDTV is compressed, often to the point of visible artifacts.
The human eye is better at "seeing" a picture in noise, than the digital tuner, and that's why analog signals are viewable at farther distances than digital. The eye can extrapolate & reconstruct whereas the digital computer just goes "Huh?" and displays a blank screen.
>>>Also, taxes aren't a bad thing. They pay for all sorts of things like roads...
Taxes are fine as long as they are used to benefit ALL (or nearly-all) the people, and not used as a vehicle to enslave the general population to enrich a few (like slaves were used to enrich one solitary master). I don't agree with using taxes to redistribute wealth from lots of neighbors, just to buy one person a new car. It makes me feel like I am working down on the plantation with chains on my legs, and that is the antithesis of what "liberty" means.
Also, roads? They are directly funded by drivers. If you don't drive, you don't pay the road tax which is collected at the gas pump.
An immoral law is an immoral law. We repealed slavery laws, because they violated the Right of Liberty for african immigrants. Similarly a law that sucks $20,000 out of people's paychecks to buy some person a new car, violates both the Right of Property and the Right of Liberty (it's a form of partial enslavement.)
More succinctly - Stealing is still stealing, whether done by a thug on the street, or a politician in a suit.
>>>And then they are further convinced that "elitists" don't care about them.
Probably true, but the people observing the conversation will know better. They'll be able to see that the Conspiracist had no ability to form a rational argument.
>>>They're not taking away your right to free speech. It's their platform, nobody is shoving the iPhone down your throat...
Oh really? So if I open my brand-new Iphone and discover a NDA inside that says, "By purchasing this item, you the customer agree not to complain, post, email, or otherwise disclose that you are unhappy with its operations.....", are you still going to still tell me my Right to Free Speech is not being violated? (After all, it's their platform, nobody forced me to buy it.)
Forget that. I'm going to complain as is my right as a customer, and if Apple wants to sue me in court, I'll be happy to show up with five lawyers trailing behind me. (After all, my great-great-grandfather picked-up a musket and shot at Redcoats to protect his freedoms; the least I can do is spend a few bucks to hire lawyers to protect my own.)
A few years ago when Paypal was taken to court, most of the "user agreement" was thrown-out since it violated state or federal laws. The judge decided that consumers can not sign-away their legal protections. Apple's unsigned or shrinkwrapped NDA would also be thrown-out for similar reasons.
And to be honest, even if I was legally-bound to the NDA, I'd still disclose the whys and wherefores of my application rejection. From time-to-time, liberty must be protected with a little civil disobedience in order to protect one's rights, privileges, and freedoms.
I think my watching of Heroes at nbc.com (an application requiring realtime streaming) should have a high-priority than grandma's downloading of email, or Billy's downloading of Hannah Montana photos. The latter functions can be delayed; the streaming video can not.
However Comcast's design does the exact opposite: it gives priority to emails, and delays packets for the real-time video streaming. Illogical, and the only thing that justifies this action is to deliberately break Internet TV streams.
>>>That said, giving bulk downloads equal or greater priority than latency sensitive solutions WILL make them unusable.
Precisely. I can bittorrent the 2-hour premier of Heroes, and if it takes 10 hours to download it, no big deal. But I can NOT accept that kind of latency if I'm watching Heroes "live" on nbc.com. It must stream in real-time without pauses.
Comcast's solution (throttle traffic) basically breaks people's access to watching television at fox.com, cwtv.com, usachannel.com and so on. Perhaps that was their REAL intent behind this proposal - kill the internet television that competes against Comcast's own television business. I think the FCC needs to open another investigation.
>>>Users who are found to be occupying large amounts of bandwidth will be placed at a lower priority for network access
So much for net neutrality.
What this basically means is the power users (perhaps work-at-home folks) will be punished, while those who rarely use the net (mom) will get preference. Isn't that the exact opposite of how business works? Usually it's the frequent customers who get "preferred" treatment, because those customers bring in more money.
Scientists need to stop saying "Newton's Law" and start saying "Newton's Theory" or "Copernicus' Theory" and so on. Nothing is absolute in science. Nothing is law.
>>>To me, it seems rather a learning issue how coping with vagueness is implemented, not a characteristic of the hardware layer
I agree. I recall reading Thomas Jefferson's discovery of sea creature fossils in nearby mountains. He was unable to reconcile the then-dominant view of a perfect God creating a perfect world, with the idea that the mountains used to harbor sea-creatures. He examined a bunch of possibilities (including Noah's flood), and rejected all of them as illogical and non-explanatory. At the end of his paper he simply wrote, "I do not know." The answer to this puzzle was not discovered until ~100 years later (the earth's surface is like a jigsaw with pieces ramming into one another, thereby turning oceans into mountains).
This world would be better-served if we had schools teach students to be like Jefferson and say "I don't know" more often, rather than force them to cough-up any old answer that comes to mind. As somebody once said (forget who): "A foolish consistency is the hobglobin of little minds..."
Yes WE have all been guilty of not listening. But that's okay! We can use that to our advantage. Oftentimes, when you debate with someone, the goal is not to convince that person. The goal is to convince the other people listening to the debate. For example:
"I think the government should provide a free car to everyone, since it's a necessity to life in America."
"Okay. Would you consider it okay to break-into your neighbors' homes, remove $20,000 from their wallets, and use that money to buy yourself a new car?"
"No of course not. That's stealing."
"Then why do you think it's okay for the government to steal the $20,000 via paycheck taxes?"
"Um... er... because everybody needs a car! It's a basic right!" ----- In this hypothetical debate, I obviously did not change this democratic-socialist's mind. Due to cognitive dissonance he simply chose to not hear what I was saying to him. However I still achieved my goal: I convinced some of the audience that the idea is immoral (because theft is theft, whether it's done directly by a thief, or through the government acting as the thief's agent).
One of the reasons analog NTSC is tunable is because it has a STRONG synchronizing signal. The tuner can lock onto that sync, and even though the rest of the image might be noise, it still has a strong lock on the station & can decode the audio..... or possibly black-and-white. i.e. Something watchable.
The new digital ATSC lacks a strong sync signal, so the tuner ends-up drifting all over the place without a proper lock. Hence, no picture or sound because the tuner can't "find" the station! The designers of digital should have included a synchronizing "burst" to stop tuner drift.
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No. Analog television has a SOFT floor, where the difference between watchable and unwatchable varies from person-to-person. The floor is movable.
>>>"They're actually receiving far more watchable digital signals than they would have done with analog, but it doesn't feel like that because they had a greater selection of signals with analog that "showed up" on the TV."
>>>
Real-world example:
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via analog - it's black-n-white but I can follow the action
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via digital - due to the 50 mile distance, the tuner just displays a blank screen
Remind me again: How is a "digital blank screen" better than my watchable analog image?!?!? Grrrr. Hulk mad. Hulk smash. Hulk want Ravens. ;-)
>>>They're actually receiving far more watchable digital signals than they would have done with analog, but it doesn't feel like that because they had a greater selection of signals with analog that "showed up" on the TV.
>>>
Real-world example:
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via analog - it's fuzzy but I can follow the action
- watching the Baltimore Ravens via digital - due to the 50 mile distance, the tuner just displays a blank screen
Remind me again: How is a "digital blank screen" better than my watchable analog image?!?!? Grrrr. Hulk mad. Hulk smash. Hulk want Ravens. ;-)
>>>The threshold level of data loss that overwhelms the error correction is MUCH lower than that to make an analog signal effectively unwatchable.
Gotta disagree. If we're comparing watchable versus unwatchable, I think analog wins. With a rooftop antenna in southeast Pennsylvania I get around 25 watchable analog stations. With my CM7000 DTV tuner box, that drops to just 13. (The remaining 12 stations are just blank screens.) Clearly the analog has a lower threshold before it becomes unwatchable, and the digital has a higher threshold at which point it displays nothing.
>>>The digital TV uses less, and in a different band.
False, false, false. Why do people keep repeating these lies?!?!? (Normally I'd say mistakes or false facts, but it's been repeated so many times, it's now become a lie.) U.S.-DTV uses the same 6 megahertz per channel bandwidth as analog. DTV uses the same VHF and UHF bands as analog.
>>>these are raw HD signals, not pre-compressed to fit into a cable channel or satellite broadcast.
False.
Raw HD would require ~1000 megabit/second whereas ATSC-TV is only 19 megabit/s wide. Therefore the HD has to be compressed prior to transmission. ALSO: If your station has multiple channels, that makes the HD even more compressed.... perhaps only 8 megabit/s. (For comparison, HD-Bluray is 50 megabit/s.) So yes over-the-air HDTV is compressed, often to the point of visible artifacts.
Put another way:
The human eye is better at "seeing" a picture in noise, than the digital tuner, and that's why analog signals are viewable at farther distances than digital. The eye can extrapolate & reconstruct whereas the digital computer just goes "Huh?" and displays a blank screen.
>>>That's fair, but it's a special case.
Is it? I've noticed more-and-more companies are applying that "no phones with cameras" rule, because they are afraid of losing proprietary data.
>>>Also, taxes aren't a bad thing. They pay for all sorts of things like roads...
Taxes are fine as long as they are used to benefit ALL (or nearly-all) the people, and not used as a vehicle to enslave the general population to enrich a few (like slaves were used to enrich one solitary master). I don't agree with using taxes to redistribute wealth from lots of neighbors, just to buy one person a new car. It makes me feel like I am working down on the plantation with chains on my legs, and that is the antithesis of what "liberty" means.
Also, roads? They are directly funded by drivers. If you don't drive, you don't pay the road tax which is collected at the gas pump.
>>>Taking money through taxes is not stealing.
An immoral law is an immoral law. We repealed slavery laws, because they violated the Right of Liberty for african immigrants. Similarly a law that sucks $20,000 out of people's paychecks to buy some person a new car, violates both the Right of Property and the Right of Liberty (it's a form of partial enslavement.)
More succinctly - Stealing is still stealing, whether done by a thug on the street, or a politician in a suit.
>>>And then they are further convinced that "elitists" don't care about them.
Probably true, but the people observing the conversation will know better. They'll be able to see that the Conspiracist had no ability to form a rational argument.
>>>They're not taking away your right to free speech. It's their platform, nobody is shoving the iPhone down your throat...
Oh really? So if I open my brand-new Iphone and discover a NDA inside that says, "By purchasing this item, you the customer agree not to complain, post, email, or otherwise disclose that you are unhappy with its operations.....", are you still going to still tell me my Right to Free Speech is not being violated? (After all, it's their platform, nobody forced me to buy it.)
Forget that. I'm going to complain as is my right as a customer, and if Apple wants to sue me in court, I'll be happy to show up with five lawyers trailing behind me. (After all, my great-great-grandfather picked-up a musket and shot at Redcoats to protect his freedoms; the least I can do is spend a few bucks to hire lawyers to protect my own.)
Precisely.
A few years ago when Paypal was taken to court, most of the "user agreement" was thrown-out since it violated state or federal laws. The judge decided that consumers can not sign-away their legal protections. Apple's unsigned or shrinkwrapped NDA would also be thrown-out for similar reasons.
And to be honest, even if I was legally-bound to the NDA, I'd still disclose the whys and wherefores of my application rejection. From time-to-time, liberty must be protected with a little civil disobedience in order to protect one's rights, privileges, and freedoms.
>>>25 per cent of their time online at work on personal activities.
Shocking.
And before computers existed, they spent 25 percent of their time standing-around the water cooler, or sitting at their desks daydreaming.
I thought analog phones no longer work? (Like television, the cellphone network has gone all-digital.)
To clarify:
I think my watching of Heroes at nbc.com (an application requiring realtime streaming) should have a high-priority than grandma's downloading of email, or Billy's downloading of Hannah Montana photos. The latter functions can be delayed; the streaming video can not.
However Comcast's design does the exact opposite: it gives priority to emails, and delays packets for the real-time video streaming. Illogical, and the only thing that justifies this action is to deliberately break Internet TV streams.
>>>That said, giving bulk downloads equal or greater priority than latency sensitive solutions WILL make them unusable.
Precisely. I can bittorrent the 2-hour premier of Heroes, and if it takes 10 hours to download it, no big deal. But I can NOT accept that kind of latency if I'm watching Heroes "live" on nbc.com. It must stream in real-time without pauses.
Comcast's solution (throttle traffic) basically breaks people's access to watching television at fox.com, cwtv.com, usachannel.com and so on. Perhaps that was their REAL intent behind this proposal - kill the internet television that competes against Comcast's own television business. I think the FCC needs to open another investigation.
>>>Users who are found to be occupying large amounts of bandwidth will be placed at a lower priority for network access
So much for net neutrality.
What this basically means is the power users (perhaps work-at-home folks) will be punished, while those who rarely use the net (mom) will get preference. Isn't that the exact opposite of how business works? Usually it's the frequent customers who get "preferred" treatment, because those customers bring in more money.
I know how to use the camera.
I just don't want to. Nothing around-here worth taking a picture of anyway. Now if I liked along a beach, then things might be different.
>>>("just give me a phone!") is rather Luddite.
Or work-dependent. The companies I work for (defense) don't allow cameras inside the building. So I literally DO need just a phone w/o the extras.
Scientists need to stop saying "Newton's Law" and start saying "Newton's Theory" or "Copernicus' Theory" and so on. Nothing is absolute in science. Nothing is law.
>>>To me, it seems rather a learning issue how coping with vagueness is implemented, not a characteristic of the hardware layer
I agree. I recall reading Thomas Jefferson's discovery of sea creature fossils in nearby mountains. He was unable to reconcile the then-dominant view of a perfect God creating a perfect world, with the idea that the mountains used to harbor sea-creatures. He examined a bunch of possibilities (including Noah's flood), and rejected all of them as illogical and non-explanatory. At the end of his paper he simply wrote, "I do not know." The answer to this puzzle was not discovered until ~100 years later (the earth's surface is like a jigsaw with pieces ramming into one another, thereby turning oceans into mountains).
This world would be better-served if we had schools teach students to be like Jefferson and say "I don't know" more often, rather than force them to cough-up any old answer that comes to mind. As somebody once said (forget who): "A foolish consistency is the hobglobin of little minds..."
Yes WE have all been guilty of not listening. But that's okay! We can use that to our advantage. Oftentimes, when you debate with someone, the goal is not to convince that person. The goal is to convince the other people listening to the debate. For example:
"I think the government should provide a free car to everyone, since it's a necessity to life in America."
"Okay. Would you consider it okay to break-into your neighbors' homes, remove $20,000 from their wallets, and use that money to buy yourself a new car?"
"No of course not. That's stealing."
"Then why do you think it's okay for the government to steal the $20,000 via paycheck taxes?"
"Um... er... because everybody needs a car! It's a basic right!" ----- In this hypothetical debate, I obviously did not change this democratic-socialist's mind. Due to cognitive dissonance he simply chose to not hear what I was saying to him. However I still achieved my goal: I convinced some of the audience that the idea is immoral (because theft is theft, whether it's done directly by a thief, or through the government acting as the thief's agent).
The best way to deal with these people is to just say, "Wow, that's really fascinating. Can you prove it?"
"Uh..."
"Yes?"
"Um..."
"Well okay. I guess not. If you can not back it up with facts or a rational argument, then I'm sorry, I have to reject your claim as invalid."
>>>slapping non-disclosure agreements on application rejection notices.
Apple can not arbitrarily take-away my right to free speech. This means nothing if I don't sign the NDA.
One of the reasons analog NTSC is tunable is because it has a STRONG synchronizing signal. The tuner can lock onto that sync, and even though the rest of the image might be noise, it still has a strong lock on the station & can decode the audio..... or possibly black-and-white. i.e. Something watchable.
The new digital ATSC lacks a strong sync signal, so the tuner ends-up drifting all over the place without a proper lock. Hence, no picture or sound because the tuner can't "find" the station! The designers of digital should have included a synchronizing "burst" to stop tuner drift.