>>>Use of the internet is becoming a daily necessity
(sigh) Kids today.;-) No, it's a luxury. Loss of the internet is not going to cause you to die. Same goes for television or radio or playstation. Don't confuse modern LUXURIES with necessities. My parents (75) and my brother (55) and my nieces (30) don't have any internet access of any kind, and they seem to be happy, healthy, and not dead. (My parents also don't have cable television! In 2008! Shocking, ain't it?) It's a luxury, not a necessity.
Thomas Jefferson said:
"Any government sufficiently big enough to provide all your needs, is also sufficiently big enough to TAKE all that you have. History shows as government grows larger, individual freedom grows smaller, until no freedom is left." (Thanks Penn & Teller for sharing that wonderful quote on your national tv show: Bullshit.)
Last time a set of companies colluded with one another (to artificially raise CD prices), the U.S. DOJ dragged them into court, accused them of forming an illegal cartel, and three members of my family got ~$20 checks. In total it cost these companies almost half a billion dollars to mail these checks to defrauded consumers.
Companies that collude will pay the price. They'd be wiser to just play fair with the consumer.
Is that anything like dark matter? (A substance that nobody has seen, or measured, or verified, and yet almost everyone "believes" it exists.) Or maybe "spontaneous generation"? (Meat magically turns into maggots.)
Well, until I SEE it or verify it, neither of these exist in my mind.
There's a giant pipe laying under my street. Inside that pipe is just two cables: Coaxial and phone line. (The electrcity enters through a different pipe.) I don't see why we can't have 4 or 5 coaxial lines, running in the same pipe, each serviced by a different company. Example: Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner, Verizon.
Pull the plug on the Usenet newsgroups??? Noooooooo. The Usenet is the last bastion of freedom. No moderators == no censorship == true freedom of speech. (No wonder the politicians want it silenced.)
As for "rights":
The internet is a luxury, not a right. Along with newspapers. Yes you have the right to buy a printing press & start running-off pamphlets ("freedom of the press"), but you don't have a right to make your neighbors pay the bill (that's called theft). Similarly you have a right to setup an internet website, but only if the money is coming out of your OWN pocket. ----- If you lack the money to buy either a printing press or a website... (shrug) that's too bad. Get a job like Benjamin Franklin did and earn the money yourself.
Positive rights:
You don't have a right to force your neighbors to open their wallets to buy you a new car, house, or whatever. That's theft of property, theft of labor, and also a form of slavery (making other persons work for the master's enrichment). Positive rights violate our true, innate, natural rights such as ownership of our own bodies & freedom from captivity.
I suspect you're right. Government taxes is the reason. It's the same with gasoline. We Americans, Canadians, Europeans all pay the same amount for gasoline (approximately $3.50 a gallon), but American/Canadian taxes are only ~50 cents whereas European taxes are $3-4 dollars.
So the final price is inflated because of government theft.... er, taxes.
Then the original article needs a citation. What we have here is essentially an opinion piece. Yes, we all know that guages are not accurate, but the article then *opines* that it's some sort of conspiracy.
It's little better than reading the editorial page.
Every car I've ever owned has worked the same way. The bar will remain on "F" until 60% is reached, and then it gradually starts dropping. When the gauge claims I have "1/4" I really only have 15% of my fuel tank left.
I've heard stories of car companies trying to make more accurate gauges, but the customers complained that the car was "half empty" after "only" 150 miles. They prefered the old gauges that still showed almost-full, even though those gauges were lying.
So I suspect the real conspiracy is just "the ignorance of the average citizen" that led to deceptive gasoline and battery meters.
I've seen a lot of 4-wheel drive SUVs/trucks in the ditches, because they displace overconfidence (like you just did). Meanwhile I've driven a midsize or compact car, and have never had an accident in the snow. The key? "Don't drive faster than 30 miles an hour ya dope!"*
As for F=ma, there's also "energy absorbing crush zones" to consider. A crash-friendly chassis is more important than F=ma. i.e. A 5000 pound SUV that remains solid like a brick (but turns its occupants into scrambled eggs) is a lot more dangerous than a 2000 pound civic that crumples like a wad of paper (but protects its passengers from damage). What matters is how well the vehicle ABSORBS the energy, not its weight. Also worthy of note: SUVs are more dangerous than cars. Why? SUVs rollover and smash the occupants.
* (By dope, I'm referring to those numerous persons I see driving 65 on the interstate during snowstorms... I always wonder how they think they're going to stop while driving on slush.)
You have a perfectly-flawless copy of a movie/tv show that is plagued with macro-blocking & artifacts. The flaw is not in the data. The flaw is in the engineer who decides 10 megabit/s was "enough" even though it clearly is not.
You said "This whole issue would have been better solved by forcing cable and satellite companies to sell a 'lifeline package' to low-income people"
Perhaps if you actually were a "geek" like your title falsely claims, you would already know that cable IS required to provide a basic-level package with about 15 channels. Unfortunately that package still costs $15-20 a month, and therefore is still more expensive than many people can afford.
Furthermore, why should people have to PAY for television??? The airwaves belong to the People, and therefore these airwaves should be used for the people's benefit w/o cost. i.e. Free television. I get 20-25 channels for free over the air, and I would be extremely angry if suddenly the government took away that free entertainment without my permission.*
* (I say "my" permission, because the government acts only with the *consent* of the People. I don't think the majority of people would be happy to have their free tv suddenly disappear. (Or free radio for that matter.))
There's no collusion here. What you're witnessing is the product of our gov't school system (i.e. citizens that don't understand technology). The average Joe or Jane Smith can not understand the concepts of 720p or 1080i or even 10 megabit/s versus 5 megabit/s. (Most of them don't even know what a kilowatt-hour is supposed to be, and that concept has existed nearly a century. They can't read their own electricity bills! much less understand HDTV.)
Here's what the average person understands:
- Wow! CBS only broadcasts 1 channel while ION broadcasts 5 channels! I'm going to watch Ion! -or- - Wow! Dish has 1000 channels while Comcast only has 200. I'm going with Dish!
They understand simplicity, not technical jargon. The companies are catering to what these people can grasp. More == better even if the quality goes down. Lowest Common Denominator marketing, not collusion.
According to Census data, the Boston suburbs ARE part of the city (urban not rural).
Here in suburban Baltimore (formerly known as White Marsh), the cost of limited cable is only $7 a month plus tax. Further north in Lancaster PA, the same company charges $19 a month. The lower population results in higher per person cost even though the service is identical.
So the OP was correct. Denser Population helps drive down costs (per home).
Betamax and VHS were introduced in a time period (late 60s/early 70s) when broadcast television was poor in quality with only 3-4 megahertz bandwidth (240-320 lines) at the receiver. Therefore a recorder that did 3 megahertz was "good enough" for the consumer.
As time passed, television upgraded to Betacam SP and then Digital Betacam, and receivers also improved in quality, which increased bandwidth to around 5 megahertz (400 lines), and that is when people started noticing VHS' inferiority, but it was too late. VHS was firmly entrenched.
JVC introduced Super VHS to capture these improved 5 megahertz signals, but the consumer ignored it.
People have been watching fuzzy, ghosting signals (by rabbit ear antennas) or non-ghosting but still fuzzy cable channels (330 lines luma, 120 lines chroma)
for years and years and years. For them receiving DVD-quality standard definition (480 lines luma, 240 lines chroma) IS an improvement over their old experience. That's why they will be satisfied with the quality.
BTW:
I'm one of those people. Having watched black-and-white, ghosting, fuzzy NTSC for 35 years, I'm happy to get something that looks like standard definition DVD. I don't feel like I need HD. And I suspect, a super-majority of American citizens feel the same way: anything that looks DVD quality is an improvement over what we had before.
I don't understand why these Station engineers always have so much trouble with their HD channels.
- Is the original material 4:3? Present it pillarboxed in 720p or 1080i mode.
- Is the original material 16:9? Present it full-screen in 720p or 1080i.
Easy as pie.
The only people that might have problems are those with old "analog" sets, but they shouldn't be watching HD channels anyway. They should be watching the old analog or SD channels.
Have you been living in a cave??? The writers went on strike last fall, therefore Heroes ran out of scripts. So did many other shows (like 24 that never even aired). NBC/FOX/et cetera cannot air scripts that don't exist!!!
The rest of the Northeast is 65 as far as I know. You have to drive out to the Midwest (Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri) to find the 75 speed limits.
What was that? Something about only having one choice? Hmmm. I'm not seeing that in my location, and I live in a small town. About the only monopoly that still exists is the cable tv company. In all other facets (internet, electricity, phone) we have competition and Consumer Choice.
>>>"with the actual content needlessly split into two pages"
I didn't realize you were handicapped. When you're handcapped, I imagine it can be painful or otherwise-challenging to click the left mouse button to turn to page 2.
What's that? You're not handicapped? Oh well then you're just lazy. No Sympathy For You!
I was making a point that you can not outlaw or protect what determined people want.
Look at alcohol prohibition. Did it work? No, the people just created underground, black-market speakeasys. How about drug prohibition? Nope, people still get the drugs they want. Gun prohibition? Nope people get their hands on guns for hunting or self-defense. Copy prohibition (DRM)? Nope, people crack the code and get what they want.
THAT was my point.
It's a fruitless and pointless effort to try & block people. You're just wasting your time. They WILL find a way around the obstacle & reach their goal.
>>>"Voting with dollars leads to an aristocracy, not a democracy, and makes "voting" empty. If I have 100 dollars and you have 20, I have 5 times the voting power you do."
(1) True but a democracy just leads to a Tyranny of the Majority that squashes the minority (or the individual) underfoot. Freedom to be Muslim? In a democracy you can forget about it; the majority will vote to outlaw Islamic worship. Ditto other minority freedoms. Democracy is a lousy solution.
(2) The amount of spending from lower and middle incomes far, far strips the amount of spending from rich folk. Hence the term "mass media"... they need to appeal to the masses. Appealing only to aristocracy rarely works anymore.
Youtube? There's nothing there worth watching. Well, almost nothing.
And I happen to like Heroes. And Medium. I think I still like my idea about buying DVDs. While it's true the studios get my money, NBC does not, so the studios might tell NBC to "shove it" and just go direct to disc, or direct to internet.
That's why most of us do not have Cable A la Carte. They know if they gave us a choice, we'd only buy 4-5 cable channels per home. So they have to FORCE us to buy all 60 just to keep themselves alive.
Typical behavior for humans - protect your job at any cost, even if that means taking away freedom of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>Use of the internet is becoming a daily necessity
(sigh) Kids today. ;-) No, it's a luxury. Loss of the internet is not going to cause you to die. Same goes for television or radio or playstation. Don't confuse modern LUXURIES with necessities. My parents (75) and my brother (55) and my nieces (30) don't have any internet access of any kind, and they seem to be happy, healthy, and not dead. (My parents also don't have cable television! In 2008! Shocking, ain't it?) It's a luxury, not a necessity.
Thomas Jefferson said:
"Any government sufficiently big enough to provide all your needs, is also sufficiently big enough to TAKE all that you have. History shows as government grows larger, individual freedom grows smaller, until no freedom is left." (Thanks Penn & Teller for sharing that wonderful quote on your national tv show: Bullshit.)
That works for me.
Last time a set of companies colluded with one another (to artificially raise CD prices), the U.S. DOJ dragged them into court, accused them of forming an illegal cartel, and three members of my family got ~$20 checks. In total it cost these companies almost half a billion dollars to mail these checks to defrauded consumers.
Companies that collude will pay the price.
They'd be wiser to just play fair with the consumer.
"Dark fiber"?
Is that anything like dark matter? (A substance that nobody has seen, or measured, or verified, and yet almost everyone "believes" it exists.) Or maybe "spontaneous generation"? (Meat magically turns into maggots.)
Well, until I SEE it or verify it, neither of these exist in my mind.
I agree.
There's a giant pipe laying under my street. Inside that pipe is just two cables: Coaxial and phone line. (The electrcity enters through a different pipe.) I don't see why we can't have 4 or 5 coaxial lines, running in the same pipe, each serviced by a different company. Example: Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner, Verizon.
Let the people have freedom of choice.
Pull the plug on the Usenet newsgroups??? Noooooooo. The Usenet is the last bastion of freedom. No moderators == no censorship == true freedom of speech. (No wonder the politicians want it silenced.)
As for "rights":
The internet is a luxury, not a right. Along with newspapers. Yes you have the right to buy a printing press & start running-off pamphlets ("freedom of the press"), but you don't have a right to make your neighbors pay the bill (that's called theft). Similarly you have a right to setup an internet website, but only if the money is coming out of your OWN pocket. ----- If you lack the money to buy either a printing press or a website... (shrug) that's too bad. Get a job like Benjamin Franklin did and earn the money yourself.
Positive rights:
You don't have a right to force your neighbors to open their wallets to buy you a new car, house, or whatever. That's theft of property, theft of labor, and also a form of slavery (making other persons work for the master's enrichment). Positive rights violate our true, innate, natural rights such as ownership of our own bodies & freedom from captivity.
I suspect you're right. Government taxes is the reason. It's the same with gasoline. We Americans, Canadians, Europeans all pay the same amount for gasoline (approximately $3.50 a gallon), but American/Canadian taxes are only ~50 cents whereas European taxes are $3-4 dollars.
So the final price is inflated because of government theft.... er, taxes.
Then the original article needs a citation. What we have here is essentially an opinion piece. Yes, we all know that guages are not accurate, but the article then *opines* that it's some sort of conspiracy.
It's little better than reading the editorial page.
Every car I've ever owned has worked the same way. The bar will remain on "F" until 60% is reached, and then it gradually starts dropping. When the gauge claims I have "1/4" I really only have 15% of my fuel tank left.
I've heard stories of car companies trying to make more accurate gauges, but the customers complained that the car was "half empty" after "only" 150 miles. They prefered the old gauges that still showed almost-full, even though those gauges were lying.
So I suspect the real conspiracy is just "the ignorance of the average citizen" that led to deceptive gasoline and battery meters.
I live in the snowbelt.
I've seen a lot of 4-wheel drive SUVs/trucks in the ditches, because they displace overconfidence (like you just did). Meanwhile I've driven a midsize or compact car, and have never had an accident in the snow. The key? "Don't drive faster than 30 miles an hour ya dope!"*
As for F=ma, there's also "energy absorbing crush zones" to consider. A crash-friendly chassis is more important than F=ma. i.e. A 5000 pound SUV that remains solid like a brick (but turns its occupants into scrambled eggs) is a lot more dangerous than a 2000 pound civic that crumples like a wad of paper (but protects its passengers from damage). What matters is how well the vehicle ABSORBS the energy, not its weight. Also worthy of note: SUVs are more dangerous than cars. Why? SUVs rollover and smash the occupants.
* (By dope, I'm referring to those numerous persons I see driving 65 on the interstate during snowstorms... I always wonder how they think they're going to stop while driving on slush.)
If the BBC is so great,
why are they broadcasting most of
their radio programs in poor-quality 128 kbps MP2?
(Or worse, in monoaural.)
There are no errors.
You have a perfectly-flawless copy of a movie/tv show that is plagued with macro-blocking & artifacts. The flaw is not in the data. The flaw is in the engineer who decides 10 megabit/s was "enough" even though it clearly is not.
Dear McGeek:
You said "This whole issue would have been better solved by forcing cable and satellite companies to sell a 'lifeline package' to low-income people"
Perhaps if you actually were a "geek" like your title falsely claims, you would already know that cable IS required to provide a basic-level package with about 15 channels. Unfortunately that package still costs $15-20 a month, and therefore is still more expensive than many people can afford.
Furthermore, why should people have to PAY for television??? The airwaves belong to the People, and therefore these airwaves should be used for the people's benefit w/o cost. i.e. Free television. I get 20-25 channels for free over the air, and I would be extremely angry if suddenly the government took away that free entertainment without my permission.*
* (I say "my" permission, because the government acts only with the *consent* of the People. I don't think the majority of people would be happy to have their free tv suddenly disappear. (Or free radio for that matter.))
There's no collusion here. What you're witnessing is the product of our gov't school system (i.e. citizens that don't understand technology). The average Joe or Jane Smith can not understand the concepts of 720p or 1080i or even 10 megabit/s versus 5 megabit/s. (Most of them don't even know what a kilowatt-hour is supposed to be, and that concept has existed nearly a century. They can't read their own electricity bills! much less understand HDTV.)
Here's what the average person understands:
- Wow! CBS only broadcasts 1 channel while ION broadcasts 5 channels! I'm going to watch Ion!
-or-
- Wow! Dish has 1000 channels while Comcast only has 200. I'm going with Dish!
They understand simplicity, not technical jargon. The companies are catering to what these people can grasp. More == better even if the quality goes down. Lowest Common Denominator marketing, not collusion.
According to Census data, the Boston suburbs ARE part of the city (urban not rural).
Here in suburban Baltimore (formerly known as White Marsh), the cost of limited cable is only $7 a month plus tax. Further north in Lancaster PA, the same company charges $19 a month. The lower population results in higher per person cost even though the service is identical.
So the OP was correct. Denser Population helps drive down costs (per home).
Betamax and VHS were introduced in a time period (late 60s/early 70s) when broadcast television was poor in quality with only 3-4 megahertz bandwidth (240-320 lines) at the receiver. Therefore a recorder that did 3 megahertz was "good enough" for the consumer.
As time passed, television upgraded to Betacam SP and then Digital Betacam, and receivers also improved in quality, which increased bandwidth to around 5 megahertz (400 lines), and that is when people started noticing VHS' inferiority, but it was too late. VHS was firmly entrenched.
JVC introduced Super VHS to capture these improved 5 megahertz signals, but the consumer ignored it.
People have been watching fuzzy, ghosting signals (by rabbit ear antennas)
or non-ghosting but still fuzzy cable channels (330 lines luma, 120 lines chroma)
for years and years and years. For them receiving DVD-quality standard definition (480 lines luma, 240 lines chroma) IS an improvement over their old experience. That's why they will be satisfied with the quality.
BTW:
I'm one of those people. Having watched black-and-white, ghosting, fuzzy NTSC for 35 years, I'm happy to get something that looks like standard definition DVD. I don't feel like I need HD. And I suspect, a super-majority of American citizens feel the same way: anything that looks DVD quality is an improvement over what we had before.
I don't understand why these Station engineers always have so much trouble with their HD channels.
- Is the original material 4:3? Present it pillarboxed in 720p or 1080i mode.
- Is the original material 16:9? Present it full-screen in 720p or 1080i.
Easy as pie.
The only people that might have problems are those with old "analog" sets, but they shouldn't be watching HD channels anyway. They should be watching the old analog or SD channels.
>>>"The "something" was YANKING THE SHOW"
Have you been living in a cave??? The writers went on strike last fall, therefore Heroes ran out of scripts. So did many other shows (like 24 that never even aired). NBC/FOX/et cetera cannot air scripts that don't exist!!!
Duh.
West Virginia has 70.
Michigan has 70.
The rest of the Northeast is 65 as far as I know. You have to drive out to the Midwest (Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri) to find the 75 speed limits.
>>>"The fact that the USA is incapable of doing this is proof that they have lost control of their political system and they're the first to admit it"
We have competition. Let's see... in my home I have:
- Netscape ISP
- Comcast ISP
- Erols DSL
- Verizon DSL
- Dish ISP
- Directv ISP
- Virgin Mobile ISP
- Cingular Mobile ISP
- Verizon FiOS (new)
What was that? Something about only having one choice? Hmmm. I'm not seeing that in my location, and I live in a small town. About the only monopoly that still exists is the cable tv company. In all other facets (internet, electricity, phone) we have competition and Consumer Choice.
Power to the people.
>>>"with the actual content needlessly split into two pages"
I didn't realize you were handicapped. When you're handcapped, I imagine it can be painful or otherwise-challenging to click the left mouse button to turn to page 2.
What's that?
You're not handicapped?
Oh well then you're just lazy.
No Sympathy For You!
I was making a point that you can not outlaw or protect what determined people want.
Look at alcohol prohibition. Did it work? No, the people just created underground, black-market speakeasys. How about drug prohibition? Nope, people still get the drugs they want. Gun prohibition? Nope people get their hands on guns for hunting or self-defense. Copy prohibition (DRM)? Nope, people crack the code and get what they want.
THAT was my point.
It's a fruitless and pointless effort to try & block people. You're just wasting your time. They WILL find a way around the obstacle & reach their goal.
>>>"Voting with dollars leads to an aristocracy, not a democracy, and makes "voting" empty. If I have 100 dollars and you have 20, I have 5 times the voting power you do."
(1) True but a democracy just leads to a Tyranny of the Majority that squashes the minority (or the individual) underfoot. Freedom to be Muslim? In a democracy you can forget about it; the majority will vote to outlaw Islamic worship. Ditto other minority freedoms. Democracy is a lousy solution.
(2) The amount of spending from lower and middle incomes far, far strips the amount of spending from rich folk. Hence the term "mass media"... they need to appeal to the masses. Appealing only to aristocracy rarely works anymore.
Youtube? There's nothing there worth watching. Well, almost nothing.
And I happen to like Heroes. And Medium. I think I still like my idea about buying DVDs. While it's true the studios get my money, NBC does not, so the studios might tell NBC to "shove it" and just go direct to disc, or direct to internet.
>>>"The rest of the channels ARE crap."
That's why most of us do not have Cable A la Carte. They know if they gave us a choice, we'd only buy 4-5 cable channels per home. So they have to FORCE us to buy all 60 just to keep themselves alive.
Typical behavior for humans - protect your job at any cost, even if that means taking away freedom of choice.